Monthly Archives: December 2022

The online article title differs, and isn’t as good, as the paper copy from NewScientist:

Death metal singing technique is also used by chatty bats

Chortleable.

I speculated that one or two Senators might go independent after the recent election, and it appears that I was right.

Except for the who part. From azcentral:

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema said Friday she is leaving the Democratic Party and will formally become an independent in a move that more fully places her at the center of a narrowly divided chamber.

She announced her decision in an opinion piece published Friday in The Arizona Republic.

“I have joined the growing numbers of Arizonans who reject party politics by declaring my independence from the broken partisan system in Washington,” she wrote.

Sinema maintained she doesn’t plan to change her voting habits: often aligning with Democrats but backing Republicans on certain issues. And she won’t dispense with the legislative filibuster that has led many Democrats to call for her to face a primary challenge in 2024.

And so much for a primary challenge. As many have pointed out, her desire to be reelected may be at the center of this strategic move, and if she does choose to run again, it’ll place the Democrats in a quandary: endorse Sinema, which will infuriate progressives, or run a Democrat and risk handing the seat back to the Republicans?

Her term ends January of 2025.

I wonder if she believes she’s working for the forces of moderation and reconciliation. If so, the radicals of the Republican Party hardly seem likely to meet her halfway. No, I see this as a tactical move to improve her reelection chances.

And I don’t really expect her to be joined by Republican Senators Murkowski and Collins.

The People We Hate At The Wedding (2022) chronicles one of the most self-centered and neurotic American families, going to a wedding. Wisdom, heartbreak, laughter in equal, if predictable, parts. See it if you’re a Kristen Bell completist or you love cheekbones.

And that’s all I really have to say for it.

Weening:

archaic
: to hold as an opinion : SUPPOSE, BELIEVE
Little did he ween that these wretched rags he now wore, were but suitable to that long career of destitution before him … Herman Melville
Since primal Man was fashioned / To people ice and stones, / No pair, I ween, had ever been / Such chums as I and JONES. P. G. Wodehouse [Merriam-Webster]

No, no sightings. The word overweening, meaning arrogant, had occurred to me yesterday as a bit of verbiage I hardly ever encounter on the Web, and, as it seemed likely to be a word constructed from others, I then wondered as to the meanings of weening.

I have read Melville, and I have the bloodstains to prove it. While I enjoyed Moby-Dick, at the end of Pierre I seriously considered clawing out my eyes.

No matter how bad they are. Like me.

Erick Erickson is appalled that Senate Minority Leader McConnell (R-KY) is backing a law that, well, it depends on how you interpret social media links to news sites:

Breitbart News says sources credit McConnell with adding the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA) to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The NDAA is a must pass appropriations measure for national security. The JCPA is a federal welfare program for the very media that hates Republicans. It is a bailout for dying publications to be funded by Silicon Valley ad dollars generated from you. If McConnell is behind this, he needs to reverse it.

You know how you can go on Facebook or Google, find a news headline, and click through to the news site to read it? The JCPA would make Facebook and Google pay the news outlets for the kindness of displaying their news headlines and generating traffic for those news outlets. It would effectively create a “link tax.” It is nuts.

Nancy Pelosi is a big fan of it. Why any Republican would vote for this is beyond me. It sure as hell is not conservative.

Skipping over the linkage of the JCPA to the NDAA, which sounds to me like two very disparate subjects and thus shouldn’t be in one bill, let’s talk about the definition of buyer/seller, the very heart of capitalism. Sellers come in one of two varieties: an entity that produces a product or service, or an entity that buys, perhaps combines with other product, and then resells it with some sort of added value.

Notice that, in the era of Radio and Television, the tangible product or service, aka the radio or television program, is not the actual product, but was rather the empty space between content scenes or segments, dictated originally by the needs of drama, and this became commercial time, desirable for companies desiring to advertise services and products. In the Internet era, an analogous source of revenue is derived from the sale of commercial space on web sites. And for paper publications, predecessor to the these three, the product for consumers was the paper and its contents, both of which had value, which they bought, while advertisers bought space from the publisher in their publications to place their advertisements; publishers were paid coming and going.

Content commerce in the Internet Era, moreso than Radio and Television, functions to separate consumers from the mostly honest transaction of paying the producer of content for that content, substituting the considerably more questionable commercial model to the transaction.

So, back to the point, your generally capitalist system has consumers paying the original producers for their services and/or product, and resellers paying them as well from their revenue made via reselling.

So, what is Facebook (or Google, or other sites in this category, for which we’ll use the iconic Facebook)?

A producer? No.

Do they pay for the links they provide to other news sites? From context it appears that’s no, as well.

In fact, this exposes a hidden contradiction in Erickson’s screed, although he may not be aware of it himself. Consider the contradiction in these two statements: It is a bailout for dying publications to be funded by Silicon Valley ad dollars generated from you, and The JCPA would make Facebook and Google pay the news outlets for the kindness of displaying their news headlines and generating traffic for those news outlets.

The contradiction is the assertion that Facebook, et al, are keeping those publications alive, and yet they are dying. When a contradiction like this comes popping out of an argument, that usually means there’s a serious problem with the characterization of the situation.

Again, is Facebook producing the news, or is it reselling the news? Well, the fact of the matter is that, in a commercial sense, Facebook is thieving it. Let’s think about Facebook’s motives: they’re not putting those links up out of the kindness of Facebook’s wooden little heart. Their visitor analysis has, without a doubt, revealed they can drive more traffic with links that make them look local than without that characterization. Most, though not all, humans desire a sense of familiarity. Why do many inhabitants of small towns lament the demise of said towns? Because they’re familiar and they know everyone and gives a sense of extended family. So Facebook sprinkles everyone’s feeds with reader-local content. I’m in the Twin Cities of Minnesota, and I see ads from Senator Klobuchar and a number of local businesses, along with an occasional news story from various sources.

Facebook also sprays me and my neighbors with high-revenue links that they hope we’ll click on. (I try not to do so.)

It’s not about the content, per se. It’s about building an ambiance that sharpens the addiction to social media, along with message “likes” and all that well-described social media goal: keep the eyeballs on the screen as long as possible. As a former social media addict of roughly 40 years experience, this is not incredible, but quite credible.

And if you don’t have to pay for the links, it’s another penny in the corporate pocket to invest in the Metaverse. This is irrelevant, but, hca      ey, Facebook’s clever in many ways, but so far their future product, Metaverse, appears to be a smoking crater.

I’m not sure what motivated Erickson’s misguided anti-legacy-media rant. Maybe he simply misinterprets the currents of media commerce, itself a confusing subject because the traditional, if misguided, private sector metric of money money money just doesn’t work so well in the free (liberty sense) press sector of society, because money doesn’t measure excellence in that sector. If you want to know about excellence, ask about Pulitzer’s and ask if Fox News has any (none mentioned on their Wikipedia page). If you want to read my laboriously worked out conclusions on sectors of society and the results of metric confusion, Sectors of Society at the top of the page is the starting point for that.

Or maybe he hates legacy media. He certainly uses a lot of negative adjectives, such as sclerotic, to describe them. He has that contemptuous attitude that makes me suspect that, as a confirmed extreme rightist, he’s appalled that a news service doesn’t support this positions, and therefore they must be condemned. That many of them are not surviving this new era of “free information” must be gratifying, and the easy conclusion that they are incompetent causes him to skip reanalysis that would reveal false characterizations. It’s an insidious form of confirmation bias.

He also doesn’t seem to be aware of the degraded journalism product that is being brought on, in part, by the lack of revenue from Facebook, etc, offered by local news providers. In this case, degraded can mean complete disappearance, such as news of strictly geographical interest like changes to city zoning regulations, the police beat, etc. These are serious degradations as they can function as oversight of police and other governmental institutions.

To Erickson, the old media are just sclerotic because he persists in applying improper metrics to legacy media, without realizing that his preferred media, which offers at least some support to his extremist positions, does not and can not offer the journalism product that the old line media does with excellence.

Here is Perry Bacon, Jr.’s proposal to find a way to preserve legacy media.

Gotta love Zefrank:

Senator Warnock’s (D) margin of victory in his reelection campaign in Georgia is coming in at nearly three points, giving Democrats a majority in the Senate, which is worth noting they lacked before the red wave. While some liberal pundits are celebrating, I find it difficult to get around the fact that his challenger, former NFL star and Trump-endorsee Herschel Walker (R), nearly won.

After decisively beating all of his primary rivals.

Mr. Walker demonstrated such skills as mendacity, fornication, and rhetorical gibberish during the campaign, and still won well more than 40% of Georgians’ votes. It’s embarrassing. That many Georgians thought that Walker somehow was better equipped than Warnock for the Senate. I’m aghast.

The Democrats now have an important question in front of them. Why was this race so close? Some possible answers:

• The American electorate distrusts Democrats.
• The Georgian electorate distrusts Democrats.
• The Georgian electorate thinks a Senate seat is a prize for the mantle and not a serious position of responsibility.

The announcement that Trump Corp and Trump Payroll Corp have been found guilty of tax fraud, involving how they paid CFO Allen Weisselberg and others in order to avoid tax liabilities, and that they’ve been found guilty on all seventeen charges, has a whole lot of schadenfreude going on in lefty and NeverTrumper land.

Along with that ungraceful behavior, a few points come up.

1. That there were no Not Guilty findings may indicate that Trump and his minions were not particularly good at being tax frauds. In fact, it may be that, much like many of those who worked on his campaign and in his Administration, his business associates were also sub-standard, that he, like many bullies, only hired sub-average folks to do what he needed done; this low-quality approach kept initial costs down, and meant that it was very unlikely he’d be outshown by a minion. His pathological narcissism wouldn’t permit that. But the cheapskate, egotist approach is a recipe for disaster. Like this one.
2. Now that he’s been proven vulnerable – yes, yes, I’m sure he’ll appeal, as the corporate attorneys affirm in the article, and in a particularly snarly outraged manner, but the damage is done – a particular segment of his base, weak of faith or maybe stronger of intellect than the average member, will drop away. They’ll look at their own tax returns, devoid of that big old stamp that says TAX FRAUD, and realize that he’s not a buddy of their’s. He’s an alleged billionaire who still avoids paying taxes. How big a segment will peel away? Hard to say.
3. His grifting return will take a hit, at least from the little guys. Whether or not this will impact his millionaire+ donor class is another question, because many of them are resentful of having to pay taxes. It’s an attitude cultivated by their mentors and heroes when the soon-to-be donors are young, and whether they inherit, steal, or earn their riches, they just can’t imagine those government types doing anything worthwhile with their money.
4. The evidence from this trial, if not already in use – I am not a lawyer, so I don’t know if that’s permitted or not – can now be released for use by all the other legal scandals swirling about the former President. This may prove fruitful.
5. The umbrella organization, The Trump Organization, has now suffered the soft impairment of being a corporate entity criminal, meaning business loans are harder to gain, and other corporations may decline to work with the company without tough guarantees, such as full upfront payments. I suspect it’s been running on empty for years; this may put a knife in it as Trump drains it of cash, whether out of sheer greed, or because of prosperity church philosophy.

And, finally, there may be a debate going on in Trump’s head right now. If he’s brought up on criminal charges, such as in Georgia for his illegal attempt to influence Georgia Secretary of State Raffensperger, will he attempt to leave the United States for a country lacking extradition? Or will the drama inherent in being a defendant be too much for him? And then would he testify in his own behalf?

Exeunt Trump, stage left, pursued by prosecutors.

Stay tuned for more drama. This is just the beginning.

Erick Erickson isn’t doing well. First, he doesn’t like his leaders, especially when it comes to Hunter Biden and his laptop:

Again, I don’t have a problem if the GOP wants to see what all the fuss is about. But giving it this much attention and making it this much of a priority is more likely than not going to be self-defeating and blow up in their faces.

A better end goal would be not to drag the Bidens but shake up and reform the national security apparatus of the United States, which has been politicized. If the GOP were smart (HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA), they’d wind this down and pass it over to a special committee designed to investigate the FBI, Justice Department, and the politicization therein. Then, the Biden laptop story becomes a useful illustration of how all the above collaborated with a social media company to censor a media outlet from telling a true story. And then the entangling details of the laptop provide extra news nuggets.

And then he makes the suggestion that the national security apparatus has been politicized. Sure. Maybe the first topic of the day will be how the FBI assisted Hillary in her run for the Presidency.

Or was it hated her? Quite honestly, you can find both views, although the former seems surprisingly popular. Talk to progressives, though, and it’s all about former FBI Director (and then-Republican) James Comey deliberately screwing Clinton over.

I read Comey’s book and felt he just got caught in the well-known Greek rocks, and then discovered that Trump is just a corrupt mess.

Yeah, have a pack of fourth-rate House GOP members questioning Republican and FBI Director Christopher Wray and his subordinates about how they all secretly supported Hillary. That’ll go down like an iron thistle.

Does Erickson really want the national security apparatus angry at his side? There’s just about no one qualified in the House GOP to conduct such questioning. How about if they put Gaetz, Jordan, and Greene in charge?

Oh, my. Now that’d be a dumpster fire to burn out the metaphor. We’d need something new.

If you happen to be one of those folks who think college – or high school! – students should have influence over how they are taught, consider this lesson from Freddie deBoer on Persuasion concerning the firing of Professor Maitland Jones of NYU:

Whatever the case, I want to suggest that the students who launched the petition were denying themselves a central element of education: figuring out what you’re not good at. Failing. Trying to learn, and failing to do so. This is an element of education as vital as learning what you’re good at, the act of self-discovery of one’s own lack of ability. All of us have limits, natural limits on what we can learn and do in academic fields. Some exceedingly rare individuals appear to be brilliant at everything, but for the rest of us, there’s a whole suite of topics and skills that we will never perform with any facility. And if colleges insist on reducing rigor to the point that learning those limits becomes impossible, something will have been lost.

In my own time as a graduate student in the humanities and as an administrator in the City University of New York, I was dismayed by the ongoing assault on rigor, with arguments against homework, against grading, and against taking attendance. Many in academia default to any position that seems pro-student, due to a desire to be “the cool professor” or through tendentious political definitions of the purpose of higher education. But such people tend to define “pro-student” as meaning whatever students want, when of course part of the point of being an educator is to do what’s best for students that they may not want to do themselves. I believe that rigor is essential to providing students with value for their tuition dollars, as I personally have been brought closer to the level of my potential thanks to professors who made serious demands of me. I have also learned the limits of that potential thanks to those teachers, who helped me to understand what I was and was not good at.

The one point that deBoer should have made, but didn’t, is that by making courses too easy, we run the risk of incompetency leaking into safety-critical fields, fatal accidents occurring – and then, who do you blame? The professor was fired, you can’t blame him. At one time, the pedagogical approach was … a graduate instructor friend of mine in the electrical engineering department explained the idea simply. If early engineering classes were easy, and most students passed them, then some of those students would inevitably run up against their academic limits later in their academic careers, at which point starting over with a new major would be harder and more expensive. [deBoer]

At one time, it was the responsibility of the educational institutions to ensure, as best one can, that only competent graduates get out the door. But if the administrators are now giving the students access to the controls, then who’s responsible?

These self-centered students. For every fatal accident caused by an incompetent graduate hailing their institution.

Those petition writers, those petition signers, have taken on responsibilities for which they lack all competency. The administrators, to be honest, bear some responsibility as well. They should know better. Indeed, deBoer’s friend’s recitation should be part of the curriculum for the would-be administrator.

And this is why you don’t let the students run the joint.

Some thoughts on possible review openings.

“The Mitchells vs the Machines (2021) is all about the critical role our robot overlords will play in healing dysfunctional families everywhere.”

No, no, no.

“The Mitchells vs the Machines (2021) gives us the grim consequences of helicopter parents meeting the issue of a geek who probably had helicopter parents.”

Oh, no, no, no! I mean, yes, but no!

“The Mitchells vs the Machines (2021) chronicles the consequences of letting a child from a home of micromanagers try to pursue her dreams.

Maybe, but it’s a dismal, tired attempt.

“The Mitchells vs the Machines (2021) demonstrates how a modern, happy family is utterly ineffectual in the face of the first bump in the road, said bump being smart-ass robots that think they know better than humanity.”

Sounds like the review for I, Robot (2004), if I had reviewed it.

Oh! Got it! Got it!

“The Mitchells vs the Machines (2021) is the proof we all needed that our Galactic Protectors are, as we’ve suspected all along …. PUGS. There’s no other explanation.”

Strangely reminiscent of the car trips down to Chicago of my own youth. Station wagon, car sickness, panic over the driving. Check. Check. Check.

Otherwise, how is it? Not bad. Hard choices are not always soft-shoed, which is good. Plot holes are covered by breakneck pacing, which pauses just long enough to build empathetic characters and explain just how things will go wrong for us if we’re not careful.

Entertaining, even if the art doesn’t appeal to you.

It may look like lamb’s ear, but don’t assume it’ll vote with all the other lamb’s ears.

One of the terms that conservatives thinkers have for Dr. Kendi’s thoughts on correcting American racism is identitarian politics, which means that identifying a person on the basis of physical, or more rarely other, characteristics as a member of a given group will also give you the most reliable key to their politics.

This tends to get on the nerves of just about everyone else, and post election polling seems to confirm that it’s a broken contention. Democratic assumptions about the Latino vote has been wrong for several years, as many of them think that illegal immigration is a serious problem and illegal immigrants should be deported.

But this report might suggest something quite similar is going on in Oklahoma:

As a group pushes to make abortion a constitutional right in Oklahoma, there’s new attention on the process they’re trying to use.

State Sen. Warren Hamilton said he wants to change how many votes are needed to change laws. Right now, state questions pass by a simple majority, which he argues disenfranchises rural Oklahoma. …

The newest possible state question making headlines is State Question 828, which by a vote of the people would amend the state constitution to protect abortion rights. Hamilton announced via press release that he’s looking to file a joint resolution that would require state questions to be passed via a two-thirds majority.

Hamilton argued the current system disenfranchises rural Oklahoma, giving a voice to only the major cities. The McCurtain lawmaker also alleged it allows for voter fraud, election tampering and out-of-state influence. [KOCO News5]

It appears Hamilton has a sudden suspicion that all those anti-abortionists from the pre-Dobbs era are just not as devoted to the cause as he might have thought back then.

But his thinking is so odd. Rural Oklahomans are pro-life while city inhabitants are pro-choice? Is he so sure of that? And just because rural inhabitants are outnumbered, it’s necessary to come right out and say the votes of city-dwellers are to be discounted?

That’s one way to start a riot, to make voters, even your voters, unhappy with you.

I look forward to hearing how this works out for him.

I’ve long beat the drum for one of the GOP’s central illnesses being their tendency towards toxic team politics, or known to the political world as Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line: party line voting.

And it seems a few of them are inching slowly, with eyes squinted, towards this diagnosis. Well, one, at least. Sort of.

Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, a Republican, declared himself unable to vote for either Walker or Warnock.

“When there’s division in the locker room, there’s finger-pointing. It’s usually kind of the hallmark sign of a losing season,” said Duncan, who has been highly critical of Walker. He drew derision from other Republicans this week after he said he stood in line to vote but left without casting a ballot.

“We’ve been asked to be team players as Republicans for too long,” added Duncan, who also has criticized Trump’s grip on the party. [WaPo]

Can’t vote for Walker, that’s a key part of breaking the rule of toxic team politics. Then Duncan veers off.

“We’re done being team players. If we want to win, we need team leaders.”

Maybe someone lusting for power.

But it’s a tiny baby step in the right direction.

Well, this is an odd one. Remember, these nominations are for those folks whose allegiance to the former President has strayed into ludicrousness, much like former Rep Earl Landgrebe’s (R-IN) did for then-President Nixon (R). Here we are:

Trump is calling for subversion of the Constitution & either declaring him 2020 presidential winner or holding a “new election,” saying there should be “termination of all rules, regulations, & articles, even those found in the Constitution” to undo Biden’s right to presidency. pic.twitter.com/BIHfQsVpXv

— Vaughn Hillyard (@VaughnHillyard) December 3, 2022

Trump is calling for subversion of the Constitution & either declaring him 2020 presidential winner or holding a “new election,” saying there should be “termination of all rules, regulations, & articles, even those found in the Constitution” to undo Biden’s right to presidency [in a Truth Social post].

Yes, the nomination goes to the former President himself, for his doubling down on his outlandish fraudulent election claims. His is a childish mentality.

A possible subsidiary nomination may go to the entirety of the Republican Party, as Professor Richardson notes this in regard to Trump’s demented call:

But Republicans, so far, are silent on Trump’s profound attack on the Constitution, the basis of our democratic government.

That is the story, and it is earth shattering.

Whether it’s earth shattering depends on the size of the Republican Party. The latest Gallup Party Affiliation poll does suggest some reason for concern, as Republicans are now at 33% of the population as of October 3rd, after being at only 24% in August. I wonder about bad polling, or outliers.

Congrats to the former President for the nomination.

I see some Indiana judges have decided to accept some important and apparently correct “sauce for the goose” logic when it comes to abortion:

A second Indiana judge on Friday blocked the state from enforcing its law banning most abortions after Jewish, Muslim and other non-Christian women challenged it in a lawsuit.

Marion County Superior Court Judge Heather Welch issued a preliminary injunction against the Republican-backed law, which prohibits abortions with limited exceptions for rape, incest, lethal fetal abnormalities or a serious health risk to the mother. The plaintiffs have argued that the measure infringes on religious freedom protected by another state law. …

Welch issued her injunction after a group called Hoosier Jews for Choice and five individual women challenged the abortion law under Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act in a case brought by the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU said the plaintiffs represented religions including Judaism and Islam as well as “independent spiritual belief systems.”

“The Court finds that S.E.A. 1 substantially burdens the religious exercise of the Plaintiffs,” Welch wrote, using the formal name of the law, in granting the plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction while the challenge to its legality proceeds. [Reuters via WABX 107.5]

Both goose and gander have used the same substantive reason for their opposition and advocacy for abortion: the polyphony, if you will, of religion.

I’m not a lawyer and I haven’t read either of the decisions in this case, but it seems clear to me that this is a firm rejection of the notion, in the secular context, that the fetus is simply another human being. I’ve discussed this notion a bit in the negative, and I won’t reiterate it.

But it’s worth noting that we are a secular nation; the dangers of proclaiming we’re a nation of pick-your-sect has been noted, and condemned, here. That the Founding Fathers consigned the religious precept approach to law-making to the dustbin was a supremely practical and intellectual reaction to the madness of theologically oriented monarchs, and the violence that seemed inherent in their reigns; the notion that a peaceful society, undisturbed by the unsubstantiated religious tenets of various sects seems far preferable to the English example of burning at the stake, quite literally, those citizens whose religious practices were at variance with that of the monarch.

Ideally, that leaves rational, objective analysis, as difficult as that is, as the basis of real legislative actions. We’re not, being humans, particularly rational, and we’re not born with the tools of objective analysis ready to go, and our ability to teach it varies with teacher, local society, and opinions of both. This all means making laws is a messy business, of infinite frustration to those who believe there’s virtue in dispatch, regardless of their position on political spectrum. For some, it takes time to learn the error of the emotional response.

Skipping some thoughts and interlocutions, as my shoulder is giving me problems today, this leaves us with the classic approach of promulgate, evaluate, revise, repeat, also known, at least to my mind, as the approach of the humble. Our metrics during the revise step are key, and my proffered list is, naturally, incomplete:

1. Does the law have a rational basis?
2. Does the law infringe on the Bill of Rights?
3. Does the law promote or obstruct a peaceful society?
4. …

In any case, and to wrap things up, the anti-abortion forces have, in my opinion, failed on at least points 1 and 3; in their attempt to enforce their religious opinions on the population of Indiana, they have brought into play opposing religious forces, which have just as much right to their religious practices as do the anti-abortionists.

In an ideal country, these practices should cancel out, and, because abortion is never imposed, but merely available, I can see no need for anti-abortion laws.

Go, Indiana judges! They remind me of the Iowa Supreme Court justices who ruled that gay marriage was legal, shocking the conservatives of Iowa and beyond. They, in turn, organized a drive to vote those justices out of their seats, in a move that proves my contention that judges should never be subject to votes of the electorate, but only of the relevant legislative body.

I have to wonder how long these judges will remain in their positions.

It’s Gogol Bordello!

OK, so the appeal is a bit odd.

Remember my suspicion that some Republicans would like to see the former President as Speaker of the House? I missed this, ummm, announcement from Rep Ralph Norman from Thursday:

Rep. Ralph Norman, who opposes McCarthy for Speaker, says the renegade Republicans have a secret candidate to run against him who is not a House member: “It will be apparent in the coming weeks who that person will be. I will tell you, it will be interesting.” pic.twitter.com/anD60jvNky

— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) December 1, 2022

Rep. Ralph Norman, who opposes McCarthy for Speaker, says the renegade Republicans have a secret candidate to run against him who is not a House member: “It will be apparent in the coming weeks who that person will be. I will tell you, it will be interesting.”

Interesting? Only if it’s not Trump. Otherwise, drearily predictable and out of step with most of America, and he’d be terribly incompetent and unaware of it, unlike myself, who would be terribly incompetent and smart enough to not even consider accepting the position.

Suppose he is nominated for the position. Would moderate Republicans and Democrats vote for him? No. So he’d be left humiliated. Or so I think.

And, yes, the persistent stupidity of these folks does induce nausea in me.

Jansky:

The Jansky (Jy) is defined as:

1 ^. 10^-26 Watts / Hz ^. m²

[SETI League]

Incidentally, my first guess was that it is a synonym for jargon. Not. Even. Close. Noted in “Ronnametres and quettagrams have joined the ranks of SI units,” Alex Wilkins, NewScientist (26 November 2022):

[Richard Brown at the National Physical Laboratory] suggests that ronto and quecto could have uses in radio astronomy, such as for measuring the very weak strength of the cosmic microwave background, radiation left over from the big bang, but astronomers already frequently use the non-SI jansky for this, says [Mike Merrifield at the University of Nottingham].

Since the last update …

• Senator Murkowski (R) of Alaska has won her race over fellow Republican and Trump-endorsed Kelly Tshibaka; Patricia Chesbro (D) was also part of the cheese grater action, which I characterize in this manner since, after all the conservative chatter about the Senator being on the edge of failure, she coasted to a 7+ point victory over Tshibaka. As I, and a host of pundits, expected, ranked choice voting vastly increases the chances for moderates even in highly polarized environments, as most independents would prefer a steady and predictable legislator like Murkowski over the product of a Party that seems controlled by radicals.
• The Georgia runoff is this Tuesday, which means the pollsters have had a bit of time to run polls. CNN sponsored a poll by C rated^[1] SSRS that shows Senator Warnock (R) leading challenger Herschel Walker (R) 52% to 48%, with a margin of error of ± 3 points. A rated SurveyUSA gives Warnock a 50% – 47% lead with no margin of error given. A- rated Emerson College Polling gives Warnock a 49% to 47% lead, with a ± 3.2 point margin of error. Place your bet and take your chances.

It’s encouraging to see no conservative pollsters in the mix here, because, while I have not systematically studied their results, my impression is that, as a group, they diverged from the less obviously linked pollsters near the middle of October onwards, and it was the conservative pollsters who seemed to perform worse. For example:

• In New Hampshire, some conservative pollsters gave challenger Don Bolduc (R) a small lead over Senator Hassan (D), while others called it a dead heat. Then pollster Lowell Center gave Hassan a ten point lead, pointedly out of step with everyone else. Hassan’s final margin of victory? 10 points. That’s more comfortable than Murkowski’s victory.
• Pennsylvania’s race between Lt. Governor John Fetterman (D) and Dr. Oz Mehmet (R) for an open seat was ultimately a 3+ point win for Fetterman, when various conservative pollsters suggested Oz was pulling ahead. However and notably, the last Fox News poll showed Fetterman up by 3 points.

But how did SurveyUSA do overall? Emerson College? I’m waiting for FiveThirtyEight’s analysis.

What’ll happen in Georgia on Tuesday? I cannot imagine a Senator speaking gibberish like Walker speaks it, so I can only hope Warnock manages to take the seat. I have far more confidence in his grasp of national and international issues than I do with Walker.

¹ All ratings continue to be from FiveThirtyEight’s ratings following the 2020 election, calculated in March of 2021.

This TRY Channel episode is one of my favorites, alongside their original durian fruit episode.

I’m torn between a joke about jumbo shrimp and noting that Titans don’t do well in most mythologies.

This is all about how some people think they should be lording it over everyone else, from Mark Sumner on Daily Kos:

Now, in what may be one of the most egregious case of someone using their power and wealth to bully both local residents and officials, drug company executive Fredric Eshelman—net worth $380 million—is trying to make the situation even worse. He’s trying to block off huge areas of land even when he doesn’t surround them, by pressing a case that would make it much easier to prevent the public from reaching public land.

In the process, Eshelman is trying to financially destroy four hunters for “trespassing,” even though they literally never set one foot on his property. The outcome of this case will affect not just hunters and fishermen, but hikers, bird watchers, artists, photographers, and anyone who simply wants to access land that belongs to all of us.

What? After the State lost a criminal case….

Eshelman piled on to the hunters with a civil suit “for causing millions of dollars in damage” which seeks not only compensation for this supposed damage, but for the hunters to pay all legal fees in both the criminal and civil cases. He is seeking an incredible $7 million in damages for disturbing a few inches of air over his land.

Unbelievable. Go read Sumner’s article, it’s a gob-smacker.

I know that, during the Eisenhower Administration, taxes on the high earners were, themselves, high, compared to today. I cannot help but wonder if those taxes helped suppress the self-regarding narcissists from running around like lunatics, which made for a calmer society.

Such taxation used to seem deeply unfair to me, but having a pack of Emperor Nero-wannabes running around like Eshelman seems a lot worse.