Category Archives: Uncategorized

Vice notes another lurid fantasy connected to Covid-19:

Fuellmich isn’t a familiar name to most people. But for many of those sucked into conspiracy theories around COVID-19, he has become one of the most influential figures in the world. Thousands of people worldwide are clinging to the fantasy that he will soon be leading a major prosecution of world leaders, scientists and journalists, placing them on trial for “crimes against humanity” for their role in supposedly engineering a false pandemic.

His followers believe these trials will carry global historical significance, so much so that they’ve become known as “Nuremberg 2.0” in reference to the trials of Nazi leaders that took place after World War 2. Jan Rathje, a political scientist and researcher at German anti-extremism think tank Cemas, said the notion of a “second Nuremberg” – framed as mass trials of treacherous “elites” – was already familiar to many in the far-right before becoming synonymous with Fuellmich’s legal battle.

“The concept of a second Nuremberg trials has been present in far-right circles for a number of years, and it’s connected to ideas of revenge,” he said.

This push for a “Nuremberg 2.0” is gaining traction within the increasingly-interconnected global anti-lockdown scene. Rathje said that mentions of the term in German Telegram groups jumped from virtually zero to over 1,000 a day in April. The term trended on Twitter in the UK this summer, and in August, a man interrupted a police press conference in Sydney, Australia, shouting “Nuremberg 2.0”.

And how do you punish a guy like this?

Ignore him. Let him crash and burn and then never hire him for important work again. Let him represent DUIs in court. I think that, because he was involved in the recent Volkswagen cheating scandal, he’s willing to see conspiracies everywhere.

Or maybe he’s on the up and up?

The committee’s “findings”, which are broadcast weekly on his website in multi-hour-long sessions, read like a glossary of every COVID conspiracy going. Hosted by Fuellmich and three other lawyers, it comes across as an official-looking enquiry – similar to what a government might set up after a national disaster.

But it’s really just a series of interviews with various figures from the international conspiracy milieu, pushing myths about COVID-19: that the pandemic was planned by secret global elites, that vaccines are a deadly form of population control. According to Rathje, the committee has been the source of viral disinformation, such as a claim that vaccines violate the Nuremberg Code established after World War 2, because they are medical experiments that people haven’t consented to. This is, of course, not true.

Conservative apologist and moral equivalency guy Erick Erickson thinks the Democrats are annoyed that President Trump, much like President Clinton liked to do with issues, has stolen one of their favorite tactics:

Stacey Abrams says she was not entitled to become the governor of Georgia. Stacey Abrams has, long before Donald Trump … Stacey Abrams peddled “the big lie”, as the media likes to call it. Stacey Abrams peddled the lie, a lie that the 2018 election was stolen from her. She was not entitled to become governor. You know what? I wasn’t entitled to become governor either. I’m sorry. Apparently, this is fairly common. The Democrats and the media have allowed Stacey Abrams to peddle a mythology to explain to them the way the world works, that Republicans stole the election. She said that ironically campaigning for Terry McAuliffe in Virginia. Terry McAuliffe himself still to this day claims that the 2000 and 2004 elections were stolen. In fact, when confronted, Terry McAuliffe in the last few weeks has continued to deny that they were legitimate elections, just that we have to move on from those elections, but he doesn’t believe they were legitimate elections. He still believes that these elections were stolen from the Democrats.

This is Democratic mythology that is pervasive. When the Democrats lose, it is because Republicans stole the election. What is so ironic about this is here comes Donald Trump in 2020 and he doubles down claiming the election was stolen. The Democrats, mainstream media, and major companies are like, “You can’t say that. That’s the big lie,” equating it to Nazism and Hitler.

While, on the surface, it may appear to be an equivalency, it’s not. The Democrats can easily point at various tactics used by Republicans to discourage voters, while Republican screaming about the stolen election have exactly … nothing.

Oh, I’m sure a few cases can be made for poor sportsmanship by the Democrats. After all, they were accused of gerrymandering Maryland. Where there’s temptation there’s often weakness.

But I think what catches my attention here is how these two sides, bereft of an existential foreign opponent, have settled in for victmhood, fantasies, and trench warfare. Is Professor Turchin going to be proven right (OK, he’s made no such prediction of which I’m aware, and he was talking about agrarian societies, but the parallels are a little frightening), and the internecine elite warfare will remove a large number of elite from standing, and in the process decrease community wealth, power, and prestige?

Or can we find a way out of this morass?

Or is Erickson really all about his endless campaign to make the Democrats and Republicans moral equivalents so that Independents – the true power holders these days – will forget that the Republicans are now chiefly fantasists who do not see the world in a realistic fashion?

I’ll be quite interested to see how New York Democratic Party chairman Jay Jacobs ends up after commenting on why he’s not endorsed the winner of the Democratic primary for nomination for the mayor of Buffalo, India Walton:

“Let’s take a scenario, very different, where David Duke, you remember him? The grand wizard of the KKK? He moves to New York, he becomes a Democrat, and he runs for mayor in the city of Rochester, which has a low primary turnout, and he wins the Democratic line. I have to endorse David Duke? I don’t think so,” Jacobs said.

He continued, “Now, of course, India Walton isn’t in the same category, but it just leads you to that question, ‘Is it a must?’ It’s not a must. It’s something you choose to do. That’s why it’s an endorsement. Otherwise they call it something else, like a requirement.” [New York Intelligencer]

He has since suggested that the analogy, as caveated as it was, was offensive. The question, though, is why?

He explicitly excluded Walton from the entire category of whatever David Duke, an otherwise fairly pathetic KKK creature, may be representative; the entire point was to suggest that finding a candidate to be ideologically repulsive means a party chairman is not obliged to endorse the candidate.

And there’s really no other way to read what the Intelligencer transcribed.

But there have been cries of racism, there have been cries for resignation.

I don’t see it. A simple, vivid analogy is not racism, especially with appropriate limitations. To cry out otherwise is to avoid the substantive question of whether the ideology of Walton, whatever it may be, is truly so awful.

But now the first question is whether Jacobs brushed some legitimately raw nerve endings – or if we’re seeing some strategic anger. Either way, full comprehension and sober consideration does not appear to have been exercised here.

At least, if you’re a Protestant:

Note that 0 means either a round-down or a not measured that year.

Protestants can take partial comfort in the thought that Christian (non-specific) may contain sympathizers, but in the end it's a little hard to get around the notion that the Protestants have fallen a long ways from their dominance of the late 1940s.

I think we're seeing a graphic demonstration of two kinds of people here: those who insist on seeing miracles and God in everything, and then everyone else, who often discovered praying doesn't get you anything but some physical rest. Or was that in poor taste?

Otherwise noteworthy? The well-publicized rising of the Nones, from virtually nothing to 20%. The exact content of this group is a little more confusing than others, though - it's not a mob of eye bulging atheists, if that's your worry. It's more of a catch-all for those who don't fit in anywhere else; I'm sure there are many "spiritual" types, which is a category I've never understood.

What does it all mean? Well, the evangelists, who are mostly Protestants as I understand it, are getting a little frantic, as does any group that finds itself transitioning down the social ladder, especially when it's from being #1. Not that they're off the top of the ladder just yet, but they can see the cessation of their dominance from where they dangle.

And thus the apocalyptic cries to which we're subjected these days.

Otherwise, it's really a sort of empty graph. Finding knowledge in it is a bit of a quest.

I suppose I should thank Ian Leslie of The Ruffian for his semi-formalization of a notion that’s been bothering me for the last decade, although elsewhere he admits to getting the idea from Andrew Sullivan. What does he call it?

MLK Syndrome:

Many middle-class people in Western societies carry a covert longing to have our moral mettle tested in the crucible of history. I’ve sometimes felt that urge myself. We want to know how we’d have behaved in societies where overt displays of racism were the norm, and laws explicitly discriminated against people on the basis of race, gender, or sexuality. Would we have meekly accepted such wrongs and even endorsed them, like many or most of our historical peers? Surely not. We’d have stood up and fought for justice, wouldn’t we? We’d have been heroes.

Following the social and political liberalisations of the last century, modern Western societies have provided little opportunity to take sides in genuinely momentous moral contests. We are no longer in conflict over whether different races deserve equal rights or women can vote or – a more recent achievement – gay people can marry. Public attitudes have consistently become more liberal. For all the fuss about populism, most of us agree on the fundamentals of liberal democracy; we’re just arguing over how to optimise it. That means the stakes are lower than they were. The closest many of us get to a test of political integrity is whether we’re willing to spend more on eco-friendly washing up liquid. It’s all unsatisfyingly undramatic.

I love the name, I love the definition. I thought of the necessary transformation of society as a result of climate change as a possible exception, but that hardly has the same personification of injustice as does, say, the beating of the pacifist heroes of the crossing of the Edmund Pettus bridge by the police in 1965. Climate change is not being brought on by deliberate evil or racism or anything of the sort, but by human limitations and overpopulation.

Much of the drama over transgenderism, homosexual marriage, vegetarianism, the anti-vaxxers, the legit skepticism movement, and many other momentary as well as long-running controversies can be attributed to MLK Syndrome, but I think I’ll omit the obvious ones. Instead, I’ll mention a new one that is annoying the skeptics.

The Catholic Church is in the midst of moving the late Pope John Paul I (aka Cardinal Albino Luciani), he who was Pope for all of a month in 1978, down the path of sainthood. What’s the alleged event that justifies claiming he’s responsible for a miracle?

The Vatican said that the healing, of an 11-year-old girl [in 2011], took place in Buenos Aires, the birthplace of the current pope, Francis. She had been afflicted with acute brain inflammation, septic shock and other grave medical problems and was deemed on the verge of death by doctors. A pastor of the parish associated with the hospital caring for her took “the initiative to invoke Pope Luciani,” the Vatican said. [Religion News Service]

Yeah. I can see why the skeptics movement finds this sort of claim to be dubious in the extreme. The guy had died in 1978; 2011 is thirty three years later!

But I can also see the notion that the Catholic Church is desperate to propagate its version of reality, a version in which God still stirs the waters with his finger, saints can be made by the Church, and dead Popes can still stride forth and heal little girls.

After all, the Church is slowly fading, isn’t it? Science is encircling it, discrediting its explanations of natural phenomenon; everywhere it operates it seems to be infiltrated by philanderers and pedophiles; former adherents are now moving on to the charismatic Protestant sects, at least in Central and South America; the dubious reputation of the Pope previous to the current Pope, who dared to retire rather than die in the chair, rests heavily on its shoulders; and the influx of recruits to the priesthood, at least here in the United States, has dropped off sharply as its reputation has become tarnished.

The yearning for a supernatural occurrence, for a new saint, must be compelling for the faithful, especially members of the power structure, who seem themselves, no matter how true to their putative beliefs, as becoming more and more irrelevant to today’s society and, perhaps more importantly, history. The divine and its evidence are the stuff which justifies the decisions of the faithful, and thus MLK Syndrome, or a cousin, very much comes into play: the belief that the drama and importance of the Catholic Church has not been consigned to history, but continues today.

And justifies this thin play for a new Saint.

Gravamen:

1. The substance, or essence, of a complaint.
2. The part of a criminal accusation that weighs most heavily against the accused. [Legal Dictionary]

Noted in “The Latest (Ridiculous) Controversy At Yale Law School,” David Lat, Original Jurisdiction:

Let’s do a close reading of the “trap house” email—starting with the term “trap house,” which seems to be the gravamen of the alleged offense. Taking this term by itself, most folks these days would associate it with the popular podcast Chapo Trap House—a show hosted by three white men, whose name hasn’t been the subject of any uproar, at least as far as I know.

It’s an interesting article. It does strike me, though, that articles like these constitute a magnifying lens on the actions of officials of any sort.

And while I’m glad I’m not an official of any sort, I think this is a good thing, so long as the lens is honest.

Further remarks on fooling facial recognition software after I provided a link to the original academic article, which is here on arxiv:

… here are some examples of what I saw before https://cvdazzle.com/. The article you shared shows a much more reasonable sort of make up. One you could probably get away with using and not draw attention to yourself.

Another reader:

Yeah, I don’t think the CV Dazzle approach is gonna get you past the human actors in these systems. One issue I saw is I wonder how much supervision the MUA’s had in doing the adversarial makeup. The example they showed with the adversarial, random, digital, and physical makeup had a nose tip shape change in the physical that wasn’t in the adversarial digital. That change, above and beyond what the software prediction of the digital requirement, may be enough to change the real time recognition percentage. In order to judge the validity of the computer calculated changes the physical implantation should be reviewed by several skilled people for how it matches the digital suggestion. Plus, as we agree, the sample size is awfully small. Not sure how broad a spectrum of FR software they had available to them, but comparing across multiple systems would also be useful. I’m sure all we really would need to do to find out the feasibility of this is ask the Chinese, Russians, and our own military and spook agencies. I’m pretty sure they’re doing this all the time.

It would be interesting to see a graph of number of training subjects vs drop in recognition rate as makeup is applied.

If you have an hour, this is a lot of fun.

And if the first ten or fifteen minutes seems a bit boring, it gets better after that. At one point, my Arts Editor remarked “Stunning choreography!”

Professor Richardson is aghast at recent currents in Texas education, specifically the new law known as S.B. 3:

But they should get that information in a specific way: through the Declaration of Independence; the United States Constitution; the Federalist Papers, including Essays 10 and 51; excerpts from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America; the transcript of the first Lincoln-Douglas debate; and the writings of the founding fathers of the United States; the history and importance of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964; and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Nineteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution.

While they managed to add in de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America—and I would be shocked if more than a handful of people have ever read that account of early America—there are some pointed omissions from this list. The Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees Black voting, didn’t make it, although the Nineteenth Amendment, which grants women the right to vote, did. Also missing is the Voting Rights Act of 1965, although the Civil Rights Act of the previous year is there.

And more, much more. You should  go read it.

Which leaves me to wonder if other States in the Union should pass laws requiring that students transferring from Texas should be required to undergo a remedial course in social studies. Just to make sure they understand that there are opposing views of what’s important in social education.

Ah, I’m such a troublemaker.

An entertaining bit of fluff.

A random part of this report on a possible large scale mechanism for extracting CO2 from the atmosphere.

But it’s really just another evolutionary pressure, at least when followed by an exterminating medicine:

Cheap rapid tests for malaria have helped drive down the prevalence of the disease in many parts of Africa. But just 15 years or so after their introduction, “stealthy” malaria parasites have evolved that can no longer be detected by the standard rapid tests.

“This is a major threat to malaria control,” says Jane Cunningham at the World Health Organization Global Malaria Programme in Geneva.

In many African countries, only people whose rapid test results are positive get treated. But in Eritrea around 2016, health workers noticed that many children who appeared to be really sick with malaria were testing negative. When medics looked at blood samples under a microscope, they could see many of the children were indeed infected.

“It was a crisis situation,” says Cunningham. “They thought there was something wrong with the test.”

Instead, her team found that up to 80 per cent of the malaria parasites in the area have mutations that mean they no longer produce the two proteins – called pfhrp2 and pfhrp3 – detected by the rapid tests. [“Parasite evolution is making it harder to detect and treat malaria,” Michael Le Page, NewScientist (2 October 2021)]

A fascinating change, isn’t it? Although the operational characteristics suggest that this is not a case of the mutation surviving the medication, but rather that the medicating never occurs. I do not know enough about detection tests to guess if this means a carrier only carried the mutation, or if the mutation simply outnumbers the predecessor.

Shibboleth:

A shibboleth (/ˈʃɪbəlɛθ,-ɪθ/ (listen)) is any custom or tradition, usually a choice of phrasing or even a single word, that distinguishes one group of people from another. Shibboleths have been used throughout history in many societies as passwords, simple ways of self-identification, signaling loyalty and affinity, maintaining traditional segregation, or protecting from real or perceived threats. [Wikipedia]

I am dismayed at my ignorance. Noted in “The battle lines around the word ‘Mormon’,” Jana Riess, Religion News Service:

That compromise certainly won’t appease the hard-liners. In fact, if the church’s efforts to expunge “Mormon” from our collective vocabulary have been successful in any way, it’s this: driving a significant wedge among our people. “Mormon” has become a shibboleth, an immediate shorthand for Latter-day Saints to size up one another’s obedience and orthodoxy.

And a bit of etiology!

There’s a cautionary tale about shibboleths in Judges 12 in the Bible. Basically, the story is that after the Gileadites defeat their rival Ephraimites in battle, the surviving Ephraimites attempt to flee by way of crossing the Jordan River to safety.

The victorious Gileadites are not having it. They want to make sure they hunt down every single escaped Ephraimite, so they set up a checkpoint at the river, which they now control. The password is “Shibboleth,” a word they pronounce differently than the Ephraimites, who can’t quite muster the “sh” consonant at the beginning. Success! The litmus test works like a charm, enabling them to identify and slaughter every fleeing Ephraimite. This story has given us the word “shibboleth” to refer to language that divides one group from another.

Goodness. A word dripping in blood and gore.

Governor “Death” DeSantis (R-FL) isn’t going along with the MAGA demands to recount votes anywhere a vote was cast:

Florida does not plan to review the 2020 election, Gov. Ron DeSantis said Tuesday during an appearance in St. Pete Beach.

“What we do in Florida is, there’s a pre- and post-election audit that happens automatically,” DeSantis said. “So, that has happened. It passed with flying colors in terms of how that’s going.”

DeSantis was asked about an audit because a growing number of Republicans have pushed for a recount of the election that former President Donald Trump won relatively comfortably in Florida — though he lost nationally. [South Florida Sun-Sentinel]

Really kinda makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Especially since Florida was expected to be a lot closer in the Presidential race than it turned out to be.

In case you’re an old person thinking of entering the writing world – which I put that way because the expectations of young and old people when it comes to the writing world may be greatly different – then you may have to rethink the old expectations. Freddie deBoer explains this using the bright flame that was apparently Gawker – and why New Gawker cannot work because old Gawker ate the food supply:

But the broader thing is that New Gawker couldn’t do what old Gawker did because everything old Gawker hated is gone. Gawker was, gleefully and often brilliantly, an anti-ideology. It was what it hated. And what Gawker hated is mostly all gone. Principal among them is glamorous, elite magazine and newspaper culture. It’s difficult to even remember this now, but Gawker’s original edge, back in the Elizabeth Spiers era, came from resentment at the money and privilege and (minor) celebrity that could be found in publishing and media – Tina Brown and Conde Nast and Graydon Carter and celebrity profiles and cushy gigs and expense accounts. Similarly, the publishing world which was intermingled with the media one had big-shot publishers and breathless profiles of hot young authors and three-martini lunches at Nobu. Spiers and those that followed her made great hay from mocking the people involved because those people really were enjoying immense material and social reward for having ascended in that world.

And in the most basic and direct terms, this world simply does not exist anymore. There are still overpaid people at Conde Nast, there are those who are lucky enough to get expense accounts (although I promise they’re not just handed a black card anymore), there’s excess and a few inflated advances in publishing, sure. But as it did in music, the internet opened a big fat hole in those industries … [charts omitted]

Here are two numbers that I have shared before, and which I insist that you young folk take very seriously: advances for books have dropped 40% in ten years, and in 2020, 98% of books sold less than 5,000 copies.

No, I never looked at Gawker. But I have to wonder if the Internet simply sucks up so much time that people don’t have time to read those magazines and books that used to garner high wages.

And are now written by “… 22-year-olds for poverty wages instead.”

I’ve often wondered if the creative class’ size would grow in relation to general population growth … and the fact of the matter that, to the extent that the Internet enables a particular class of artist to push their work to the public, the growth is greater than that of the population; instead, it relates to how access to the Internet grows for the potential audience.

BUT – the money that greases the creativity, as it were, did not, because the audience did not grow that much larger, and it has more targets, both inside and outside of the given creative class. Any economist will look at that and predict the fall of wages, just as deBoer observes.

Heinlein once said that if you ask a writer why they write, and they don’t answer “for the money,” they’re lying. But I suspect this is becoming less and less true. A few writers will do well, because they scratch the itch of general culture; most will target genres with precision, or genre fusions with either desperation or genius.

And I just have to say deBoer has touched on something very important here:

There’s still literary pretension. But, as I said recently, generations of writers who came up in the culture that spawned Gawker have been trained to see literary ambition as inherently ridiculous, and spend most of their books mocking the fact that they were so arrogant as to write one.

I shall have to meditate upon this observation. It suggests contamination of the literary world.

Yesterday I read about Idaho Republicans manning the ramparts to defend the extremists from … the more extremists, and calling the Democrats on their red emergency phone. Today I see long time conservative Jonah Goldberg is, well, essentially giving up:

Perhaps there’s another way. The primary system is the GOP’s Achilles’ heel because it makes a mere plurality of the vote a de facto majority of the vote. A recent Pew survey found that 44 percent of Republicans want Trump to run again. As 2016 showed, that’s more than enough to win the nomination in a crowded field. The same dynamic explains why Republican congressional candidates kowtow to Trump—they’re afraid of his primary voters. And right now, there is no countervailing pressure within the party.

So why not create pressure outside of it? Specifically, a third party with a simple, Reaganite conservative platform combined with a serious plank to defend the soundness of elections? For simplicity’s sake, think of it as a GOP minus the Trump personality cult.

If a Republican candidate met its requirements, a new party of the right could endorse the Republican, the way New York’s Conservative Party does. If not, a non-Trumpy candidate could play the role of spoiler by garnering enough conservative votes in the general election to throw the election to the Democrat. [The Dispatch]

So real Republicans can spoil the run of the MAGA-ites without actually voting for those evil creatures of Hell Democrats. Erick Erickson likes it but doesn’t think it’ll work:

As I see it, the problem is a lot of us used to be not of the establishment, but of the part of the conservative movement the establishment took seriously and we had some serious ideas ( or at least guys like Jonah do). Now, to stay in power, the party establishment (which really has not changed) has to listen to Aunt Flo who thinks the vaccine has a microchip in it and Uncletifa who thinks the CIA used Hugo Chavez’s ghost to hack into voting machines and that Ashley Babbit is a martyr while George Floyd got what he deserved.

It’s all rather unseemly and embarrassing particularly because we all know the establishment guys don’t believe any of it, but nod sincerely and act as if they believe it. Of course, the establishment guys didn’t really believe us either. They are professional head patters.

Frankly, therein lies the rub and it is why I can grin and bear it. The establishment guys will say and do whatever they can to stay in power. The people most willing to believe the crazy are the least likely to get elected and the people most proficient at lying to the crazy are the ones who stay around. They are, after all, the ones the party revolted against and led to Trump. But those guys are still the ones in charge. They’re really good at theater and surviving. It is one of the least appreciated aspects of the Age of Trump — all the people who the base wanted to purge by bringing in Trump are still the ones in charge.

A bit opaque.

Goldberg may not see this as defeat, but I think that if his scheme were to work in the short term by helping to defeat extreme right candidates wearing MAGA hats, in the long term the conservatives would become a fragmented set of two or more parties, each led by its own charismatic power-seeker.

And they’d hate each other. Make no mistake, Goldberg’s proposal is hardball politics at its core, and, culturally, the far-right conservatives, animated as many or most of them are by religious beliefs, would be bitterly resentful of anyone or any organization that deprived them of their “rightful” victory. Need I say the bitterly resentful find it difficult to work with their enemies?

Attempts to lure members of one party to another party would be met by resistance from the leaders, whether grifters or true believers, who would have to find reasons that would stop such a migration; fortunately, religion is fecund territory for creating stories to keep members loyal.

After a few years of getting their butts handed to them by the Democrats, the parties would begin to coalesce into a single Party. There’d be members who’d vote as directed, because toxic team politics, so useful to the leaders, would survive; there’d be members whose loyalty would be begrudging, and not necessarily vote as directed all the time. And there’d be non-members who realized that the competency presumably offered by the Democrats is more important than loyalty to any single issue.

But I suppose Goldberg’s long term goal is not clear. If it’s simply for the Republicans he favors to gain power long term, well, I don’t think it would work. If it’s to teach the Republicans a lesson, culturally I don’t think they’re prepared to learn it.

I wanted a herd of golden calves, but this one, from Chabad.org but otherwise uncredited, is far too charming to ignore.

But I think the real far-right extremist “conservative” problem is demographics. The youngsters who have not yet invested their emotional and other capital into ideas and institutions are watching and learning from the behaviors and results of their elders. That’s why new generations are so loathed by the old generation – not because of their supposed moral turpitude, but because the new generation often rejects the golden calves of the old generation. People hate having their holy water spat in.

That red line isn’t doing well.

A few will buy into Republican ideals and institutions, but most are going to watchful enough to reject the Republicans. They see a crashing climate and a conservative industry that rejects inconvenient scientific findings, whether they be evolution or climate change – and, for the young, climate change will be real and, if any of a number of phenomenon such as the Siberian and California wildfires continue, quite painful – that is, existentially threatening. They see rampant lying and unrestrained power-seeking and a political culture that’s OK with that. They see the evangelicals voting for the Prince of Mendacity, the former President, and have to wonder about the morality inherent. Heck, locally a Young Republicans (I think that’s the name) leader has been arrested for sex trafficking, and that brought down state Republican chairperson Carnahan. The behaviors, taken together, are a little astounding.

The demographics are not at all promising.

Spaceweather.com has a report on something blowing its top:

So you think you know what a comet is? Think again. Comet 29P/Schwassmann-Wachmann is challenging old ideas. Astronomers call it a comet, but, really, “giant space volcano” might be a better description. It’s a 60-km-wide ball of ice orbiting the Sun beyond Jupiter, and it appears to be one of the most volcanically active bodies in the entire Solar System.

Comet 29P just blew its top … again. In late September 2021, 29P erupted four times in quick succession, blowing shells of “cryomagma” into space.

And has anyone informed the conspiracy theorists?

When this object was discovered in 1927, astronomers thought they had found a fairly run-of-the-mill comet, unusual mainly because it was trapped in a nearly circular orbit between Jupiter and Saturn. 29P quickly proved them wrong as it began to erupt over and over again. Modern observations show that outbursts are happening as often as 20 times a year.

“The current outburst, which began on Sept. 25th, appears to be the most energetic of the past 40 years,” says Dr. Richard Miles of the British Astronomical Association (BAA). “Within a span of only 56 hours, four eruptions took place in quick succession, creating a ‘superoutburst.'”

See the link for the explanation why. So cool.

Or, in other words, are we operating a system by the skin of our teeth?

Or is this description of the reason for the supply snarl-up deeply misleading?

As consumers confront random shortages of clothing, toys, groceries and cars, the disrupted supply lines that define the pandemic-era economy are evident in dozens of giant container ships anchored off the coast of Southern California. Some vessels wait two weeks for an unloading berth.

Similar delays await freight once it reaches the shore, where docks, rail yards and warehouses are jammed with goods, the fruits of an economic recovery the administration boasts is robust. [WaPo]

Bold mine. So, in other words, our transportation system is so finely tuned to the needs of yesteryear that a recovery from a year long slump can overwhelm it?

I wonder.

… but it still feels like war. Mark Lechtik has a report on a cyber attack via UEFI (the boot module, the replacement for the old BIOS module for us old-timers) on SecureList, and I found his overview of probable adversaries to be fascinating:

Throughout this blog we will elaborate on the following key findings:

• We discovered rogue UEFI firmware images that were modified from their benign counterpart to incorporate several malicious modules;
• The modules were used to drop malware on the victim machines. This malware was part of a wider malicious framework that we dubbed MosaicRegressor;
• Components from that framework were discovered in a series of targeted attacks pointed towards diplomats and members of an NGO from Africa, Asia and Europe, all showing ties in their activity to North Korea;
• Code artefacts in some of the framework’s components and overlaps in C&C infrastructure used during the campaign suggest that a Chinese-speaking actor is behind these attacks, possibly having connections to groups using the Winnti backdoor;

Certainly, China and North Korea are sometimes uneasy allies, so this is certainly plausible. Their finding?

The goal of these added modules [to hacking kit VectorEDK] is to invoke a chain of events that would result in writing a malicious executable named ‘IntelUpdate.exe’ to the victim’s Startup folder. Thus, when Windows is started the written malware would be invoked as well. Apart from that, the modules would ensure that if the malware file is removed from the disk, it will be rewritten. Since this logic is executed from the SPI flash, there is no way to avoid this process other than eliminating the malicious firmware.

Linux continues to look more secure than Windows, doesn’t it? I look forward to future reports.

Many would argue that former President Trump is the apotheosis of the Republican Party. The note he issued yesterday suggests that it may be both true and about to rip out the hull of the good ship GOP:

If we don’t solve the Presidential Election Fraud of 2020 (which we have thoroughly and conclusively documented), Republicans will not be voting in ’22 or ’24. It is the single most important thing for Republicans to do. [via Maddowblog]

This is Trump’s strike to take the Republican Party private, to make it into another division of The Trump Organization, and, by so doing, boot out all Republican leaders, no matter how extreme, who show the least little bit of independence.

Such as Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), whose approach to the debt ceiling issue enraged Trump. Even Governor DeSantis (R-FL), who owes his current position to Trump’s endorsement in 2018, may not be welcome, as he’s rumored to be maneuvering for a Presidential run.

But it’s the cultural currents which fascinate me here. Republican Party links to the private sector are decades old and well-known. The private sector is often characterized as being based on greed and, to a lesser degree, self-centeredness, and while I think companies and individuals who are emblematic of those claims often become cautionary tales – the Lehman Brothers collapse comes to mind – it’s a fact that the Libertarian wing of the Republican Party has often defended this “philosophy” of greed as being a social plus.

But when these currents bleed into the river of politics, unwelcome results can occur. This is the problem facing the GOP: either they get behind Trump’s childish fantasies, his unbridled greed, his pathological narcissism, his need to be the center and own everything he desires, or he’ll destroy their power by destroying the Party.

Because a Party of Losers will fly apart.

Governance in the United States has traditionally been a work of hand in hand: finding compromises, both intra- and inter- Party, that solve the problems facing the polity. This is not the heart of the private sector, where organizations are more top-down and unwilling to compromise.

But here comes private sector baby Trump and his, uh, diseased intellect. These currents are no longer currents; they’re rip-tides that’ll rip the Party to pieces unless these officials, who themselves possess some imperious egos, submit to the will of Trump.

I suggest they dig in their heels and wait for Trump to implode, because Trump, due to his mental illness and religious upbringing (“name it and claim it“), will keep repeating his claim to have won, but he’ll never be vindicated. By standing firm, they stand for law and order. It’s their best bet.

Long term readers know that for years I’ve been predicting the Republican Party would shrink and change character, due to toxic team politics and the use of RINOing by the power-hungry to chase the less extremist – sometimes – out of their positions and the party. I think events have proven that out.

But this latest, although logical, wasn’t on my list of psychic predictions:

While divisions within the Republican party — especially among those who look to former President Donald Trump for guidance — are commonplace everywhere, they are playing in high definition in one of the country’s most GOP-dominant states. The highly-publicized spat displayed how pitched — and to outsiders how silly — the battle for control of the Republican Party has become in the Gem State.

And now some prominent mainstream Republicans, worried the state’s hard-right drift could scuttle their efforts to grow Idaho’s economy, are asking Democrats and Independents to register as Republicans to vote in the party’s May primary.

“Everybody and their dog ought to get out to the primary and have their say so,” said Jim Jones, a former chief justice of the Idaho Supreme Court and former Republican Idaho attorney general. “That’s where your vote counts.” [The Idaho Statesman]

That’s quite a conundrum, isn’t it? Should Democrats forsake their duty to their own Party because the Republicans, due to the toxic culture they’ve long prided themselves in, are now reaping the whirlwind? Steve Benen points out the hurdle:

Idaho has what’s known as “closed” primaries, which means voters have to be registered with one party or the other to participate in the party’s primary elections. In this instance, it would mean Democrats and independents would have to register as GOP voters in order to “rescue” Idaho from far-right extremists running in Republican primaries.

It’s either/or, not both. But to really complete the picture, Idaho happens to be the home of Lt. Governor Janice McGeachin (R-ID), now running for the Governor’s seat and notorious for this little bit of showboating when Governor Brad Little (R-ID) briefly left the state recently:

McGeachin, a far-right Republican known for her opposition to COVID-19 restrictions and association with anti-government figures, declared herself acting governor and tried to deploy National Guard troops to the Mexican border. She was rebuffed by the guard’s commanding general. She also tried to issue an order blocking vaccine requirements. Gov. Brad Little, a fellow Republican, repealed the order the next day, from Texas. [The Idaho Statesman, same article.]

McGeachin’s an elected official right now. The Republicans, whose decisions and culture and votes have lead to the edge of utter debacle, are begging Democrats and Independents to join them in order to defend nutcases likes … McGeachin^[1]?

Ethicists suggest that citizens in democracies should vote for the person they think will best fulfill the office and has a chance to win. I have to wonder if they’re really that naive, or if a more strategic approach is acceptable to them, to wit:

If the Democrats and Independents refuse the entreaties of the Republican Party, there’s a good chance that even more extreme people will win primaries and elective office in Idaho.

And then demonstrate extreme incompetence. Not that competence correlates perfectly with the moderation through extremism spectrum, but in my experience, if you have to bet on it, figure the extremists won’t be able to find their own ass with two hands.

The Republicans may disdain expertise, experience, and competence. Extremists likewise. Even citizens can be led around as if they believe it, too – right up until they’re the ones watching their city burn to the ground because the water lines were fouled by the incompetent boob of a mayor who flushed glue down the lines to clear them.

And then they may finally figure it out and vote the extremists out. If they don’t chase them out of town waving their pitchforks. The Democrats should stand ready with replacements.

But no kidding, it is a sticky conundrum. It’ll be interesting to hear what the Democrats do.

¹ Lt. Gov. McGeachin’s page on On The Issues is empty, so getting an idea of how far right she’s gone is a little difficult.

The Lincoln Project, despite its internal problems, is still producing hard hitting political news:

Tired of hidden fees and white nationalism?

It may be time to cancel your @ATT package. pic.twitter.com/19l8hkMnVZ

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) October 12, 2021

Jennifer Rubin of WaPo has some harsh words for the media in connection with their coverage of the January 6th investigative House panel:

The punditocracy has repeatedly underestimated the House select committee on the Jan. 6 attempted coup.

When Republicans filibustered the formation of an independent commission to examine the monstrous act of domestic terrorism, many in the media chose to engage in a horse-race analysis (Pelosi loses! Republicans remain in Trump’s corner!), rather than focusing of the utter abdication of responsibility by Republicans, many of whom hyped the “big lie” about a stolen election.

When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) decided to reject two of the Republicans nominated for the select committee for having publicly denounced the role of the committee and fanning MAGA conspiracy theories, the pundits shook their heads. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), they insisted, had outplayed her. (Look how angry Republicans are! The committee will look too partisan!)

For all of her outrage at punditry’s omissions – and, if accurate^[1], they’re very important – I think she missed a real duty of her own.

Implied in her commentary is the concept of civic morality: how we live and treat each other in the public square. This is a critical concept in the workings of a heterogenuous democracy such as the United States, because an agreement on the civic morality forms the basis for the democracy. Religions agree to abide by secular law and are, therefore, subordinate to the government in temporal authority; elections are respected; we treat each other with respect and honesty; and the other foundations of the liberal democracy, as we’ve developed it over time.

Morality was, and still makes appearances in, the lexicon of those purporting to be conservatives, and, for many of those still hesitant to leave the fold even while appalled by the behaviors of their supposedly conservative fellows, it is an important word. Often coming out of a religious context, it remains a controlling factor in their lives.

As it should.

So by focusing explicitly on the concept and phrase civic morality, we bring into focus the terrible implications of the January 6th insurrection: abrogation of such requirements of civic morality as respect for elections, honesty in communications, probity in conduct and judgment, equal standing before the law, and an allegiance to the liberal democracy which is the most basic aspiration of the United States.

And let that important, potent word, and the accusation that the actors and conspirators of January 6th are immoral persons, ring out to condemn them. The failure to understand the requirements of civic morality is what defines this incident, not only for those who actively assaulted the Capitol, but also those conspirators who planned the incident. That collapse of morality is of the greatest importance to the select panel, and to the electorate.

And the hell with the horse races.

¹ I don’t get out much, so to speak.

A reader remarks on the statistical size of the study of how to fool facial recognition systems:

Yeah that’s a pretty small sample. Did the article talk about the makeup? Because I’m pretty sure it’s not the usual “fancy your face up” treatment, it’s something else entirely.

Yes, they did:

What makes the system so clever, says Mariann Hardey at Durham University, UK, is that it doesn’t rely on gaudy colour palettes. Instead, the adversarial system [the AI used to fool the facial recognition system] is limited to using natural make-up hues. That’s important because it lets people try to simultaneously avoid recognition while not drawing attention to themselves: pre-existing research shows wearing outlandishly patterned clothes can foil such systems, but they look obviously like an attempt to avoid detection.

Or, as another reader notes:

Anyone who does theatrical makeup will agree with that. What you see isn’t necessarily what you’ve got …. 🙂

There’s a bit more than Senator Cruz (R-TX) just making a mistake here:

This weekend, over 2,000 reported Southwest Airlines cancellations brought untold thousands of passengers to their knees. The airline has the boring reason: “weather.” Conservatives have a more thrilling one: a working-class rebellion against President Joe Biden’s vaccination tyranny. So victory against Democrats is weary masses forced to stand in line for hours at dawn, sleep on the floor, and make TikToks, while baggage piles up around the conveyor belt.

Among them, Sen. Ted Cruz is spreading an unverified rumor that pilots staged a massive “sickout” to protest “Biden’s illegal vaccine mandate.” Newsweek’s deputy opinion editor Batya Ungar-Sargon asked: “Were the canceled flights the result of a ‘sick out’ on the part of pilots refusing to get vaccinated?” and continued, baselessly, to conclude that this represents a “powerful form of collective action” by working-class vaccine-refusers. [Whitney Kimball, Gizmodo]

And he’s refuted:

Southwest Airlines pilots have denied that theory, which seems spun from the fact Southwest Airlines Pilots Association (SWAPA), a bargaining unit representing over 9,000 pilots, filed a request last Friday asking that a Dallas federal court block the airline from enforcing vaccine mandates.

If Cruz read the motion, he’d likely hate their rationale; SWAPA’s staking out a labor rights stance, arguing that Southwest illegally neglected to bargain with the union over the policy change.

The question is whether this is an unforced error on Cruz’s part, or a deliberate maneuver? I think it’s the latter.

Decades ago, I was invited to attend the test screening of four pilots of situation comedies, or at least so they were represented; they were probably actually to test commercials, judging from the follow up calls. The interesting part was when they got everyone together – maybe a couple of hundred of us – and asked for a show of hands from people who thought the shows were good, which, incidentally or not, were NOT.

First a few hands went up, then you could see people glancing at their neighbors and then putting their hands up, a wave of glances and hands going up, until maybe 3/4s of us had our hands up. (Not me nor my companion.)

I see this as an extension of that phenomenon. Cruz wants folks, many impressionable, to believe there’s a union that has rebelled against vaccine mandates. Cruz knows how this works: first impressions are strong, corrections are weak.

And often people do not discern patterns of mendacity from folks in positions of prestige, like Senator Cruz.

So don’t think this is a simple mistake. This, I think, is a deliberate maneuver by Cruz.