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.

What causes my Arts Editor to yell OH, COOL!?

About 1,600 blocks of metal movable type from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries have been discovered inside an earthenware pot underneath Jongno, one of Seoul’s busiest tourist districts. This is the largest collection of movable type blocks from the period ever discovered in Korea. Six hundred of the pieces use hangul, the Korean alphabet, which was created in 1433 and gradually replaced Chinese characters.

The earliest known examples of hangul metal movable type are 30 pieces held by the National Museum of Korea, dating to 1455, that were used by Korean royalty. Researchers believe the new finds date from around the same time. The blocks were found with other metal objects that commoners would normally not have had access to, including artillery and parts of an astronomical clock and a water clock—both of which are described in royal documents. [“Typing Time,” Hyung-eun Kim, Archaeology (November/December 2021)]

Our past shapes our behavior, and she comes out of a now-former publishing family.

For societies aspiring to be liberal democracies, such as the United States, there are a number of characteristics they must meet, such as form of government, valuing the individual, using debate and reason to determine actions, rather than autocratic or theocratic means, etc. Let’s focus on the requirement to fully and honestly debate proposed changes to society, whether they be changes to the legal system, or to more informal facets of society.

A good example of such an issue and debate is gay marriage. Gay marriage was illegal in the United States until 2001, when it began to be recognized by various states, until the final SCOTUS ruling in 2015, in Obergefell v. Hodges, which neutralized all laws opposing it throughout the United States. I remember the debates over the issue here in Minnesota, sparked by the proposal to add an Amendment to the Minnesota State Constitution to explicitly ban gay marriage in 2012; eventually, the proposal was defeated by 3.5 percentage points at the ballot box, after being both down and up in the polls.

But the point is that there was a debating aspect to it. We talked about it. Some people changed position. And, while many on the losing side proceeded to squeal loudly a number of absurd predictions, none of them have come true, and society has continued on with aplomb. Why? Because the issue’s depths had been plumbed, people had given it thought, and, in the end, we realized that no harm would come of it, while great good probably would. Gay marriages were performed, children were adopted or sometimes had naturally, gay divorces occurred, and suddenly we went from having an irrationally loathed minority to just another minority.

This post isn’t to rehash the gay marriage debate; it’s merely used as an example. Nor is it a shot at a Republican Party which has abandoned its responsibilities under the liberal democracy model of government that the Founding Fathers chose so long ago. It is enough to point at the actions of Republican Party leaders, such as Senator Mitch “No” McConnell (R-KY), and their en masse refusal to even debate certain Democratic legislative proposals, such as legislation concerning regularization of voting laws, or McConnell’s personal pride at having behaved very dishonestly when it comes to SCOTUS nominees and his supposed principles. These, as well as many other responses to problems, have left the Republican Party open to just condemnation on this point.

No, my concern is not the Republicans. It’s the Democrats and their allies.

Remember the Democrats screwing up a sure-fire win as Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) beat former governor Terry McAuliffe (D-VA) in the governor’s race? I suggested this was a gift to the Democrats, because, for the price of a governor’s seat and some seats in the Virginia legislature, it tells them that they have a problem.

But it’s only a gift if they get right down to studying their failure, to deriving and applying lessons from it.

I know there’s been at least some such study performed, although I haven’t seen the final results. But WaPo has just published a preliminary analysis of the demographic shifts in voting in Virginia, which went for Biden by ten points in the 2020 Presidential race, and while there are many factors involved in the race, the part concerning “White women” really caught my eye.

Julie Bowling, who lives in Amherst County, said she used to think of herself as a Democrat, supporting climate issues and social services, but this year felt like she’d started losing touch with the party.

Living in a region of Virginia she called the Bible Belt, the 55-year-old said Youngkin’s education stance — especially on transgender bathrooms — pushed her to vote Republican.

“The Democrats are swinging so far out of what I believe,” Bowling said.

Assuming this is representative – and WaPo knows enough to publish representative remarks – it marks a continued concern about the transgender topic, which can range from bathroom usage to the premature medicalization of the condition in immature humans, which is sometimes not reversible for those that are, as it’s termed, detransitioning.

Let’s focus on the bathroom issue. Remember, during the Obama years, that it was introduced as a civil rights matter, much to the outrage of the conservative side of the political spectrum. I was paying attention to the political scene at the time, if not as much as I do these days, and I do not remember any real debate of the matter from ground zero, by which I mean a conversation that starts with Say, what do you think about … rather than This new government regulation, substantially undebated, is being imposed …

Not a single word.

Granted, maybe I missed it. Maybe it was discussed in a dusty academic journal, settled, and then imposed.

But that would be inappropriate, wouldn’t it? The general public doesn’t know about the debate, and doesn’t get to take part, which is a vital facet of the concept of a liberal democracy.

If this is true, then I have to ask: Are the Democrats and their leftist allies truly committed to the crucial liberal democracy underpinning of the United States? Extend this to the education issue vis á vis racism, and the allegations that white children are being told by teachers that they’re responsible for enslaving black people as an inherent aspect of being white, and it’s not hard to see why the “white women” demographic moved to the right, especially given Youngkin’s distancing of himself from former President Trump.

Not because of the racism issue in education – I don’t even know if that actually occurred or was a Republican lie – but because, in essence, of the abandonment of a key pillar of liberal democracy. Public debate goes a long way to neutralizing allegations of autocratic & arbitrary government actions.

Speaking of Democratic / left of center woes, it’s not entirely clear to me that they’re willing to question themselves just yet. From the same article, I found this passage highly disquieting:

Jatia Wrighten, an assistant political science professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, said Youngkin successfully weaponized education as a dog whistle, and she likened his use of critical race theory to the historical “Southern strategy” of employing White people’s racial fears in political campaigns.

“He activated White women to vote in a very specific way that they feel like is protecting their children,” Wrighten said. “White women felt like this was a way to protect their children from the unknown of critical race theory.”

She said there’s been a shift in recent years to think of White women as more liberal than they are. Although hundreds of thousands of pink hat-wearing women descended on Washington to protest Trump’s presidency at the women’s march in 2017, she noted, 55 percent of White women voters in 2020 supported his reelection bid.

Wrighten said that even in feminist movements, White women have historically worked toward their own progress — initiatives and policies that would help White women, but not necessarily always benefit women overall.

“White women have always had the privilege of being White,” she said.

Notice the deft assumption that it’s the voters that are at fault here, not the Democratic candidates or, worse, their Party. The implication is that this is still the result of racists, even though neither McAuliffe nor Youngkin are black. The “white women” are mislead by the evil conservatives, in essence, rather than following what they consider a rational judgment.

This strikes me as the judgment of the hubris-soaked and arrogant academic, unwilling to analyze their own ideology and methods. That’s exactly what the Democrats need to do, and, at least from Professor Wrighten, there is no sense of a self-consciousness of potential error on their part. The focus is on the enemy, which may turn out to be to the detriment of themselves.

But if they’ve abandoned the experiment of liberal democracy, they may have doomed themselves. After all, the common voter, for all of their flaws, have had the experiment of liberal democracy bred into them; if they feel that transgender bathroom issues skipped the debate portion of the national program, or a perversion of the educational program that, in their opinion, would prop up racism rather than destroy it, is being practiced, they will exercise their ultimate power, the vote, and dismay the Democrats, again.

The Republicans, full of fourth and fifth raters who cling to a mendacious and failed President’s knees, are a terrible and destructive carbuncle on the hide of the United States. Will the Democrats become the same thing, screaming about their virtue, lazily labeling dissents and criticisms as racist, and arrogantly descending into the pit of bewildering defeat because of it?

The United States can ill-afford that disaster. The Democrats and their leftist allies need to ask, Have they broken trust with the American public?

Osteobiography:

So, what is an osteobiography? It’s exactly what you’re probably thinking. An osteobiography is someone’s personal life history as told by their skeleton. Think of a skeleton as a book written in a language osteoarchaeologists can understand (and translate). We’re familiar with every bump, groove, hole, and rough spot there is, from the top of our heads to the tips of our toes. Our skeletons are a blank slate that’s shaped by life experiences. [“What is an osteobiography?” Stephanie Halmhofer, Bone, Stones, and Books]

New enough to not appear in dictionaries, but it seems quite sensible. Noted in “Identifying the Unidentified,” Jarrett A. Lobell, Archaeology (November/December 2021):

“The suggestion of slavery, punishment, or something nefarious immediately leapt to mind,” says Chinnock. Despite the fetters’ dramatic appearance, they do not definitively prove that the man was enslaved. This type of shackle has rarely been found anywhere in the Roman world, and never in Roman Britain. When Chinnock examined the skeleton to reconstruct the man’s life based on his bones, creating what scholars call an osteobiography, he found some lesions on his ankles and tibias from infections or trauma, but nothing that conclusively linked them to the fetters. He also found a bony spur on the man’s left femur. “The spur is of a type that can occur from a traumatic injury or from the repetitive activities of an active lifestyle, hard labor, or even heavy contact sports,” says Chinnock. “Nothing screams that this person was enslaved.” Furthermore, the man was buried near a thriving Roman town, and there would have been both slaves and laborers in the surrounding fields, farms, and villages.

My childhood comes through. Calculators / converters. Yes, have you ever muttered about Celsius to Fahrenheit conversions? Ever written a converter?

I’ve done it twice. Once was for a commercial product which never saw the light of day. For that, I invented (along with a few thousand other programmers, I later learned) a method by which adding a single conversion to support a new unit in a category resulted in automatic conversions for the rest of the members of the category by repeatedly converting to other units until the desired unit was found. Expensive in terms of computer cycles, but it changed an O(n) task to an O(1) task for the engineer – and engineer cycles are generally considered more important than computer cycles. There’s a name for this approach, but I forget it.

Later, when I was learning Mythryl, it was the basis of my approach (no, I had no connection to the actual project) to eliminating the mistake that destroyed the Mars Climate Orbiter. What was that mistake? From SimScale:

The Mars Climate Orbiter, built at a cost of $125 million, was a 338-kilogram robotic space probe launched by NASA on December 11, 1998 to study the Martian climate, Martian atmosphere, and surface changes. In addition, its function was to act as the communications relay in the Mars Surveyor ‘98 program for the Mars Polar Lander. The navigation team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) used the metric system of millimeters and meters in its calculations, while Lockheed Martin Astronautics in Denver, Colorado, which designed and built the spacecraft, provided crucial acceleration data in the English system of inches, feet, and pounds. JPL engineers did not take into consideration that the units had been converted, i.e., the acceleration readings measured in English units of pound-seconds^2 for a metric measure of force called newton-seconds^2. In a sense, the spacecraft was lost in translation.

Briefly, Mythryl provides^[1] fine abstraction support. I used it to provide abstract categories from which variables could be defined, such as mass, length, acceleration, and the like, plus intuitive mathematics operators. Mythryl would not compile attempts to add a length and a weight, so it was safe in that matter. Programs would be responsible for initializing variables with the proper unit, and requesting the results in the proper unit, but all math beyond that was handled by the operators – and was theoretically safer, since there was no need to worry about units.

Some of the more abstruse categories lead to some odd problems and interesting conversations with Mythryl project lead Jeff Prothero concerning compiler hooks for handling such problems, but he died before we could pursue them seriously.

And, again, a project which never saw the light of day.

ANYWAYS … the latest in online converters appears to be the Omni Calculator. At first, it appeared fairly mundane. Then, as I searched for a promised conversion to blue whales, I ran across this:

The list of supported currencies is limited, and includes two I’ve not heard of – no surprise there.

This is rather upping the game, isn’t it? It really makes me wonder what else is hidden away in this mathematical / information tool. For example, here’s a Tree Benefits Calculator.

This might be worth a quick traipse through the undergrowth, and qualify as a useful resource.

¹ Or perhaps past tense provided, as I believe that without the late Jeff Prothero’s support, it’s sadly going nowhere.

Cortege:

A cortege is a procession of people who are walking or riding in cars to a funeral. [Collins Dictionary]

Noted in “In 1921, the first soldier of the Tomb of the Unknowns was laid to rest. The memorial was caught on film,” Michael E. Ruane, WaPo:

They jammed the avenues to watch the cortege pass, and swarmed into the cemetery to see the burial.

I was reading Jennifer Rubin’s commentary from a couple of weeks ago concerning an upcoming summit on democracy, and I had a weird visual. First, the relevant passage:

It might seem like a cop-out for regimes, especially those that been criticized for backsliding on human rights such as India, to make up their own pledges. But having nations show up and present themselves as democracies is an achievement in and of itself. A gathering of a broad, impressive array of 100 or so countries would provide a contrast with the smaller clutch of illiberal regimes that seek to undermine democratic values and institutions. The event will put pressure on regimes to address domestic critics and reform advocates. And in any event, international commitments that do not have domestic political support would likely be toothless anyway. [WaPo]

Source: The World Factbook

The visual? I’m thinking of a large map of, say, Europe, large enough to be walked on. On each country stands a person representing not the country, but the country’s essential governmental core – the democracies of France and Germany and the UK dressed in a handsome blue, the more deceptive countries, such as Russia and Belarus, are loud, boisterous men and women in an alarming off-red.

And, since I mention Belarus, run by the strongman Alexander Lukashenko, who wins fake elections, let’s note that he’s been making international news lately by his maneuvering at the border of his country with Poland. He’s transported migrants to the border and set them on the Polish border guards, who, in turn, have hit the rock-throwing migrants with water cannon. Thus, Lukashenko’s attempt to manipulate a neighbor is thought to have been turn on its head.

Returning to my visual, I’d see those neighbors who dislike him, Poland, Ukraine, etc, advancing to their borders while Belarus’ representative bellows at them, and then advancing over the border, leaving a beautiful light blue in their wake, while Belarus’ person bellows some more – and then flees to the arms of Russia’s representative.

It’d make a great commercial for the summit.

Rolls-Royce is in the electric airplane business:

Rolls-Royce believes its Spirit of Innovation plane could be the world’s fastest all-electric aircraft.

The firm – whose aerospace headquarters are based in Derby – said the plane reached a top speed of 387.4 mph (623 km/h) during test runs at an experimental aircraft testing site.

It is thought to have set new World Records over three different distances. [BBC]

A reminder that the airline industry won’t be going down without a fight.