Author Archives: Hue White

A few days ago I mentioned, purely as a hypothetical exercise, the idea of impeaching those SCOTUS Justices who voted Yay in the Dobbs decision. Not for voting Yay, of course, but assenting to the use of false history, as asserted by the Organization of American Historians, in the justification of their vote. That they don’t know better, or worse do, but were desperate to reach the judgment that they did, is a condemnation of the implicit, ahem, institutional judgment by their professional colleagues that they are the best of the best^[1]. It even suggests that this group of Republican-nominated Justices might just be … fourth-raters.

I had not expected to ever bring up the subject of impeachment again.

But then along came a Center For Inquiry, which is either akin to, or an actual, “freethinkers” organization, citation of a rather horrific, within the context of the legal world, Rolling Stone allegation:

On July 6, Rolling Stone reported that Peggy Nienaber, described in the article as executive director of DC Ministry for Liberty Counsel, though Liberty Counsel maintains that this title was made up for the article, and described her instead as “vice president of Faith & Liberty,” was caught on tape confessing to having prayed with Supreme Court Justices inside the court building and inside the homes of unspecified Justices. Liberty Counsel is a prominent conservative religious advocacy group that has brought several cases before the Supreme Court, filed at least seventeen amicus curiae briefs, and whose brief was cited in the overturning Roe v. Wade.

In a letter to Chief Justice Roberts, CFI and its allies request a formal investigation into these claims, writing, “If confirmed, the allegations cast serious doubt on the impartiality of multiple justices and the Court itself.”

Impartiality indeed. A judge being buddy-buddy with people and organizations that come before that judge in one of the most solemn and important legal forums on the planet isn’t a minor oopsie! or a She told me she was over eighteen! moment, as we might hear Rep Gaetz (R-FL) use in defending himself in the near future.

No, this is a major faux-pas that a member of the Federal judiciary of the seniority and standing of a Justice of SCOTUS shouldn’t have to think twice of not doing.

So, if this is true – and it’s merely an allegation at this juncture – then this behavior doesn’t require a reprimand. It requires an impeachment and removal of all implicated Justices, and a rehearing of all cases in which the offending Justices took part.

Because, clearly, they’ve been bought off. Not necessarily with money, but there are other objects of value: sentimentality comes right to mind.

So, yep, we may be seeing impeachments of SCOTUS judges in the future if Democrats do as well as I suspect they will in November. It won’t be vengeance. It’ll be proper oversight.

And all the fourth-raters will greatly, greatly resent it.

¹ OK, OK, that’s a bit of hyperbole. The politics of SCOTUS nominations is a well-known and voluminous subject. So, yes, not all SCOTUS nominees and Justices have been considered to be at the top of their profession. While I don’t have a list of such nominees in front of me, along with their ABA ratings, names that were less than absolutely top-notch at the time of nomination include George H. W. Bush-nominated and current Justice Clarence Thomas, George W. Bush’s White House Counsel Harriet Myers, who withdrew prior to confirmation hearings, and, of course, George H. W. Bush-nominated Robert Bork, who was rejected by a bipartisan coalition of Senators, and later revealed to have taken a bribe from then-President Nixon in the form of … a promise of nomination to SCOTUS. And thus became the hatchet-man in the Saturday Night Massacre.

But I suppose this was merely an indulgence on my part.

More on anticipated European weather from the UK’s Met Office:

The high pressure near the southern half of the UK, which has been responsible for this week’s warm weather, continues to dominate bringing largely dry and clear weather for most. However, during the weekend, a developing southerly flow will allow very high temperatures currently building over the continent to start to spread northwards into the UK. Further north, eastern areas of Scotland could see temperatures in in the high 20°C in a few places, well above their average for the time of year.

And

This is the first time we have forecast 40°C in the UK. The current record high temperature in the UK is 38.7°C, which was reached at Cambridge Botanic Garden on 25 July in 2019.

Weather forecast models are run numerous times to help us quantify the likelihood of a particular event occurring and estimate the uncertainty which is always present in weather forecasting to some degree. Some models are now producing a 50% chance of maximum temperatures in excess of 40°C in isolated parts of the UK for the start of next week. Mid, to high, 30s Celsius will be seen more widely with an 80% chance we will exceed the current record.

Extreme heat warnings in cool nations is never a good thing.

⚠️⚠️🔴 Red Extreme heat warning issued 🔴⚠️⚠️

Parts of England on Monday and Tuesday

Latest info 👉 https://t.co/QwDLMg9c70

Stay #WeatherAware ⚠️ pic.twitter.com/YHaYvaGh95

— Met Office (@metoffice) July 15, 2022

Good luck to the UKers.

Latitudinarian:

: not insisting on strict conformity to a particular doctrine or standard : TOLERANT
specifically: tolerant of variations in religious opinion or doctrine [Merriam-Webster]

Noted in “Separation of Church and State Has Always Been Good for Religion,” Ed Simon, Religion & Politics:

In America, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” the First Amendment reads. But its piety was ensured by what follows that comma, for the state shall not prohibit “the free exercise thereof.” Such latitudinarian tolerance in the combination of the establishment clause and the free exercise clause was responsible for transforming America into a veritable spiritual laboratory. Tocqueville understood that the greatest aid for faith was removing it from its position of direct political power, noting that “religion cannot share the material strengths of the rulers without suffering some of those animosities which the latter arouse.” This was a lesson well understood in Tocqueville’s America. When the Frenchmen would inquire as to the reasons for such spiritual vibrancy in the New World, Americans “mainly attributed the peaceful dominion of religion in their country to the separation of church and state.”

It took me only … three or four months … to finish Cixin Liu’s Three Body Problem.

I was not beset by unusual activity or delays.

Its clunky style – or is that the Chinese style? – just didn’t catch my attention.

Although I did appreciate the scanty peek he gives us into the political and military swirls of the Cultural Revolution, of which I know very, very little. To nothing.

Back to Jack Vance?

Taken this morning, a fine lily.

OK, so the composition’s a bit mediocre. I LIKE ORANGE FLOWERS.

For those January 6th insurrectionists who didn’t confess and had to be convicted at trial, this may be dismaying:

BREAKING: The DOJ has filed its sentencing memo asking a judge to order Guy Reffitt — the first J6 defendant convicted at trial — to serve 15 years in prison. They argue his actions warrant a terrorism enhancement. Link: https://t.co/iIC7hexQI2 pic.twitter.com/htZJ5uhEK7

— Jordan Fischer (@JordanOnRecord) July 15, 2022

Reffitt, so far as I can see, supplied his own evidence of guilt. He was also the dude who threatened to kill his own children if they tipped off the FBI, which I believe they did. A search of his home was very unfortunate for him as well.

He seems to live to be angry at the government.

If Stewart Rhods, head of the Oath Keepers, is found guilty of treasonous sedition, what’ll be the recommended sentence? Maybe thirty years for trying to overthrow the government?

I don’t like your performance, my dear. Homer, get Chewbacca to replace her, I’ve heard he’s tired of being stereotyped.

It’s pouring rain, the road is a mudpit, the car dates from the ’30s – the 1930s, not the 2030s – and the catty couple in the backseat, a Broadway producer named Wood, and his secretary, a Homer Erskine, are engaged in their usual foreplay, while the driver, Ames, has to avoid a tree blocking the road. Forced to slog their way to a nearby house, the real question raises its head from the muck:

Is this just a house, or is it a one night only theater, purely for the seduction of Wood and his production company?

That’s The Ghost Walks’s (1934) beginning.

And it leads to an important question: If a character dies, does it matter? What if the actor portraying the character is also dead? Is it fidelity to her art?

And then her body disappears? Negative points, maybe?

For all that the script needed refinement, that the tension between Wood and Erskine is just a trifle repetitive, this is actually a bit of unexpected fun. It wasn’t laugh-out-loud funny, but it did make me smile unexpectedly, even at the climactic plot twist.

And now we’ll need everyone to go push the car out of the muck.

And the cost of cryptocurrency can become prohibitive – when you can’t take the heat:

Here in the United States we tend to be a bit myopic, which these days is unsurprising, given the political uproar. But the situation in Europe, while predictable, is nevertheless upsetting.

No, not the politics. The weather:

Extreme heat is hitting Europe with Seville reaching 41C while France & Germany are expected to experience similar highs. Italy is under drought orders. Portugal is on fire with hydro plants limited. These are no longer temperature anomalies. This is the new normal. pic.twitter.com/hKKMpy9vT2

— Peter Dynes (@PGDynes) July 12, 2022

More details here at WaPo.

This caught me by surprise:

Nearly 100% of Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen members have voted in support of a nationwide strike, which BLET National President Dennis R. Pierce is calling “a showing of solidarity and unity.”

The National Mediation Board (NMB) on June 14 set in motion a 90-day-maximum time clock toward a national railroad shutdown. It released BLET and 11 other rail craft unions (bargaining in two coalitions collectively representing some 115,000 rail workers) from NMB-guided mediation with most Class I freight railroads and many smaller ones, ending attempts to negotiate, voluntarily, amendments to existing wage, benefits and work rules agreements.

This triggered a “cooling off period,” which is set to expire at 12:01 a.m. EDT on July 18, 2022. At that point, self-help is available to the parties, unless President Joe Biden appoints a Presidential Emergency Board (PEB) pursuant to Section 10 of the Railway Labor Act. A PEB would halt any strike or lockout by the parties, and would investigate and issue a report and recommendations concerning the dispute. [Railway Age]

Possible impacts? xaxnar of Daily Kos has some thoughts on the matter.

And this? Not really related. Just a pic from our visit to the Minnesota Transportation Museum‘s St. Paul location a few year’s back.

No, it’s not a denizen of Hell getting loose. At least, I don’t think so.

That’s really a lot of energy emitted by the Sun:

The “Bastille Day” flare as seen by EIT in the 195 Å emission line.
Image: NASA.

It took the Bastille Day CME [Coronal Mass Ejection of July 14, 2000] months to reach the distant spacecraft–180 days to Voyager 2, and 245 days to Voyager 1. Being near the edge of the solar system, both spacecraft were naturally bathed in high levels of cosmic rays. The CME swept aside that ambient radiation, creating a temporary reduction called a “Forbush Decrease.” Conditions returned to normal 3 to 4 months later and, finally, the storm was over. [spaceweather.com]

And it lasted 3-4 months? Wow.

The conservatives – such as former Senator John Danforth (R-MO) and former judge J. Michael Luttig, famous for his stop in at the televised January 6th House hearings – are striking back against the far right, issuing a report on the 2022 Presidential Election entitled:

LOST, NOT STOLEN:
The Conservative Case that Trump Lost and Biden
Won the 2020 Presidential Election

Claiming to be an exhaustive analysis of the Trumpian court actions, its conclusions are:

Donald Trump and his supporters have failed to present evidence of fraud or inaccurate results significant enough to invalidate the results of the 2020 Presidential Election. We do not claim that election administration is perfect. Election fraud is a real thing; there are prosecutions in almost every election year, and no doubt some election fraud goes undetected. Nor do we disparage attempts to reduce fraud. States should continue to do what they can do to eliminate opportunities for election fraud and to punish it when it occurs. But there is absolutely no evidence of fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election on the magnitude necessary to shift the result in any state, let alone the nation as a whole. In fact, there was no fraud that changed the outcome in even a single precinct. It is wrong, and bad for our country, for people to propagate baseless claims that President Biden’s election was not legitimate.

and

We conclude that Donald Trump and his supporters had their day in court and failed to produce substantive evidence to make their case. …

In our system of government, these cases provided the forums in which Trump and his supporters could and should have proven their claims. This Report shows that those efforts failed because of a lack of evidence and not because of erroneous rulings or unfair judges. Judges, legislators, and other election officers, often including members of his own party, gave Trump ample time and every opportunity to present evidence to make his case. Post-election audits or reviews in each state also failed to show any irregularities or fraud that would overturn the electoral results. In many cases, after making extravagant claims of wrongdoing, Trump’s legal representatives showed up in court or state proceedings empty-handed, and then returned to their rallies and media campaigns to repeat the same unsupported claims.

They are risking splitting the Republican Party into two, then three, four, etc., pieces. Why? Because they’re threatening the social standing and power bases of many candidates, and many Trump-allied elected officials, who now must face the question of whether they love power or truth more. The former will win in many cases because of the backing of religious-allied forces, most infamously the evangelical movement, which has, in a time-worn tradition, convinced itself that the Divine is on their side – uniformly through the assertions of self-proclaimed spokespeople for the Divine; the latter remains mute, but no one notices, amidst the clamor of false prophets. Then comes the back-biting and election-cheating claims and and competing claims of being backed by the Divine and all the destructive behaviors endemic to the fourth-raters forming the Republican Party right now.

But there’s also the chance that everyone will ignore it. After all, it’s an exhaustive compendium of unpleasant truths. If the Trumpians refuse to seriously engage with it, it may sink into the dust of the world, little more than a curiosity and cry for help, while the power-mad sweat and cry and bleed for their momentary prominence, whether it be in a governor’s seat, a legislator’s office, or a Justice’s robes.

It’ll be fascinating to see how this important document holds up over the next few weeks. This could be the beginning of the end for Trumpian allies up for election this year – or it could be a nothingburger. As ever, the independents hold power in their hands.

I hear they spend all their free time at the bowling alley or on Tik-Tok.

Our rose bush is flowering:

It appears that a zoo to the northwest of the Twin Cities had a wee problem:

The owner of a central Minnesota zoo was airlifted to an area hospital Wednesday afternoon after a camel bit his head and dragged him several feet. [CBSNews]

I confess to having little sympathy for zoos. I’d prefer to see the inmates out in their natural habitat. Eating each other, of course. But here’s the important part of the report.

Officials also said the camel wasn’t hurt, and “remains in good health.”

Go Team Camel!

Court of Chancery:

Chancery originated in Medieval England as a distinct court of equity, named for the Lord Chancellor. In its earliest form, those who were unable to obtain an adequate common law remedy could petition the King of England, who would refer the case to the Lord Chancellor. Over time, Chancery grew from an administrative body within the King’s Council to a separate court with its own formalized procedures and doctrines. Compared to the increasingly rigid courts of common law, the Court of Chancery provided more adaptable remedies based on notions of moral fairness. While courts of common law were mostly limited to providing monetary damages, the Court of Chancery could order forms of equitable relief such as specific performance or injunctions.

Many of the early American colonies preserved the distinction between common law and equity jurisdiction, and some states eventually established chancery courts with exclusive jurisdiction over matters in equity. Today though, only a few states maintain separate chancery courts. Delaware’s Court of Chancery is perhaps the most prominent for its handling of corporate disputes and fiduciary litigation involving trusts and estates. Mississippi Chancery Court has jurisdiction over adoptions, custody disputes, divorces, guardianships, and sanity hearings. Both Mississippi and Tennessee give their chancery courts jurisdiction to hear name change petitions. As a general rule, most disputes in chancery court are heard by a chancellor, who resolves the case and fashions relief without a jury. [Cornell Law School/Legal Information Institute]

Noted in “What to know as Elon Musk’s rocky deal with Twitter heads to court,” Rachel Lerman, WaPo:

Delaware is one of the only remaining states in the United States to still have a chancery court, which mainly deals with issues such as guardianships, trusts, estates — and, particularly in Delaware’s case, corporate matters including mergers and acquisitions.

Trouping ever onwards…

• State Senator Burt Jones (R-GA), now running for Lt. Governor of Georgia, was apparently a fake elector, and now Republican strategists are squirming, as his opponent is using this against him in their contest. Why does this matter in an update on Federal Senate races? Because the Republican strategists worry it may cause collateral damage to other races on Election Day – including the Warnock/Walker contest.
• This Alaska Daily News article claims Alaska Democrats are “supporting” Patricia R. Chesbro, who appears to have little political experience. Earlier reporting had Alaska Democrats endorsing incumbent Senator Murkowski (R). I think it’s still Murkowski’s to win or lose. WaPo reports that a recent Alaska Survey Research poll (FiveThirtyEight rating: B/C) shows Murkowski winning in the new Alaska non-partisan primary top four to a RCV (ranked choice voting) system. Trump-endorsed Tshibaka would lead the first two rounds of the RCV, but in the third, as the two more liberal candidates were eliminated and their voters’ second and third choices were counted, Murkowski wins by several points, just as I suspected would happen with RCV – the extremists end up losing. And then she would be deafened by shrieks of outrage from Tshibaka and Trump. Unknown to FiveThirtyEight pollster Ivan Moore has similar results for Murkowski.
• WaPo has a summary of interviews with anonymous GOP strategists here. It looks as if Senator McConnell’s (R-KY) concerns about candidate quality are justified. I did find it interesting that Senator Grassley (R-IA) did not come up as a potential weak candidate, despite his longevity in the Senate. I suspect that is a swamp too far for the strategists, most of whom don’t appear to realize the January 6th televised hearings are happening, with concomitant collateral damage to Trump allies such as Grassley a good possibility.
• Speaking of, the seventh televised meeting of the House Committee investigating the Jan 6th insurrection will deal more damage to close Trump allies who happen to be running for the Senate, as well as other positions. Just how much is, of course, hard to say.
• In Florida, a Center Street PAC poll shows incumbent Senator Rubio (R) ahead of likely Democratic challenger Rep Val Demings by 5-8 points, depending on how you want to size it up. Jacob Perry of Center Street PAC thinks Rubio could be in trouble. Let me see Demings making progress up that hill and maybe I’ll agree with him, otherwise its Rubio in November, no matter how tired he looks and incoherent he sounds. Man, it’s like Sauron is munching on his soul or something.
• Jennifer Rubin in WaPo expands on the theme of damage to Trump’s Senate allies by noting that the two former Trump supporters who testified yesterday to the House January 6th investigatory committee serve as examples and warnings to Trump supporters nation-wide. But how many Trump supporters are watching the hearings? Not many, I’d guess. Now, if Fox News happens to put them up on the screen without meddling with them…. nyah. I don’t see this as working out.

Earlier updates here.

Just watch or read:

Kari Lake tonight says her Republican primary opponent is going to try and steal their election by having dead people vote. pic.twitter.com/76QluTwYpV

— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) July 13, 2022

And multiply by many or most of the other primaries, now and in the future. This is an example of the self-centered determined to win at all costs, destroying the very structure they’re determined to climb.

Erick Erickson is really giving the far-right a big target with this post:

I have heard all the excuses for focusing on Hunter Biden. He shows his dad is a bad dad or crooked or on the take. The leaks from his phone show Hunter is using his dad. Conservatives are obsessed with dragging Hunter and using Hunter to take his dad with him.

But Hunter Biden is the quintessential shiny object. He’s something Republicans can fixate on to distract the base from failing to do substantive things and, more importantly, no one outside the rabid base of the GOP gives a crap.

Here he tries to balance on the top rail of the RINO corral:

The base of the GOP will clap like seals and ignore there is no impeachment of Secretary Mayorkas or Attorney General Garland. There are no appropriation bills forged to fight back against the growth of government. There is no budget, just a continuing resolution that perpetually funds the government.

Sure, talk about impeachments for, what? Imaginary scandals, maybe. I dunno. It seems to be a statement of appeasement to the far-right, after riling up the base by calling favorite hate-target Hunter Biden nothing more than a distraction.

But it is a sad statement on the Republicans these days. Erickson is stuck with a Party leader who looks more and more like an unindicted criminal with every televised hearing, an ideological movement that has a self-destroying culture in the form of the RINO maneuver and the allegiance to vote straight ticket, a membership which, with the exit of the top Republicans from the Party, is devolving into a collection of self-righteous and arrogant fourth-raters, and a religious aspect which, regardless of sect name, believes it has the right to impose its theological cant on all the citizens of the United States, and they have the additional misfortune to have a majority on the SCOTUS.

He’s been trying to beat the drum and blow the bagpipe for the conservatives over the last couple of weeks, and no doubt the far-left’s own arrogance has helped a bit, but quite honestly it’s not convincing. A couple of days ago, he posted this bit of what is, frankly, gibberish.

He may find himself labeled a RINO soon, now. What then?

My favorite of the four pics that are up front on the James Webb telescope site:

Stephan’s Quintet, a visual grouping of five galaxies, is best known for being prominently featured in the holiday classic film, “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Today, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope reveals Stephan’s Quintet in a new light. This enormous mosaic is Webb’s largest image to date, covering about one-fifth of the Moon’s diameter. It contains over 150 million pixels and is constructed from almost 1,000 separate image files. The information from Webb provides new insights into how galactic interactions may have driven galaxy evolution in the early universe.

With its powerful, infrared vision and extremely high spatial resolution, Webb shows never-before-seen details in this galaxy group. Sparkling clusters of millions of young stars and starburst regions of fresh star birth grace the image. Sweeping tails of gas, dust and stars are being pulled from several of the galaxies due to gravitational interactions. Most dramatically, Webb captures huge shock waves as one of the galaxies, NGC 7318B, smashes through the cluster.

Kick ass!

The seventh of the series of televised meetings of the House Committee investigating the January 6th insurrection took place tonight. The first half, or perhaps a bit less, wasn’t quite as interesting as prior hearings, but then two witnesses were brought forth, one a former member of the Oath Keepers, one of the two primary militia groups associated with the insurrection, the other an “everyday” man who showed up at the speech at the Ellipse from his home in Ohio and made the mistake of joining the march

The first guy, Jason Van Tatenhove, was quite interesting. Calling himself an independent journalist and graphics artist, he testified he was hired into the Oath Keepers to work on their web page and do other graphics work. He gives us an insight into Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes, a man who, if I’m to believe Tatenhove, has, as his primary goal, power. He sounds, unsurprisingly, like former President Trump, obsessed and unrestrained by standard codes of honor and behavior, willing to lie and even kill to get what he wants.

The other man, Ayers as I recall, functions as the victim, albeit fairly willing, in this little ad hoc vignette. A family man with a job as a supervisor at a local working shop in Ohio, he was, by his own admission, fascinated by politics, but fed off bad news sources. Now deeply regretful, as it’s cost him his job and perhaps his own self-respect for permitting himself to be taken in by the former President and his allies, Ayers was fairly incoherent, but managed to convey to his former fellow victims that “taking the blinders off” when it comes to the news was the most important thing he did after the insurrection. He is no longer a support of the former President.

There were other points made, such as the vague but unsettling speeches of Alex Jones, Roger Stone, and other Trump allies, who worked on pumping up the crowd on January 5th, with precious little but empty rhetoric. The entry of recent witness Pat Cipollone, White House counsel for the Presidency during the Trump Administration, which does not make him Trump’s counsel, via videotape made for some very interesting moments. While capable of lawyer talk, as he demonstrated once or twice, he mostly stuck with simple, easy to understand answers that, once again, cast the former President in the worst possible light.

In the end, the closing statements of Representatives Murphy, Raskin, Cheney, and Thompson were more important than usual, as they defined and asserted the role that officials, appointed and elected, must fulfill in order to safeguard the Republic and the Constitution. As one of them, I forget who, noted that Pence had made all the appropriate phone calls on January 6th, trying to arrange protection for Congress, while Trump did nothing but sit back and enjoy his debacle, all I could think was this:

DERELICTION OF DUTY.

Steve Benen isn’t keen on acknowledging that a liberal reading of candidate for the seat of Senator from Georgia Herschel Walker’s (R) latest statement on climate change isn’t quite completely gibberish:

It’s against this backdrop that the Republican candidate tried to talk about climate change at a recent campaign event:

“Y’know, climate change — I’m gonna help y’all with that real quickly, and I’m gonna do it in the Wrightsville way, so you can understand what I’m saying. We in America have some of the cleanest air and cleanest water of anybody in the world. So what we do is, we’re gonna put from the Green New Deal, millions or billions of dollars cleaning our good air up. So all of a sudden — China and India ain’t putting nothing into cleaning that situation up. So all that bad air is still there. But since we don’t control the air, our good air decide to float over to China’s bad air. So when China gets our good air, their bad air got to move. So it moves over to our good air space. And now we got to clean that back up.”

It’s tempting to compare Walker’s comments to a student trying to do a book report about a book he obviously hasn’t read, but that’s not quite right: The way the Senate hopeful spoke, he seemed quite sincere, as if he were genuinely offering a meaningful tutorial about an important issue.

He was not. Walker’s comments were effectively gibberish — or more the point, this was the latest in a series of examples of the Georgia Republican addressing public policy with comments that were effectively gibberish.

In all fairness to Walker, a brief examination of his message is provided:

1. 

   Source: Statista.

   America have some of the cleanest air and cleanest water of anybody in the world. We’re certainly doing much better, due to environmental regulations, than we did 50-60 years ago. But the statement is irrelevant, because we’re not talking about pollution overall, but two types of pollution – CO₂ and methane emissions, which are the two molecules that trap solar radiation and that humanity’s technological artifacts emit as they consume fossil fuel energy. At right is a chart of 2020 emissions, and, yes, it shows China as #1, and the United States #2. That makes us a major polluter in this category, and if we don’t clean ourselves up, we’ll be shitting on ourselves – and our children.

2. So what we do is, we’re gonna put from the Green New Deal, millions or billions of dollars cleaning our good air up. So all of a sudden — China and India ain’t putting nothing into cleaning that situation up. This is an appeal the listeners’ prejudices, based on what they might do – cheat, given the chance. But China has a recent history of both cleaning their air and water up, and of polluting some more, and India recognizes its problems, although my impression. But, in the end, 13% is 13%, and just as atmosphere is shared, atmosphere can also stay in place – that is, entropy, to which Walker is appealing, is not a quick process. It can be a very slow process. Which means us cleaning up our emissions doesn’t mean the emissions of China will be immediately and substantially diluted.

Walker’s not just gibbering here, he’s just not right. His statements on other issues really are gibberish. Meanwhile, his opponent, Senator Warnock (D), talks sense.

NASA has, with the help of President Biden, released the first picture taken by the James Webb telescope.

From the accompanying description:

This first image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe to date. Known as Webb’s First Deep Field, this image of galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 is overflowing with detail. Thousands of galaxies – including the faintest objects ever observed in the infrared – have appeared in Webb’s view for the first time. This slice of the vast universe covers a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground.

More from NASA tomorrow!

Over the weekend there was somewhat perplexing news that former President Trump was “withdrawing” his claims of executive privilege with regards to Steve Bannon’s potential testimony to the January 6th committee. Readers may recall that Bannon did not agree to talk to the committee upon receiving a subpoena, claiming he was under executive privilege to the former President, who confirmed it. His story was so much baloney, as he wasn’t employed by the government or by Trump personally at the time under discussion. The committee set in motion the wheels to send a note to the DoJ suggesting a crime had been committed, and the DoJ chose to indict Bannon. His trial is coming up. [Update: it’s in a week or so.]

The news that Trump was withdrawing his claim of executive privilege was met by guffaws from the center and left wing punditage, but I think it’s worth understanding the maneuver a bit more deeply. First, I suspect Bannon is unwilling to spend time in prison for contempt of Congress, and he hopes that, by finally agreeing, that can be avoided; I’ve already seen speculation that it won’t work.

Second, I rather think that Bannon informed Trump of his decision. At this juncture, the appearance-conscious former President, who is not entirely unjustified for concerning himself with appearances, realized that a trial ending in Bannon’s conviction would make Trump look weak; Bannon testifying to the existentially dangerous January 6th investigatory committee, despite Trump’s claims of non-existent executive privilege, would also make him look weak, maybe even weaker.

Caught in a squeeze play of his own making, and facing an unforgiving reality, Trump decided to go with the least-weak, most-puzzling move available: he “gave” Bannon the freedom to testify.

And he can continue to beat his chest and claim to be strong.

What does this mean?

Chinese authorities on Sunday violently dispersed a peaceful protest by hundreds of depositors, who sought in vain to demand their life savings back from banks that have run into a deepening cash crisis.

Since April, four rural banks in China’s central Henan province have frozen millions of dollars worth of deposits, threatening the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of customers in an economy already battered by draconian Covid lockdowns.

Anguished depositors have staged several demonstrations in the city of Zhengzhou, the provincial capital of Henan, over the past two months, but their demands have invariably fallen on deaf ears. [CNN/Business]

I’m not really sure. The article continues:

Police in Xuchang, a city neighboring Zhengzhou, said in a statement late Sunday they recently arrested members of an alleged “criminal gang,” who were accused of effectively taking control over the Henan rural banks starting from 2011 — by leveraging their shareholdings and “manipulating banks executives.”

The suspects were also accused of illegally transferring funds through fictitious loans, the police said, adding that some of their funds and assets had been seized and frozen.

Made up story? True facts?

Is the Chinese banking system beginning to fold under the strain of Covid and, perhaps, the CCCP economic system?

Or is this just a hiccup, not to be noticed?