Author Archives: Hue White

Circumnuclear disc:

The circumnuclear disc (CND) orbiting the Galaxy’s central black hole is a reservoir of material that can ultimately provide energy through accretion, or form stars in the presence of the black hole, as evidenced by the stellar cluster that is presently located at the CND’s centre.

Noted in “We finally found the hot wind coming out of our black hole,” Alex Wilkins, NewScientist (4 October 2025, paywall):

These winds, however, have never been conclusively detected in Sgr A* [the black hole at the center of the Milky Way], despite being predicted since the 1970s. This is partly because it is so difficult to observe the region around our galaxy’s black hole, a tightly packed melange of stars, dust and gas called the circumnuclear disc (CND).

Because, in order to hold the mob organization together, the boss must show some minimal amount of loyalty to the minions, and do so publicly:

Disgraced former Rep. George Santos, who had been serving a seven-year term for the fraud charges that got him ousted from Congress, was released from prison on Friday night after President Donald Trump commuted his sentence, his lawyer tells CNN.

Trump first announced the commutation on Truth Social on Friday evening, and, according to attorney Joseph Murray, Santos’ family picked him up from the prison about five hours later.

“George Santos was somewhat of a ‘rogue,’ but there are many rogues throughout our Country that aren’t forced to serve seven years in prison,” the president wrote on Truth Social.

“George has been in solitary confinement for long stretches of time and, by all accounts, has been horribly mistreated. Therefore, I just signed a Commutation, releasing George Santos from prison, IMMEDIATELY. Good luck George, have a great life,” Trump added. [CNN/Politics]

Notice the weakness of the President’s reasoning.

But I doubt Santos could be re-elected to his former seat; perhaps he could be elected to some other district’s seat, but I dunno. He’d have to run around screaming he was mistreated until he was hoarse, and, looking at his record, he’s little more than a pretty face.

Hello, Dan Quayle!

de trop:

too much or too many : SUPERFLUOUS, EXCESSIVE [Merriam-Webster]

From the French. Noted in Andrew Sullivan’s answer to some mail on The Weekly Dish here:

Point taken. I have tried to make distinctions between actual transexuals and the gender woo-woo crowd, but obviously not enough. I’m grateful for the upbraid. And that policy is dumb. I have long opposed restroom bans as de trop, and only consider full-nudity locker rooms to be problem [sic]. But the distinction between post-op transexuals and the dude who just decided he feels like a woman today is huge and important. I guess what I’m saying here is: I’m with you. And I think the genderqueers have hurt legit transexuals by their postmodern hooey.

Cryptocurrency is in the news a lot; my lack of commentary is reflective of laziness, not dearth of events. The latest combines, inevitably I think, with politics. Reuters reports from the Middle East:

NEW YORK, Oct 13 (Reuters) – Following the largest crypto liquidation in history last Friday, options market investors are bracing for more volatility and further declines in bitcoin and ether, aggressively positioning in trades that offer protection against another potential freefall.

Market participants said the crypto sector on Friday saw more than $19 billion in liquidations across leveraged positions as panic selling and low liquidity triggered sharp swings. The plunge came after U.S. President Donald Trump announced late on Friday a 100% tariff on Chinese imports and threatened export controls on critical software.

Crypto analysts said this was the largest wipeout in a 24-hour period in the market’s history, nine times larger than the February 2025 crash and 19 times bigger than the March 2020 meltdown and the FTX collapse in November 2022. [Reuters]

My goodness. Long-time readers may recall this anonymous observation made upon the launch of $TRUMP by the now-President:

CNN noted that the release of the meme coin had raised “serious ethics concerns,” but those who participate in the industry were less gentle. One wrote: “Trump’s sh*tcoin release has caused possibly the greatest overnight loss of credibility in presidential history. He made $60B. Great for Trump family, terrible for this country and hopes we had for the Trump presidency.”

Fulfillment of the ominous prediction? Well, we’ll see. It may turn out to be a blow to DJT’s “treasury” of cryptocurrency; a bit of a knee delivered to the President’s reproductive equipment. With his own knee.

Or, if he’s just into chaos, then it’s not so bad for him.

Or does he consider other mega-billionaires to be ‘competition’ for a place next to God in his prosperity church? And that was a blow against them? Sounds like madness?

Welcome to the club.

I suppose Governor Scott (R-VT) is wheat:

“From what I’m seeing, I just think it’s unnecessary. It further divides and threatens people,” the governor said at a press conference in Waterbury. “We need stability right now in this country — we don’t need more unrest.”

As of that afternoon, Trump had called up 500 guard members from Illinois and Texas to the Chicago area, some of whom were seen at a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility west of the city’s downtown. Trump also ordered 200 members of Oregon’s national guard to deploy into Portland, Oregon, but that plan was in a holding pattern following two rulings from federal judges. The status of the Chicago deployment was not entirely clear, either, with its own legal challenge pending in federal court.

“I don’t think our guard should be used against our own people. I don’t think the military should be used against our own people. In fact, it’s unconstitutional,” Scott said. “Unless, of course, there’s an insurrection, much like we saw Jan. 6 a few years ago,” he said, referring to the attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of Trump in 2021. [Mountain Times]

Governor Scott is an occasional target of President Trump’s vituperation, probably because the Governor behaves like a responsible adult, an attainment not on the President’s mantlepiece.

Or you can call the President Mr. Chaff. To be sure, chaff has its uses in American industry, but it’s not an important foodstuff, but more of something that must be stripped out of wheat.

An action strangely applicable to the President.

Erick Erickson is working hard to keep his flock together, demonizing the other side as much as he can:

Unfortunately for Democrats, some of whom are complaining that “Trump would do this anyway” even without those prior indictments, we actually have a 45th presidential administration where no such things happened and that was also the presidency of Donald J. Trump. Two wrongs do not make a right, but Democrats did start this. Trump intends to finish it. And the ratchet gets ever tighter because, as the Democrats kept lecturing us, “no one is above the law.” After all, Letitia James was not indicted by Donald Trump nor Pam Bondi nor the deep state nor Hillary’s server, nor any of the nonsense talking points that Democrats have been trotting out in left-wing media, but by a jury of her peers. See how that works now, Democrats?

The missing element is context. Mr. James Comey was indicted … after Trump fired the Trump-selected prosecutor who refused to attempt the indictment and nominated a nobody with apparently absolute allegiance to the President, rather than the law.

That’s the key, what Erickson, despite his training in the law, doesn’t get. If the law appears to have been broken then the apparent malefactor should be put on trial – Republican or Democrat. If Mz James, on honest assessment, appears to have broken the law, then let’s see what happens at trial. What does Erickson seem to think? That his choice for President shouldn’t be prosecuted, while victim Democrats have brought this fate upon themselves.

And if President Trump … oh wait. In two cases juries indicted and found him guilty. In other cases, the GOP wing of SCOTUS bestowed immunity upon the President.

Yeah, it doesn’t stand up to real scrutiny, does it?

Even that bullshit sentence about Trump in his first Administration is so lacking in context that taking it seriously is an impossible intellectual task.

But will Erickson’s audience pick up on these intellectual faux-pas and discard Erickson’s argument? Hard to say. Some folks will read his tone as being authoritative and take Erickson’s argument seriously; others will react negatively to the tone and evaluate what he wrote dispassionately, as I try to do.

We’ll just have to see.

Many pundits have commented on President Trump’s long history of bullying, and I think of that when considering the ending of the Israel-Hamas war. Bullies attack the weak, and Hamas, having expended its strength in the mass murder and kidnap of civilian Israelis, and the subsequent destruction of Gaza City and many of its citizens, was ripe for the threats and gestures for which Trump is known.

Despite the wild-eyed claims of the right, though, this doesn’t make the President brilliant, or even competent. It simply means he had a target that fit his favored profile, and they, Hamas, do seem to have rolled over.

But when I look at virtually any agreement with a foreign power, especially those powered by religious arguments, I prefer to wait decades before evaluation, and as President Trump is evidently incapable of planning, I expect the adversary, whoever it is in whatever conflict we’re talking, will have outplanned him.

It doesn’t mean he will lose, but the odds are against him. For example, he claimed he could end Putin’s War in a day during his last campaign; these days, he’s trying to wash his hands of the mediator role nine months later, having experienced abject failure.

And, of course, how much credit should go to Secretary Rubio? While he started his position as a man lacking shoes on a flint filled beach, he may have taken a step up here. Good for him, if so.

But don’t let yourself be fooled by Mr Trump’s supporters into thinking he’s a genius. The problem with the right is that they have overwhelming backed amateurs, folks who don’t even realize how much they don’t know. When they won the election, mostly due to Left’s utter foolishness, the GOP opened itself up to many, many embarrassments. In some cases, they don’t even seem to realize that they’ve screwed themselves. They live in a bubble and often only hear themselves talk.

So legitimizing this victory as being incredibly clever, rather than Hamas stumbling into range and getting blasted by a guy who enjoys being a bully, betrays the essential weakness of the Right.

The thing is: Has Left become just as bad?

It’s been two months, give or take a week, since the last time I surveyed DJT, the stock symbol of Trump Media & Technology Group, but it hadn’t moved much until last week.

… and I can’t actually show the DJT chart, as my browser is messed up. DJT is down in a down market, the latter of which is attributed to the President’s sudden decision to increase tariffs on Chinese imports to 100%. Or maybe it was by 100%. It can be so hard to tell with this President.

Anyways, at $15.97/sh DJT’s down about 8% since the last report of two months ago, which, in a volatile market, can be erased in moments.

Or that loss can be quadrupled just as quickly.

It suggests, though, that investors are not inspired by the offerings and intellectual holdings of Trump Media & Technology Group. In particular, its star performer, President Trump, continues to show signs of serious mental decline and certain physical deficits, and, if he should exit the firm, it’d probably collapse, resulting in the principals rushing to cash in their rewards.

But, as ever, I am not a financial expert, just a guy who watches one of the odder stories of the era, and is wondering where it’s going.

Yes, yes, far behind am I on my reading. This situation summary by Professor Richardson was interesting…

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) today floated the idea that workers furloughed during a government shutdown are not guaranteed back pay when the shutdown is resolved. Marc Caputo of Axios broke the story of the new OMB memo this morning. Caputo pointed out that in 2019, during the last government shutdown, President Donald Trump signed a law designed to make it clear that furloughed workers would get paid. Caputo notes that the OMB’s new reading of the law is “a major departure from the administration’s own guidance issued…last month.”

Two people familiar with the administration’s plans told Jacob Bogage of the Washington Post that officials are hoping the memo will give the Republicans more leverage against Democrats in negotiations over the shutdown.

I suggest the Democrats make the dismissal of Mr Vought a key part of their negotiations. Nothing like pricking the skin of a self-important prick.

In case you’re interested in the mental illness du jour, at least here in the United States, NewScientist has an article on the latest in the field, and manage to write it without reference to our leading example:

Looking back, the signs were obvious: an extreme need for control, a pathological tendency to exaggerate and an almost comical sense of superiority.

My family member claimed to know more than everyone about everything, no matter the topic. He claimed to have the makings of a world-class teacher, doctor, writer or athlete, while also boasting about his modesty. Any disagreement would result in shouty rants or violent outbursts.

Family friends could barely believe it when I told them. “When he meets us, he acts like charm personified,” is how one put it.These were all classic traits of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), a condition characterised by a disregard for the feelings of others combined with an extreme sense of self-importance, often manifesting in interpersonal abuse. At the time, however, I had no way to make sense of this family member’s behaviour – this was before the conversation around narcissism had reached its current level of social saturation. [“The truth about narcissists: How to handle them, and can they change?” David Robson, NewScientist (27 September 2025; paywall)]

A good article, if it makes me clutch at my throat a bit. I think I ran into several of this type in the early days of my social media experience.

That fight’s finished. Where’s the next one? I’m hoping it’s at the spirits shop.

Young Detective Dee: Rise of the Sea Dragon (2013) is the second, more or less, story of the early years of Detective Dee, a fictional Chinese detective working around 660 CE, who is in the Imperial City Luoyang, changing governmental jobs, and stumbles across clues as to the sinking of the fleet. Starting out with the disapproval of Yuchi, a member of the Judicial branch who has been charged with discovering the nature of whatever sank the fleet, Dee stops competitive kidnappings, wins Yuchi’s approval, and generally does amazing things for the Chinese Imperial family.

And it is fun, even if it’s difficult to become familiar with any of the characters as they seem to be a mixture of cliches; perhaps it’s more accurate to suggest their motivations are opaque, although they might be collectively labeled Don’t piss of the Empress. Add in captions, Chinese tropes and legends of which Westerners generally know little, and a certain frenetic brittleness, and this big movie becomes a mouthful that is distracting rather than involving action.

The visuals are gorgeous and the climactic battle is quite fun. I shan’t recommend it for the foregoing reasons, but I didn’t regret watching it.

Governor Landry (R) of Louisiana is simpering towards the President, I fear. Here’s the official announcement:

Tonight, on the Sean Hannity show, Governor Jeff Landry announced that he submitted a request for federal assistance (RFA) to Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, to activate up to 1,000 Louisiana National Guard personnel. The Guard will assist in addressing ongoing public safety concerns throughout the State. Letter attached.

This request builds on the proven success of Title 32 deployments in Washington D.C. and Tennessee, providing critical support for events like the Bayou Classic, Sugar Bowl, and Mardi Gras. Past Louisiana National Guard missions—including Hurricane Ida (2021), Hurricane Francine (2024), the January 1st Terrorist Attack, Super Bowl LIX, and Mardi Gras (2025)—cut crime by 50% in early 2025.

“Since taking office, we have made real progress in driving down crime across Louisiana — but the job is far from finished. Federal partnerships in our toughest cities have worked, and now, with the support of President Trump and Secretary Hegseth, we are taking the next step by bringing in the National Guard. This mission is about saving lives and protecting families. To the criminals terrorizing our communities: your time is up. Law and order are back in Louisiana,” said Gov. Landry.

How much do they need National Guard, which Landry could call up without the permission of his Prince?

But crime in some of the state’s biggest cities has actually decreased recently, with New Orleans, seeing a particularly steep drop in 2025 that has put it on pace to have its lowest number of killings in more than five decades. [AP]

Yeah, this guy has no pride, no self-sufficiency. Just brown-nosing a President who’d accuse him of encouraging crime if he were a Democrat, despite the drop in crime statistics. Instead, peace descends upon the State – hurrah for him! – and he throws away his pride in his eagerness to please the Prince. The President. Whatever.

Quite a shame.

Sundowning:

Sundowning is increased confusion that people living with Alzheimer’s and dementia may experience from dusk through night. Also called “sundowner’s syndrome,” it is not a disease but a set of symptoms or dementia-related behaviors that may include difficulty sleeping, anxiety, agitation, hallucinations, pacing and disorientation. Although the exact cause is unknown, sundowning may occur due to disease progression and changes in the brain. [Alzheimer’s Association]

Noted in the title of this Daily Kos post, “CNN interviews Trump by text message because he(sic) says so. (or was he sundowning?)“, by annieli.

The Librarian: Curse of the Judas Chalice (2008) is the third in the Librarian series of stories concerning a secret library, or museum collection, of insanely dangerous artifacts, and the guy in charge of it. Shouldn’t he be known as the Curator? The Director? The Too-Smart Guy?

This time around we’re visiting charming New Orleans, in search of the purpose of life. This appears to be, in the Librarian’s case, being the Librarian and not getting the girl.

And searching for the chalice of Judas Iscariot, because drinking from it restores the humanity of, ah, vampires. Wait, why does the museum need it? Anyways, the Librarian’s girl is a vampire who is desperate to be good, and after 400 years of life, she’s a bit tired, although it’s not explained why she doesn’t just take an afternoon walk and dissolve in a whirlwind of glowing particles.

So there’s plenty of adventure, but the theme, which seems to be Fulfill your destiny! is dubious. If the purpose of life is to fulfill your destiny, then why bother? It all becomes a deterministic and muddled mess, devaluing free will and making watching the movie a depressing exercise in some philosopher’s sordid assertions concerning existence. Unlike, say, the moral conundrums of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981).

This story is sort of fun, if you’re not thinking about it too much, but you won’t remember it the next day. It asks a question about life, but it’s not an intriguing, challenging answer.

And if the purpose of life is to devote ourselves to Bo-bo-bo-ob Newhart….

This is actually a bit late – Nov 18 of 2024 – but the nomination has a nasty observation at the end.

Oklahoma’s superintendent of public education can’t require schools to show students a video of him praying for Donald Trump and condemning teachers’ unions, the state attorney general’s office said.

The state superintendent, Ryan Walters, emailed the bizarre video to school district superintendents last week, saying his office was requiring the video be shown to students and shared with parents, as well. Talk about self-absorption. [MSNBC, Ja’han Jones]

This is along with various abrogations of the rule against endorsement of religion, and an ideological test for incoming teachers. Getting the President’s attention requires non-stop work, y’all.

How did all that work out for Mr Walters? Oklahoma was rated in education … 50th out of 51st, with New Mexico the only State/entity ranked worse. Significantly, the excuses began immediately from Mr Walters (same article from KOCO News):

“A lot of these are kind of ridiculous,” Walters said. “They love to take into account how much money we put into education. That’s never been an evaluation of mine of what makes a good education system — it’s outcomes.”

Sure, if the rating was on ideology then he’d be doing great. But teaching ideology in school only sounds good until you consider an ideology you don’t like. Then, like forbidding endorsements, implicit and explicit, of sects by government, it becomes sensible not to teach ideologies.

No matter how much it might appeal to President Trump.

So what’s happening with Mr Walters?

Oklahoma Superintendent Ryan Walters announced Wednesday that he would step down from his role overseeing the state’s schools to lead the conservative group Teacher Freedom Alliance, saying, “We’re going to destroy the teachers unions.”

The announcement from Walters, a conservative Republican who pushed to incorporate teaching about the Bible into public school classrooms, caps off a contentious tenure marked by a willingness to embrace culture war issues.

Oh, isn’t he adorable? Destroy teachers unions.

I suggest the unions not take the bait. Instead, welcome the Teacher Freedom Alliance (TFA) to the great war of, well, teaching kids. State that you look forward to working with them, will invite them to conferences, etc. It gives TFA three choices: run around screaming like lunatics while ignoring the invite; go to the conferences and run around screaming like lunatics; or be adults and discard the demonization of teachers’ unions.

My guess is that Mr Walters, being one of those folks who think culture warriors are important, will go with the first option and discover, too late, that the public wants effective education, and that the unions are acceptable so long as they facilitate … education.

Dune: Part Two (2024) continues the long slog of the Dune epic, in this one portraying the conversion of Paul Atreides, the son of the murdered leader of House Atreides, to the ways of the fremen, the inhabitants and rightful owners of Arrakis, the desert planet otherwise known as Dune.

And it’s entertaining … but not memorable. I saw it maybe a month ago, and I had to go look for reminders of the plot. And then it still didn’t come back vividly.

It just doesn’t really work for me. Then again, neither did the novel, which puts me off in a distinct minority, I know. But there it is. I can watch for the visuals, and appreciate the well-portrayed scene, but after that, it’s not so much.

Let me talk about that a little bit. As I recall, this movie has the scene where the head of House Harkonnen, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, tests his heir apparent by having him duel with prisoners who are members of Atreides. The focus is just about all Harkonnen, yet Atreides is the underdog here, and a focus on them might have made it more memorable. Instead, it almost feels pre-ordained.

That’s always boring. When the Divine says things will happen this way, there’s little to learn from the actions of the fictional mortals.

If Dune’s your thing, go for it. It’s not a shabby effort at all. It just doesn’t work for me.

This caught me by surprise:

This month, the Department of Education released its latest edition of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the standardized tests better known as the Nation’s Report Card. The results have left me blazing with rage. …

But scores are not slipping everywhere. In Mississippi, they have been rising year over year. The state recovered from a brief decline during COVID and has now surpassed its pre-COVID highs. Its fourth grade students outperform California’s on average, even though our state is richer, more educated, and spends about 50% more per pupil. [“Illiteracy is a policy choice,” Kelsey Piper, The Argument]

The report says … has seen [Mississippi] climb from 49th in the country on fourth grade reading to ninth nationally.

Mississippi ninth? Sounds like a miracle – in fact, some call it the Mississippi Miracle – but, like most big improvements, the lessons learned need to be distributed so all young Americans can benefit. Will they?

Our legislators who pursue this must keep in mind that a lot of professionals in the field will have an investment of some sort – generally prestige, along with NIH (Not Invented Here) and even financial – in other methods than that pursued by recently improving States. Add to that the determined demonization of the education labor unions by the right, such as the libertarians, and the political landscape may be dotted with mountain lions, which will discourage the career politician.

But this is why we hire politicians, to get the job done. I hope Americans can find such politicians.

Via Ars Technica:

New research released earlier this month titled “We Politely Insist: Your LLM Must Learn the Persian Art of Taarof” shows that mainstream AI language models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta fail to absorb these Persian social rituals, correctly navigating taarof situations only 34 to 42 percent of the time. Native Persian speakers, by contrast, get it right 82 percent of the time. This performance gap persists across large language models such as GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Haiku, Llama 3, DeepSeek V3, and Dorna, a Persian-tuned variant of Llama 3. …

“Cultural missteps in high-consequence settings can derail negotiations, damage relationships, and reinforce stereotypes,” the researchers write. For AI systems increasingly used in global contexts, that cultural blindness could represent a limitation that few in the West realize exists.

For us provincial types, other cultures have radically different ways of getting business done, and if you don’t know that, or arrogantly don’t care, failure will be your lot on the venture.

This emphasizes where AI may be a weak addition to the quiver of arrows.

Here’s Wikipedia’s page on taarof.

Metabolomics:

Metabolomics is the scientific study of chemical processes involving metabolites, the small molecule substrates, intermediates, and products of cell metabolism. Specifically, metabolomics is the “systematic study of the unique chemical fingerprints that specific cellular processes leave behind”, the study of their small-molecule metabolite profiles. The metabolome represents the complete set of metabolites in a biological cell, tissue, organ, or organism, which are the end products of cellular processes. Messenger RNA (mRNA), gene expression data, and proteomic analyses reveal the set of gene products being produced in the cell, data that represents one aspect of cellular function. Conversely, metabolic profiling can give an instantaneous snapshot of the physiology of that cell, and thus, metabolomics provides a direct “functional readout of the physiological state” of an organism. There are indeed quantifiable correlations between the metabolome and the other cellular ensembles (genome, transcriptome, proteome, and lipidome), which can be used to predict metabolite abundances in biological samples from, for example mRNA abundances. One of the ultimate challenges of systems biology is to integrate metabolomics with all other -omics information to provide a better understanding of cellular biology. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “What researchers suspect may be fueling cancer among millennials,” Ariana Eunjung Cha, Álvaro Valiño and Dan Keating, WaPo:

[Professor Gary Patti of Washington University School of Medicine] in St. Louis team is focused on metabolomics — the vast, largely unmapped study of the small molecules coursing through the human body. Using high-resolution mass spectrometry and custom-built computational tools, Patti’s lab has developed a system capable of scanning a single blood sample for tens of thousands of chemicals at once.

President Trump at the big military meeting in Virginia:

During a 71-minute speech to senior military leaders in Quantico, Virginia, President Donald Trump suggested that the military use “dangerous cities as training grounds.” [CNN/Politics]

It’s like watching somebody suggest to a rocket engineer that launching a rocket would be so much easier using a trebuchet.

Well, I suppose this is still better than blowing everyone up at the meeting as a way to get rid of all those old-timers, invalidated with their outdated ideas concerning how to run things.

Steve Benen provides a quote from Truth Social so I don’t have to visit that site:

In a semi-coherent 232-word rant published to his social media platform, the president described [The New York Times] as “one of the worst and most degenerate newspapers in the History of our Country,” adding that the outlet “has engaged in a decades long method of lying about your Favorite President (ME!).”

“(ME!)“? Does the author, presumably Mr Trump, have doubts that his readers will actually not understand that their favorite President is Mr Trump?

Or is the President, aware his piss-poor policies are making him less popular than the liberals, feeling that he needs to remind them of their loyalties?

Or maybe he just figures everyone else has the same dementia he has.

For those readers who’ve seen one or more episodes of the TV series Horrible Histories (2009), a Scholastic Productions product intended for the child demographic that sought to teach history through farce, the movie Horrible Histories: The Movie – Rotten Romans (2019) is an extension. Employing over-emphasis and characterizations potentially irritating to adults, it portrays Nero in Rome, and a Roman legion facing Queen Boudica in England, with a hapless Roman who is banished to that legion, and how he survives, at least for a while, in the land of barbarians, some of whom are in his own legion.

If it’s to your taste, great! We made it through the series with laughter, but the movie was a bit much. So enjoy it if you can.

In case you were wondering whether vaccines benefit society …

The covid-19 vaccines cost $79 billion to develop and deliver globally, but provided health and economic benefits worth between $5 trillion and $38 trillion globally in the first year alone, based on avoided infections, hospitalisations and deaths. That is a return on investment of between $60 and $475 per dollar invested. [“Covid-19 vaccine benefits worth up to $38 trillion in first year alone,” Michael Le Page, NewScientist (20 September 2025, paywall)

Fascinating.

While random reading I ran across this in “From ‘Tractors’ to Cell Therapy Clinics: Unproven Medical Procedures,” Curtis E. Margo, Skeptical Inquirer (September/October 2025, paywall) …

[Historian James Harvey Young (1915–2006) ] named the chapter [in The Toadstool Millionaires] featuring Elisha Perkins “Galvanizing Trumpery.” He created this memorable pun by linking the dual meanings of the verb to galvanize with the word trumpery from fifteenth-century French (tromperie, “to deceive”), which later in English would come to mean “worthless” and “of no or little value.”

I’m not sure this is a pun, although the subject, Mr Perkins, was engaged in electricity-related scamming (in the late 18th century), and galvanizing has an electricity-related definition, also known as electrogalvanizing.

But that is beside the point, which is really below me, but it being a Saturday morning a bit of humor is in order, and if it’s at the expense of proponents of uninhibited wealth-pursuit, so much the better.