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The leading lickspittle of the United States Senate, Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC). See the second video.

"Everything should be on the table" — Lindsey Graham won't rule out that Republican legislatures should invalidate the election results and (presumably) award their electoral votes to Trump pic.twitter.com/ykNdFCicZW

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 6, 2020

Yep, he endorses throwing out the ballots and letting the legislature decide. He accepts Hannity’s claim that mass illegalities are occurring – because, of course, the GOP has no lawyers with which to file suits – without objection, and goes from there to endorsing his hero, President Trump.

Good lord, the lizard people really have a good grip on this guy’s brain.

And my apologies if I slathered the sarcasm on a little thickly.

Courtesy Right Wing Watch:

Presidential spiritual adviser Paula White is currently leading an impassioned prayer service in an effort to secure Trump's reelection. pic.twitter.com/hCSRh84d6g

— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) November 5, 2020

She’s quite the con man, isn’t she? She takes her audience out of the rational zone by pounding on their ears in order to deactivate any thinking, a well known practice, and invites them into group emotional response that suggests they are the Chosen, and, well, it actually makes me a little nauseous just thinking about it. And there’s a lot of people far better qualified to analyze the deceptive, manipulative qualities of her presentation, so if you want more operational analysis, I suggest you seek them out.

But I’m not here to poke fun at her – she’s actually a consummate professional, from what I can see, in the hallowed profession of grifter – or at her audience, or to pity the latter, or even to predict her comeuppance if Trump does lose the election, as appears to be happening this afternoon. In the magical realm of evangelical Christianity, she’ll blame it on Satan, whip the crowd into a frenzy, and suck some more cash out of them in the name of defeating Joe Biden’s – or his supposed puppet-masters’ – agenda.

No, my question is this – how do you rescue her congregation? When I said magical realm, I wasn’t joking. Religion & divinity, by its very nature, breaks the laws of nature and of logic; that’s how you identify a divinity. That magical realm, where ordinary common sense and logic are ignored in favor of whatever it takes to keep the emotional self happy, makes it very difficult to come up with effective arguments for the dissuasion of followers from their path.

Only when something like a plague impacts the followers will doubts be raised, or when another power-hungry cleric begins efforts to poach members.

So, OK, Biden may have won. That doesn’t have much impact on an evangelical movement bent on following its magical thinking that tells them that they’re OK just as they are, rather than invest in the hard work of rationality and self-improvement. Will we simply have to wait for the evangelical demographics to thin the ranks? Younger generations, by and large, are reportedly repelled by the White Evangelical antics of late.

Or is there some way to pry them lose from the spiritual cocaine that Paula White and her colleagues offer?

Max Boot is deflated by the election results:

That Trump did so well in the election after doing so badly as president is mind-boggling and disturbing. So too is the fact that Republicans seem to have paid little price for allowing him to ride roughshod over the Constitution, lock kids in cages and spread the poison of nativism and racism. Embattled Republican senators such as Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.), Joni Ernst (Iowa), John Cornyn (Tex.) and Steve Daines (Mont.) seem to have been rewarded rather than punished for their sickening sycophancy toward Trump. After having spent the past four years as Trump’s enforcer and enabler, Sen. Mitch McConnell (Ky.) will remain in office and probably remain majority leader, with the ability to frustrate any agenda that a President Biden would try to enact.

The conclusion is simple if disheartening: Demagoguery and dishonesty work. Trump ran what may be the sleaziest presidential campaign ever — denying the reality of covid-19 while spreading it with his rallies; lying about Biden’s agenda, acuity and ethics; spewing personal abuse and vitriol — and yet he produced a better result than most pollsters and pundits had expected. His dishonesty increased as the election drew near — yet just as in 2016, he won late-deciding voters. [WaPo]

Boot may largely be correct, but I have to wonder how many of those voters are Trumpists, and how many of those voters were, perhaps reluctantly, obeying the GOP dictate: thou shall vote for the Party nominees, no matter how terrible.

Regular readers know that I loathe and despise team politics, as a rule, as destructive to the fabric of the Republic. That rule permits more corrupt and incompetent nominees into the ranks of the elect than just about any other rule of politics of which I can think. A little adherence to the Party religious tenets (anti-abortion, absolutist gun rights, anti-regulation, anti-taxes), a little tap dance, and who gives a shit about the would-be candidate’s character, experience, or competency? For the faithful, adherence to the quasi-religious-tenets immunizes the candidate from incompetency and corruption.

We’ve now experienced the results of that rule, so beneficial for the would-be autocrat.

I’m not really disputing Boot’s right to despondency; the moral failures of those who voted for Trump deserve to be treated with deep concern, especially given the pack of grifters who have personally supported and benefited from Trump for the last four years. But I am saying that the operational nature of the GOP deserves a great deal more inspection than it currently gets, particularly by those who’ll eventually seek to replace the GOP with a responsible conservative party.

For those readers that remember my remarks on the Mississippi electoral system, it looks like a referendum change has passed:

Mississippi voted 78-22 for Measure 2, which repeals a provision of the state’s Jim Crow-era constitution that deliberately penalizes Black voters and the Democrats they support in elections for statewide office. The new law requires candidates for posts like governor or attorney general to take a majority of the vote in the general election in order to win outright; if no one hits this threshold, a runoff would take place between the top-two vote-getters. [The Daily Kos]

That sounds a helluva lot more fair than the old one. And, yes, I was wrong – the citizenry did manage to make the change, overwhelmingly. Yay for them! Shame on me for doubting them!

Rapporteur:

A rapporteur is a person who is appointed by an organization to report on the proceedings of its meetings. The term is a French-derived word.

For example, Dick Marty was appointed rapporteur by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe to investigate extraordinary rendition by the CIA. [Wikipedia]

The example seems vaguely at odds with the definition.

Noted in “The Progeny Of A Fecund Racket,” Paul Fidalgo, The Morning Heresy:

Ahmed Shaheed, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief, called upon world governments to “repeal all laws that undermine the exercise of the human rights to freedom of religion or belief,” warning about “trajectories of violence and even atrocity crimes.”

But Troll only because Elephant already has a primary meaning in this context.

Here’s what’s bothering me, starting with Steve Benen on the left:

It’s not yet clear why so many polls painted a misleading picture this election season. The industry leaders will no doubt spend the next several months scrutinizing the problem from every possible direction, just as they did after a similar miss in 2016, and try to make adjustments ahead of the next cycle.

But there’s no denying the fact that as Election Day 2020 comes and goes, pollsters confront the most significant credibility problem the industry has ever had. For the foreseeable future, every time a new poll is released, a significant percentage of the political world will pause and say, “Yeah, but….”

And Erick Erickson (email) on the right:

Lastly, there are some really good pollsters out there. Trafalgar, who I have been deeply skeptical of, is coming off way better than a lot of mainstream media pollsters. Ann Selzer in Iowa continues to outperform everyone. But yes, increasingly it is clear the polling industry is not going to survive. Also, I think the traditional media is probably going to die off too. It is clear that the American press last lost touch with those they supposedly report on.

We are in the realignment I expected would happen, but it is happening faster than I expected and the media and polling industry, so inside a secular progressive bubble, probably won’t hold up well even as the country comes out on the other side just fine.

And what does neither acknowledge? Voting machine subversion. I don’t know why Benen doesn’t bring it up, but, for Erickson, it would ruin his story of how the world works, so he ignores it.

But, as an engineer, I look at this and I ask What are all the ways we can explain a situation where professional pollsters, many with decades of experience, could be this wrong?

There are many interesting explanations. Maybe there were undetected technical problems with their approach to polling, such as not surveying certain groups adequately. Maybe their sample sizes were too small.

Perhaps, as was reported in the media, enough Trump supporters simply lied when they were called. This would fit neatly into the cult of the Father of Lies, and, as an aside, if you run into someone who is boasting about that, do not do business with them as a matter of self-preservation. Quite frankly, you can’t trust them to honor their word. If you’re feeling adventurous, tell that to their face. Remind them that honesty is a core American value. Maybe take a large person with you when you do that.

Maybe there’s other explanations besides subversion and Erickson’s potentially self-serving remark, but let’s skip those because I can’t think of them, and let me get back to the point.

When it comes to subversion, all I have are circumstantial observations, and no solid legally valid evidence. So? Many investigations that end in legal action begin with circumstantial evidence, compiled by investigators with investigative legal powers. That makes it worth talking about this. Let’s list them:

1. The polls turned out to be off, in the direction of the Republicans.
2. Most jurisdictions use voting machines of one make or another.
3. Both hardware and software are compromisable, either through malicious external entities or corrupt internal design. To the latter point, I mean both hardware and software backdoors, which can be impossible to detect through simple examination. The former point has more meat here. Or you can look at the work of Dr. Beth Clarkson, who was denied the chance to verify deliberate cheating in the 2016 primaries in Kansas.
4. Most or all voting machine manufacturers are owned by Republicans, last I looked. Has this changed? This is more difficult to determine than one might think, because the age of the voting machines in use are the determining factor, not the current owner. I don’t have access to that data.
5. Most or all voting machines are legally protected from examination of their internals. Sheer madness. And, in at least one isolated case of examination, the design was described as “… this voting system is far below even the most minimal security standards applicable in other contexts.”
6. And the USPS, responsible for delivery of mailed ballots, is run by a Republican, recently appointed to the job, whose business acumen resulted in degradation of service. What happened there? Why, Federal Judge Emmet Sullivan has ordered USPS to conduct sweeps to find the location of ballots recorded as received by USPS, but not delivered – and USPS refused. According to WaPo, 300,000 ballots are involved. I sincerely hope someone ends up in the hoosegow for this one.

Right, there’s nothing legally actionable in there, excepting perhaps #6, which is really not relevant to my thesis – I mention it only for completeness. But, besides #6, they all point in the same direction, don’t they? Subversion of the voting machines is certainly congruent with the situation. Nothing proven – but all very, very interesting.

There are three conclusions to draw here:

1. SCOTUS should grant an exception to proprietary protections for any machine involved in the voting process. This won’t happen, of course, because the conservatives control SCOTUS, and the sanctity of the free-market and its productions will not be violated, at least not by conservatives. The universal utility of the free market is a conservative religious tenet on the order of the divinity of Christ. But it is, in my opinion, a major mistake that we use private machines to conduct a critical piece of political public business.
2. A detailed analysis of the areas of the country in which polling was egregiously off, cross-referenced with the make & model of the voting machines used in those areas, should be performed. It’s quite possible that only one manufacturer is cheating, and this would be clarify who needs to be examined – and possibly sued.
3. Stop using voting machines. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Just stop it.

Corrupt people are adders of corruption. Corrupt computers are multipliers of corruption.

Which do you want?

From Jacob Lupfer:

Trump’s coterie of “faith advisers” is mostly made up of hucksters, charlatans, publicity hogs and grifters. They are a peripatetic parody of themselves, and not one member of the Trumpist clergy offers a religious message I would take seriously for a moment. They sold their birthright for a mess of pottage and ought to take the gospel of Jesus Christ out of their mouths until they repent of the damage they’ve done to his name. [Religion News Service]

Which will never happen. They defined success as wealth and influence, and they got it. Only their congregations are the losers, and most of them are getting something out of the deal, or otherwise they wouldn’t stick around.

But those followers’ support of President Trump marks them as manifestly failing any test of morality.

Matan Shelomi is out having fun:

On March 18, 2020, the American Journal of Biomedical Science & Research published my paper claiming that eating a bat-like Pokémon sparked the spread of COVID-19. This paper, “Cyllage City COVID-19 outbreak linked to Zubat consumption,” blames a fictional creature for an outbreak in a fictional city, cites fictional references (including one from author Bruce Wayne in Gotham Forensics Quarterly on using bats to fight crime), and is cowritten by fictional authors such as Pokémon’s Nurse Joy and House, MD. Nonetheless, four days after submission, editor Catherine Nichols was “cheerful to inform” me via email that it had “received positive review comments” and was accepted for publication.

It’s not the only fake paper on Pokémon I’ve had published or accepted for publication, covering creatures from Pikachu to Porygon. Some would argue that editors cannot recognize Pokémon names, but lines in the text such as “a journal publishing this paper does not practice peer review and must therefore be predatory” or “this invited article is in a predatory journal that likely does not practice peer review” would have tipped off anyone who bothered to read the articles. These papers did not slip in under the radar; they were welcomed in blindly. [TheScientist]

How do they make money? By billing the authors for publishing their papers, for one thing. If they’re smart, they won’t pay. But I wonder if they pay those who cite their paper. You’d think no one would do that, yet …

To make matters worse, my Pokémon-inspired paper on the novel coronavirus has already been cited. A physicist based in Tunisia published “The COVID-19 outbreak’s multiple effects,” which claimed that COVID-19 was human-made and is treatable with “provincial herbs,” in another predatory journal, The International Journal of Engineering Research and Technology. He not only cited my article, but also cited one of my made-up references, “Signs and symptoms of Pokérus infection,” as the paper that first identified SARS-CoV-2. When I asked the author how this happened, he failed to see any problem with citing a paper he never read while writing a paper outside his field, and was unaware of the difference between open access and predatory journals. The difference—editing and peer review—is critical: when it comes to public health, fake journals are a real danger.

Of course, if the person doing the citing thinks they can turn their little scam into a profitable venture, then the fee for citing – if it exists – is merely a one-time fee for buying credibility.

I wish I could say this is all delusional, but seeing industries such as homeopathy and acupuncture fleecing their customers of their wealth year after year after year, I am not surprised.

Wolves and sheep. That’s our nature. Which are you?

He just wanted to lick them.

What started as a peaceful morning of kayaking turned into a close call for two friends at Avila Beach.
Video shows the pair appearing to almost be swallowed by a humpback whale.https://t.co/dJZulNZedN pic.twitter.com/JEyZibxjxi

— FOX26 News (@KMPHFOX26) November 3, 2020

I can only say that, whatever the results, I’m deeply disappointed nearly half the country. They chose to vote for a President, and his enablers, who is, quite frankly, a chronic liar, cheat, and terrible human being. They did so in preference to a candidate who is widely acknowledged to be a deeply decent man, well-informed on matters relevant to the Executive, with an able backup in Harris.

I don’t say this as a partisan. Not only am I an independent, I have never felt this way before. Romney, McCain, Bush, Dole, Bush, Reagan … those were policy elections. I would certainly disagree over policy, but that’s expected, because governing is hard. If they won, they won, and I wished them well.

When it’s an election over morality, the decision should be easy. Every Trump voter, every voter who voted for a Republican who has supported Trump, failed the simple test of morality.

And it’s a damn shame. But, if Joe Biden is indeed elected, then he and Kamala Harris can spend two years demonstrating responsible governance. They and the House can formulate policies to benefit the American public, especially those who didn’t vote for them, and then dare the Senate to reject the.

And then comes – sigh – 2022.

They should have thought of that before they went there to do research:

When scientists discover a new species, they are allowed to make up its binomial (Latin) name. This results in interesting names, like Scaptia beyonceae, a horse fly that was named after Beyonce, or Laboulbenia quarantenae, which got its name because it was discovered during quarantine. Scientists from Aberystwyth University in Wales, UK, decided to keep it simple and name one of the species of myxobacteria after where they found it. The only problem: it was found in Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, giving this species the name Myxococcus llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogochensis. [Massive Science]

No offense to my Welsh readers, but I didn’t want to study that microbe anyways.

Long-time readers may remember my loathing for voting machines, and that I’d prefer to see a legion of volunteers doing the counting manually. This Politico report changes my opinion not a whit:

“We’re going to wind up with a thousand court cases that cannot just be resolved by just going into the software and checking to see what happened, because it’s proprietary,” said Ben Ptashnik, the co-founder of the National Election Defense Coalition, a bipartisan advocacy group that pushes Congress to reform election security.

In most elections, the intellectual-property laws that surround the machinery of America’s electoral system prove inconsequential in determining who won or lost a campaign, and software isn’t central to most contested-election scenarios, such as late-arriving ballots or issues with access to polling locations. But in instances where the vote tally itself is in question, analysts could need access to voting machines’ underlying code to determine if potential security flaws, errors or even purposeful tampering are behind the irregularities. And this year, with widespread fears of contested ballots, recounts and the potential for weeks of legal challenges that threaten to undermine public faith in the results, those IP laws could prove decisive.

“You know how Apple fights against law enforcement coming in and going into their iPhone software? Well, you’d be in the same position,” said Ptashnik. “You might have to go all the way to the Supreme Court to get permission to get into proprietary software.”

Even if we had access to the hardware and software for full inspection, it’d not really be enough. Proving software is correct is a difficult proposition, and in all likelihood these companies aren’t using languages that lend themselves to automated proofs.

Hardware is it’s own ugly game.

As are backdoors in both realms.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: People are adders, computers are multipliers. Sure, people can be corrupted – but we know, or knew, how to keep a vote uncorrupted. A single counter can only affect a few votes, and a little redundancy will catch them at their game. At higher levels, it’s a matter of keeping an eye on management – and that’s what party lawyers can do.

But it’s a rare party lawyer who can say This machine is miscounting!

Pronk:

When fleeing from a predator, gazelles often perform a distinctive stiff-legged vertical leap known as “pronking” or “stotting.” This can seem strange, since these high bounces into the air make the gazelle more visible to predators, and also take up time and energy that could be dedicated to faster, more direct movement away from their pursuer. …

Scientists have considered several possible explanations for this, such as alerting other members of their herd to the danger or trying to avoid an ambush in tall grass. Research on Thomson’s gazelles, however, suggests pronking is a form of communication from gazelles to their predators. It may be a behavior known in evolutionary biology as an “honest signal,” in which a gazelle leaps to show off its own general fitness, potentially discouraging the predator by demonstrating how hard it will be to catch. [“8 Facts You Might Not Know About Gazelles,” Russell McLendon, Treehugger]

Ambitious Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) may have just thrown away his shot at the White House – or even keeping his Senator’s seat in purplish Florida:

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) at last night's rally on the Texas Trump caravan that menacingly surrounded Biden bus:

"We love what they did, but here's the thing they don't know: We do that in Florida every day. I love seeing the boat parades … We thank all the great patriots…" pic.twitter.com/kRaLcW60jn

— The Recount (@therecount) November 2, 2020

The danger of playing to your base is alienating all those other voters, and this is an alienating move.

2022 is not far enough away for voters, or opponents, to forget about this endorsement of an act of intimidation.

As anyone paying attention knows, there are concerns that Trump will attempt to delay or confuse the vote counting in various states, in a far-fetched attempt to steal the election. He’s also expressed disinterest in a peaceful transfer of power if he loses.

So let’s setup a scenario here.

As is probable, let’s assume Democrat Mark Kelly wins the special election in Arizona.

Fairly improbably, but possible, Democrat Rafael Warnock wins the special election in Georgia.

Special election winners are seated immediately. This brings the Senate to 51-49 before Jan 21 – probably well before it.

And then there’s a new corruption scandal on the horizon – which will be known as the influence peddling scheme concerning the Turkish bank Halkbank:

If the New York Times’s story about the Justice Department’s handling of the case of a Turkish bank—and President Trump’s interference in that case—had broken any other week, it would be a very big deal. A week before the election, with the country inured to the president’s propensity to abuse law enforcement power, it has barely merited a yawn.

The case is worth your time.

Recall that back in June, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Geoffrey Berman, was dismissed abruptly under somewhat confusing circumstances. Attorney General William Barr announced that Berman had stepped down from his position—only for Berman himself to deny having resigned. Berman then refused to leave until President Trump himself issued a letter firing him, after which Berman announced that he would depart from his job with the expectation that his deputy would “continue to safeguard the Southern District’s enduring tradition of integrity and independence.” The strange chain of events, including why the attorney general was so eager to be rid of the U.S. attorney, has never been fully explained. [Lawfare]

Suppose, at 51-49, Trump is being recalcitrant and pulling his usual bully shit. Speaker Pelosi, with an even larger majority incoming (but not seated) than before, calls up Senator Schumer (D-NY) and Senate Majority Leader (R-KY), who will probably survive reelection, and lays it out:

1. Trump is shredding our nation.
2. Trump is destroying the Republican Party.
3. Trump is selling influence (see Halkbank, above), which reflects poorly on the Republican Party as well, especially with 2022 already on the horizon.

What to do about it?

Lightning impeachment. Seventeen Republican Senators is a long ways to go, but it’s not as improbable as it seems.

Impeachment articles can be drawn up in a hurry, if Pelosi so wishes it. They can be delivered to the Senate within a day or two. SCOTUS cannot save President Trump, only the Senate GOP members can save him.

And many of them are not happy with him. They see fellow Party members voting against him. And against them.

And some of the incumbents, besides those already lost in Arizona and Georgia, will also have lost, such as Perdue (also of Georgia – it’s the two-fer state), Gardner (R-CO), Daines (R-MT), Ernst (R-IA), Robertson (R-KA – he’s retiring, actually, but having nothing to lose but his Party, he may still be interested), and Graham (R-SC), all looking for revenge on the failure in the White House. In the Senate until Jan 21, it’s entirely possible that they, and a few Senators who were not up for reelection, just might be willing to turn on the Curse of the Republican Party.

So perhaps McConnell twists some arms, collects some promises – and then he, House Minority Leader Senator Schumer (R-NY), and Pelosi, after some horse-trading, compose a letter telling Trump to peacefully cooperate or face immediate dismissal.

A long-shot? Sure! But speculating about the possible is part of what gets me through these tension-filled times. And it would be quite entertaining if it came down to actual impeachment.

The senior Republican Party attorney, Benjamin Ginsberg, remarking on frenzied claims of voting fraud:

Nearly every Election Day since 1984 I’ve worked with Republican poll watchers, observers and lawyers to record and litigate any fraud or election irregularities discovered.

The truth is that over all those years Republicans found only isolated incidents of fraud. Proof of systematic fraud has become the Loch Ness Monster of the Republican Party. People have spent a lot of time looking for it, but it doesn’t exist. [WaPo]

If anyone would know, he would. I always like retrograde opinions from knowledgeable people.

David French, a NeverTrumper, discovers the pleasures of being a political independent:

On the surface, this feels like a hard road to walk in a highly polarized time. And it can be. There’s an immense comfort in a sense of political belonging, especially if you live in a deep-blue or deep-red region. It can be personally difficult to chart a different path.

But there are deep rewards. First, it liberates you from uncomfortable and destructive associations and arguments. While the Bible promises Christians that they’ll face challenges and sometimes-fierce opposition in their lives, it is vastly better to face opposition for the things you actually believe and the values you actually hold rather than being forced to align with an ideological and political “package” you do not want to purchase.

Second, it opens up opportunities for unlikely friendships and unexpected relationships. It changes your posture towards the world to one that welcomes allies case-by-case. It cultivates a posture of openness and fellowship.

Simply by being an independent, one can influence friends, even strangers, who’ve retreated into Party membership and partisanship. But you must be prepared with sophisticated arguments, willingness to concede points, an open mind for new knowledge, and a thoughtful demeanor. But then, being an independent means building your own opinions and your own definitions of acceptance.

For the partisan who has been having doubts on either side of the line, being an independent is a viable course that lets you keep your intellectual integrity intact. It means that you and I don’t have to vote for someone whose competency is in doubt, just because they’ve been picked by the Party; it means I can consider the universe of choices and pick the one that I think will be best for their desired position for the term.

It’s good to see an influential former straight-line Republican voter evolve a more sophisticated approach to being a citizen – and implicitly reject team politics.

Some ornamental cabbage from a couple of weeks ago.

Probably gone now.

When you get that first uncomfortable feeling that you’ll soon need full access to the bathroom. Remember the lawyer dude in Jurassic Park?

Monster Island (2019) may not have had any real discernible theme, certainly no stars, and not even Godzilla, and yet this story of what a hard driving marine mining entrepreneur discovers on the floor of the ocean, amidst the manganese nodules he seeks, is unexpectedly charming.

And what does he find? A kaiju, a monstrously huge, tentacled, fiery creature that traps the mining CEO and the crew of their submersible craft when they investigate the sudden disappearance of their remotely controlled probe. As they ride out their situation, the Australian Coast Guard intervenes via ship and submarine, much to the woe of the Coast Guard, the kaiju – and its young.

But the miners are not without craft, seeking to find ways to destroy their foe. But when an attempt goes awry in unforeseen ways, a government inspector, along for the ride, who happens to be a geomythologist – a rather neat portmanteau – suggests bringing in an expert on kaiju myths, who directs them to Monster Island.

Because that’s where the kaiju killer … exists.

It all sounds silly, and some of it is. For quite a while, nary an Australian accent is to be heard. The physics and the biology beg for hoots of laughter. The reclusive expert on myths is given some bad dialogue. And, yet, it’s an earnest, almost charming, movie. Given a set of ridiculous assumptions about kaiju in the world, it quite calmly follows the logic, both physical and emotional, to its end point. It doesn’t hesitate to sacrifice a character to emphasize the serious situation in which they find themselves. The characters change in believable ways, and, even more importantly, they’re not cardboard cutouts. My personal favorite is the grizzled French captain of the rental boat used by the miners for transporting their, for he has a fine gift of subtle sarcasm.

The story comes to an abrupt end, in fact such an abrupt end that I wonder if they ran over-budget and had to prematurely terminate what could have been a truly messy kaiju fight. But if you’re in the mood for some big monsters trodding the boards, as it were, you may enjoy this uneven effort.

I know I’d watch a sequel.

In physics, a half-life is the time it takes half of a homogenuous group of unstable atoms to decay.. But in society? Take a guess as to how much longer the QAnon phenomenon to be, well, half way to disappearing.

Yeah, I don’t know, either. But if you guessed around maybe five more years – it first appeared in October 2017 – I think you’re way short of the mark, in light of this article by Amarnath Amarasingam and Marc-André Argentino on conspiracy theorists:

Rationalization is now seen by researchers as the most important factor in whether a group survives prophetic failure. Groups can do this in at least four ways:

1. Spiritualization: the group states that what was initially thought of as a visible, real-world occurrence did happen, but it was something that took place in the spiritual realm.
2. Test of Faith: the group states that the prophecy was never going to happen, but is in fact a test of faith: a way for the “divine” to weed out true believers from those unworthy.
3. Human Error: the group argues that it’s not the case that the prophecy was wrong, but that followers had read the signs incorrectly.
4. Blame others: the group argues that they themselves never stated that the prophecy was going to happen, but that this was how outsiders interpreted their statements.

The third strategy—reaffirmation—is also one used by several groups discussed in previous research. In this approach, the group brushes aside the failure of prophecy and reaffirms the value of the group, the benefits of membership, and doubles down on the importance of their journey on the path of truth. [Religion Dispatches]

As a big rationalizer myself – in common with most of humanity, I suspect – as well as an investor, this makes sense. Once that initial substantial investment is made, whether it’s a financial matter or a belief system, it’s hard, so hard to walk away. From social prestige within the group to the simple belief that you are privy to secret knowledge, QAnon has several features that attract and hold believers.

And will so continue, frantically rationalizing, no matter how many QAnon promises and prophecies fail. It’s much like the charismatic sect leader who proclaims the failure of his prophecy means his followers have prayed away disaster. It’s ridiculous, but nearly all of his, or her, sect members will buy it with hardly a blink. The alternative, of course, is to think themselves fools.

Based on this reading and experience with hard core believers of other conspiracy theories – and I include religious sects in that list for analytical reasons – I will guess QAnon will hang on for at least twenty years.

And possibly as many as fifty years.

For the next five years, they will be a potent force. We will soon have a QAnon believer in Congress, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a couple more are elected in 2022. After five years of lunacy, incompetency, and failed QAnon promises, though, I expect QAnon will start a long, long slide into oblivion. Hopefully, no one will be killed because of any associated ravings.

First and foremost for most Trump-gaggers has been then assault on American democracy by Trump and the merry band of gerrymanderers and voter suppression teams that preceded him. But there are other worries, such as the assault on the balance between religious “freedom” (is it a freedom to inflict one’s beliefs on another via the legal system?) and the secular system deriving from the Establishment Clause. Or the disregard of science when its conclusions were not politically convenient. Towards these two, the Center for Inquiry (CFI), a free-thinkers organization, has developed a handy timeline and published it for all. Naturally, CFI’s peculiar concerns play a part in such a timeline, but I tend to consider that all to the good. To the right, I present just a portion of the timeline, without working links. If you’re looking for a handy summation of just how much Trump was manipulated by the right – or, if you prefer, how much he championed their causes, earnestly or not – this is a good place to start.

Phantasmagoria:

Phantasmagoria (American pronunciation (help·info), also fantasmagorie, fantasmagoria) was a form of horror theatre that (among other techniques) used one or more magic lanterns to project frightening images such as skeletons, demons, and ghosts onto walls, smoke, or semi-transparent screens, typically using rear projection to keep the lantern out of sight. Mobile or portable projectors were used, allowing the projected image to move and change size on the screen, and multiple projecting devices allowed for quick switching of different images. In many shows the use of spooky decoration, total darkness, (auto-)suggestive verbal presentation, and sound effects were also key elements. Some shows added all kinds of sensory stimulation, including smells and electric shocks. Even required fasting, fatigue (late shows) and drugs have been mentioned as methods of making sure spectators would be more convinced of what they saw. The shows started under the guise of actual séances in Germany in the late 18th century, and gained popularity through most of Europe (including Britain) throughout the 19th century. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “So, while we’re waiting . . . will Mike Pence ever be president?” Ben Terris, WaPo:

There won’t be any boat parades for Pence, but not all roads to the White House go through a marina. He might not call for the jailing of his political foes, but he might well find success in selling Trump’s phantasmagoria of “American carnage” — antifa mobs, police abolitionists, immigrant caravans, a new Red Menace — to voters who are more comfortable with a milder messenger.

This looks interesting:

An AI system can produce magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans with only a quarter of the data normally required, which could speed up the scanning process.

MRIs are created by placing a person inside a machine that scans the body and are often used to image brain development or muscle and tissue injuries. The speedy AI-based system, called FastMRI, was developed by researchers at Facebook AI and NYU Langone. It was trained on thousands of images gathered from 242 people.

The team then used the new system to create MRI scans of 108 people’s knees using 75 per cent less data taken during the scan to generate the finished image. The AI reconstruction uses less actual data, resulting in less time in an MRI machine. It manages this by filling in the “gaps” based on the images it was trained on.

The team then gave the 108 FastMRI scans to six radiologists, five of whom couldn’t distinguish them from MRI scans obtained using the traditional method. [NewScientist, paywall]

I get to spend another 45 minutes in an MRI machine in order to check how a cyst on my pituitary gland is changing, if at all, after pandemic vaccines are developed and approved, so something like this is interesting, if too late to reduce in my particular case.

But I do worry that the data of interest will reside in the gaps filled in by the machine learning algorithm. They don’t really address that possibility in this relatively short article.

I’ve been mulling Erick Erickson’s missive of yesterday and what it reveals about the far-right, but I’m not really sure what to pull out of it that he might acknowledge. Here’s the first paragraph that caught my attention:

I voted straight Republican this year except for my local sheriff and district attorney, two positions I do not think should be partisan anyway. I would not vote for a politician who supports abortion rights. Abortion is a euphemism for legally sanctioned murder. I would not vote for Joe Biden, a man who I think actually is nice, but whose policies are terrible and will wreck our recovering economy.

The abortion position remains an unreasoning emotional position. I’ve spent quite some time trying to reach it logically, and it doesn’t work. Either every bit of sperm is sacred, as a certain group of comedians once said, or his position is arbitrary. That he uses it as the single issue on which he rejects the Democrats is desperate and, arguably, un-American.

But his position on Biden is far more interesting. If Biden and the Democrats do, in fact, win mastery of the Executive and the Legislature, then I would encourage Erickson, and all serious anti-Biden voters^[1], to sit down and write out what’s going to happen that they believe will be bad for the country. It’s necessary to be both honest and fair; by the latter, I mean, using a hypothetical analogy to President Trump, recognizing that if Trump had supplied the proper leadership to close up the country early, the economy would still have gone down before recovering, and that would have not been fair game for the Democrats. Some roads lead into valleys before reaching the heights.

So write them down and, in four years, honestly evaluate them. For those regarding expertise that you don’t have, seek out non-partisan sources for help – sources such as National Review are not acceptable. If your expectations have been fulfilled, celebrate! Your mental model of politics, society, and the economy works.

But if your expectations are proven wrong? You have a few choices:

1. Walk away. Become an independent who is aware of your shortcomings, and work to resolve them.
2. Stick around and try to correct the far-rights’ misconceptions.
3. Stick around and take advantage of the other far-right denizens.
4. Stick around and marinate in the far-rights’ conspiracy theories.

Similarly, if my reader is a far-right conspiracy theorist, and of far right conspiracy theories there appear to be quite a few, I would encourage my reader to take a similar action. For example, using one conspiracy theory I ran across, you could write down your expectation that within six months of Inauguration Day President Biden will be sidelined through Vice President Harris’ inappropriate use of the 25^th Amendment.

List more than one, as that makes your study statistically significant, and if they all turn out negative, maybe it’s time to walk away.

The second paragraph, far removed from the first:

Stop nodding and agreeing, Democrats. Your morally corrupt, atheistic precious Obama did the same thing. He persecuted nuns and gave license to local authorities persecuting Christian bakers and florists and also gave license to sympathetic Christians and “Christians” to claim it isn’t really persecution because no one got shot in the back of the head.

Skipping the part where Obama has always claimed to be Christian and attended church regularly – unlike Trump, whose attendance is reportedly desultory – I’d like to focus on his derogatory use of the word atheistic. I don’t think the far right will ever welcome, or even accept, those who have embraced the concept that there is no spiritual realm, no divinities, who believe we evolved, and as individuals we come to life in understandable biological processes, live for a while, and die. I’ve heard, over the years, questions from the faithful about How  can atheists possibly be moral? a question which I think can be answered, once one accepts or at least stipulates to the absence of divinity, and accepts evolution as a working theory.

Source: Pew Research Center

But that morality can be constructed in a secular fashion cannot be accepted by the faithful, as it destroys a key part of the mythology of the divine, at least in Christian circles, as symbolized by the Ten Commandments – the gift of the rules of living. Given the gradual sinking of Christianity’s standing in American society, and the concomitant rise in popularity of the ‘nones’, as they’re collectively called, I have to wonder if far-right extremism is going to continue to be a growing problem in American society. Their opposition, in the absence of religious teaching of tolerance and love, and their feelings of persecution due to the shrinkage in their numbers and political influence, will result in sporadic far-right violence, paradoxically damaging Christianity, both bad parts and good, by its very existence.

Erickson’s worries about ‘persecuted bakers’ has a slight bit of merit; I’d prefer to see the bigoted bakers, as history will judge them, simply driven out of business by customers voluntarily going elsewhere, rather than legal authorities using the power of the State. It would drive home the fact that accepted the morality, nation-wide, is that homosexuality and the freedom to marry is now accepted; that condemning homosexuals, however well meant, over an immutable characteristic, is unjust and results in impairment for those so targeted, or to be graphic: they could be hurt or even dead due to the attitudes of these bakers over which he worries. Erickson may carp that it’s immoral according to the Bible, but then we don’t stone witches any longer, either. Morality, at least that listed in the Bible, has never been immutable; whether or not homosexuals are evil or not mentioned in the Bible becomes irrelevant when the standards of justice, as we understand them today & tomorrow, disagree with the Bible. We’re not a Christian nation; we are a Christian-influenced nation, which means we get to throw out the bad bits as they’re discovered. And that’s good for us. Of course, some of the good bits are temporarily discarded as well, as we see with the birth and growth of prosperity churches, an abomination of the Christian faith as far as this agnostic can see. I hope the realization that judging folks by their (self-proclaimed) financial worth, and that God will judge you by the same, is simply a road to disaster will come sooner than later.

Erickson continues on with some concerns, unknown to me, about nuns and persecution, probably having to do with abortion – because what doesn’t with him? – and thus it permits him to be bitter that the country hasn’t turned to evangelical Christianity as its saving grace.

Your side is burning down America with an American press blaming Donald Trump when it’s your activists and leaders encouraging it. And your last guy played with cigars and interns in the Oval Office and you made so many excuses for him that you incentivized a whole lot of the present President’s supporters making excuses now. But God forbid we point that out and make you confront it or point out some of you only apologized for it as an expedient way to now move on to criticizing the present President’s flaws.

The problem for Erickson is that he has to find a moral failing on the left equivalent to that of White Evangelicals desperate clinging to President Trump, in spite of his worldliness, profligate sinning, and profoundly awful incompetency. So Obama becomes an atheist and a persecutor of nuns, rather than just a member of a different Christian sect. Clinton – at least, I think he’s referring to the former President – had consensual sex outside of his marriage with an intern, which was a very poor choice by him due to the power relation between them, but not an unique or even unusual practice for those in positions of power, regardless of their political persuasion^[2], throughout history and largely regardless of the identity of the power structure. Erickson’s bitterness is a little hard to take seriously in the face of Clinton’s successes, while Trump’s many moral failures – lying, caging children – easily eclipses Clinton’s failures.

The thing is, I think Erickson’s in earnest.

I’ll give up on this, simply noting that the ‘nones’, of which I’m certainly a default member, will still face a rocky road ahead of them if they seek political power, i.e., contribute to the leadership of the country. There have been very, very few acknowledged atheists or agnostics in Congress or the Executive branch; it’s almost a requirement that one exhibit some sort of religious observance in order to be accepted by the American electorate.

One can only speculate on the magnitude of the cost of this bigotry, exhibited throughout the political spectrum, to the nation. How much political talent has not been of use to the United States because of this notion that only the religious can exhibit moral behavior?

It’s the same question that racial bigots and misogynists cannot answer without referencing ideology or theology of extremely dubious quality.

¹ As contrasted with those Trump voters who are voting for him simply to get the Democrats’ goat. They are not serious citizens, and are not amenable to the liberal democracy’s great advantage over competitor political systems, reason. Which, come to think of it, appears to apply to the far left as well.

² I must confess Erickson’s cigar reference escapes me, even though I remember wearing a Halloween costume featuring the cigar, and my companion wore a frock.