Category Archives: Uncategorized

Perhaps the least satisfying character is the singer, Shawn Colvin, who is necessarily on stage the entire time and exhibits little variability. It’s still a cute character, though.

The Starlighter (2018?) is an exercise in charm, in the rarely seen art of cut paper for animation, and in the original, and sometimes disturbing, forms of fairy tales and fables, as sung by Shawn Colvin. Constituting a story within a story within a story, from the audience it requires concentration and a delight in whimsy, and an acceptance that twenty minutes is all you’re getting.

The audience for this may be small, in more ways than one, but they should be delighted by the varied characters, the slice of life approach, and the technical competence of the entire production. If this sounds at all interesting to you, dip your toe into The Starlighter.

My Arts Editor insists these are gnome hats.

This one has the traditional splash of color.

A bit artsy.

This may need some trimming.

But the last couple of apple harvests from this tree weren’t very good. This tree was diagnosed with fire blight a few years back, and may not have any good harvests left in it. A shame, we had several really fabulous harvests from it.

Banyan:

A banyan (through Portuguese banian and Arabic بنيان, banyān, from the Tamil வாணியன், vaaniyan/வணிகன், vanigan, the Gujarati વાણિયો, vāṇiyo, meaning “merchant”, ) is a garment worn by European men and women in the late 17th and 18th century, influenced by the Japanese kimono brought to Europe by the Dutch East India Company in the mid-17th century. “Banyan” is also commonly used in present-day Indian English and other countries in the Indian Subcontinent to mean “vest” or “undershirt“. [Wikipedia]

An example is provided here, courtesy my Arts Editor, a former professional tailor.

Please excuse the hair.

One of these two wishes to eat the other. Can you guess who is predator and who is prey?

Warm Bodies (2013) is our annual Christmas movie for 2022. When it comes to Christmas movies, we like to find something that is surprisingly good, with the bar set by Anna and the Apocalypse (2018) in December of 2019, along with Rare Exports (2010) the year before.

So how did Warm Bodies work out? An intelligent take on the possibility that the nearly supernatural pathogen infecting humanity and turning them into zombies might be defeated by our immune systems, given a bit of time, this story follows ‘R’, a young man, or zombie, who retains at least some self-awareness, as he introduces us to the zombie and boney communities. The former are the infected who retain most of their flesh; the boneys are those zombies who’ve torn all the flesh from their own bodies, but still require the flesh of the living for sustenance. They are little more than cranky animated human skeletons.

And ‘R’ doesn’t really feel a part of either community. After all, eating the flesh of the living isn’t an attractive attribute when one runs into a beautiful, uninfected woman named Julie. So he does the next best thing:

He doesn’t eat her.

In fact, he saves her. From here, the story trundles on semi-predictably, from Julie’s repulsion at ‘R’, to acceptance, affection, and of course, well, who knows? All while cleverly dodging the eternally hungry.

But a predictable story, clever and well-done, is nothing to sneeze at, and this is moderately well-done. There may not be the surprises that befall the audience member in Anna and the Apocalypse, from plot to songs, but this subject is treated seriously.

And it works, if you’re willing to ignore a few plot holes. Like, how did the uninfected build a wall around a city so damn fast? How does boneys feeding on the uninfected sustain them, precisely?

But there’s good chemistry and more than a bit of fun here. While it’s not the new bar to clear in the Christmas Movie category, it’s a worthy story.

The destruction of the Republican Party, the political strategy of former Speaker, quitter, and Rep Newt Gingrich (R-GA), and possibly some other parts of the conservatives, such as the “conservative movement,” appears to be well under way now, and while the following report from Fox News seems, and is, extraordinary, I think we’re going to find it’s just the first in a series of many chronicling the Republican Party being torn apart by its constituent power-seekers, selfish and fourth-rate.

Thirty-one House Republicans are doubling down on their threat to oppose any legislation in the next Congress that is favored by GOP senators who vote for a massive $1.7 trillion spending bill this week.

The group of House Republicans, led by Texas Rep. Chip Roy, says the threat is serious. In a letter sent to Senate Republicans on Wednesday, which was obtained exclusively by Fox News Digital, the lawmakers said they would block “even the smallest legislative and policy efforts.”

“We reiterate that if any omnibus passes in the remaining days of this Congress, we will oppose and whip opposition to any legislative priority of those senators who vote for this bill – including the Republican leader,” the lawmakers wrote.

Their threat could have major repercussions for next year, as the GOP-controlled House will only be able to lose a handful of votes on any piece of legislation before having to rely on Democrats to secure passage.

And the Senate GOP reaction?

Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby said he does not think the House message “intimidates anyone.”

Will we be seeing a war between GOP Senators and GOP Representatives? Probably not. For one thing, GOP Senators will find it difficult to initiate legislation that is not inherently bipartisan, as they are in a 51-49 minority. That legislation which the Senate passes and sends on to the House will either be highly obscure, such as the naming of Post Offices, and thus of dubious worth in blocking, or of high enough popularity that the entire House GOP will not be willing to put their seats on the line in order to satisfy the demands of an extremist faction.

But the threats, the tendentious noise from these names, such as McCarthy (CA), Chip Roy (TX), Gosar, Greene, and quite a few others, will be enough to signal the continuing dissolution of the Republican Party. By dissolution I do not mean shrinkage, for there are plenty of extremist barstool types who will think they’ve found a political home that will welcome these views that are so tenuously linked to reality; but the clamor and bizarre, brutal contents of their voices will dismay the independents, who are the keys to power in our current and future political situation.

Do you doubt it? Elsewhere I discussed Democratic over-performance in the 2018, 2020, and 2022 elections, relative to expectations; only in the 2021 Virginia and New Jersey off-year elections did they fail to outrun expectations^[1]. The boisterous foolishness of a GOP full of officials dedicated to self-aggrandizement, religious nonsense, grifting, and associated poor behaviors will continue to repel independents, regardless of what the currents of history, if you will, are thought to dictate by conventional pundits. It’s necessary for Democrats to direct independents’ attention to the unacceptability of the GOP candidates for office, but that appears to be less and less of a problem, as the overperformance that I noted appears to indicate that GOP marketing wing, once second to none, may either be breaking down, or just can’t find a way to successfully market such names as Finchem (R-AZ), Lake (R-AZ), and many other Republicans to the electorate. It’s probably a combination of the two.

And, meanwhile, more Republicans, once considered extremists in their own right, will be chased from the party, branded RINOs. Hike up your shirts, folks, so we can read your cattle marks easily enough.

¹ This could have been an important lesson for the Democrats, but I think they’ve only learned some elements of it, such as disassociating from the Defund the police slogan. Others, such as their premature position on transgenderism and consequent tactic of bullying, do not seem to have been recognized.

But this could be a bigger bite than usual. Even with those rabbit ears.

I Kill Giants (2017) gets off to a promising start as we follow Barbara Thorson, a 12 year old, at a guess, living on the American eastern seaboard, through a day or two of her life: the bullies at school who find her less than compliant, the teachers who find her less than compliant, the principal who finds her less than compliant, the new school counselor who finds her less than compliant.

And at home, where her older sister and brother also find her less than compliant. Parents? Not in sight; the older sister seems to be running the joint.

But intruding into Barbara’s world is Sophia, a British import of Barbara’s age who seeks her friendship. Barbara is a practicing supernatural specialist, it turns out, defending the town from the giants who turn up every month or so. Sophia finds the giant schtick hard to believe, but the bullies are rough, and Barbara does help Sophia with those bullies. Soon, she’s learning from Barbara about the habits of the giants, and how to kill them, from nasty deadtraps to fire.

And into Barbara’s imperfect world comes two things: a terrible and surprising hurricane, containing a supernatural force that even she cannot really hope to defeat, and the revelation, at least to the audience, that her mother is alive.

And present.

Upstairs.

In bed, with a terminal illness.

And this introduces the troubling question of whether all of this is a heroic fantasy that lets Barbara pretend that she is a force to be considered in the world, when the reality is that she’s simply another piece of detritus swirling about in the wake of the random vortex in which we all try to live our lives, construct social barriers against the terrors of chaos, and be happy, OR if the giants, of which we see hints and hear their imprecations, do exist, and Barbara is doing a desperate duty protecting the town not only from the naturally self-interested giants, but from the very knowledge of their existence.

And this is where the story begins to fall apart. Perhaps I was simply too interested in the questions of what lies beyond our puny, natural perceptions, and took the giants to be real and Barbara to be the guardian of the town. That left the unanswered question of how Barbara learned how to kill the giants, and do so without revealing their shocking existence to the town’s inhabitants. I mean, those are gonna be some big scat left behind.

But the explanation that this is just cover against the incomprehensible Universe damaging Barbara as it swirls unfeelingly onwards is a cop out, just another story of replacing reality with a fantasy, and clumsily done at that. It’s never entirely clear which way the story is going.

Part of it is the incomplete character building. Her older sister, Karen, is little more than a cardboard cutout whose sudden stress, while understandable, just doesn’t come across as a clue to the real nature of the story. Maybe it’s her mother’s terminal illness, maybe it’s having giants staring in the windows. The brother is a zero. The bullies are more fun, and as it appears that they’re set upon by giants at one point, we have to wonder.

In the end, I found this to be a story that loses its way after a fast start. But maybe your mileage will vary. I hope it does. Enjoy.

Unbeknownst to the audience, the Bad Guy had attached one of the phone electrodes to Nancy’s inner thigh.
She’d always been a bit of a masochist.

Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase (1939) shows the celebrated pre-adult detective determinedly faking evidence, concealing evidence, conspiring to break laws, breaking and entering, disorderly conduct, destruction of property, more breaking and entering, and indiscriminate shrieking when she finally finds herself in too much trouble to just face down. This is all in her relentless pursuit of the guilty party in a murder case involving a horse race track and two little old ladies who are tangled up in the rules of inheritance of a father who was apparently a little nuts.

Or maybe it’s just a plot device used to drive the story in a certain direction. Complete with a handle and everything!

My Arts Editor was approving of Drew’s forthright approach to solving the murder – I think – but it was all a little bit too pat for me.

Wait, is Nancy Drew’s middle name Patricia?

Great cinematography, OK dialog, hapless boyfriend. Face it, it’s from a B-list series, at best. Sure, Casablanca (1942) was also considered a B-list production when it was made, but this is no Casablanca. No brains needed, just a trifle of moral outrage.

And tolerance for another mildly incompetent police force.

Long time readers will recall this short thread on how to minimize police brutality through financial incentives. Back in September of this year, WaPo had an article on progress on precisely this topic:

ST. ANN, Mo. — A patrol officer spotted a white minivan with an expired license plate, flipped on his lights and siren,and when the driver failed to stop, gave chase. The driver fled in rush-hour traffic at speeds of up to 90 mph, as other officers joined in the pursuit. Ten miles later, the van slammed into a green Toyota Camry, leaving its 55-year-old driver, Brent Cox, permanently disabled.

That 2017 police chase was at the time the latest in a long line of questionable vehicle pursuits by officers of the St. Ann Police Department. Eleven people had been injured in 19 crashes duringhigh-speed pursuits overthe two prior years.Social justice activists and reporters were scrutinizing thedepartment, and Cox and others were suing.

Undeterred, St. Ann Police Chief Aaron Jimenez stood behind the high-octane pursuits and doubled down on the department’s decades-old motto: “St. Ann will chase you until the wheels fall off.”

Then, an otherwise silent stakeholder stepped in. The St. Louis Area Insurance Trust risk pool — which provided liability coverage to the city of St. Ann and the police department — threatened to cancel coverage if the department didn’t impose restrictions on its use of police chases. City officials shopped around for alternative coverage but soon learned that costs would nearly double if they did not agree to their insurer’s demands.

Jimenez’s attitude swiftly shifted: In 2019, 18 months after the chase that left Cox permanently disabled, the chief and his 48-member department agreed to ban high-speed pursuits for traffic infractions and minor, nonviolent crimes.

Part of the trick is to make the cost impact those responsible for policy:

“I didn’t really have a choice,” Jimenez said in an interview. “If I didn’t do it, the insurance rates were going to go way up. I was going to have to lose 10 officers to pay for it.”

The most stubborn people can be moved this way – or even be caught doing the wrong thing.

Beneath his pretty exterior lurked … Cthulhu! Wait, that can’t be right, the Big C didn’t like that brand of cigarette. Must be some other Elderly God.

Force of Evil (1948) looks into the moral dilemmas of a pair of brothers, the younger brother, Joe Morse, a lawyer working for the mob, a mob looking to take over the bookie trade, and the older brother, Leo, runs, of course, a bookie operation.

The former is angling for a piece of the action, while the latter is simply trying to offer an honest service. Indeed, some of his employees are what we today call challenged, working for Leo despite their various handicaps, and sometimes Leo makes sure they get home after work.

But the mob is not interested in honesty, and Joe discovers that the weight he swings is insufficient to his ends of financial wealth and familial integrity.

And don’t forget Leo’s assistant, Doris, to whom Joe takes a shine. Can she possibly survive the association?

Yep, this is noir, a story of bad decisions, of poor lifestyle practices, of shabby desire taking precedence over the duties of adulthood – and the arrogance that goes along with it all. This may not be the darkest of noir, but it’s definitely in the genre: Joe finding the organization considers him a tail, not the body, a hammer rather than the brain directing it.

And all brought on by his desire for financial rewards rather than the societal rewards that Leo seeks. And that’s where there’s a crack in this plot, because bookie operations are commonly criminal, ugly operations; that decent Leo would get involved is a little hard to credit. Maybe I’m prejudiced against bookies, or maybe I don’t understand the history of bookies, but I found it a little disturbing that the good guy was actually just another criminal.

But this may be a minor blemish, depending on the audience member. It’s not a bad 1940s movie at all, with excellent acting and cinematography; in fact, there’s nothing wrong with the technical aspects.

It’s down, dirty, and discouraging as humanity tussles with itself. And, maybe, loses.

Subnivium:

ECOLOGIST Jonathan Pauli used to spend a lot of time keeping track of animals over winter – often across cold, harsh landscapes that seemed inhospitable to life. It always surprised him that as soon as the weather got warmer in early spring, insects would pop up. “Snow fleas would emerge from underneath the snow,” Pauli recalls. Where, he wondered, had they been hiding?

Eventually, he discovered some old scientific papers from the 1940s and 1960s. They revealed a secret world that Pauli, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been studying ever since: a hidden ecosystem under the snow. It is found in a clandestine space between the snowpack and the soil beneath, which is sheltered from the bitter cold and is where some insects, spiders, frogs and even small mammals spend at least part of the winter. Concealed from the world above, flies buzz, plants thrive and animals forage, hunt and give birth in this so-called subnivium (from the Latin sub, meaning under, and nivis, meaning snow). But what will happen to this winter wonderland and all the creatures it shelters as the climate warms up? That’s the topic of Pauli’s most recent research. [“Subnivium: The secret ecosystem hidden beneath the snow,” Ute Eberle, NewScientist (17 December 2022, paywall)]

I cannot help but wonder if the GOP’s advantage in the House may become even smaller in the light of what’s rapidly becoming The Santos Debacle. This involves Rep-elect George Devolder-Santos (R-NY), who upset Robert Zimmerman (D-NY) in a race not including an incumbent. The district was won by Rep Suozzi (D-NY) over Devolder-Santos by more than 12 points in 2020, while Biden beat Trump in the district as well. This is via Maddowblog:

The New York Times reported this morning:

By his account, [Santos] catapulted himself from a New York City public college to become a “seasoned Wall Street financier and investor” with a family-owned real estate portfolio of 13 properties and an animal rescue charity that saved more than 2,500 dogs and cats. But a New York Times review of public documents and court filings from the United States and Brazil, as well as various attempts to verify claims that Mr. Santos, 34, made on the campaign trail, calls into question key parts of the résumé that he sold to voters.

First of all, it’s worth reminding ourselves that the toxic culture of the GOP created by Newt Gingrich and his successors, through the creation of and adherence to team politics, and near-religious faith to such tenets as taxes are always bad and so is regulation, has led to candidates for whom experience and adherence to truth are definitely of secondary or even tertiary importance.

Of primary importance is gaining and retaining power.

Following that are questions of vetting by both Republican and Democratic officials, who should be zealous in avoiding embarrassment; questions of how he could have won a safe Democratic district in the midst of anti-Trump land.

And then will come this very important question: if the mendacity of his campaign is confirmed, will Minority Leader McCarthy tell him to resign? Lead the effort to boot him out if he won’t?

Or will he solicit Santos’ vote for the Speaker of the House race?

A while back I speculated that Representative, then-Minority Leader, and Speaker-wannabe Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), in refusing to nominate responsible GOP Representatives for the January 6th Committee, was not being extraordinarily stupid, as many pundits thought, but, instead, was having a real nasty revenge on former President Trump for his actions leading up to the January 6th Insurrection. Here’s Steve Benen today engaging in a touch of schadenfreude:

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy was one of four Republican members referred to the House Ethics Committee yesterday by the Jan. 6 committee, and three of the four publicly criticized the developments. McCarthy, however, spent yesterday saying effectively nothing.

It’s possible the Californian was so focused on his struggling bid to become House speaker that he didn’t have time to consider the latest from Jan. 6 investigators. But it’s also possible that McCarthy doesn’t want to talk about the committee at all — because he realizes he made a mistake in how it took shape.

And, yet, I have not seen dispositive evidence either way on this issue. I still think it’s possible that McCarthy, at night, sits down in his favorite comfy chair and savors Trump’s drawn-out demise.

Or he could be squirming. Like I said, there’s no dispositive evidence either way. But I relish the thought of then-Speaker Pelosi (D-CA) and McCarthy colluding to vanquish Trump from the political arena, and even put him in prison.

From “Experimental CRISPR technique has promise against aggressive leukaemia,” Michael Le Page, NewScientist (17 December 2022):

The 13-year-old girl, called Alyssa, hadn’t responded to other treatments. As part of a trial, she received a dose of immune cells from a donor that had been modified to attack the cancer. Twenty-eight days later, tests revealed she was in remission.

Tough on the donor, I’m tellin’ you. Generally, they just modify the immune cells.

This announcement – or angry remark – from the Trump Campaign made me laugh a couple of weeks ago, but I’ve been too busy until this vacation week to remark on it. So here it is:

“President Trump entered the race three weeks ago ready to win and he is going to do exactly that — no amount of wishful thinking from the media or consultant class will change it,” said Taylor Budowich, head of the MAGA Inc. super PAC supporting Trump. “He’s building one of the most ruthless and talented teams in American politics, and he is the only person in the country who is ready and capable of reversing America’s decline.” [WaPo]

Given the quality of the people who have worked for him, I just laughed out loud when I saw this.

And note the bolded text, which I bolded. It’s of a piece with he being the only person capable of saving the stock market and all that other only me crap of his. The mark of a supremely mentally ill narcissist, believing that only he is capable of XYZ.

Source: Astro Did You Know?

Growing up with him as a father must be like living too near a black hole.

In the wake of several recent debacles, noises are starting to appear in the mainstream press suggesting the end of cryptocurrency could be in sight:

Activity is lessening.

The total value of the world’s cryptocurrencies tracked by data company CoinMarketCap is now around $850 billion, down from $3 trillion a year ago. The average value of cryptocurrency trades per day has fallen from $131 billion in May to $57 billion in December — a drop of more than half, according to CoinGecko.

Bitcoin’s value has plummeted 65 percent this year, to around $17,500, although that’s still more than it was worth for the majority of its existence.

And value.

Looking a bit shabby, I fear.

But so what? The questions are what are the trends, the tangible advantages and disadvantages, what is the sentiment?

I’m disinclined to vigorously dispute the subtle suggestion that cryptocurrencies are on the way out. The use of technology, particularly exciting new technologies and clever ideas^[1] to attempt to resolve a problem, be it policy, social, or otherwise, is neither new nor surprising; only the nature of the sexy problem is really changing. In this case, getting corruptible government out of the business of controlling currencies seemed clever enough.

But I think the nature of the problem was, and still is, really misunderstood, and the project driven by a fundamental mistrust of governments, which is not entirely without foundation. But attempting to circumvent government, rather than recognize that it has positive attributes that should be cultivated, and the general enterprise improved and properly managed, is, I think, a misapplication of technology.

There goes one now! Look at those metallic tentacles!

Unless you are one of the few looking forward to the appearance of our robotic overlords.

Cryptocurrencies may be the miserable grandchild of President Reagan’s remark that … government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem, which is, notably, slightly out of context, but mistakenly taken to be ideological kant by far too many people. I do suspect this is coming into focus for a lot of people, if only due to the grift and neglect to regulate the industry by, ah, government. In the end, the rampant corruption that appears to infest the industry may be an object lesson concerning the importance of government in the face of humanity’s indifference to ethics and morality, not to mention the inapplicability of Reagan’s quote to most situations.

Which will be summarily ignored by all those infected by paranoia or profiting from crypto. Not only the individual grifters, but national adversaries such as ransomware purveyors and users. The crash of crypto may put quite a few bad actors out of business.

---

¹ Make no mistake, production of tokens, or coins, through “mining,” which is generally the process of solving complex problems that become harder over time, seemed clever back then. The entire “It sucks up how much energy?” problem with mining, at least in the proof-of-work mining paradigm, is not a matter of “they should have seen it coming,” but instead a common, if unrecognized, problem in the entire software industry, because energy consumption of algorithms, or implementations thereof, is not a topic of conversation for “coders” or for software engineers, or at least not that I’ve ever heard, excepting maybe in cryptocurrency mining, in AI, in the auto-driver algorithms of cars, where a drain on batteries is currently a real problem, and meteorological forecasting models, which naturally work on huge datasets fairly quickly.

There are other mining paradigms, such as proof-of-space (how many hard drives do you own?), but this is, again, consumption-oriented. I am not plugged into the cryptocurrency implementation community, so I don’t know the answer to this question: Rather than using paradigms that fall into the consumption or extraction category, are there any paradigms that could be properly placed in a category labeled production or contributing?

Answer print:

An answer print is the first version of a given motion picture that is printed to film after color correction on an interpositive. It is also the first version of the movie printed to film with the sound properly synced to the picture.^[1] [Wikipedia]

Noted in “Ship in German ‘Titanic’ film sank, killing far more than the real one,” George Bass, WaPo:

The movie’s twisting of facts to suit the Nazis’ agenda meant major creative differences behind the scenes. Selpin, frustrated with the interference of military officials on set and the fact each day’s rushes had to be sent to Berlin for approval, made remarks critical of the Nazi regime. He was denounced by the film’s screenwriter to the authorities, arrested, interrogated by Goebbels, and found hanged in his prison cell the next morning.

The film had to be completed by an uncredited director, Werner Klinger. On the night before its scheduled premiere, the British Royal Air Force bombed the theater that was housing the movie’s answer print.

The film was made in 1943, and was apparently the circus you might expect. I may have to look this one up.

This is not the movie poster for which you search. Try down corridor Z. What? You’re not looking for The Lost City of Z. Well what the hell Lost City do you think you’re searching for? What? Stop dangling my participles? Fuck you. Answer the question. Just The Lost City? Never heard of it. Let me consult the index. Uh….. surely you mean some other Lost City, eh? No? OK, it’s down the corridor labeled Forbidden Movies that Will Make You Claw Your Eyes Out. Yes, that’s an exaggeration. Maybe. Don’t come back to me to complain, you brought this on yourself!

The Lost City (2022) is in the same class of movies as Jungle Cruise (2021) in that it wants to evoke the same passions as did Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), and again around archaeology, divinity, and romance. However, it’s not nearly as good as the enjoyable Jungle Cruise because replacing the driven archaeologist Dr. “Indiana” Jones of Raiders with a bereft widow, Loretta Sage, a romance book writer in career interruptus, who is annoyed by a smitten book cover model, while being kidnapped by a nutcase who has more money than sense (take a breath here), just ruins the story: rather than wonder just where the obsession will take her next in the absence of, well, obsession, the audience just tires of the schtick.

Which is not to say the movie is a total loss. The former military man hired to rescue Sage, Jack Trainer, was a source of endless amusement in a role of remarkable brevity, and the cover model’s reaction to him at least made me giggle a bit.

I wonder if I was supposed to giggle.

The nutcase, on the other hand, has no real life of his own; he exists to pay the bad guys who are pursuing the romance writer and her, uh, admirer around. He’s a poor replacement for Raider’s René Belloq, the Nazi’s French archaeologist who something of a cipher symbolizing the worst of archaeology prior to the modern age of archaeology. His pursuit of the object, rather than knowledge, invalidated his entire professional standing in Raiders, but heavens know if the general audience member realized that.

In the end, The Lost City needed at least two more drafts, and maybe three, along with a better title. The main story contains a number of ideas that might have worked, but feel like they came out of a bag labeled Plot Twists As Needed, with little organic or thematic movements to them. Even the supporting cast’s subplots, which can often outshine the primary plot line in a movie of this quality, were a disappointment. They felt tacked on as necessary distractions, rather than logical consequences of the antecedents to, and/or the developments during, this plot.

Too bad. I think the movie needed more Nazis, like Raiders of the Lost Ark had. And how often do you get to say that? As it is, it’s limp and forgettable, and the characters, who improbably manage to become cardboard stereotypes, exit stage left without attracting the least applause.

Well, excepting Jack. Jack Trainer. What a guy. We’ll miss. Him. No, miss him. For about a minute. Two minutes.

I wonder if a movie about Jack Trainer is in the works.

One of the sub-themes of this blog is to demonstrate how to deal with the modern world as a working person who doesn’t always have the time and/or training to minutely research every topic that comes across my plate. I’ve done this with the right-wing mail stream (search on ‘mailbag’), politics, artificial intelligence, skepticism, etc.

So today, when we ran across an episode of Tasting History with Max Miller that we didn’t immediately recognize – we did, five minutes into it – we watched it and I was delighted to see Miller talk about the problems of false “facts” and how he tries to deal with them.

And he’s just fun. Here it is.

This is a forgotten composition, with the last draft dated 20 October 2022, which I’ll post as a service to the reader.

A recent release of a nationwide poll by The New York Times and A rated Siena College has stirred up the countryside pundit world of late. Why? It showed a tremendous shift among independent women from favoring Democrats to favoring Republicans. A 32 point shift, to be generally in the ballpark.

In a month.

The impact on the pundits? Depends on who they are. Some ignore it. Some have a panic attack. And some analyze it. That’s what Kerry Eleveld on Daily Kos did, and they found it wanting.

But for today’s purposes, if you compare the Times/Siena poll to other polls fielded around the same time, Oct. 9-12, the survey’s generic ballot R+3 result is an outlier. Here are results from a couple other reputable polls:

• Fox News (Oct. 9-12), RV, 44%-41%, D+3
• Economist/YouGov (Oct. 8-11), 48%-46%, D+2

At the end of the day, this midterm continues to be a competitive race that is likely to hold some surprises that go both ways on Election Day. No single poll at this point disrupts that reality. It’s still possible that independents break one way or the other in the final weeks but, again, we won’t know that until November either.

The lesson here? Even the best polls can be outliers. This can be due to a breakdown in procedures, calculations, or respondents being dishonest, as sometimes MAGA Republicans claim they do. For all we know, a bunch of anti-MAGA women lied to the surveyers in an effort to mislead Republicans.

Yeah, seems unlikely.

But pundits necessarily rely on polls. Erick Erickson is convinced the Republicans are going to clobber the Democrats based on generic Congressional ballot results:

I’ve been talking about this so much on the radio and here that several listeners and readers complained. I’d like to say now I told you so. The wind the Democrats thought was at their back turned out to be an economic hurricane building that will sink their ship of state.

In the Real Clear Politics polling average, there are now only three polls that give Democrats a lead, two of which are still registered voter polls. Five of the remaining six have a GOP lead and one has a tie.

I mistrust those sorts of polls precisely for the same reasons that the Senate’s often controlled by something like 40% of the population, that is, the problem that California and Wyoming each have two Senators, despite the huge difference in population.

And that’s it. The important point here? The right’s belief that the polls for the generic Congressional ballot forecast disaster for the Democrats. No such thing occurred. If New York and Florida had been better organized, we might be seeing an imminent election of Rep Jefferies (D-NY) to the Speaker of the House, rather than the mystery of which Republican will be Speaker, a mystery brought on by their far smaller than forecast margin.

So be wary of generic Congressional ballots, especially when the interpretation confirms the pundit’s desires. Confirmation bias can lead to egg-on-face syndrome.

Ya remember how you could go to a garage sale and buy most anything, free & clear? Things are a little different in the Digital Age. Renting software has become a popular business strategy, at least for those who write the software.

And non-fungible tokens (NFTs)?

What exactly are buyers of the Trump Trading Cards purchasing? Yes, they are NFTs, but unlike others of these digital art pieces, the people foolish enough to purchase a Trump Trading Card don’t actually own the things they paid for, at least not in the traditional sense. If any buyer decides to sell their Trump card in a secondary market, they don’t get all the proceeds. The fine print reveals that 10% of every secondary market sales goes right back to Trump and his fellow grifters. For more details, buyers are told to click the link to terms and conditions. [Kurt Eichenwald, The Threats Within]

And Eichenwald claims the page containing the terms and conditions is a Page not found. Maybe they fixed it.

It looks like Trump isn’t selling these cards, he’s renting them out on an unlimited time, transferable-for-a-fee basis. Of course, outrage may not be called for if the value of these cards sink into mire.

Long-time readers of this semi-dormant thread will recall that the CO₂ monitor on Mauna Loa in Hawaii has been showing rises in CO₂ levels for a long time now. Here’s the latest:

No improvement in trend. But now this monitor is being forced offline:

Lava flow from the ongoing eruption of the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii has knocked out power and cut off access to an observatory that has recorded the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere since 1958.

Mauna Loa started erupting the evening of 27 November. Initially, the lava was confined to the volcano’s summit caldera, but on 28 November, the Northeast Rift Zone – a section on the side of the volcano where the surface can crack and split – also started erupting. This caused lava to flow upslope of the Mauna Loa Observatory, according to the US Geological Survey.

At 6.30pm local time on 28 November instruments at the observatory lost power, according to a statement from the University of California, San Diego. The observatory is run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and hosts instruments measuring changes in the atmosphere including the flux of greenhouse gases. [“Mauna Loa eruption interrupts key record of atmospheric CO2,” James Dinneen, NewScientist (10 December 2022, paywall)]

The article also states that

The observatory was located on Mauna Loa to ensure measurements weren’t impacted by local changes to CO2, such as emissions from cars or cities. The lack of plants on the volcanic rock meant records also wouldn’t be affected by the respiration of nearby plants.

But they don’t address emissions from local volcanoes, so I wonder.

A horrible thought, eh? Presidential election politics already?

But it’s true, the ambitious are already in play. Governor DeSantis (R-FL) and Trump have been working at it for months, as seen in the governor surreptitiously flipping positions on vaccines, and the former President following up his entry into the race announcement with <strangled laughter> his announcement that he will sell NFTs of pictures of his head on various muscled bodies.

I kid you not. Maybe it’s the joke that Philip Kennicott thinks it to be:

Another name mentioned nationally is Governor Youngkin (R) of Virginia, the man who led the upset of the Democrats in Virginia in 2021. In the following 2022 election, he chose to compete with the former President in the endorsement arena, and it didn’t go well:

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) defended his record in only five of the 15 GOP gubernatorial candidates he campaigned with winning their races in the midterm elections last month.

“We picked hard races, races where the states were set up a bit like Virginia, where Joe Biden had won by 10 points, and we went to work to try to flip those states,” he told Fox News’ Martha MacCallum in an interview.

Youngkin said Republican candidates’ performances showed that their message “carries,” but unseating an incumbent is difficult.

In the midterms, Republicans were only successful in defeating one Democratic incumbent governor, Steve Sisolak in Nevada. GOP nominees failed to win races in key states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. [The Hill]

A brave, even smart thing to do, but while it may seem like your message got through despite losing, it’s important not to fool one’s self: the Republican message is primarily anti-Democrat, followed by hollow echoing of the religious tenets of lower taxes and less regulation will lead to prosperity, unless you’re Trump, in which case it’s whine whine whine about the 2020 election.

The truth of the matter is that the last three national elections, which are 2018, 2020, and 2022, the Democratic performance has exceeded expectations, and the Republicans have failed to meet expectations. In the 2022 election the Republicans predicted a gain of sixty seats in the House, and gained … nine. Worse yet, the Democrats gained a seat in the Senate. Republican expectations of retaining the Pennsylvania Senate seat while flipping Senate seats in Nevada, Washington, New Hampshire, and a few other States ended in bitter disappointment, often by large margins. Even consolation was bitter as victory margins in several traditional strongholds didn’t match their historical norms. For example, Senator Grassley of Iowa once again won reelection, but fell far short of his average victory margin of 33 points.^[1]

Youngkin’s endorsements didn’t work out? He might want to consider it an important lesson. He simply doesn’t have enough influence to lift underdog candidates to victory, meaning his national reach is not forceful. On the other hand, Virginia governors are term-limited at one term, meaning he can only serve non-consecutive terms. Maybe he needs a hobby.

But conservative leaders are apparently appraising their movement and have decided some careful management of the herd base is necessary, starting by tossing the former President out on his ear, while assuring everyone that No, there’s nothing really wrong with the conservative movement. Erick Erickson chose the Start with unhappy truths and finish with a fantasy approach to this challenge:

We now have the USA Today and the Wall Street Journal polling — both, I would note, were pretty reliable in 2022. Those outlets and their pollsters suggest most Republicans are ready to move on from Trump. From USA Today:

By 2-1, GOP and GOP-leaning voters now say they want Trump’s policies but a different standard-bearer to carry them. While 31% want the former president to run, 61% prefer some other Republican nominee who would continue the policies Trump has pursued.

Over the past two years, and really after the midterms, callers to my radio show have also begun to move on.

The consensus is that people want Trump policies, but they are not sure he is the best standard bearer moving forward.

People genuinely do appreciate what President Trump did for the country. They appreciate his fight. They appreciate his judicial picks. They appreciate his robust defense of the United States worldwide and his tough stance with China, Iran, and others.

But, as he notes in his graph on the right here, the MAGA conservatives have no intention of moving on from Trump. The red arrow is the day he posted an anti-Trump screed to his paying subscribers only, and the graph shows the impact on his paying subscriber base.

Up to here, Erickson’s putting the best spin he can on a bad situation, and if he chooses to ignore some gaping chasms, such as the SBC debacle, the abortion disaster, the precarious problem of GOP leadership in the House, and a number of other conundrum, well, self-delusion can be its own punishment.

But this is the sort of thing I’d classify an outright lie:

The media is going to elevate the loud voices of NeverTrump and OnlyTrump. To stay relevant, any good candidate will be defined as the second coming of Trump by NeverTrump, and a weak-kneed establishment sell-out hack by OnlyTrump. Both need Trump to stay relevant.

The upside for the GOP and the nation is that neither do. The Republican Party has a very deep bench of talent. While the midterms were not what we wanted.[sic?] The future is bright.

My bold, and follow that with No, it’s not. The future, that is, for the GOP. Oh, I could be wrong. Maybe all the good future candidates aren’t yet apparent. But the lesson from this election, and the January 6th Insurrection fallout, is that if your leadership is McCarthy, McConnell, Cruz, Hawley, Gaetz, Greene, Madison Cawthorn, Boebert, Ralph Norman, and other folks who, in some cases, managed to put safe Republican seats at risk, well, you don’t have enough intelligent people to fill the seats you’re winning. Gohmert, Gosar, Biggs? No, no, and no. Here is CO-3, Rep Boebert’s seat, results:

And Erickson knows this. From a different post:

It is official. Republicans have taken back the House of Representatives. They gathered yesterday to announce their first official act: an investigation into Hunter Biden.

Dumbasses.

What a bunch of idiots. The American people just rejected the GOP “own the libs” strategy. They signaled they’d love to have responsible adult Republicans in charge. In fact, from NEW YORK STATE !!!! to Arizona, voters elected Republicans who ran on local issues tied to the economy and crime.

I think it's clear that the GOP suffers from a poison at its very heart. Senator Goldwater (R-CO) knew it 60 years ago. It manifests as blind arrogance, as team politics, as an adherence to political positions as if they're religious mantra. This all leads to deeply substandard candidates being elected, repelling the independents who are often key to winning elections.

The question isn't really about the GOP, is it? No. It's about the Democrats. Are they swirling down their own vortex?

¹ I think Grassley was fortunate to win at all, and my friends to the south have committed a major foul by nominating and then electing him again, given his recent history of mendacity and/or dementia.

Particoloured:

1. Made up of sections having different, often bright, colours. [Wiktionary]

And there wasn’t much out there for definitions of particoloured, I was surprised to say, although there was a blog called Particolour. Noted in “Flying squirrels carve nuts to store them securely in tree branches,” Michael Le Page, NewScientist (10 December 2022, paywall):

They then set up 32 infrared cameras to monitor some of the stored nuts. They found two species of squirrels came to check the nuts or retrieve them: a subspecies of the Hainan flying squirrel called Hylopetes phayrei electilis and the particoloured flying squirrel (Hylopetes alboniger).

A fascinating article on these two species of flying squirrels chewing grooves in their food nuts in order to securely store them in tree forks.

The diligent student is interrupted by the janitor, who is about to shoo him out of the parlor and into the study hall. There, he finds fifteen potential victims, and, as part of his final exam, he’ll need to ascertain the most likely reason each victim will be heedlessly slaughtered before midnight. The time is 11:30pm. Ready? Set! <bang!> Uhh … uhhhhh….

If you value plausibility, even logic, in your murder mysteries, then you may want to give Murder at Midnight (1931) a pass, although I think a really inquisitive mind could make it all seem to work. But this many unsympathetic, in some cases “oh, please kill them, too!” characters, made it hard to take the story seriously. It quickly devolved into the morbid game of How many will be dead at the end of this?, followed by And will they kill off that damn cop who spreads peanut shells everywhere?

Sadly, the answer is No.

However, while it may have been common in the era the movie was made, I’ve never seen a game of Charades in which it actually looked like the players were putting on a little drama. It was charming.

But that’s not nearly enough to save this story from the trashcan of the mundane.