Category Archives: Uncategorized

Along with starring in this movie, the octopodes also had guest appearances on Babylon 5.

There’s a giant octopus in New York Harbor. Or maybe two monstrous octopodes. We’re not sure, but they’re slurping up Russian tourists and members of the Harbor Patrol like baby toes at the buffet in Octopus 2: River of Fear (2001). Little do they know, though, is that this is the appetizer, because it’s July 1, and in 3 days the Independence Day celebration will open as their main course, featuring 20,000 boats floating about like pasties, just waiting to be opened and cleaned out.

But the Harbor Patrol isn’t without its heroes, embodied in Walter. Payton. Wait, they’ve been slurped up, it must be handsome Nick, who is fighting the Captain and the Mayor as they doubt his deductions and observations. Ah, poor Nick. Something troubles him, but I don’t think we ever quite learn what.

But don’t worry, as this shambling wreck of a movie finally brings in the bus load of disadvantaged children, we know what’s going to happen, and Nick rides to the rescue of the kids and their maiden escort.

Oh, yeah. This was bad. Although the teeth on the octopodes were truly marvelous. And you have to wonder who came up with the idea of having one octopus humping the Statue of Liberty. I’d like to shake his hand, if only to get a DNA sample.

I think that this report will swiftly become obsolete as better methods are found for growing meat in a petri dish, but it’s still a bit dismaying. From NewScientist (23 February 2019):

John Lynch and Raymond Pierrehumbert at the University of Oxford compared the emissions from cattle-farming and lab-grown meat, and modelled their climate impact over 1000 years (Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, doi.org/c2vs).

Livestock farming produces about 18 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, but lab-grown meat could have a bigger impact, thanks to its high energy requirements, which would mean high carbon dioxide emissions.

It still answers those who cannot abide killing animals for food, but for the environmentalist, so far artificial meat is not acceptable.

And another specimen from the ol’ mailbag. This time, it’s just a picture:

Oh, are we back to the anti-tax meme? Last week, I noticed in a news report on an unexpected decline in revenue from Minnesota state taxes, Republican state House Rep Kurt Daudt immediately blamed the $500 million shortfall on “all the millionaires leaving the state because of taxes.”

That doesn’t pass the sniff test, much less the belly laugh test. What a dirtbag. Water-carrier.

Couldn’t be the economy starting to slow down, could it? Or someone screwed up in forecasting? No, it’s all about the myth of Minnesota being so heavily taxed.

This sort of thing doesn’t depend on any single message, just all of them put together. I often hear, from the older generation, weeping and moaning about a .5% rise in one tax or another. They don’t seem to get that the services rendered from those taxes are what ATTRACTS employers here. And that this isn’t like the American Revolution, the slogan of which was NO TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION. We have plenty of representation.

Sometimes all of us working together accomplish a whole lot more than all of working apart. And I’m tired of Republicans with smoke coming out of their ears every time they can find a way to blame something on supposedly taxes.

Kevin Drum happens to look into opposition to the Green New Deal – from liberals and their allies:

Jimmy Carter’s farm
Clean Technica

San Bernardino County is really big and really sunny. It’s a great place for solar energy farms. But not everyone is thrilled about that:

The county’s Board of Supervisors is slated to vote Thursday on a policy that would prohibit large renewable energy projects on much of the unincorporated private land governed by the county….Renewable energy has been a source of tension in California’s deserts for years, with nearly all large solar and wind projects facing opposition from unhappy local landowners, environmental groups or both.

Hmmm. Environmental groups. Then there’s this:

After signing onto the Green New Deal as an original sponsor, one House Democrat…said he faced harsh criticism from building trade representatives who worried the plan would put their members out of work….Unions, a key constituency, have been less than enthused by — and in some cases, downright hostile to — the ambitious proposal to tackle climate change. Terry O’Sullivan, the general president of the Laborers’ International Union of North America, or LIUNA, denounced the Green New Deal the day it was introduced.

I think Kevin is, consciously or not, highlighting that so long as we see ourselves as collection of free agents, fighting to see who’ll be winners and who’ll be losers in the decarbonisation of national and international economies, we are going to have a very hard time accomplishing the goal of retaining a world-wide environment in which humanity can continue to flourish. This sort of lack of leadership will inflict unwarranted damage on those unable to defend themselves, and while the rich may think they’ve done well in the end, the truth of the matter is that they are making enemies which will carry not only personal grudges, but systemic grudges: they’ll perceive, rightly or wrongly, that the prevailing economic order is at fault, and that’ll doom the rich and their successors, metaphorically and probably physically.

We need leadership that will try to distribute the pain in equal parts, and communicate that goal to everyone. I’ve talked about this before in terms of the coal industry, where I suggested that everyone involved in this doomed industry be, well, bought out is probably a good term for it. In other words, doomed industries shouldn’t mean doomed families; burdens should be shared. Not set up for life, but given a second chance. Unfortunately, when it comes to climate change, our leadership in Washington is delusional, fluctuating between chants of Chinese hoaxing and the celebrations of the End Timers. Those who should be leading, at least on the Republican side, can’t be bothered to even admit there’s a problem that can be dealt with.

But the concern about the loss of jobs expressed by the union leader in Kevin’s post can be dealt with while working on the decarbonization problem. Renewable energy fans have been talking this up for years, but Andrew Sullivan touches on it in passing in his support for the semi-despised nuclear energy, present in this first section of his weekly tri-partite diary:

Focus on a non-carbon energy source that is already proven to be technologically feasible, can be quickly scaled up, and can potentially meet all our energy demands. What we need, given how little time we have, is a massive nuclear energy program. Sure, we can keep innovating and investing in renewables, and use as much as we can. But they are not going to save us or the planet in time. We know nuclear works and does so quickly. As argued in Scientific American:

The speediest drop in greenhouse gas pollution on record occurred in France in the 1970s and ‘80s, when that country transitioned from burning fossil fuels to nuclear fission for electricity, lowering its greenhouse emissions by roughly 2 percent per year. The world needs to drop its global warming pollution by 6 percent annually to avoid “dangerous” climate change in the estimation of [respected climate scientist James] Hansen and his co-authors in a recent paper in PLoS One.

What’s the catch? It’s superexpensive. While the price of renewables keeps falling, nuclear remains very costly. The plants take a long time to build, and they’re difficult to site. One estimate is that it would cost $7 trillion to build a thousand nuclear plants, which would allow us to get a quarter of our energy from this non-carbon source. For the U.S. to get half its energy from nuclear would cost around $14 trillion. But if we committed to a huge nuclear investment, and the innovation that comes with it, that cost would come down. Compared with one estimate of $93 trillion for the Green New Deal, it’s a bargain. And remember most of the cost of nuclear power is up-front.

Sullivan’s sources are somewhat older than I’d like, but I suppose the numbers haven’t changed much since they were published. But think about building a thousand nuclear power plants – that’d eat up a lot of construction labor and probably scrabble around, looking for more. In fact, I have to wonder if the price to standup a nuclear power plant would go up simply because of the demand for experienced construction personnel. I have similar concerns about operational and mining personnel as well. The nuclear industry has been withering for decades, and that means a sudden turnaround could put unexpected strains on Human Resources.

But it’s worthwhile noting, as does Sullivan, that leading environmentalists have endorsed nuclear power in the past. He also points at this very recent article in Quillette by Michael Shellenberger, who we’ve puzzled over before:

I used to think that dealing with climate change was going to be expensive. But I could no longer believe this after looking at Germany and France.

Germany’s carbon emissions have been flat since 2009, despite an investment of $580 billion by 2025 in a renewables-heavy electrical grid, a 50 percent rise in electricity cost.

Meanwhile, France produces one-tenth the carbon emissions per unit of electricity as Germany and pays little more than halffor its electricity. How? Through nuclear power.

Then, under pressure from Germany, France spent $33 billionon renewables, over the last decade. What was the result? A rise in the carbon intensity of its electricity supply, and higher electricity prices, too.

What about all the headlines about expensive nuclear and cheap solar and wind? They are largely an illusion resulting from the fact that 70 to 80 percent of the costs of building nuclear plants are up-front, whereas the costs given for solar and wind don’t include the high cost of transmission lines, new dams, or other forms of battery.

Comparing prices can be difficult without controlling for government subsidies, geographical oddities, etc, and it’s not clear if Shellenberger has done so or not. Carbon intensity, on the other hand, is a scientific measure that should be mostly independent of such factors, so it’s a little dismaying to see someone say that carbon intensity is not dropping despite oncoming investment. It’s a good article that is worth a read.

I’ve never been on the anti-nuclear bandwagon, so it’s not hard for me to think of it in positive terms. Of course, cost overruns (here’s a recent debacle) and the potential for disaster if run by corner-cutters is always a concern – but a little easier to swallow if you consider our fossil-fuel energy suppliers have each been disasters that happen to span decades, rather than occurring in a few minutes.

But, if you believe Shellenberger, and I believe that someone with more time on their hands than I could fact-check him and come up with mostly positive results, even “green energy” will impact the environment in ways unacceptable to environmentalists. Nuclear power, properly managed, may have the capacity to save nature; improperly managed, destroy it.

But the alternative may turn out to be a drastic reduction in human population, and that is, to use one of those juiceless words, unpalatable. If you’re solidly anti-nuclear, consider the lack of progress on carbon intensity per unit of energy that he observes, and then try on horrific, terrifying, and appalling. Then go back to looking at nuclear energy. It’s an interesting exercise. You may not change your mind, but you might be a trifle less certain of your rectitude.

I like maps. So does my Arts Editor. After reading this National Geographic article on the North Poles (there’s three of them), I found that Wikipedia has a lovely time series map of the wanderings of the Magnetic North Pole.

This apparently has to do with irregularities in that globe of liquid iron forming the core of our planet. These movements have implications for our navigational aids, of course. One thing not mentioned, but I wonder about, is that the changes in the magnetic field will also have an impact on how cosmic rays impact us: strength and frequencies.

Keep that inner globe spinning.

Oh, and the South Magnetic Pole, of course. It’s not as interesting.

Here it is in package form:

The Lakers appear to be cratering, a fact that has one of its superfans super stressed out. Entertainer Snoop Dogg shared his frustration in an expletive-filled rant on social media in which he offered his Staples Center seats for the low, low one-time-only price of $5 after the Lakers were embarrassed in a loss Saturday to the Phoenix Suns, the last-place team in the Western Conference.

Snoop called everyone not named LeBron James “goofballs” and called for Luke Walton to be fired as coach. And his anger took him way over the line when he asked for a slave ship to move “all them sorry m———— the f— outta here.” [WaPo]

In other words, you’re moored to a dock over which you have absolutely no control. That’s the life of a dedicated cultist, except political cultists can’t even express their rage and disappointment at the behavior of their adorated, because that’s no longer permitted. Just drool every time their God opens its mouth and expends more spittle.

The Atlanta Fed has released its most recent nowcast of next quarter’s GDP growth, and it may be alarming:

This is NOT a metaphor.

The GDPNow model estimate for real GDP growth (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in the first quarter of 2019 is 0.3 percent on March 4, unchanged from March 1. After this morning’s construction spending release from the U.S. Census Bureau, the nowcast of first-quarter real nonresidential structures investment decreased from -0.8 percent to -2.7 percent and the nowcast of first-quarter real residential investment increased from -13.2 percent to -11.0 percent.

I’m not familiar with this model with respect to its reliability, though, so I’ll turn to Kevin Drum to cover that:

Obviously GDPNow is much more volatile than the actual quarterly estimates from the BEA, but they’re usually in the same ballpark. Sudden spikes up and down are sometimes accurate and sometimes not. On the other hand, the three previous drifts downward to near zero were all missed calls, so maybe this one will be too. Stay tuned.

It doesn’t look all that accurate to my untrained eye. But it’s something worth keeping an eye on.

One must love luscious scientific mysteries, and it appears Ultima Thule is dishing them up:

The larger bulbous end of the rock, called Ultima, is not spherical as we had thought, but flat, like a cookie. The smaller bulb, called Thule, is also somewhat squashed, like a walnut.

“The new images are creating scientific puzzles about how such an object could even be formed,” mission scientist Alan Stern said in a statement. “We’ve never seen something like this orbiting the sun.” [NewScientist]

NASA/Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/National Optical Astronomy Observatory

Honestly, the graphic just looks like some supernova debris that hooked up.

Cairene:

1. Of or pertaining to Cairo, the capital of Egypt.

   The shop, in typical Cairene fashion, was small. [Wiktionary]

Noted in “Egypt’s Eternal City,” Andrew Curry, Archaeology (March/April 2019):

That’s not to say that the team is ignoring the spectacular statuary left behind by generations of pharaohs. When Cairenes looted [Heliopolis] for building materials in the Middle Ages, they took the limestone but left the remains of toppled sculptures of red granite, quartzite, and basalt in place. Among these are intact reliefs 15 feet square and granite falcons that once graced a temple gate dedicated to the pharaoh Nectanebo I (r. 380–362 B.C.). Other finds point to even more impressive monuments—a recently uncovered foot-and-a-half-long stone claw suggests the existence of a sphinx statue 50 feet long. “Whatever sculpture we get is extremely high quality,” Raue says. “Heliopolis was such an important site that we just get the best.”

Provided for decorative purposes only.

Up here in Minnesota we’re enduring an unusual stretch of intense cold, interrupted by near normal temperatures, accompanied by lots of snow, starting in early or mid January, with maybe an end in sight. Or maybe not. All the houses appear to have horrendous ice dams, which is certainly new in my experience (50 odd years up here). I may spend part of the day trying to remove ice from my gutters, although if it remains as cold as it is right now (@ 9AM, it was -9°F, -23°C, but @ 11AM we’re up to -3°F) it would be a fruitless endeavour. Not to mention my gloves would freeze to the ladder. Meteorologists explain this as a result of a breakdown in the polar vortex. Such are the consequences of our climate change conspiracy, eh?

But this isn’t awful. Awful is the trend in North Carolina, especially Oregon Inlet, NC. It starts with this report from NOAA:

The relative sea level trend is 4.69 millimeters/year with a 95% confidence
interval of +/- 1.16 mm/yr based on monthly mean sea level data from
1977 to 2018 which is equivalent to a change of 1.54 feet in 100 years.

But it’s not the water creeping up over the land just yet, because it’s not doing that. The problems? Storm surges and salt percolating up from below. Here’s WaPo’s Sarah Kaplan:

Of climate change’s many plagues — drought, insects, fires, floods — saltwater intrusion in particular sounds almost like a biblical curse. Rising seas, sinking earth and extreme weather are conspiring to cause salt from the ocean to contaminate aquifers and turn formerly fertile fields barren. A 2016 study in the journal Science predicted that 9 percent of the U.S. coastline is vulnerable to saltwater intrusion — a percentage likely to grow as the world continues to warm. Scientists are just beginning to assess the potential effect on agriculture, [East Carolina University hydrologist Alex Manda] said, and it’s not yet clear how much can be mitigated.

“We spend a lot of time and money to try to prevent salt,” [local farmer Dawson] Pugh says. “I worry what the future is. If it keeps getting worse, will it be worth farming?”

If farmers in coastal areas have any hope of protecting their land — and their livelihoods — the first step is to disentangle the complex web of causes that can send ocean water seeping into the ground beneath their feet.

A truly discouraging development for coastal farmers world-wide, as local scientists seem a little surprised by it. Speaking of a rising sea level sparked by rising temperatures, how’s that CO₂ measurement out at Mauna Loa?

Just the same, really. Up and up and up. Hope my readers like the heat more than the wildlife does.

He’s too boring to satire satirize.

Not much really goes right for Cast a Deadly Spell (1991), a private eye cum comedy cum supernatural cum … ummmmm I’m not sure what else to add into it. Hard-bitten private eye H. Philip Lovecraft, former cop, is hired to find a stolen book of the Necronomicon by a wealthy sorceror in late 1940s Los Angeles. That rare man who has not made a deal – literally – with the forces of supernatural evil, in his quest for the book he’s assailed by gargoyles, zombies, a minor hoodlum or two, even a unicorn hunter – and his ex. In the end, the bad guys are dead in suitably horrific ways, as are a few good guys.

The problem is that none of the facets are well done. Lovecraft, a Philip Marlowe analog, isn’t nearly as tough or world-weary to really be the anchor this story needs. The humor is far too understated, being mostly references to famous names from the various genres, and compared to the standard upon which such satires are judged, The Cheap Detective (1978), well, it hardly garners a grin. The supernatural’s rules are unstated, meaning they don’t exist and therefore any opportunity to display cleverness by playing off those rules is lost.

Not all is rotten in this state of Denmark. The visuals are mostly good, even cartoonish in a good sort of way. But the special effects ranged from, well, mundane to really fairly awful. The plot is mostly predictable, limp, and beset by weakly motivated actions. Characters come and go with only a little hand wave at using them to develop any themes beyond satirizing the originals – and then it’s not done all that well.

This is mostly a waste of an hour and a half, unless you’re a Julianne Moore completist, and she’s not really given enough material to be effective. So find something else to watch.

Gotta love this story:

Without notifying his followers or even his inner circle, the longtime president of a legacy neo-Nazi group has signed over its control to a black civil rights activist from California.

James Hart Stern, a 54-year-old with a history of infiltrating white supremacist groups, is the new leader of the National Socialist Movement. And his first move as president was to address a pending lawsuit against the neo-Nazi group by asking a Virginia judge to find it guilty of conspiring to commit violence at the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017.

Next, he plans to transform the hate group’s website into a space for Holocaust history lessons.

“I did the hard and dangerous part,” Stern told The Washington Post in his first interview since taking over the National Socialist Movement. “As a black man, I took over a neo-Nazi group and outsmarted them.” [WaPo]

Glorious. I just love it.

I read this description of the Taiwanese health system with interest.

Kevin Bozeat, a 25-year-old student, wrote about coming down with severe gastrointestinal symptoms while studying in Taiwan: stomach cramps, bouts of vomiting that would not abate and, perhaps worst of all, the inability to keep any fluids down.

Around 3 a.m., he decided it was time to go to the hospital for treatment, not knowing what to expect having never been to a hospital in Taiwan — a country that has a national health-care system, or as Bozeat wrote, “socialized medicine.”

He was checked in and given IV fluids within 20 minutes of his arrival. Phlebotomists drew blood and the lab ran tests on it. Hospital techs performed an ultrasound to make sure he didn’t have gallstones or appendicitis. And eventually they diagnosed stomach flu, gave him two prescriptions and discharged him.

“Each day since I’ve gotten progressively better and am now pretty much back to normal,” Bozeat wrote. “The bill for the ER visit? . . . US $80.00.” [WaPo]

Sounds lovely. His conclusion?

“Taiwan is less wealthy than the US, yet it spends less and gets more out of its healthcare system. We see the same story repeat itself,” he wrote. “This debate is all so tiresome, because there is no debate. Universal healthcare works, it can be done here, it can be done in any country with sufficient resources. All we need is political will and an implementation plan.”

And this is where I can’t help but get a little bothered, because he’s missing one detail: who’s developing the therapies the Taiwanese are using? That’s where there may be a fly in the ointment. Long time readers are well aware that I’m not necessarily in favor of the private sector controlling the medical sector as it currently does, but one must consider all the factors in a world in which medical systems are not isolated from each other. The information and drugs that are the lifeblood of health systems flow from health system to health system, but it costs money to develop them. A lot of it.

So, when Bozeat think all it takes is political will, he’s neglecting to ask how much of Taiwan’s admirable efficiency is enabled by the basic and commercial R&D performed by other health systems. Do the Taiwanese develop their own therapies, or do they use therapies from other systems? And then ask the same question about the United States health system.

I’m not arguing for or against any particular system; I’m criticizing the analysis presented as being too simplistic. What happens if we shift to single payer and suddenly things get no better and we didn’t foresee that? To charge confidently ahead as he appears to be recommending seems a bit foolhardy to me. There are certainly efficiencies that can be attained, but what will be the drawbacks?

A friend pointed out this article in The Idaho Statesman, entitled “This bill would have ended child marriage for those under age in Idaho. The House voted it down“. I’m finding the objections, listed here, to be ill-thought out at best, and perhaps disingenuous, and because the whole subject is making me slightly ill, I think I’ll have to disassemble them:

Several lawmakers who spoke against the bill cited government overreach.

“I do not think courts should be involved in marriage at all,” said Bryan Zollinger, R-Idaho Falls. “I don’t believe there should be a license required to get married. I think two willing people should be able to go and get married.”

Given the inequalities possible between the parties, especially how an older party can manipulate a younger party, and the immaturity implicitly involved, this appeal seems ignorant and ideological, at best. Worse yet, though, is the hidden contradiction. The statement is all about freedom, from government oversight in this case. Yet, this very advocacy will result in marriages in which one of the spouses is trapped, even forced into the marriage. In the name of freedom, freedom will be erased.

Rep. Julianne Young, R-Blackfoot, said: “This is a decision I think should belong with families. I believe parental consent, which is what is in the law right now, should be sufficient.

Parental consent is, too often, code for arranged marriages. The use of children as a way to enrich family fortunes, whether it be material or societal, teaches those children that human beings are merely objects to be moved around at will. This is not healthy.

Rep. Christy Zito, R-Hammett, complained that the bill would make it illegal for a 15-year-old girl to get married but not to get an abortion.

In Idaho, a girl younger than 18 can get an abortion with permission of one parent or a judge.

“If we pass this legislation, it will then become easier in the state of Idaho to obtain an abortion at 15 years old than it will to decide to form a family and create a family for a child that has been conceived,” Zito said.

So? This is one of those shiny thing arguments, to my mind. You cite an irrelevant, yet emotionally inflammatory argument, and soon the air is fouled with the smoke of battle, and nothing gets done. It’s much like the drinking age battle, wherein a teenager can join the Army, potentially end up killing other people, yet they can’t drink themselves under the table in order to forget about it.

After a couple of months of chasing the rhetorical tail in circles, you realize the connections between the arguments are tenuous and unhelpful. But the battle is lost to the forces of chaos.

Look: Marriage is an institution which should be entered into by two^[1] consenting adults. Those last two words are loaded with meaning and implication, and to write them off with empty ideological trigger words is gobsmackingly wrong. Considerations of maturity, power relations, and other topics must come into consideration, and in this context a few simple governmental rules helps iron out a host of problems introduced by the entire concept of marriage before you’re ready for it.

¹ My apologies to fans of more outré forms of marriage, such as polyandry and others, but in this context those would be another shiny thing.

I’ve been reluctantly thinking about the 2020 Presidential Campaign, so I suppose I’ll kick off the fun with a look at Senator Warren (D-MA) and her latest campaign ploy. I had recently mentioned that she’d made the mistake of venturing in President Trump’s territory, but her new tactic seems to be an attempt to dictate where a future battle will be fought, as found on her blog:

So let me be perfectly clear, in the way that everyone who might be President next should be: If I’m elected President of the United States, there will be no pardons for anyone implicated in these investigations.

Everyone who might succeed Donald Trump as president should adopt the same policy. Starting with Vice President Mike Pence.

This means no pardons or commutations for anyone who is prosecuted and sentenced as part of the Mueller investigation.

In order to move away from Trump’s use of the pardon, and thus away from his field of battle, she defines its use:

The pardon and clemency powers are supposed to be about granting mercy to the powerless — not immunity for the powerful.

A populist phrase that might catch some attention in Trump’s populist base. On the other hand, it’s also a veiled threat to the current Republican leadership, as toothless as it might be. She’s saying she’s expecting more guilty pleas and convictions.

It’ll be interesting to see how the Republicans react. Dispassionately analyzed, it’s a bit hollow, isn’t it? But for those who may have pursued their ambitions without inhibitions, it must seem menacing.

In the end, though, I would have been more impressed if she’d made a slightly different promise: to not pardon Democratic office-holders for crimes while in office. And then to express the belief that there won’t be any cases to consider.

Precept:

noun

1. a commandment or direction given as a rule of action or conduct.
2. an injunction as to moral conduct; maxim.
3. a procedural directive or rule, as for the performance of some technical operation.
4. Law .
   a writ or warrant.
   a written order issued pursuant to law, as a sheriff’s order for an election. [Dictionary.com]

I used it in this recent post. An hour or two later, I ran across the related preceptor in story The Dragon Masters, by Jack Vance, from which I shall forgo quoting.

On Lawfare, Benjamin Wittes, et al, make an important observation regarding the public Michael Cohen hearings yesterday:

The second notable feature of the hearing was that it was really two hearings. One was a sometimes frustrating, sometimes incompetent, sometimes serious effort to learn what the committee could about the conduct of the man who currently serves as president of the United States. The other hearing alternated in five-minute increments with the first but was a different exercise entirely. It involved a confrontation between a man who had devoted a decade of his life to making Trump’s legal, ethical and personal problems go away—a man who once reveled in being dubbed Trump’s “fixer”—yet who now had become one of those problems, and was being confronted by a phalanx of 17 applicants for his old role.

Indeed, with the notable exception of Rep. Justin Amash, who engaged in a serious colloquy with Cohen about how Trump communicates indirect orders to his subordinates, none of the Republican members of the committee showed any serious interest in developing the factual record about the president’s conduct: not on matters related to L’Affaire Russe, not on payments to paramours, not on other corruption matters. They showed up, rather, as fixers—very much as Cohen himself would only recently have done. They were there merely to discredit the witness. And in this project they confronted a problem: It is actually hard to brand someone as a liar when he walks in, having recently pleaded guilty to any number of lies, and brands himself as a teller of untruths. There’s not much you can say about such a person that he hasn’t just said about himself.

It’s an interesting thought, isn’t it? President Trump’s next right hand man might be one of those Republican House members, yet they haven’t the wit to look at the man in front of them and see themselves behind that table in a few years time – or behind a defendant’s table in a court of law.

And – more importantly – they seem to be stuck in political attack mode. Rather than take their jobs seriously, they simply defend their President from potentially devastating testimony from a man who is obviously at the heart of the alleged matter. Their roles should have been to ask tough questions in an attempt to discern whether Cohen is telling the truth now, evaluate accompanying evidence, and, if their dispassionately reached conclusion is that he’s telling the truth, then begin deciding the implications of the evidence.

Not, as one Rep whose name I did not catch, yelling “Liar, liar, pants on fire!” In a Nation less prone to drama, I’d feel the need to reprimand such childish behavior. As it is, his constituents should harbor serious concerns about his judgment.

I suppose the title of this post is a misnomer, though: the morality of the GOP these days is “Whatever is good for President Trump.” That is how cults often roll. And the behavior of the GOP Reps corresponds – with the exception of Rep Amash, as Wittes notes – very well with cult members. And it makes it hard for independents, like myself, to take them seriously on an intellectual level.

The Chief Justice continues to find common ground with the liberal wing of SCOTUS, this time on a ruling that Alabama’s court system did not adequately investigate whether or not death row inmate Vernon Madison’s mental condition is such that he recognizes why he is to be executed:

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joined the court’s four liberals in saying Alabama death-row inmate Vernon Madison deserves another chance to prove that strokes and worsening vascular dementia have left him unable to remember his crime or why the state wants to execute him. [WaPo]

The ruling was 5-3, with Justice Kavanaugh not part of the proceedings. While I wouldn’t care to state that Roberts is swinging left just yet, it does appear he has more sympathy for the arguments advanced by the liberals than for the conservatives.

Incidentally, Justice Alito is fairly blistering in his dissent, which was joined by Justice Thomas and IJ Gorsuch. From the opinion, Madison v Alabama, p 19:

What the Court has done in this case makes a mockery of our Rules.

Petitioner’s counsel convinced the Court to stay his client’s execution and to grant his petition for a writ of certiorari for the purpose of deciding a clear-cut constitutional question: Does the Eighth Amendment prohibit the execution of a murderer who cannot recall committing the murder for which the death sentence was imposed? The petition strenuously argued that executing such a person is unconstitutional. After persuading the Court to grant review of this question, counsel abruptly changed course. Perhaps because he concluded (correctly) that petitioner was unlikely to prevail on the question raised in the petition, he conceded that the argument advanced in his petition was wrong, and he switched to an entirely different argument, namely, that the state court had rejected petitioner’s claim that he is incompetent to be executed because the court erroneously thought that dementia, as opposed to other mental conditions, cannot provide a basis for such a claim.

I have no idea if it’s customary to indulge in such hyperbolic language in SCOTUS dissents, nor as to the accuracy of Justice Alito’s claims. But I can’t help but note that first sentence is an ugly little bit of grunge. I suggest, oh, The Court’s opinion in this case makes a mockery of our Rules.

While Michael Cohen has been offering public testimony to Congress today, I’ve been bothered a little bit by the CNN headlines, which have been quoting Cohen as using the words ‘racist,’ ‘con-man,’ and ‘cheat.’ I’ve finally figured out why.

Racism is not in the same category as con-man and cheat.

While the former is repugnant and, to tell the truth, stupid, the latter two are indicative of illegal behavior. And that’s the truly important part of this testimony. The racism doesn’t really matter when it comes down to the nuts and bolts, unless you can prove a hate crime has occurred, and that somewhat dubious category of crime is difficult to prove because it requires insight into the state of mind of the alleged criminal. This can be available, of course, but it’s always a bit more arguable than a bloody knife and a body.

So don’t let me get off point here. Cohen is testifying to possible illegalities and lies by the President, and those are important as a basis for sending him on his way in two years, and possibly even for an impeachment, although honestly the GOP has no spine in the matter. His racism? It may be true, but it’s not relevant, really.

And that’s just me being obsessive, I suppose.

Hope these don’t make it into my dreams.

There are some movies that I really hesitate to review, and Attack of the Mushroom People (1963; in Japan, Matango) falls into this category. An anomalous collection of Japanese people board a yacht for a long sail. They range from a egotistical corporate executive, to a famous singer, to a professor of psychology, a writer, an apparent nobody, and the boat’s captain and mate.

The inevitable storm comes up, but – to my surprise – no monsters board the ship and hunt down the occupants. Instead, it sustains enough damage to distress the crew, although the passengers seem merely irritated. As they transition from distress to real nutritional deprivation, a fog-bound island appears and they make their way onto shore.

The hunt is on for food, and they find a few roots, clams – and a bounteous crop of mushrooms, which they carefully avoid. From the top of a hill, they spot another wreck. A visit reveals an abandoned ship whose log is mysteriously vague; even the nationality of the ship is questionable. It’s clearly a research vessel, but gear is present from both Communist and free world countries – and why is a radiation meter present?

They take up residence, and not a moment too soon, as strange figures appear at the portholes. But it’s all quite leisurely, building the tension until we begin to see the various personalities begin to fall apart under the pressure. The big windup doesn’t come from without, but from within, and somehow that’s more satisfying.

I found it annoying at the same time I was fascinated. The acting was on par with general Japanese kaiju movies, with which I’ve never been comfortable. But here it’s as if the audience is watching stereotypical characters from one genre finding themselves in another, and it can lead to a certain cognitive discomfort.

And that’s what makes me wary of this review. Perhaps, for a Japanese person of the era, the characters seemed perfectly natural. I don’t dispute their reactions to the tension brought on by whatever has happened to the crew of the wreck our immediate characters have found. It’s an interesting dig into the psychic tensions of what may be generic examples of certain categories of people. But the whole thing may be colored by my American perceptions.

So, if it sounds interesting, give it a watch. The first 10 or 15 minutes were tedious, but when the storm hits, things become more interesting. And if you have a clue as to how to evaluate this movie, let me know.

I’ve been watching the measles outbreaks with grim bemusement (yeah, figure that one out), as they center around areas in which anti-vaccination crusades have taken hold. In other words, they’re paying the price for their own bad judgment, which is not a bad way for things to go. WaPo published an article on the subject today, which includes this dubious remark:

Jill Collier, a registered nurse, told lawmakers she was against the [vaccination] bill because she believed it would harm the doctor-patient relationship. “We cannot blanket-mandate an injection for a child and hold their education hostage for noncompliance,” she said.

And why not? Look at it the other way: your unvaccinated kid forces those children who are implicitly incapable of tolerating the vaccine (such as for genetic reasons) to stay away from school for their own safety. You’ve just denied them an education just as much as this bill might restrict your’s.

Only, unlike your behavior, their’s is not voluntary.

For a post from long ago on the subject of vaccinations and public health, see here.

This post from Steve Benen on Maddowblog has been bothering me for several days, and I’ve finally decided to get it off my chest. It concerns the both the characterization of the political landscape as well as the implications that come from it.

As we discussed a few years ago, part of the problem is that the “independent” label, in practical terms, has little real meaning. It’s widely assumed that self-identified independents see themselves as moderate/centrist voters. As the argument goes, the left sides with Democrats, the right sides with Republicans, which leaves independents in the middle.

It’s a tidy little summary, but it’s not true. The Monkey Cage’s John Sides published a piece several years ago that doesn’t appear to be online anymore, but it continues to ring true.

[H]ere is the problem: Most independents are closet partisans. This has been well-known in political science since at least 1992, with the publication of The Myth of the Independent Voter.

When asked a follow-up question, the vast majority of independents state that they lean toward a political party. They are the “independent leaners.” … The number of pure independents is actually quite small – perhaps 10% or so of the population. And this number has been decreasing, not increasing, since the mid-1970s. […]

The significance of independent leaners is this: they act like partisans…. There is very little difference between independent leaners and weak partisans. Approximately 75% of independent leaners are loyal partisans.

Gallup’s findings, often seen as proof of strong independent support, show that most of the Americans who describe themselves as independent actually lean towards one party or the other.

So why do so many Americans bother with the label? Perhaps the most important thing to understand about independents is that there are so many different kinds of independents. Some are on the far-left or the far-right, and see the major parties as too moderate. Some are closet partisans who get a personal sense of satisfaction from the independent label, using it as a synonym for being “open-minded” or a “free-thinker.”

Nowhere in the post is addressed the elephant in the room: the fact that political parties change position on the political spectrum^[1]. The Republican Party has been flying rightwards since the days of Gingrich, or perhaps even Reagan. Or even Goldwater. Recent activities within the Democratic Party suggests there’s at least a bigger standard deviation in terms of political position across the party than there used to be. Will conservative-inclined voters continue to vote Republican in the face of a Republican President whose main hobby appears to be lying in order to keep his cultists solid? Will liberal-leaning independents buy-in to the New Green Deal and a proposed further push of the health system to the left, not to mention a worrying movement towards forming their own cult? And what are we to make of numerous moderate Republicans who’ve renounced their party ties in favor of being independents – or even Democrats?

But let’s ignore all that and concentrate on the implications of Benen’s argument. How, then, are political campaigns to be structured? Well, we already know the answer to that hypothetical, because it already is an aphorism of the trade: Get the base out!

But I fear the move towards cultist strategies in which the tenets of the cult are reinforced at the expense of real intellectual debate. We see this in the empty-headed attempts to destroy the ACA without a responsible plan for replacing it, which may have damaged the Republican brand among independents – if you disbelieve Benen. But many strategies attach to the cultism angle. For example, blogs, which formerly functioned as opinion bullhorns with little respect for orthodoxy, are gradually dragged into line as the writers are insensibly influenced by the political currents of their favorites. As they become mere outlets for propaganda, they lose their value, little more than a place for the authors to bray in unison. Don’t think it won’t happen? I saw it happen with REASON Magazine during the Obama years. Under editors Postrel & Sullum (1990s-2008, roughly), it was an interesting, if sometimes usefully flawed, exploration of alternative approaches to governance, and how the market might resolve problems society encounters. Under Welch, though, it became a right-wing rag whose only goal was to level any old criticism at Obama – and I never renewed. Not because I had voted for Obama, but it was dull, sometimes incomprehensible, and quite often dishonest.

Is that how we want our political discourse to run from either party?

Governor Hogan’s On The Issues Political Spectrum position.

Right now, the parties are so differentiated that it’s hard to see an “independent” voting one way or another on overtly political ballots (i.e., something above the level of your town council, if you’re not in a big city), although there are some edifying exceptions, such as Governor Hogan (R-MD), who must have captured a large number of independent votes in the very blue state of Maryland in order to win by 14 points last year. Tellingly, Hogan is a never-Trumper and quite moderate Republican who probably appealed to moderate Democrats, especially as his opponent, Ben Jealous (D-MD), scores as a Left Liberal. However, in 2014 Hogan’s opponent, Anthony Brown, scored as a Moderate, and also lost, albeit by a smaller margin than Jealous. Senator Klobuchar (D-MN) also springs to mind.

My point is that I regard Benen’s view of the political landscape to be without nuance and rather chilling. I’d prefer to think of the citizenry as calm, rational people who evaluate candidates based on attributes such as ideology, competency, personal character, and that sort of thing – not to which party they may currently belong.

OK, stop laughing. They can have their delusions, I’ll keep mine.

¹ The mouse in the room is the fact that voters also change positions on the political spectrum. Without data, I can only suppose that it’s credible to argue that the net result of such movements is of little relevance year to year, but over decades it will add up. It’s tempting to point at examples, but without solid data it’s a waste of time.

I’ll solve the puzzle, Alex. Oh, this isn’t Wheel of Fortune? And Alex is the wrong TV host? Well, shiiiiiiit.

A movie in the classic B-list tradition, Giant From The Unknown (1958) tells the story of the discovery of a Spanish consquistador from the 1600s – still alive and kicking in the hills of California in the 1950s. Indulging in bloody murder and mayhem, “Diablo” Vargas does his best to cover up the sins of this script, the foremost of which was the terrible role assigned to the lead female, the daughter of the archaeologist in search of Vargas. She is, at best, vapid. And a bad screen kisser. Of course, there’s the handsome local with whom she’s tangling tonsils, the local sheriff who hates the handsome local, various minor characters, and a not-too-awful hunt-down-the-murderer scene, in which the locals actually suffer significant casualties.

But it’s all fairly dull. The daughter grates on the nerves, the archaeologist is just a trifle too, ummmm, sciencey, and I kept hoping they’d push the sheriff off a cliff. But it’s Diablo who takes the tumble in this one, leaving us with another yawner worthy of watching only because we were both sore from shoveling snow. In fact, the mystery gecko was perhaps the most interesting part of the movie. He’s a real scene stealer.

Believe it or not, this little guy embodies the most important plot mechanism of the movie.

I shot these last week sometime, and sort of liked them.