Category Archives: Uncategorized

Intrauterine cannibalism:

The large birth size of O. megalodon suggests that the young sharks, like many present-day sharks, ate unhatched eggs in the uterus to survive – a phenomenon called intrauterine cannibalism.

“The consequence is that only a few pups will survive and develop, but each of them can become large in body size at birth which gives [them] an advantage as already large predators,” says [Kenshu Shimada at DePaul University. [“Megalodon sharks grew 2 metres long in the uterus by eating eggs,” Karina Shah, NewScientist (16 January 2021)]

A related phenomenon, I suppose, is the occasional occurrence of a human twin absorbing the other of the pair into its body. When the twins are fraternal, I believe the result is called a chimera, as different cells may exhibit different DNA signatures.

NewScientist (16 January 2021) takes note of a study concerning Lyft and Uber:

The introduction of ride-sharing companies, including Uber and Lyft, has been associated with a 0.7 per cent increase in car ownership on average in US urban areas.

Jeremy Michalek at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania and his colleagues analysed trends in vehicle ownership in 224 urban areas across the US between 2011 and 2017 to investigate how these were influenced if a ride-sharing company – either Uber or Lyft – began operating in the area.

“We would have expected ownership to probably go down, because when people gain access to this alternative travel mode they may be able to get away with not owning a car, or owning fewer cars in their household,” says Michalek.

I’m in line with this guy:

“In a lot of respects, this is not surprising,” says Os Keyes at the University of Washington in Seattle. “If there’s money to be made in having a car, more people are likely to have cars.”

And why get rid of the family car? Using ride-sharing may be perceived as a slightly chancy business, and, post-pandemic, people will be going into offices again – and have to get there. I couldn’t get a rideshare won’t be an acceptable excuse. Using ride share is a way to slow physical degradation of the owner’s car and avoid stress, but it isn’t a reasonable excuse for not having a car. Those who don’t want to own a car should arrange to live near a commuter rail line – and, even then, having that personal transportation is still desirable for most people.

I think Lyft almost has the right of it:

Lyft said: “Lyft has helped remove almost half a million cars from our roads by investing in technology and services that reduce our dependence on personal vehicles. This includes managing the nation’s largest bike share system, integrating public transit information directly into the Lyft app, and partnering with transit agencies across the country to increase mobility within their cities.”

In other words, use the proper metric: increasing the number of passengers per vehicle, thereby reducing the number of vehicle trips made. Car ownership is not a symmetric related metric. Fewer total vehicle trips doesn’t imply fewer vehicles, only different usage patterns.

They just don’t state it clearly.

I’ll also nitpick the study authors: We would have expected ownership to probably go down. No No No. Try Our hypothesis is that car ownership declines when ride sharing becomes available, and our hypothesis was falsified in the geographical region studied. The latter removes expectations, overt and covert, which might corrupt the study’s structure. The former suggests a lack of insight on the part of the researchers. Not that the study is not worthwhile, quite the contrary. Checking “insights” is always important, because not all insights are accurate.

But getting the statement right is equally important.

Asterism:

BETWEEN December and March, there is something special for stargazers in most of the world to watch out for. You will be able to see a pattern of stars, or asterism, made up of six bright stars. It is called the Winter Hexagon or Winter Circle in the northern hemisphere, or the Summer Hexagon or Summer Circle in the southern hemisphere. [“How to spot the Winter (or Summer) Hexagon by locating its six stars,” Abigail Beall, NewScientist (13 January 2021)]

I suppose this wouldn’t apply to, say, the cast of Ocean’s 11.

For those of us suffering being manly about this cold Minnesota day, here’s some pictures for encouragement:

I hope you all feel better.

Readers may recall my concern about bitcoin’s precipitous rise in late December. This has not abated:

Graph from Buy Bitcoin Worldwide

So what does this mean to me? Not as an investor, and don’t take anything I say to be investment advice, but as someone who, being part of American society, uses cash, checks, and credit cards – but not cryptocurrency.

First, I’ve never been a currency trader, and I’m guessing it’s a quick way to lose a fortune. This is really a currency trade at this point, isn’t it? But with one difference, as CNN/Business points out:

Investors have sent the price of bitcoin skyrocketing during the pandemic as the Federal Reserve cut interest rates to near zero in March 2020 (and expects to keep them there for several more years), severely weakening the US dollar.

That makes bitcoin, comparatively, an attractive currency. There’s a set limit to the number of bitcoins on the planet, and investors believe that once the supply runs out, the digital coin’s value can only increase.

No more new bitcoins, sometime in the future. That limitation differs from other currencies in which the issuing body can print more money, whether it’s to cover debts or compensate for increasing wealth. Currency traders must try to factor those changes into their calculations.

In the bitcoin case, though, the X factor may be investor naivete. That is a much larger X factor than governmental issuance.

But the other problem here is that limitation on how many bitcoins can be issued. One of the primary goals of most governments is growing the economy, which means stronger production of goods and services over time. Concomitant with a successful result is the need to issue more money in order to cover the increase in national wealth; otherwise, individual prices would plunge and disconcert everyone who depends on stable or even increasing prices.

Bitcoin apparently won’t do that. Indeed, that is a factor in the recent gain in the price of bitcoins. That suggests that bitcoin’s future as a primary currency is highly dubious.

I am also wary as the way to profit off a bitcoin investment is purely through the currency trading option. So far as I know or even visualize, investing in bitcoin doesn’t yield dividends. It’s all predicated on the bet that bitcoin’s value will increase faster than the currency against which trades are occurring.

And, for a currency dependent on a digital infrastructure, that worries me. A successful hack, or a collective decision by international government entities to shut bitcoin down, could be an extremely damaging hit to a financial situation.

But do your own thinking. Maybe I don’t understand currencies as well as I think I do.

The problem with “onesideism” is that it fits the facts around a narrative. Onesidedness is a product of ideology, of a belief that something is true because it ought to be true. This is not merely the stuff of 5-year plans in Soviet Russia—this is the essence of Trumpism, embodied in his false claims of victory in the 2020 election.

— Lionel Barber

I would only quibble that facts is a poor word selection, and perhaps assertions would be more accurate. Barber not only employs this in the context of Trumpism, but also The New York Times’ decision to remove opinion editor James Bennet.

You, sir, are an object lesson.

Planet of the Vampires (1965) is an odd, jarring movie, because it’s a witches’ brew of ingredients. Briefly, and with trepidation, I deliver the plot to you: two ships exploring deep space detect and respond to a distress signal from a nearby planet. As they assess the planet, gravitational waves impact the ships, the crews go mad, and the ship on which this story is focused, the Argos, lands on the planet willy-nilly.

Captain Markary, who alone has been resistant to the madness, bitch-slaps his crew back to rationality, and, well, since they’re on the planet, they have to go exploring. They find it is a graveyard of ships and the remains of their crews, and for a bit they get to play with leftover alien toys.

But then they find their partner ship, also grounded, and her crew dead. Per tradition, they put them in the ground with some fancy aluminum sculpture as headstones, but soon they find that’s not good enough: The dead crew is up and running around, stealing critical equipment and generally being assholes.

But it’s not them. The native race of this planet, who are spiritual in nature, are facing extinction, and have decided to take over a spaceship and just plum leave. It seems a bit of overreaction, but there you have it.

Will they make it? What about the “meteor rejector” device that keeps going missing? And Captain Markary’s resistance to their mad plans? Is he going to …

Oh, wait.

The science, as you may have guessed, is execrable, even laughable. The acting is earnest. The story, while it is admirably parsimonious is handing out information, is ultimately not compelling, at least for me. However, I am not a horror movie aficionado; the attractions of the genre escape me.

Just a little reminiscent of Alien (1979). Or maybe the other way around.

But the special effects are not bad, except for the bubbling mud standing in for lava, and the sets! Oh, my, a surrealistic collage of color, brutalist space ships and monstrous rocks, singular headstones, in which the people scampering about, lugging guns and dying messily, create a juxtaposition that I still remember, even two weeks later. The contrast between the sterile internals of the ships vs the wild colors and shapes of the planet underlines the difference between mankind’s desire for control, and the wild Chaos which eternally surrounds it.

It’s bad, with some interesting elements. You may get more out of it if you keep that bottle of second-rate brandy nearby.

Typosquatting:

In the domain name system, typosquatting is a well known problem. Typosquatting is the malicious registering of a domain that is lexically similar to another, often highly frequented, website. Typosquatters would for instance register a domain named Gooogle.com instead of the well known Google.com. Then they hope that people mistype the website name in the browser and accidentally arrive on the wrong site. The misguided traffic is then often monetized either with advertisements or malicious attacks such as drive by downloads or exploit kits. [“Typosquatting programming language package managers,” Nikolai Tschacher, incolumitas.com]

You have to like the dude’s results, too.

At least 43.6% of the 17289 unique IP addresses executed the notification [i.e., hoax] program with administrative rights.

That’s a lot of vulnerability.

As expected, President Trump was acquitted of high crimes and misdemeanors, winning – in a vote emblematic of his time in government – 43-57.

Yes, 57 Senators, a simple majority, voted to convict, but because a super-majority is required by the Constitution, the sordid political loyalties of 43 Republican Senators were sufficient to spare the former President the indignity of a post-Presidency conviction and probable banning from future public office.

I am appalled.

Who were the seven Republicans who remembered their duty?

Ben Sasse (Nebraska)
Susan Collins (Maine)
Richard Burr (North Carolina)
Lisa Murkowski (Alaska)
Pat Toomey (Pennsylvania)
Mitt Romney (Utah)
Bill Cassidy (Louisiana)

Burr and Toomey have already announced their retirements in 2022. Collins and Murkowski are the most moderate of the Republican Senators. Romney still believes the Republican Party can be a responsible governing body – and dislikes Trump for both moral and personal reasons. Sasse has a history of no follow-through when it comes to Trump, so this is a break in his pattern.

And Cassidy? He’s not been on my radar. But Louisiana is not the Republican long-time stronghold that it may appear to be. Cassidy, in fact, had to defeat a Democratic incumbent to become a Senator in 2014. In Louisiana, Senate elections consist of a jungle primary in which the top two advance to the general, unless someone wins more than 50% of the primary. In 2020, Cassidy did so. Given the number of Democratic candidates, though, he may be worried about Democratic voters in the future, looked at Trump’s non-existent future, and decided he’d rather be on the side of sanity, despite a TrumpScore of 89.1%.

And that may work for him. Or perhaps he was simply being earnest.

But the point is that all the Senators who owed some large part of their success, inasmuch assuming office and achieving their trivial goals counts as success, to former President Trump couldn’t help but bow down to the man who deliberately and maliciously put them in danger in a desperate attempt to stop a standard part of our democracy. It’s simply a travesty.

So what’s next for a disgraced Republican Party? Will we see more defections as more members of the base come to the realization that an insurrection was held in their name, their Senators failed to repudiate it, and now this moral depravity is on them if they do nothing about it?

Time will tell.

I wasn’t aware of this:

The sun is windy. Every day, 24/7, a breeze of electrified gas blows away from the sun faster than a million mph. Solar wind sparks beautiful auroras around the poles of Earth, sculpts the tails of comets, and scours the surface of the Moon.

Would you believe, Earth is windy, too? Our own planet produces a breeze of electrified gas. It’s like the solar wind, only different, and it may have important implications for space weather on the Moon.

“Earth wind” comes from the axes of our planet. Every day, 24/7, fountains of gas shoot into space from the poles. The leakage is tiny compared to Earth’s total atmosphere, but it is enough to fill the magnetosphere with a riot of rapidly blowing charged particles. Ingredients include ionized hydrogen, helium, oxygen and nitrogen.

Once a month, the Moon gets hit by a blast of Earth wind. It happens around the time of the full Moon when Earth’s magnetic tail points like a shotgun toward the lunar disk. For 3 to 5 days, lunar terrain is bombarded by H⁺, He⁺, O⁺, N2⁺ and other particles. [“A New Form of Space Weather: Earth Wind,” Dr. Tony Phillips, Spaceweather.com]

Fascinating. And I wonder if those particles would constitute a hazard to any Moon-dwelling humans?

Earlier this week, three GOP Senators conferred with Trump’s defense team, and, as Steve Benen notes, this casts doubt on their legitimacy as members of the Senate:

Years old, still loved it:

I actually do not have a fascination with, a creepy need to stalk, Erick Erickson.

Really.

But his post today was a very strong example of his utter unconsciousness about his own side’s place in the cosmos. Going through the post, all you had to do was replace ‘cancel culture,’ the current worry trigger for the right, with the word abortion, and it applied equally well to the far right fringe.

Worse yet, it has applied for decades, through punitive & dishonest legislation, bad reasoning, barbaric threats, and assassinations. Cancel culture is, what, a couple of years old and already causing chatter on the left that it may be overreach? I have confidence that its excesses will either cause it to be modified or discarded; and if Critical Race Theory, from which I believe it springs, is really as flawed as Andrew Sullivan and other suggest, then liberal critiques will eventually banish it to the hinterlands, if not beyond, in due time.

Because that’s how the liberal tradition works. I have no such confidence in the conservative tradition as it stands now.

But here’s the creme de la creme of Erickson’s post:

In America, a socially conservative person should be allowed to live in a socially conservative area that bans abortion centers and does not have transgender bathroom access or its bakers compelled to bake cakes for gay weddings. In America, a socially liberal person should be allowed to live in a community that funds the local abortion clinic, has transgender bathrooms, and encourages the whole town to turn out and celebrate the gay wedding. The only exception to what some may perceive as intolerance is race because our nation explicitly fought a war over that issue and the right side prevailed and amended the constitution accordingly.

That some will read the prior paragraph and refuse to acknowledge the validity of each side being able to live in communities governed by majority cultural interest is why the United States will not stay united and the disproportionate power of the left to end careers and wipe out livelihoods for failure to adhere to their cultural orthodoxy is why the United States is not going to survive unless something changes.

There are so many things wrong here that it’s hard to know where to start.

Let’s begin with his accusations that the left will be responsible if the nation splits into pieces. Yet, what he describes, In America, a socially conservative person should be allowed to live in a socially conservative area that bans abortion centers and does not have transgender bathroom access or its bakers compelled to bake cakes for gay weddings …, is strongly congruent with separate nations – not one united nation. In other words, I want to split the United States without taking the blame.

Next, what advantage to the nation is having it split so strongly as he envisions? In particular, he mistakes his strong anti-abortion stand as being a positive attribute, and it’s not. Unequal rights will discourage free migration within the nation and lead to even more polarization, bringing on exaggeration, lies, and hatred on both sides.

Sound familiar?

We improve when we mix, borrow ideas freely, explore how changes to morality improve or hurt society. Rigid orthodoxy, which is the result of unequal rights, benefits those who scramble to the top and enforce that orthodoxy, but few others; society stultifies; and when they see other parts of the country doing better in spite of violating orthodoxy, hatred follows.

I just can’t quite believe Erickson seriously wrote that nonsense. It’s not April 1st, so it’s unlikely to be a joke. That he actually believes it is one of those things that makes me wonder if we have a shared intellectual understanding of the world.

Or if it’s complete shat.

There have been multiple reports in the media of defections from the Republican Party in the wake of the January 6th Insurrection, but there’s nothing like a graph to bring important developments to the fore.

This is reinforced by editorials such as this from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

The Senate impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump should be an opportunity for Missouri Sens. Roy Blunt and Josh Hawley to redeem themselves for blindly supporting a man whose conduct was indefensible. Instead, they continue bringing additional embarrassment to the state after having flirted with the abolition of democracy in favor of keeping a dictator wannabe in the White House.

Hawley, of course, is the Senate’s biggest cheerleader when it comes to asserting that Trump won the Nov. 3 election and that Trump shouldn’t be held accountable for directing a mob to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6. Blunt had the gall to tell reporters that, until a 13-minute video of the Capitol attack was shown to senators on Tuesday, he had never taken so much time to watch what occurred on that “truly a horrendous day.” Both voted against allowing the trial to proceed.

Missourians must not allow themselves to be fooled by the weak boilerplate defenses by Hawley and Blunt. Hawley tweeted on Tuesday: “Today Democrats launched their unconstitutional impeachment trial while President Biden cancels thousands of working class jobs across this country. Americans deserve better.” In fact, a bipartisan majority of senators have deemed the proceeding to be constitutional. And the attempt to divert attention to Biden, who has not canceled a single job, is pathetic but oh-so-typical of Hawley.

These are symptoms of the clash of morality systems. In one corner we have the morality of democracies, wherein we build our secular morality around truth, justice, and a vote per person. The rest is negotiable and contingent on how reality works out.

The other? It’s a quasi-religious authoritarianism, a semi-redundancy seeing as the Divine is rarely elected, and its representatives only somewhat more so. Not that I’m condemning religion in general, but only certain sects that have succumbed to the lure of worldly wealth, power, and prestige, and have melded the opposition to democratic (small-d) pillars inherent in their religions to their view of how the world should be run, despite, in the dominant case, admonitions in their theological texts against application of those very principles to worldly matters.

This is not a matter of utter clarity. The general voter, not particularly interested in the shades of gray, sausage grinder that is politics, may not recognize where the Republican Party has been headed. Indeed, outside of a few precocious members and ex-members, the Party itself didn’t realize that its toxic chemistry of fall-into-line and amateurism would lead to a Party that brays for an autocratic outcome, all in the name of, well, winning. Winning in the name of the Divine. Which leads to the consequence that Any behavior is acceptable in the Name of the Divine.

Editorials such as that of the Post-Dispatch seek to remind Senators far gone in the authoritarian morality system that the system in which they are flourishing is not the one they desire, and that to which they are aligned is not friendly to democracy. I fear such editorials will go for naught, at least so far as the Senators themselves are concerned; there may be more impact on voters, who may or may not be important in the future of the United States of America.

Why? Those Senators are so certain of their righteousness that they do not commit to ideals of democracy, but to the ideal that the Party must win. In this scenario, the desires of voters is ignored. We saw this in the pathetic lawsuit Texas v Pennsylvania.

But they fail to think ahead. Consider this description of yesterday’s Impeachment Trial proceedings from Benjamin Wittes and Tia Sewell:

Ted Lieu of California builds on this point by arguing that Trump’s behavior after the attack indicated a dangerous lack of remorse. Lieu states that “not even once” did Trump condemn the attack on the day it occurred, despite the pleas of numerous lawmakers who experienced the violence firsthand. Rather, when the president told insurrectionists to go home—three hours after the attack—he also stated “we love you” and repeated his false claims about a stolen election. Lieu claims that Trump was “eerily silent” on Jan. 7, until finally—nearly 30 hours after the attack—he released a video condemning the Capitol breach. But notably absent from this video, Lieu notes, was the instruction to never do it again. Nor has Trump shown any remorse or taken responsibility in the weeks since: The House managers show a video from Jan. 12, in which Trump states that his speech on Jan. 6 was “totally appropriate.”

DeGette describes how extremist groups were emboldened by Trump—warning that unless there is action now, “the violence is only just beginning.” According to U.S. intelligence community bulletins, she shows, there was a great increase in violent online rhetoric and credible threats following the Capitol breach. She covers the price in dollar terms to both state and federal governments associated with increased security measures following the riot and argues that constituents have also suffered from a lack of regular access to their representatives. DeGette also notes that experts who study domestic extremist violence in the U.S. have stated that the “perceived success” of Jan. 6 will foment future attacks, which pose a specific threat to racial, ethnic and religious minorities in the United States. [Lawfare]

Now what happens? I alluded to it here:

FLASH MOB: You stole your election! You stole your election!

[REPUBLICAN ELECTED] OFFICIAL: I did not!

FM: You stole your election! You stole your election!

OFFICIAL: I did not!

FM: PROVE IT, THEN! PROVE IT, THEN!

OFFICIAL: I don’t have to! You have no proof!

FM: JUST LIKE YOU DON’T ABOUT THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, YOU HYPOCRITICAL, LEG HUMPING, PANTS WETTER! WE DON’T NEED ANY!

Imagine that happening for every election. And then the flash mobs are replaced by violent mobs. And then, in 2024, candidate Cruz, smoothly thinking the Republican nomination for President is in the bag, is suddenly assaulted and torn apart by Hawley’s mob.

And then Hawley is never seen in public, seized as he is by terror at the death threats issued by Cruz’s partisans.

A scenario such as this should have been described to the Senate, a reminder to Cruz and Hawley that autocracies and theocracies are extremely dangerous, not only because of ambitious politicians, but to ambitious politicians. One of the great strengths of democracy is the peaceful transfer of power, so touted from the latest November until January 6th. The riot run by the ambitious and the wretched in Trump’s thrall attempted to destroy that tenet of democracy, but it only magnified its importance to those citizens – many in number – who are happy with democracy.

And so the decline in the popularity of the Republican Party. Gallup may try to make this seem a typical part of the ups and downs of the political parties:

Sub-40% favorable ratings for the Republican Party are not unusual. The last such measure was 38% in January 2019 amid the partial federal government shutdown related to a dispute over funding for Trump’s proposed southern border wall. From 2013 through 2018, the average favorable rating for the GOP was 39%.

In contrast to those generally weak ratings, in January 2020, a slim majority of Americans viewed the Republican Party favorably while Trump was in the process of being acquitted in his first impeachment trial, and the U.S. economy was strong.

The current GOP image reading is still significantly above the party’s historical low rating of 28% from October 2013, when disputes over funding the Affordable Care Act led to a partial government shutdown. Gallup also measured a low 31% reading for the GOP in December 1998 after Bill Clinton was impeached by the Republican-led House of Representatives.

But the Insurrection of January 6th is unique in modern American history. The fact that it has not been definitively rejected by the Republican Party marks the Party’s alleged adherence to democratic ideals as suspect, and as most Americans would prefer to live in a democracy rather than a theologically seasoned autocracy, I suspect the Republican Party will continue its descent into triviality.

What could stop it?

Determined leadership by the Republican leadership. Rep McCarthy (R-CA), House Minority Leader, has already definitively failed that test, acting like a toady for Trump since the Insurrection.

But Senator McConnell (R-KY), the leader of the GOP Senators, still has an opportunity to save his Party from diminishment and extinction. He’s reportedly still undecided as to whether he’ll vote guilty or innocent.

If he votes guilty, he leads most of the other GOP Senators into voting guilty as well. By repulsing Trump at long last, he communicates to the public that the Republican Party may be open to the morality of democracy, rather than than of authoritarianism – true or not.

If he votes innocent, then the independents and the reported thousands of Republican defectors will read that as an endorsement of the Insurrection, an endorsement of fallacious election challenges, an endorsement of the unimportance of truth and facts.

And they’ll vote accordingly.

It’s not fun, it’s not entertaining, but it’s grim and accurate:

Remember: Brian Sicknick deserves justice. pic.twitter.com/doBHaL05hO

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) February 10, 2021

It’s tragic that the Republican Party is expected to give President Trump yet another mulligan rather than punish President Trump, even the feeble punishment of banning him from public office – as if he’d ever win another election.

Another indictment of toxic team politics.

Erick Erickson still tries to promote moral equivalency:

All your bile and rage at them should be, in part, directed at the Democrats who decided to engage in emotional theater instead of having a real trial.

Are they subpoenaing Mike Pence as a witness? Nope.

The bison helmeted jackass? Nope.

The police officers? Nope.

They’re not having a trial and a year ago Chuck Schumer said not calling witnesses made it a sham.

This is Chuck Schumer’s sham.

Mitt Romney nearing the insurrectionists, saved by Officer Goodman.

Funny, but I saw witness testimony yesterday.

It showed insurrectionists breaking down fences.

It showed Vice President Pence making for shelter scant moments before the insurrectionists almost caught him.

It showed Senator Romney (R-UT) almost blundering into a group of insurrectionists, before Officer Goodman found and redirected him just moments before disaster would have struck.

Yes, security cameras are witnesses. Erickson may call out legal technicalities and insist a witness be human, or at least biological, but that is a distinction with meaning that he won’t like.

Why? Because the cameras are objective; humans are subjective and not necessarily honest, even under oath. If they were, what need would there be for cross-examination and penalties for perjury?

Indeed, are there penalties for perjury if, say, Senator Hawley was called to testify?

Cameras do have their problems, from deepfake tampering to low-fidelity recordings, as we often see on the local news. But, absent tampering, they do not skew their opinions: you see what they see.

So when Erickson attempts to turn purple with outrage: This is Chuck Schumer’s sham, I just have to laugh. Yes, the first impeachment lacked anything resembling witnesses, as even the transcript was an incomplete transcript, which left observers wanting to know what was omitted: perhaps a threat of a bombing run by US forces if the Ukrainian President didn’t deliver what Trump wanted? I merely speculate to show just what was obscured by that transcript.

The cameras, limited as they are, do not obscure.

Erickson is positively frantic to paint the Democrats as being morally equivalent to the Republicans, but, so far, it just doesn’t wash. The Senate is awash in the best of witness statements, and the Republicans’ failure to act on this mute, yet so eloquent, testimony will condemn them in the eyes of future Americans for their lack of devotion to the truth.

Senator Mike Lee (R-UT), in response to President Trump’s then-upcoming second impeachment trial:

Right wing pundit Erick Erickson finds it necessary to be careful when trying to speak truth:

What [Molly Ball’s Time Magazine] article actually does is show just how inept the Republicans were in 2020 across the board. Privately, when you talk to members of President Trump’s campaign team, including those who participated in the post-mortem of their election, they will admit there was a lot of ineptitude on the Republican side. Many of them are now screaming about a stolen election, which has provided them a smokescreen to avoid being held accountable for their incompetence. This has nothing to do with the President, but the people who surrounded the President and made a lot of money grifting off of President Trump’s campaign.

So long as you dare not criticize Dear Leader, you aren’t going to find truth.

Truth is, the buck stops at Trump. Truth is, Trump hired these people, and therefore he should have vetted them.

Truth is, Trump ran an amateur’s campaign and suffered an amateur’s fate.

And Erickson knows this. He exclaimed upon it once, even if I can’t find the damn quote.

Trump shot himself in the damn foot, like any amateur will, but Erickson doesn’t dare point to the hopping because you just don’t do that in the Party of That Idiot Trump.

“Don’t go near those who have had the COVID vaccine. They have become homosexuals.”

You could easily think that another far-right fringer, maybe a pastor like Paula White, has been heard from.

And you’d be wrong.

From the Jerusalem Post, this is Iranian Ayatollah Abbas Tabrizian. I don’t know more about him than what’s in the article, but this sort of statement is congruent with protecting his power structure, Islam, against encroachments. So’s this:

Tabrizian has a history of derogatory opinions about Western medicine. Last year, a video showed him burning Harrison’s Manual of Medicine and saying that “Islamic medicine” had made such books “irrelevant,” according to an article on the website of Radio Farda, the Iranian branch of the US-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty broadcast service.

And while this can be interpreted as an anti-Western, Islamic-centric screed, I think it’s more likely to be an attack on a far more dangerous, for Tabrizian, advance: that of rational, evidence-based medicine. The Islamic Republic of Iran, at least in the eyes of the eponymous power structure, should center its existence on Islam, not on anything else.

Because, in that way, power can be retained.

The real question is whether Tabrizian honestly believes a book that was written centuries ago can have any relevant medical knowledge. Can medicine based on “Islamic principles” compete with evidence-based medicine? I doubt it. The history of Christian, Islamic, even Traditional Chinese Medicine is that of grifting, not success.

And if Tabrizian goes looking for all of these new homosexuals, he won’t find them.

But this is a lesson for the United States. The nuttiness of the Christian far-right has been contained to the obscure corners of the country, so far. For four short years we were somewhat exposed to what happens if a President lets Christian grifters manipulate him, principally through the hydroxychloroquine debacle.

Tabrizian’s spew is a lesson to the United States why putting religious grifters or zealots in charge is a fundamentally bad idea.

If you sit on your own voodoo doll, can you ever get up again?
tobi711

From “Arizona Senate votes to not hold Maricopa County board in contempt,” from the AP, KTAR News:

In a surprise move Monday, the Arizona Senate voted to not hold the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors in contempt for failing to turn over voting machines and ballots from the November election.

The vote was expected to pass with a Republican majority, but GOP Rep. Paul Boyer voted against the resolution, evening the tallies at 15 each and killing the resolution.

If the vote would have passed, the five-member board consisting of just one Democrat could have been subject to immediate arrest.

And I’ll tell you, that Democrat is working really damn hard.

Still, it’s a troubling story of Republican shenanigans in Arizona, where the fringe-right doesn’t comprehend that it’s ideology has been rejected by Arizona residents.

Phytomining:

The planting (and subsequent harvesting) of vegetation that selectively concentrate specific metals from the environment into their tissues, for the primary or subsidiary purpose of commercial exploitation of the extracted metal. [Wiktionary]

Noted in “Plants that suck metals from the soil can be farmed to make our tech,” Michael Allen, NewScientist (9 January 2021):

One incident that helped draw that attention was [Anthony] van der Ent’s discovery in Borneo. The plant’s sap turned out to contain a whopping 25 per cent nickel by weight. “It is the best candidate metal crop we have ever found,” he says.

The first thing he did on seeing this plant was ask the park ranger where it came from. He couldn’t remember. So van der Ent offered local people a reward if they could tell him – to no avail. It wasn’t until 2015, a few years after the initial discovery, that he chanced upon a clump of the plants growing on a nearby hillside. From there, he began experimenting with farming metal, otherwise known as agromining or phytomining, as an environmentally friendly alternative to mining. He even named his shrub Phyllanthus rufuschaneyi in homage to the inventor of agromining.

If you go to the state of Sabah in Borneo these days, you can find what van der Ent calls the “first tropical metal farm”. There, he and his colleagues are growing that nickel-loving woody shrub. Each year, they coppice the plants, pulp them and extract the metal. In 2019, they reported a yield of 250 kilograms of nickel a year – currently worth almost $4000 – from each hectare of land.

I’ve gotta wonder how long a field can be productive. Or does the metal move upward somehow?

This NewScientist (9 January 2021) article on using bread as a scaffolding for growing new human organs contains an even more startling revelation:

While bread-based tissue engineering might sound rather implausible, an even more unlikely sounding project based on one of [Andrew Pelling at the University of Ottawa]’s plant materials is looking very promising: treating spinal injuries with asparagus.

Pelling’s team has shown that rats whose spinal cords have been completely severed can recover some movement after implanting capillaries extracted from asparagus. The microchannels guide the growth of axons from nerve cells, allowing some connections to be remade.

Pelling stresses that it isn’t a miracle cure and other teams have achieved similar results in rats. Yet the big advantage is that it doesn’t require using living cells, making it much cheaper and simpler than many other approaches. In October, the US Food and Drug Administration designated the implant as a “breakthrough device”, which speeds up the process of beginning human trials.

I wonder how quickly someone will take offense at the use of asparagus to repair damage to the human body. Surely someone will be appalled.

Always treat your monsters informally.

How To Make A Monster (1958) is a minor B-list gem of a movie. Blessed with superior B&W cinematography, this is the story of Pete Dumond, master makeup artist with a specialty in the traditional monsters such as the Werewolf, and his war with the corporation taking over Dumond’s employer, American International Studios (look for the in-joke). NBN Associates, the buyers, are not interested in continuing the monster movie tradition; they want the physical assets, but the people? Only those who are applicable to producing their style of movies. Dumond does not fit in.

But Dumond has other plans.

Dumond’s secret weapon? Well, let’s just say he’s found an improvement to his art that enhances the performance of the actors underneath the fur, feathers, and face plasters. Under his terse direction, the monsters become a menace not just to the movie heroines, but to anyone in their path.

And there’s even more lurking under the affable Dumond exterior. Indeed, that which bubbles under his balding pate is enough to consume everything. But will it?

Competent performances and story round out this low-key movie. I won’t say it’s wonderful, as some of the horror didn’t really connect for us, but it surprised us in a delightful manner, which was perhaps reflective of our low expectations.

Enjoy!