Category Archives: Uncategorized

I enjoyed the cinematography in this movie. Here, we see Paul’s soul leaving for better surroundings. What? No? Maybe it’s the Emperor Palpatine’s? No again? Crap.

The Amazing Mr. X (1948; aka The Spiritualist) tells the story of two predatory men, grifter Paul, who married and then “died” in a burning car, and spiritualist Alexis, expert at the technology of the seance and the haunting. Caught between these two men are Martin’s widow, Christine, and her younger sister, Janet.

It’s been two years since Paul’s body was discovered in a burned out car, and Christine is only beginning to date again, in this case lawyer Martin. But she’s been hearing voices, and when Alexis appears out of nowhere on a beach, he proves to know information that Christine cannot believe he knows. Alexis works the situation until he gets Christine and Janet to his place for a seance.

He doesn’t realize, though, that Martin, alarmed at Christine’s behavior, is investigating as a lawyer of the era might. He makes a surprise appearance at the seance with a detective in tow, but Alexis avoids a terminating exposure through some fancy footwork.

All the while, though, lurks the specter of Paul. Paul, who can hardly exist without a drink in his hand and a cruel quip on his lips. Paul, who holds all the cards.

Paul, a genius at the piano.

Paul, who has leverage over Alexis.

But when it’s time to dispose of Christine, something slips. Badly. Paul may be an unreserved devotee to the life of corruption, but Alexis, bewitched by Christine’s sister Janet, relapses into chivalry, and now Paul has a problem.

What to do with Alexis. And Martin. And his detective. And then the rest of the police force. Damn, it’s getting crowded.

For the era, it was probably quite a tense story, what with seances and men of few morals lurking around heiresses. But today, Christine and Janet are annoying spineless victims, even when they fight back, and so the story is really less than satisfying.

In the face of the conservatives’ failures in the Senate, principally the initial rejection of the Honor Out PACT Act, the transformation of the conservatives’ wine of the Dobbs decision into the fly-ridden sand of the overwhelming rejection of a proposed anti-abortion Kansas Constitutional Amendment, the legions of right-wing extremists who are fourth-rate politicians who think their failures at the ballot box are due to cheating rather than their manifestly inferior views on a variety of subjects, and – to put a premature stop to this litany of extremist failures, and this is my prediction only – not only the failure of a Republican wave to materialize at the ballot box this fall, but victory for many Democrats expected to fail, well, take a deep breah, Erick Erickson has to do something to keep the conservative faithful, errrrr, faithful, as it were.

Per usual, he’s determined to show that the liberal elites are just as guilty of perfidy and excess as the conservatives.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney says Donald Trump is the greatest threat to our republic. I respectfully disagree with a man whose whole family I adore.

I actually think bipartisan establishment lassitude toward China is a bigger threat to our republic than Trump. The whole reason we got Trump is that a large segment of the population can accurately perceive the American cultural/political elite decided our time is up and want to cash in while managing a decline in China’s favor. Our socio/economic and political elite have given up on America.

The American people believe we are in a recession, so we are in a recession. Our national cultural and political leaders believe our best days are over, so they are — it’s preventable and reversible, but not with a leadership that has quietly embraced the idea of China’s inevitability.

Does he mention the visit of House Speaker Rep Pelosi (D-CA) to Taiwan just this week? Incredibly, he does manage it – a few paragraphs beyond the quote, and carefully stripped of her undeniable membership in the liberal elite crew, because acknowledging that would invalidate his entire thesis. He doesn’t mention the fact that we finally left Afghanistan, as arranged by his President Trump and fulfilled by President Biden, in order to concentrate on China, nor Trump’s well-known affinity for China’s Xi, not to mention Russia’s Putin and North Korea’s Kim – autocrats all.

But as a spreader of fear of “the other,” which in this case is fellow Americans, it’ll certainly work on the unserious reader. By “demonstrating” the liberal elites’ supposed lack of nationalistic oooomph, he can excuse the conservative failures. He can even argue that extremists and incoherent odd-balls should receive conservatives’ votes, because, well, surely conservatives are better than them thar baby-killing liberals.

Ahem.

The rest of his little multi-topic post is equally ludicrous, in particular his attempted condemnation of the public health system. It seems he really wants to equate monkeypox with Covid. Does monkeypox even have a measurable death rate? Is the hospitalization rate of monkeypox comparable?

No. So his frantic condemnations are all ridiculous.

I don’t know if Erickson realizes just how much trouble his “movement” is in. Over the last few weeks he’s been incoherent with joy at the failures of the Democrats, at least what he perceived as their failures. Faced with the conservative failures above, plus those unmentioned, such as the January 6th Insurrection, he’s not been silent, but notably restrained.

But I read a post like this as a frenzied attempt to keep the conservatives from fragmenting, or even defecting into the moderate conservative camp. It’s hard to feel sympathetic. I see this as a symptom of the hard-line anti-abortion movement, much like the temperance movement, melting away as they begin to recognize that, fallacious or not, anti-abortion as a single issue vote is a disaster for the nation. It has been carefully cultivated for fifty years, its followers protected from the intellectual ripostes by hiding the faithful in the skirts of the Divine, but the biggest Divinity of all, Reality, is reaching up and whacking them in the head.

And the anti-abortion movement, along with a few other single-issue voter fabrications, are beginning to fall apart as the electorate really sees the end-result.

The childish antics of GOP candidate for Arizona Governor Kari Lake have been a subject of lively discussion in the pundit world. What did she say before her August 2nd primary election?

Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake is warning voters that “stealing” is already underway in Tuesday’s primary election.

Ms. Lake, a former television news anchor who has former President Donald Trump’s support and backs his stolen 2020 election allegations, delivered the warning about more election fraud in a speech this week to the North Valley Constitutional Republicans.

“I’m telling you right now, anybody trying to steal this, first of all, we’re already detecting some stealing going on, but you guys know I’m a fighter right?” Ms. Lake said, according to The Arizona Republic. “You haven’t seen me when they try to steal something. I’m gonna go supernova radioactive. We’re not gonna let them steal an election.” [The Washington Times]

A lot of pundits are still puzzling over how anyone can be this disrespectful of the process of democracy – in a partisan primary.

But I think the Democrats, nation-wide, should look at this as a gift and opportunity. Most politics is local, to paraphrase an old aphorism, but once in a while an issue comes along that can be used on a national basis, such as the “tax and spend” tactic used over the years by the Republicans against the Democrats.

Here we have a simple issue – respect for democracy. So here’s an idea for a nationally usable ad:

We’re the Democrats, and we’re occasionally a bit ugly. But here’s the Republicans today.

<insert video of Lake’s statement, above. Use authentic video if available, otherwise hire a lookalike and tape it.>

Ask yourself, friend, where does this end? Will we still have a democracy after Lake goes after all her opponents this way, shrieking that she was cheated?

This is what Republicans nation-wide are doing. Go check for yourself. And then ask yourself – do any of these so-called election-deniers deserve your vote? They don’t respect, you, your vote, or democracy. Why should you vote for them?

<insert usual patriotic music here>

And are they really doing this nation-wide? The AP provides a partial list here.

It needs a bit of sharpening up, but it’s a rare national opportunity. The Democrats should thank Lake for her narcissism.

A reader writes concerning American concern for native ecology:

I’ve been saying for more than 20 years that the immediate area around Lake Mead drawing water from it was a disaster in the making, and mostly insane. Flying into Phoenix in 2002, it was crazy to see the amount of green growing stuff that should not be there — golf courses, lawns, orchards, crop fields. Plus the huge amount of urban sprawl just since the last time I flew over that area in 1994, much less the amount of metro growth since I passed through on the freeway in the mid 1970s.

From “Organic Farming in the Desert of Wadi Rum,” Charismatic Planet.

There’s a couple of related theories in my mind for our attempts to landscape the desert. The first is that we arrogantly believe that we can reshape the world into what we want it to be, without repercussions. We see this in China, throughout the United States, etc. Some people call these MegaProjects.

And then there’s what I call the graffiti theory. Mankind’s signature signal for mating is its ability to make a mark on the surrounding environment, such as climbing a water tower to decorate it with graffiti, or building Stonehenge. You do it to attract the attention of the sex to which you’re attracted, because that’s how humanity works.

So when you see a verdant farm in the middle of a desert that doesn’t need to be there, it’s not about feeding the fellow citizens so much as it is about leaving a mark, bending the environment to your will, and letting whoever you might want to mate with know about it.

And when the population is nearing the edge of the carrying capacity of land, well, we get madness like what my reader observes.

It’ll soon be August 2nd. Then it’ll be August 2nd. And then it’ll be past, and maybe some news will blow in through the door, riding a rogue tumbleweed.

• In New York, the latest Emerson College poll finds incumbent Senator and Majority Leader Schumer (D) leading challenger and radio pundit Joe Pinion (R) 53% – 31%.
• In Missouri, as if that election is not enough of a dumpster fire, independent John Wood claims to have collected and filed enough signatures on petitions to make the November ballot. It seems likely that this enhances the Democrats’ chances in this election, as Wood claims to be a lifelong Republican, but it’s hard to be certain. And it may not be enough. Especially with Trump’s endorsement of “ERIC”. On the other hand, the dumpster fire was damped down by the GOP when they selected relative-to-Eric-Greitens moderate and current Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt over Greitens, who came in third, and second place finisher Rep Vicky Hartzler (R-MO). Schmitt must still contend with the results of a bitter primary and the presence of Mr. Wood on the ballot. Meanwhile, Trudy Busch Valentine, who is politically inexperienced, a nurse, and heir to the Anheuser-Busch fortune, won the Democratic side of the Senate primary. The safe bet in this contest is Schmitt. A May poll from A-rated SurveyUSA showed Schmitt with a 13 point advantage over Valentine, but a lot has happened since then. We need a new poll.
• Is Senate Majority Leader Schumer’s decision to do a deal with Senator and Minority Leader McConnel (R-KY) in order to pass the Honoring Our PACT Act a mistake? After all, it seems to make a nice club for Democrats to use on Republicans. However, there are some problems with that reasoning. If it’s not passed, then veterans may choose to blame both sides, so in this way the Democrats get some extra points; and not many actual Republican candidates in the Senate voted No, maybe two by my informal count, so its usefulness was somewhat problematic. I think Schumer has simply wrung a few more drops from the rag.
• Wisconsin incumbent Ron Johnson (R) either knows more than I do about the electorate, or is committing political suicide-by-voter. From Madison.com: Saying programs like Social Security and Medicare suffer from improper oversight, U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson on Tuesday called for turning every government program into discretionary spending programs, meaning Congress would have to allocate funding for the programs each year. You don’t need to listen carefully, the shrieks from the AARP should be REALLY LOUD. It’ll be fascinating to see how the first poll of Johnson vs Barnes turns out.
• In Arizona Blake Masters, political novice, endorsee of the former President, and funded by Peter Thiel, won the GOP Senate primary and will be challenging incumbent Senator and retired astronaut (US Navy Captain, ret.) Mark Kelly (D). Arizona has been shifting from a strong Republican state to a more ambiguous status over the last five years, with Kelly winning a special election two years ago over the appointed Senator McSally (R), who exhibited a record and presence that had a lot in common with Senators Perdue (R-GA) and Kelly Loeffler (R-GA), both of whom also lost in that year. Masters seems emblematic of the next stage of the GOP toxic culture evolution, sending arrogant candidates into contests that are certain that, if they lose, the loss indicates cheating rather than simply losing, dependent on one or two “strong-men” rather than any personal appeal of their own – and perish the thought of a demonstrated personal competency in government! Even the anti-abortion waltz or anti-gun control jig is optional; one must snuffle up to the strong men of the party, an extreme example of what I’ve been predicting for years. Anyways. Waiting for the first poll, but I suspect independents will be so repelled by Masters that it’s Kelly in a walk. Kelly was thought to be vulnerable, so this may be another dodged meteorite by the Democrats. Sorry ’bout that.
• The biggest news out of the August 2nd primaries was Kansas’ voters rejection of a proposed state Constitutional Amendment to permit the Kansas legislature to ban abortion in some form, as I discussed here. Kansas is considered to be safely Republican, despite the Governor being a Democrat, so this rejection is a surprise – a 20 point surprise. Adding to the significance, kos of Daily Kos has some new information, although he doesn’t source it: “That means at least 75,000 Republicans voted no, plus the overwhelmingly majority of the 160,000 voters who came to vote only on this amendment and didn’t vote in either party’s primary.” There are two facets here, the first being that voters will come out simply to vote against threats to their (or their partners’) abortion rights, and secondly that a good portion of the moderate-to-conservative base resent the loss of those rights. In the latter case, this may result in a failure to vote for a candidate, or even switching a vote to an opponent or using the write-in option. While Republican pundits, as well as candidates such as Senator Johnson (R-WI) and Adam Laxalt (R-NV), have been trying to claim the Dobbs decision overturning Roe will have little impact in November (see the Daily Kos link, above), it appears that every election featuring a fervently anti-abortion candidate will be impacted, just as every left-leaning pundit, and many independent pundits like myself, suspected. The conservative tendency towards an epistemic bubble, as well as a fixation on improper metrics (the Justice Thomas mistake, to coin a phrase), seems to be leading them not towards victory in November, but a shocking failure against a bumbling Democratic Party that still has not addressed its failures in managing the transgender issue.

Previous irreligious thoughts regarding the election here.

Evapotranspiration:

Evapotranspiration (ET) is a term used to refer to the combined processes by which water moves from the earth’s surface into the atmosphere. It covers both water evaporation (movement of water to the air directly from soil, canopies, and water bodies) and transpiration (movement of water from the soil, through roots and bodies of vegetation, on leaves and then into the air). Evapotranspiration is an important part of the local water cycle and climate, as well as measurement of it plays a key role in agricultural irrigation and water resource management. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “‘Corn sweat’ is making the air in the Midwest oppressively muggy,” Barb Mayes Boustead, WaPo:

During summer, the Midwest can experience some of the most oppressive humidity in the country. Fields in Iowa can be muggier than beaches in Miami. The culprit? Billions of stalks of corn.

Akin to a person breathing, plants exhale water into the atmosphere through a process called evapotranspiration. Some call it “corn sweat.”

I hate mugginess.

Abortion is one of those issues that are difficult, because it evokes strong emotions on both sides, as prospective mothers who find their situations difficult, socially or medically, demand a safe and respectable ‘out’, while those who think of abortion as ‘killing a baby’ are understandably upset. Intellectually it can be confusing as well, as a life is created and then is sustained at the heavy, even deadly, expense of the vitality of the pregnant woman. Evaluating such a situation a priori is a headache due to subjective factors involved, particularly those masquerading as being connected to Divine opinions.

So it’s best to remember that American law and morality, as much as the clerics and their followers may wish to dispute it, are a consensual matter, as befits a liberal democracy. We have an honest discussion, come to a conclusion in which everyone who wishes contributes, and make laws, or not, based on those conclusions.

So what happened in yesterday’s various primaries that might be of interest?

Kansas had a state Constitutional Amendment proposal on the ballot that would “… affirm there is no Kansas constitutional right to abortion or to require the government funding of abortion, and would reserve … the right to pass laws to regulate abortion.” If it didn’t pass? Then the Consitution, as currently formulated “… could restrict the people … from regulating abortion by leaving in place the recently recognized right to abortion.”

It was added to a primary ballot in which there was no pitched battles on the Democratic side, only the Republicans’ side, thus theoretically not likely to bring out many Democratic voters. Democratic voters in Kansas, I might add.

And then there appears to have been a conservative-led attempt to mislead voters:

The text claimed that approving that measure, which could allow the Republican-controlled legislature to outlaw abortion, would safeguard “choice.” If the amendment fails, constitutional protections would remain in place, buttressing current law that allows abortion in the first 22 weeks of pregnancy.

“Women in KS are losing their choice on reproductive rights,” the text warned. “Voting YES on the Amendment will give women a choice. Vote YES to protect women’s health.”

The unsigned messages were described as deceptive by numerous recipients, including former Democratic governor Kathleen Sebelius, who also served as health and human services secretary in the Obama administration. She told The Washington Post that she was “stunned to receive the message, which made clear there was a very specific effort to use carefully crafted language to confuse folks before they would go vote.” …

But the messages were crafted by a political action committee led by Tim Huelskamp, a former hard-line Republican congressman from Kansas, and enabled by a fast-growing, Republican-aligned technology firm, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the advertising blitz. The people and groups behind the campaign have not been previously reported. [WaPo]

For a lot of observers, this has a flavor of an Expected maneuver, at least on the left, while on the right, Erick Erickson doesn’t even mention it, at least not in his non-subscriber postings. Did any others?

And what was its fate?

Kansans rejected the Amendment.

Overwhelmingly. Last number I heard was by 18 points.

From polls and from nurses’ anecdotes, from votes on Constitutional amendments, it’s becoming clear that the conservatives have lost the argument at the bedrock of liberal democracies: the attempt to convince their fellow citizens.

But they persist in attempting to change the law and in getting out over their ski tips. And how about a little thumb on the scales? Oh, sure, that’s OK, too.

I think it’s time, it’s past time, that they acknowledge that, on abortion, most Americans disagree to some degree with them. The law should reflect the sober discussions, vs the unsettled irrational passions for which the Bill of Rights and Amendments exist to restrain, of the citizenry, not those passions that have been fanned by power seekers.

These politicians who compete on the metric of who can be most extreme should, for the sake of the Nation, read the hint that’s being thrust in their faces.

Dr. Phillips at Spaceweather.com has an alarming observation:

GIANT SOLAR PROMINENCE: There’s a loop of plasma on the sun’s eastern limb so large that normal scientific notation doesn’t describe it. “It’s ginormous,” explains Richard N. Schrantz …

The arch is 325,000 km long–almost the distance between Earth and the Moon.

Implication? Implication?? Beyond normal scientific notation??? WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?!

See the above link for a pic.

Perhaps one of the most potentially explosive situations is China, which has had water issues for decades, and still hasn’t found a solution to them. Interesting Engineering has an article on their latest effort:

Daniel Byman notes that the assassination of Ayman al-Zawahiri by American remote controlled forces may have have a net operational negative effect:

Yet, al-Zawahiri’s death may actually be good news for al-Qaeda, or, short of a boon to the organization, will likely have little impact given the group’s many existing problems. Al-Zawahiri, in contrast to Bin Laden, was pedantic and had little charisma. Under his watch, the core group had not conducted any spectacular terrorist attacks on the United States and Europe for many years despite a continued rhetorical focus on the United States and Europe. Affiliates tied to the organization, such as al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), did inspire and perhaps orchestrate attacks, such as the military trainee from Saudi Arabia who killed three American sailors at a U.S. naval base in Florida in December 2019, but the core organization has not done a successful attack on the United States or Europe since the 2005 bombings in London. This may reflect operational weakness or simply a more pragmatic shift toward areas where its affiliates are most focused, but either way it is good news for the United States. [Lawfare]

Which rather makes this look like instructional vengeance. And I’ve been wondering if we’ll be seeing a counterstrike on American forces or politicians. But:

Philippic:

Philippic is discourse (traditionally an oration) that is characterized by fierce condemnation of a subject; a diatribe or rant.

The term philippic (from Greek philippikos) is derived from the virulent denunciations of Philip II of Macedon delivered by Demosthenes of Athens in the fourth century BC. Demosthenes is commonly regarded as the greatest orator of his age. See Examples and Observations, below. [ThoughtCo.]

That’s a new one on me. Noted in “Now we see the wisdom of the high court’s ‘vulgar cheerleader’ ruling,” George Will, WaPo:

Professor Madalyn K. Wasilczuk happens to agree with me about police officers and their emotional development requirements:

Scientists agree that people between ages 18 and 25—sometimes called “emerging adults”—continue to undergo biological and psychological changes that influence the way they behave. Put more simply, they have not fully matured. This lack of maturity manifests in incapacities that make emerging adult officers ill-suited to the job of policing. What’s more, the way policing affects emerging adults may mean that joining the force during this period of their lives will change the way those officers police throughout their careers.

Though police spend a minority of their time dealing with crime, their jobs require a great deal of personal interaction, sometimes in tense situations. These conditions require police to be calm, think on their feet, and have strong emotional self-regulation skills. In emergency situations, where, as the Supreme Court has said, “[p]olice officers are often forced to make split-second judgments,” those judgments should be as well-considered and reasonable as possible. Unfortunately, emerging adults’ developmental capacities make this unlikely. [Lawfare]

Good not to be a lonely voice in the night.

People who like prominences. Maybe.

• The Manchin-Schumer suckering of Senator McConnell (R-KY) and the Senate Republicans on the reconciliation bill – here’s Steve Benen’s summary of the incident – may be the gift that keeps on giving. In revenge, the Republicans unexpectedly killed the all-but-passed Honoring Our PACT Act, which is a Veteran’s healthcare bill related to “burn pits,” a military base hazard. This can be expected to excite questions on the campaign trail, even for Republican Senators who voted to pass it on the second try. Now it appears codification of gay marriage at the Federal level may be endangered, according to Senator Collins (R-ME), and that won’t go over well with the gay community, a group that otherwise has been slowly moving towards a more conservative political viewpoint, or with supporters of justice for all Americans. What will be Republicans’ next target that can be turned on them during the campaign?
• In Wisconsin, all serious Democratic candidates except Lt. Governor Mandela Barnes have dropped out of the primary, leaving Barnes as the likely Democratic nominee for Senator Johnson’s (R) seat in the Senate, although it’s worth noting that not all the drop outs are official and the primary, as of this writing, is still scheduled to occur. On the Republican side, Senator Johnson and David Schroeder are in the primary. I should think it’ll be Johnson vs Barnes in the general election, and Johnson will have a hill to climb. But how big a hill?
• Lt Governor Fetterman’s (D) lead over Dr. Mehmet Oz (R) in the Pennsylvania race to fill Senator Toomey’s (R) soon-to-be-empty Senate seat is up to 11 points, at 47-36, according to a Fox News poll. Is it safely a Democratic acquisition yet? And when will former President Trump dis-endorse Oz for failing to take a lead? The former President is so desperate to look successful that he might end up endorsing … deep breath … Democrat Fetterman! Not kidding, either.
• Famed statistician Nate Silver thinks New Hampshire incumbent and candidate Senator Hassan (D) has a good chance of winning reelection, but knows that New Hampshire can be quite swingy and hard to predict.
• In North Carolina, local political experts believe the Beasley (D) vs Budd (R) contest to fill a future empty Senate seat currently occupied by Senator Richard Burr (R) to be too close to call. If President Biden manages to repair his national approval rating between now and November, it may be enough to push Beasley over the top, beating Trump-endorsed Budd. I expect Biden to, in fact, recover in the polls with his recent legislative victories, clarified messaging, and inevitable Republican bungling.
• The latest Fox News poll in Georgia gives Senator Warnock (D) a four point lead over challenger Herschel Walker (R), which is within the margin of error. Fox is A-rated by FiveThirtyEight. Notice how Warnock’s lead bounces from a couple of points to ten points, there’s nothing guaranteeing a victory for either nominee.

Tomorrow is the August 2nd primaries, which should answer one or two more questions, mostly in Arizona. Slightly out of date previous amateur analysis is here.

I was a little puzzled by this NewScientist (16 July 2022, paywall) article:

A computer component that uses vibrations rather than electrons could approach the physical lower limit for energy use when processing and sending information.

The minimum amount of energy needed for a computer to perform a computational step is called the “Landauer limit”, named after the 1960s physicists Rolf Landauer. In his calculations, Landauer did not consider any specific computer design, but rather the basic energy cost required to manipulate information, like erasing or re-writing a bit.

Well, OK. So what?

Nanomechanical computers are unlikely to replace the machines in our homes, but they may prove uniquely suited for use on satellites, says [Warwick Bowen at the University of Queensland in Australia]. A nanomechanical computer free of wires and electronics could withstand extreme conditions like solar flares, stopping it from losing information in such an event, he says.

Oh! So that’s cool! At least until the satellite sags into the atmosphere and burns up. But still.

Here’s orange

and yellow.

I like them both. But the yellow caught the light better.

Remember Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers (R), who testified on television to the shameful activities of Trump supporters when he refused to engage in illegal actions at Trump’s behest, but then stated that, yes, he’d vote for Trump again?

Not anymore.

Arizona state House Speaker Rusty Bowers (R) on Sunday said he’ll never vote for former President Trump again, a reversal of earlier claims that he’d back Trump in a match-up against President Biden.

“I’ll never vote for him, but I won’t have to. Because I think America’s tired and there’s some absolutely forceful, qualified, morally defensible and upright people, and that’s what I want. That’s what I want in my party and that’s what I want to see,” Bowers told moderator Jonathan Karl during an interview on ABC’s “This Week.” [The Hill]

I couldn’t help but note this remark:

“It is a tenet of my faith that the Constitution is divinely inspired, that this is my most basic foundational belief,” Bowers, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, told the committee. “And so for me to do that because somebody just asked me to, is foreign to my very being; I will not do it.” [NBC News]

It’s one of those remarks that sounds sophisticated and authentic and all that rot, at least on first thought. But on second thought?

I think I’m just a piece on a cosmic Monopoly game.

I wonder why he can’t give credit to the humans who came up with the Constitution, with the series of compromises, good and bad, of checks and balances, of a document that reflects hope, humility, and awareness of the inevitability of error? What keeps him from acknowledging it’s a best attempt by humans, rather than some oddball Divinity who appears to think we’re all, well, to be honest, thumb puppets?

Why, yes, Detective Queen, I am up for a role as Bela Lugosi.

The Mandarin Mystery (1936) is an Ellery Queen story, which means that the fictional Queen and his father, a police inspector, have to figure out how one, then two, murders have been committed – and why.

It’s not bad, but the storytelling is brittle, meaning the suspects are basically from the usual herd of 1930s suspects, and the idea that a postal stamp worth $50,000 in the money of the period would be carried with virtually no safeguards is a plot hole that may have been believable in the thirties, but surely isn’t now.

The Queen character is played with some verve, but in the end this is a minor failure of a story. I couldn’t figure out why I should care, and if I can’t figure it out for myself, I can’t figure it out for you, either.

E. J. Dionne, Jr. has an epiphany about the upcoming midterms:

When it comes to predicting midterm elections, it’s difficult to distinguish between insightful nonconformity and wishful thinking.

The conventional wisdom, well-rooted in history and data, suggests the Democrats should be toast this fall. But beware, say the dissenters, because 2022 is not a normal year, and it will not play out in a normal way.

The dissenters may be onto something, even if the case for a Republican sweep is strong. [WaPo]

So why has it taken Dionne, a professional pundit, this long to realize that there’s something abnormal going on?

It’s not blindness, or conformity.

It’s his status. He’s a professional.

This places multiple constraints on him, and folks in his class. He gets his income from being a pundit. He has a position of some prestige to maintain. He’s part of the standard power structure.

All of these factors, and more, conspire to keep him in a conservative position – not politically, but simply as a predictor of the future – when it comes to the midterms. Historically, the party holding of the Presidency does perform subpar when the economy sucks. He, and all other professional pundits, know these rules of thumb.

And, as their employers expect them to come out with reasonable predictions, this is what comes out.

Don’t confuse reasonable with accurate.

But how about me? I’m an amateur pundit, by which I mean I’m unpaid, I get my income elsewhere, and therefore the time I would otherwise spend researching the political scene instead goes to my employer. I’m under-informed compared to Dionne. Heck, if there was a term further down the ladder from amateur, I’d be that.

But I’m also unconstrained.

So I’ve been predicting for months and months that the Democrats, if they communicate clearly, and their January 6th investigation comes up with good information – which it has – then the Democrats may be looking through the right side of the telescope, despite their blunders with the management of the transgender issue.

Right now, I think in the Senate the Democrats have a good chance of netting two-four seats. If the bowling ball breaks just right, add two more. In the House, which I do not study, I simply note that the Democrats are thought to have more chances to flip seats than the Republicans, who more or less stood pat in most states where redistricting is necessary. I expect Rep Gaetz (R-FL) to lose big time to his challenger, Rebekah Jones (D). Heck, I expect a spirited contest and possible Democratic victory in traditional Republican stronghold CD1 in Nebraska.

I think the independents are finding their local Republicans to be extremists unworthy of positions in Congress. In a way, the election is more under Democratic than Republican control, and while publicly Republican officials and strategists talk an optimistic game, the mutterings from anonymous Republican sources – or even Senator McConnell (R-KY) – are that the extremists have been recognized for what they are by independents and even moderate Republicans, and won’t be getting the votes they think they’ll get.

And I can say this stuff because I don’t depend on a pundit-payer for my income.

But pity the poor reader, because I also don’t have the hours to devote to reading up on each race and talk to local party officials and all that rot. It’d make me ill, anyways. No, I’m an obsolete software engineer who reads way too much and is pushing his impressions of the upcoming election out onto the blog for digestion by a reader who’s not quite sure if I’m spinach or a bad bacteria.

I guess we’ll find out in a few months.

In case you were wondering if Lake Mead is drying up this rapidly due to numbers of people, well, yes, but indirectly. Christopher Ingraham on The Why Axis says the immediate culprit is farming:

Conceptually the west’s water problem is a simple one: humans are draining the Colorado River faster than it can replenish itself via rain and snowpack, a problem compounded by the ongoing drought. But this is fundamentally not a problem of cities being too big, or populations being too high, or families doing too much laundry. Entsminger’s testimony points to the real culprit: desert farms.

“Around 80 percent of Colorado River water is used for agriculture and 80 percent of that 80 percent is used for forage crops like alfalfa,” he said. Stop and sit with that one for a minute. Eight out of every ten gallons that flows down the Colorado gets diverted to farms and ranches. And most of that gets turned into alfalfa for use not by humans, but by cattle.

Western farmers, in other words, are pumping precious water hundreds of miles around the desert in order to grow plants and animals that cannot otherwise survive there — especially during a multi-decade drought. It’s profoundly wasteful, a practice untethered from a reality that has finally caught up with it.

He also seems unduly optimistic about humanity’s wisdom:

The optimistic case for the southwest is that these dire conditions force a rethinking of how agriculture is practiced in the region, leading to water savings that put the river on a more sustainable footing. A couple winters of record snowpacks could go a long way toward replenishing water levels on Lake Mead.

Me? Between overpopulation, chronic narcissism, and general need to make a living, I don’t think we’ll learn a damn thing.

And here’s a nice graph of Ingraham’s.

Photon sphere:

Black holes can have a feature called a photon sphere, where gravity’s pull is so strong that light orbits the black hole. So if you aim a light just outside the photon sphere you could, in theory, see that light come around the other side of the black hole. [“James Webb Space Telescope pictures: Your questions answered,” Leah Crane, NewScientist (23 July 2022)]

From Yahoo! News:

Former President Donald Trump said in a statement Wednesday that he had notified CNN he was intending to file a defamation lawsuit against the news outlet for its refusal to back his discredited claims that election fraud accounted for his loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential race.

“I have notified CNN of my intent to file a lawsuit over their repeated defamatory statements against me,” Trump’s statement said. “I will also be commencing actions against other media outlets who have defamed me and defrauded the public regarding the overwhelming evidence of fraud throughout the 2020 election.”

“You haven’t backed my false claims of electoral fraud so I’m suing!”

Yep, frantic to waste money on lawyers, he is. He’s apparently never heard that part of earning respect is Knowing when to fold ’em.

And speaking of Knowing when to run, when will he be fleeing the United States for the Seychelles? He’s making my prognosticating skills look poor.

Donald J. Trump and the 2020 election. In case you were wondering, he does not have stripes.

This thread has been dormant for quite a while, but it’s worth noting that it’s been nothing but downhill for the reservoir since my last comment in 2015. Indeed, Mead is no longer a harbinger of things to come, but now a dread hunting ground for souvenirs, oddities, and even archaeological artifacts:

When the employee is ten times bigger than the boss, those reviews can be dicey. Here’s the headline from the print version of NewScientist (23 July 2022, paywall), rather than the remanded online version:

Wild bison roam in UK for first time

Four bison were released into an English woodland that they are expected to transform

What happens if the bison fail? Are they fired? I’d hate to be the one delivering the bad news.

Edward Parker and Michael Vermeer want a contest!

NIST [U.S. National Institute for Standards and Technology] and others in the cryptography community are carefully analyzing several PQC [post-quantum cryptography] algorithms to try to catch any potential vulnerabilities. But it’s almost impossible to mathematically prove the security of most cryptography algorithms. In practice, the strongest evidence for an algorithm’s security is simply that many experts have tried and failed to break it. The more people try to attack the new PQC algorithms and fail, the more likely it is that they are secure.

One possible option for further crowdsourcing the analysis of NIST’s final candidate PQC algorithms would be a contest in which the general public is invited to try to break them. As hundreds of companies that offer public bug bounties have discovered, crowdsourced penetration testing can be a very useful tool for improving cybersecurity. The U.S. Departments of Homeland Security and Defense have also recently experimented with offering bug bounties to anyone who discovers cyber vulnerabilities in the departments’ systems. A public contest certainly can’t replace a mathematical security analysis, but it could be a useful complement that provides additional evidence of the algorithms’ security. [Lawfare]

Parker and Vermeer address and repudiate the usual objections to such a contest, and I tend to agree – let “the public,” a necessarily self-selecting group of mathematicians, both professional and amateurs, have a go at it. Both cash and notoriety will accrue to anyone who actually finds a weakness in any of the algorithms.

And may result in the development of new mathematical techniques and tools. Win-win?