Category Archives: Uncategorized

In regards to a State law with some religious implications:

State Rep. Phil Christofanelli, R-St. Peters, who sponsored the bill last year, said it’s too early to comment on the groups applying to run the program. He said the law protects against religious discrimination by the educational assistance organizations.

“It’s pretty well established in American law that you can’t discriminate for immutable characteristics like religion,” he said. [St. Louis Post-Dispatch]

I’m sure everyone else has had their say about immutable characteristics, but I have to have my horse’s laugh as well. Dude, people are forever adjusting, changing, and abjuring religion. You should be ashamed to be trying to slip that particular bit of deceit by the people of St. Louis.

Hah!

CNN/Politics‘ Chris Cillizza makes the typical error of holding a variable constant as he panders to Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) from back in the latter’s more ambitious days:

This is from the Solar Orbiter, operated by the ESA and NASA:

The Full Sun Imager of the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager on board the ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter spacecraft captured a giant solar eruption on 15 February 2022.

Solar prominences are large structures made of tangled magnetic field lines that keep dense concentrations of solar plasma suspended above the Sun’s surface and often take the form of arching loops.

This is the largest solar prominence eruption ever observed in a single image together with the full solar disc.

Amazing. Good that when that explosion went off, it was pointed that-a-way and not this-a-way.

In the wake of the spectacle of a few power-hungry yahoos declaring their little chunks of eastern Ukraine are actually independent countries qualified to sign treaties with Moscow’s Vladimir Putin^[1], Edward Luce of the Financial Times (at least according to Professor Richardson) wrote:

Cannot be stated strongly enough: If the west – chiefly America, but also Britain – doesn't burn its financial ties to Russia's oligarchy then Putin will prevail. This means taking on Wall Street, the City, law firms realtors, the prep schools and western laundering outfits.

— Edward Luce (@EdwardGLuce) February 21, 2022

It seems to me the proper procedure will be to freeze all assets, of all the Russian oligarchs, available, and then, one by one, confiscate them. Even go after those that seem beyond reach. Putin’s at the top of an oligarchic kleptocracy, which means he’s only there because he’s the toughest and most skilled at internal power struggles, which range from brutality to diplomacy. The latter depends on success; if a Russian oligarch finds themselves not so oligarchic any longer, they may decide the Putinesque diplomacy isn’t working and take a shot at removing Putin.

A tip into an informal Russian civil war will make it far easier for Ukraine to regain its territorial integrity.

¹ Which is so cartoonish that I’d be laughing, but the consequences for the Ukrainians are so potentially tragic that laughter is impossible. I’m not sure English has a name for the actual emotion.

The Center for Inquiry (CFI) is upset about someone not thinking in Oklahoma:

A dangerous bill in the Oklahoma legislature would create a de facto blasphemy law for public school teachers, severely punishing them for teaching anything that conflicts with any student’s religious beliefs, and advocates for reason and secularism stand ready to challenge the law in court should it pass. Today, the Center for Inquiry (CFI) sent notice that if Oklahoma State Senator Rob Standridge’s “Students’ Religious Belief Protection Act” becomes law, CFI will see to it that the law is struck down as a blatant violation of the First Amendment.

But I have to wonder if threatening to take the State to Court really is the best course. I suggest that they write an alternative letter that suggests CFI will fund anyone willing to sue under this proposed law, regardless of their religious affiliation, over anything.

Say, when someone else sues because their delicate sensibilities have been bruised, CFI will also sue – the same teacher – for any offered apologies and mea culpas.

This Standridge brute would swiftly come under fire, some of it literal, for denuding all the schools, public and private, of the teachers.

And it would make the blundering foolishness of incorporating singularly religious values into state law visceral. The swirling madness of religion that so many think is right would be a pie to the face for a change. And get the law, if ever passed, repealed.

William Galston and Elaine Kamarck are, or should be, legendary within the Democratic Party for having analyzed the Democratic failures of the 1970s and 1980s and producing a set of recommendations that soon-to-be President Bill Clinton used in refashioning the Democratic message – and winning the Presidency.

Now they’re back, and when it comes to race, they sound remarkably like Andrew Sullivan:

MYTH 1: PEOPLE OF COLOR THINK AND ACT ALIKE

Early in the 21st century, many Democrats came to believe that long-term demographic trends would move the electorate inexorably toward a Democratic majority. The expectation was that decades of robust immigration from previously under-represented countries in the Western Hemisphere and the Asia-Pacific region would steadily increase the diversity of the U.S. population. As they entered the electorate, they would join forces with other people “of color” — especially African Americans and Native Americans — to strengthen support for the Democratic Party, especially its progressive wing. Underlying this projection was the assumption that these new groups would experience various forms of discrimination that would define their political identity and unite them with African Americans and Native Americans in demands for justice and equality.

For a while there was evidence that what some called the “Rising American Electorate” would indeed transform our politics. The coalition that gave Barack Obama a strong majority in 2008 was diverse in all the expected ways, and younger voters brought new and often progressive perspectives into the political arena. Black turnout has remained high, Hispanics continue to stream into the electorate, and turnout among Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders rose by 39% from 2016 to 2020.^[5]

But more recently, developments among the largest segment of this coalition, Hispanic Americans, have called into question the belief in the basic similarity among people of color. It was widely recognized that the term “Hispanic” — a census category — covered an internally diverse community from dozens of different countries. It turned out that differences of national origin shaped political outlooks: It was one thing to flee countries dominated by brutal right-wing dictatorships, quite another to hail from socialist societies like Cuba and Venezuela. [Progressive Policy Institute]

This statement, particularly concerning People of Color, rings true in the wake of a 2020 election in which a substantial minority of the Hispanic vote went Republican; in the wake of reports that the Cuban-derived minority in Florida are strongly against the legalization of illegal immigrants, when they themselves went the entire route as prescribed by law; that the term Latinx has no popularity with the general Hispanic population, suggesting those pushing it are not listening to the feedback from their audience.

That, in turn, is in congruence with the analysis, thus far, of election results, most recently the Virginia elections, which the Democrats, under standard analysis, should have won, and instead more or less were run out of town. Their reaction to post-voting polls? That the voters are a bunch of bigots.

That’s called CYA, not honest analysis.

In fact, and with the admission I haven’t had time to read the entire report, this strikes me as a not-so-veiled shot at Ibrahim X. Kendi and the American far left who’ve settled into the position that If you’re White, you’re evil. The subsumation of non-White into a single group, the POC, is reflective of the ideology, the propaganda, spread by the far left, of White evil and everyone else victims – as well as their dictates that only racial power politics, an unstable and violent pattern as we see in the historical record, can restore justice.

It has never brought justice, in reality.

And how strong are these dictates? Just sitting here writing, I finally realize why I found Kendi’s book, How To Be An Antiracist, to be so grating: it’s not a book built on the liberal democratic support of intellectual persuasion, of buttressing arguments with evidence to make a point. Oh, he has some evidence, but I felt some of it was doubtful or inaccurate, but it’s mostly irrelevant. It’s a book of dictates mixed with some interesting anecdotes from his and other’s lives.

But it wasn’t persuasive. It was all about orders.

And most folks don’t want to follow orders in order to win a political contest and reap the prizes – which will be handed out as the leaders see fit. Too much brown-nosing. Rather, people want the chance to succeed through their own labor.

And if the left is going to demonstrate a system that undermines such an ambition, they and their allies won’t get the votes they think they deserve.

The Democrats had better start learning fast, or November 2022 could be a horrendous shock. I look forward to finding time to read further in Galston and Kamarck’s analysis. I want to see if they continue to dig at the foundations of intellectual bullying.

You should go read it, too.

Professor Blackmun gives us a quick description of a Federal Circuit’s social dynamics compared to the private sector:

Generally, workplaces are not static. Over time, leaders with different styles come and go. Organizations are restructured. Workers who do not work out will leave, or are asked to leave. New blood is brought in to reinvigorate the organization. And, if the workplace is failing, eventually, the organization itself may become defunct.

These rules do not apply to the federal courts of appeals. Their membership is largely static. New judges are added on an infrequent basis, while senior judges tend to stick around. There are no leaders. (No, the chief judge does not count). Every member of the court has an equal vote. And, with rare exception, judges who are unhappy remain ensconced in their life-tenured sinecures. Finally, federal courts cannot be abolished–well, they probably can’t be abolished. These unique dynamics of the federal courts of appeals make interpersonal relationships very different than in traditional workplaces. [The Volokh Conspiracy]

I don’t think sinecure is actually the right word to use here, but that’s a detail. The real fun is reading about the friction caused by judges who are less respectful of precedent than others.

There’s a real conundrum going on here:

“I’ve been to flat Earth conferences and I remember this guy said he used to contract with Nasa,” [Kelly Weill] said on the show.

“He said, ‘Quite frankly I think they’re lying about the shape of the earth so that we believe in aliens so that when Jesus comes down we’ll mistake him as an alien and we’ll shoot him.’”

Yeah, we don’t even know where to start with that one. [“Flat Earther claims that Nasa makes us believe in aliens so that we’ll shoot Jesus if he returns,” Harry Fletcher, indy100]

Where you start is with the question, If Jesus is God, a Divine creature, is s/he/it really going to give a shit about being shot?

Yeah?

He may be pissed off enough to do a War Of The Worlds gig on the shooter, but that’s a different conspiracy theory, isn’t it?

Liminal:

A liminal space is a space between spaces. A liminal space is a boundary between two points in time, space, or both. It’s the middle ground between two grounds, the mid-structure between two structures.

When you’re in a liminal space, you’re neither here nor there, neither this nor that. At the same time, you’re both here and there. Both this and that. [“Liminal space: Definition, examples, and psychology,” Hanan Parvez, PsychMechanics]

Noted in “Do you taboo? On the silence of nonreligion,” Jennifer Michael Hecht, OnlySky:

We’d already won many small battles for the right to disbelieve in peace. But the headline still asked: is the political poison of being an atheist really twenty years stronger than the political bad-beverage of being gay?

My answer is yes. It was. It probably still is. We seem to be in a liminal hinge of history though, where the big problem of voting for an atheist leader might finally go on the decline.

Bank on a poet to come up with that word.

Between the expected Russian invasion of Ukraine and storms on the Sun, this could be an exciting week. Oh, you hadn’t heard of the latter? Here’s Spaceweather.com:

HERE IT COMES: The source of last week’s huge farside explosion is moving closer to the Earthside of the sun. NASA’s STEREO-A spacecraft is stationed just behind the sun’s eastern limb, and it has caught sight of a large ultraviolet hotspot approaching the visible edge of the solar disk:

STEREO-A does not have a white light telescope, so we cannot know for sure that the “hotspot” is actually a sunspot. But it almost certainly is.

Whatever it is, it’s big enough to affect the way the surface of the sun vibrates. Researchers at Stanford University are using helioseismology to map the farside of the sun.

And

The northeastern limb of the sun is surging with flares …

Go read about it. One big blast could knock down satellites and even disable our power grid.

One of the most esteemed scenes in American cinema, yes?

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984) remains a conundrum for anyone who thinks stories are serious endeavours, and those that are not well done should be considered a failure. This one is full of silliness: a scientist who’s a rock star who meets his late wife’s unknown twin sister at a concert? The same scientist doesn’t follow protocol, but accedes an impulse to drive a superfast car into a mountain of waste, there encountering other-dimensional creatures who bounce of the car’s windscreen?

Aliens from that dimension, desperately searching for a way home, are after the same scientist’s device which powered the car, which itself is a refinement of another device used to open the dimension, which allowed an alien to take over the body of another foolhardy scientist? What, don’t they teach these scientists impulse control?

All the aliens are named John, for goodness’ sake!

And then there’s the climactic battle, wherein we discover just where the hell some of the Star Wars space action sequences came from, which I find obscurely disturbing.

And despite all that, we keep coming back to see it again and again. Cult Classic is scrawled across the film tin as if written by a drunken madman. Maybe it’s a way station for some stars, and an origin for others, because names just roll off the tongue: Clancy Brown, Christopher Lloyd, John Lithgow, Peter Weller, Emily Barkin, Jeff Goldblum, Robert Ito, Yakov Smirnoff, just to name a few. It’s a cast who knows how to act and pulled it off without cracking a smile.

Recommend it? Of course. It’s a necessity of the American cultural scene. If you haven’t seen it, you won’t really understand American culture.

Now will you?

Minnesota in Summer:

And in Winter:

Someone saw the grift about election cheating and thought to themselves, “I can make money off this,” and I think we’re seeing that now:

But the specialized inks and watermarks also would limit the number of companies capable of selling ballot paper — potentially to just one Texas firm with no previous experience in elections that consulted with the lawmakers proposing the measures.

Mark Finchem, an Arizona state representative spearheading the initiative, said in an interview that he developed ideas for the proposals after discussions with executives of Authentix, a company in Addison, Tex. The firm has since hosted other GOP lawmakers at its office and given presentations about the idea to legislators in two states, according to participants and social media posts. …

Finchem said he thinks there will be a “foot race” among states to adopt the measures as a way to alleviate skepticism that elections are secure. Authentix, he said, would not be able to overcharge for the special ballots because he said the company would otherwise lose the support of public officials. But, he added, “it certainly does offer the opportunity for a company to engage in commerce.” [WaPo]

My suspicion is that “footrace” will be among five to ten States that have State leadership teams committed to the idea that private is always better than public. Then problems and drawbacks will start popping up. Supply issues will occur and be incurable by election officials, only by companies – some fly-by-night. The article notes that what few estimates of the cost is that it’ll be higher. Much higher. And the monopoly situation will continue, protected by patents. The libertarians’ standard Competition will Lower Costs! card will be played, but it won’t work because switching costs are very high when dealing with a system that Can Not Fail. The first mover will be the big, and only, winner.

Then someone will be caught corrupting the process. Or maybe they’ll find a need to encrypt something, and forget the cardinal rule of encryption: don’t roll your own.

And those five to ten States will quietly return to administering the elections with proper technology. And no one will mention election cheating because, it turns out, it only happened on the Republicans’ watch.

Just a feeling on my part.

Emollient:

1. making soft or supple
   also : soothing especially to the skin or mucous membrane
   // anemollient hand lotion
2. making less intense or harsh : MOLLIFYING
   // soothe us in our agonies with emollient words [Merriam-Webster]

Noted in “Behold the Republican somersaults for Trump,” George F. Will, WaPo:

It’s been hard to miss the news that Mazars accounting firm has dropped former President Trump as a client, presumably because of the State’s concerns about Trump’s ethically dubious approach to valuing property, allegedly depending for whom the valuing is occurring. This has led to speculation that Trump will end up in Court on fraud charges, as telling one entity one value and another a substantially different value is generally frowned upon in polite company.

But this may not be the company at the top of Trump’s concerns. The former President, recall, has as his base of political support the evangelist and prosperity church members who haven’t yet fled those churches. The former President grew up in the prosperity church tradition of Dr. Norman Vincent Peale. His connections are many, but primary is that he’s perceived as wealthy.

If that perception slides down the drain, not everyone will abandon him – but a significant portion will. He’s already perilously near the abyss of irrelevance, and if it turns out he’s just an ordinary millionaire, he could just suddenly fade away, no matter how much he sputters.

So the Mazars incident might put him in jail – and it might sever him from any prestigious political future.

Say hi to Peeper.

On my father’s grave, I will french that T-Rex in this scene!

Land Of The Lost (2009) is, I suppose, a camp on camp movie, a spoof of the old Land of the Lost TV series, of which there were two versions itself. Played as humor, it has a couple of good bits – a T-Rex with a sense of surreality is a lovely twist, and the ice cream truck had a lot of potential, of which it fulfilled perhaps a tenth – but the truth of the matter is that there was simply too much crude humor which existed for the sake of crude humor.

And that was boring.

While the T-Rex was a lot of fun, this was a waste of time. And what did they do with the evil Sleestak, anyways? Why aren’t they fascinated with the universe’s garbage pit? Isn’t that a possible way home? Another two drafts of the script in order to scrape out the aimless bits of humor and explore the possibilities of their new universe would have been a great improvement. Too bad they didn’t take it.

There’s something about what Steve Benen wrote about former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s (R-MT) run to represent the new 1st Congressional District of Montana in the US House of Representatives. For those readers of doubtful memories – like mine – Zinke’s time as the Interior Secretary was marked by numerous scandals, although he didn’t match up with the legendary Scott Pruitt of the EPA.

Anyways, over to Benen:

In the abstract, Zinke’s many scandals would dim his future political prospects. But in contemporary GOP politics, the Montanan believes red-state voters won’t much care, because accountability for Republican misconduct is a quaint nicety with little relevance in 2022.

The commercial writes itself, doesn’t it? Appeal to the ethical nature of Montanans by quoting Benen, heft up the bolded (which is mine) text to drive it home, and annoy the declared Republicans, while making everyone else think.

And then deliver the essence of ethical message of the competing candidate. Remind the audience that Zinke’s time in office was not marked with probity and seriousness, but by questionable behaviors, even rapacity.

And, finally, tie a vote to Zinke to an endorsement of embarrassingly bad, even criminal, behavior.

And it’s an ad for both primary and general election seasons. I do hope someone gives it a run. Zinke should, but won’t, be desperately embarrassed by his behavior. That’s what made him a fine member of the Trump Cabinet.

My Arts Editor declared she was going to have to wash her eyes out with bleach after this was on Colbert.

The Democrats have succeeded in excising some unpopular officials from their seats in San Francisco:

Three San Francisco School Board members were removed from their positions by voters on Tuesday, CNN projects, following a tough recall campaign that pitted Democrats against Democrats as interlocking controversies over school closings and renamings fueled a well-funded backlash.

The recall is among the most dramatic examples yet of parents’ frustration spilling into local politics. School closures and debates over masking children, along with discussions about race and gender in classrooms, have made education a central political issue.

More than 70% of voters supported the recall of School Board President Gabriela López, Vice President Faauuga Moliga and Commissioner Alison Collins as of Wednesday morning, according to preliminary results from the San Francisco Department of Elections. Their temporary replacements will be named by Mayor London Breed, a Democrat who in announcing her support for the recall last year said the city was at a “crossroads” and called the board’s priorities “severely misplaced.” …

The seeds of anger that led to the recall effort were planted early in the coronavirus pandemic, when the board considered changing the names of as many as 44 public schools in a city that was still grappling with how to safely reopen them. The discussions, which became the subject of some head-scratching in national media, touched off angry confrontations between the city’s liberal establishment and movement progressives. [CNN/Politics]

The progressives have unfortunately marked themselves as Angry Others, virtual enemies of the common citizen, for the action of punishing heroes of the Republic for their now-offensive crimes, without recognizing that they also performed heroically and intelligently in the face of overwhelming force, and triumphed, thereby winning the right to self-government.

In other words, yes, some of the Founding Fathers were slaveholders. But, unlike the traitor Confederate General Richard E. Lee, they also rose above their cultural training when they fought for freedom from the English Monarchy.

The Democrats have ejected the progressives from their seats, not only for insulting the Founding Fathers, but for the perception of ignoring the real business of the district, even though the former seat holders deny it. The next step for the progressives is to follow their brethren down the path of redemption. They need to publicly acknowledge the intellectual mistake in evaluating the Founding Fathers only on their moral failings, which were common for the time, and not including their accomplishments, which were deeply uncommon and even visionary.

Without such a public display, the independent voters will continue to remain suspicious of the progressive politician, thus inhibiting their chances of even winning primaries, much less general elections.

When you’re meeting a Lovecraftian monster, you might as well pack big heat, if only to build up to the greatest let-down possible.

The Last Case of August T. Harrison (2015) is definitely an amateur hour effort. Yet, this retelling of an H. P. Lovecraft story didn’t drive us away, because despite the uneven acting, odd cinematography, and outre story, the basic humanity of the eponymous character, a retired police detective who is asked to take on a private case by his son, carries the story.

Harrison’s son, an artist named Jason, relays a request from another artist, Eleanora, for Harrison to find some film, actual film. The content of the film is not clear, but the woman specifies it as important and irreproducible, filmed during a research project into an odd corner of physics, led by a local professor of same, Professor Hobb. She also specifies that a young man, Drake, was last known to have it.

Harrison’s searching is fruitless, until he picks up on a final clue that leads him to an obscure academic conference room, where he finds Drake. He’s covered in tattoos that he claims conceals him from Eleanora, whom he labels a witch.

And then the monsters come, and Drake ends up dead.

Harrison leaves in a hurry, but he has the film. But the next day, the film has disappeared, and Harrison is left with nothing but an angry Eleanora, a now-missing son Jason, and a mess of monsters that are always just out of sight, as if they’re in another dimension.

Which reminds him of his wife, so mysteriously in a near-coma: not speaking, just staring. What is she seeing?

And what is Harrison not seeing?

This isn’t noir, this is horror, and it isn’t going to end well for those involved. Harrison’s devotion to those he cares about makes the film plausible, despite the bad audio and sometimes cheesy effects, but there are limits. There are plot holes, such as the missing film, which is never explained. They’re annoying.

But most importantly is it almost comes across as a slice of life, of lives ending in what may be the worst possible ways. Don’t go into this expecting to be amazed, but it does have its own brand of creepiness playing throughout.

When your signaling mechanism is visual, such as the naval use of flags, smoke is often a useful way to break up communications. So I’m a little surprised that Steve Benen is surprised at Republican outrage over planned retraction of certain restrictions on public life:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell delivered floor remarks yesterday, rebuking Democrats, not for scaling back Covid restrictions, but for scaling back Covid restrictions for the wrong reasons.

“Now, obviously, the scientific facts have not changed in the last few weeks…. The only science that’s changed in the last two weeks is the political science. The only data that’s changed in the last two weeks is Democrats’ polling data.”

As a quantitative matter, the Kentucky Republican is clearly wrong. Two weeks ago, according to The New York Times’ tally, the daily national average for new infections was over 425,000. Now, it’s about 155,000. Hospitalization numbers have also improved dramatically. …

But even putting the data aside, what’s surprising is the fact that Republicans who want to see a rollback on restrictions are admonishing Democratic officials who are rolling back restrictions. As Jon Chait recently noted, this has become especially common in conservative media.

“This is not about science — this is about Democrats looking at polls and panicking at their diminishing midterm prospects,” claims the Washington Examiner. “Why are we seeing this shift now? The science has not changed, but perhaps the internal polling has,” surmises the American Spectator. “Only one circumstance has changed, and it has nothing to do with science and data — unless the science was an experiment to test parents’ patience and the data is the number of infuriated Americans calling B.S. on Democrats’ twisted games,” charges the Federalist. “The thing that’s changed is the calendar year. It’s 2022, and Democrats are beginning to evaluate the numbers: the number of months left until November.”

As I’ve noted before, we have competing world-views here. The conservatives, possessed of the inferior theory of reality, in which they have pastors & prophets running around proclaiming themselves and their flocks immune to Covid-19 because, well, God loves them, and then becoming ill and even dying a few weeks later, and the hucksters and grifters out in force, focused on shearing the flock through hoax treatments, are faced with a problem.

The other side is winning.

The decision to begin retracting restrictions is based on a reduction in numbers, as Benen notes. No one should be surprised at the caveat that politics has a role to play, too, but the Democrats are going to be hyper-sensitive to the possibility that we see yet another run-up in numbers, which would be a disaster for them. That’s why I’m not too worried about a retraction, because most Democrats are committed to the science and the advice of public health professionals.

But this also means the traditional, even conservative, approach to public health worked: get the professionals’ advice, follow it, and wait for the pharma to come up with a solution using the latest in development and testing tools. And hope none of the variants of Covid-19 become deadly, like its cousin MERS. Yeah, click on the link and see what we were risking every time someone turned down a vaccination.

And it proves the somewhat incoherent world view of the far-right to be utterly wrong. Ivermectin and its ilk did not work. Praying did not work. Being dumb assholes at town council meetings and school board meetings did not work. People still got sick, overloaded the health system, sometimes died, sometimes ended up with long-Covid, and sometimes had to attend funerals.

And that’s political poison for Senator McConnell and the Republicans. If the liberals (read: traditionalists!) were right about public health, what else might they be right about?

Maybe some of the far-right will think about that.

And McConnell can’t have that. So he accuses the Democrats – the conservatives in this case! – of corruption, while the folks on his side have been sick, dying, and straining a health system to the limit, all while risking the mutation of one of the Covid-19 family of viruses into something far more deadly. They’ve been mislead and endangered the nation.

Who’s the corrupt one here, Senator McConnell?

And that’s why this is not surprising.

Erick Erickson is caught up in a flap and I think reveals that he’s so firmly embedded on the right that he can’t the obvious:

It’s not David French’s fault per se, but I’m starting to hate Sundays. David writes something at The Dispatch. It infuriates friends of mine. My phone buzzes the entire day with people sending me links demanding to know what I think. It is more a Sunday routine of late than church. We’ve been going to Sunday School and avoiding church the last couple of months as omicron swept through. I’m ready to go back. But it just means when I get out of church at noon my phone will be having seizures from all the messages flooding in if David has been near a keyboard. …

I do want to note that I disagree with David’s tweet below.

As I’ve documented, I am really alarmed with the growing desperation on the left. I actually think much of the political radicalism David is writing about will fade, in large part because it is premised on one man.

No. It appears Erickson has bought into his own propaganda that his religious movement is based on cool, rational reason, a notion that would probably fatally stricken Paul Fidalgo of The Morning Heresy if he were to hear about it.

Look, without objective evidence to argue over, it’s difficult to make progress and resolve matters, and there isn’t any such evidence. It’s religion, it’s faith – no evidence required. Add in the fact, as observed by Senator Goldwater more than 50 years ago, that this possibly-imaginary God is involved and is taking sides – at least so claim many extremist pastors, supposed prophets, and congregation members, all based on evidence which is, at worst, fake, and at best is based on private information, meaning it cannot be examined by neutral observers, but instead may be nothing more than some odd-ball feeling that popped up after a twelve hour bender.

But so long as evidence is not demanded, there is no reason to believe the former President – or St. Trump, as some deluded believer will call him when he passes away – will fade away completely. He satisfies the desires of a lot of people, valid or otherwise, and quite a few power-hungry people recognize this and are positioning themselves as his successor.

Or, we can take a look at this from the other direction. Since at least Reagan, and possibly Nixon, the irrationality and dangers of the right have been increasing. From assassinating abortion doctors, sometimes in their own worship centers, onwards to the bombing by Timothy McVeigh, to the January 6th insurrection, the right has been increasing in violence.

Add in God, and it’s increasing in the certainty of their cause.

And, yet, Erickson doesn’t get it. There will be a shrinkage in the Trump base, as demographics are inevitable, and some people will leave in shame of what they’ve been supporting. But don’t expect the Trump movement to disappear. It’ll be sticking around, sustained by those who are not happy with the results of democracy, and certain that God backs them in any power plays they may entertain.

She’s a minx. You just know it.

The classic How To Train Your Dragon (2010) is a master’s class in the basic kid-against-all-societal-norms story form. The protagonist is the young and runty son of the chief of a Viking village, named Hiccup. His father, Stoick the Vast, must direct the defense of the village, which is assailed periodically by their enemies, a collection of flying dragons that carry away the villagers’ sheep and even the occasional villager; it’s implicit that Hiccup’s mother is dead.

Hiccup, being smaller than your average Viking, has to make up for his shortcomings in the usual way: being smarter than everyone else. In his role as intern to Gobber the Belch, village blacksmith and all around engineer, short a leg and an arm himself, he’s had the opportunity to construct a weapon of war: a machine that will fling a net hundreds of feet.

And, tonight, the dragons are arriving.

The night is lit with great belches of fire, and the cries of sheep who are experiencing flight for the first, and perhaps last, time. But for all the fires, when Hiccup hears an attacking dragon, all he can see are the flames it shoots, and can only use that for targeting.

The next day he finds an excuse to leave the village and hunt his prey, and finds to his shock the net in an unused valley with a lake, and in it? A black dragon, injured and befouled, of a description unknown to him or the village. It’s time for the kill! These things have killed man and beast! This one is helpless and easy prey for the knife.

Too easy. Hiccup can’t do it, and, instead, releases it.

And does he become the prey, instead?

The audience can guess; the kid has displayed bravery, intelligence, poise, and, most importantly, forgiveness to the dragon which supposedly threatens him. Their sympathy is won; would any dragon, even Toothless, as the black dragon is named by Hiccup, dare to go against the audience’s wishes and devour he who released him?

Well, he’s awfully darn thing, all elbows, really, so Toothless spares Hiccup. Soon enough, Hiccup’s doing his darndest to not kill a dragon, much to the dismay of Stoick and Gobber and just about everyone else. Even if he does seem to be a magician with captive dragons.

There’s much more to this plot, including antagonistic teenagers with whom Hiccup begins training, and the winning of Stoic’s respect, and it’s all played very well. For those of us who love the obscuring of information until a key moment, this important element of story-telling is performed professionally.

The result is a story that should win the hearts of all but the most cynical. It’s a delight.

Recommended.