Author Archives: Hue White

My Arts Editor remarks:

It’s the sordid and dramatic tale of a yellow leaf.

It seems a bit much.

And sometimes those costs come from mistaking a lion for, say, an anteater. A puzzling remark, you say? Not if you’re Salvadoran:

Bitcoin’s value has plunged by 22 per cent in the past five days [late June – haw] as investors rush to sell the cryptocurrency amid fears that an asset bubble is bursting.

The average bitcoin buyer is now in the red after the world’s most popular cryptocurrency shed a trillion dollars in value in two months.

For El Salvador, which staked its economy on the success of bitcoin when it became the first country to make cryptocurrency legal tender in September 2021, the crash has wiped out more than half of its bitcoin holdings – and could be the death knell for its national crypto experiment. [“What will the crypto crash mean for ‘bitcoin nation’ El Salvador?” Luke Taylor, NewScientist (25 June 2022, paywall)]

Volatility is about the last thing you want in your national currency, so mistaking a volatile cryptocurrency,   which may be little more than a sophisticated wealth-drainer, as a currency replacement turns out to be a critical intellectual failure.

And, one would think, easily predictable.

It’s worthwhile to note that most Salvadorans were great skeptics of the great experiment:

Prior to the latest price crash, El Salvador’s national bitcoin push was already failing. A study published in May found that most Salvadorans abandoned the national bitcoin wallet after receiving a sign-up bonus and most who continue to use it trade dollars, not cryptocurrency.

Whether those who did hold on to bitcoins were the working poor, the slender middle class, or the top of the heap is not clear. Will El Salvador try to apply muscle to make this experiment, apparently on its way to failure, work?

“They are never going to accept that they [president Nayib Bukele] have failed on this,” says Mario Gomez, a developer who was detained by police for criticising the bitcoin law.

For better news concerning cryptocurrencies, we can turn to Washington, D.C.:

A wave of notoriously risky cryptocurrency firms could one day be integrated into the traditional banking system under a little-noticed provision in a new bill that is raising alarms among financial experts about potentially destabilizing consequences.

The provision — part of a sweeping proposal to regulate the crypto industry that Sens. Cynthia M. Lummis (R-Wyo.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) introduced in June — would force the Federal Reserve to grant so-called master accounts to certain crypto firms seeking them from the central bank. The accounts give holders access to the Fed’s payment system, allowing them to settle transactions for clients without involving a separate bank.

Two Wyoming-based crypto firms championed by Lummis stand to benefit. Both companies, Custodia Bank and Kraken Financial, have been stymied over the last two years in bids to gain Fed master accounts. But financial regulators and experts say the measure’s impact would cascade through the industry and beyond. [WaPo]

I freely admit that I do not ken (grok for you SF fans) all the consequences of such legislation, but then we pay financial regulators to be experts in this sort of thing. I can’t help but notice that, given the failure of cryptocurrencies to behave like traditional currencies, this seems like quite the foolish action. Is someone inserting a shunt into our financial system?

And how is bitcoin doing these days?

CoinMarketCap

Not recovering since last time I checked. I don’t sense this to be an opportunity.

Phenological mismatches:

Phenological events are often synchronised between species. The classic example is a food chain comprised of the pied flycatcher (Ficedula hypoleuca), caterpillars and oak trees. Every spring, the birds produce large broods that eat vast quantities of caterpillars – the adults must deliver as many as 60 an hour over the 18 days it takes for the chicks to fledge. But caterpillars are an ephemeral resource, hatching to coincide with the emergence of oak foliage. The birds have thus evolved to breed so that their chicks hatch during maximum caterpillar abundance. The cue they take is temperature, which also precipitates leaf unfurling and caterpillar hatching.

This tightly coupled sequence is being disrupted by climate change. Even though all three events are triggered by rising temperatures, they are responding differently to warming. In some parts of Europe, birds are hatching too late to catch peak caterpillar, reducing the chicks’ chances of survival.

It is problems like these, known as phenological mismatches, that are bringing [UN Environment Programme] out in a cold sweat. We have long appreciated that phenological changes can spell trouble for individual species or pairs of species. But there is a dawning realisation that this is a widespread problem that could presage the breakdown of whole food chains or even ecosystems. “This is truly a global problem affecting plant and animal species in mountains, oceans, tropical and temperate forests and polar regions,” says Kappelle. [“How climate change is knocking natural events wildly out of sync,” Graham Lawton, NewScientist (25 June 2022, paywall)]

If you have an affinity for the Sun-God, such as Egypt’s Re, that is:

The sun goes through cycles of high and low activity that repeat approximately every 11 years. During periods of high activity, it blasts out charged particles and magnetised plasma that can distort Earth’s magnetic field.

These so-called solar storms can cause glitches in our power grids and bring down Earth-orbiting satellites. A handful of studies have also hinted that they increase the risk of heart attacks, but these were too small to be conclusive.

To explore further, Carolina Zilli Vieira at Harvard University and her colleagues analysed records of deaths between 1985 and 2013 in 263 US cities. They then compared heart-related fatalities with solar storm data.

They found that more heart disease deaths occurred on days when solar storms had disturbed Earth’s magnetic field.

For each year of high solar activity during that period, they estimate that an additional 5500 people in the US died of heart attacks or other cardiovascular complications. [“Solar storms may cause up to 5500 heart-related deaths in a given year,” Alice Klein, NewScientist (25 June 2022, paywall)\

Which is about the last thing I would have expected from the mild-mannered species of solar storms.

Maybe the folks in tinfoil hats are on to something after all.

In the following age-sorted list^[1], C = member of the conservative wing, L = liberal, M = moderate conservative.

The point being that two of the most regressive Justices are the most aged. I’ve been struck by the number of articles moaning about a new, conservative era of the SCOTUS, and how many generations will be affected, etc etc. But, as I point out in this Word Of The Day post concerning the legal term dicta, SCOTUS decisions need not be permanent:

All I can add is that the conservative justices themselves have demonstrated the solution for the mistakes they’re making: overturning these problematic rulings. The raw political power being practiced here by the conservative wing of the Court has a number of shortcomings in a democracy, while persuasive arguments do not suffer permanently from its inherent problems like raw political power.

Which is not to say that irreversible damage is not done by them, such as women dying of flawed pregnancies, but only that these decisions can be corrected.

And, as the two^[2] oldest conservative Justices are now in their 70s, an age where, well, age starts becoming a concern, it’s not a guarantee that they’ll be around for another twenty years. Or ten years. Or five years.

I wish them all well, but retirement beckons.

The Democrats hold the Senate and the White House, and I expect they’ll be adding to their majority in the Senate in January, if I may indulge in an unconscionably long distance prediction.

I cannot help but meditate on the role of the judiciary in society. To my mind, it is to enforce, correct or void the law for, and, on occasion, lead, the common societal morality. Stare decisis, or precedent, helps build the edifice of wisdom, and should lend stability to the interpretation of the law.

The application of obscure and exotic interpretations does not contribute to that desired stability.

The chart on the right reinforces my belief that most Americans share my interpretation, or would after some discussion. The failure of the conservative wing of SCOTUS to uphold settled law and Constitutional interpretation in Dobbs, Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, Carson v. Makin, and most recently West Virginia v. EPA, in which the right of Congress to expressly delegate its authority is questioned, has led to this situation.

And it also marks a serious intellectual failing of these supposed conservatives: selecting the wrong goal in a liberal democracy.

One of the marks of a liberal democracy is its system of error correction. No mature governmental model should be without such a system, but, historically, nearly all theocracies and absolute monarchies feature leaders, singular or plural, that cannot admit mistakes and failures, at least not as such. Why not? Hey, they’re backed by God, dude! That’s right, and God is never wrong. Autocrats, too, having proclaimed themselves the only one capable of leading, find themselves in a similar constriction, and that’s why these systems of government tend to end in various amounts of tears, rather than a peaceful transfer of power that marks prosperity.

But liberal democracies have error correction, which means a couple of things:

1. The far-right extremists, having overturned Roe v. Wade, have not only proclaimed victory but even think they can contemplate a nation-wide ban. These folks are so far out over their ski tips that they’re tumbling – and they don’t realize it. As noted, these decisions can be overturned; that is, error correction with popular support can be applied. Thomas, et al, believe that SCOTUS is the final word, even as they demonstrate that it is not.
2. The citizenry has the real final word, but the far-right only sort of understands that, as we see in the gerrymandering of Republican-controlled states. If they really understood, they would be making as persuasive a case as possible before SCOTUS rules on each of the issues. In some cases they have, such as abortion. They failed, as public polling clearly indicates, and many folks have applied considerable intellects to the question and come up pro-choice. It’s not unfair to say that the pro-choice solution is the rational conclusion, although I will not say that it’s an easy conclusion. But the bane of a liberal democracy, founded as it is on honest attempts to be rational, are those who are determinedly irrational, depending on little more than easily mislead intuition, or an arguable interpretation of a religious text, itself of dubious authenticity.

This is the heart of the problem with those who call themselves conservatives these days – they don’t understand how liberal democracy works. Their appeal to autocratic traditions are alien to our ways, no matter how much they dress them up in charismatic leaders^[3], or black robes and smoothly written opinions; they break with tradition and sometimes even with the facts on the ground (see Kennedy and Sotomayor’s dissent) to achieve their goals, and the hell with their fellow citizens and traditions of honesty.

Trust in error correction doesn’t mean Don’t worry, but it does mean there’s always a way forward in liberal democracies for those steeped in liberal democracy traditions. If we’re willing to calmly and wisely take that step.

¹ All names and ages taken from Wikipedia. Ages valid only yesterday.

² If we, perhaps ill-advisedly, adjust for expected life span for men vs women, then Roberts joins Thomas and Alito in the top three. However, applying statistics to individuals is always a chancy business.

³ Or so I’m told; generally, I’m immune to charisma.

And you thought RadioShack was gone.

Gen Z may not be familiar with the RadioShack of their grandparents, but they’re getting to know its replacement. The 100-year-old retailer reintroduced itself on Twitter this week with a stream of often-profane tweets — some since deleted — filled with crude comments and drug references.

Variations of, “What in the world is going on?” peppered the comment threads, but a glance of the company’s Twitter profile partly held the answer: RadioShack is no longer the electronics store Americans ran to for generations, but rather an online cryptocurrency company that also happens to sell batteries. [WaPo]

It used to be a respectable entity, which, for those readers whose eyes just skip over respectable as meaningless, actually means trustworthy.

I still have my RadioShack multimeter that I must have bought thirty years ago.

Ummm, touchdown?

For a bit of slightly unfocused fun, Forbidden Empire (2014; aka Viy) isn’t a bad choice. English, but with a strong Russian influence, this early 18th century story of an aspiring English cartographer who is chased from his lover’s bed to his chosen task, to map the dark interior of Ukraine, is certainly colorful enough, with the clash between reason and the supernatural sparking the emergence of monsters from the very skins of the villagers.

Or maybe it’s the potent local drink, eh? Sort of the same, now isn’t it?

Populated with vividly stereotypical villagers, there’s a failure to strongly differentiate each character from the next, so all these guys with fabulous mustaches and exotic hairstyles, who talk much alike and drink with the same gusto, are hard to keep apart in my mind, and when the bashing of skulls begins it’s hard to remember who is who and why they’re bashing. Or getting bashed.

The plot is told with some conventions not familiar from standard Hollywood fare, as scene segues are erratic, even jumpy, just sketching in the journey from village to the cursed church on the lake in a couple of seconds. Sometimes the plot is a whirlwind.

And the expectations of the English cartographer are so at odds with the villagers, their religious conventions, and their fears of the Devil’s minions, that it can be a bit mind-bending if the audience isn’t prepared through historical associations, or at least a warning.

Technically, the special effects are beautifully well-done, the sets are very good, I liked the acting, and the English wigs, ah so beautiful. While at some point I thought this was dubbed from Ukrainian or Russian, I now think this is a true English version, and there is a slight problem in the audio in which the lips don’t match the dialog, quite, at a couple of points.

But, in the end, the failure of this story is in theme, at least for this viewer. The cartographer isn’t given a theme consonant with that of the villagers, or at least so I felt. He’s more or less a bumbling scientist who runs into a village of grinding poor, who fight over money, not necessarily because of greed, but through the need to survive. It’s hard to see how it’s supposed to come together and be powerful and memorable. He’s driven to achieve, but the bad guy is driven to clutch after power. It doesn’t work together.

But it was rather fun.

Rockoon:

Image: Wikipedia.

A rockoon (from rocket and balloon) is a solid fuel sounding rocket that, rather than being immediately lit while on the ground, is first carried into the upper atmosphere by a gas-filled balloon, then separated from the balloon and ignited. This allows the rocket to achieve a higher altitude, as the rocket does not have to move under power through the lower and thicker layers of the atmosphere. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “On the Ball,” [review of Off The Edge, by Kelly Weill], Glenn Branch, Skeptical Inquirer (July/August 2022, paywall):

Not to be unduly captious, but there are a handful of minor problems with the book. The description of a rockoon as a “rocket attached to weather balloons that would carry it upward after the rocket fuel burned out” (153) is backward—the rocket is fired after the balloons carry it as high as they can—which suggests a deficiency in Weill’s grasp of basic physics. Toward the end of the book, Weill speculates that flat-earthers are motivated in part by a desire for a cozy cosmos; perhaps so, but a similar diagnosis is available to flat-earthers, who have been known to argue that mainstream astronomy’s insistence on the vastness of the universe is intended to scare, and thus enable control over, the public. And it is annoying that there is no index. But these, again, are minor problems. Weill’s Off the Edge is not only a worthy successor to Garwood’s Flat Earth and Schadewald’s The Plane Truth but also a worthwhile contribution in its own right.

Continuing the saga of the seamy underside of human greed:

More in this series of updates…

• The savior of the Missouri GOP? A top investigator for the January 6th panel, John Wood, has resigned his position and is making an independent run for the open Senate seat in Missouri. Proclaiming both parties as too extreme, while he’s been a life-long Republican, Wood thinks he can get the job by appealing to the common-sense independents and Party members alike. If he can pull this off, he may become one of the most powerful members of the Senate as a swing-vote member with no iron-bound Party loyalties. And he’ll be a savior because the Missouri GOP won’t have to suffer the abject humiliation of being responsible for Eric Greitens as Senator. But Wood is a long shot, and in fact is not yet on the ballot. Assuming he makes the ballot, he may end up splitting the conservative voters and handing the election to the Democrats, but once again If only the Democrats can field a strong candidate.
• Utah incumbent Senator Mike Lee (R) won his primary on June 28th, but an incumbent only winning 62% of the GOP voters’ ballots suggests discontent in the ranks. As his general election rival is Evan McMullin (I), who has picked up the Democrats’ endorsement, more out of desperation to derail the far-right Senator, Lee may be skating near open water. Lee appears aware of the danger, as his post-victory speech was conciliatory towards the disaffected Republicans, the AP reports.
• I somehow missed the fact that, in Nevada, Adam Laxalt won the GOP primary to win the right to challenge the allegedly-vulnerable incumbent Senator Catherine Cortez Masto (D), and, while he attained a majority victory, it was only 56%, so if that was a bitter battle, he may have lost some GOP support already. Cortez Masto, on the other hand, won her primary with 90% support. I haven’t seen any polls yet, but Laxalt may start down a strike, as The Nevada Independent acquired a recording of Laxalt making anti-abortion remarks: Earlier this month, Republican U.S. Senate candidate and former Attorney General Adam Laxalt called the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision “a joke” and said it’s “sad” that Nevada is not anti-abortion. That will not endear him to the independents who value the availability of abortion medical procedures.

Hopefully there’ll be nothing over the Fourth of July weekend. But just in case …

Yes, you’re right: a bug on the wall.

I see the desperate are becoming a bit more desperate, much to the distress of educators in Florida:

Several South Florida high school educators are alarmed that a new state civics initiative designed to prepare students to be “virtuous citizens” is infused with a Christian and conservative ideology after a three-day training session in Broward County last week.

Teachers who spoke to the Herald/Times said they don’t object to the state’s new standards for civics, but they do take issue with how the state wants them to be taught. …

… trainers told Broward teachers the nation’s founders did not desire a strict separation of state and church, downplayed the role the colonies and later the United States had in the history of slavery in America, and pushed a judicial theory, favored by legal conservatives like DeSantis, that requires people to interpret the Constitution as the framers intended it, not as a living, evolving document, according to three educators who attended the training.

“It is disturbing, really, that through these workshops and through legislation, there is this attempt to both censor and to drive or propagandize particular points of view,” said Richard Judd, 50, a Nova High School social studies teacher with 22 years of experience who attended the state-led training session last week. [Miami Herald]

This is the sort of thing that can be hung around Gov. DeSantis’ (R-FL) neck if he runs for President in 2024.

But I appreciate the distress of the educators, and for that reason I suggest some billionaire step forward and fund a new school called, oh, maybe George Washington Corrective School. It would run during the summer months and supply school lessons that correct the mis-taught lessons propagated by the State propagandists.

For extra credit, they could provide specialists that would trace exactly why the traditional teachings are more accurate than the new State-led teachings.

DeSantis and his backers pissed? Too bad. Private enterprise. Parents enroll children for, say, $50 a head, with a need-based scholarship available.

Shameful lies like these really deserve a boot to the crotch.

The anti-abortion movement, blinded by its temporary success in SCOTUS, is feeling its oats and trying to extend its reach:

It’s no doubt too early for this sort of speculation, but I cannot resist. I’ve watched the January 6th hearings, seen at least some right-wing media evaluate the hearings as devastating for the former President, and now the first few polls have come out indicating a shift in independent voter sentiment, from Republicans to Democrats. Will it be both seismic and persistent?

Let’s assume so. Further, if this is a well-deserved disaster for Trump, it’s not unreasonable to assume his allies in the elected official pool, at least those running for election or reelection, are facing their own disasters, even if they don’t comprehend it just yet. Well-deserved guilt by association.

And the Republican Party is splashed with dishonor, not because Trump was a member in good standing, but the nauseating personal allegiance that so many members had to him, loudly proclaimed.

Who will be the first Republican member of Congress to leave the Party?

Senator Murkowski.

If any do, my guess is the most likely is Senator Murkowski (R-AK), who, as a moderate politician of independent mien, does not get the respect she deserves from an Alaska GOP that appears to be out of its mind. Further, she voted ‘aye’ on the Alito, Gorsuch, and Barrett nominations to SCOTUS, leaving her mighty embarrassed by Dobbs. Given that she won the 2010 campaign as a write-in candidate after being primaried, she almost certainly has the strength to leave the Republicans and set up shop as a successful independent. And I can’t imagine she’s delighted by many of her fellows in the Republican Party – it’s not the Party of her father, Senator and Governor Murkowski.

Senator Collins.

But she may have a competitor in Senator Collins (R-ME), who has made public her dismay at the poor behavior of the four Justices for whom she voted (Kavanaugh in addition to those for whom Murkowski voted) who lead her to believe they respected stare decisis, or judicial precedent, and then have proceeded to overturn several rulings that the Federalist Society has hated.

As independents, these two Senators would join Senators Sanders (I-VT) and King (I-ME), making for four independent Senators, each a power in their own right as they don’t, or no longer, owe allegiance to either Party.

If Even McMullin (I-UT) were to defeat Senator Mike Lee (R-UT), that’d make five. That’s almost a bloc in itself. And Senator Romney (R-UT), although formerly a steadfast Republican and even Presidential nominee, has over the last few years seemed more and more out of place. A sixth?

But it all has to start with some Republican. I won’t speculate about House members, as I don’t track them much. But it’s my guess the first defection, if any, will be in the Senate, and won’t take place until very near the election, or shortly thereafter.

Longtime Senator Republican leader Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) may be facing more losses than he anticipates, and not entirely his direct fault. Not that I am sympathetic about it, as he’s been a destructive force all of his own.

This was momentarily distressing:

To complicate things even further, there have been documented cases of zoos faking panda bears. For instance, a zoo in Taiwan was reportedly caught dying a sun bear black and white and marketing it as a panda in the late 1980s. An Italian circus was also caught dying puppies black-and-white in an effort to pass them off as pandas in 2014. Such incidents clearly have given skeptics ammunition to believe that panda bears as a whole aren’t real. [RollingStone]

The word they want is dyeing, I believe, and if it’s not, it should be.

Dicta:

Dicta are judicial opinions expressed by the judges on points that do not necessarily arise in the case. [The ‘Lectric Law Library]

Noted in “GOP-appointed justices make combating climate crisis much harder,” Steve Benen, Maddowblog:

In biting dicta, [Associated Justice] Kagan poked her conservative colleagues for their casual indifference to their purported principles. “Some years ago, I remarked that ‘[w]e’re all textualists now.’ It seems I was wrong,” she wrote. “The current Court is textualist only when being so suits it.”

See here for my commentary on how SCOTUS has achieved this depressing low in public opinion.

All I can add is that the conservative justices themselves have demonstrated the solution for the mistakes they’re making: overturning these problematic rulings. The raw political power being practiced here by the conservative wing of the Court has a number of shortcomings in a democracy, while persuasive arguments do not suffer permanently from its inherent problems like raw political power.

And apparently the extremist conservatives failed in persuasion, and so are moving on to the flawed raw political power phase of their failing political movement.

Having just watched the Colbert interview of Rep Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), who is not running for reelection, all I can say is that maybe Illinois Republicans should wage a write-in campaign for him.

Articulate and principled. He makes Greene, Gaetz, Boebert, and that crowd look like children who lit their hair on fire at the urging of a pyromaniac.

The latest updates, taken best with your favorite cartoons…

• SemDem on Daily Kos has a fascinating article on Ukrainian-Americans and the Republican fight to, apparently, alienate this reliable Republican voting bloc. It reminds me that fourth raters can often be identified by how often they step on their dicks – and then don’t admit it.
• Republicans, feeling their oats after SCOTUS overturned Roe v Wade with Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, are now talking about a nation-wide abortion ban. That’s unlikely to go down well with most Americans.
• An early post-Dobbs poll of generic Democrats vs Republicans show the Democrats have flipped the balance to their side of the teeter totter, 48-41. What that means in an already polarized environment is not clear, although it may mean the House will remain under the sway of Democrats. And it’s only one week. Show me four polls with similar results and I might pronounce it as significant.
• Senate candidate J. D. Vance (R-OH) thinks pregnancies, even those from rape, are an inconvenience. In what promises to be a hotly contested race against experienced Rep Tim Ryan (D) for an open Senate seat, will outraged Republican and independent women voters dump him by the side of the road, rather than in Ohio’s soon-to-be-empty Senate seat? And, even more importantly, will those outraged women continue to be outraged when it comes to voting for their Congressional Representative? Down-ballot damage can be a bitch.
• The surprise sixth televised hearing of the January 6th investigatory panel certainly demonstrates a President desperate to retain power, laws, rules, and traditions be damned. But what impact will this have on the various Senate races? Stay tuned.
• In Colorado, the June 28th GOP primary resulted in John O’Dea winning the GOP nomination to face Senator Michael Bennet. For those paying attention, it appears the Colorado GOP has a taste for relatively moderate candidates, rejecting such specimens as indicted elections clerk and candidate for Colorado Secretary of State Tina Peters. Incidentally, Peters then denied that her own primary lost loss, claiming it was rigged. Toss her in the bin with all the other whiners.
• The June 28th primary for the Oklahoma Senate seat held by incumbent James Lankford (R) has resulted in the selection of Lankford (68% of GOP primary voters selected him) by the Republicans and inexperienced Madison Horn (37%) by the Democrats. While a plurality win like Horn’s isn’t usually significant for the easy-going Democrats, Lankford’s majority victory is, perhaps, surprisingly weak; in 2016 he did not even face a primary opponent. But the far-right in Oklahoma is disappointed that he didn’t vote against counting electoral votes on January 6, 2021. That 32% of GOP voters desired someone other than an experienced Senator, possibly because his TrumpScore is only 86.8%, may indicate a fracture in the Oklahoma GOP, but is it great enough to let Horn slip through? I doubt it, but I’ll hold my breath until polls come out.
• In the special election to replace Oklahoma Senator Inhofe (R-OK) for the final four years of his term, Rep Markwayne Mullin attained the primary runoff with 43.7% of the GOP voter ballots, while T. W. Shannon, with a less impressive 17.5%, will be in the other slot. As noted before, former Rep Kendra Horn (D-OK) will meet the winner of the runoff, who I expect will be Mullin. Does Mullin’s plurality indicate weakness? Does his attempts to attract former President Trump’s attention bring doubt upon his campaign, now that Trump appears to be in serious legal trouble? Probably not. But it’s worth keeping half an eye on this contest.
• Former EPA Administrator for President Trump, and stricken with multiple scandals during his tenure, Scott Pruitt (R-OK) came in fifth in the primary for the special election to replace Senator Inhofe (R-OK). This is more noteworthy than it sounds, as Pruitt tried to campaign on the scandals to his advantage, and failed. At least portions of the GOP have little patience for naked power-seekers. Sorry about the visual.
• In Georgia a new Quinnipiac University Poll shows incumbent Senator Warnock (D) with a ten point lead (±2.5 points) over challenger and former NFL star Herschel Walker (R). This is particularly of interest: In today’s poll, Democrats (97 – 2 percent) and independents (62 – 33 percent) back Warnock, while Republicans (93 – 7 percent) back Walker. First, independents are leaning to the Democrats, which may explain Georgia resident and leading right-wing pundit Erick Erickson’s panicked public posts over the last couple of days. Second, the Republicans are strongly in Walker’s corner, which suggests they’d rather have power than a reasonable representative. I consider Warnock to be far more reasonable than Walker, who gets kudos for being forthright concerning his mental illness – but that’s not an excuse for speaking gibberish concerning the Uvalde tragedy, but more a reason to sit out the election, or vote for Senator and Pastor Warnock.
• With a slogan unfortunately reminiscent of at least one slogan of failed and disgraced former President Trump, “the only Republican who can defeat Tammy Duckworth in the fall,” Kathy Salvi won the Republican primary in Illinois, and the right to challenge incumbent Senator Duckworth (D). Potentially hampering her effort is the fact that her plurality victory consists of winning 30.5% of the GOP primary vote. If the losers’ supporters are embittered, as sometimes happens in GOP contests of late, then Salvi will have a very difficult hill to climb.
• Krystie Matthews (D-SC), a member of the South Carolina House of Representatives, won the right to challenge incumbent Senator Tim Scott (R-SC), emerging from a primary runoff in which she had to come from behind. No polls seem to be available just yet, but it’s South Carolina, so I expect Senator Scott to win another term.

Previous update here.

One of the behaviors of the insurrectionists of January 6th, 2021 that has puzzled me has been the lack of focus of the rioters. They break in, saunter about, engage in some chanting, steal stuff, shit on other stuff, and then saunter out.

Sure, these are not the brightest bulbs from the factory.

But yesterday’s hearing clarifies that their lack of focus was caused by the inadvertent lack of leadership, as Professor Richardson’s summary of the hearing really makes clear:

Hutchinson testified that Trump was determined to go to the Capitol with the crowd despite the desperate efforts of White House Counsel Pat Cipollone to make sure it didn’t happen. Cipollone told Hutchinson that Trump’s appearance there would open the White House up to being charged with “every crime imaginable” because it would look like Trump was inciting a riot. Nonetheless, Trump was furious that Meadows had not been able to persuade the Secret Service to make it happen, so furious that Cassidy heard from others that when he found that the SUV in which he was riding would not take him to the Capitol, Trump had lunged at the agent refusing to take him there.

Hutchinson did not know what the plan was for Trump’s trip to the Capitol, but there was talk of an additional speech there, “before he went in. I know that there was a conversation about him going into the House chamber at one point,” she said. The president is only supposed to go into the House chamber when specifically invited, so perhaps he expected to be invited in, or perhaps he was going in without an invitation, or perhaps those talking about it were just tossing out unworkable ideas.

All of a sudden it becomes clear that, without Trump, the rioters, who were not trained nor instructed that anything more than a riot would take place, made a push, but then really got lost.

Many were afflicted, as they subsequently testified, with buyer’s remorse, as it were. Without Trump there to stir the pot, they just moved around randomly and then ran away when so instructed.

The Secret Service may have saved the bacon for the Senators and House members. Senator Cruz (R-TX), despite objecting on specious grounds to the electoral votes of the swing states and thus showing his alliance with Team Trump, had better thank them after this hearing, because a crowd like that, despite Trump’s hypothetical leadership, could have easily executed everyone in sight on the excuse that It’s time to clean house and start over.

Great things sometimes happens for those who are faithful to their duties.

This was the first surprise hearing of the series, which certainly will raise questions in and of itself: are witnesses in existential danger, or simply that they might turn shy after Trumpian blandishments are communicated to them, as the last five minutes of the hearing indicated?

The hearing itself didn’t put a stake through anyone’s heart, but Mark Meadows aide Cassidy Hutchinson, self-possessed and articulate even as she sweated, certainly did some damage. Under Rep Cheney’s (R-WY) guidance, we were given an eye-witness account of the activities of former President Trump, his Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, and various bit players.

Much of it was new and fascinating. It wasn’t hard to imagine veins throbbing in Meadows’ forehead during the broadcast, because he came out looking fairly awful. I don’t think it’s particularly insightful to state that the biggest unsolved mystery brought to light is the question of who Meadows was talking to on the phone when he refused to let Hutchinson into his car during the event at The Ellipse, where the former President gave his incitement speech. A grocery list from his wife? Confidential discussions with White House staff?

Instructions from an outside agency?

I don’t know if phone records will be available to solve the mystery, but I sure hope so.

In the end, though, the real goal of this hearing was to get the message out to other witnesses, both future and past: Information may spare you prison time. Obstinacy, such general Flynn “taking the Fifth” when it comes to whether he thinks a peaceful transfer of power is a good thing, may land you in a morass of dishonor, as well as prison.

Witnesses should think soberly about the costs of being on “Team Trump.” He won’t be loyal to you when your usefulness has passed, why be loyal to him?

Slip opinion:

“Slip” opinions are the first version of the Court’s opinions posted on this website. A “slip” opinion consists of the majority or principal opinion, any concurring or dissenting opinions written by the Justices, and a prefatory syllabus prepared by the Reporter’s Office that summarizes the decision. … These opinions are posted on the website within minutes after the opinions are issued and will remain posted until the opinions for the entire Term are published in the bound volumes of the United States Reports. For further information, see Column Header Definitions and Information About Opinions. [SCOTUS]

Noted in “Sotomayor says Gorsuch flubbed prayer case facts (and she’s right),” Steve Benen, Maddowblog:

For those who’ve never read a slip opinion from the Supreme Court, it’s worth emphasizing that they almost never include images: Justices write their opinions, concurrences, and dissents — and that’s it. There’s nothing but text.

But in her dissent yesterday, Sotomayor took the highly unusual step of including several photographs to prove her point: The images showed the high school coach engaged in public worship with public school student athletes — minors who were seeking their coach’s approval, and who needed to stay on his good side if they intended to play — at public school events.

I actually did read small parts of that opinion, which is not a hobby of mine, and I recall shaking my head over Gorsuch’s description of the dispute. It didn’t accord with news reports, but, hey, I’m not a lawyer.

It appears, though, that Sotomayor has caught Gorsuch with his pants down. Perhaps that’s an unfortunate metaphor.

But, with all due respect to SCOTUS‘ conservative wing, it does appear that they are in the process of crashing and burning. There’s been a string of really doubtful opinions of late when it comes to religious issues, such as the egregious blunder in Carson v. Makin, Dobbs (aka the overturning of Roe v Wade), and now this decision, Kennedy v. Bremerton School District.

In addition, neither Alito, with a petulant side-note in Dobbs, nor Thomas, who in a concurring opinion to Dobbs scoots much further out on the right-wing tree limb than Alito or the other three who voted Yes on Dobbs, comes out of Dobbs with a shining halo. They had an agenda on their minds, used Dobbs as their horse to fulfill it, and didn’t apologize for blowing up stare decisis with bad history or bad reasoning.

And now Justice Gorsuch, IJ, is shown to be a religious hack as well, falsifying facts when they don’t fit his narrative.

This probably isn’t severe enough to warrant an impeachment, and the Republican Senators would never stand for it, but it’s worth noting that misrepresentation is not a mild offense at the SCOTUS level. Maybe Gorsuch doesn’t understand that. Or maybe he’s in such thrall to religious doctrine that he can’t help himself.

Long-time readers will recall some posts concerning the CAHOOTS program of Eugene, OR, in which mental health specialists are sent to emergency calls specifying a mental health emergency, rather than police. Denver has implemented something similar and is reporting success:

Cities across the US, including New York, Washington DC and San Francisco, are experimenting with programmes to address mental health emergencies without police involvement. After the implementation of a pilot programme in Denver, Colorado, non-violent crime rates decreased by 34 per cent in participating police precincts.

The Support Team Assisted Response (STAR) Program in Denver involves mental health specialists and paramedics responding to non-violent emergencies instead of police. [NewScientist (18 June 2022, paywall)]

Is that decline due to simply not reporting the incidents handled by STAR as crimes? And is that inappropriate? Maybe not.

But…

There was no impact on rates of violent crime.

But also ..

“[People] might be concerned that not having police at lower-level crimes might lead to an escalation of something more violent, and that simply did not happen,” says Dee.

I wonder how the combined budgets of police and mental health compare to the budget for the police prior to the initiation of the STAR program. Some hint is given:

STAR was also more cost-effective than traditional police programmes. Dee says that in six months, STAR prevented an estimated 1376 criminal offences and cost $208,141. That implies a cost of $150 per offence prevented, says Dee. In comparison, minor criminal offences cost the criminal justice system an estimated $646 each due to related expenses like imprisonment and prosecution.

In the wake of the overturning of Roe v Wade by the Roberts Court, there’s a move afoot to defend the decision to the conservatives and, maybe, independents, at least by Erick Erickson – and I suspect other right-wing pundits as well. If Erickson is typical, I’d say they’re operating off of a blinkered view of history, which more authoritative people than I will tear them a new one.

But I can’t resist. Here’s Erickson, aware that the arguments advanced are a bit dubious, at his best august authoritativeness:

One cannot find an abortion right. There is not one in American history that one can point to as defining it.

There is no right to marry in the constitution, but one can point to American history and say there must be that right. Why? Because George and Martha Washington did not have to remarry once the constitution was ratified. It was just accepted. The same goes for the right to own property, which the constitution hints at because of the necessity of compensating people for taking their property. But abortion? No state permitted it until around the time of Roe. Intellectually, whether one supports abortion or not, that has to be understood as a bridge too far for the Supreme Court’s constitutional jurisprudence.

There’s a couple of problems with this rather haphazard argument. The first one will bother astute engineers, and I suspect lawyers as well. An argument that goes Well, it’s always been this way is the sort of argument that raises red flags. If your theoretical model, your legal theory, lacks an explanation of any reasonable power for something like this, what you have isn’t a viable theory, it’s a results-oriented hack that should be distrusted and discarded at the earliest opportunity.

Second, if there an insistence on trying to hide behind this argument, well, the Emperor has not clothes. Abortion is not an invention of the last fifty years. Not the last one hundred years. Consulting the archaeological and historical literature, helpfully summarized by Wikipedia, reveals that abortion has been around about as long as marriage, for as long as women have had to manage their families in the face of unwanted pregnancies. To suggest marriage should be permitted because George Washington was married when the Union was formed, while abortion should be banned because it allegedly wasn’t is to ignore simple history.

Has it been banned? Sure, various forms of it have been banned. So has marriage, as Loving v. Virginia demonstrates, and one can go back and find all sorts of bans on marriage – between members of various religious sects, between social classes, second marriages, between foreign citizens to domestic, interracial, there’s more than I can think of, I’m sure.

But Loving v. Virginia, et al, demonstrates another shortcoming of using historical standing as a justification for a law: justice is not defined by historical standing. Justice and injustice are a matter, ideally, of social debate, compromise, and agreement; non-ideally, as in the recent overturning of Roe v Wade, it’s the result of a tyranny of a minority that, behind the curtain of a Constitutional theory of lawmaking, has permitted minority representatives make a law with which most of the electorate disagrees. Which is to say, on this hard subject, a small minority is claiming a right to set the law after having lost the debate.

Erickson’s historical assertion is, at its most basic, and to slightly misquote his comrade lawyer Rudy Giuliani, a result in search of a legal theory. His audience cannot rest easy based on this excuse, no matter how much he tries to play it.

But wait, there’s more!

And [the right] won. It took fifty years and several setbacks, including David Souter, but they won.

They did it democratically.

Erickson likes to cling to his theory that this was all done democratically, which lets him accuse the left of being a bunch of dangerous, ummmm, whiners. But as I pointed out here in a slightly different context, the assertion is flawed and foundering.

In order to not bring a derisive laugh to my lips, Erickson must answer for

• The Brooks Brothers riot. Intimidation of vote-counters is not part of the definition of democracy, last I checked. Does Erickson have a new definition? (Does the extreme left?)
• Bush v Gore, in which the conservative leaning SCOTUS shockingly stopped the Florida count prior to completion, thus handing Bush Florida, and the Presidential Election.
• The 2000 Presidential Election, which, via the electorate, Gore won, 50,999,897 to 50,456,002 votes, not Bush.
• The dereliction of duty of Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who led the successful effort to ignore President Obama’s nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to SCOTUS for a year, purely as a political power play, while ignoring his historically decreed duty to officially contemplate the nomination in a timely manner. Cough cough.
• The 2016 Presidential Election, which, via the electorate, Clinton beat Trump, 65,853,514 to 62,984,828. Hell, that’s not even close, dude.
• I’ll skip the Senate representative imbalance, as that takes time to track down and calculate, and I am aware that the Senate was a compromise between the small States and the larger States of the original thirteen, so it could be argued that it’s … just. Or fair. Or something. Anyways, I’m a working dude and don’t have time to tease out all the counts and nuances.

Shall we tote up the damages of Erickson’s flawed concept of democracy?

• President Bush, minority President only through the thumb of SCOTUS on the balance of justice, appointed Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito. Both are still on the bench, and while sometimes Roberts shows some responsibility, that may actually be just him trying to show that the Court is non-partisan. Alito authored the Dobbs opinion, which overturns Roe v Wade. Would Gore have appointed either? Doubtful.
• President Trump, minority President through the ridiculous quirks of the Electoral College, Russian interference, and HRC’s incompetence at campaigning, appointed Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett. They each, during nomination hearings, claimed Roe v Wade was “settled law.” They each voted to shitcan Roe v Wade. Now, it could be argued that, if Clinton had been sitting in the Oval Office, Justice Anthony Kennedy would not have retired; then again, we could also argue that he would voted to retain Roe. Unless he speaks out (has he?), I guess we’ll never know on either issue.

That’s five Republican-nominated judges that, in a democracy, would have been Democratically nominated. That doesn’t guarantee they’d have been confirmed; the wailing over Kavanaugh and Barrett by the left would be as nothing compared to the right facing a 6-3 liberal majority on SCOTUS. Erickson predicted riots over Barrett, which never occurred. What if it had been Brown to make the sixth liberal on the Court?

How much gunfire would she and her bodyguards have to endure from a violent right-wing?

So the point is that Erickson’s trying to justify that the right has played by the rules, when they’ve actually played fast & loose by the rules. Indeed, he may realize that, as his next paragraph is this:

They argued for a cause the elite in this country hate. Even a lot of Republicans who gave them lip service privately thought the pro-life movement stood no chance and so they could be humored to no effect. But they won.

Note the appeal to Christian victimhood. It function as a distraction, a reminder that Christians are forever being victimized and must hang together always and forever, or those demonic liberals might get power and do something, like eating all those unwanted fetuses. Which seems unlikely to me, but maybe not to his audience.

And certainly not let his audience think about what he’s saying. It’s all about stirring up the feelings of allegiance with repulsion for the enemy, and it’s no way to honestly explore a topic.

So? Here’s a graph I’ve been meaning to use:

Source: Gallup

Yeah, that’s rather brutal, isn’t it? And it’s from before Dobbs. It’s reflective of a series of Republican maneuvers, rulings, and attitudes that have been ill-chosen since, well, the nomination of Alito, I suppose. Will it fall further? I don’t think Gallup is planning to redo the poll prior to the November elections, although they might.

So what comes next? Oddly enough, I’m thinking of the 18th Amendment, better known as the Prohibition Amendment, which was later overturned by the 21st Amendment. Comparing the overturn of Roe to Prohibition is a dicey proposition, at least for the literal minded: one banned ingestion of a substance known to cause harm, both physically and socially, while Roe removed a ban on a medical procedure.

But I think the actions of banning alcohol ingestion and stripping away a Constitutional right have some important similarities. Both were implemented by self-righteous minorities who would do anything to achieve their goal, from chasing drunks around with an axe, assuming a moral high ground of uncertain stability, to putting political hacks on SCOTUS through deeply un-American maneuvering. Neither set of advocates realized how much damage they did to their arguments and organizations by attaining these goals: the Temperance Movement, as a political force, is spent, even dissolved, and although calls for moderation in drinking continue to exist, actual banning is not even on the political horizon. Similarly, even as today’s political right achieves its goals, it’s dissolving, as individuals are driven away by the ethically and morally dubious actions of leaders as diverse as Senator McConnell, former President Trump, the entire SBC leadership, every Republican running for office under the pennant of “election-denier,” and all the power-hungry hacks who, upon acquiring that power, will misuse it, to the disgust of their erstwhile compatriots.

The Republicans have demonstrated the quicksand-like consistency of their moral systems, from Erickson’s omission of key facts in order to justify the overturning of Roe, to Senator McConnell’s certainty that the goal, and only the goal, matters. That’s not how the American people have functioned in the past, and not how they’ll function now and in the future. Means matter, vitally.

I expect we’ll have to endure a couple of years of a patchwork of bans. In some States, local prosecutors will refuse to enforce anti-abortion laws, while in others, substandard prosecutors will execute their conception of the law with little regard to the actual law, or to societal comity.

Americans will tire of stories of women dying because of the misdeeds of legislatures and governors, and one day they’ll rise up, go to the ballot boxes, and a whole lot of Republican legislators in Republican states will howl about stolen elections.

SCOTUS members can leave the Court in three ways: passing away, retirement, and impeachment. Two of those in any combination will be sufficient for SCOTUS to be liberal again, and then we can anticipate a case tailored to permit the majority to resurrect Roe.

And what’s to keep the Republicans from trying to do the same? Republican and independent voters putting their feet down and telling them NO. And I think that’s what will happen.

Asteroseismology:

Asteroseismology is the study of oscillations in stars. Stars have many resonant modes and frequencies, and the path of sound waves passing through a star depends on the speed of sound, which in turn depends on local temperature and chemical composition. Because the resulting oscillation modes are sensitive to different parts of the star, they inform astronomers about the internal structure of the star, which is otherwise not directly possible from overall properties like brightness and surface temperature. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “Gaia telescope’s new map of the Milky Way will let us rewind time,” Alex Wilkins, NewScientist (18 June 2022):

One particular type of tsunami-like vibration that changes a star’s shape, known as a starquake, was detected on some stars when it shouldn’t have been possible according to current theories. “Gaia is opening a goldmine for ‘asteroseismology’ of massive stars,” said Conny Aerts at KU Leuven in Belgium in an ESA statement.

From last week, I think.