So pleasant:

I’ve been trying to ignore Erick Erickson’s post today, but it’s title, Gaslighting America, just screams … projection. Why? Let’s take a look:

Repeatedly, the Biden Administration has claimed wages are going up. This too is gaslighting. Wages have barely increased and inflation has far outpaced wages. Therefore, the purchasing power of each dollar now buys less than what a dollar bought just six months ago. It amounts to a wage cut.

Or does it? What if prices go down? Look, there are several components to prices, from the cost of inputs, including labor costs, to the effects of competition, right up to sheer greed. So let’s take labor costs: they’re going up at the moment, and it’s anyone’s guess if they’re coming back down. If they don’t then prices will have one supporting factor.

But another factor are supply chains, and those are currently in a shambles. This shambles means supply prices, whether food or components or whathaveyou, is at a premium. This causes price rises, but as those shambles are resolved, and as demand settles down – remember Kevin Drum’s chart at right? – supply prices should settle downwards.

Wages are up. Those can be permanent. Prices may go up, but they also may go down. I consider Erickson’s claims specious, especially an unquoted remark of his using the adjective skyrocketed. No, I grew up in the Carter years, when prices really jumped. I’m am not prepared to consider our 5-6% annual inflation to be a SpaceX rocket.

The Biden Administration is also gaslighting us on fuel prices. The official line is that oil is a global market and there is little the President can do. Take out even last year during the pandemic when no one traveled. Two years ago, fuel prices were lower.

Progressives in the Biden Administration have willfully worked to make fuel costs higher. Until it hit their polling, Democrats openly said fuel prices needed to be higher to reduce demand for fossil fuels. The Biden Administration cancelled pipeline plans, canceled exploration leases on federal land, and drove up regulatory costs for petroleum producers. These policies have contributed to the fuel scarcity. When Trump was President, the United States was a net exporter of energy. Now we are left begging OPEC to produce more.

And. So. What? Pipelines and oil fields are not built in a day or a year. To make this specious claim is to play with emotions, not deduce from facts. And maybe, just maybe, you want those “regulatory costs” a little higher. Hiding behind that bland little phrase are two facts: the quasi-religious Republican tenet that Regulation is bad, and the fact that regulation, properly implemented, safeguards life, both existentially and quality-wise.

So prices are a little higher. Snopes, of all sources, has an interesting quote I found in regards to the claim Did Biden Set US ‘Back 50 Years’ on Energy Independence Progress? made by Turning Point:

The Turning Point meme disregards entirely the existence of the year 2020. The omission of 2020 masks not only a decline in U.S. fossil fuel production that occurred, it also conceals a larger truth about U.S. presidents and the global energy market: Neither they nor their policies have a significant effect on the market compared to other global factors.

Remember how the price of oil jumped around prior to the pandemic? It was generally blamed on investors, but it’s also caused by transit costs, threats of war costs, and other factors. While I tend to think that Presidents have more influence than is suggested by Snopes, the club they wield isn’t known for its nuance, and must be handled with care.

So if Snopes suggests Trump had little to do with energy production, while Erickson wants to nastily imply that he did, without actually quite saying it, what is to be made of this?

Crude oil production did grow significantly during Obama’s presidency — up 77 percent — but experts, including the federal government’s Energy Information Administration, have said the growth is largely due to technological advances, such as fracking and horizontal drilling. [FactCheck.org]

I immediately noticed Erickson omitted this important fact when lamenting the price of oil, as if Trump alone were responsible – but, if Trump claims accolades, then on the same basis so does Obama. (Who did try.)

And if one doesn’t get any, neither does the other. Erickson’s claim and omission are painfully hypocritical.

Which is all quite sad because I think there’s something to consider here:

At this point, Democrats seem almost willfully trying to lose the 2022 midterm elections. After the Virginia elections, Democrats doubled down accusing voters of racism. Voters in Virginia elected the first black Lt. Governor for the state and first Hispanic Attorney General. But the talking heads in the press said it was just further proof of racism while still denying critical theory is a thing.

I don’t know if the racism claims occurred. Maybe they did. He provides no link. But I’m finding the entire school issue to be highly confusing. Some writers claim it doesn’t exist. Some claim it does. I don’t respect everyone, but some are worth the respecting and those stories are conflicting. The Democrats had better learn from the Virginia loss for 2022.

Or they will lose.

Some folks are finding this encouraging:

Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming says that many fellow Republicans are “privately” thanking her for standing up to former President Donald Trump as she runs for reelection in 2022.

Cheney, one of the most well-known and vocal members of a small group of GOP lawmakers and leaders opposed to the former president, is one of only two Republicans serving on a special committee organized by House Democrats to investigate Trump’s role in inciting the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol by right-wing extremists.

“It’s a real reflection of the times in which we live that privately and behind the scenes, there are many Republicans who say, ‘Thank you for what you’re doing. We wish we could be more public,’” Cheney told Fox News on Tuesday. “People who understand that what the former president is saying is dangerous, is not true, and who know that our party’s got to be a party based on truth, that we can’t embrace the lie.” [Fox News]

But to me it’s a little odd and makes me wonder if this is indicative of a general mysteriousness in the culture of the Republican Party. Who else cannot name their supporters?

Donald J. Trump.

The former President was infamous for his anonymous validators, as Steve Benen called them, supposedly high-seniority Democrats and business leaders who’d call up Trump and cheer him on, but he couldn’t name them for obvious reasons.

And it’s hard to see a substantive difference between Rep Cheney and the former President here. Each claims support from groups that supposedly hate them. Indeed, Cheney’s lost her leadership position in the House GOP, and that would be because of them, while the President lost his position, although not so directly, because of the Democrats and the business leaders.

It’s not all that hard to extend this observation to the mystical side of the Republicans: the Divine presence, supposedly endorsing the President and his adherents, is a notoriously difficult entity to interview or even get a straight word from on current events; your best bet are proxies who are of either very dubious reputation, or appear to be self-delusional (your pick here). But the choice of believing the mystical, as much as there’s a lot of pressure on the base to believe the former President, remains with the base; if the claimant sweats it, fumbles the words, or is caught fondling the wrong person, the base may choose to disbelieve the claim.

That is actually an attractive alternative for people who don’t want to take the word of experts, who want desperately to assert their own competence to make this choice. There are, after all, no real experts. It makes for an inviting business.

Whether Cheney is good enough in the earnest claim business remains to be seen.

I can’t help but be struck how it appears the GOP is running down the slide to self-destruction:

But what’s striking about all of this is what constitutes outrage among GOP lawmakers. Wyoming’s Liz Cheney denounced anti-election lies, so Republicans kicked her out of the party’s leadership. Illinois’ Adam Kinzinger joined a bipartisan investigation into the Jan. 6 attack, and he became persona non grata in his party. Thirteen members voted for a bipartisan infrastructure package, and now there’s talk of partisan retaliation against them, too.

In the meantime, those same House Republicans who demand consequences for perceived transgressions have a whole lot less to say about Arizona’s Paul Gosar, Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, Colorado’s Lauren Boebert, and other far-right members who actually deserve to be seen as scandalous extremists.

This isn’t a situation in which GOP members refuse to go against one of their own because of partisan loyalty. On the contrary, House Republicans are only too pleased to turn on their ostensible allies in response to ideological heresies that are considered unforgivable. [Steve Benen]

Outrage by the far-right extremists? Check. Punishing transgressions? Check. Whittling down the Party? Check. Cries for revenge?

The thirteen who voted for it surely voted on the policy, but on the strategy they gave the Democrats a win and a talking point. Ron Klain got to go on television and make the case the Democrats absorbed Tuesday night’s results and responded by passing the infrastructure plan to show they got the message. [Erick Erickson]

Check.

Parties contemptuous of compromise and dissent, that attitude being a signpost of the power hungry and politically immature, I think inevitably decline and fall as the variances in opinion on the difficult subjects of governance and reelection come to the fore – or those attitudes and members are ejected from the party.

I’ve been saying it for years: One day the GOP will consist of three members, and two will be on probation. Those seventeen that voted from the infrastructure bill can be considered to be on probation. The Democrats have their own problems, but so long as they stay away from the organizational model of the Republicans, they have a chance to reform their Party and stop giving the electorate reasons to vote for the Republicans.

Can they do it? I don’t know.

I see Erick Erickson is complaining about about what he views as the predictable: an “orthodox” Montana pastor who makes some income on the side as a realtor has been caught in a squeeze play in which the realtor association, to which he must, practically speaking, belong, has banned ‘hate speech’ – such as condemning homosexual behavior.

Which this pastor does.

So Erickson manages to wind up with this:

The real world implications here are pretty significant. If the left insists people give up their worldview to participate in the private sector, the right is going to destroy the private sector. The left will be just fine with that. But it won’t end well for anyone. If we cannot all mutually tolerate each other’s views, we cannot remain united States. Together, the illiberal left and right will burn it all down.

The National Association of Realtors knew pastors and people of faith could be targeted by their hate speech code. A lot of public discussion revolved around that at the time they enacted it. But the association proceeded anyway and now, as so many predicted, Christians are being targeted for punishment by the wokes. It was all foreseeable, predictable, and they did it anyway because more and more trade associations have embraced Woke-O Haram.

And, having read this, all I can think is Welcome to the other foot. Existential hatred of homosexuals was, and is, the stock-in-trade for many “orthodox” Christian churches throughout much of the 20th century and earlier. Keep them out of the military, out of the public square, chase them out of the private square.

Call them pedophiles and Satan worshippers and what have you. Engender murderous hatred where possible.

It’s just the other fungus-afflicted foot now, isn’t it?

But it’s worth noting this: while most homosexuals will tell you they have no choice about being homosexual, this pastor certainly has a choice. How do we know this?

Because interpretations of the Bible change over time. We already know they change from sect to sect, but we also know this because, in most locations, suggesting we have a good ol’ fashioned witch-burning would be met with understandable and civilized horror. But we know we used to kill them – or, more importantly, those so accused – such were the Salem Witch Trials, eh?

So what Erickson is inadvertently highlighting is an ongoing change in Biblical interpretations. It’s been going on for decades, because social change only occasionally happens instantaneously; even today, if you look hard enough, you can find a few Bible literalists who, honest to the end, cry out Death to witches, rather than appreciating that general Biblical practice no longer tolerates blood lust in that regard.

Whether or not the realtor association should be taking this position is something of an open question in my mind, although I am inclined to say yes, but remain open to argument. I also tend to see this as Erickson trying desperately to keep his conservative base together through the use of infuriating epithets and refusing to consider the entire situation.

But that’s a rant for another day.

Nutrigerontology:

Nutrigerontology is defined as the scientific discipline that studies the impact of nutrients, foods, macronutrient ratios, and diets on lifespan, ageing process, and age-related diseases. Its goal is to investigate compounds, foods, and diets that can reduce the risk of ageing-related diseases and increase the healthy lifespan, achieving successful ageing and longevity. [BioMed Central]

Noted in “Want to add healthy years to your life? Here’s what new longevity research says.” Matt Fuchs, WaPo:

I’ve been watching CNN headlines over the last couple of weeks, and, up until a couple of days ago – basically, the passing of the bi-partisan infrastructure bill – they pronounced doom and gloom about the state of the Biden agenda, the Democratic Party, and a future of terrible inflation.

And then that all stopped.

When I stopped to think about it at all, it seemed to me that this was just politics as usual for the Democrats: a robust discussion of various views of governance, goals, and funding.

But not for CNN.

Jennifer Rubin has been beating on the mainstream media for its poor coverage of politics, and had another blast at it today:

Weighing in on the alleged economic recovery is Kevin Drum:

Retail sales are so strong that they’ve not only made up the decline from the pandemic, they’ve made up the decline from the entire housing bubble. We may be “missing” 5 or 9 or 10 million workers, and supply chain problems may be restricting the supply of goods, but that sure hasn’t stopped consumers from buying stuff.

Indeed. Perhaps consumers are sucking so hard on the straw that it’s collapsing.

Maybe that’s an unfortunate analogy.

Via AL-Monitor:

When the recipe says, Beat the eggs, poorly.

I’m not saying what sort of clue.

Professor Richardson has a snarky remark about Governor-elect Youngkin’s (R-VA) victory in Virginia:

In Virginia, governor-elect Glenn Youngkin’s 17-year-old son tried twice to vote despite being too young. This was unfortunate because his father had emphasized “election integrity” in his campaign, announcing that he would create an “Election Integrity Task Force” that would work “to ensure free and fair elections in Virginia.”

Her source is WaPo:

The 17-year-old son of Virginia Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin (R) tried to cast a ballot in Tuesday’s gubernatorial election twice despite being too young to vote, Fairfax County officials said in a statement released Friday.

If Mr. Youngkin is smart, he’ll turn this into lemonade through some sort of public punishment, or endorsement thereof, for his son. Indeed, this may even be a setup, a manufactured opportunity to show his public rectitude. It’s not the opening shot in a re-election campaign, as Virginia bans consecutive terms as governor, but perhaps Youngkin has higher office ambitions. This would make an important contribution, if managed properly.

If that comes out, I think we can predict Youngkin either running in 2024 for President, or for one of the two Virginia Senatorial seats.

Long-time readers may remember the software, some call it malware, created and distributed by NSO Group of Israel, which broke into phones, given a little help, aka phishing, by the phone’s owner. This was in 2016; now that it’s 2021, it appears the American response has been updated, as WaPo reports:

The United States on Wednesday added the Israeli spyware company NSO Group to its “entity list,” a federal blacklist prohibiting the company from receiving American technologies, after determining that its phone-hacking tools had been used by foreign governments to “maliciously target” government officials, activists, journalists, academics and embassy workers around the world.

The move is a significant sanction against a company spotlighted in July in an investigation by the global Pegasus Project consortium, which includes The Washington Post and 16 other news organizations worldwide. The consortium published dozens of articles detailing how NSO customers had misused its powerful spyware, Pegasus.

The move could also raise tensions between the United States and Israel, where NSO is a prized technological powerhouse. Exports of NSO’s software are regulated by Israel’s Ministry of Defense, which must approve them as it would any weapons sale.

That last paragraph leaves me to wonder if the United States has misjudged the situation – or if Israel’s MoD has a problem, either of corruption or not in alignment with general liberal democracy goals.

If Israel or NSO cannot find a way to take them off the list, NSO may gradually disintegrate:

The entity list designation prohibits export from the United States to NSO of any type of hardware or software, severing the company from a vital source of technology. It could also hinder future business arrangements and challenge the firm’s ability to work as an international company.

“The impact is broader than just the legal prohibition,” said Kevin Wolf, an international trade lawyer at the Akin Gump law firm who previously ran the entity list process. “It’s a huge red flag.”

Not that America is the only source of innovation, both in hardware and software – but Americans are a very significant source. If NSO is cut off from an important input source, the people who do the work may leave for greener pastures.

Death by a thousand cuts.

Potable:

clean and safe to drink:
potable water [Cambridge Dictionary]

Noted in “Toronto is home to the world’s largest lake-powered cooling system. Here’s how it works.” Tik Root, WaPo:

Had me hooting with laughter.

It doesn’t hurt that the cat is a near-ringer for my late and lamented Mischief.

It’s rough when the winner of a primary loses the general election … not to the other party’s nominee, but to a write-in campaign mounted by the loser of the primary. Although not a final result, this is what apparently happened to India Walton (D-NY), an avowed socialist, as her primary opponent, incumbent Mayor Brown (D-NY) of Buffalo, NY, defeats her with a write-in campaign:

Maybe we should have just stuck with ASCII and made everyone learn English after all:

Virtually all compilers — programs that transform human-readable source code into computer-executable machine code — are vulnerable to an insidious attack in which an adversary can introduce targeted vulnerabilities into any software without being detected, new research released today warns. The vulnerability disclosure was coordinated with multiple organizations, some of whom are now releasing updates to address the security weakness.

Researchers with the University of Cambridge discovered a bug that affects most computer code compilers and many software development environments. At issue is a component of the digital text encoding standard Unicode, which allows computers to exchange information regardless of the language used. Unicode currently defines more than 143,000 characters across 154 different language scripts (in addition to many non-script character sets, such as emojis).

Specifically, the weakness involves Unicode’s bi-directional or “Bidi” algorithm, which handles displaying text that includes mixed scripts with different display orders, such as Arabic — which is read right to left — and English (left to right). [Krebs On Security]

To think you can stare at source code and not actually be reading the code correctly is a little disconcerting. I mean, you can play bizarre games with the C preprocessor, but this is taking it to a whole new level.

BTW, they’re calling this Trojan Source. Cool name.

Omoo-Omoo, the Shark God (1949) is a rather dreadful story of stolen eyes, featuring some of the worst facets of Western man: unfettered greed, even in the face of disaster; lust; alcoholism; casual antagonism; desire for power; disrespect for divinities, especially those of people seen as backward; oh, yeah, and …

BAD MOVIEMAKING.

On a small sailing ship of the early 1800s, in which most of the crew are belligerent drunks, the owner-master is deathly ill with the undiagnosed illness of having stolen the eyes of an island divinity. He doesn’t actually have them, mind you; he took them and hid them so close to the statue of the divine Ooma that it’s fortunate that said statue doesn’t take dumps, if you catch my drift. Yet, he’s still ill. A petty god, it is. Which is sort of like the puny god, Loki, but never mind that.

Between the weather of the Pacific Ocean, drunken brawls, and an utterly irrelevant scene of a moray eel and an octopus in a fight to the death, we’re lucky to reach the island, which sounded suspiciously like Tahiti with a different vowel of some sort. Once there, will we be retrieving the eyes and presenting them to the villagers and their god, in hopes of a metaphysical cure?

Nyah. This is all about the greed of the captain. And of his daughter, who, upon having her father die in her arms, is also infected with greed. It’s like a disease, except you’d think if you were a god you’d be infecting the infidels with a disease compelling the return of the eyes, wouldn’t you? Maybe I shouldn’t have asked, gods are always mysterious and trying to teach lessons that happen to be of little use to anyone.

From the bottom of the pit, it’s all downhill, and it doesn’t really turn out all that well for anyone but the villagers, who appear to suffer from the era’s usual and disorienting movie making habit of using natives for the flunkies and Caucasians for the chiefs. Still, I liked the dancing.

And not much else. Definitely a movie to watch when the muscles are hurting from over-exertion and your sense of aesthetic standards has seized up. If you really think you want to watch it. You will if you’re a Herman Melville completist, as it claims to be based on Melville’s Ooma. But don’t take that as a recommendation.

Cannibal Coronal Mass Ejection (CME):

This CME is a cannibal because it ate others of its own kind. Cannibal CMEs are fast coronal mass ejections that sweep up slower CMEs in front of them. The mish-mash contains tangled magnetic fields and compressed plasmas that can do a good job sparking geomagnetic storms. [“A Cannibal CME,” Dr. Tony Phillips, Spaceweather.com]

It appears the northern lights will not be reaching the Twin Cities, but they’ll be close. Meteorologist Chris Schaeffer of WCCO said tonight they’d reach Lake Mille Lacs, which is to our north by, oh, a hundred miles?

Erick Erickson had it right and the Democrats had it wrong, as Democrat and former Governor Terry McAuliffe (D-VA) has gone down to defeat in his race to regain his seat in the governor’s mansion (Virginia governors may not serve consecutive terms), and Governor Murphy (D-NJ) is leading his opponent, Jack Ciattarelli (R-NJ), by less than a point at last check, when he was expected to win easily. Erickson is exultant, while CNN sees it through the typical news media eyes:

Biden arrives back in Washington to a political nightmare

And neither has gotten it right.

This is a gift to, well, both parties. The GOP has a victory to gobble over, a win that they’ve been trained, for twenty and more years, to virtually consider the be-all and end-all of politics. Governing? Hah! But it makes them feel good, while invalidating all the rancid claims about the elections being rigged.

But the Democrats are the big winners, because for the price of a governor’s seat, maybe two, and some other seats they didn’t expect to lose, they’ve received the priceless knowledge that the electorate, at least in some areas, is pissed at them.

And while some of them certainly suspected it, this brings home the enormity of the problem.

Now the question is whether or not the Democrats were smart enough to gather data directly from the voters. Are Sullivan’s observations accurate? Will certain far-left ideas, such as Defund the police, which was defeated in Minneapolis last night, be dropped by Democrats – or will they renew making the case for them? That’s always a tricky dance, isn’t it? And if the Democrats blame the quality of the candidates, what to do then? Don’t bet on them in that case.

But this is a golden opportunity for the Democrats – and Erickson may not realize it, but if he’s a strict partisan as I think he is, it’s a disaster for him.

A potential disaster, at least. The Dems have about a half year to get it all figured out and start campaigning on their revised platform.

And that’s not nearly as slick as this:

In the Netflix hit series “Squid Game,” characters gambled with their lives. The price of playing the game in the real world may not be as steep as a life, but for many people who piled their money into Squid, a once red-hot cryptocurrency named after the show, the financial loss has still been significant.

On early Monday morning, the value of a Squid coin collapsed from a high of just over $2,860 to effectively zero as cryptocurrency traders watched the token’s unknown creators clean out some $3.3 million in funds, according to digital records.

The maneuver, known as a “rug pull” in cryptocurrency circles, occurs when a token’s creators abandon the project by exchanging many virtual coins for real-world cash. They quickly drain liquidity from the product, effectively driving the coin’s value to zero and leaving other investors holding the bag in an apparent scam. [WaPo]

If I had any inclination to to make bets on new cryptocurrencies leaping upwards in value for big returns, this would cool me right off. As it is, it’s a lesson in how grifters take advantage of the young and foolish.

I hope no one was too hurt by this grift.

Erick Erickson has a good piece on the imminent gubernatorial contest in Virginia, featuring former Governor Terry McAuliffe (D-VA) vs businessman, and inexperienced politician, Glenn Youngkin (R-VA), which I had pegged as an easy 10 point win for the Democrat a few months back.

The last polls show the race to be neck and neck. Here’s Erickson:

In the real world, gas prices are making it more difficult for people to live their daily lives. Food prices compound the problem. Shortages add to the problem. But progressives and the press bellyache that consumerist Americans have it great, Americans are the problem, and Americans need to shut up and get vaccinated.

Meanwhile, these Americans’ friends and family are losing jobs because of vaccine hesitancy and the press vilifies them while Democrats punish them. While all of that is happening, Democrats want to throw even more trillions of dollars at the problem and cause even more inflation.

Today in Virginia, McAuliffe is most likely going to lose and, should he win, it will be closer than it should be.

By midnight, as this reality settles in, the media and Democrats will realize their January 6th and Donald Trump hysteria and screams of racism and various phobias will not have impacted Americans. They will then do what the press and progressives do best — blame the American people. Sometime around midnight, the tears on MSNBC and on social media will muffle the sounds of lament that America is racist again.

Now, politics is always local, so McAuliffe’s bona fides are of limited importance; his personality, his positions, and all the rest of his negatives are important as well.

But it’s also possible to evaluate this race based on a hierarchy of voter concerns.

Look: As I’ve said before, no matter how much we want to hold democracy sacred, it’s not a religious tenet. People come with individual, but often shared, hierarchies of concerns to all elections, and these can change from election to election – but changes are rarely major.

First up on most lists, as the Romanovs of Imperial Russia discovered, is putting food on the table. At some point, it doesn’t matter how loudly you scream about the holiness of your position, the people will overturn you if you’re not making it possible to put food on the table, and at a price, justified or not, that they think is reasonable.

Then there’s safety – which makes the rising crime rate in combination with the leftists’ Defund the police slogan a real loser.

For those with children or conscious of the importance of supporting and developing children’s transition into citizens, education is high up the list.

After that come the religious issues, such as abortion & separation of church and state, and then ideological issues – unfettered free markets vs socialism.

This serves as a plan of attack. For a governing party, they should discover the general order of priorities peculiar to the electorate for this cycle and then make sure they are keeping citizens happy on each, in order of priority – or they have a satisfactory excuse and a record of at least trying.

Have the Democrats managed the hierarchy? Erickson doesn’t think so – he figures they’ve screwed up economics, although then he desperately defends the ideology that has already led to one insurrection. How about Andrew Sullivan? In response to a letter he received explaining why a married couple of Democratic-leaning of voters were voting Republican (you’ll have to go read that for yourself, and you’ll need a subscription for that, but it had to do with Education, which is way up the hierarchy of concerns), Sullivan remarked:

If I were in Virginia, I’d vote for Youngkin too. The Democrats need to be shaken out of their commitment to critical theory’s extremists on race, sex and gender — especially when it comes to indoctrinating children. They won’t listen until they’re forced to.

Not having children myself, nor the time to research whether there’s indoctrination going on, or whether Critical Race Theory remains a dusty old law theory, it’s tough for me to say. Have the Republicans lied their way to victory?

Whatever the answer, the McAuliffe should have won this race easily. The lemonade squirting from the clouds, though, is that this functions as an early warning for the Democrats to clean their message up. Start with the Defund the police message – the partisans behind that slogan may hate the Democrats for doing it, but the Democrats have to repudiate it or the GOP will use it as a club on them, and as important as the treachery implied by the insurrection of Jan 6th remains, the fact of the matter is that violent, dangerous crime is a lot closer to most voters than Washington, D.C., and so the Defund club will be a lot larger as well.

Then they need to investigate what’s happening in schools. Is indoctrination happening? Or is it all lies? Whatever it is, they need to affirm that a law theory isn’t appropriate for anyone below college. The problem is that certain school boards have been indulging some dumb passions, such as renaming schools to remove the names of American heroes from them. That it’s a mistake to apply today’s moral laws to yesterday’s people is easily demonstrated. One approach is by comparing the actions of Generals Washington and Lee, and asking why one is no more than a slave owning traitor on the wrong side of a war to retain slavery, while the other was a slave-owning war hero who ushered in a new form of government, if I may stretch a point slightly – and why the latter, in an era of slavery, is worthy of admiration, while fighting to retain slavery is a moral abomination.

Democrats have to clean up their message and the associated implementation, or McAuliffe’s close shave or loss will be replicated in 2022’s elections. No ifs, ands, or buts.

Heterodox:

1. : contrary to or different from an acknowledged standard, a traditional form, or an established religion : UNORTHODOX, UNCONVENTIONAL
   heterodox ideas
2. : holding unorthodox opinions or doctrines
   a heterodox religious sect [Merriam-Webster]

Noted in “Treasury Secretary Yellen expresses openness to defusing debt ceiling without GOP votes,” Jeff Stein, WaPo:

If you’re a wasp, that is.

When you’re playing poker with an alligator, do you ever dare think it’s a bluff?

The Alligator People (1959) sounds like your typical B-list movie, doesn’t it? Some B&W weird horror movie, with people in rubber suits terrorizing the populace to the amusement of the mad doctor responsible for the infernal results, and alligators carrying off fainting maidens for some casual ravishing and refreshment.

Well, it is B&W. Actually, a well done B&W cinematography, even during the bayou rainstorm.

And one guy does have an alligator head on at the end.

But … I’d be really careful about turning my back on the two female leads in this story. One, Joyce, is looking for her husband, Paul, who disappeared during a very short stop of the train on their honeymoon night. She’s been left by her war-hero, freshly married husband before even sharing the marriage bed!

It’s jitters, and she’s frantic.

Six months later, Joyce is following her last clue, an address in the Louisiana bayou, left at her husband’s college frat. That’s right, nothing stops Joyce, a nurse, and she’s smart. There she finds a hostile older woman, Lavinia, ensconced in an old, Victorian home, complete with terrified servants – except the one who’s handless, drunk, and heavily armed, named Manon. He doesn’t like alligators, on account of one of them taking his hand.

Staying the night out of necessity, the charm of a piano tune lures Joyce out of her room, where she encounters the shy piano player, who dashes from the house into the swamp before she can get a look at his face. Probably just as well.

Soon enough, Joyce digs out the truth – Lavinia is Paul’s mother, although she doesn’t want to explore the topic. Refusing to leave, Joyce resolves to trap her husband, but it’s a downpour that night, so when he shows up and runs again, she not only can’t catch him, but gets lost and has to be found by Manon, who’d like a little bit of gratitude, if you get my drift. Paul shows up just in time to discourage Manon’s advances.

And the mandatory mad scientist component? Meet Mark Sinclair, M.D., a charming older gentleman who also tries to discourage Joyce, eventually lets on that, as a result of his experiments with alligator extract on horribly injured patients, he saved Paul from a lifetime of being crippled, or worse – but discovered later that there were certain unfortunate side effects to the treatment. Pressed by Lavinia, Paul, and Joyce, he’s consented to an experimental treatment for Paul.

And in the midst of this treatment comes a vengeful Manon, out for the return, if only metaphysically speaking, of his hand, not to mention his frustrated romantic notions. The treatment spoiled, Paul runs off into the swamp, Joyce in hot pursuit, in what might qualify as a metaphor for the desperate need of American women of the period to marry in order to advance in society. This doesn’t end well.

The two female leads are strong roles, as my Arts Editor commented, but not so much the servants’. The mad doctor’s motivations are completely believable, which is a relief; Manon was a quirkily repulsive example of primal male chaos. Paul demonstrates the male’s path from primal violence to civility, and how easily it can be foiled by a lack of path or guidance.

And all the alligators, who appeared to be actual live animals? They must have given the actors quite a thrill.

While I’m not recommending this one, it definitely performed far above expectations, even if its theme was a little hard to discern. Maybe it had none. And the alligator suit was a bit of a laugh. But I enjoyed this story far more than expected.