From WaPo in an article on a paleontology dig that is yielding results suggesting T. Rex hunted as part of a pack:
The researchers are still exploring why the tyrannosaurs would have hunted together but believe a collective effort helped them compete against large, plant-eating dinosaurs.
No! T. Rex may have competed with other predators for prey, but they don’t compete with the prey itself.
They just eat them.
And just for fun …
This letter from Senator Rick Scott (R-FL) is a bit startling:
Dear Woke Corporate America,
I hope you are all having fun with your virtue signaling. I hope you are enjoying trying to one-up each other and showing how woke you can be, all the while believing that you are more sophisticated and morally superior to the hard-working people of this country.
You must have loved the accolades from your elitist, left-wing peers when you took the MLB All-Star Game from Georgia. What a fun day for you on Twitter. Congratulations.
Never mind that you have destroyed working people’s jobs and hurt people who haven’t worked since COVID-19 took a member of their family or destroyed their small business.
You get texts from your elitist friends praising you for your courageous stand when you support “mostly peaceful” movements that loot small businesses, set fire to government buildings, and take the lives of innocent people.
It goes on with brazen threats of what’ll happen in 2023 when the Republicans win back Congress: no more corporate welfare, etc etc.
I must say that it’ll be getting chapters in future history books all of its own.
I suppose the Republicans see their strategy of changing election laws to disadvantage non-Republican voters as possibly their last gasp before they’re forced to do normal politicking – that is, putting forth policies that the public likes, finding people who are more honorable to run, have competency, and that sort of thing.
The stuff that they’ve gradually become worse and worse at.
The American relationship to its territories – such as American Samoa, Puerto Rico, D.C., etc – is a bit fraught because they are infamously lacking in Federal representation, one of the foundation stones of the United States. The Democrats would like to make at least some of them States, as Steve Benen notes:
The Democratic-led House is expected to vote this week on the “Washington, D.C. Admission Act” (H.R. 51), which would welcome D.C. as the nation’s 51st state. The plan entails carving out a new federal district — limited to the National Mall, to the west of Capitol Hill — where there are no residents, while making the rest of D.C. a state.
But after some discussion with my Arts Editor, we more or less agreed that it doesn’t sit so well with us making D.C. into another State, even if lawmakers as diverse as Goldwater, Nixon, and Biden have been in favor of the transition. We’d rather see D.C. be made part of one of the local States and attain representation, as well as control of the National Guard, in that way. The lack of control inherent in the uneasy relationship between D.C. and the Federal government was a major issue during the January 6th insurrection.
But it occurred to me today that we could take an aggregate approach. This would consist of making all extant territories, not otherwise with Representation, into an ad hoc State, duly allocated its two Senators and however many Representatives in Congress as is appropriate. D.C. could either become a core member of this unnamed State, or it could become part of one of its neighboring States; Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and all the others could also have, at their option, be part of the ad hoc State, or become a State of their own.
That might be a good compromise for my competing dislikes of a city-state and of some American citizens lacking full representation at the Federal level.
He can’t help but dribble out some more every time he opens his mouth:
[former President] Trump was asked in an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity set to air Monday night whether GOP congressional candidates should run on the so-called make America great agenda.
“If they want to win, yes. We’ve expanded the Republican Party,” he said, citing the electoral gains he made among Hispanic voters in the 2020 presidential election. “If you want to win and win big, you have to do that. You have to do it.” [The Hill]
Wah Wah Wah …
Yes, that would be the Republican Party’s popularity plunging under President Trump.
But Spaceweather.com sets me straight:
Researchers once thought that Southern Lights were exact counterparts of Northern Lights on the opposite side of Earth. Indeed, the physics is the same. Energetic particles rain down from space, causing the atmosphere to glow green, purple, and pink. Simultaneous observations of Earth’s poles from space, however, show that auroras dance differently at the two ends of our planet–an assymetry that researchers are only beginning to understand.
The upshot: Southern Lights may be present even when Northern Lights are not. Monitor the Amundsen-Scott camera for updates.
Keeping in mind that magnetic fields have polarity and that the Sun’s magnetic field flows out with the solar wind, I can see that the interactions will be different in different locations on the Earth magnetic field. The details escape me, though, as I did poorly in college physics.
And there’s a fascinating pic at the link above.
If you’ve got an anti-electric vehicle Luddite in the family, perhaps in a few years you can give him this for a Christmas present – an electric tugboat:
Does your old baby need to be replaced finally?
Crowley Engineering Services has released the design details for the first fully-electric tugboat with autonomous capability for the U.S. market.
Crowley is promoting the design as a sustainable and high-performing solution for ship assist and harbor services in any port. It leverages a large battery system and power saving technology enabling a fully-electric mode of operation while producing zero air emissions or greenhouse gases. The 82-foot tug will provide 70 short tons of bollard pull, with an Azimuthing drive propulsion system with two 1,800 kW motors and a 6 MWh battery. [gCaptain]
A perk of all-electric:
With no exhaust stack, the tug has 360 degrees of visibility from the pilot’s station, allowing the operator to see without obstruction.
It just might win over that old curmudgeon of a relative.
CNN is reporting former Vice President Walter Mondale has passed away. He was one of the good guys. May he rest in peace.
When it comes to bitcoin, Megan McArdle is a believer … in utility:
Most of the value of a bitcoin has accumulated in the past 12 months, as the price of a bitcoin increased almost tenfold since April 2020. Yet underlying that value — bitcoin’s real-world, non-speculative, non-hobbyist uses — are things such as transferring money out of countries with currency controls or dealing in certain illicit goods or offering an alternative to currency in countries experiencing hyperinflation. In these contexts, it looks less like a currency than a substitute for expensive jewelry — something small, reasonably durable and highly valuable, which is thus relatively easy to move across borders undetected or to store and liquidate in case society collapses. But at least jewelry is pretty to look at in the meantime.
The more I think about it, the more I wonder if that isn’t the right analogy. Maybe techno-utopians just like looking at bitcoin the same way brides like being able to see two months of their spouse’s work flashing on their hand. And what’s wrong with that? [WaPo]
I’ll be keeping an eye out for other skeptical opinions on cryptocurrencies. Given how wrong I’ve been about Paypal (“What unique utility does it have?”), unpublished, I’m looking forward to someone unveiling why I can’t live without cryptocurrencies.
This is our Pasque flower, an early spring bloomer.
Steve Benen’s rant concerning the acceptance of a huge donation by disgraced for RNC member Steve Wynn by a Republican House group headed by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) cross-breeds into whimsy. First, the end of the rant:
And yet, here we are, watching Kevin McCarthy praise and thank Steve Wynn — even vowing to work with him again in the near future — as if the sexual misconduct allegations are simply less important than Republicans’ quest for power.
Quest for Power. Yeah.
Who here remembers the movie Quest For Fire (1981)? I think someone could do a screamingly funny parody of that film as a simple one minute video, with Quest For Power as the title.
Incidentally, one of my co-workers at the time (F. W. Woolworth’s, for those who were wondering) reported she heard a wee little voice ask, What are they doing, Mom? at a rather inopportune moment during that movie.
If you like Taiko drumming, this might tickle your fancy.
Over the weekend came the news that some of the farthest fringe-right House of Representatives members were considering forming something called the America First Caucus. While it already seems to be fading out under accusations that the proposal is itself a veiled racist document, I found this bit interesting from their proposal:
The America First Caucus recognizes that our country is more than a mass of consumers or a series of abstract ideas. America is a nation with a border, and a culture, strengthened by a common respect for uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions.
These guys, they do realize that the dominant political tradition is monarchy? That, arguably, it’s absolute monarchy?
What a pack of chumps.
Joe Biden may turn out to be Donald Trump’s savior.
Hear me out.
The former President is motivated, as his family has said, by money and by fear of being seen as a loser. His entire “I won I won I won!” Trumpian bit is about satisfying those twin drives, as, in the latter case, Richardson notes:
In part, this appears to have been a fund-raising ploy. Thanks to a terrific story by Shane Goldmacher in the New York Times, we now know that the Trump campaign boosted revenues by tricking donors into making recurring donations before the election, replenishing its badly depleted funds. When unsuspecting donors found out and complained, the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee ended up having to make more than 530,000 refunds worth $64.3 million. That money came in after the election, as Trump promised to fight the election results because, he said, he had been cheated.
And that has led to this:
But the more they harden Trump’s base by pretending that the former president won the 2020 election, the harder it is for them to move away from Trump. In Republican primaries in Republican states, candidates are vying to get Trump’s endorsement.
It is a vicious downward spiral, based on a lie. As Utah Senator Mitt Romney, who was the Republican candidate for president in 2012, said after the insurrection, “The best way we could show respect for the voters who are upset is by telling them the truth.” And yet, Republican lawmakers continue to feed the narrative that Trump won in 2020.
But here’s the conundrum Biden may be solving. Each of those Republicans that publicly believe in the Big Lie that Trump really won the election – by a landslide – despite the multiple recounts and court cases that Trump unequivocally lost, even when they landed in the courts of judges appointed by Trump, these Republicans, whether they are outlandish fourth-raters like Gosar or Gohmert, or they’re nameless members of the base, are a signal.
They are a signal to the rest of the world that the moral depravity at the center of the Republican Party may also infect American society as well. International observers do take note, it’s part of their duty.
And what does moral depravity say about the dependability of the United States as a … pillar of international financial?
The value of those dollars will decrease.
Yeah. With every lie Trump tells in his desperate attempts to extract more and more money from his base, each of those dollars’ true value decrease as a result of international observers’ judgement that the United States is not as trustworthy as it once was.
Trump is, essentially, chasing the proverbial receding goal, with his every step causing it to recede ever more.
The error of short-term thinking, which is all Trump has.
His savior? JOSEPH R. BIDEN, President of the United States, who has displayed great energy in acknowledging and engaging with problems that Trump could do little more than cry out that they were minor and would go away, even as his Administration crumbled around him. While the results of Biden’s efforts are not known, and will not be known for a while, and will not all be positive, the character of these efforts are those of a highly competent, knowledgeable politician who knows to push back on hatred, how to successfully engage with his political opponents, and how to run a massive bureaucracy.
And that supports the stock of the United States in the world, and thus the financial worth of Trump.
Nothing, though, can support and advance the honor and trustworthiness of Trump. At this point, the mass of lies has no excuse. And that’s part of the equation, too, isn’t it? Doing business with the dishonorable is always bad for business.
But right now it’s plausible to think that the efforts of Biden are playing some small part in keeping Trump from a disaster he could never forecast for himself.
For those readers interested in the fate of the newspapers owned by Tribune Publishing Co, there’s a hiccup:
A Wyoming-based Swiss billionaire who formed half of the consortium making a bid to buy Tribune Publishing Co. has backed out of the deal, according to two people familiar with negotiations.
Hansjörg Wyss had joined with Maryland business executive Stewart Bainum Jr. earlier this month in submitting the $680 million proposal to a special committee of Tribune’s board, in an attempt to beat out an offer from Alden Global Capital. The development casts further doubt on whether journalists at Tribune newspapers can avoid a takeover by the hedge fund, which has a reputation for deep cost-cutting. [WaPo]
But …
Bainum — who is said to still be committed to the deal to buy Tribune and is actively seeking investors to join him — informed the special committee of Wyss’s withdrawal verbally Friday night and confirmed it in writing on Saturday. A spokesman for the special committee of Tribune’s board declined to comment.
Bainum has also completed his due diligence into Tribune’s finances and found the numbers “more than satisfactory,” one of these people familiar with the negotiations said. (Both spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to comment publicly about the deal). Bainum has fielded interest from other wealthy individuals and foundations as well.
The drama continues – and perhaps the fate of the United States.
I always did like a trifling bit of drama.
Why does “pretty” have meaning other than as as a descriptor of a person or object of pleasing aspect? I’m not casting aspersions; I recall being interviewed in middle school, which was 40+ years ago, using pretty in just this way, later seeing the quote in the school newspaper, and being puzzled as to why I would have ever used.
Why oh why oh why?
Today CNN/Business notes some volatility in bitcoin:
After a hype-filled week for cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin experienced a flash crash over the weekend, plunging nearly 14% in less than an hour, from about $59,000 to $51,000, on Saturday night before rebounding. Other popular cryptocurrencies including etherium and Dogecoin also fell dramatically, before recouping some of their losses.
Bitcoin has skyrocketed in value this year as it gained more mainstream acceptance, but the sharp price fall this weekend seems to have been triggered by an unconfirmed Twitter rumor that the US Treasury was planning to crack down on money laundering schemes involving cryptocurrencies. The agency did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Sunday.
Bitcoin’s rapid overnight plunge is the latest indicator that the crypto market remains wildly volatile.
Last week crypto enthusiasm seemed to reach a peak as trading platform Coinbase went public at a valuation of $86 billion, followed by a wild 500% rally in Dogecoin — an asset that was created as a joke in 2013. Cryptocurrency backers have spent years insisting that bitcoin, ethereum and other digital coins could revolutionize the world of finance, and with the success of Coinbase’s Wall Street debut Wednesday, those backers are finally having their moment.
While 14% could be worse, it’s interesting. It makes me think one of two things is happening, if it’s not the rumor cited in the CNN/Business article.
It’s becoming harder and harder to not conclude this is actually a scheme to make the founders rich.
But that’s just an idle observation by an outsider who’s never had a virtual wallet or possessed a bitcoin. It’ll be interesting to watch its evolution and how society uses it over the next few years.
Here’s some blue things, whose name I forget.
Yeah, I like that last one.
Kazakh Steppe.
If you think you know about the steppe, here’s a funny little quiz for you from Razib Khan. I scored a 21, which his quiz says is very good, and I did that despite not knowing much at all about the steppe – just a lot of archaeological reading.
North Carolina state senator Jeff Jackson (D) has decided to move up in the world and is running to replace retiring US Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) in 2022. Somehow I “friended” him on FB quite a while back, and I saw this morning that he had decided to show a little of his day:
Running for U.S. Senate is a unique experience.
So this Sunday morning, I thought I’d pause the policy posts and give you a sense of what life looks like from inside our campaign.
Yesterday morning I got a call from a national reporter asking me a question about policy.
Happy to talk, but… what he was really doing was inviting me to attack one of my opponents and hoping I’d give him a quote to create confrontation. I didn’t want to do that, so I kept my answer positive and non-combative.
I could hear the disappointment in his voice as he gave me multiple opportunities to wage an attack:
“Ok Senator, but do you feel it’s unfortunate that other people in this race don’t share that view…?”
Fishing, this reporter is. I’d be tempted to call up the reporter’s editor and demand a better class of reporter next time. Mention that reporters should be reporting, not creating, news. Move him to the opinions page if he wants to make news.
WaPo’s Kathleen Parker seems afraid of debate when it comes to the question of whether SCOTUS should be expanded. She notes that President Biden has named a commission to examine the idea:
Biden is uncorking the commission to keep his left flank happy; and few people who follow these things believe it will finish its work by cooking up more justices on the bench. But it is likely that he is laying the predicate for such a move years from now.
You might even call this the “Never You Mind That Now”strategy, in which the Democrats are raising the prospect of a bigger court today only to seed it in our brains for their later use. This is a little like an arsonist who sets a fire so that he can put it out and become a hero. In the liberal version of this opera, a monster is created — the legislation to increase the court — so that the party can then kill it this round. When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said she’d never allow the bill on the floor, the audience heaved a sigh of relief.
But the commission, if nothing else, serves the purpose of making something once unimaginable at least a topic of conversation. Basically, you get people talking about something, back it up with evidence (or commissions) and, gradually, the idea becomes less unpopular. People even forget why it was once objectionable.
But this is an illiberal (small-l) stance. Discussion and debate, formal (The Federalist Papers v. The Anti-Federalist Papers) or informal (yelling over the din at the bar), lies at the very heart of the liberal project in which our best hopes lie. In that concept resides the recognition that more than one mind, relying on honest, disinterested arguments, help find the best solutions to the problems, be they moral dilemmas or tangible thorny questions, which bedevil us in the world going forward.
To suggest we shouldn’t bring up the question going forward is to fear that best answer.
All that said, I think it’s worth remembering Justice Breyer’s remark on the question, which Parker also provides.
“If the public sees judges as politicians in robes, its confidence in the courts — and in the rule of law itself — can only diminish.”
And while sometimes it seems SCOTUS honors this sentiment more in the breech than its preservation, it remains a necessary aspiration for the Court, as it is for all courts, local, state, or federal, in order to retain their legitimacy. The manipulation of the Court in order for Democrat-nominated Justices to become the dominant faction, no matter how legal and, contra-Parker, imaginable it is, will strike most of the electorate as an unwillingness to play by the rules. Sure, it’s legal and it has been done before – but in American politics, perception is all.
And the Democrats must realize that such a maneuver would lose them a position of moral superiority. Some of the electorate remembers, and the rest can be reminded, that former Judge and current Attorney General Merrick Garland was never given the hearing he deserved as a result of his nomination by President Obama to replace the late Justice Scalia, because It was too close to the next Presidential election, never mind that event was more than ten months away. A variety of petty political lies were trotted out by a Republican Party that didn’t dare consider a candidate suggested by Republican Senators, and the result was a repudiation of the responsibility of the Senate by then-GOP majority leader McConnell.
But when Justice Bader-Ginsburg passed away, just a few months ago, with something like a month left before the next Presidential election, the Senate GOP arranged and confirmed Trump’s nomination of now-Justice Barrett, and even celebrated it, completing the utterly hypocritical circle and marking them as completely unsuitable for American governance roles.
Hypocrisy is an important concept because those who are hypocritical can only be trusted to break the rules whenever their self-interest will benefit from doing so. If they are faced with a decision that is existential to the nation, and offered an opportunity by a foreign adversary to select an option beneficial to the adversary in exchange for a bribe, they’ll take it without regard for the welfare of their fellow citizens.
That’s Senator McConnell (R-KY), GOP leader in the Senate, for you. If you’ve ever wondered why McConnell is loathed, it’s for his disregard for the safety and honor of the nation.
If the Democrats succumb to a round of Whataboutism, then they’ll be no better than their rivals, and the nation will suffer for it. SCOTUS members are subject to the infirmities of age. Pundits like to talk about how generations will be subject to conservative legal opinion. Given the agedness of just about everyone on that Court, I have to think those pundits like their drama a bit too much.
So, in the end, I’m with Parker that expanding SCOTUS is a bad idea – but discussing it is not, in itself, a bad idea.
George F. Will, WaPo:
Those who believe that the nation’s real founding was the arrival of slaves in 1619, that the American Revolution was fought to defend slavery, that the nation remains saturated with “systemic racism,” that the economic system has always been fundamentally exploitive, that the social order is rotten with injustice and that even the nation’s most revered historical figures are unworthy of respect — those who think like this can be credited with moral earnestness, but not with patriotism: They cannot love what they will not praise.
I don’t often like George Will, even when I agree with him, but I think this is a paragraph worthy of meditation, extraction of questions with regard to one’s own beliefs – especially for the woke – and derivation of answers to those questions that are more than “But, but, but!” and bulgy eyes.
We’ll open with a hand of tulips.
Mummiform:
- Having the shape of a mummy. [Wiktionary]
Noted in this Ask A Mortician video at roughly the 1:40 mark.
The title says it all:
One side of Earth’s interior is losing heat much faster than the other
This article from NewScientist (20 March 2021) explains:
Our planet is a bit lopsided. One half of Earth is losing heat from the planet’s interior faster than the other, and has been for much of the past 400 million years.
The uneven heat loss is probably a relic of past supercontinents, when all the land masses were joined together on one side of the planet.
“We see that the Pacific has lost more heat,” says Krister Karlsen at the University of Oslo in Norway. “That is in large part due to the distribution of the continental land masses.”
Why?
The first [dataset] concerns the amount of heat from Earth’s interior that flows up through the crust. This data set shows that oceans aren’t as good at trapping heat inside Earth as the continents are, says Karlsen. That is partly down to the thickness of the rock: continental crust is often many kilometres thicker than oceanic crust, so it is a better insulator.
The second data set relates to the movement of the continents deep in prehistory. Some continental rocks carry telltale traces of Earth’s magnetic field, which varies around the globe.
Data from these rocks can be used to show that Earth has, on several occasions, been home to a supercontinent – and it can help establish some of those supercontinents’ approximate position. The most recent supercontinent was Pangaea, which existed from around 335 to 175 million years ago, and was centred roughly where Africa lies today.
Which leaves me to wonder: is the imbalance enough to impact Earth’s orbital dynamics around the Sun?
