Monthly Archives: December 2024

Here’s Steve Bannon, would-be leader of the Republican Party, sending a message to rival Elon Musk, meta-billionaire:

They’re trying to dump people off the platform like that’s going to matter? You can’t stop us… We’re a thousand times better than you guys are. Keep coming after American citizens like you’re coming and you’re going to find out how tough we are. You’re trashing the MAGA movement… I don’t care how big a check you wrote.

We’re a thousand times better than you guys are … Good God, it’s like a fifteen year old boy reading from a prepared script about his sixteen year old rival.

This is what passes for political dialog these days?

<Snarky comment omitted because she frightens me.>

Slash/Back (2022) is about a community of young Inuit girls in an Inuit village, so what did I expect from a script about girls aged, oh, seven to thirteen? Oh, so much hair itching!

If it helps any, my Arts Editor suggested that for American girls of the same age, the dialog was spot on; she wasn’t quite so sure about Inuits.

So what’s their problem? Well, between the spats, aliens have appeared and are menacing the girls. The aliens take over creatures, which never goes well, so, if it helps, think of zombie humans and polar bears and a memorable murderous zombie bunny rabbit. The parents?

They’re at a dance, and, given what happens to the cops, perhaps that’s just as well.

Sounds ridiculous? If you can make it past the dialog and spatting and the actually realistic kids being kids part, this is not too bad. Girls grow up a bit and get to be clever, monsters take it in the shorts. What’s not to like?

Well, the male characters might as well have been cardboard cut outs.

And that charging polar bear? It reminded me that polar bears freak me out. Good thing it was only a monster.

When it comes to the popularity of artificial intelligence (AI), back in October Ted Gioia, based on his successful prediction that the metaverse would be as popular as a capsized dinghy, which are my words, not his, is now predicting that artificial intelligence is the next big flop:

Guess what? These same four companies—Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Google—have a new dream technology built on fakery.

It’s called artificial intelligence.

What an amazing coincidence! Do these four CEOs coordinate their moves in secret? Or are they just obsessed with imitating each other in some kind of warped Girardian way?

But their AI plans aren’t much different than the virtual reality debacle.

• In VR, we go into a fake world to interact with real people.
• In AI, we remain in the real world but interact with fake people.

That’s not much of an improvement. By my measure, it’s actually a step backward.

Reality is not something to trifle with. It always gets the last laugh.

Given the companies named, he’s talking about generative AI, which I’ve mentioned seems like little more than a party trick to me. However, the starting post of this thread references claims that generative AI is now showing signs of artificial general intelligence, If this is a true claim then Gioia may not be right.

And other forms of artificial intelligence, or, more accurately, machine learning (ML), have already proven invaluable, from reading x-rays to spot cancer to weather forecasting.

Generative AI, since it’s basically a technology for digesting and summarizing a textual data source, may also have its place in the sun, as many academic disciplines experience such a volume of publications that researchers cannot keep up; some even have implemented their own agents for digesting the river coming at them.

The metaverse is, I think, a sponge for money that pretends to be a solution for ill-defined problems. AI? It’s already demonstrated some utility. I suspect it’ll be hanging around for a long while.

Sclerochronologist:

Sclerochronology is the study of periodic physical and chemical features in the hard tissues of animals that grow by accretion, including invertebrates and coralline red algae, and the temporal context in which they formed. It is particularly useful in the study of marine paleoclimatology. The term was coined in 1974 following pioneering work on nuclear test atolls by Knutson and Buddemeier and comes from the three Greek words skleros (hard), chronos (time) and logos (science), which together refer to the use of the hard parts of living organisms to order events in time. It is, therefore, a form of stratigraphy. Sclerochronology focuses primarily upon growth patterns reflecting annual, monthly, fortnightly, tidal, daily, and sub-daily (ultradian) increments of time. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “The oldest animal ever found could reveal whether a crucial ocean current will collapse,” Sarah Kaplan, WaPo:

Remember Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI and subject of Cheesiest Picture Ever?

Yeah, that guy. Well, while searching for something else, I ran across this post, and, to save the reader the time of clicking the link, and quote the quote from that post, an observation by Annalee Newitz:

Take Worldcoin, which at first glance seems like a serious company. It is the brainchild of Sam Altman, an influential Silicon Valley investor, who raised more than $25 million for the firm’s launch in October. The company admits that only 3 per cent of the world’s population currently uses a cryptocurrency, but aims to change that. How? Well, this is where it gets odd. Worldcoin will give “as many people as possible a share of a new currency”. Anyone who wants a Worldcoin can have one – as long as they are willing to look into “the Orb”.

That’s right, Worldcoin’s big technical advance is that it has created a shiny, silver ball about the size of a grapefruit called an Orb. You gaze into it, a camera inside takes a picture of your eyes and – poof! – now you have a Worldcoin in your app. Of course, the company also has a picture of your irises.

Like your fingerprint, each of your irises is a unique biometric attribute that can be used to identify you any time you look into a camera. On its website, Worldcoin has strange pictures of “Orb operators” asking people to gaze into shiny balls on a farm in Indonesia and on the streets of unnamed cities in Sudan and Kenya. The vibe is reminiscent of those edge-of-the seat moments in a horror film when something horrible is about to happen to the protagonist. You want to scream: “Don’t look into the Orb!” [“2021 was the year cryptocurrencies went completely off the rails,” Annalee Newitz, NewScientist (18 December 2021, paywall)]

Have any readers stared into a big silver orb?

When individuals have access to so much energy as we do, and the results of centuries of thinking, and are obsessed with making money and, perhaps more importantly, climbing the social ladder, well, we get folks like this running around.

Remember when he was fired and most of OpenAI declared they’d follow him into Hell to Microsoft? I suspect he’s quite the charmer, too. And for those not keeping up with personnel movements at OpenAI:

In November 2023, OpenAI’s board removed Sam Altman as CEO, citing a lack of confidence in him, but reinstated him five days later after negotiations resulting in a reconstructed board. Many AI safety researchers left OpenAI in 2024. [Wikipedia]

Gotta love that last sentence. Sheesh, I feel like a gossip.

What is seen cannot be unseen!

Last And First Men (2020) examines an attempt by humanity, a couple of billion years in the future and facing an existential rupture of space-time, attempting to communicate with, well, us.

There are no characters, just a narrator, discussing the problems of future humanity, while showcasing the abstract architectures of the future.

Sounds dull, something to skip? So I thought, although the movie makers did a good job coming up with disturbing shapes for the architectural elements, and I did make it to the end relatively painlessly. But this movie is based on the book of the same title, by Olaf Stapledon, a British philosopher, from 1930, and a little reading in Wikipedia dredged this up:

Stapledon’s writings directly influenced Arthur C. Clarke,^[15] Brian Aldiss,^[16] Stanisław Lem, Bertrand Russell,^[17] John Gloag,^[18] Naomi Mitchison,^[19] C. S. Lewis,^[20] Vernor Vinge,^[21] John Maynard Smith^[22] and indirectly influenced many others, contributing many ideas to the world of science fiction. Clarke wrote:^[13]

In 1930 I came under the spell of a considerably more literate influence, when I discovered W. Olaf Stapledon’s just-published Last and First Men in the Minehead Public Library. No book before or since ever had such and impact on my imagination; the Stapledonian vistas of millions and hundreds of millions of years, the rise and fall of civilizations and entire races of men, changed my whole outlook on the universe and has influenced much of my writing ever since.

Ideas such as a “supermind” composed of many individual consciousnesses forms a recurring theme in his work. Star Maker contains the first known description of what are now called Dyson spheres. Freeman Dyson credits the novel with giving him the idea, even stating in an interview that “Stapledon sphere” would be a more appropriate name.^[23] Last and First Men features early descriptions of genetic engineering^[24] and terraforming. Sirius describes a dog whose intelligence is increased to the level of a human being’s. Stapledon’s work also refers to then-contemporary intellectual fashions (e.g. the belief in extrasensory perception).

Last and First Men is a work of an influential early writer in the science fiction arena, almost a progenitor. This makes this movie more intriguing; it may even be a novel worth pursuing.

It’ll not be winning any awards, but it does stir up some thoughts for the audience able to disregard its taste for adventure, rom-coms, period dramas, and other genres, and simply watch and think.

We made it to The Museum of Russian Art this weekend. Displays include watercolors of mushrooms (lovely), Christmas decorations from the Soviet period, sacred art, and nesting dolls.

Enjoy TMORA.

I’ve discussed the expected rupture of the Republicans several times over the years, so this remark from a post by Professor Richardson concerning how the MAGA/Republicans may be going to pieces is more surprising for the details, which I didn’t expect, than the general overall fact that a movement built on, even advocating for, self-interest will tear itself apart:

Civil war has broken out within the MAGA Republicans. On the one side are the traditional MAGAs, who tend to be white, anti-immigrant, and less educated than the rest of the U.S. They believe that the modern government’s protection of equal rights for women and minorities has ruined America, and they tend to want to isolate the U.S. from the rest of the world. They make up Trump’s voting base.

On the other side are the new MAGAs who appear to have taken control of the incoming Trump administration. Led by Elon Musk, who bankrolled Trump’s campaign, the new MAGA wing is made up of billionaires, especially tech entrepreneurs, many of whom are themselves immigrants.

I suppose that, in retrospect, I should not be surprised that some of the business community would try to take advantage of the chaos that is the mendacity machine, Mr. Trump, in order to increase their profits even more. It’s important to note that the top management is often under heavy pressure to continually increase profits by investors, who tend to view themselves as the most important part of the organism well call big business – rather than the least important.

In any case, Professor Richardson’s post, if accurate, is one of the more important that I’ve seen from her for those attempting to understand the current American political scene.

One of her citations of participants in the right wing brawl is that of Vivek Ramaswamy, a proposed partner in the government efficiency effort:

The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if…

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) December 26, 2024

The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if we’re really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the TRUTH:

Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG.

A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.

A culture that venerates Cory from “Boy Meets World,” or Zach & Slater over Screech in “Saved by the Bell,” or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in “Family Matters,” will not produce the best engineers.

(Fact: I know *multiple* sets of immigrant parents in the 90s who actively limited how much their kids could watch those TV shows precisely because they promoted mediocrity…and their kids went on to become wildly successful STEM graduates).

More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of “Friends.” More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less “chillin.” More extracurriculars, less “hanging out at the mall.”

Most normal American parents look skeptically at “those kinds of parents.” More normal American kids view such “those kinds of kids” with scorn. If you grow up aspiring to normalcy, normalcy is what you will achieve.

Now close your eyes & visualize which families you knew in the 90s (or even now) who raise their kids according to one model versus the other. Be brutally honest.

“Normalcy” doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent. And if we pretend like it does, we’ll have our asses handed to us by China.

This can be our Sputnik moment. We’ve awaken from slumber before & we can do it again. Trump’s election hopefully marks the beginning of a new golden era in America, but only if our culture fully wakes up. A culture that once again prioritizes achievement over normalcy; excellence over mediocrity; nerdiness over conformity; hard work over laziness.

That’s the work we have cut out for us, rather than wallowing in victimhood & just wishing (or legislating) alternative hiring practices into existence. I’m confident we can do it.

A post full of logic errors that doesn’t get to the heart of the problem: money is widely accepted as a proxy for earned social prestige, and, in an allied way, the importance of social prestige in today’s society is not what it used to be. It used to be the smartest people didn’t go into engineering, but medicine. Now? No longer true. Now they go into business & finance, trying to make money from selling useful & non-useful stuff to folks, or playing games with financial loopholes, such as odd derivatives which sought to transfer risk from those seeking to enrich themselves to those supplying the cash, a dubious practice concealed through obfuscation.

Meanwhile, medical personnel are considered severely understaffed. Even medical doctors, who remain admired, are in short supply for many specialties.

In any case, Ramaswamy has written an inspirational, rather than logical, rant, and for those of us who are paying attention to such details, it just comes off as fakery.

Freshly hatched Mumble had a case of birth-vertigo. They almost had to put him down.

Happy Feet (2006) is a joyful animated musical involving many penguins on one side, and the shared threat of rapacious hunger of humanity on the other, seasoned with the lust for power shrouded in religion. Mumble is a fresh-born Emperor penguin, a species of tall, flightless marine bird in which singing ability confers status.

Mumble can’t sing; for him, it’s the unsettling squawk. The best he can do is shuffle his feet.

One day, despondent, he becomes separated from the colony, and nearly lunch for a threat-spewing sea leopard, but encounters a gang of five of Adelie penguins. They are short, wise-cracking marine birds who are happy to help him out of his jam of becoming jam for the sea leopard. In return, he begins teaching the gang to dance, a skill that puts the gang in good stead with their own colony, especially after the Adelie guru, Lovelace, blesses the skill.

But all penguins are facing starvation, and Mumble, without a mate, decides to investigate. He finds the fish being harvested by soulless human ships, and he and the gang decide to ask Lovelace for help. To keep things short, Mumble ends up in captivity.

Foot-shuffling captivity.

Is this a masterpiece? Not quite, but it’s damn good. You’ll root for the good guys, but some of the bad guys are driven by their nature, such as the sea leopard, and other bad guys aren’t really as driven as they’d have to be for this to rise to another level.

But it’s worth a watch, especially by the kids. Very good, I’d say.

We don’t see much for graffiti around where I live, probably because there’s a scarcit of appropriate surfaces. However, a local strip mall did have an empty spot, and my Arts Editor said she liked the graffiti, so, without further ado…

There ya go.

“I will get you and your little dog, too! Oooops, wrong script. “Uh…. To go where no …. darn it, too many scripts! Script-boy! Bring me all the scripts labeled Mustache!”

Murder on the Orient Express (2017) is a film adaptation of the famous Agatha Christie novel, a lovely, if unrealistic – train cars are not that wide – retelling of the story of vengeance wreaked upon a narcissist, perhaps even a solipsist, for the kidnapping and killing of a baby by those with a connection to the victim, and how an injustice such as the heretofore unpunished murder of the child, and the shared murder of the perpetrator, troubles Christie’s famed Hercules Poirot.

This is the Kenneth Branagh version, based on a screenplay by Michael Green.

There is little to criticize here – oh, but that mustache! – and a lot to admire. The moral questions explored in this tale are, in my limited experience with the Christie canon, far more salient than most of her stories; perhaps Mr Green or Mr Branagh enhanced the original story, which I have not read, to bring them out. If so, this is welcome.

We enjoyed this version quite a lot, and if you enjoy murder mysteries, you will, too.

Rep Kay Granger (R-TX), who withdrew from the primary to be reelected earlier this year and thus would ordinarily see the end of her term in about four weeks, may have actually already seen it. Having not voted since July 24, a Dallas Express journalist went looking:

We then received a tip from a Granger constituent who shared that the Congresswoman has been residing at a local memory care and assisted living home for some time after having been found wandering, lost, and confused in her former Cultural District/West 7th neighborhood.

Which is an ending I would wish on no one. However, the fact that this has been concealed does require investigation. Along with the Dallas Express‘ many questions, I’d like to ask if Speaker Johnson (R-LA) knew? Why has this not been announced? Worries about losing another special election to the Democrats? As Granger (and now her successor, Rep-elect Craig Goldman (R-TX)) have been winning elections in this district by a 2-1 margin, that hardly seems likely.

This doesn’t even make sense in my understanding of the context of who controls the House. It doesn’t matter, if she’s not their to vote. Or were Johnson & Co worried that, on word of Granger’s hypothetical resignation, other Republicans angry at Johnson might also resign, giving the Democrats control of the House in July of ’24?

Or is it just something as venal as her staff being determined to continue to collect salaries?

The Judge was about to read the latest chapter of her murder mystery to the convicted murder when all Hell broke loose. First came the innermost circle, then there was an administrative foul-up, and now we’re waiting for the 8th circle.

Die Muse des Mörders (2018; English version, Murder By The Book, which is what we saw) is a murder mystery that lets the plot of a book guide the actions of the killer. As plot twists go, I’ve seen worse, such as any mystical movie you’d care to name. It may clue some audience members in to the identity of the maniacal killer, though.

But this story suffers mightily from a lack of interesting characters. Victims, bystanders, killers, all they evoke is a yawn. None, absolutely none, do anything to evoke a positive emotion, such as rescue a cat, give a kid a cotton candy face, or indulge in popcorn lust. Nothing. Quick, kill another one and alarm the Austrian cops a bit more. They need the exercise, emotional and physical.

Add to this the dubbed versions inferior dubbing. Hello, you’re outside, not buried in a bad sounds booth!

And the climax!

Actually, the best part of the movie. The hysterics are reasonable and well-conveyed. But will they survive, or just become more chopped meat? How much do you limply detest them?

In the end, don’t bother with this clunker unless you’re in the mood for an Austrian drama.

On Lawfare, Kevin Frazier, Alan Z. Rozenshtein, and Peter N. Salib have a report on a jump forward in generative AI:

OpenAI’s Latest Model Shows AGI Is Inevitable. Now What?

Last week, on the last of its “12 Days of OpenAI,” OpenAI unveiled the o3 model for further testing and, eventually, public release. In doing so, the company upended the narrative that leading labs had hit a plateau in AI development. o3 achieved what many thought impossible: scoring 87.5 percent on the ARC-AGI benchmark, which is designed to test genuine intelligence (human performance is benchmarked at 85 percent). To appreciate the magnitude of this leap, consider that it took four years for AI models to progress from zero percent in 2020 to five percent earlier in 2024. Then, in a matter of months, o3 shattered all previous limitations.

This isn’t just another AI milestone to add to a growing list. The ARC-AGI benchmark was specifically designed to test what many consider the essence of general intelligence: the ability to recognize patterns in novel situations and adapt knowledge to unfamiliar challenges. Previous language models, despite their impressive capabilities, struggled on some tasks like solving certain math problems—including ones that humans find very easy. o3 fundamentally breaks this barrier, demonstrating an ability to synthesize new programs and approaches on the fly—a crucial stepping stone toward artificial general intelligence (AGI).

The implications are profound and urgent. We are witnessing not just incremental progress but a fundamental shift in AI capabilities. The question is no longer whether we will achieve AGI, but when—and more importantly, how we will manage its arrival. This reality demands an immediate recalibration of policy discussions. We can no longer afford to treat AGI as a speculative possibility that may or may not arrive at some undefined point in the future. The time has come to treat AGI as an inevitability and focus the Hill’s regulatory energy on ensuring its development benefits humanity as a whole.

Oddly enough, while the word exponential gets a bit of use in this article, generally in the context of human lack of intuitive comprehension of the implications of exponential growth, there is neither mention of the decades of near-zero progress in AI capabilities, despite predictions, nor is there mention of the hypothetical singularity, which is the time when exponential technological advancement, if graphed against time, becomes approximately vertical, and irreversible. Nor do they mention the Mechanical Turk, an infamous fraud.

But then, the point of the article was creation of regulatory frameworks in order to keep how AI disturbs society orderly.

If o3 is marginally beyond human intelligence at 87.5%, I gotta wonder what it takes to make 100% – and where it scores if it accomplishes the destruction of its makers.

Art Deco design found on the road.

Sometimes the best information after a loss comes from the front-line folks, and in politics that’ll be the candidates, win or lose. Soon-to-be former Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) has a view that needs to be considered:

Why? Brown says the political shift in his state began with a signal event: the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993, the first year of Bill Clinton’s presidency.

“Workers have slowly migrated out of the Democratic Party,” he told [interviewer Jennifer Rubin]. “It accelerated as more and more jobs were lost. And I still heard [about NAFTA] in this campaign, especially in the Miami Valley, Dayton, where we still won, [and] up there in Mahoning Valley, where we didn’t win.”

Workers came to view Democrats “as a bicoastal elite party,” he explained. “We were too pro-corporate. They know Republicans are going to shill for corporate interests. They expected Democrats would stand up for them, and they don’t see that nationally.” [WaPo]

The NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) issue is painfully funny, because I recall President Bill Clinton (D) stealing the entire free trade issue from the Republicans way back when, and that theft quite probably contributed to the Republicans’ hatred of President Clinton and his subsequent impeachment over trivial issues involving a blowjob. The real point is that the Republicans, if Clinton had not been involved, would have heartily endorsed NAFTA.

But yes, it does seem like the Democrats have lost the back of the workers, despite President Bidens efforts to boost unions during his term.

But although he himself will no longer be there come January, Brown insists that Democrats can — and must — win back the votes of working-class Americans. Those voters may disagree with some of the party’s stances on social issues, such as guns, abortion, crime and immigration, but will return to the fold “if we stay on economic issues and do it right.”

“We have to sharpen our message. I don’t look at politics left and right. It’s who’s on your side,” he said. “Work really binds. I mean, what do we have in common? The term ‘dignity of work’ really cuts across all lines.”

What American voters face.
(Yes, I know I’ve used this several times. It’s a favorite.)

For workers, the jobs that don’t require college degrees, that take the workers down into mines and forty stories up tacking together buildings are very important – and the Democratic Party, steered by legitimate or illegitimate leaders more concerned with exotic ideologies, and burdened by a lack of knowledge concerning how liberal democracies work, managed to steer the Party onto the rocks of madness and leave American voters with a Party that feels autocratic and facing another Party that feels … autocratic.

Ludeme:

A ludeme is “an element of play” within a card game or board game, as distinct from an “instrument of play” which forms part of the equipment with which a game is played. An example of a ludeme is the L-shaped movement of a knight in chess, whereas the knight itself is an instrument of play. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “The ancient board games we finally know how to play – thanks to AI,” Jeremy Hsu, NewScientist (14 December 2024, paywall):

Another way that AI can help is testing how the myriad permutations of possible rules play out, to find out which are fun and which lead to tedium. This is done by breaking the game down into units of game-playing information and feeding these “ludemes” into an AI.

Neither article gives the etiology of ludeme, so I can’t actually say that ludeme comes from an early game otherwise mentioned in the NewScientist article:

One of the first case studies for this AI approach has been Ludus Latrunculorum – one of the ancient games that we know the most about because of historical writings. “This gave our reconstruction process the best chance of success,” says Cameron Browne at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, who led the Digital Ludeme Project (DLP) – a five-year project that ran until 2023 and that “investigated the full range of over 1000 traditional games throughout 6000 years of human history”.

A side issue that arose in this recent election was the Presidential poll by Iowa’s Selzer & Co, a firm treated with enormous respect in the polling industry and rated a 2.8 out of 3, at the time, by FiveThirtyEight’s rating of pollsters. Collected and released late in the voting cycle, the poll gave Harris a three point lead in the state of Iowa, a shocker in that Iowa had strongly favored Mr Trump in his previous two Presidential runs, which were in 2016 and 2020. Of course, I was tracking Senate races; the Selzer poll was noted only in the context of whether or not it would effect Senate races (“no”). But I was curious as to the Iowa results.

In the end, Vice President Harris did not win Iowa’s six Electoral College votes. The margin? 13.2 points.

That’s not even close. Off by 16 points.

What went wrong? WaPo’s Philip Bump has an analysis, based on Selzer’s comments, which might be best summarized as dated methods. The ways in which we may be contacted are becoming more and more specialized, anonymized, and, for the purposes of statistics, self-selecting, meaning we have some idea of who’s calling, even if the caller’s name is not made available. In the old days, you whippersnappers, the phone rang and you either let it ring or you picked up without knowledge, generally, of who was calling. That’s not true today. The majority of citizens don’t want to answer a poll, leaving only a few that do (self-selecting) or don’t pay much attention to caller’s ID (those curious about the world, perhaps) or refuse to pay for it where it costs (cheapskates).

It’s a recognized problem in the industry, and it’s a problem because it skews the raw results, meaning corrections built on unverifiable assumptions must be applied.

The Des Moines Register had a discussion of its own:

Selzer’s review has taken the form of testing plausible theories against available data. To date, no likely single culprit has emerged to explain the wide disparity. But I wanted to walk you through what has been looked at and what relevant data shows.

Following the Register’s long practice, we already released the poll questionnaire. For transparency, we’re also releasing the poll’s full demographics, crosstabs and weighted and unweighted data, as well as a technical explanation from Selzer detailing her review.

The balance of the analysis comes to Nothing yet, still looking! I did notice they did not address the issue of poll respondents simply lying, but then that would be a tough reason to address. If true, though, to the extent such a supposition can be proven, it would be very disappointing concerning the moral character of Iowans. I’d rather not think so.

Selzer has also announced she’s leaving the business:

Public opinion polling has been my life’s work. I collected my first research data as a freshman in college, if you don’t count a neighborhood poll I did at age 5. I’ve always been fascinated with what a person could learn from a scientific sample of a meaningful universe.

Beyond election polls, my favorite projects were helping clients learn something they did not know to help them evaluate options for their companies, institutions or causes. That work may well continue, but I knew a few years ago that the election polling part of my career was headed to a close.

Over a year ago I advised the Register I would not renew when my 2024 contract expired with the latest election poll as I transition to other ventures and opportunities. [Des Moines Register]

Taking her at her word, it appears the polling game is becoming more and more difficult, not due to the usual factor of increased competition, but because the data they are mining, if I may use a precious metal metaphor, is becoming more and more difficult to obtain, and thus interpret.

For those of us who like polls as a way to learn how the nation is leaning, this is a horror-filled message.

Finally, Mr Trump is suing Selzer & Co:

But Trump, apparently still smarting from having to endure a day of people wondering if he might lose Iowa, sees himself as the one who had to deal with dire consequences. On Monday, his lawyers filed a lawsuit in Iowa alleging that the poll’s release was an example of “brazen election interference.”

Selzer would “have the public believe it was merely a coincidence that one of the worst polling misses of her career came just days before the most consequential election in memory,” the lawsuit claims. It later adds that the poll “was no ‘miss’ but rather an attempt to influence the outcome of the 2024 Presidential Election.” [WaPo]

Mr Trump will, or should, be laughed out of court. Or he’ll endanger a bunch of bad Republican pollsters. I think Selzer should ask how much money Trump has via the press, and then comment how much fun it’ll be to strip that money out of Trump’s operations. Once that’s finished, have his lawyers disbarred.

“I always wanted Kermie to play Ebenezer,” Miss Piggy said, “but, alas, the producers wouldn’t listen to me.” She paused, continued. “I kicked the shit out of them in that alley two years later.”

“I tore a hangnail something fierce.”

The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992) suffers from a central flaw:

The supplier of most of the cast members, the eponymous source of the title, the Muppets of The Jim Henson Company, is for kids.

What does this cause? While I’ve not read the also-eponymous actual source material, A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, I’ve seen enough versions of the story, effective or disappointing, to notice that this is, wait, keep the groans to a minimum, a quintessential story of redemption. Money-lender Ebenezer Scrooge, despite several positive role models growing up, decides to embrace laissez-faire capitalism, free of sentimental restraints: the lascivious, single-minded pursuit of wealth. At the beginning of this story, when his partner, Jacob Marley, passes away just prior to Christmas, Scrooge is rich in money and, maybe, material things, but poor in his ties to the community and communal morality.

And the spirit world, from ghosts of humanity to embodiments of Christmas, objects. It objects strongly. The spirit world, interrupting his rest, guides Scrooge to access to information he doesn’t have: how hard his assistant Bob Cratchit works; the sad circumstances of Cratchit’s family, in particular the failing health of his youngest son, the charming Tiny Tim; Scrooge’s nephew, Fred, poor in wealth and possessions, yet undoubtedly a happy man for all that lack, for he has enough to eat, and has his many friends, and a fiancee: his ties to the community and, therefore, communal morality content him; and several other more anonymous members of the community.

The more effective versions of this story include Scrooge committing vile, morally dubious acts in pursuit of wealth, such as forcing Fezziwig, one of his good role models, and a moneylender himself, into selling out. Doesn’t sound so bad? As a moneylender, such institutions have a choice: to be, like Scrooge, highly avaricious people, perhaps members of the community in name; but, in reality, more in the vein of parasites, creatures that are all take and no give. Or moneylenders, through using their judgment concerning rates charged and the strictness of repayment, can be pillars of the community, respected and happy because of it, for that is one of the things that make humans tick.

Given the importance of exploring moral dimensions, it may be telling that the most popular movies of the season are those deriving from A Christmas Carol, and It’s A Wonderful Life (1946), include, as a necessary part of their foundation, and in different forms, moneylending institutions. I’ve not reviewed It’s A Wonderful Life, but I can recommend it.

Returning to the tragedy of Fezziwig, he is portrayed as a pillar of the community, and the joy that helping people brings him is integral to the character. When Scrooge, in those versions of the story that include Fezziwig’s victimization, destroys him as a moneylender, both Fezziwig and the community are damaged – and it’s an avoidable tragedy.

One more example, which I’ve only seen in one version, is Scrooge (and his partner Marley) backing the embezzling head of, as I recall, a charity. They are helping persuade the Board of Directors not to report their client, the embezzler, to the police, by suggesting it would destroy the charity’s reputation. The case is dubious; yet, through veiled threats, Scrooge and Marley carry the day, much to the detriment of Justice, and to the great outrage of the audience. Naturally, the morally bankrupt, but flush CEO, rewards Scrooge and Marley.

As I said, this story is about redemption, and the worse Scrooge’s moral turpitude and decay, the more effective the story becomes at his redemption.

And herein lies the problem. Muppets are, by nature, comic characters. That’s their purpose, which drives their design, and that comedy is marvelously accomplished. This carries forward to the movie. Nevermind their reputation; their appearance and mannerisms, even toned down, constrain the effort to make Scrooge’s initial moral decay strong enough to sustain a high level of uplifting redemptive force. The makers of this story understood that, and so the moral decay of Scrooge is minimized. He drove his fiancee away with his avarice, a common element of these derived stories, but not convincingly here; he insults the advocates for the poor, but not memorably. He’s Scrooge, but it’s more of a handwave at the avarice, not a heaping spoonful.

And therefore, when we came to the end of The Muppet Christmas Carol, my Arts Editor and I stared at each other and said, Well, that was a little flat.

The other elements of this rendition are quite nice. The stage is a revelation, the muppetry is fine puppetry, and the implied humor of adding Jacob Marley’s brother, Robert, to the mix was one of the more clever bits that I’ve seen. But while Scrooge’s portrayer, Michael Caine, has a reputation for playing morally torn characters himself, it doesn’t come through here. The script doesn’t let him be evil enough.

It does make me wonder how famed evil character actor Basil Rathbone, who I see played Scrooge in The Stingiest Man In Town (1956), would play Scrooge. I’ll have to search.

In the end, Muppet completists will not suffer in viewing this movie, because it’s well done. However, inherent limitations make its impact dilute, and that’s a sad result.

Professor Richardson has an admirably succinct summary of the events over the last few days in our nation’s capitol^[1]:

As CNN’s Erin Burnett pointed out “the world’s richest man [Elon Musk], right now, holding the country hostage,” Democrats worked to call attention to this crisis. …

Tonight [that is, the evening of Dec 20, 2024] the House passed a measure much like the one Musk and Trump had undermined, funding the government and providing the big-ticket disaster and farm relief but not raising or getting rid of the debt ceiling. According to Jennifer Scholtes of Politico, Republican leadership tried to get party members on board by promising to raise the debt ceiling by $1.5 trillion early in 2025 while also cutting $2.5 trillion in “mandatory” spending, which covers Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and SNAP nutrition assistance.

34 Republicans voted against, 15 Republicans and 14 Democrats did not vote, and the balance of each Party were for it, for 366 votes. Of most importance:

The fiasco of the past few days is a political blow to Trump. Musk overshadowed him, and when Trump demanded that Republicans free him from the debt ceiling, they ignored him. Meanwhile, extremist Republicans are calling for Johnson’s removal, but it is unclear who could earn the votes to take his place. And, since the continuing resolution extends only until mid-March, and the first two months of Trump’s term will undoubtedly be consumed with the Senate confirmation hearings for his appointees—some of whom are highly questionable—it looks like this chaos will continue into 2025.

Publicity hound Trump may be furious with Speaker Johnson (R-LA) for not delivering a debt ceiling increase, a demand he added to the debate just a few days ago, and he may be furious with Musk for making both Trump and Musk look like losers in this contest.

Seasoned politicians know that you win some, you lose some, but Trump and Musk have influence due to their air of invincibility, even if Trump’s aura is more than a little tainted from his various failures.

But what about his backers? This is a hit to their investments. If some of those are of international stature, such as President Putin, could Musk be in trouble? In very serious trouble?

This could become frighteningly interesting.

¹ Yes, I’m a lazy bastard.

Quixotic:

having or showing ideas that are different and unusual but not practical or likely to succeed:
This is a vast, exciting and some say quixotic project. [Cambridge Dictionary]

Sometimes, it’s just nice to know a definition more precisely, and, yes, I’ve read, in translation, The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, which I found tiresome, but I have a low boredom threshold.

Noted in “To fix the world’s problems, we need both optimism and pessimism,” NewScientist (14 December 2024):

Going into a new year with such uncertainty, it is hard not to feel pessimistic, but that might not be a bad thing. Next year will mark 10 years since the Paris Agreement came into force, and even at the time, it was clear the 1.5°C target was pushing at the limit of what was achievable. As we wrote in our end of year leader at the time: “As a call to action, it is quixotic: its aspiration of a 1.5°C cap on global warming seems almost totally unachievable.” Indeed, remaking the modern world to halt greenhouse gas emissions and reach net zero is the most ambitious goal humanity has ever set itself.

WaPo’s Dana Milbank caught me by surprise in this column concerning the potential, but perhaps voided, government shutdown of tonight^[1], and the future of Speaker Johnson (R-LA):

But this is just the first act of what promises to be a four-year circus. Already, a dozen or so House Republicans, angered by Speaker Mike Johnson’s inept handling of the spending bill, are now making noises about blocking his reelection as speaker Jan. 3 — and the defection of even two or three Republicans could doom him. This, in turn, could delay Congress’s certification of Trump’s election victory and possibly create a constitutional crisis over the transfer of power. Even if Johnson (R-Louisiana) gets out of that mess, a few House Republicans are already lining up in opposition to extending Trump’s tax cuts, a core component of his 2025 agenda.

My bold. Delaying an Inauguration by finding a different manner of imbecility. Bless their hearts, the Republicans do like to shoot themselves right in the nuts in public. As my Arts Editor asked, What happens if there is a delay? Does President Biden remain in office?

Democrats are far more subtle when they shoot themselves in the head and then spend months wandering about wondering what happened to them in the election.

I can’t see such a delay actually happening, but maybe SCOTUS had best stay up late and do some research. And maybe issue a proactive ruling. We don’t need an Army Colonel standing around on January 20th, holding the nuclear football, muttering, “Now who do I give this to?”

Bad grammar, that. SCOTUS, think, think! Republicans, get your Speaker situation straightened out and save us from televised bad grammar! No, no, I insist. And whoever’s muttering Speaker Musk, just stop that right now. Even former Rep and Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-IL), later a convicted pedophile, would be better than Musk. You have better choices, so stop it. Now.

¹ LATER: Avoided, as a Continuing Resolution (CR) was passed by Congress, and signed by President Biden. No shutdown.

The promises of the Summer God was proven empty, its icons glazed, its wardens overwhelmed.

AW, CUT, CUT! THOSE AREN’T GUARDIANS! SOMEONE GET ME EFFECTS!

The Director was then promptly eaten by the air-conditioners. Air-conditioners are notoriously grump guardians.

Soon to be former leader of Senate Republicans and generally honor-free person Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), reportedly planning to yield his position as leader to Senator Thune (R-SD) sometime around Inauguration Day, and then retire at the end of his term in January of ’27, is the subject of a Steve Benen dream:

It was a notable brushback pitch from a key GOP official, but it was also part of a recent pattern: McConnell has thrown a lot of these pitches at Trump and his team lately.

• In an interview with the Financial Times, published last week, McConnell warned about the dangers of isolationism, which he seemed to tie directly to his party’s incoming president. “We’re in a very, very dangerous world right now, reminiscent of before World War II,” the senator said, adding, “Even the slogan is the same. ‘America First’ — that was what they said in the ’30s.”

And etc. – Warnings about the RFK, Jr nomination, isolationism, Gaetz, and other nominations and positions of Mr Trump’s, which Senator McConnell finds distasteful – or worse.

Benen’s dream? That Senator McConnell successfully leads the GOP opposition to Mr Trump.

Will it happen? I doubt it. Senator McConnell has had such a zealous allegiance to the GOP that he’s broken Senate norms and rules and indulged in brazen lies in service of this dubious allegiance.

However, with retirement in sight and a Senate GOP that is, honestly, not what McConnell has led for all these years, he may feel free to be stubborn.

And if, despite all of his flaws, his inability to pass real legislation, to be barely capable of simply approving judge nominations with minimal oversight, he still considers himself a brassy, loud American, there’s always an option that would positively shock the political world.

He could cancel his registration in the GOP and become an independent. Senator McConnell (I-KY).

That is actually interesting. He might still caucus with the GOP – or he might not.. Republicans might no longer count on his vote on matters legislative or even judicial.

Currently, if you just count Senate election results, in the next Congress Republicans hold 53 seats, Democrats 45 seats, and two seats will be held by independents who caucus with the Democrats, so it’s 53-47. But don’t jump to conclusions.

Senator Vance (R-OH) must resign his seat in the Senate to become Vice President, making it 52-47.

Then there’s Senator Rubio (R-FL). Mr Trump has announced the Senator is his nominee for Secretary of State. Now, nothing is official until Mr Trump is sworn in, so I figure there’s a 70% chance that Rubio will be the nominee. And if he is and the Senate confirms one of their own, as seems likely, forcing his resignation?

51-47.

Now, what if Senator McConnell becomes I-KY? Yes, 50-47, while closer, is more or less unimportant so long as McConnell votes with the GOP caucus. But if he doesn’t on certain matters? 50-48.

And then there’s the matter of Senator … Murkowski (R-AK). She has been making noises of disillusionment with her Party. If she, too, took I-AK status, and announced limited cooperation with the Democrats, then … 49-49.

Now, it’s true that the Democrats would be short one vote for taking control of the chamber, as then Vice President Vance would break ties in the chamber, and, depending on the views of soon-to-be Majority Leader Senator Thune, they might not even want the majority. And then the special elections for the seats of Rubio and Vance will restore the Republican’s margin – but those will be a couple of months out.

A meditative Republican might note the Democrats have a definite advantage in special elections over the last few years. That Republican might consider those special elections to be not skirmishes, but flat out wars. Maybe our Republican might only consider that Democrats are inclined to blame anyone but themselves, and even when the latter is achieved, it’s always some other wing of the Democrats.

Meanwhile, Senator Collins (R-ME), another traditionalist, will be feeling the pressure of a GOP made up of aliens, from her perspective – and also, on the other hand, feeling pressure from her constituents in famously hard-headed Maine, who might prefer to see their many-termed Senator, who is already reported to be planning for another Senate run, be an independent rather than caucus with the businessmen and unapologetic extremists who are coming to dominate the GOP conference.

Potentially interesting times. I don’t actually expect any of this to occur.

But it could.