Monthly Archives: December 2022

Subnivium:

ECOLOGIST Jonathan Pauli used to spend a lot of time keeping track of animals over winter – often across cold, harsh landscapes that seemed inhospitable to life. It always surprised him that as soon as the weather got warmer in early spring, insects would pop up. “Snow fleas would emerge from underneath the snow,” Pauli recalls. Where, he wondered, had they been hiding?

Eventually, he discovered some old scientific papers from the 1940s and 1960s. They revealed a secret world that Pauli, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been studying ever since: a hidden ecosystem under the snow. It is found in a clandestine space between the snowpack and the soil beneath, which is sheltered from the bitter cold and is where some insects, spiders, frogs and even small mammals spend at least part of the winter. Concealed from the world above, flies buzz, plants thrive and animals forage, hunt and give birth in this so-called subnivium (from the Latin sub, meaning under, and nivis, meaning snow). But what will happen to this winter wonderland and all the creatures it shelters as the climate warms up? That’s the topic of Pauli’s most recent research. [“Subnivium: The secret ecosystem hidden beneath the snow,” Ute Eberle, NewScientist (17 December 2022, paywall)]

I cannot help but wonder if the GOP’s advantage in the House may become even smaller in the light of what’s rapidly becoming The Santos Debacle. This involves Rep-elect George Devolder-Santos (R-NY), who upset Robert Zimmerman (D-NY) in a race not including an incumbent. The district was won by Rep Suozzi (D-NY) over Devolder-Santos by more than 12 points in 2020, while Biden beat Trump in the district as well. This is via Maddowblog:

The New York Times reported this morning:

By his account, [Santos] catapulted himself from a New York City public college to become a “seasoned Wall Street financier and investor” with a family-owned real estate portfolio of 13 properties and an animal rescue charity that saved more than 2,500 dogs and cats. But a New York Times review of public documents and court filings from the United States and Brazil, as well as various attempts to verify claims that Mr. Santos, 34, made on the campaign trail, calls into question key parts of the résumé that he sold to voters.

First of all, it’s worth reminding ourselves that the toxic culture of the GOP created by Newt Gingrich and his successors, through the creation of and adherence to team politics, and near-religious faith to such tenets as taxes are always bad and so is regulation, has led to candidates for whom experience and adherence to truth are definitely of secondary or even tertiary importance.

Of primary importance is gaining and retaining power.

Following that are questions of vetting by both Republican and Democratic officials, who should be zealous in avoiding embarrassment; questions of how he could have won a safe Democratic district in the midst of anti-Trump land.

And then will come this very important question: if the mendacity of his campaign is confirmed, will Minority Leader McCarthy tell him to resign? Lead the effort to boot him out if he won’t?

Or will he solicit Santos’ vote for the Speaker of the House race?

A while back I speculated that Representative, then-Minority Leader, and Speaker-wannabe Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), in refusing to nominate responsible GOP Representatives for the January 6th Committee, was not being extraordinarily stupid, as many pundits thought, but, instead, was having a real nasty revenge on former President Trump for his actions leading up to the January 6th Insurrection. Here’s Steve Benen today engaging in a touch of schadenfreude:

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy was one of four Republican members referred to the House Ethics Committee yesterday by the Jan. 6 committee, and three of the four publicly criticized the developments. McCarthy, however, spent yesterday saying effectively nothing.

It’s possible the Californian was so focused on his struggling bid to become House speaker that he didn’t have time to consider the latest from Jan. 6 investigators. But it’s also possible that McCarthy doesn’t want to talk about the committee at all — because he realizes he made a mistake in how it took shape.

And, yet, I have not seen dispositive evidence either way on this issue. I still think it’s possible that McCarthy, at night, sits down in his favorite comfy chair and savors Trump’s drawn-out demise.

Or he could be squirming. Like I said, there’s no dispositive evidence either way. But I relish the thought of then-Speaker Pelosi (D-CA) and McCarthy colluding to vanquish Trump from the political arena, and even put him in prison.

From “Experimental CRISPR technique has promise against aggressive leukaemia,” Michael Le Page, NewScientist (17 December 2022):

The 13-year-old girl, called Alyssa, hadn’t responded to other treatments. As part of a trial, she received a dose of immune cells from a donor that had been modified to attack the cancer. Twenty-eight days later, tests revealed she was in remission.

Tough on the donor, I’m tellin’ you. Generally, they just modify the immune cells.

This announcement – or angry remark – from the Trump Campaign made me laugh a couple of weeks ago, but I’ve been too busy until this vacation week to remark on it. So here it is:

“President Trump entered the race three weeks ago ready to win and he is going to do exactly that — no amount of wishful thinking from the media or consultant class will change it,” said Taylor Budowich, head of the MAGA Inc. super PAC supporting Trump. “He’s building one of the most ruthless and talented teams in American politics, and he is the only person in the country who is ready and capable of reversing America’s decline.” [WaPo]

Given the quality of the people who have worked for him, I just laughed out loud when I saw this.

And note the bolded text, which I bolded. It’s of a piece with he being the only person capable of saving the stock market and all that other only me crap of his. The mark of a supremely mentally ill narcissist, believing that only he is capable of XYZ.

Source: Astro Did You Know?

Growing up with him as a father must be like living too near a black hole.

In the wake of several recent debacles, noises are starting to appear in the mainstream press suggesting the end of cryptocurrency could be in sight:

Activity is lessening.

The total value of the world’s cryptocurrencies tracked by data company CoinMarketCap is now around $850 billion, down from $3 trillion a year ago. The average value of cryptocurrency trades per day has fallen from $131 billion in May to $57 billion in December — a drop of more than half, according to CoinGecko.

Bitcoin’s value has plummeted 65 percent this year, to around $17,500, although that’s still more than it was worth for the majority of its existence.

And value.

Looking a bit shabby, I fear.

But so what? The questions are what are the trends, the tangible advantages and disadvantages, what is the sentiment?

I’m disinclined to vigorously dispute the subtle suggestion that cryptocurrencies are on the way out. The use of technology, particularly exciting new technologies and clever ideas^[1] to attempt to resolve a problem, be it policy, social, or otherwise, is neither new nor surprising; only the nature of the sexy problem is really changing. In this case, getting corruptible government out of the business of controlling currencies seemed clever enough.

But I think the nature of the problem was, and still is, really misunderstood, and the project driven by a fundamental mistrust of governments, which is not entirely without foundation. But attempting to circumvent government, rather than recognize that it has positive attributes that should be cultivated, and the general enterprise improved and properly managed, is, I think, a misapplication of technology.

There goes one now! Look at those metallic tentacles!

Unless you are one of the few looking forward to the appearance of our robotic overlords.

Cryptocurrencies may be the miserable grandchild of President Reagan’s remark that … government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem, which is, notably, slightly out of context, but mistakenly taken to be ideological kant by far too many people. I do suspect this is coming into focus for a lot of people, if only due to the grift and neglect to regulate the industry by, ah, government. In the end, the rampant corruption that appears to infest the industry may be an object lesson concerning the importance of government in the face of humanity’s indifference to ethics and morality, not to mention the inapplicability of Reagan’s quote to most situations.

Which will be summarily ignored by all those infected by paranoia or profiting from crypto. Not only the individual grifters, but national adversaries such as ransomware purveyors and users. The crash of crypto may put quite a few bad actors out of business.

---

¹ Make no mistake, production of tokens, or coins, through “mining,” which is generally the process of solving complex problems that become harder over time, seemed clever back then. The entire “It sucks up how much energy?” problem with mining, at least in the proof-of-work mining paradigm, is not a matter of “they should have seen it coming,” but instead a common, if unrecognized, problem in the entire software industry, because energy consumption of algorithms, or implementations thereof, is not a topic of conversation for “coders” or for software engineers, or at least not that I’ve ever heard, excepting maybe in cryptocurrency mining, in AI, in the auto-driver algorithms of cars, where a drain on batteries is currently a real problem, and meteorological forecasting models, which naturally work on huge datasets fairly quickly.

There are other mining paradigms, such as proof-of-space (how many hard drives do you own?), but this is, again, consumption-oriented. I am not plugged into the cryptocurrency implementation community, so I don’t know the answer to this question: Rather than using paradigms that fall into the consumption or extraction category, are there any paradigms that could be properly placed in a category labeled production or contributing?

Answer print:

An answer print is the first version of a given motion picture that is printed to film after color correction on an interpositive. It is also the first version of the movie printed to film with the sound properly synced to the picture.^[1] [Wikipedia]

Noted in “Ship in German ‘Titanic’ film sank, killing far more than the real one,” George Bass, WaPo:

The movie’s twisting of facts to suit the Nazis’ agenda meant major creative differences behind the scenes. Selpin, frustrated with the interference of military officials on set and the fact each day’s rushes had to be sent to Berlin for approval, made remarks critical of the Nazi regime. He was denounced by the film’s screenwriter to the authorities, arrested, interrogated by Goebbels, and found hanged in his prison cell the next morning.

The film had to be completed by an uncredited director, Werner Klinger. On the night before its scheduled premiere, the British Royal Air Force bombed the theater that was housing the movie’s answer print.

The film was made in 1943, and was apparently the circus you might expect. I may have to look this one up.

This is not the movie poster for which you search. Try down corridor Z. What? You’re not looking for The Lost City of Z. Well what the hell Lost City do you think you’re searching for? What? Stop dangling my participles? Fuck you. Answer the question. Just The Lost City? Never heard of it. Let me consult the index. Uh….. surely you mean some other Lost City, eh? No? OK, it’s down the corridor labeled Forbidden Movies that Will Make You Claw Your Eyes Out. Yes, that’s an exaggeration. Maybe. Don’t come back to me to complain, you brought this on yourself!

The Lost City (2022) is in the same class of movies as Jungle Cruise (2021) in that it wants to evoke the same passions as did Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), and again around archaeology, divinity, and romance. However, it’s not nearly as good as the enjoyable Jungle Cruise because replacing the driven archaeologist Dr. “Indiana” Jones of Raiders with a bereft widow, Loretta Sage, a romance book writer in career interruptus, who is annoyed by a smitten book cover model, while being kidnapped by a nutcase who has more money than sense (take a breath here), just ruins the story: rather than wonder just where the obsession will take her next in the absence of, well, obsession, the audience just tires of the schtick.

Which is not to say the movie is a total loss. The former military man hired to rescue Sage, Jack Trainer, was a source of endless amusement in a role of remarkable brevity, and the cover model’s reaction to him at least made me giggle a bit.

I wonder if I was supposed to giggle.

The nutcase, on the other hand, has no real life of his own; he exists to pay the bad guys who are pursuing the romance writer and her, uh, admirer around. He’s a poor replacement for Raider’s René Belloq, the Nazi’s French archaeologist who something of a cipher symbolizing the worst of archaeology prior to the modern age of archaeology. His pursuit of the object, rather than knowledge, invalidated his entire professional standing in Raiders, but heavens know if the general audience member realized that.

In the end, The Lost City needed at least two more drafts, and maybe three, along with a better title. The main story contains a number of ideas that might have worked, but feel like they came out of a bag labeled Plot Twists As Needed, with little organic or thematic movements to them. Even the supporting cast’s subplots, which can often outshine the primary plot line in a movie of this quality, were a disappointment. They felt tacked on as necessary distractions, rather than logical consequences of the antecedents to, and/or the developments during, this plot.

Too bad. I think the movie needed more Nazis, like Raiders of the Lost Ark had. And how often do you get to say that? As it is, it’s limp and forgettable, and the characters, who improbably manage to become cardboard stereotypes, exit stage left without attracting the least applause.

Well, excepting Jack. Jack Trainer. What a guy. We’ll miss. Him. No, miss him. For about a minute. Two minutes.

I wonder if a movie about Jack Trainer is in the works.

One of the sub-themes of this blog is to demonstrate how to deal with the modern world as a working person who doesn’t always have the time and/or training to minutely research every topic that comes across my plate. I’ve done this with the right-wing mail stream (search on ‘mailbag’), politics, artificial intelligence, skepticism, etc.

So today, when we ran across an episode of Tasting History with Max Miller that we didn’t immediately recognize – we did, five minutes into it – we watched it and I was delighted to see Miller talk about the problems of false “facts” and how he tries to deal with them.

And he’s just fun. Here it is.

This is a forgotten composition, with the last draft dated 20 October 2022, which I’ll post as a service to the reader.

A recent release of a nationwide poll by The New York Times and A rated Siena College has stirred up the countryside pundit world of late. Why? It showed a tremendous shift among independent women from favoring Democrats to favoring Republicans. A 32 point shift, to be generally in the ballpark.

In a month.

The impact on the pundits? Depends on who they are. Some ignore it. Some have a panic attack. And some analyze it. That’s what Kerry Eleveld on Daily Kos did, and they found it wanting.

But for today’s purposes, if you compare the Times/Siena poll to other polls fielded around the same time, Oct. 9-12, the survey’s generic ballot R+3 result is an outlier. Here are results from a couple other reputable polls:

• Fox News (Oct. 9-12), RV, 44%-41%, D+3
• Economist/YouGov (Oct. 8-11), 48%-46%, D+2

At the end of the day, this midterm continues to be a competitive race that is likely to hold some surprises that go both ways on Election Day. No single poll at this point disrupts that reality. It’s still possible that independents break one way or the other in the final weeks but, again, we won’t know that until November either.

The lesson here? Even the best polls can be outliers. This can be due to a breakdown in procedures, calculations, or respondents being dishonest, as sometimes MAGA Republicans claim they do. For all we know, a bunch of anti-MAGA women lied to the surveyers in an effort to mislead Republicans.

Yeah, seems unlikely.

But pundits necessarily rely on polls. Erick Erickson is convinced the Republicans are going to clobber the Democrats based on generic Congressional ballot results:

I’ve been talking about this so much on the radio and here that several listeners and readers complained. I’d like to say now I told you so. The wind the Democrats thought was at their back turned out to be an economic hurricane building that will sink their ship of state.

In the Real Clear Politics polling average, there are now only three polls that give Democrats a lead, two of which are still registered voter polls. Five of the remaining six have a GOP lead and one has a tie.

I mistrust those sorts of polls precisely for the same reasons that the Senate’s often controlled by something like 40% of the population, that is, the problem that California and Wyoming each have two Senators, despite the huge difference in population.

And that’s it. The important point here? The right’s belief that the polls for the generic Congressional ballot forecast disaster for the Democrats. No such thing occurred. If New York and Florida had been better organized, we might be seeing an imminent election of Rep Jefferies (D-NY) to the Speaker of the House, rather than the mystery of which Republican will be Speaker, a mystery brought on by their far smaller than forecast margin.

So be wary of generic Congressional ballots, especially when the interpretation confirms the pundit’s desires. Confirmation bias can lead to egg-on-face syndrome.

Ya remember how you could go to a garage sale and buy most anything, free & clear? Things are a little different in the Digital Age. Renting software has become a popular business strategy, at least for those who write the software.

And non-fungible tokens (NFTs)?

What exactly are buyers of the Trump Trading Cards purchasing? Yes, they are NFTs, but unlike others of these digital art pieces, the people foolish enough to purchase a Trump Trading Card don’t actually own the things they paid for, at least not in the traditional sense. If any buyer decides to sell their Trump card in a secondary market, they don’t get all the proceeds. The fine print reveals that 10% of every secondary market sales goes right back to Trump and his fellow grifters. For more details, buyers are told to click the link to terms and conditions. [Kurt Eichenwald, The Threats Within]

And Eichenwald claims the page containing the terms and conditions is a Page not found. Maybe they fixed it.

It looks like Trump isn’t selling these cards, he’s renting them out on an unlimited time, transferable-for-a-fee basis. Of course, outrage may not be called for if the value of these cards sink into mire.

Long-time readers of this semi-dormant thread will recall that the CO₂ monitor on Mauna Loa in Hawaii has been showing rises in CO₂ levels for a long time now. Here’s the latest:

No improvement in trend. But now this monitor is being forced offline:

Lava flow from the ongoing eruption of the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii has knocked out power and cut off access to an observatory that has recorded the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere since 1958.

Mauna Loa started erupting the evening of 27 November. Initially, the lava was confined to the volcano’s summit caldera, but on 28 November, the Northeast Rift Zone – a section on the side of the volcano where the surface can crack and split – also started erupting. This caused lava to flow upslope of the Mauna Loa Observatory, according to the US Geological Survey.

At 6.30pm local time on 28 November instruments at the observatory lost power, according to a statement from the University of California, San Diego. The observatory is run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and hosts instruments measuring changes in the atmosphere including the flux of greenhouse gases. [“Mauna Loa eruption interrupts key record of atmospheric CO2,” James Dinneen, NewScientist (10 December 2022, paywall)]

The article also states that

The observatory was located on Mauna Loa to ensure measurements weren’t impacted by local changes to CO2, such as emissions from cars or cities. The lack of plants on the volcanic rock meant records also wouldn’t be affected by the respiration of nearby plants.

But they don’t address emissions from local volcanoes, so I wonder.

A horrible thought, eh? Presidential election politics already?

But it’s true, the ambitious are already in play. Governor DeSantis (R-FL) and Trump have been working at it for months, as seen in the governor surreptitiously flipping positions on vaccines, and the former President following up his entry into the race announcement with <strangled laughter> his announcement that he will sell NFTs of pictures of his head on various muscled bodies.

I kid you not. Maybe it’s the joke that Philip Kennicott thinks it to be:

Another name mentioned nationally is Governor Youngkin (R) of Virginia, the man who led the upset of the Democrats in Virginia in 2021. In the following 2022 election, he chose to compete with the former President in the endorsement arena, and it didn’t go well:

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) defended his record in only five of the 15 GOP gubernatorial candidates he campaigned with winning their races in the midterm elections last month.

“We picked hard races, races where the states were set up a bit like Virginia, where Joe Biden had won by 10 points, and we went to work to try to flip those states,” he told Fox News’ Martha MacCallum in an interview.

Youngkin said Republican candidates’ performances showed that their message “carries,” but unseating an incumbent is difficult.

In the midterms, Republicans were only successful in defeating one Democratic incumbent governor, Steve Sisolak in Nevada. GOP nominees failed to win races in key states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. [The Hill]

A brave, even smart thing to do, but while it may seem like your message got through despite losing, it’s important not to fool one’s self: the Republican message is primarily anti-Democrat, followed by hollow echoing of the religious tenets of lower taxes and less regulation will lead to prosperity, unless you’re Trump, in which case it’s whine whine whine about the 2020 election.

The truth of the matter is that the last three national elections, which are 2018, 2020, and 2022, the Democratic performance has exceeded expectations, and the Republicans have failed to meet expectations. In the 2022 election the Republicans predicted a gain of sixty seats in the House, and gained … nine. Worse yet, the Democrats gained a seat in the Senate. Republican expectations of retaining the Pennsylvania Senate seat while flipping Senate seats in Nevada, Washington, New Hampshire, and a few other States ended in bitter disappointment, often by large margins. Even consolation was bitter as victory margins in several traditional strongholds didn’t match their historical norms. For example, Senator Grassley of Iowa once again won reelection, but fell far short of his average victory margin of 33 points.^[1]

Youngkin’s endorsements didn’t work out? He might want to consider it an important lesson. He simply doesn’t have enough influence to lift underdog candidates to victory, meaning his national reach is not forceful. On the other hand, Virginia governors are term-limited at one term, meaning he can only serve non-consecutive terms. Maybe he needs a hobby.

But conservative leaders are apparently appraising their movement and have decided some careful management of the herd base is necessary, starting by tossing the former President out on his ear, while assuring everyone that No, there’s nothing really wrong with the conservative movement. Erick Erickson chose the Start with unhappy truths and finish with a fantasy approach to this challenge:

We now have the USA Today and the Wall Street Journal polling — both, I would note, were pretty reliable in 2022. Those outlets and their pollsters suggest most Republicans are ready to move on from Trump. From USA Today:

By 2-1, GOP and GOP-leaning voters now say they want Trump’s policies but a different standard-bearer to carry them. While 31% want the former president to run, 61% prefer some other Republican nominee who would continue the policies Trump has pursued.

Over the past two years, and really after the midterms, callers to my radio show have also begun to move on.

The consensus is that people want Trump policies, but they are not sure he is the best standard bearer moving forward.

People genuinely do appreciate what President Trump did for the country. They appreciate his fight. They appreciate his judicial picks. They appreciate his robust defense of the United States worldwide and his tough stance with China, Iran, and others.

But, as he notes in his graph on the right here, the MAGA conservatives have no intention of moving on from Trump. The red arrow is the day he posted an anti-Trump screed to his paying subscribers only, and the graph shows the impact on his paying subscriber base.

Up to here, Erickson’s putting the best spin he can on a bad situation, and if he chooses to ignore some gaping chasms, such as the SBC debacle, the abortion disaster, the precarious problem of GOP leadership in the House, and a number of other conundrum, well, self-delusion can be its own punishment.

But this is the sort of thing I’d classify an outright lie:

The media is going to elevate the loud voices of NeverTrump and OnlyTrump. To stay relevant, any good candidate will be defined as the second coming of Trump by NeverTrump, and a weak-kneed establishment sell-out hack by OnlyTrump. Both need Trump to stay relevant.

The upside for the GOP and the nation is that neither do. The Republican Party has a very deep bench of talent. While the midterms were not what we wanted.[sic?] The future is bright.

My bold, and follow that with No, it’s not. The future, that is, for the GOP. Oh, I could be wrong. Maybe all the good future candidates aren’t yet apparent. But the lesson from this election, and the January 6th Insurrection fallout, is that if your leadership is McCarthy, McConnell, Cruz, Hawley, Gaetz, Greene, Madison Cawthorn, Boebert, Ralph Norman, and other folks who, in some cases, managed to put safe Republican seats at risk, well, you don’t have enough intelligent people to fill the seats you’re winning. Gohmert, Gosar, Biggs? No, no, and no. Here is CO-3, Rep Boebert’s seat, results:

And Erickson knows this. From a different post:

It is official. Republicans have taken back the House of Representatives. They gathered yesterday to announce their first official act: an investigation into Hunter Biden.

Dumbasses.

What a bunch of idiots. The American people just rejected the GOP “own the libs” strategy. They signaled they’d love to have responsible adult Republicans in charge. In fact, from NEW YORK STATE !!!! to Arizona, voters elected Republicans who ran on local issues tied to the economy and crime.

I think it's clear that the GOP suffers from a poison at its very heart. Senator Goldwater (R-CO) knew it 60 years ago. It manifests as blind arrogance, as team politics, as an adherence to political positions as if they're religious mantra. This all leads to deeply substandard candidates being elected, repelling the independents who are often key to winning elections.

The question isn't really about the GOP, is it? No. It's about the Democrats. Are they swirling down their own vortex?

¹ I think Grassley was fortunate to win at all, and my friends to the south have committed a major foul by nominating and then electing him again, given his recent history of mendacity and/or dementia.

Particoloured:

1. Made up of sections having different, often bright, colours. [Wiktionary]

And there wasn’t much out there for definitions of particoloured, I was surprised to say, although there was a blog called Particolour. Noted in “Flying squirrels carve nuts to store them securely in tree branches,” Michael Le Page, NewScientist (10 December 2022, paywall):

They then set up 32 infrared cameras to monitor some of the stored nuts. They found two species of squirrels came to check the nuts or retrieve them: a subspecies of the Hainan flying squirrel called Hylopetes phayrei electilis and the particoloured flying squirrel (Hylopetes alboniger).

A fascinating article on these two species of flying squirrels chewing grooves in their food nuts in order to securely store them in tree forks.

The diligent student is interrupted by the janitor, who is about to shoo him out of the parlor and into the study hall. There, he finds fifteen potential victims, and, as part of his final exam, he’ll need to ascertain the most likely reason each victim will be heedlessly slaughtered before midnight. The time is 11:30pm. Ready? Set! <bang!> Uhh … uhhhhh….

If you value plausibility, even logic, in your murder mysteries, then you may want to give Murder at Midnight (1931) a pass, although I think a really inquisitive mind could make it all seem to work. But this many unsympathetic, in some cases “oh, please kill them, too!” characters, made it hard to take the story seriously. It quickly devolved into the morbid game of How many will be dead at the end of this?, followed by And will they kill off that damn cop who spreads peanut shells everywhere?

Sadly, the answer is No.

However, while it may have been common in the era the movie was made, I’ve never seen a game of Charades in which it actually looked like the players were putting on a little drama. It was charming.

But that’s not nearly enough to save this story from the trashcan of the mundane.

Plebiscite:

A plebiscite is a vote by the whole people and is often used synonymously with a referendum. In the most recent literature a plebiscite has been defined as “an instrument, which allow[s] a government to appeal to people to express themselves with a yes or a no”[i].’ [sic] The two terms do not always overlap in the legal, political and diplomatic literature as will be shown below. [Encyclopedia Princetoniensis]

Noted in “Thursday’s Mini-Report, 12.15.22,” Steve Benen, Maddowblog:

* Puerto Rico’s future: “The House voted Thursday in favor of the Puerto Rico Status Act, which seeks to resolve the U.S. territory’s status and its relationship to the United States through a binding plebiscite. In a 232-191 vote, the bill was passed by 216 Democrats and 16 Republicans. All votes against the bill came from Republicans.”

As the Republicans were supporting statehood for the Puerto Ricans about a decade ago, it’s a puzzling vote. And while the Democrats may not find the Puerto Ricans to be as liberal as they might like, the current flavor of Republicans may be equally disappointed.

Damn heavy snow makes for nice tableaus.

Now if the shoulder would stop hurting.

In the Dobbs decision, Justice Thomas exhibited some remarkable reasoning regarding history and the law when he suggested that, without evidence of abortion being legal in the days of the Founders, it could not be a Constitutional right today; Erick Erickson tried to take it further and fell on his face.

But now we’re getting the first ripples of this Dobbs reasoning from the inferior judges, as this article summary makes clear:

Federal judge in Texas rules that disarming those under protective orders violates their Second Amendment rights

U.S. District Judge David Counts signed another opinion Thursday that cited a lack of historical record on laws relating to domestic violence to justify disarming abusers. Advocates fear the ruling will put more victims in harm’s way. [The Texas Tribune]

The idea that someone already considered to be violent and irrational should continue to be armed is painfully silly.

But the real point here for me is an almost reverence for a supposed position of the Founding Fathers, a reverence that is directly and fatally repelled by a simple reading of the Constitution. Remember the part where it specifies that the Constitution may be amended by 2/3 of each House of Congress, followed by approval by the States?

In that very statement lies the information that should result in the dissolution of his order.

It is the acknowledgment of doubt, of the possibility of error, the recognition that, as society changes, so should the law of the land, in small particulars and great generalities.

This is the kind of ruling that is a regression, after the progress, the changes in which the 2nd Amendment, itself not an unlimited right in a country of limited rights, which brought us through the 1950s, a regression of dubious worth that could easily result in the deaths of estranged spouses and responding police officers. It ascribes a holiness to the alleged beliefs of the Founding Fathers that is uncalled for, and, in fact, a barrier to the necessary critiques and adjustments to our laws that are necessary to improve our country.

And it’s sad, really. Whether Judge Counts thinks this is a necessary ruling in the wake of Thomas’ ruling, or it was his own idea, there’s a good chance people will die because of it.

On Lawfare Martijn Rasser is discussing increasing pressure put on China by the USA when it comes to semiconductors:

The Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) published a rule with five main parts. One part banned any entity or individual from supplying leading-edge graphics processing units (GPUs)—a type of integrated circuit that accelerates the creation of images—and electronics containing them to any other entity or individual in China. These controls were imposed because GPU chips play an important role in the development and use of artificial intelligence applications, particularly the deep learning methods that are the main driver of the current AI boom. This ban applies to all foreign-made GPUs as a result of a modified extraterritorial jurisdictional rule called the foreign direct product rule, or FDPR for short. The new FDPR subjects any such chip made directly from American technology or software, or produced, even in part, from U.S.-made semiconductor production equipment to U.S. jurisdiction.

Because all semiconductor fabrication facilities use at least some U.S.-made equipment, every such GPU on the planet is now subject to U.S. controls. The Biden administration needed to apply this part of the rule extraterritorially because these GPUs are not made in the United States and no other country subjects them to any form of export control given their widespread commercial applications. No supply of these chips to a Chinese entity can take place without a U.S. government license. Unlike the Trump administration’s policy of granting licenses to Huawei and the Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) for certain types of older-generation consumer applications, the Biden team’s announced licensing policy is to presumptively deny all such licenses.

This was imposed October 7th, so it was before the China-wide protests over the zero tolerance Covid policy, but it certainly contributes to the pressure on the Chinese government. It says, Enough copying! Figure it out on your own! And the Chinese government is not known for encouraging widespread creativity; down that path lies forbidden thoughts.

But given their sudden change of policy when it comes to Covid, from zero tolerance to a dropping of many restrictions, which according to NPR has confused and discouraged Chinese citizens, one has to wonder how close they are to a tipping point when it comes to the government.

They’re probably a ways away. The Communist Party retains control of the armed forces, and I have yet to see any evidence, credible or otherwise, of the Chinese military be willing to turn against the Party.

On the other hand, I’d be surprised to see any such evidence. It seems very likely that senior military leaders are well aware of what would happen to the leaders of a failed coup. A whisper cannot released until the deed is done; don’t expect to hear rampant rumors that the Chinese military is restive.

Talking Points Memo (TPM) took advantage of access to the texts and messages of then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows (R), the former Congressman from North Carolina, that he sent and received during and after the January 6th insurrection, to analyze and publish some of them. Of particular interest to just about every one was this:

One message identified as coming from Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) to Meadows on January 17, 2021, three days before Joe Biden was set to take office, is a raw distillation of the various themes in the congressional correspondence. In the text, despite a typo, Norman seemed to be proposing a dramatic last ditch plan: having Trump impose martial law during his final hours in office.

Mark, in seeing what’s happening so quickly, and reading about the Dominion law suits attempting to stop any meaningful investigation we are at a point of � no return � in saving our Republic !! Our LAST HOPE is invoking Marshall Law!! PLEASE URGE TO PRESIDENT TO DO SO!!

For me, there’s insight in the phrasing. This is not a malevolent entity looking to take control of the government despite the election going against him.

No, this Rep really does think the election has been stolen. The mindset is not clear, but it’s clearly congruent with the worries of Senator Goldwater (R-AZ) of the 1960s: a man convinced that God has promised them the election would, of course, worry that cheating by the corporation providing the ballot counting systems might steal away an election. It’s more than a little shallow-minded, but it makes a lot of sense.

It’s also more than congruent with a politician who has foolishly bought into the Republican propaganda concerning the Democrats. One is tempted to ask him if he thinks Democrats are spending evenings in their comfy chairs, smoking jackets holding in their stomachs as they suck on the marrow of dead babies. He’d probably say he hadn’t thought of the smoking jackets, but it seemed likely.

Any way this goes, it’s the sort of mindset of someone who’s given in to the idea that a political adversary is, in fact, an enemy. This is a toxic fraction of our national bloodstream, and Rep Norman should probably simply resign and go back to whatever it was he was doing before he became a politician, because this sort of mindset is simply not appropriate, left or right, in a politician.

At least, without evidence.

… and it’s Obstruction.

Every morning my Arts Editor is muttering about him being in the way.

Girl in camo.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle (2018) is a mystery. Late 1940s, perhaps, small-town America, and who murdered the parents of 18 year old Merricat Blackwood and her older sister and owner of the house, Constance? Why are they loathe to go into town to get supplies, and why do the townspeople, in turn, loathe them? Is this why Merricat is practicing a type of magic to protect her, and does it work? Is Uncle Julian, who lives with them and is confined to a wheelchair, completely sane, or has he caught on to the secret of his brother and sister-in-law’s death, and it’s made him unbalanced? Is this new guy, Charles Blackwood, really a cousin, or is he something else? Or is it bad enough that he’s … a member of the family?

And, while we’re at it, why? Why do I care about this story concerning two mentally challenged women, living in their inheritance as if in a ship lost in a sea of chaos?

Or do I?

In the end, there’s nary a sympathetic character to be found, as it seems that everyone, from townsperson to children to the Blackwood parents, cousin Charles, and even Uncle Julian seem fully capable of enacting violence, incoherent, terrifying violence.

And perhaps that’s the point – understanding that when no one’s perfect, rejection of the imperfect leaves one in a precarious position. And that sometimes, rather than hating in an unforgiving furor, a little forgiveness may make more sense.

Maybe.

Well done, but mystifying rather than uplifting, be in an inquisitive mood when watching this one. Black depression definitely contraindicates this story.

Late last month there came a potential scandal involving SCOTUS:

Long time readers may remember my complaints of 4+ years ago that then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp (R-GA) neither recused himself from management of the 2018 election in Georgia, nor did he resign from his position. Why? Because he was running for the Governor’s seat that year, and thus it was a reasonable argument that Kemp had a conflict of interest when it came to overseeing his own election.

So why bring this up? Just moments ago, I discovered the same situation arose in the 2022 cycle, and I missed it. It involves Democrat, candidate for the Arizona governorship, and current Secretary of State for Arizona Katie Hobbs, who gained a narrow, narrow victory over former newscaster and MAGA Republican candidate Kari Lake. The margin is less than 1 full point, and it took quite a long time to call the race.

Sigh. It appears politics in Arizona is a messy business. Indeed, Wikipedia notes this:

Hobbs faced the Republican nominee, former KSAZ-TV news anchor Kari Lake, in the general election. She limited access to reporters, sometimes going out of her way to avoid them, and held small-scale campaign events. She declined to debate Lake, saying she wanted to deny Lake the opportunity to spread election denialism. Hobbs narrowly defeated Lake with 50.3% of the vote. After the election, Lake refused to concede, and is assembling a legal team to contest the election results.

Refusal to debate leaves voters less informed. While it’s true a website and other resources can inform the persistent voter as to candidate positions, a debate gives the audience an up-front display of performance in the face of confrontation, and may even demonstrate inconsistency, ignorance, or ideological kant infesting the positions of the candidate.

By refusing to recuse or resign for this election, Hobbs has given Lake a leg to stand on, although I don’t know that there was any more than that. Still, the appearance, as well as her behavior, stinks.