Category Archives: Uncategorized

When it comes to the Chinese balloons appearing in American skies, whether they’re meteorological or more menacing in their vital nature, it rather appears to depend on what you want to see as to what anyone wants to see. The liberals – and maybe the American military – sees it as a mistake that happens from time to time:

The top U.S. general responsible for protecting North American skies said Monday that past incursions by Chinese balloons went undetected by the Pentagon, exposing what he characterized as a worrisome deficiency that must be addressed.

The Defense Department has acknowledged that the craft shot down Saturday off the South Carolina coast after a days-long journey across the U.S. mainland marked at least the fifth time in recent years that Beijing has breached the nation’s airspace using such technology. Officials informed lawmakers over the weekend that, dating back to Donald Trump’s presidency, there had been similar breaches near Texas, Florida, Hawaii and Guam. [WaPo]

Erick Erickson doesn’t buy it – but, then, he’s followed right-wing instructions most of the time over the years I’ve read his public blog, and this seems to be a classic example:

The larger issue of the Chinese balloon is a test to see how we would respond. We failed the test. We could have taken action over the Pacific as it wandered into Alaska. We could have taken action as it wandered into very rural northern Idaho and Montana, where the loss of lives would be virtually non-existent. Instead, we waited until it traversed the whole United States, floated over the Atlantic, then shot it down.

Biden ordered the shootdown on Wednesday. It happened on Saturday.

In the run-up to the shootdown, several defense sources said these balloons also happened in prior years, predating Biden. Also, several made clear that they were not sure what was actually on the balloon, so it was better to wait for the ocean in case there were biological or radiological issues, particularly with power. But considering the solar panels, that seems to be excuse-making. And, with a seven-mile debris field possible, the damage of impact on the land would not have been much different.

Culminating in …

That Joe Biden’s gut still tells him to go with the advisors who keep leading him astray is a problem with Joe Biden, not with his advisors. He looks weak.

Erickson’s problems? You mean, besides the report from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics that the US blew by professional estimates for employment gains … “Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 517,000 in January, and the unemployment rate changed little at 3.4 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today.“?^[1]

Yeah, this analysis from CNN:

As the new year got underway in China, hopes appeared to be running high that an easing of tensions with the United States could unfold in the months ahead.

China’s Foreign Ministry expressed as much late last month when it said China would “welcome” a visit from US Secretary of State Antony Blinken – an expected visit that analysts say Beijing viewed as an opportunity to help strengthen its economy and repair fraught diplomatic ties.

So when a high-altitude balloon from China carrying a payload the size of three coach buses equipped with what American officials have described as surveillance equipment was spotted over the continental US, visibly hovering above a state with key military assets and ultimately sparking an international incident – it naturally raised critical questions about just what had happened, and why.

China maintains the vessel, which was shot down by the US over the Atlantic Ocean on Saturday, was a weather balloon thrown off course. And it has shown signs of both being caught off guard by the incident and wanting to stem the potential damage, analysts say, not only framing the situation as the result of factors beyond its control, but also offering a rare expression of “regret” over it in a statement Friday.

Indeed, if China’s government is having internal problems stemming from its response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and exacerbated by its inferior CoronaVac vaccine and a national pride that prevented its use of Western-developed vaccines, then this analysis makes a great deal of sense. Needing to cool a heated relationship that might otherwise result in sanctions could easily be at the top of Chinese priorities – at least for top leader President Xi Jinping. Autocracies are stable right up until they fly apart, and so for all I know Xi is trying very hard to hold together China, and doesn’t need the USA making things worse.

But his rivals might risk it. Just like this.

Finally, Professor Richardson, a professional historian and a liberal, has a bit of scorn to serve up:

It’s Saturday night, so I will be a bit snarky: [right wing critics] need to get a grip. A key aspect of any country’s national security is spying, and of course China and the U.S. are spying on each other. Shooting the balloon down as soon as it was spotted would have endangered Americans and made learning anything from it more difficult.

That being said, it’s not at all clear to me what this balloon was designed to accomplish politically. Secretary of State Antony Blinken canceled his planned visit to Beijing over it, giving the U.S. a reason to back out of a visit that certainly seemed likely to bolster President Xi Jinping’s government. Scholar of international relations Daniel Drezner notes in his Drezner’s World it appears to have been a screw-up at a level below that of President Xi. China has been trying to cool tensions with America, not heat them up.

That being said, the visible spy balloon predictably sparked Republican attacks on President Biden, so the incident has the potential to weaken the administration’s strong steps to counter the growing power of China.

For those who think the balloons are of a sinister nature, it’s worth noting that analysis of their remains will yield useful information for the USA, and monitoring their communications prior to their elimination may yield even more information. The Chinese had to know that, eventually, they’d be detected and knocked down, so why would they send high value surveillance technology into American airspace. Out of context, that is a puzzle.

So what’s the context? These balloons are flying at around 60,000 ft and moving fast. They may actually be above the North American jet stream, or they may spend time in it. And here’s the final piece that I’ve yet to see mentioned anywhere:

What if this really is an accident brought on by weather that’s slowly becoming more and more extreme?

Yes, all this squalling could be the result of climate change. Sure, right-wingers like Erickson will squawk and laugh and ignore such an idea because it doesn’t fit with their tenets of how reality works, but I think it’s worth considering in all this learned analysis. Accidents do happen, and that’s what we may be seeing here.

¹ Naturally, one should not trust the first cut numbers of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, given its history of issuing revisions. Still, half a million new jobs is a bit of a gob smack when the projection was short of 200,000 jobs, enough so that I wonder if someone screwed up the count. And … it certainly weakens Erickson’s sniping at Biden’s advisors, doesn’t it?

Oh, damn, forgot the grocery list! Oh, damn, the reflux!

Predators (2010) is, as an older reader might expect, one of the sequels to the Arnold Schwarzenegger paean to the grandparents’ sage advice of Never give up!, Predator (1987), in which overly-weaponized aliens use our planet as an individual hunting preserve, alien on humans. Speaking of aliens, Predator has spawned a couple of sequels involving the nightmarish creatures of the Alien franchise, such as this.  These were rather cheesy. Finally, reading a one sentence summary of Predators will lead the jaded reader to, sadly, expect more of the same, an attempt to cash in on an old and burned out franchise that will inevitably disappoint the hopeful.

Reset your expectations, dear reader.

We started Predators in precisely the aforementioned frame of mind, expecting to shut it off five minutes in, groaning in disbelief that a studio would release such a failure of a movie. At five minutes in, though, we were still puzzling – a good thing – over the beginning, as a group of people, all military or former, professional warriors as it were, parachute into a tropical forest.

An hour later we were still watching, nearly on the edges of our seats, disentangling the complex lines of the plot. Questions abound: Why does one guy have only a knife, while others come with fully automatic weapons? Just which planet is this? What is whispering in English in the jungle? WTF is going on?

Why is my heart racing?

I kid you not. Shortly after the movie ended, we were off to the ER, where I was diagnosed with tachycardia and treated with adenosine. Problem solved. But I cannot promise that the movie had nothing to do with the tachycardia, even if the docs didn’t take my suggestion to that effect seriously. I was into it.

And what’s not to like? The Predators come in multiple versions, there’s individualism vs cooperation, betrayal and loyalty, innovative solutions to impossible situations, drugs, claustrophobia and agoraphobia, hot guns and little knives, little guy vs nasty aliens.

And so much violence.

If you’re a fan of the original, this is not a bad followup at all. The acting is good, special effects quite good, and the extensions to the original make some sort of sense. The tension is palpable.

And it’s a good popcorn movie. Well done.

Elvers:

SO WHAT ARE ELVERS?

Elvers look more like clear noodles than fish, but in reality they are baby eels that migrate at night from the Atlantic Ocean to freshwater lakes and ponds.

And the Chinese and South Korean’s [sic] eat up Elvers like we eat up hot dogs… except of course our American hot dogs cost a fraction of what a pound of elvers costs… but at any rate, Asians consider these tiny eels much more of a delicacy than we do. [“YOU’LL NEVER BELIEVE WHAT FISH IS SELLING FOR $2,500 PER POUND!” Joseph Simonds, SaltStrong]

Noted in “How we finally tracked European eels all the way to the Sargasso Sea,” Graham Lawton, NewScientist (21 January 2023, paywall):

For the next few months, glass eels wash in and out of estuaries, feeding and growing and gradually transforming into elvers, which are dark brown and about 12 cm long. At this point they are ready to swap the sea for freshwater and make their way up rivers and streams to find a place to grow up. Once settled in a lake or river, they transform again, into yellow eels. “This life stage can be decades long,” says Wootton. “And this is usually what we see when we see eels within our rivers and lakes and lochs.”

I’ll be trying to work that word into dinnertime conversation, I will.

Megan McArdle speaks a little sanity out in the whirling vortex of madness that is the transgenderism wars:

Friend-zone:

a friendship in which one person, typically male, is romantically or sexually attracted to the other, but the attraction is not mutual:
He’s obviously in love with her but she keeps him in the friend zone. [Dictionary.com]

Noted in “She friend-zoned him. He’s suing her for $2.3 million over it.” Bryan Pietsch, WaPo:

WARNING: SPOILER ALERT. MANY SPOILERS.

Nothing occurring to me is up to par, so you’ll have to supply your own snark.

The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) is an almost too obvious of a parable concerning the Irish and the common aphorisms concerning them: obstinate, deceivingly prideful. In 1923 or thereabout, on the fictional island of Inisherin, separated from Ireland by a slender strait, is located a village, presumably of the same name. Isolated, yet connected to Ireland, the Irish Civil War afflicting the big island has little effect on Inisherin, although occasionally the village inhabitants’ eyes are drawn to the bells of hell of a people torn apart: gunshots, cannon bellowing, and the usual announcements of bellicose barbarism.

But on Inisherin a new hell is beginning to form. Colm Doherty, a man in his late middle years, as we so politely like to put it, is feeling the weight of history on his shoulders, which is to say he fears that, in twenty years, if his ghost returns and asks a random inhabitant Who was Colm Doherty?, the answer will be What is that name now?, followed by a head shake. No wife, no children, we must assume, only his faithful dog inhabits his hut with him, the dog and his artistic efforts.

To the end of avoiding such an ignominious fate, Colm now focuses on composing an intangible, perhaps since the intangible fight the rot of time more effectively than the tangible, and the composition is a new fiddle tune. In Colm’s eye glints the fear of finality, of being forgotten.

His buddy, Pádraic Súilleabháin, is younger than Colm, a peaceful, humble shepherd. He cares for his cows and their milk, and, perhaps too much, donkeys, and when they’ve been cared for, he calls on favorite donkey Jenny to escort him to Colm’s, and then the pub for a pint or three, all without a wife; Pádraic lives with his sister, Siobhán, who quietly despairs as she keeps house for him. Day in; day out. Thus are timeless rhythms of life established, carrying society onward.

And that’s not good enough for Colm, who one day begins to ignore Pádraic. Pádraic, who wonders how he’s offended, how he’s become inadequate, how everyone thinks he’s dull. Pádraic, who becomes deeply confused when he learns the local policeman’s son, a late teener or early twenties, is beaten on a regular basis by his father, and sexually molested, too.

Pádraic, who doesn’t fight back when, upon revealing his knowledge of the policeman’s brutality, is himself beaten senseless by the policeman. And all the villagers, who hear and witness, shake their heads at his interference.

In the meantime, said son, Dominic Kearney, with his bruises, unfiltered mouth, and unfortunate manners, would like to court Siobhán.

But I’m getting ahead a bit. Pádraic is stubborn, believing Colm merely needs to have Pádraic interfering in his life in order to be reminded that he’s missing something. Colm disagrees and tells Pádraic that if he interferes again, Colm will start cutting off his own fingers. Colm’s, that is.

Surely a rhetorical device, a more sophisticated person, such as his own sister, might opine. Shortly thereafter, though, Colm calmly deposits a finger on Pádraic’s doorstep. All to the fell melody of the Civil War, which now yields up its own crop of fingers in the form of prisoners up for execution. That cop? He doesn’t even know which side is executing the other, he just knows there’s a cash offer for executioners, and he couldn’t possibly turn it down.

It’ll be fun. Such is the morality of officialdom, eh?

And then another crop of fingers comes to decorate Pádraic’s doorstep, and now events turn serious, because Jenny the donkey mistakenly ate two or three, and choked to death on them. Would that I knew Irish history in some detail. Regardless, Pádraic is heartbroken, for the next best thing to a wife is dead, a loyal donkey, and must be repaid.

The message from Pádraic to Colm? Well, he’s a civilized person, so he tells Colm to keep the dog out of the house tomorrow, because Pádraic intends to burn Colm’s house down, and Colm can be in it or not as he sees fit.

Meanwhile, Pádraic’s sister Siobhán receives an offer to work at a library over in Ireland, a dream job, and as the Irish insanity surges around her, she decides to be off, leaving Pádraic and Colm to their shared madness. Again, Irish history would be useful.

Far be it from me to attempt to detail the parable here, as my knowledge of Irish history – if my reader hasn’t guessed – is no better than the average American’s. The Irish have been persecuted by the Brits, who took and colonized Dublin, while indulging religious hatreds; the Famine years; the eventual hard-won independence, followed by the Troubles, eventually brought to an end by a treaty, which these days occasionally threatens to come unraveled; the Irish Catholic Church tragedy; and even today there’s apparently “recreational rioting” in Dublin.

But the personifications of various facets of Irish society are apparent, from obstinacy to official corruption, the face of morality behind which base grasping and urges reign supreme, all for which Ireland, to various extents, is known – as if no other nation has suffered them. This parable is pointed. Perhaps too pointed.

But this is not the only way to read it, for I actually thought of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) as a comparable approach to storytelling first. In this story, three men, hating each other, yet dependent on each other, are searching for a hidden treasure. During this search for a little temporary wealth, the American Civil War is booming around them, with battles to be dodged and survived, the implicit morality of freeing the American slave population a condemnatory note concerning their banal search for gold.

There are similar notes struck in The Banshees of Inisherin. The Irish Civil War suggests that some sort of moral struggle is going on, although closer examination might falsify the assumption. The Inisherin struggle is certainly that of the trivial, and the reaction overwrought, almost as if a proportional reaction is just too boring for words. And the ending?

Well, that would be telling.

All that said, it’s a well told tale, although if you find Irish accents difficult, then this will be a struggle. But the story raises the hair on the back of the neck when the audience isn’t laughing. And the Civil War is ending, is it? No, it’ll go on forever and forever, so long as the subtle arrogance of the Irish goes on.

Thus are the Banshees known to be present.

Excellent.

Educator Sal Khan and Jeffrey Rosen of the National Constitution Center brought together a bunch of law professors to talk about what-ifs:

Political polarization, the conventional wisdom goes, has made our Constitution unamendable. The supermajorities required to propose and ratify constitutional amendments — two-thirds in both houses of Congress plus three-fourths of the states — are now unobtainable. As a result, as Jill Lepore reported in the New Yorker, the United States has one of the lowest amendment rates in the world. …

• The 28th Amendment would eliminate the natural-born citizenship requirement for the presidency. If the amendment passed, Henry Kissinger and Arnold Schwarzenegger could run for president.
• The 29th Amendment would allow for legislative vetoes of executive and regulatory actions. [WaPo]

And on through a 32nd amendment. Band-aids on a 20 inch gash through the femoral artery, I fear. The law professors, regardless of persuasion, are trying to fix a problem through minor adjustments to the Constitutional foundation without paying attention to political forces, right and left, that are desperate for power, whether its gaining it or protecting it, and operate regardless of facts on the ground, truth, and reality.

That goes for left & right.

It’s what their training dictates, of course, but it would seem to have little relevance to the problems of what amounts to political arrogance and lust for power.

Eudaimonic happiness:

Happiness can be defined in many ways. In psychology, there are two popular conceptions of happiness: hedonic and eudaimonic. Hedonic happiness is achieved through experiences of pleasure and enjoyment, while eudaimonic happiness is achieved through experiences of meaning and purpose. Both kinds of happiness are achieved and contribute to overall well-being in different ways. [ThoughtCo.]

Noted in “How to be happy, according to the longest-running study of happiness,” an interview with Robert Waldinger by Alison Flood, NewScientist (14 January 2023, paywall):

Alison Flood: How do you define happiness?

Robert Waldinger: There are two big bins that happiness seems to fall into. One is hedonic happiness. It’s like, am I having fun now? It’s a moment-to-moment, fluctuating experience. Then there’s eudaimonic happiness, which is a sense of life having meaning and being worthwhile. For example, you’re reading to your child before bed. You’ve read the same book eight times, but she wants you to read it again. You’re exhausted. Is this fun? No. But is this the most meaningful thing you could imagine doing? Yes. In our studies, we think about well-being a lot, which is more eudaimonic happiness than moment-to-moment happiness.

For all of the hubbub over the AI tool ChatGPT, this report sounds more interesting:

An artificial intelligence is set to advise a defendant in court for the first time ever. The AI will run on a smartphone and listen to all speech in the courtroom in February before instructing the defendant on what to say via an earpiece.

The location of the court and the name of the defendant are being kept under wraps by DoNotPay, the company that created the AI. But it is understood that the defendant is charged with speeding and that they will say only what DoNotPay’s tool tells them to via an earbud. The case is being considered as a test by the company, which has agreed to pay any fines, should they be imposed, says the firm’s founder, Joshua Browder. [“AI legal assistant will help defendant fight a speeding case in court“, Matthew Sparkes, NewScientist, 14 January 2023, paywall]

Will this result in more court traffic? Or will courts move faster because the AI lawyer never has the flu, or family troubles?

The social aspects may be underrated.

Emirati Minister for Artificial Intelligence, Digital Economy and Remote Work Application, Omar Sultan Al Olama took part in a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where he mentioned a term new to me:

Olama discussed the future of decentralized finance, or DeFi, at the panel. DeFi is a form of fintech whereby individuals can conduct financial transactions such as loans without intermediaries such as banks, relying on technology such as digital financial databases. DeFi uses blockchain technology similar to that of cryptocurrency.

Olama called DeFi the “least regulated” sector in the crypto world. He added that DeFi could become a “bubble,” meaning it will crash after seeing a quick increase in value.

“We are going to see some bubbles in the DeFi space in the coming future that will require a lot of government intervention,” he said. [AL-Monitor]

I should think that fighting advanced computer criminals will become tougher when the usual law enforcement tools that depend on access to financial institutions’ databases become useless.

Autogynephilia:

Autogynephilia is defined as a male’s propensity to be sexually aroused by the thought of himself as a female. It is the paraphilia that is theorized to underlie transvestism and some forms of male-to-female (MtF) transsexualism. [PubMed.gov]

Noted in “We could actually use a little more shame around sex,” Meghan Murphy, The Same Drugs:

While I am not suggesting we literally police the bedrooms of others, I am suggesting that being completely open-minded and non-judgemental of anything labelled “sex” is not a good thing. I don’t think it is a good thing that single women are expected to sell themselves to strangers on dating apps and social media. I don’t think it’s a good thing that Instagram is so full of pornography it is unavoidable, even to people like me who would prefer to avoid it. I don’t think it is a good thing that parents are bringing their children to drag shows where men in stilettos parade down runways, pausing to accept dollar bills in their g-strings. I don’t think it’s a good thing that the Pride parade has turned into a parade of fetishes, wherein furries, BDSM fanatics, and autogynephilic men have received the blessing of progressive politicians and the public alike to take their private sexual habits out onto the street, as if anyone needs to know what gets you off. And I definitely don’t think it’s good that a multi-billion dollar sex industry that sees hundreds of thousands of women and girls exploited and abused around the world is treated as a necessary form of free expression.

You’re all giving me heartburn, so I’m going to whip out this gun and fix it.

The attentive audience member will readily see the hands of the creators of Queen Of The Amazons (1946) in their work. They’ll be glimpsed up the backsides of the characters, who all seem to blow in the wind; mouthing the horribly limp dialog; padding the paper thin plot with African savanna populated by the exotica of lions, lions, lions, giraffes, monkeys, zebras, one quick shot of a hippo, and lions savaging the members of various tribes and one white guy; characters betraying no ambition beyond obtaining husbands, both Amazonian and domestic; and generally out to make a buck and not tell a story.

My Arts Editor commented that this one was not worth picking apart. Sure, it’s an anti- ivory-trade story, but it’s tension free. The lady’s fiancee is missing? Sure, she’s charging right out to find him in the wilds, with nary a worry in the world. Some poor Indian gets shot while telling her what the fiancee was up to? Pity about that, too bad. Safari staff get mauled by a lion? Ah, yeah. Amazon Queen’s going to marry your fiancee? Nyah. OH, OK, so she’ll marry another white guy!

The best parts are the crow (“Jimmy, go get the commissioner a match!”) and the poetry-composing cook.

Yecccccccccccccccch.

The late Tyre Nichols, killed in an encounter with police earlier this month, was a photographer.

In memoriam to his passion. He was more than a victim. His site is here.

I am left to ponder, weak and weary,
Morticia's response, will it be fury?
When the passing of her mate, Gomez,
Brings an end to his nightly roamez,
When his stately form stills,
Focusing all on his wills,
The final puckering of those lips,
Brings on those offal rips.
Will she caper in outre celebration,
Pouring out some bloody libation?
Will her pallor finally evaporate,
Forcing her to use makeup immaculate?
Or will the most immodest of displays
Result in her honest sprays
Of salted sorrows,
Fated for a dozen tomorrows?

The Addams Family 2 (2021) is the animated feature creature sequel to The Addams Family (2019), the animated version of the celebrated family invention of famed cartoonist Charles Addams. The first installment, which was an origin story of sorts for the family, positively celebrates the challenges of every day life and non-conformism by upping the ante and dancing a bit faster. Last time, we met son Pugsley and learned what will, eventually, make him a man’s man – it’s not his foil-work, unlike his dear ol’ master swordsman Dad, Gomez – and he made us his fan club; this time around, the imperturbable Wednesday will lead our little band of misfit toys to that one island. That one island.

That can perturb the sacred, walking pallor that is Wednesday.

Because when one has allegiance to the family that is Addams, its sacred secrets and unfortunate baldness – someone push Uncle Fester out of an airplane, please, as I hate his signature look, which has Nessie’s flipper prints all over it – its role in Western Civilization, and, most importantly, its scientific insights. Wait, where was I?

Oh, yeah. Their camper van vacation. No? I still like the camper van.

When someone, that someone, a peerless narcissist, suggests that he and his wife are the parents to the imperturbable, rather than Gomez and Morticia, well, chaos rears up, reads the DNA chart, and pauses its ceaseless vortex for that brief moment it takes for Wednesday to begin tracking down this feckless fiend.

And the rest is, as they say, mere detail. Such is the revenge of Wednesday.

Fun it is, but not memorable. Rather like the first of this series in that respect, but there is even less underlining of contemporary societal contradictions. And, so, The Addams Family 2 is doomed to a quick peak and then eternal obscurity.

Which I think they’d prefer, given the lack of their progenitor here.

Hydronic:

adjective

1. of or relating to a heating system for a building in which the medium for carrying heat throughout the structure is circulating water, especially when the circulation is aided by a pump. [Dictionary.com]

Noted in “How to make your home more energy efficient — and get a tax break too,” Erica Werner, WaPo:

Radiant floor heat relies on a system of tubing underneath or incorporated into the floor of a house, which heats up when hot water is forced through it. (There are also electric and hot-air-based systems, but the water-based hydronic systems are most cost-effective and popular, according to the Energy Department.) These systems are more efficient than most baseboard or forced-air systems.

Ummmm. I live in a house built in 1938, but I don’t see any radiators. Too bad. I had the old boiler hauled out back in 2005 or somesuch. Drat.

The purple hair infection was, sadly, terminal. They had to bury Liz in a bath of acetate.

The Mirror Crack’d (1980) is another Miss Marple special from Agatha Christie, and recounts a murder on a movie set, as Hollywood invades a small British town. Suffice it to say that, while quite twisty, the storytelling is also a little brittle, perhaps brought on by the abrupt segues that seemed characteristic of the 1970s moviemakers, or perhaps the rather large cast. The lesson of this tale is somewhat atypical for Christie, as an unfortunate transmission of a virus by the murder victim, who did not know she was infected, results in the birth of a retarded baby.

A sad commentary on the realities of a world. Let not innocence stand in the way of sudden death, Agatha might be heard to mutter.

But, for completists, this is a bonanza, crowned by Tony Curtis and Elizabeth Taylor, bringing the glamor of a, by then, bygone age – and its seamy underside.

Enjoy, but you may have to work at it.

Shaping the battlefield is a phrase used by analysts of Putin’s War, describing the attempt to reshape a battle field into a more favorable configuration by each side. It’s very common and, in politics, it happens a lot, from what I see, especially for statewide contests.

The Republicans are now signaling their recognition that there’s an existential threat in ranked-choice-voting, as Alaska Public Media is reporting:

Alaska Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom has certified an application for a petition that, if successful, would get rid of the state’s ranked choice voting system and non-partisan primary.

Sponsor Art Mathias wants to go back to the traditional election, where a candidate from each officially recognized party has a spot on the general election ballot in each race.

Which is much easier for extremists. The ideological gap, if you will, between an extremist and a moderate example of their Party may be far larger than that between the moderate and the moderate of a different Party, and, if this is made apparent during the campaign, why, the extremist may not get the votes they’d otherwise receive in a non-ranked choice voting system.

Mathias reason for discarding a system made for moderates?

He said the new system forced candidates to hold their tongues, to avoid rankling the supporters of their opponents.

Sounds like unrepentant whining to me.

Look, shaping the battlefield, or changing the rules in less romantic parlance, is a perfectly valid maneuver, providing the changes don’t unfairly advantage one side or the other. That, in itself, can sometimes be a nasty little question, but I’ll not go into it here.

The real question here is not whether Mathias is just a whiner, or recognizes that he’s an extremist and is trying to cover it up. The question is whether Alaskans liked the experience of having available an option to select a moderate in the two 2022 state-wide races (in which Senator Murkowski (R) and Mary Peltola (D) won re-election and election, respectively), and took it.

I would say the same question applies to the left wing of the Democrats, but in Alaska the Republicans dominate, so it may not matter much.

And this may be one of the most important political maneuvers for the next five years, if it spreads out of Alaska. Win or lose, this is an excellent path for reclaiming seats from extremists.

Too bad this was the best headgear. I’d have preferred the title Evil Under Hats. Or maybe Evil Under Hairpieces.

Evil Under the Sun (1982) is a lightweight rendition of Agatha Christie’s Poirot stumbling into a murder, this time on a French vacation beachfront. Make no mistake, there are twists and gambits, passions and hatreds, but somehow it never comes to life. A is dead, B through F have reasons, even good reasons, to kill A, but in the end the bad guys would get away, if they just hadn’t made that one tiny error.

Meh.

Perhaps the problem is the scenery dominates the movie, fabulous cliffs and blue seas and men and ladies in scant, for the time, swimming clothing. But it all feels so bourgeois, as if it’s happening again and again on all the beaches local to this one, to the self-centered by the self-centered. Bourgeois? Yes, bourgeois, crimes of the bourgeois against the bourgeois.

It may be murder, but in some essential sense it feels like a peculiarly bourgeois crime, committed by newcomers to the class of bourgeois against its royalty, a ridiculous statement on its face, and, yet, a truth that renders the drama painfully socially provincial: no one really cares, but, perhaps, Poirot and his neurotic physique.

Perhaps the lack of Poirot-foil is brought to a sharp point in this drama, as Captain Hastings, the naive and jealous sidekick of Christie’s invention, is not yet present. In other of the Belgian’s dramas he’s the anchorline for Poirot, who is the racing yacht, holding the quicksilver detective in close contact with the working men and women who have suffered at the hands of some criminals’ mischief; or, sometimes, the reverse, as the lower-class criminal buffets the hapless heiress, relieving her of her ill-earned millions and even her life, much to her grief.

But in Evil Under The Sun, it’s not so much the criminals, but the entire social system under indictment, an indictment equal parts criminal and petty and boring. They all dance, but it’s all uncertain mincing and tights exhibiting dismaying seams.

Et ainsi ça se passe.

Found on AL-Monitor’s Why Tunisian InstaDeep’s $682m exit may not mark Maghreb’s turning point:

Yassir Ismail Idrissi, former Careem entrepreneur and co-founder of the Egyptian food supply startup Nomu, believes that this exit will not lead external investors to pump money into the region, “not because they don’t want to, but the hassle of dealing with the region’s grunting policies is not worth it.”

Grunting? I understand that exit means the enterprise has been sold, but grunting?

Ryan Cooper of MSNBC is another advocate of the platinum coin solution to the threatened Federal debt default. If you’ve not been paying attention, this hypothesized imminent catastrophe is the fact that the amount of money that can be borrowed by the Federal Government is limited by law, and when we run into that limit then the government cannot borrow more to, say, pay subcontractors, employees, and any other liability. House Republicans have so far refused to up the limit, demanding Democrats cut spending on a collection of institutions, such as Medicare, and thus letting the Republicans bypass the primary, preferred, and only legitimate way to change those programs: legislation. What they’re trying to do is extortion, as many have pointed out.

Incidentally, the House Republicans, or at least the House’s Freedom Caucus, think they should be able to pick and choose who gets paid in the meantime, but the President, the Senate Democrats, and quite possibly the Senate Republicans have all slapped the House GOP’s hand.

Cooper’s advocacy is for an outré counter-strategy called the platinum coin solution:

All this is why the famous platinum coin is Biden’s most legally defensible option, despite how silly it sounds. A 1997 law clearly grants the treasury secretary the ability to mint platinum coins of any denomination, in part with the intended purpose of making profit for the government through seignorage [WOTD here – haw]. If Congress says that the president must spend, cannot borrow, but can mint, then the way is clear for a legal stickler. Mint a trillion or two in platinum coins, deposit them at the Federal Reserve, and hey, presto, problem solved. Economically, it would be virtually identical to borrowing the money, and presumably at some point the ceiling could be raised and the coin spending replaced with normal debt.

More on the platinum coin solution is here.

Now, I’m no expert on this sort of thing. Arguably, no one qualifies as such when it comes to a financial strategy that has never been promulgated before. It’s worth noting that Treasury Secretary and former Federal Reserve Chairman Janet Yellen disagrees with Cooper, as he notes:

Yet administration lawyers apparently disagree. Yellen has further said the coin is a “gimmick” that “compromises the independence of the Fed, conflating monetary and fiscal policy.” This is a weak argument in context — it’s hard to see why a gimmick that allegedly erodes the (highly overrated) independence of the Fed would be worse than financial Armageddon.

Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), current leader of the GOP in the Senate.

In the end, though, I have to wonder if Cooper is trying to analyze the wrong problem.

Anyone who has been paying attention to President Biden knows the President’s strongest domestic concern is not a debt default, but, much to the consternation of the GOP, the House GOP itself. Biden regards their behavior as poisonous to the United States. He’s said this a number of times.

So how does one defang the serpent?

Not by negotiating with the extremists. It grants them legitimacy and a reputation for being effective. They are wild-eyed extremists, and letting them acquire a reputation for being part of the mainstream would simply encourage them to repeat this illicit maneuver.

So, instead, they are being isolated. They are told to follow the rules, they are virtually being told to grow up. For many, including myself, Biden is running the risk that the House GOP won’t abandon the extremists, and we’ll go into default, world-wide financial meltdown, blah blah blah. But Biden and his advisors may calculate that such a disaster is better than letting the inmates run the show – and then can be used to end the careers of the troublemakers. They may view this as a win-win situation – and it’s a position not without legitimacy.

In the end, I think the point here is to blunt the extremists’ influence, and to imperil their careers. Solve the default problem? Sure, that, too.

It’s just what you think: the Plantae version of Senator McConnell, See above for the human version.

But, really, it may be to chase the nut-cases out of the government. This may be part of the McConnell Reform Effort.

What!! you say?

Senator McConnell (R-KY), much as it pains me to say it, may represent the sanest segment of the current Republican Party. He’s certainly no fan of such lunatics as former President Trump, or Senators Scott (FL), Johnson (WI), or the Freedom Caucus. I, personally, think he’s displayed exceptionally poor judgment over the years, resulting in an arrogant, overweening super-majority on SCOTUS that is bringing public opprobrium on the institution, and an inability to write serious legislation when he’s in charge of the Senate. But, compared to the other inmates, he may be the most sane, and he seems to be competing with the far more extreme members of the GOP for access to the controls of the party.

And so I call it the McConnell Reform Effort.

And sigh.

Just give her a pipe and she’ll fit right in.

Them! (1954) is a highly competent story-telling effort grafted onto a nuclear horror meme. It all starts with the discovery of a little girl wandering the New Mexican desert by the police. Traced to a nearby vacation trailer owned by an FBI agent, the location of her family remains a mystery, as the trailer has been wrecked.

Sending the kid to a hospital via ambulance, the cops find a local store similarly vandalized, and the proprietor dead. One of the cops heads for the station, leaving the other to face the New Mexican night and its shadows.

It doesn’t go well.

Soon, a father & daughter team of entomologists from the Federal Government show up in response for calls for assistance. With their help, the local New Mexicans finally find a huge mound, and in it is … well … monsters.

Nuclear monsters.

They’re eradicated, but where there’s one mutation, there can be more, and a nationwide search yields another infestation under Los Angeles, missing children, and the ongoing challenge of bad special effects.

But that last is the worst of the movie, and badly done monsters is something of a tradition in the industry of the time. The rest of Them! is absolutely nothing to sneeze at: tight, logical, and plausible plot, a minimum of gender discrimination, and excellent acting and sets. It was really a pleasure to watch.

If you like monster movies from the era prior to the advent of computer graphics, Them!, despite its fairly odd title – yes, I know the little girl uses it – is one of the best of that category.

Not all physicists are tongue-tied.

I'm thrilled to be joined on the Science Committee by my Republican colleague Dr. George Santos, winner of not only the Nobel Prize, but also the Fields Medal – the top prize in Mathematics – for his groundbreaking work with imaginary numbers. https://t.co/RJQ7eP8n8x

— Congressman Bill Foster (@RepBillFoster) January 20, 2023

Rep Foster (D-IL) forgets to mention that MIT Professor Santos’ work in black holes is a wonderful metaphor for what the good Professor is doing to the Republican Party – sucking them down a black hole of dishonor.

Image source: ScienceBlogs

In a moment, you’ll be asked to judge the Executioner’s technique. Please use the criteria of efficiency, cost, and – no, D’Artagnan, that’s not a kaiju. Shame on you for distracting us while trying to save the malcontent!

The Four Musketeers (1974) is the simple and straightforward continuation of the first of the series of Aramis, Portos, Athos, and D’Artagnan of Gascony. Suspicion of Milady’s origins has D’Artagnan in her bed, where he discovers she was indeed condemned, and is also Athos’ ex-wife. With the endangered Constance, who has insulted Milady, safely tucked away in a convent, the Musketeers engage in various adventures.

Meanwhile, the ladies are either helpless, or having to sacrifice their virtue to avoid having to, ah, sacrifice their lives to the marital gods. Freedom is, for the most fortunate women, dearly bought; the less fortunate simply don’t have any.

But then, the men are subject to the whims of the King, of God the Cardinal, and, lurking in the background, incurable illnesses and a medical profession incompetent in much of its efforts. The parallels are unemphasized, but present. My Arts Editor, unfamiliar with the story, fully expected one of the good guys to find a miraculous way to survive imminent death, so when that death did prove implacable, it’s yet another reminder that, for all the life and vivacity of the story and, especially, Athos’ particularly energetic style of fighting, the dice of the Gods play’s heavily with the lives of everyone in this story.

But it remains fun, and is a worthy successor to The Three Musketeers (1973).

When it comes to the cryptocurrency situation, it’ll be interesting to see in five years how the following report is viewed – an announcement introducing the Great Turnaround, or the introduction of the Clown Show of the Last Act:

In an attempt to eradicate trade transactions in fiat currencies, Russia is working with several countries to launch a stablecoin backed by the global monetary asset, gold, but this move could reportedly pave the way for the establishment of a new global economic order.

Nikhil Kamath, the co-founder of the Indian financial services company Zerodha, sounded the alarm about this undertaking led by Russia and Iran and noted that if this trend picks up, then it could establish a new global economic order.

Zerodha is the largest, most popular and technologically advanced stock broker in India that works on a low-margin, high-volume model that allows the company to charge a very minimal amount per transaction due to its generally high trading volume.

“Iran and Russia to issue a new stablecoin backed by Gold. Damn, if this picks up could be day 1, event 1 of establishing a new economic order everywhere. No idea why it’s getting no oxygen from the global press,” Kamath said in a tweet Monday. [International Business Times]

Because, well, this is Russia and Iran using Western technologies, if only inspired. Because the two countries together don’t have the international prestige and wherewithal to swing this project.

As the potential for corruption and grifting using cryptocurrencies comes into focus, why would anyone paying attention to international events even consider playing in this sandbox?

So this is just a weird little clown show, in my view.