From time to time a Republican official will make reference to the size of the GOP tent, but I think those claims are becoming less and less accurate. After all, former President Donald Trump really has no civilized tolerance for rivals, or their supporters, as this NBC News report makes clear:

A new super PAC ad attacking former North Carolina Republican governor and Senate hopeful Pat McCrory criticizes the Republican for backing Mitt Romney — in 2012, when Romney was the party’s presidential nominee.

Seeking to draw a contrast between how McCrory spoke about Romney and about Trump, a new Club for Growth Action ad airs audio of McCrory calling Romney “a man of incredible courage” followed by him saying that “Donald Trump is destroying democracy.”

McCrory’s praise of Romney came in August of 2012, per the disclaimer on the bottom of the ad, when Romney was the GOP presidential nominee (who had been endorsed by Donald Trump months earlier). And the North Carolina Republican’s comments about Trump came in the aftermath of the 2020 election as he criticized Trump’s unfounded claims the election was stolen, comments McCrory’s opponents have used to argue he isn’t the right fit for Republican voters in a party dominated by Trump.

Superficially, this makes some tactical sense. By associating McCrory with Romney, The Club for Growth makes it clear to the Trumpist base that McCrory is not the Trump-endorsed candidate (that would be Rep Ted Budd (R-NC)) in this race.

But this is not an isolated tactic:

It’s not the first time that a GOP group has tried to use a candidate’s support for the party’s 2012 nominee against them. Last cycle, a GOP group attacked future Tennessee Republican Sen. Bill Hagerty for working as Romney’s national finance chair in 2012, the Club for Growth evoked Romney’s image in an attack on future Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall, and the Club also attacked a GOP House candidate in Florida for donating to Romney’s presidential bid.

Yeah, this tactic is not working – yet. But by attempting to drive wedges between the Trumpist base and Romney-associated politicos, especially those with lots of experience such as McCrory, the Club for Growth is doing Trump’s bidding, and by so doing they are sending a signal to all non-Trumpists that their welcome in the GOP is not assured.

And the Trumpist base, while sizable enough to be worthy of a financial harvest, is neither huge nor even stable. That is, Trump’s moral standing is neither bolstered by heading a church, nor is it stabilized by his own behaviors, and if his tax records are released and show he’s not the genius he claims to be, his base could shrink rapidly.

And with other factions expelled from the “Big Tent,” it could become quite the small tent indeed. This may be the necessary next step in the Reformation of the Republican Party, as the party tears itself apart because of the utterly immature impulses of the man-child at the titular head of the party, and those who are expelled begin building a new party.

We shall see.

Depuration:

depuration of the harvested bivalves in an approved depuration center (depuration is the reduction of microorganisms to a level acceptable for human consumption by the process of holding live bivalve mollusks for a period of time under approved, controlled conditions in natural or artificial seawater suitable for the process, which may be treated or untreated); [ScienceDirect]

Noted in “An inside look at oysters – and how to enjoy them safely,” Sam Wong, NewScientist (20 November 2021):

As filter-feeders, oysters can pick up pathogens lurking in the water. To reduce this risk, they are usually kept in clean water for 42 hours after harvesting in the UK, a process called depuration.

Sadly, this isn’t completely effective – particularly with respect to norovirus, one of the most common causes of gastroenteritis. A 2017 report found that between 100 and 1000 copies of the norovirus genome may remain in each gram of oyster tissue after depuration. Just 10 copies are thought to constitute an infectious dose.

In a post asserting that the just-argued case which threatens to throw out the Roe v. Wade decision will not affect upcoming elections, which I otherwise am inclined to agree with, Erick Erickson falls for the old dollars buy votes line:

All one needs to know is the name Ed Stezler. He is a State Representative and authored the fetal heartbeat law in Georgia. His district had trended Democrat. Stacey Abrams won it in 2018 and he barely hung. In 2020, after the Georgia legislature passed Ed’s bill, he became the most highly targeted state house Republican in America. Democrats from across the nation poured money into beating Ed. They made their entire campaign about abortion. They targeted voters. They sent door knockers. They had phone banks. They had celebrities. They outspent Ed Setzler and the Republicans.

Biden beat Trump in his district. The Democrats picked up both Senate seats in his district. Ed won with 50.5% of the vote. Making the race against him about abortion failed.

The assumption is that increasing campaign spending will buy votes. It’s as simple as that. And it’s false.

In a district with a substantial portion of single issue voters and highly partisan voters, the number of dollars is going to have a steeper marginal rate drop-off than in other districts. That is, votes that aren’t normally voted, or are changeable, are hard to come by.

Dollars improve messaging, occasionally spark debates that can change minds (think: the gay marriage debates) and can get voters to the polls, although the latter is supposedly vote-indifferent – that is, a ride cannot be conditionalized on who one votes for.

But it’s like giving dollars to a known practicing pedophile. It doesn’t matter how much money is given, that pedophile will not win the seat for which they vie.

While I do think overturning Roe v Wade will be a big fizzle for the Democrats, unless they can persuade that it’s a big deal for the independent, a bigger deal that the rot at the heart of the Democrats, I am not convinced by Erickson’s argument.

In case you’re a fan of Rep Devin Nunes (R=CA), the guy who sued Twitter for being mean to him using a cow mask, I have some bad news.

NEW: Rep Devin Nunes is retiring. I'm told he “got a job offer that he can’t refuse” — CEO of a new Trump media org.

— Jacqui Heinrich (@JacquiHeinrich) December 6, 2021

MediaIte helpfully notes:

California is in the process of redrawing its congressional districts after the Golden State lost a seat after the 2020 U.S. Census. As Nunes’ hometown paper the Fresno Bee noted, the congressman would face an uphill battle in a general election unless he were to decide to run in a district that isn’t the one he currently represents.

Dave Wasserman of Cook Political Report explained that if the current proposed map is adopted, Nunes’ 22nd congressional district would become an area that voted for Joe Biden by nine points, as opposed to having voted for Trump by five in the last election.

It’s still worth noting that one of the former President’s strongest allies is leaving Congress when Trump needs his allies the most – at least in his mind. The only reason Trump won’t metaphorically try to burn him to the ground is that Nunes is coming to work for Trump.

Which will almost certainly turn out to be the same thing.

I have no doubt, Nunes will try to keep a profile with the public, but Trump will subsume him or, failing that, fire him. And one of the more entertaining personalities will disappear.

Which is fine with me.

The dark side of Pluto, as illuminated by Sun’s tepid light reflecting off of Pluto’s moon Charon, and photographed by New Horizons in 2015:

Image: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Southwest Research Institute/NOIRLab via NewScientist

Edward Tabash is the Center For Inquiry’s (think: freethinkers) Board Chair, and he thinks sex robots should be totally OK, as he states in a LoC to the Los Angeles Times:

To the editor: As both a constitutional and criminal defense lawyer for people charged with prostitution-related offenses, I applaud Professor Rob Brooks’ support for future purchasers of artificially intelligent sex robots. He properly criticizes the religious right and the anti-porn left for their opposition to these soon-to-be mechanized intimate companions.

Brooks refers to society’s “typical censoriousness about sex.” All ideological extremes want to prohibit people from living differently from that belief system’s dictates. If our neighbors are not objectively harming us, we have no right to forcibly restrict their personal choices in order to compel obedience to what is ultimately our own subjective code of conduct.

If someone chooses to privately interact with a robot that provides sexual gratification, any ideology underlying an attempt to deprive anyone of the legal right to seek such pleasure is a totalitarian threat to our freedoms.

I think the unspoken assumption is that freedom, to the extent that it doesn’t physically or financially damage anyone else, is a good thing, and, yes, it’s hard to argue against it.

But the first thing that came to mind was to wonder what the Amish would have to say if sex robots were to be proposed for introduction into Amish society. I don’t means this jocularly; it’s a serious question. The Amish, from what I’ve read, will debate the introduction of new technology into their society, and often reject it. What concerns would they raise as they wrestled with this proposal?

Would they see this as detrimental to the cohesiveness of society? Or a comfort to men and women lacking partners?

I’ve been meaning to post about this and kept being forgetful. From gCaptain:

The first new U.S.-flagged Great Lakes freighter to be built in nearly 40 years was launched [October 28] at the Fincantieri Bay Shipbuilding shipyard in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin.

The Interlake Steamship Company vessel, M/V Mark W. Barker, is self-unloading bulk carrier that will transport raw materials such as salt, iron ore, and stone to support manufacturing throughout the Great Lakes region.

The new River-class vessel is believed to be the first ship for U.S. Great Lakes service built on the Great Lakes since 1983. Delivery is planned for Spring 2022.

The first in 40 years? What’s triggered this? Just a worn out fleet? Or is shipping increasing on the Great Lakes?

It’d be a pity if happened to that company of – oooooh, too late:

The five Syrians pulled from their homes by secret police on the same night last year were not insurgents, spies or suspected of being disloyal to the country’s president, Bashar al-Assad.

Instead, they were targets in a desperate new phase of Assad’s battle to survive: the hunt for cash.

All five were executives at Syria’s second-largest cellphone company, MTN Syria, according to individuals familiar with the episode. Their arrests were part of a ruthless campaign by the president to seize MTN’s assets, along with almost every other meaningful source of revenue in Syria’s shattered economy. [WaPo]

Not only personal endangerment, but corporate as well:

MTN was ultimately brought to its knees four months ago after protracted pressure in which those arrests were followed by demands for multimillion-dollar payments, threats to revoke the company’s operating license and a dubious court ruling that put an Assad loyalist in charge of the company.

Every company that funds Republican candidates who think that any Democratic victory is questionable should read that and think about the ignominy that would go with such a failure.

It was about here that I recalled I don’t actually like musicals much.

If you know the name Jerome Kern, but haven’t seen Till the Clouds Roll By (1946), you may want to see it. A “fictionalized biopic,” it follows the life of theater composer Jerome Kern, as he bounces from unknown, to his first success and, concurrently, the love of his life, endures the loss of a producer in the sinking of the S. S. Lusitania, and endures other incidents, fictional and not, all to the accompaniment of the many theater songs he composed over the decades.

It’s softly lit, references conflict, loss, and setbacks, but without making them the center of the film. As a tribute film, this makes sense; the decision to fictionalize it makes less. The result is a collection of sweetly sentimental songs which may require an injection or two of insulin, and a question in the back of the mind: what was true and what was not?

But it was still enjoyable.

Poor Paul Harsanyi. Apparently, he drew the short straw at National Review and was stuck condemning skepticism about God … as a self-proclaimed atheist. It all comes to a head in this broken kaleidoscope of, well, fear:

It is also the case that we need more people in the pews to save the Republic. Mostly because God-fearing Americans tend to be more serious about other vital institutions. Maybe it’s because they believe in something bigger than themselves — or even the CDC, if one can imagine such a thing. Inalienable rights make sense to the person of faith in the same way a pliable set of guidelines that perpetually bend to accommodate the vagaries of contemporary life does not. Putting man above God as the final arbiter of “rights” is a haughty and perilous enterprise, as we witnessed in virtually every tragedy of the 20th century. There is far too much of that going on.

As an atheist, he should be well aware that the last verified appearance of a divinity appears to be … never. As such, ideas pertaining to governance coming from the religious sector must be considered contaminated with notions about a creature about which no one knows much, including that pesky question concerning actual existence. Such ideas, not necessarily grounded in reality, well, one can still make the argument that there’s merit in how long they’ve survived, i.e., refinement via social evolution, but most religions with which I’ve had some reason to look have little use for democracy, particularly those unconscious of the word hubris.

But Harsanyi wants to hand religions, which he’s admitted have engaged in century-long wars over fine points of theology – and they weren’t formalities – a Get Out Of Jail Free card, while condemning humanity for its efforts at governance.

But governance is humanity’s responsibility.

If Harsanyi is going to cling to atheism as a position on the divine, then he must be willing to admit that it’s up to humanity to find a way to govern that brings stability to society; furthermore, since he’s already demanding that his view on the divine be respected for truthfulness, and by stating it, yes, he’s demanded that respect, then he should also demand that truthfulness be part of governing. I’m not asking that he present a plan, because governance is hard and, as overpopulation increases, it’ll get worse. But understanding that respect for reality and truth, rather than relying on religious ideas of governance based on a titular, and, depending on your divinity selection, chronically angry and murderous divinity, should lead to a better governance model. It’ll at least increase the odds.

Just making assertions such as

And, obviously, if you’re willing to throw away a few thousand years of history, what’s a mere 200-odd years of constitutional law?

may sound clever and convincing, but my response is Y’all mean like Trump, his high powered allies, and the January 6th insurrectionists? SCOTUS and abortion? The intellectual progenitors to the current crop of Republicans, the 1861 traitors, who relied so heavily on Biblical text for justifying their defense of slavery?

He’s written easy, throw-away lines without much thought, and that makes him look uncaring. He may have been trying to be clever, but it doesn’t work. A direct acknowledgment that theocracies, and belief in the unlimited power of a divinity that fails to even communicate with us, has not gone over well is a critical first step in questioning how to turn out good American citizens.

Oh, dammit. Someone call up Lenin, we need a seventh for poker. What, what do you mean He’s dead, too? Why doesn’t anyone ever tell me these things?

Speaking of stories involving the USSR (yes, right here), The Death Of Stalin (2017) is a surpriser. Advertised as a farce, this story about the end of Josef Stalin’s reign as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union, which were ended by his lingering death from what appears to be a cerebral hemmorhage, features the circus which was precipitated by his illness and death. From those who were arrested the night prior and were being tortured, and now are being shot by no less a personage than Minister of Internal Affairs (think: the secret security forces known as the NKVD) Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s privileged childrens’ problematic fates, the immediate execution of all of Stalin’s servants, including the execution of the executioners, and the clownish internal political maneuverings that center around Stalin’s funeral, it does seem farcical.

But the farce is not the story so much as the suspicion that all this, within the parameters of a dramatization of a real life incident, may have really happened, and necessarily happened. That is, when society uses the measures of ruthlessness, toadying, and a personality with a substantial sociopathic, or even psychopathic, component, as the metrics to measure worth as a government official – and Stalin, Malenkov, Kruschev, and Beria certainly qualified in either or both of the latter two categories – while discounting competency, humanity, and intelligence, then a farcical element to the government may be inevitable. The ministers working directly with Stalin at the time of his death are well aware that their colleagues are similarly ruthless, yet unintelligent, which all acts like a positive feedback loop, which are never pleasant. The Soviet people, too, have their own part to play, for if they choose to ouster the successor, these ministers know that oustering is usually feet first, out a window, and usually the landing is on one’s head. Do they even want to win Stalin’s place?

The storytellers wisely added another element from real life: the appearance of General Zhukov, awarded Hero of the Soviet Union (four times), who makes an appearance at the funeral, a bottle in one hand, a gun hidden in his uniform, and, as if wearing a cloak, a decisiveness unseen among the ministers, whose plots to take power suffer from uncertainty. Zhukov, being a good Soviet, cannot, as an active Army commander, take direct power himself, but he understands the currents of power, and is more than pleased to help bring Beria to his knees, from which he’ll never arise; in a frenzy, his plans come to naught from a bullet to the brain.

Perhaps my oddest experience in this great cock-up was the sudden feeling that Trump ally Roger Stone, a self-proclaimed Nixon groupy (I’ll skip the less palatable terms), would have fit right into this group: plotting, incompetent, arrogant, and absolutely wrong about everything.

Beautiful cinematography, well acted, well plotted, and just plain fun in that way horrific, barbaric regimes that signal their own demise can only be, with that edge of inevitability that makes one uneasy about their own governments, this is Recommended.

Or just some investors harvesting the crop? CNN/Business has the report:

Bitcoin prices plummeted overnight to a low of about $43,000.

As of 10:30 am EST Saturday, the cryptocurrency had dropped more than 13% in the previous 24 hours, from $56,294 to $48,309 — a loss of almost $8,000.

That’s a stark contrast from its all-time high of just last month, when Bitcoin reached almost $69,000 on November 9.

It’s a slight rebound from a plunge of more than 17% earlier in the day.

Ether, the second most popular cyrptocurrency, fell almost 10%.

Sure, maybe it’s just part of the roller-coaster that is cryptocurrencies. But I thought this was interesting:

Data from another platform, Coinglass, showed that nearly $1 billion worth of cryptocurrencies had been liquidated over the past 24 hours, with the bulk being on digital exchange Bitfinex.

Bitfinex? Here’s Wikipedia’s entry on Bitfinex:

Bitfinex is a cryptocurrency exchange owned and operated by iFinex Inc registered in the British Virgin Islands. Their customers’ money has been stolen or lost in several incidents, and they have been unable to secure normal banking relationships.

Research suggests that price manipulation of bitcoin on Bitfinex accounted for about half of the price increase of bitcoin in late 2017.

Someone made their profit goal and is getting out? Could be. This is the sort of thing that keeps me completely out of this sort of market, that and the fact that the purpose of cryptocurrency seems to be, well, separating investors from their money.

Or does Wasilla, Alaska, the home of former Alaskan governor and candidate for VP of the United States, the truly odd Sarah Palin (R-AK), breed them odd?

Rep. Christopher Kurka, a Republican from Wasilla, will run for Alaska governor in 2022, he announced Monday.

Kurka, a former director of Alaska Right to Life, was elected to the state House in 2020 and is in his freshman term within the Legislature. In office, he has been a staunch far-right conservative who opposes abortion rights and measures aimed at combating COVID-19, calling them “extreme evil.” [Anchorage Daily News]

He’s comparing the lockdown to Nazi death camps, basically. While hospitals attempt to hold on due to overcrowding, this limp-brained, self-important twerp thinks he’s going to run for governor.

What is it about Wasilla, anyways?

Remember Cannibal CMEs? Well, Dr. Phillips of Spaceweather has some more:

A SUDDEN DROP IN ATMOSPHERIC RADIATION: Last month, a “Cannibal CME” hit Earth, sparking a strong G3-class geomagnetic storm and auroras as far south as California and New Mexico. You might think such a storm would boost radiation in Earth’s atmosphere. Think again. High-altitude balloons hurriedly launched by Earth to Sky Calculus during the storm on Nov. 3rd and 4th found just the opposite. Radiation in the stratosphere plummeted:

More at the link above. Heliophysics is fun!

Or someone will hoot,

There’s gold in them thar hills!

Let’s go to the tape!

The social media posts started in May: photos and videos of smiling people, mostly women, drinking Mason jars of black liquid, slathering black paste on their faces and feet, or dipping babies and dogs in tubs of the black water. They tagged the posts #BOO and linked to a website that sold a product called Black Oxygen Organics.

Black Oxygen Organics, or “BOO” for short, is difficult to classify. It was marketed as fulvic acid, a compound derived from decayed plants, that was dug up from an Ontario peat bog. The website of the Canadian company that sold it billed it as “the end product and smallest particle of the decomposition of ancient, organic matter.”

Put more simply, the product is dirt — four-and-a-half ounces of it, sealed in a sleek black plastic baggie and sold for $110 plus shipping. Visitors to the Black Oxygen Organics website, recently taken offline, were greeted with a pair of white hands cradling cups of dirt like an offering. “A gift from the Ground,” it reads. “Drink it. Wear it. Bathe in it.”  [NBC News]

And the benefits appear to be limitless. At least, for those collecting the money.

Steve Benen summarizes more cracks in the face of the rotting GOP iceberg:

But by most measures, this week’s feud between two first-year GOP members — Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene and South Carolina’s Nancy Mace — is qualitatively different.

The dispute stems from Rep. Lauren Boebert and her bigoted rhetoric directed at a Democratic colleague. Mace denounced the Coloradan’s anti-Muslim smear, and Greene denounced Mace for having criticized Boebert.

The dispute took an unfortunate turn yesterday, as Greene described Mace as “the trash of the GOP Conference,” adding a personal attack related to abortion, while the South Carolinian responded with a tweet that used emojis to call Greene a “bats— clown.” The right-wing Georgian took her concerns to Donald Trump, as if he were the grown-up.

This is what you see when fourth and fifth raters are beholden to someone besides themselves for their power – they’re cavorting in corruption in order to get the attention of their master.

Literally.

The difference between ambition restrained and ambition unrestrained, and the weakness of the latter system, is that the former encourages competency and honor, while the latter encourages skills and character traits unrelated, even detrimental to, the honorable execution of their duties.

Look for accusations of each other being insufficiently loyal to the former President to spill forth soon enough. Remember former Representative Roby (R-AL)? She was as conservative as could be – and that was not good enough to immunize her from being primaried by other conservatives shouting about her lack of loyalty when she found the former President’s “pussy” comments repugnant. Well, this is worse. None of them would be in office without their loyalty to Trump, and that leaves them with a dubious – very dubious – moral and intellectual foundation.

And Benen’s concerned about Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) being unable to keep his party members in line? He’s a never-ran. He has no chance of being an effective leader. Not because of personal failings, of which he appears to have a few, but because of the composition of the elected officials from his Party.

Let’s hope the Democrats manage not to follow them down the tubes. I remain concerned about a rot at the heart of the Democrats, but perhaps they can scrape that out. Pelosi, Schumer, and Biden have a lot of experience. Let’s hope they can figure it out.

From the House of Representatives Calendar, in connection to subpoenaed witnesses for the House Select Panel investigating the January 6th insurrection:

The contempt of Congress statute, 2 U.S.C. § 192, makes clear that a witness summoned before Congress must appear or be ‘‘deemed guilty of a misdemeanor’’ punishable by a fine of up to $100,000 and imprisonment for up to 1 year.6 Further, the Supreme Court in United States v. Bryan (1950)  emphasized that the subpoena power is a ‘‘public duty, which every person within the jurisdiction of the Government is bound to perform when properly summoned.’’7 The Supreme Court recently reinforced this clear  obligation by stating that ‘‘[w]hen Congress seeks information needed for intelligent legislative action, it unquestionably remains the duty of all citizens to cooperate.’’

Jeffrey Clark isn’t going to curry favor with lawmakers intent on punishing those who planned the endangerment of lawmakers’ lives without testifying.

I see Erick Erickson is defending his position on abortion using all the dubious tools at his disposal. Shall we take a look?

Roe takes the Constitution, a document written so American citizens could understand their rights and government, and hands it over to a professional class of life-tenured black-robed masters and lawyers who can conjure at will their coveted requests from the constitutional framework. We are, with Roe, a nation of judges and lawyers, not men and women. It began a series of cases that separates citizens from the Constitution, requiring a near-divine and always infallible intermediary in a black robe to tell the citizen what his Constitution actually says.

This is part of the general right wing denigration of the expert, the person who’s spent years studying the subject matter, thinking about its implications, perhaps doing research – and whose opinion may grind the grits of the yahoo who spent, if we’re lucky, a couple of hours thinking about the issue, based on rumors of facts, imagination, narcissism, theological inclinations, and all nature of other tomfoolery unique to the individual.

That Erickson is an admitted lawyer, specializing in elections law years ago, who has recently professed that he’s not an ‘intellectual’, is really quite ballsy.

But this is how you get people in trouble: tell them their opinion is no worse than the expert in the big city, who has trained for years to see the critical nuance that someone without that training doesn’t yet imagine. That’s how you get people dead.

That’s what we’re seeing with Covid-19.

And the violence that would erupt without those interpreters in their black robes … ! Opinions of scholars and laypeople alike vary on nearly every single one of the original ten amendments, as well as many of those added in later years. Erickson’s not thinking clearly. But then, he’s too busy unloading the heavy artillery and trying not to pinch his fingers as he does so.

With the second amendment, the average citizen can ascertain the right of gun ownership in America. With abortion, no citizens not trained in the dark arts of liberal legal interpretation and how to read the breath of a living piece of paper can even understand and so can never truly respect the rule of law. The law becomes not the compact of governance, but the possession of the great “Says Who” — who says what the law is, regardless of what the law plainly means.

It’s interesting that he references the Second Amendment, as its formulation is quite the puzzling bit of text, with multiple interpretations over the years – remember, just fifty years ago, before the takeover of the NRA by LaPierre and his ilk, the NRA itself was a supporter of gun control laws, as well as a strong supporter of requiring gun education for the prospective owner. He’s playing to his absolutist gun rights segment of his readership, using this approach to link them, via paranoia concerning the Big Bad government, with the anti-abortion absolutists.

And it works, because a huge majority of the audience is, like any such audience on the right and left, susceptible to confirmation bias, the quite human tendency to believe arguments that confirm preconceptions and beliefs.

But anyone who has worked to excise confirmation bias from their ego, and has some critical thinking skills, will look at Erickson’s argument and just shake their heads.

Not only does Roe conjure things no one can fairly read into the Constitution, it imposes a morality on 350 million people demanding those people give a right to kill children that many of them abhor. Roe set off the culture war we have today all because seven lifetime appointees of the Supreme Court decided the morality of Harvard Yard could be imposed as a one size fits all morality for all of the varied fifty states. It remains a decision of ultimate pride that has seeded a culture of death in America.

Notice the sleight of hand here. He’s quietly steering the reader’s attention away from the Bill of Rights – your rights – so he can try to save something that may be miscarried tomorrow. Sadly for him, the Bill of Rights is part of the Constitution, at least in the non-expert atmosphere that he presumes to promote – and, I suspect, given the importance attached to most of the Amendments contained in the Bill of Rights, it’s a good assumption.

Why does this matter? Using what he told me I should be doing, I’m going to point at the Ninth Amendment,

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

and suggest that anti-abortion laws violate the 9th Amendment. Let’s look at his next argument:

Beyond that, the defenders of abortion rights now are left in the morally depraved state of using the arguments of nineteenth-century slavemasters to defend their right to kill. “It’s my property” has become “it’s my body.” “If you don’t want one, don’t have one” stays the same. “They aren’t even really human” stays the same. “They can’t survive off the plantation” becomes “they can’t survive outside the womb.” On and on the moral depravity goes.

Notice his ad hominem flavored attack. Two keywords are depravity and slavemaster, and these are keyed to make the opposing side, the pro-choice side, distasteful and worthy of hate. The reason to use such an attack can be tactical – meaning, This argument is weak so I better distract the reader with some flash. He’s using analogy to push along the ad hominem against the pro-choice, and this is where he’s made a critical error, in the fourth part, above. There should be no doubt, given the performance of former enslaved people and their descendants, that proclamations of their inferiority, as found in the speeches of Jefferson Davis and other prominent Southern politicians, were little more than political hot air by men and women who cared more for wealth and power than justice. That’s the basis of the ad hominem, but it breaks down under examination. They can’t survive off the plantation was, of course, false. They can’t survive outside the womb?

No, a fetus can’t. Take a fetus out of a woman’s womb prior to reaching term, dump it on a lactating woman’s breast, and, depending on its age, it’ll die immediately to a few minutes later. That term baby, on the other hand, will, barring certain tragic medical problems inherent in the messy business of being biological, happily suckle and, with luck, go on to prosperity.

This lack of biological severability serves to differentiate the fetus from the infant; but it is a magnitude greater than that between adult and the immature. To call a fetus a baby is simply an intellectual error; to call it an unborn baby is to heap deeply dishonest propaganda on top of that intellectual error.

But medically we can save that fetus taken early from the mother’s womb, you say? It doesn’t matter. We have grown human ears on the backsides of rats – does that make them human? The test here isn’t what medical miracles can be used to heroically save the premature, but the natural flow of events. Upon that is based morality. And, yes, the SCOTUS test of viability is wrong.

Erickson’s failure here also validates the statements he seeks to bring to grief. Yes, it is her body. Yes, a fetus is not human, seeing as, depending on age, it lacks a brain, a heart, other recognizable internal organs, and it’s totally and completely dependent on the woman and her health to survive. It has no independent life nor, until near the end, thought.

And, no, abortion is not depravity. It doesn’t matter how much ad hominem is deployed. Erickson, in the midst of attempting to condemn abortion through association with the ignoble arguments for slavery, has instead bolstered the argument on the pro-choice side of the issue because of unclear thinking, a faulty analogy, an eagerness to employ ad hominem, and a dependence, conscious or not, on confirmation bias.

This is why it’s so hard to take Erickson seriously sometimes.

My Arts Editor, regarding the fecal output of our darling Peeper:

She has the Megaladon poops!

Ahem.

… perhaps they need to be reminded that, as citizens, graft and corruption are as damaging for them as it is for real citizens. Here’s Margaret Sullivan of WaPo with a graphic example of what we’re losing as local newspapers sink into the sea of insolvency:

I spent some time with Bertram de Souza, the paper’s editorial page editor, who had been at the Vindicator [now shuttered] for 40 years. As a reporter, he helped reveal the corruption of James Traficant, who was expelled from Congress and sent to prison in 2002 after being convicted of racketeering, taking bribes and using his staff to do chores at his home and on his houseboat. Youngstown “is absolutely the kind of place that needs watchdog reporting,” de Souza told me, “and this newspaper was committed to exposing corruption.” The problem, going forward, is that when it comes to revealing malfeasance, you don’t know what you don’t know: If there’s no one to keep public officials honest, citizens might never find out how their faith is being broken and their tax dollars squandered.

Or new business suppressed, or enemies at contemporary businesses attacked from the castle of a corrupt government. As Sullivan points out later in the article, a free press subsisting on government subsidies isn’t a healthy relationship.

Back in the heyday of newspapers, while readers were expected to pay for access to the gathered news, that wasn’t the primary source of income for the newspaper. Advertising paid the bills, advertising mainly paid for by local businesses.

Today, the Web and email permit businesses to bypass the newspaper, and I do not doubt they save scads of money by doing so. But the cost to the community, of which they are a part, puts that community more and more at risk of becoming a toxic swamp rather than a source of profit. Can your local car repair shop, 3M, Cargill, the grocery store, and the local model train club all survive in an environment in which the government is corrupt? Where corporations had better contribute to the reelection fund, or face possible extinction?

I’m not necessarily suggesting that the local business community find a way to support the free press, although I think it’s a strong contender. I cannot help but wonder if it’s possible to extract the job of investigating government into some other entity, again supported by local business, that can investigate, without bias, the local and national government as necessary.

But newspapers do seem to be the natural residence of such investigators. And I think that business, having once had a critical role in funding the investigators, had better consider assuming that role again.

This makes me wonder if the Web is doomed:

We’ve all heard of the Ancient Aliens theory, a pseudoscientific belief that aliens built (among other things) the Egyptian pyramids. This week, however, history buffs on TikTok were confronted with a brand new conspiracy theory: “Ancient Rome isn’t real.”

This idea was put forward by @momllennial_, a history TikToker who often sparks controversy on the app. Previously, she’s theorized that Alexander the Great was a woman, that Jesus Christ’s name can be translated as “clitoris healer,” and that the iconic 18th century painting “The Swing” is full of hidden codes about the French revolution. Over the past few weeks she’s posted a lot about Ancient Rome, including a TikTok claiming that “Hadrian’s Wall can’t be proven to be of Roman construction.” [daily dot]

There’s ruins, ancient documents, history, archaeology, all documenting Rome. But this person, whoever it is, flings out some baseless assertions and gets attention.

Never mind that science is the search for truth. Attention!

This makes me play with the idea that people respected for their hard work in academics may one day pull out of the Web, out of Twitter, Facebook, and their own web sites, leaving it to be the domain of those who, like some narcissists I’ve known, will monopolize anything in order to get attention. People have already announced they’re leaving Twitter, leaving Facebook. Will they take the next step out of the hog’s pen?

And so much for Andreesen’s dream of the Web democratizing information. When information is not prioritized by truth-value, it all becomes swill, swill of uncertain intellectual nutrition value.

And will people walk away from that? Or will someone find a way to make the Web useful again?

In the meantime, it’s a sort of … well … I apologize … a Greek tragedy, now isn’t it?

For the most part though, the response to @momllennial_’s theories came in the form of factual debunk TikToks and history jokes. Right now, HistoryTok is full of academics satirically mourning the end of their careers because Ancient Rome Isn’t Real—and people generally making fun of the drama.

Some Republicans haven’t received the memo just yet, in connection with the report that the Republican National Committee (RNC) is paying some Trump legal bills:

“This is not normal. Nothing about this is normal, especially since he’s not only a former President but a billionaire,” said a former top RNC official.

“What does any of this have to do with assisting Republicans in 2022 or preparing for the 2024 primary?” the official added.

Bill Palatucci, a national committeeman from New Jersey, said the fact that the RNC made the payments to Trump’s attorneys in October was particularly frustrating given his own plea to party officials that same month for additional resources as the New Jersey GOP sought to push Republican Jack Ciattarelli over the finish line in his challenge to incumbent Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy.

“We sure as heck could have used $121,000,” Palatucci told CNN. [CNN/Politics]

They need to understand that, to Trump, money is holy, and he who has lots of it at their death is better in God’s eyes than the losers who didn’t do as well.

That’s all this really comes down to, shameful as it is. The RNC is party to one of the oddest death cults we’ve ever seen.

Yes, I know he’s taller, but I’m better looking!

The Courier (2020) falls into a class of movies in which some obscure but important person finally gets their time in the sun. In this case, it’s British businessman Greville Wynne, a facilitator of business deals, an everyday husband and father, who becomes, in 1960, a reluctant courier for Britain’s MI6 to and from Oleg Penkovsky, a KGB Colonel disenchanted with the USSR.

They perform the usual: information transfers, the ticklish ‘trap dance’ that goes with all such transactions, the methods to evade detection, and their eventual failure.

The charm of a story like this is not in the suspense, because the audience knows what’s coming: it is, after all, a tale derived from reality. In that respect, there will be no surprise at the plot at the highest levels, although minor twists and turns may still titillate the curiosity.

The strengths and weakness of a story like this lies, more heavily than most, on characterization and sensitivity to the costs of the protagonists’ actions. Wynne has been asked to risk liberty, life, and even family to act as a courier, and then to attempt to rescue Penkovsky. How does he react? Is he foolhardy, or living up to the standards of Western Civ? What would be the consequences of not trying?

The Courier’s storytellers do a fairly good job of it, making the audience care for the characters, but for those audience members who’ve seen a number of this sort of movie, the ranks of which include The Imitation Game (2014), there remains a faint ambiance, a commonality with other members of the category which is slightly unpleasant.

Still, that’s not to discourage readers from watching The Courier. If nothing else, it’s an interesting, if chilling, glimpse into autocratic Russia, a look at what it’s like to live in a society in which there were spies under every rock, spies who got ahead by finding things.

A reminder that autocracy’s offerings are accompanied by a price that is far too high.

Circadian:

Circadian rhythms are 24-hour cycles that are part of the body’s internal clock, running in the background to carry out essential functions and processes. One of the most important and well-known circadian rhythms is the sleep-wake cycle.

Different systems of the body follow circadian rhythms that are synchronized with a master clock in the brain. This master clock is directly influenced by environmental cues, especially light, which is why circadian rhythms are tied to the cycle of day and night.

When properly aligned, a circadian rhythm can promote consistent and restorative sleep. But when this circadian rhythm is thrown off, it can create significant sleeping problems, including insomnia. Research is also revealing that circadian rhythms play an integral role in diverse aspects of physical and mental health. [Sleep Foundation]

Noted in “Tiny region of human brain that helps regulate sleep studied at last,” Jason Arunn Murugesu, NewScientist (13 November 2021, paywall):

“I think that the method they’re using has a lot of potential,” says Debra Skene at the University of Surrey in the UK. But she says the researchers used such bright pulses of light to elicit a response from the nucleus that it is unclear if this particular study tells us anything new about circadian clocks.