Needless to say, the cultural warriors have leapt to their artillery now that Judge Kavanaugh has been nominated to SCOTUS by President Trump. My previous thoughts and knowledge on the judge, slim as they may be, were written up here. Steve Benen didn’t much care for his acceptance speech:

There’s simply no way Kavanaugh can speak to this with any authority. For him to state such a claim as fact is hard to take seriously.

I imagine the White House’s allies will say the judge was simply being polite, saying nice things about the president who, moments earlier, announced plans to reward him with one of the nine most important jobs in American jurisprudence, and there’s no need to take it too seriously.

Perhaps. Alternatively, when a Supreme Court nominee uses pro-Trump hyperbole better left to the president’s press secretary, he’s signaling a deference that should give us pause.

Rather than agree – or disagree – with Steve, I’d rather speak to Judge Kavanaugh’s potential future on the Court. Given his previous comments that a sitting President should not be bothered by such minutiae as lawsuits, it’s reasonable to assume, as many commentators have been quick to point out, that he was selected for his inclination to protect Trump’s backside in case Special Counsel Mueller comes out with legal action against the President – or, for that matter, if Congress impeaches the President.

So my thought is this – will Judge (perhaps soon to be Justice) Kavanaugh have the balls to recuse himself if such a lawsuit ends up before SCOTUS? Having substantively discussed how he’d decide such a lawsuit, he’s effectively compromised himself.

Yesterday I mentioned California’s Republican embarrassment, but now it’s back to the other coast, specifically New Jersey, as WaPo’s Dave Weigel reports:

The National Republican Congressional Committee has withdrawn its endorsement of a congressional candidate in New Jersey after reporters dug up offensive comments he’d made about black and Hispanic people.

“Bigotry has no place in society — let alone the U.S. House of Representatives,” NRCC Chairman Steve Stivers said in a statement Monday night. “The NRCC withdraws our support of Seth Grossman and calls on him to reconsider his candidacy.”

Grossman, a former elected official in Atlantic County, was not the party’s first choice to run in New Jersey’s 2nd District. Rep. Frank A. LoBiondo (R-N.J.) announced his retirement late last year, and the local party scrambled to find a contender in a district that backed President Trump in 2016 but was high on Democrats’ target list.

No strong candidate emerged, and Grossman won the four-way June 5 primary with 39 percent of the vote. Almost immediately, Democratic and liberal groups began digging through his social media and through videos from candidate forums.

And what did he say?

In one video, Grossman answered a question about how Republicans could reach more diverse groups of voters by saying “the whole idea of diversity is a bunch of crap, and un-American,” having “become an excuse by Democrats, communists, and socialists, to say that we’re not all created equal.” In a Facebook post, first uncovered by the liberal watchdog group Media Matters, Grossman linked approvingly to an article at a white nationalist website that argued African Americans “are a threat to all who cross their paths, black and non-black alike.”

“Oy vay!” wrote Grossman. “What so many people, black, white and Hispanic, whisper to me privately but never dare say out loud publicly.”

And he managed to win a plurality in the primary. This speaks either to the relative ignorance of the current Republican voter, their tolerance for extremism, or their mental state, which appears to find anything outside of their social circle to be frightening.

In any case, it’s not conducive to a productive American society.

I have yet to see similar cases for the Democrats, although they’ve tried to chase away a few candidates on various tactical grounds.

Our newest phlox. I’m hoping it’s not as predacious as the current phlox:

A look down Herb Lane:

And our new Guardians of the Garden. They’re a bit shy, but I’m assured quite rambunctious:

I suppose we could liken them to a bad case of acne. The owner doesn’t want them, but there they are, ugly little red explosions in Illinois, Virginia, and now California, according to The New York Times:

A Republican congressional candidate in a reliably blue California district managed to capture nearly a quarter of votes cast in the state’s open primary last month — just after the state Republican Party caught wind of his anti-Semitic comments and rescinded its automatic endorsement.

The candidate, John Fitzgerald, urged people on his campaign website to pay attention to “Jewish supremacism,” among other anti-Semitic views, which led party leaders to rescind their support in May, about two months after the official endorsement.

The Republicans have removed the endorsement, but it’s still egg on the face – and another clue that the extremists are riding on the skirts of a Party that is already in the shallows of the Extremist Sea. How soon before they climb the rope ladders and take control of the ship from the slightly less extreme extremists?

On Lawfare Kimberley Marten outlines how Russia is asserting influence throughout the world:

Russian aggression is a central concern of the foreign and security policy community, with debate focusing on what Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intentions are and how best to deter him. But missing from much of the discussion is the fact that a variety of semi-state security groups, with a hazy relationship to Moscow’s central authorities, are playing an increasing role in Russian actions both at home and abroad. The United States and other Western states must develop a better understanding of the complex motives and economic interests held by these opaque and informally commanded security forces to ensure the best possible attribution of and response to any hostile acts they commit. This will require recognizing that they are likely not always following Putin’s direct orders.

While many scholars and analysts now have a sophisticated understanding of the roles played by private military and security firms around the world, the array of semi-state security actors mobilized by Russia is unique—and noteworthy. Putin’s Russia is replacing the traditional notion, held by most Western countries as well as the Soviet Union, that states should have ultimate command and control over how armed force is used on their territories or in their name abroad. Instead, the new Russian model is centered on ambiguity, and the Kremlin even seems comfortable with the fact that these semi-state actors often have distinct commercial interests, separate from the Russian state. When a well-armed state with a growing international presence chooses to redefine the relationship between sovereignty and force, the magnitude and variety of threats that it might produce is being redefined as well.

The semi-official methods they’re moving to also impacts the Russians who make up these private military forces, as the loss of central regulation may also mean less chance of rescue or exchange of prisoners.

It also increases the chances of rogue actors.

Poker night was always a problem with this crew.

Destroy All Monsters (1968) is a rare outlier in the Japanese Godzilla / kaiju genre of movies. Most of these stories feature a monster or two laying waste to the countryside, often acting as the deus ex machina that brings punishment down upon the evil-doers of the moment, while the citizenry cowers in its shelters. But in this one, despite the destruction of a number of cities world-wide, the monsters are actually the mechanism of a more comprehensive and comprehensible plot. Earth has been invaded by the Kilaak, a race of creatures which can take over humans through technological means. They’re Their goal? The usurpation of Earth for their own, unclear purposes.

As a means to that end, they surreptitiously take control of the several monsters penned up on an island named Monsterland, and send them out to destroy various foreign cities. Eventually, several meet at Tokyo, leaving it a wasteland. But the real action is taking place behind the scenes, as a various government agencies frantically try to discover what has happened to those who were in charge of Monsterland, and how to respond. In the climactic scene, humanity’s monsters are freed from alien control, stomp a space monster into the ground, and win the day.

To say this is a step up is true. To say the cheap special effects, obvious models, bad acting, and dubious story makes it worthwhile is a claim I shan’t be making. This is positively awful.

Only watch while drunk. Or working on it.

I’ve often thought that charitable motivations were one, or more, of the following:

1. Religious motivations. We give because God (or, more precisely, some guy who claims to have a special relationship with God) tells us to give.
2. Indirect gain motivations. We perceive a shortcoming in society, and by donating we believe we’ll help shore up the hole in the dike.
3. Reputational motivations. We give because it makes us look good to society at large, and then we reap the direct gains of looking charitable.

This article in Nautilus then attempts to explain the phenomenon of anonymous giving in the context of the third motivation, the reputational motivations category. Here’s a small bit from it, in the context of an episode from a TV series with which I’m not familiar, so I apologize for not expanding the context:

What’s intriguing about anonymous giving, and other behaviors apparently designed to obscure good traits and acts, like modesty, is that it’s “hard to reconcile with standard evolutionary accounts of pro-social behavior,” the researchers write. Donations fall under a form of cooperation called “indirect reciprocity.” “Direct reciprocity is like a barter economy based on the immediate exchange of goods, while indirect reciprocity resembles the invention of money,” Nowak wrote in his highly cited 2006 paper “Five Rules for the Evolution of Cooperation.” “The money that fuels the engines of indirect reciprocity is reputation.” Donation evolved, in other words, because it granted a good reputation, which helped humans in securing mates and cementing alliances. But if that’s true, how did the practice of anonymous giving arise? The title of the new paper suggests a solution: “The signal-burying game can explain why we obscure positive traits and good deeds.”

The signal-burying game is one of the latest examples of scientists gaining insight into human behavior from game theoretic models and signalling theory. These games, the authors write, make sense of “seemingly counterintuitive behaviors by carefully analyzing which information these behaviors convey in a given context.” Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico, said recently on Sam Harris’ podcast, “Waking Up,” “Signalling theory is probably the part of game theory I use most often. The idea there is: How do you credibly demonstrate what kind of organism you are through the signals you give out? And what makes those signals honest, and hard to fake, rather than easily faked, like cheap talk?”

The article is, of course, pop-science, which means they aren’t being properly general in their discussion. The impression I gain from the article is that the authors have accepted that everything is done for selfish reasons (libertarians would love that), and they’re attempting to rationalize anonymous giving, one of the potholes in their road to the compleat explanation of human behavior, by saying it doesn’t exist.

But of course it exists. While some might argue this is a self-negating statement, when I give I would give just as much anonymously as I do with my name attached – the latter is what happens because I mainly give by credit card, and since the government currently lets me take them against my taxes, I do that, too.

But while the latter is a well-known example of social-engineering, it doesn’t qualify to negate anonymous giving.

While I don’t doubt that some folks do engage in the behavior of interest in the article, which is “anonymous giving which is then leaked,” this is unsurprising in a culture where we also find rare, but documented, cases of Munchausen syndrome by proxy. The intellectual error in this article may be to fail to recognize there are non-biological as well as biological evolutionary reasons for behaviors. Rather than attempt to deny that anonymous giving occurs, it makes more sense to ask how it fits into the various categorizations of motivations for giving; we can use the categories I gave, above, or come up with your own.

In the first category, religious motivations, we have the most arbitrary and capricious reasons for immediate motivations, but they all boil down to God said be anonymous. This is the introduction of social evolutionary pressure which I mentioned, because it measures conformance, or lack thereto, of social strictures. The signaling mechanism indicating conformance might be the swelling of the coffers of the charity, singular or plural, in question, or the lack of apparently wealth of the donors. Just a trifle ironically, the various forms and reasons of anonymous giving are subject to the forces of social evolution; that is, those forms which lead to negative consequences for the members of the religion in question will become dead ends, while those leading to positive results will be propagated. This is an elementary observation. It’s simple to realize that there must be a congruency between positive for members of the religion and for the greater society in which it is partially or totally embedded, otherwise society will extinguish the particular phenomenon – or be extinguished.

In the second category, indirect gain motivations, anonymity may or may not serve the ultimate goal the betterment of society. However, I will point out that there are reasons for not advertising that one has the resources to contribute large amounts of wealth to a particular cause, such as importuning from other causes, worthy or, more often, not worthy. Then there’s outright criminal behaviors with negative impacts on the giver. This may be the strongest case for anonymous giving that I can think of – improving society, with it consequent positive results for the giver and their family relations, without signaling that one has wealth which may be gained by malefactors through negative acts. It makes anonymous giving seems like a more rational course of behavior than reputational giving, at least in relation to the perception of potential criminality in the society at large.

This, too, is a matter of social evolutionary pressure, especially if those who do not anonymous give are then eliminated from the idea pool. The idea pool is analogous to the gene pool, and consists of those ideas which are used to improve society. If we admit that those with more wealth are often those who most control the direction in which society will travel, then those victimized by criminals will lose that influence – and society will lose those ideas, for better or for worse.

And then there’s folks, like myself, who have no taste for gaudy & pretentious gestures. Not usually. I’m not as shy as when I was young, but I’m still not much for the limelight.

In any case, I’d take this article with more than a grain of salt.

I don’t watch a lot of television, but when my sister gave my Arts Editor a gift of a Amazon Prime membership, we started taking advantage of it.

One of the shows we tripped across is Endgame, the principal character of which is fictional chess Grandmaster Arkady Balagan. Having witnessed the assassination of his fiancee, he is now trapped by the psychological damage from the incident in the hotel in which they were staying prior to her death. In order to finance his stay in this high-end hotel, he turns to crime-solving using his analytical skills and his Russian temperament, but in the background is conducting his own investigation of his fiancee’s death, in association with his fiancee’s young, determined, yet naive sister.

If you enjoy modern crime solving dramas, this is not a bad little series to try out. The acting is more than competent, the staging and character chemistry is well done, and the stories are enjoyably intricate.

The wonder, of course, is why this intriguing effort didn’t make it more than the single season. It certainly had a lovely cliff-hanger season ending, as Balagon is warned not to further pursue his investigations of his fiancee’s death. Perhaps even better, characters are not necessarily permanent, as one dies in the final episode.

We’d have happily watched more episodes, and I don’t know why they didn’t continue this show. Put it in the file labeled One season wonders.

From Retraction Watch:

35,000 papers may need to be retracted for image doctoring, says new paper

Yes, you read that headline right.

In a new preprint posted to bioRxiv, image sleuths scanned hundreds of papers published over a seven-year period in Molecular and Cellular Biology (MCB), published by the American Society for Microbiology (ASM). The researchers — Arturo Casadevall of Johns Hopkins University, Elisabeth Bik of uBiome, Ferric Fang of the University of Washington (also on the board of directors of our parent non-profit organization), Roger Davis of the University of Massachusetts (and former MCB editor), and Amy Kullas, ASM’s publication ethics manager — found 59 potentially problematic papers, of which five were retracted. Extrapolating from these findings and those of another paper that scanned duplication rates, the researchers propose that tens of thousands of papers might need to be purged from the literature. That 35,000 figure is double the amount of retractions we’ve tallied so far in our database, which goes back to the 1970s.

Wow. I’d like some more explicit information. Ah, here we go:

RW: You extrapolate that if 10% of the MCB papers needed to be retracted for image duplication, then 35,000 papers throughout the literature may need the same. How did you perform that calculation, and what assumptions is it based on?

EB: We extrapolated the results from previous studies to the rest of the literature. In our previous study, in which we analyzed 20,000 papers, we found that 3.8% contained duplicated images. We know that the percentage of duplicated images varies per journal, because of a wide variety of reasons (different editorial processes, variable levels of peer review, different demographics of the authors). Since this percentage was calculated on papers from 40 different journals with different impact factors, this percentage serves as a reasonable representation of the whole body of biomedical literature. The 10.1 % is the percentage of papers that were retracted in the MCB dataset. Granted, this was a much smaller dataset than the one from the mBio paper, but it was a set that was seriously looked at.

If there are 8,778,928 biomedical publications indexed in PubMed from 2009-2016, and 3.8% contain a problematic image, and 10.6% (CI 1.5- 19.8%) of that group contain images of sufficient concern to warrant retraction, then we can estimate that approximately 35,000 (CI 6,584-86,911) papers are candidates for retraction due to image duplication.

And one of the researchers on this subject, Elizabeth Bik, commented:

Errors can be found anywhere, not just in scientific papers. It is reassuring to know that most are the result of errors, not science misconduct. Studies like ours are also meant to raise awareness among editors and peer reviewers. Catching these errors before publication is a much better strategy than after publication. In this current study we show that investing some additional time during the editorial process to screen for image problems is worth the effort, and can save time down the road, in case duplications are discovered after publication. I hope that our study will result in more journals following in the footsteps of ASM by starting to pay attention to these duplications and other image problems, before they publish their papers.

So this really is a matter of carelessness OR working on a very difficult enterprise with either inadequate tools or methodologies.

It’s still a big number.

This is the Creeping Bellflower. The pic is from our garden of last year, but it’s back again this year:

And how has it attained the exalted title of this post? From iNaturalist:

This plant is native to Europe and western Siberia and it has been introduced to North America, where it has become an extremely invasive weed. It chokes out other plants, and eliminating it is nearly impossible due to its multiple propagation mechanisms.

Sound familiar? I might point out it’s actually fairly attractive on the surface and has wormed its way to the heart of our political system garden, and is going to be damned pernicious.

Adumbrate:

1. : to foreshadow vaguely : intimate • the social unrest that adumbrated the French Revolution
2. : to suggest, disclose, or outline partially • adumbrate a plan
3. : overshadow, obscure • bubbling optimism, not at all adumbrated by difficulties [Merriam-Webster]

Heard on Dr. Who today, Trial of a Time Lord.

Such camera hogs. I daren’t bring the camera anywhere near them or they’ll snatch it away.

Then, no more spam phone calls.

Hmmmm.

Dicta:

The part of a judicial opinion which is merely a judge’s editorializing and does not directly address the specifics of the case at bar; extraneous material which is merely informative or explanatory.

Dicta are judicial opinions expressed by the judges on points that do not necessarily arise in the case.

Dicta are regarded as of little authority, on account of the manner in which they are delivered; it frequently happening that they are given without much reflection, at the bar, without previous examination. [The ‘Lectric Law Library]

Noted in “Fellow conservatives, stop the baseless attacks on a potential Supreme Court pick,” Alberto R. Gonzalez, WaPo:

The same reporting included another case where the District of Columbia Circuit ruled to allow an undocumented pregnant teen to get an abortion. Again, Kavanaugh dissented, and once again nameless conservatives argued that the dissent should have gone further, no doubt frustrated that Kavanaugh did not take on abortion rights even though he is bound as a circuit judge to follow Supreme Court precedent. I remember a time when true judicial conservatives did not act to advance a social agenda through dicta — words that have no legal bearing in the case at hand nor serve as precedent for future cases.

Source: Wikipedia

In case you hadn’t heard about it, Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), a man reportedly powerfully in conservative and Tea Party circles, has been accused by former Ohio State athletes of knowing about the activities of Dr. Richard Strauss, the Ohio State University doctor who examined athletes for treatment and research purposes. The doctor committed suicide after he was convicted. Jordan, then an assistant wrestling coach at the OSU, reportedly did nothing about the sexual assaults. I have no opinion on the guilt or innocence of Rep. Jordan in this matter – it’s up to our law enforcement representatives to determine his knowledge of the sexual assaults in the matter.

But I will note that the alleged behavior, which is essentially protecting the power hierarchy, is certainly congruent with the  culture of the GOP. True, moderate members are chased out of the Party, and the Tea Party wing has certainly revolted against the establishment. But notice that, so long as ideological purity of the wing is maintained, non-ideological transgressions are tolerated. It’s a symptom of an addiction to power, an allegiance overwhelming that of good sense. It’s also worth noting that the nature of ideological purity will change over time as a function of the membership kicking out the moderates and recruiting ever more extremists from the right.

I have no idea if the allegations against Jordan are truly credible, or if they’ll just fizzle and fade away. I have no animus against Rep. Jordan. It’s simply a note that his alleged behavior would not be surprising in this context.

Note to all outside garbage bin makers:

PLEASE do not make deep, deep grips to be used for hauling around your bins. Wasps and other stinging creatures love to use those deep grips to make their nests. And it’s damn hard to see those nests unless you lay the damn thing over on its side.

Thank you.

The nest was in the right-hand cubby. One dead wasp may be barely glimpsed by the morbidly minded.

First, a bit of lily.

Then, a shot down a neighbor’s grape arbor:

Our tomatoes from two weeks ago.

Finally, a lovely artifact of the camera.

Like I said a few days ago, the hocks are out!

Building with the plentiful to make the rare.

(Vimeo’s being annoying with its privacy settings, but I’ll post this anyways.)

https://vimeo.com/237604550

On 38 North, Michael Madden suggests recent North Korean coverage might be a bit over the top:

Prior to the Singapore Summit, the biggest news about the DPRK concerned a personnel shuffle of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) High Command. Some of the coverage of these changes, obviously targeted on a general audience, was misleading. According to recent commentary, Kim Jong Un, the “brutal dictator,” had once again embarked on a bloody purge of senior officials.

A more coherent and accurate interpretation of Kim Jong Un’s rationale was that he switched his top military leaders as part of the preliminary phase of mothballing the DPRK’s WMD program; there is a certain logic to moving malcontents to other positions, lest they resist Kim’s moves on denuclearization. However, this was only a minor factor in Kim Jong Un’s calculations. …

If the shorter time periods are considered, then this is a characteristic similar to other political systems, democratic and totalitarian alike. When the longer time periods are considered, the institutions in question go through periods of interim or transitional management to facilitate a smooth arrival for the new boss. In any event, these changes are not undertaken rashly; rather, they are deliberate and well-planned. This personnel management method—which is highly risk-averse—is one of the foundations of the DPRK political system’s resilience and survival. This lends itself in watching leadership activity in state media to occasionally seeing political dead men walking. Some conceal their alienation better than others.

In other words, Kim is settling into the job, and the job is settling out around him. Reading every personnel move as cold-blooded murder leaves open the question Why hasn’t the rest of the leadership just shot Kim in the head and moved on? To suggest that every change in high leadership is an occasion for blood ignores the problems engendered by such an unsettling way of changing people around. And, if the media is being appropriate proctored, it leaves them with egg on their face.

But we don’t proctor them. We’ve confused media with entertainment in some crucial ways, and unless we backtrack and disentangle news from entertainment, and understand that the former can be deadly serious, we’ll never really see improvements in coverage.

My Left Foot (1989) is the biographical film of the poet, painter, and novelist Christy Brown of Dublin, Ireland. He was born with cerebral palsy, a condition which was not only a challenge to him as an artist, but for him as a person in a large, poverty-stricken family. It covers the period from his birth to his marriage, after achieving fame with his novel of the same name. The title refers to the only limb over which he had the necessary control to express himself visually, his left foot.

Like most biographies, it seeks a central theme around which to build what may seem to be a series of random incidents, and, unsurprisingly, for Brown it’s perseverance in the face of overwhelming odds. Along with that theme is that of the importance of a loving, supportive family, although in this he had to win his father over, as the man, at least in the movie, would hardly accept his mute, uncommunicative son could be his progeny. He thought of Christy as something near a vegetable, until the day Christy proves he can think and communicate.

But if the storyteller is to demonstrate the virtues of perseverance, then hurdles must present themselves, and for Christy they are numerous: personal relationships, sudden black depressions, and the continual physical challenges someone with cerebral palsy must face. But, as the movie would have it, Christy did not accept the constrictions his condition would have put on him in the eyes of others, and so we see his eventual triumph as an artist.

And that’s part of the mythos of the Western version of the story of perseverance, isn’t it? The success stories are told, but what of those of those who struggled and persevered – and did not succeed? I sometimes wonder if those stories should be told to honor those who struggled and lost, much like those numberless, nameless men who fought and perished int those few, tragic days of the Battle of the Somme in World War I. Crushed into the mud, lost to their families, what of them? Is it enough that the poets who wrote for them and then lost their own lives were published?

Or is it just that, someday, their constituent atoms will once again be star stuff, as will those atoms of my reader and myself?

My Left Foot chronicles someone who was a winner, and it’s well-done, if predictable. If you’re in the mood for the inspirational struggle, you won’t go wrong with this technically excellent movie.

Conservative WaPo columnist Max Boot finds it necessary to confirm his decision to leave the Republican Party in the wake of it transforming into the Trumpian Party:

Personally, I’ve thrown up my hands in despair at the debased state of the GOP. I don’t want to be identified with the party of the child-snatchers. But I respect principled conservatives who are willing to stay and fight to reclaim a once-great party that freed the slaves and helped to win the Cold War. What I can’t respect are head-in-the-sand conservatives who continue to support the GOP by pretending that nothing has changed.

They act, these political ostriches, as if this were still the party of Ronald Reagan and John McCain rather than of Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller — and therefore they cling to the illusion that supporting Republican candidates will advance their avowed views. Wrong. The current GOP still has a few resemblances to the party of old — it still cuts taxes and supports conservative judges. But a vote for the GOP in November is also a vote for egregious obstruction of justice, rampant conflicts of interest, the demonization of minorities, the debasement of political discourse, the alienation of America’s allies, the end of free trade and the appeasement of dictators.

That is why I join Will and other principled conservatives, both current and former Republicans, in rooting for a Democratic takeover of both houses in November. Like postwar Germany and Japan, the Republican Party must first be destroyed before it can be rebuilt.

It’s encouraging that some of the conservatives who populated the Republican Party recognize the disaster into which the GOP has transformed itself. But there really needs to be more than this: how this has occurred must be identified, isolated, and procedures put into place to discourage it from happening again. For example, one of my favorite hobby horses is the Team Politics rule and how it turns out that it encourages victory at the electoral box, but discourages the development of worthy leaders, locally and nationally. The result is that he or she who is best at lickspittle politics ends up occupying positions of power – the opposite of a meritocracy, which is the basis of the United States. This policy, this entire culture, should be banned by the leaders of the future reborn GOP, or whatever the legitimate conservative party ends up naming itself.

So when Mr. Boot waves a flag of national emergency, it’s all well and good. But we need to learn from this national mistake, and try to prevent it in the future, if possible.

They’re on a date. Bestiality will occur later.

For science nuts, Dinosaurus! (1960) is an abomination and a blasphemy – if you also don’t have a sense of humor. For the rest of us, it’s an agonizing stop-action / sock puppet movie set in the Virgin Islands. A crew of Americans are dredging out a bay at an island when they encounter two frozen monsters. In the interests of paleontology, they drag them up on the beach, much to the delight of the local cute kid, Julio. In the meantime, the local equivalent to a mob boss has been menacing the waitresses of the restaurant and Julio (the Americans are not impressed), but during the night, he inadvertently discovers the frozen body of a caveman. Smelling a cash cow, he pulls the body off the beach and into the woods.

The incoming tropical storm of the evening features lots of lightning, which functions as a giant automated external defibrillator (AED) for giants, and soon enough the monsters, a Tyrannosaurus Rex and a Brontosaurus, are up and tromping about, making dinner out of the watchman (who, in a touch of humor, happens to be reading a comic book named Rip Van Winkle) and then charging off into the forest.

An unusual and, sadly, unfortunate element of this movie is the recovery of the caveman, who invades a local house and proceeds to puzzle over the sputterings of the short-wave radio, tries on the lady’s frilly dress (it doesn’t suit him), and is eventually discovered and befriended by Julio, who serves him a bit of pie after teaching him how to sit in a chair. In what’s otherwise a survival tale, the humor is ill-fitting, if earnestly presented, but has little function in this story.

The mob boss refuses to let go of his dream of riches, and despite the shrieks of the T. Rex in the forest, he and his minions (another couple of farce-specialists) track down the caveman. However, he proves hard to handle and escapes with Julio into the forest. Pursued by the mob boss, the T. Rex, and the leader of the Americans, Julio gets a ride on the Brontosaurus before he and the leading lady, who has little function beyond being cute, take refuge in the abandoned mine from the T. Rex. (We’ll skip over the uncomfortable near-sex scene of the caveman with the leading lady.)

T. Rex proves impervious to the Molotov cocktails dreamed up by the Americans, but soon enough the refugees escape and end up at the ruins of the colonial fortress of the island, where a moat of oil-fueled fire holds the T. Rex off until the leader of the Americans hits on the idea of forcing the T. Rex off a cliff and into the sea below using construction machines.

I shouldn’t have wasted my time reciting the plot. While the comedic element of the caveman was unusual and unwanted, it was otherwise the typical dinosaur survival story, or, to misquote Jurassic Park’s Ian Malcolm, a screaming and running movie. The Rip Van Winkle bit made me laugh, but otherwise it was all fairly boring. Perhaps in 1960 it was thrilling, but in the context of today’s CGI effects, it’s more a historical curiosity.

On The Resurgent, Susan Wright is discomfited by another evangelist leader who’s using the Bible to support Donald Trump:

Televangelist Andrew Wommack hosted a Facebook question and answer time on Facebook Tuesday night, as a lead-in to his usual Truth & Liberty livestream event.

At some point, the pastor was asked by a viewer why so many Christians were “blinded” and couldn’t see how God could be using Donald Trump.

It’s the same kind of nonsense I have dealt with in a thousand interactions since the election. Trump, with his adulteries, cheating, scamming, lying, and abusiveness is King David. He’s King Cyrus. They’ve stopped just shy of assigning messianic qualities to him, in some cases.

Just shy.

Wommack’s answer to this question was the dangerous twisting of Scripture that so many have used to excuse their support of an ungodly man.

Citing a passage from 2 Thessalonians in which Paul warns that, in the Last Days, God will send a “powerful delusion” on those “refused to love the truth,” Wommack said that this is precisely what is happening now.

“How come people can’t see things today?” he asked. “It really defies logic. It really does defy logic. It seems like there is a supernatural deception that’s over people that they can’t see the fallacy of what they’re doing.”

“I do believe that we are in the End Times and this is one of the signs of the End Times,” Wommack said. “I believe that there is a demonic deception that is blinding people today.”

I’ll agree with Wommack on this: There is a great delusion that has overtaken the people.

Four heads are better than one.

Trying to derive doctrine from a text readable in so many ways, years after it’s been translated, all strikes me as one of the nuttier ways to spend one’s time these days. But I suppose it’s not surprising, as it’s a movement pre-disposed to accepting the cloying bullshit of charlatans.

I know it’s just chanting into the wind, but how about evaluating President Trump on his own terms, using your life experiences with liars and cheats, and then tell me how you feel about his competency in a position completely outside of his experience? The difference in conclusions will cast a new light on the rancid remark magical thinking.

Yacking over “doctrine” … just leaves me shaking what I use for a head these days.

The US Chamber of Commerce has evaluated the costs of the “easy to win” trade wars President Trump is kicking off, and broken them down by state. What does Minnesota stand to lose?

Tariffs imposed by the United States are nothing more than a tax increase on American consumers and businesses–including manufacturers, farmers, and technology companies–who will all pay more for commonly used products and materials.

Retaliatory tariffs imposed by other countries on U.S. exports will make American-made goods more expensive, resulting in lost sales and ultimately lost jobs here at home.

This is the wrong approach, and it threatens to derail our nation’s recent economic resurgence.

This is coming from a bastion of Republican support. As the Republican Party becomes the Party of Trump, of right-wing ideology (that being, manic loyalty to Trump) and Trump’s poorly thought out political actions, the Chamber of Commerce becomes a marker of sorts of just how far the GOP has slunk from its old mooring at the pier of capitalism, free markets, and a strong defense, and moved to the pier of mercantilism, xenophobia, and a cult of personality that might begin to verge on Mao-like someday. It’s not hard to attribute some principle to the CoC, while the Republicans, as embodied by Trump, are now more or less moving through a self-interested set of political moves, not motivated by love of country, but love of self.

Kevin Drum thinks this means the cultural war we’ve been expecting is about to begin:

Trump hasn’t responded with a devastating tweet yet, but I’m sure he will eventually. At this point, though, China has retaliated against Trump. Canada has retaliated against Trump. Europe has retaliated against Trump. And now the Chamber of Commerce has retaliated against Trump. The battle is finally fully engaged.

I don’t know that Trump considered the CoC to be a vital ally, so he may not consider their ‘betrayal’ to be much of an event. But time will tell.