Category Archives: Uncategorized

It’s well known that all “artificial intelligence” systems are sharply limited in their domain. IBM’s chess playing Deep Blue doesn’t drive a car. But what happens when the domain itself begins a tectonic shift?

I initially felt a little bad at the thought of quoting Erick Erickson, the conservative dude who keeps me on his non-subscriber list to whom he nevertheless sends mail, because it is a mass email, not something I can point at as documented.

But, hell, the guy who once accused all anti-Trumpers as having Trump Derangement Syndrome, which made me giggle madly at the thought of this allegedly devout guy defending an inveterate liar, sexual infidel, cager of children, etc, the guy who had asserted he trusted Governor Kemp (R-GA) in the matters of Covid-19 response, a state now in today’s Top Ten for Covid-19 infections per capita, and was able to somehow ignore this …

I had people show up at my house to threaten my family and witnessed an organized effort to have me kicked off the radio. In fact, some of the very people most outraged about cancel culture right now were trying to cancel me because they just hated I wouldn’t hump Donald Trump’s leg with them and still won’t.

And now, only now, has he figured out that maybe, just maybe, those Republicans, whose supporters tracked him down for purposes of intimidation, who he judged to be better qualified for election than the hated Democrats, really aren’t all that … admirable:

The President of the United States was just fine in good times and got a lot accomplished, in spite of himself, but a person’s character is revealed in crisis and we should not be surprised that the man is revealed in crisis to be unfit for leadership during a crisis. Lest you think otherwise, the rest of the world is starting to go back to normal and the virus is running rampant here.

The very people that told us not to wear masks in February and March and then ridiculed Joe Biden for wearing a mask now have an erection for a President wearing a mask as if his own Surgeon General and other leaders were not telling us otherwise and he himself was treating mask-wearing as a sign of weakness.

Yes please, let me repeat this — THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION TOLD US NOT TO WEAR MASKS BECAUSE IT WOULD DO US NO GOOD.

But frankly, my issue is not really with the President. It is with his apologists who have shown themselves to be full of invective without much insight. The people who told us 2016 was a “Flight 93” election have crashed the plane and are now fighting over who to blame. Along the way, they showed themselves to lack the valor and integrity of those aboard the real Flight 93. Go down the rabbit hole of deep insight among that crew and you’ll realize many of these people are all bluster. Their ideas are as completely incompatible with the structure of our republic as the left’s ideas are. Their “nationalist-conservative” hybrid approach can’t work in a democracy when more than half the people hate their standard-bearer and they think they can somehow use the mechanisms of a national bureaucracy to steer a country to “national greatness” but can’t even fight a freaking microscopic virus with any credibility. Drag-queen storytime delenda est my left butt cheek. Good luck with that.

And he’s surprised that the man who was impeached for international blackmail and caught committing civil offenses prior to his election has attracted the worst? That who Trump endorses seems to be chronically, even terminally incompetent, capable of only … humping Trump’s leg?

I’ll be just a moment. I have to sit back and smile. Erickson himself is a victim of his ideological fixation and team politics.

But Erickson has limits. He can only vaguely see the damage being done by the Republicans, from whom he conveniently distances himself. Biden?

Do you know the difference between Joe Biden and a tomato? A tomato is actually a fruit, not a vegetable. The leading luminaries of Reliable Sources on CNN, the gabfests of MSNBC, etc. have spent an inordinate amount of time on the mental fitness of Donald Trump to be President and have totally ignored their preferred candidate is a cadaver with a pulled back face who will be controlled by far-left activists.

The Democrats are too scared to even speak up against the mob right now because they are afraid the mob will turn on them. The mob is absolutely going to turn on them because the Democrats’ entire governing coalition is about ending the Trump Administration. Once it ends, the mob turns on itself like the orcs of Mordor with no hobbits around.

And, yet, his preferred candidate has surrounded himself with incompetent ideologues who are incapable of thinking the world is different from their dreams, people who live in delusions. The test for Biden and his team lies not in being perfect, because they won’t be, but it will be in how they adjust their strategies as they encounter reality. Obama did quite well in that area, and I expect Biden to emulate his old boss.

Trump? He still thinks domestic politics are stuck in the 1950s.

So, that’s my schadenfreude for the next six months.

This poor guy. Ill? Just can’t choke down what he’s been asked to swallow and regurgitate? Finding magical thinking is harder when you try to say “Saint Trump”?

This is @RepGrothman *today* at the Wisconsin Republican convention (which was held in-person) pic.twitter.com/MnsVlJryLE

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 12, 2020

In any case, this was at the non-virtual Wisconsin Republican Convention. I sincerely hope neither he nor any of his compatriots were ill.

But this is not a good omen, for those of us who believe in omens.

Only one purple clematis has done well this year, sad to say. We’re used to three or even four going crazy. Here’s some close ups.

This is something I’ve been meaning to look at for a while, and WaPo dumped it in my lap:

Here we see President Trump’s alleged lies on a time series graph: how many per month. It’s apparent that the average number of lies appears to be increasing, although, since months are not the same size, there’s a bit of vapor involved; weekly would have been better, while daily, which is an option, turns out to be too granular.

Of course, data like this demands an explanation even as it provokes outrage. I speculate there are three possible explanation, non-exclusive. The first is the obvious: the more stress President Trump feels, the more he lies. Thus, the peaks prior to the mid-terms and during the impeachment process.

The second is an effective liar must maintain integrity. That is, if a liar takes an opportunity to lie, now they must continue to tell that lie. While cultists will tolerate being lied to without regard to integrity, independents may take a dim view of losing track of one’s lies.

Finally, a third reason: the network effect. Assertions often have relationships with each other, and a lie is an assertion that just doesn’t happen to be congruent with reality as it’s widely known. A lie can force more lies on other subjects, simply in order to have it all make sense. This is, in fact, the construction of a narrative: a collection of assertions that should contain a story arc, true or false. Where one lie exists, there can easily be more to support the first, and soon they must be repeated – at least for a politician of Trump’s sort.

So it seems unsurprising to see the average slowly rising.

This guy was on Mueller’s team of prosecutors and is reacting to the commutation of Stone’s sentence:

Time to put Roger Stone in the grand jury to find out what he knows about Trump but would not tell. Commutation can’t stop that.

— Andrew Weissmann (@AWeissmann_) July 11, 2020

Which raises the question: will a President Biden do that? Or will he leave that to his Attorney General? I would advocate for the latter, as the Executive is not the chief law enforcement officer.

But more importantly, much like President Ford, the next President and their AG will be confronted with an undoubtedly criminal (or possibly criminally insane) former President and his cronies, for whom a sizable part of the population still has loyalty, and will be convinced that the Democrats were, to quote a friend, “out to get [them].”

This will be quite a conundrum. Alienate part of the electorate, or decline to prosecute, thereby legitimizing a number of activities (international blackmail, lying to the nation and to Congress, deliberate crippling of the government, abandonment of allies – among others)?

I’ll vote for the latter, but I’ll understand if there’s a certain hesitancy to go beyond cleaning up the messes left behind by the Trump Administration and its minions in Congress. It’s important to send a message that certain behaviors can never be tolerated. Some of those messages are necessarily sent by the voters, and I hope and expect that a number of Republican Senators, perhaps as many as ten, will fall in the upcoming elections.

That would be the healthy thing to do.

But many of these messages can only be sent in criminal courts. Stone had one delivered, but being the morality-free type, it didn’t bother him. But others, it will, as will the spectators who haven’t signed an oath in blood to remain loyal to the bitter end. As this largely older group of people die off, the bitterness go away, too.

Justice isn’t usually easy.

I should have started this subject years ago. Magical thinking refers to thinking that is clearly at odds with reality. The kick-off is this:

The White House is seeking to discredit Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s leading infectious disease expert, as President Donald Trump works to marginalize him and his dire warnings about the shortcomings of the U.S. coronavirus response.

In a remarkable broadside by the Trump administration against one of its own, a White House official said Sunday that “several White House officials are concerned about the number of times Dr. Fauci has been wrong on things.” The official gave NBC News a list of nearly a dozen past comments by Fauci that the official said had ultimately proven erroneous. [NBC News]

And illustrating the absurdity of the situation is Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT):

Don’t let this feel normal.

It’s nuclear grade bananas to have White House staff sending reporters opposition research on their own top infectious disease doctor in the middle of a worsening pandemic that has already killed 130,000.

— Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) July 12, 2020

Evidently, Fauci’s message is at odds with the desired political message, and since politics always changes reality, it’s time to discredit the expert.

Or, to return to my old prism analogy, the jokers who made this decision have had their prism of politics firmly welded to their face. Reality is merely an annoying gnat to them, right up until their own relatives start dying.

While I have little sympathy with calls for term limits, as I dislike seeing experience being forced out the door, and the term-limited can always get elected to other posts, I can understand the frustration when something as irresponsible as this occurs. It’s just like the Soviets – sacrifice anyone, friend or foe, to keep power.

Keep an eye out for other Soviet tactics.

Exhibit A: Grumpy old man. Did he do it?

Perhaps this is stretching a point, since, as a movie, it’d run about 10 hours, but if you like mysteries, and don’t mind reading captions or you speak Dutch, De 12 van Schouwendam (2019) may be right up your alley. A man shows up in a Dutch village who resembles a teenager who disappeared 25 years ago. Soon villagers are wondering what happened to the teen-aged girl who also disappeared at the same time – and our guy happens to have the girl’s jewelry.

And a bump on his head. He doesn’t know where either came from. In fact, he doesn’t even know who he is.

And then the bodies suddenly start piling up, bringing in a detective from the Dutch version of the FBI.

This is structured to let information leak out very slowly, giving the audience plenty of time to chase down all sorts of dead-ends. Just about every character has something going on in the background which feeds into the plot. And even better?

There’s more than one terrible secret hiding behind closed doors. It’s like one of those terminally dysfunctional English country villages which look so idyllic and are really just centers for murder practice.

And the big reveal is a real hoot and a holler.

If you have the patience for it, Recommended.

A few weeks ago I speculated that the lack of Republican solidarity on SCOTUS in the matters of what we call ‘culture wars’ might not be a matter of ideological inconstance, but that the side taken by the liberals is actually the right side. Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule, whose proposal for a new constitutional philosophy of interpretation I incidentally critiqued a few weeks ago, disagrees. He prefers a more nuanced interpretation:

What are the principles underlying our unwritten constitution? It is best understood as a sociopolitical order that privileges a particular set of commitments held passionately by educated urban professionals and what Joel Kotkin and Fred Siegel have termed “gentry liberals.” Among these, and relevant to the current term, are ensuring a high rate of immigration, encouraged by policies against full enforcement of the law, and protecting sexual expression and liberty, including contraception, abortion and unconstrained expression of sexual preference and gender identity. These beliefs are not spelled out explicitly in law, yet they exert a gravitational force that powerfully influences the justices’ interpretations.

Here are the hollyhocks sharing the picture frame.

If you are a regular reader of the blog, first, thank you! But, second, if you use Facebook to get notifications of new posts – because I put them up manually – you may wish to look into using the RSS Feed to receive email notifications of each post. The link is somewhere on the right.

Why? Because Facebook is becoming a trifle iffy. A few weeks ago I lost access to Facebook for reasons never explained, except they claimed I had breached community standards. I examined their community standards and couldn’t see a breach. Upon appeal and delivery of a picture of myself – I contrived to look appropriately grim – and possibly my phone number, they returned access.

A week ago, on trying to send a link to a post to a friend via FB Messenger, it refused and said I had done that too many times recently, which was just silly – I probably don’t do that more than once a month.

Today, I noted that at least one of my FB posts linking to UMB was odd – it just said go to the link for more information, rather than retrieving a preview of the post.

So I’m wondering about the reliability of FB as a marketing platform, for which I pay nothing, for my blog, for which I receive nothing and pay a fee to Bluehost to host. Such are the needs of psychological venting.

In any case, an RSS feed might be a bit annoying, but at least you’d know when I belched again. And that’ll make your world complete, now won’t it?

A reader responds to my follow up on the American withdrawal from the World Health Organization (WHO):

And in what way is it spreading around the globe? A few newly hit countries are still seeing rises, but in most of the world, just like the US, it’s done. Look at the current death rates from COVID for any European country, or the US for that matter. There is no US “surge.” We’re doing about half a million tests a day, and based on previous research it’s estimated that about 30% of the US population has already had COVID, so every “new” case is just a report of an old one. And that data is totally useless.

Did I miss something, or did the CDC not stop conflating infection tests with antibody tests? They admitted to that blunder something like a month ago, and I had assumed they fixed it. If they did, then the statement every new case is a report of an old one would seem to me to be false. Infection tests are for cases in which the virus is active in the body; antibody tests are for the antibodies which are generated by the body either during the infection, or after the infection has been resolved. Infections are expected to resolve within, as I understand it, at worst a couple of months; that’s an extreme. Most numbers I see are for positive infection tests, not labeled positive antibody tests.

Based on previous experiences with pandemics, mostly the 1917-1918 influenza, the statement that Covid-19 is done because we’re seeing a decline in cases in many countries is unsupportable. The double spike seen in that outbreak was not a data signal from the pathogen’s interaction with the human population. It was a signal from human psychology and how it interacted with the pathogen. In other words, the second spike came from human behavior. Given that and that our behaviors of today don’t seem to be that different from 100 years ago, a behavior inconsonant with good public health measures could easily reintroduce an incline in those numbers. Say, reopening bars or churches.

When we look at the US numbers, deaths, hospital beads [sic] in use, ICU beds in use, ventilators in use, are all flat or declining.

I put this current map from Global Epidemics to make the point that I think numbers taken at the granularity of the United States are worthless. We’re a nation of states that, by and large, formulate their responses to the pandemic without reference to the other states; attempting to summarize our current status on a national basis may be useful for predictions for unaffected parts of the nation about potential futures, but to suggest that it’s done when hospitals not coincidentally located in the states colored red in the above map are reporting nearing overflow conditions (Florida, Texas) strikes me as meaningless. Questions this sort of map provokes is whether the colors map faithfully to human behaviors, such as staying home in green Vermont while going to bars in red-colored Texas, as well as increasing usage of hospital beds, ICU beds, and deaths due to Covid-19 in the red and orange colored states.

The WHO was absolutely worthless during this event. The inaccurate numbers they reported and based models on, along with the inaccurate statements of everything from transmission methods, incubation periods, and even symptoms sparked inappropriate government responses around the world. We’re better off without them.

I’m baffled by this statement. The WHO is a front-line organization that serves to

The WHO’s broad mandate includes advocating for universal healthcare, monitoring public health risks, coordinating responses to health emergencies, and promoting human health and well being. It provides technical assistance to countries, sets international health standards and guidelines, and collects data on global health issues through the World Health Survey. [Wikipedia]

My bold. Given that such advice can only be given as deductions from information, which, by definition, is in short supply at the beginning of a pandemic, the quality of their recommendations is inevitably going to be worse early than later. They and their nation-partners are busy learning, and, in this case, studying a pathogen which seems to stimulate an unusually large variety of symptoms. Its reactions to medications are, of course, unknown at the beginning, and given the difficulties of designing and implementing medical studies, speedy improvements in advice are unlikely. And then add in the unreliability of those nation-partners’ data in some cases! I’d have difficulty supporting the reader’s conclusion, I’m afraid, especially in the face of the obvious political facets of the President’s announcement.

Finally, the reader remarks …

This is older now, but time has proven the data in it to be completely accurate.

Covid-19: What The Data Tells Us [by Josh Ketter]

Right off the bat, I’m not going to dispute this guy’s data or analysis. I’m a working dude, it’s not my area, and I don’t have time. But frankly I am skeptical of anyone who’s jumping up and down claiming the experts are wrong but he’s right – unless he has an interesting credential or work experience to throw into the mix. This could lead into a post about how non-experts should approach this sort of missive, but I’ll defer that to another day – and maybe I’ve written it already, I don’t recall.

But here’s just a couple of points (I’m having some physical problems with typing, so I’m limiting myself) that bother me.

The topic of immunity. Ketter’s just a dancer. That is, he spends a fair-sized paragraph trying to elide the current truth concerning the length of post-infection immunity, which is We don’t know. We just don’t know if you’re life-long immune to Covid-19 after surviving a bout, or only for 5 years – or only for 5 minutes. This is important because prescribing future human behaviors until a cure or vaccine is developed and distributed must pivot on the value discovered for the reinfection rate over time. There’s no choice or wiggle room. If immunity is non-existent, then we’ve got a problem, because we can’t just keep going to the hospital over and over again – or, for those who are primed to the economic side, missing work over and over. If immunity is 5 years, the problem is a lot less severe. But to suggest that the problem has passed, and that it wasn’t as severe as thought, without a value for the reinfection rate, is flat out nutty. I’ll also note the hidden contradiction in that paragraph: he references cousin coronaviruses to fake up some possible values for the immunity period, without noting that MERS had a case-fatality rate (that is, the ratio of known deaths from MERS to the number of known MERS cases) of .34, or 34%. There’s a really good reason epidemiologists became very worried about Covid-19 when it popped up – it’s bad enough losing 1% of the population for any country, but a 30% hit would cause absolute chaos.

The topic of collateral damage. Again, his coverage of the topic is incomplete. Here’s his visual aid, of which I’m properly envious:

Nowhere does he mention that these values are all affected by our response to the pandemic. Identification of specific problems is only half the battle, the other half is focusing on and tuning our response to the pandemic. For example, if suicide due to unemployment is forecast to be a problem, then cover the income problem for the duration of the emergency might be the initial response, followed by investigating how to support the businesses that provide the jobs until the pandemic has resolved.

The point is that these are not numbers written in stone by Mother Nature; what we do will affect them, so we should be mindful of these forecasts and let them guide our responses. Suggesting the vulnerable should just suck it up and die, and telling people in front line positions that, hey, thanks, and that’s it doesn’t really cut it, now does it?

Stopping now. It’s too nice out and the hands need a rest.

From Spaceweather:

Observers of Comet NEOWISE (C/2020 F3), by far the finest comet in years, have had just one complaint. You have to wake up at the crack of dawn to see it! Not anymore. NEOWISE is now visible in the evening sky, too.

We’re not in an optimal location, as our northwest includes streetlights and neighbors’ houses. Still, we’ll try to take a look.

Jonathan Chait in New York’s Intelligencer:

Politics is a matter of life and death. If you start with the premise that one side has a monopoly on truth, you inevitably land on the conclusion that questioning its ideas is dangerous.

There are two important truths in those two sentences.

The first is that politics matters. A common, allied aphorism is Elections have consequences. From the system of governance we use to how a member of society fulfills the responsibilities which that system of government thrusts upon them, these will have consequences in our lives, from bringing them prosperity to, yes, premature deaths for them and their loved ones – maybe burned at the stake, even. See English monarchical history – and that of today’s Saudi Arabia.

In American society, meaning a political system of representative democracy, I’ve repeatedly advocated that voters must bring more to the table than ideological allegiance. I argue that integrity and competency should play a far greater role than they do, while strongly suggesting that simple electoral victory via team politics is actually a net negative, not a net positive, due to the incompetent and radical personalities that gain power through their adherence to the ideological themes of the day. Enough. Search on ‘team politics’ on this blog if you want more thoughts on the matter.

The second truth? The observation concerning, well, truth: “If you start with the premise that one side has a monopoly on truth…” Implicit in that premise is that we can know truth, with complete certainty, a priori. I have become convinced that one of the key foundations of our nation is the incorporation of the concept of We’re not sure. It may not be inspirational, but the honest acknowledgment that we don’t know on a huge variety of important subjects has guided us to more wisdom than we’ll ever know. It has nourished the decision that we are a secular nation, not Christian, Muslim, nor Scientologist, and has led to untold numbers of legislative compromises which have kept governments from local to national running, rather than hung up in staring contests, and, from the consequences of those compromises, positive or negative, led to shared agreements on the truth or falsity of the propositions underlying the positions of the compromisers.

What happens in the absence of compromise? Think of the “government shutdowns” to which we’ve been subjected recently as extremist politicians stamp their feet and shout NO!, secure in the knowledge that only they are right. I shan’t point fingers, as I’m sure all those who are guilty would be outraged at being accused of engaging in such hubris, but I think most government observers will have strong opinions.

Chait’s opinion piece is quite long, and I think it qualifies as self-criticism, where self refers to the political movement to which you belong. Much like Andrew Sullivan, he’s critical of recent leftist intellectual trends that he perceives as illiberal; I haven’t the time nor formal training to really come to a conclusion, and I don’t travel in circles where I’d encounter those he discusses. But I found this statement fascinating:

Without rehashing at length, my argument against the left’s illiberal style is twofold. First, it tends to interpret political debates as pitting the interests of opposing groups rather than opposing ideas. Those questioning whatever is put forward as the positions of oppressed people are therefore often acting out of concealed motives. (Even oppressed people themselves may argue against their own authentic group interest; that a majority of African-Americans oppose looting, or that Omar Wasow himself is black, hardly matters.) Second, it frequently collapses the distinction between words and action — a distinction that is the foundation of the liberal model — by describing opposing beliefs as a safety threat.

His first argument is straightforward and, I think, stands a good chance of being correct. Ideas & principles drive actions when people act individually. However, when we coalesce into groups, ideas, principles, and rationality are subsumed, and the ideas and principles of only the leaders become the guiding lights of our actions, for good and bad.

This, not so incidentally, is why I am hardly ever a joiner. The idea that blindly following some leader about and committing a moral, if not legal, crime because of the leaders’ mistaken, but unchallenged, ideas makes me positively ill. I read too much history as a kid.

Now, I recognize that I refer to a caricature of a group; the best groups engage in extensive discussion, tolerate dissension, do not show deference to the leadership’s ideas, and if someone chooses to walk away in protest, they are not taking their intellectual or physical lives in their hands by doing so. But not all groups are “best,” as illustrated by the simple existence of the word apostate, a word with a definite denigrative connotation. Many groups, placing survival above idea excellence, punish dissension and either bar exits, or, contrarily, kick out the blasphemer.

But, returning to Chait, when we substitute groups defined by anything but shared ideas & principles, arguments based on ideas are forever in danger of illicit rejection, by which I mean they are correct arguments, in correspondence with reality and all that rot, but not accepted by some or all of the groups in question. Idea-based arguments are, in the liberal tradition, the only arguments that may lead to compromise, and then onwards to agreements concerning reality, without violence. To give a counter-example, grouping us by skin color and then asserting that one group is better than another is, in the end, a fool’s errand that can only be resolved by violence, not by peaceful resolution on some rational point. It’s madness personified.

But I found his second argument more interesting:

Second, it frequently collapses the distinction between words and action — a distinction that is the foundation of the liberal model — by describing opposing beliefs as a safety threat.

I’m not sure how he means that the distinction between words and actions are a foundation of the liberal model. Does he mean that we can argue over a beer about them, rather than pikes and pitchforks at dawn? I must meditate on this.

Hubris:

a way of talking or behaving that is too proud [Cambridge Dictionary]

Defined for a future post. I might have defined it as talking or behaving with unwarranted, even divine, certainty. Which reflects my understanding of the word up ’til now.

Remember when the Cathedral of Notre Dame was badly damaged by fire all those decades ago?

The spire of Notre Dame cathedral, which was destroyed in a fire last April [actually, April 2019], will be restored according to the original Gothic design.

French President Emmanuel Macron announced the decision, putting an end to speculation that the spire would be rebuilt in a modern style. [MSN]

Which was a pity. I was quite taken by this proposal to replace the spire with a swimming pool, as reported by Architectural Digest back in 2019.

Ulf Mejergren Architects

The thought of the Pope going for a swim while blessing the faithful fills me with awe. Pronounce that as you will.

Andrew Sullivan expresses relief here (third part of the diary entry). He’s quite the traditionalist.

This is not new, but I just happened to run across it and I am morbidly amused by it. From Retraction Watch:

We have a new record for the longest time from publication to retraction: 80 years. It’s for a case report about a 24-year-old man who died after coughing up more than four cups of what apparently looked — and smelled — like pee.

According to the case report titled “Een geval van uroptoë” published in 1923, an autopsy revealed that the man had a kidney that was strangely located in his chest cavity. A case of pneumonia caused the kidney to leak urine into the space around his lungs, leading to the perplexing cough.

If that sounds too crazy to be true, you’re right: This man never existed. The case was retracted in 2003. (Yes, we are a little late to this one — it recently popped up in one of our Google alerts.)

In case you thought those pictures of grave men in old fashioned clothing showed they took their lives seriously, here’s the editors of the journal publishing part of the letter admitting to, not fraud, but hoax:

The editors found the definitive answer about the truth of the case in the autobiography of someone named Prof. Dr. A. Querido (1901-1983), emeritus professor of social medicine at the University of Amsterdam, who was a medical student in 1923. He and some of the students had some down time after they had finished studying for an exam, and so turned to hypothetical medical conditions:

Taking it easy at the start, but growing more enthusiastic as time went on, we started to make up diseases and forms of illnesses: “If one was suffering from this disease, what would be the symptoms?”

“If kidney growth (Mesonephros) continued to exist due to an embryological error”, said one of them, “you would see a working kidney across the spine, into the thorax.”

“Indeed”, said another, “that side would then have to lack a testis, because the mesonephros forms the efferent ductules of the testis.”

“That’s right”, said a third, “and if that half-man suffers from a lung infection, the infection spread into the primitive renal pelvis, resulting in the patient suffering from…”

“Piss cough.”

The students decided to try to get this made-up case published: …

Troublemakers!

News and pundits everywhere have already commented on the important part of the SCOTUS decision in Trump v. Vance, in which the District Attorney of New York subpoenaed accounting firm Mazars USA for the President’s tax returns, and Trump sued to quash the subpoena on the grounds that …

… a sitting President enjoys absolute immunity from state criminal process under Article II and the Supremacy Clause.

Given that appalling assertion – and Justice Kavanaugh’s assertions, prior to his appointment to SCOTUS, that President’s are far too important to actually subject to investigation, it was quite reassuring to see this:

Given these safeguards and the Court’s precedents, we cannot conclude that absolute immunity is necessary or appropriate under Article II or the Supremacy Clause. Our dissenting colleagues agree. JUSTICE THOMAS reaches the same conclusion based on the original understanding of the Constitution reflected in Marshall’s decision in Burr. Post, at 2, 5–6. And JUSTICE ALITO, also persuaded by Burr, “agree[s]” that “not all” state criminal subpoenas for a President’s records “should be barred.” Post, at 16. On that point the Court is unanimous.

As I’ve argued before, the President remains a citizen subject to the same laws as everyone else. That SCOTUS unanimously agrees on this point, even if the final outcome of that particular case was 7-2, is reassuring that some obvious bedrock principles are shared across the political and legal spectrum. There is no blanket immunity available, nor is it justified.

If the President is thought to have committed a serious crime, that’s why we have vice presidents.

Matrilocal:

The definition of matrilocal refers to a custom or culture where the husband goes to live with the wife’s family.
When the custom of a tribe is for a man to marry and then go live with his mother and father-in-law, this is an example of a matrilocal tribe.
[YourDictionary]

Noted in “[Review of] Authority, Autonomy, and the Archaeology of a Mississippian Community, By Erin S. Nelson“, Jessica Crawford, American Archaeology (summer • 2020, print only):

Like later historic societies, they would have been matrilineal and matrilocal, and thus made up of house groups of related women, their children, and husbands all living in close quarters and using the shared space of the courtyards.

All typos mine.

When I bought this place, there were hollyhocks in place – bi-annuals, which is to say they reseeded and took two years to flower. Eventually, they failed, so more seeds were obtained, and now we have some lovely examples again. First, the purples, much like the initial inhabitants.

And then these pale pink jobbers:

Scofflaw:

A person who flouts the law, especially by failing to comply with a law that is difficult to enforce effectively. [Lexico]

Noted in “Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer toughens mask mandate and orders businesses to reject scofflaws,” Kim Bellware, WaPo.

I particularly appreciate the refinement clause concerning difficult to enforce laws.

Here’s another Covid-19 tracker that demonstrates the resurgence – or perhaps first peak – of the disease throughout the United States:

It also includes a state listing sorted on the rolling 7 day average of daily new cases / 100K people, which may be even more useful. As you can see, at least by new infections, Arizona’s doing poorly.

New infections are a mediocre proxy, I suspect; the real question is how many hospital beds will be consumed by these new infections, especially in ICUs. That, after all, was the entire point of the shutdown: conserving those beds. It might be a useful exercise to make this a predictive exercise, based on whatever characteristics are available in the data feeds.

But, as predicted, we can see those southern states that reopened earlier than the rest of the country are experiencing new infections in greater quantities than the rest of the question. Some states are reporting hospitals are under a lot of strain in Florida, Texas, and Arizona. If we start digging mass graves again …

We sort of like the icky black spots seem to hover over the rest of the putrefaction. First pic is without the flash.

And the second is with the flash.

I presume the black specks each have their own little stalk that I couldn’t really see. I suppose I should have taken much better pictures over a few weeks to document any growth patterns.

And, one day, I would have simply disappeared.

SCOTUS came through for a long-oppressed minority yesterday in McGirt v. Oklahoma: