Category Archives: Uncategorized

From NewScientist (7 August 2021):

Supermassive black holes have such an intense gravitational pull that they bend light right around them, allowing us to see an “echo” of the side that would otherwise be hidden from view. We have now seen echoes of X-ray bursts from behind a black hole, confirming a prediction of general relativity.

How?

Dan Wilkins at Stanford University in California and his colleagues used the NuSTAR and XMM-Newton X-ray telescopes to observe these flashes of radiation coming from the supermassive black hole in a galaxy called I Zwicky 1. They saw that a flare of X-rays was sometimes followed by a second, slightly dimmer flash as the radiation bounced off the accretion disc in a sort of echo.

Presumably, the accretion ring, at any given point, is only a few light-seconds away from the black hole.

I really like the visual I’m imagining.

Walter Einenkel on Daily Kos reports on the tactics of the owners of Nabisco…

While record numbers of families struggled through lockdowns and steep unemployment, the wealthiest individuals and companies have enjoyed record profits during the global coronavirus pandemic. One such example is Nabisco’s parent company, Mondelēz International. Fortune says that Mondelēz International pulls in more than $3.5b in profits every year. The Guardian reports that in the second quarter of this year, Mondelēz reported “more than $5.5bn in profits and spent $1.5bn on stock buybacks in the first half of 2021.” Belgian businessman Dirk van de Put made just under $17 million as CEO of the confectionery, food, beverage, and snack company.

The median annual pay for a Mondelēz International employee? Just $31,000.

At the beginning of August, around 200 Nabisco bakery union workers in Portland staged a walkout. Three weeks into the strike, union workers have joined them in Colorado, Virginia, and Chicago, Illinois—the latter is where Mondelēz International is headquartered. The striking workers are represented by the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers, and Grain Millers (BCTGM). Cameron Taylor, a business agent for Local 354, told Oregon Live that the strike results from workers’ dissatisfaction with ongoing contract negotiations with the company. “This company made record profits throughout the pandemic, and then they come to the table and they want concessions. It’s absolutely a slap in the face.” In total, the strike is reportedly representing more than 1,000 Nabisco workers across the country.

Sounds like the folks who own Oreos didn’t get the memo that screwing over workers isn’t as acceptable as it used to be.

I think I’ll be skipping the Oreos fix for a while….

Remember AG Ken Paxton (R-TX), who filed the enormous dud of a lawsuit, Texas v Pennsylvania, when the former President found himself losing the last election? He was, and remains, under FBI investigation for taking bribes.

Except not in his mind, as the Houston Chronicle, errrr, chronicles:

Embattled Texas AG Ken Paxton releases anonymous internal investigation clearing himself

I keep trying to convince myself that, No, the GOP is not a party made up of fourth and fifth-raters.

And then a headline like that comes rolling along and disproves me. Again.

Remember the abuse and deaths of First Nations’ people as reported a couple of months ago? In a NewScientist (7 August 2021, paywall) interview with Samir Shaheen-Hussain there’s a bit more horrifying information:

Roxanne Khamsi: Were you aware of the scale of the involvement of the medical community in the residential school system before writing your book?

Samir Shaheen-Hussain: Oftentimes, we only thought of it as being run by the government and churches, which is the case. But what was a surprise to me was the extent of the active role of physicians and scientists in causing suffering to these kids and certainly not preventing death – and potentially even sentencing these kids to death in many cases. …

In 2015, [the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada] estimated that up to 6000 children died at the schools, many from tuberculosis. Why did that disease run so rampant?

There are several reasons. One is that the schools were notoriously poorly ventilated. The kids were often forced to live in close quarters. From an infectious disease perspective, that is going to make it much easier for tuberculosis to spread. The other element is that children were systematically malnourished, if not starved. And if you’re malnourished, you’re not going to be able to mount much of a defence against various infectious diseases, including tuberculosis.

What role did physicians play in exacerbating the tuberculosis outbreaks?

In the early 1900s, Indigenous children who were being taken away from their families and put into residential schools had to get a medical certificate. Physicians in that context could have played a role in making sure that children who had tuberculosis, for example, were not allowed to go into residential schools.

Similarly, even when tuberculosis was endemic in many of these schools, which it was, they could have prevented healthy children from going into them. Physicians could have played a role in essentially shutting down the entire residential school system by saying that it’s not a healthy place for Indigenous children. But that didn’t happen.

And …

In the summertime, some of these kids went back to their community and then TB would spread to many in these communities as a result – if it wasn’t already there.

Scientists and doctors are heir to the same flaws of the flesh mind as is everyone else. It’s not surprising, though – morality is a system of thought, not unlike that of chemistry, but with regard to voluntary behavior rather than the prescribed behaviors of elements and molecules. As such, it requires study and digging at foundations, just as most breakthroughs do. Accepting its current conclusions, as many of these doctors did, is easier.

In this regard, one might as well just blame the Catholic Church, again, as a purported custodian of morality.

An award should go to the folks running Vaccine Talk:

Anthony Buchanan considers himself a scientific, independent thinker. But for months, the Foreman, Ark.-based arborist couldn’t decide what to believe about vaccines. Google searches turned up conflicting information, and his Facebook feed was dominated by vaccine-skeptical posts and memes.

Then Buchanan came across a private Facebook group called Vaccine Talk that billed itself as “an evidence based discussion forum” for pro-vaccine and anti-vaccine folks alike. As he followed the discussions, occasionally chiming in with a question of his own, he noticed a pattern.

“On both sides, there’s people telling the truth, at least their truth,” said Buchanan, 32, who last month became infected with the coronavirus. “But on the pro-vaccine side, there was just more logic” — and more links to solid research. “On the anti-vaccine side, there was more conspiracy.”

Now he’s going to get vaccinated.

As covid-19 cases surge in the United States, jeopardizing the reopening of schools and offices and rekindling debates about mask and vaccination mandates, the battle to win over the vaccine skeptical has taken on fresh urgency. Much of that struggle is happening on social media, where misinformation about the vaccines continues to flourish. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have all established rules against posting false information about covid and vaccines. Yet just this weekend Facebook said the most-shared link on its site from January to March this year was a factual article about the CDC investigating the case of a Florida doctor who died two weeks after taking the vaccine. The article was widely shared by anti-vaccine pages. [WaPo]

Not everyone has the same faith in science – a notorious oxymoron – that I do, and it would pay benefits for all of us to treat the vaccine hesitant as simply people who have important questions that need answering.

Kudos for taking the time to make it work!

We’re both regretting this gig, I believe I can say for the Colonel.,

Appointment With Death (1988) is sloppy, uninspiring rehash of the Agatha Christie novel of the same name. Who killed the wicked old witch? Everyone’s drearily motivated, and Peter Ustinov’s rendition of Christie’s Poirot has an ugly, unconvincing accent. The bones of a good murder mystery are here, but the acting is mostly stiff, characters a bland lot, and many character interactions are unconvincing.

Or maybe it was the broadcast TV editing. Poirot’s accent ended up on the floor.

I’m several days behind on this one, but I still want to honor it.

You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y'all. Stop it. https://t.co/TWb75xYEY4

— U.S. FDA (@US_FDA) August 21, 2021

In other lands, the Chinese attempt to buy influence and loyalty via the Covid pandemic may be failing:

A GROWING number of countries that have been depending on vaccines developed in China are losing faith that these alone can rein in the coronavirus as they face continued surges in infections and the spread of the more transmissible delta variant.

On 1 August, Cambodia became the latest nation to approve the use of a different vaccine as a booster shot. It will administer the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine as a third dose to bolster immune protection for those who have already received two doses of the Sinovac or Sinopharm vaccines.

In the past month, Bahrain, Indonesia, Thailand, Uruguay and the United Arab Emirates have all begun mixing and matching vaccines in a tactic known as heterologous vaccination in the hope of improving protection and stemming transmission.

Although China’s two leading vaccines have gained emergency approval from the World Health Organization, not much phase III trial data has been made public for either. The jabs from Sinopharm and Sinovac Biotech both use inactivated virus particles to provoke an immune response. This is a more traditional approach than the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech mRNA vaccines, but has yielded worse results. [“Countries are mixing and matching vaccines to tackle the delta variant,” NewScientist, (7 August 2021, paywall)]

This is an important consequence for the autocrats of China. They’ve been attempting to sell autocracy as a better way of governing; by doing so, they would earn credibility and influence convertible to prestige and wealth.

Falling down on their promises gets them little to nothing. And while no one is likely to challenge them militarily, it does make the leadership look bad, a valuable consideration in face-conscious China.

Their lack of greater influence may be one of the most important, yet invisible, results of the pandemic.

Steve Benen & associates continue to puzzle over the behavior of far-right conservatives when it comes to medicines:

Erick Erickson sketches out the 2022 Republican strategy, based on how far over his ski tips he’s getting in relation to the Afghanistan withdrawal:

That’s an NBC poll. NBC polling leans Democrat. Polls of “all voters” lean Democrat. And the GOP is only one point behind in a poll that alreadly [sic] leans Democrat with a margin of error greater than 1%. That means, in the real world, a majority of voters want the GOP in charge of Congress. That’s without redistricting, etc.

Biden and the Democrats are cratering everywhere, which is why you don’t see a cavalcade of Democrats rushing out to defend Biden. In fact, the Democrats are internally split even over infrastructure, which was supposed to be Biden’s big win. This not only suggests the GOP will take back the House, but will take the Senate too. That then undercuts pressure to end the filibuster.

To be sure, events can change things, but this Afghan situation will be exacerbated when the trapped Americans get home and start telling their stories and people head into Thanksgiving and Christmas paying way more for holiday meals and presents than they did last year.

This is shaping up to be terrible for the Democrats and will give the GOP an opportunity to learn no lessons from 2020.

And, as he says, there’s lots of time. What has Erickson forgotten?

1. Patience. The electorate that still has its mind open will judge the Afghanistan withdrawal on final results, not the hurried, partisan reactions of folks like Erickson, as I said yesterday. Professor Richardson, in fact, observed that … on CNN this morning [Aug 22?], Matthew Dowd, who was the chief strategist for the Bush-Cheney ticket in 2004, noted that more than 20,000 people have been evacuated from Afghanistan without a single loss of an American life … This may mark the beginning of the end of effective condemnations of President Biden: a Republican strategist noting the withdrawal has positive attributes.
2. The pandemic. The tragically rising numbers of illness and death are not only reasons for mourning, they will be turned into weapons by the Democrats. While a few rogue members of the left have been against vaccination, it is the right that has been, for the most part, rabidly against it. The positions of several GOP governors with regard to mask mandates and vaccination mandates will be dead-weights on the Republicans, and names such as Abbott (TX), DeSantis (FL), McMaster (SC), and Noem (SD) may become quiet curse words in Republican strategists’ mouths.

Kevin Drum thinks the withdrawal is going well, and notes why Erickson might not:

But you’d never know this thanks to an immense firehose of crap coming from the very people we should least believe. This includes:

• The hawks who kept the war in Afghanistan going for years with lies and happy talk, and who are now desperate to defend themselves.
• Republicans who figure this is a great opportunity to sling partisan bullshit. Their favorite is that Biden has destroyed America’s standing in the world, an old chestnut for which there’s no evidence whatsoever.
• Trumpies trying to avoid blame for the execution of their own plan. It is gobsmacking to hear them complain about slow processing of Afghan allies when they were the ones who deliberately hobbled the visa process in the first place.
• Democrats who, as usual, are too damn cowardly to defend the withdrawal for fear of—something. It’s not always clear what.
• Reporters who are sympathetic to all this because they genuinely care about the danger that the withdrawal poses for people they knew in Afghanistan.

These are excellent points to keep in mind when evaluating the withdrawal, and are a good starting point for formulating standards and evaluations.

For my part, I remain patient. How many Americans and Afghan allies, awaiting evac, end up dead may be the best metric. But questions regarding equipment left behind will be important. Not that I expect the Afghans to use them against us, because high-powered weapons require high power training, but they can be sold. I hope they were rendered useless before or during the evac.

My hope to analyze the various contents of an email from a conservative source on a daily basis appears to have been ill-considered, so I’ll apologize for forgetting and then analyze.

But, of course, they don’t fact-check their own cartoon. If you speak to an election official, regardless of party, they will tell you that each ballot is carefully checked, especially those mail-in ballots that have received so much … I cannot call it criticism, because criticism must begin with a well-informed mind … simple-minded sliming. Indeed, they use bar-codes, which are checked against databases of eligible voters and databases of who has already voted. In the twenty+ years of mail-in balloting, no systemic cheating has been detected.

But notice the sleight of hand going on here. “Every tweet and meme must be fact-checked.”

Really?

REALLY?

Since when does that happen? Yeah, you’re right: it doesn’t. Fact checking of tweets, even today, doesn’t happen in most cases; only in a very small proportion of tweets, mostly involving vaccines and Covid-19, does fact-checking occur, and even then we’ll see plenty of misinformation slip through, at least initially.

And fact-checking memes? As there is no official meme-source, fact-checking of memes doesn’t happen. Period.

The entire cartoon, in reality – and go check on this and don’t take my word for it – has it all backwards. Tweets and memes are not fact-checked outside of a small selection of topics (and, speaking as a software engineer, checking all tweets at present volumes and range of topics isn’t practical). Ballots and voting are carefully checked. There is no evidence of systemic cheating in the electoral system, if I may be rigidly correct in my logic, and the only circumstantial evidence amounts to nothing more than the distressed wailing of candidates unable to accept that they’ve lost.

Yeah, the emotional five year olds.

This is another attempt to drive a wedge between citizens and the officials that they themselves have voted into office. Distrust is not harmless; it makes necessary cooperation more difficult and even impossible, leads to civic chaos, and a disrespect for the law that can get people killed.

Something a national adversary will love.

Source: Dari Panama

Having read a few insta-reactions to the Afghanistan situation from such folks as Max Boot, Jennifer Rubin, Erick Erickson, Kevin Drum, and Andrew Sullivan, in terms of analysis I’m finding that defending President Biden’s decision is, interestingly, far easier than it is to condemn it.

Let’s start with metrics. The various commentators are trying to measure different things without sometimes understanding the problem of separating one from the other, while others do. Erickson wants to condemn Biden for the pullout but not the termination of the war, while Rubin and Boot, on different sides of this issue, are not nearly so clear.

If we take these separately it may become more clear. Insofar as the war itself goes, Biden has been against this war for a long time, and this is well-known. He did not accept the military’s official evaluations of the war, and as the war dragged on for an unprecedented 20+ years, it’s become more and more clear that he is right. The publication of The Afghanistan Papers more or less put an exclamation point on the matter.

To his credit, he followed through on his judgment. And I think we’ve waited long enough – twenty years – to pass judgment on the conflict.

The second point, his decisions regarding the actual withdrawal, requires more time for appropriate appraisal. When I see someone like Erickson crying out that Biden should resign in disgrace, I read his justification and shake my head – because the judgments are on points that are not yet clear. Indeed, exactly on what grounds he calls for resignation isn’t clear. In simple fact, such a call recalls Trumpian projection: Many people called for my [Trump’s] resignation, therefore we’ll paint Biden with the same calls and make it a moral equivalence.

Look: an approach often used in technical fields for measuring success or failure is to define a measurement that would indicate complete success, and then ask what a comparison with a real world measurement tells you. And I’m having some real trouble coming up with that ideal measurement. What does it mean to have a well-run withdrawal in the real world?

After a while, I have to ask: Are we seeing it right now?

Boot thinks it’s a disaster, yet every point he raises in his article I thought dubious. For example, We could have disregarded Trump’s agreement with the Taliban and stayed on without further losses. Well, no. Abstractly, people make decisions based off current status and expected events. Concretely, the Taliban have fought for nearly twenty years, at the time, when they got the Trump agreement which would hand them the country on a platter. Why launch more attacks and endanger the prize? Trump’s a chump, a demonstrated fact, so let him remain a Trump and have the prize drop into our laps. Boot’s point evaporates.

Erickson wants to hide behind an alleged claim that we should have withdrawn during the Afghanistan planting season, not the fighting season, and then the collapse of the Afghan Army wouldn’t have happened. The problem is that Afghanistan is a huge prize, and the Trump agreement enriched Taliban fighting forces with roughly 5000 previously imprisoned fighters. But the Taliban had already secured the mass defection of Afghan forces; the fact that the former Afghan President jetted on out of Kabul within days convinces me that the defection was well-known within Afghanistan, and possibly by American forces and key American politicians as well.

Erickson, because he made the mistake of taking Limbaugh’s radio chair and must accede to his ready-made audience’s demands, has to be completely invested in the idea that Biden is as bad, or worse, than former President Trump, and he thinks this is the chance. But if he can’t make a convincing point, it’s really a disaster for him.

The other points I’ve seen made in support of Biden’s condemnation are similarly weak. They can be, with varying amounts of thought, either completely discredited, or at least be unproven as of yet. I shan’t cover them because of time considerations.

To the extent that it matters what my opinion might be on Biden’s decision, I’m going out on a limb as I make public my premature – thoroughly premature – opinion and suggest that this event, so thoroughly condemned by the right and a matter of concern – rightly – to the independents, center, and the left, may become, in the eyes of non-partisan historians, if not the right, a signature decision, an important course correction to the American polity, and one of finest … not accomplishments … but decisions taken by President Biden.

But assessments of how well we evacuate Americans and Afghan allies that are in distress will affect that determination. I think anyone who’s already decided on their assessment of this Biden decision is merely a partisan, and possibly a hack, unless they back off and admit it:

We’re not ready to make this judgment just yet.

Everything’s connected, Mr. Boot.

Some lovelies fresh from the garden today.

It was a bit windy.

Fulminate:

v. ful·mi·nat·ed, ful·mi·nat·ing, ful·mi·nates
v.intr.

1. To issue a thunderous verbal attack or denunciation: fulminated against political chicanery.
2. To explode or detonate. [The Free Dictionary]

Noted in “Trump & Co. engineered the pullout from Afghanistan. Now they criticize it,” Max Boot, WaPo:

“Aww, damn! There’s something in my eye!” “CUT! TAKE 37!” “Come on, Leonardo, get it together!”

Atlantic Rim: Resurrection (2018) is part of a genre called mockbuster: movies that pretend to be part of a blockbuster movie’s universe, but are almost certainly not, made and released to take advantage of audiences who fail to do the research, like me, that would make them realize this is not an official product of the blockbuster’s producers.

But a cheap ripoff.

And so it is with Atlantic Rim: Resurrection. Set years prior to the fabulous Pacific Rim (2013), it follows the trials – no lawyers – and tribulations of a military force attempting to stand up the giant robots later used in Pacific Rim to defend the world. Battling mysterious lags buried in the robots’ programming, a couple of kaiju, a horde of child kaiju, malfunctioning weapons, and some innovative ideas for monsters working together, the whole smorgasbord is driven along by meaningless side plots that trail off, characters with potential that are under-used (Go Bugs!), and the inevitable outcast scientist who knows better than everyone else.

While programming in … Python. Yeah, no kidding. Yes, there is such a language. No, it’s not a heavy duty AI language, at least not that I’ve ever heard.

A very sloppy plot, crappy special effects, actors who can only do so much with bad dialog, and some historical inaccuracies which will irritate those with at least a little knowledge of US Naval history^[1], overwhelm some right ideas, such as killing off good guys and some monster ideas that I thought were interesting. This made for a movie that will not be forgotten, but not for the right reasons.

¹ Oh, you want to know? The movie opens on a battleship firing on a kaiju. It’s clearly a battleship, as that’s a three gun turret with what are clearly 16 inch caliber guns. The US Navy retired its last battleship sometime in the 1990s, and even that was a “reactivated” battleship that was in service only for political purposes. I do not believe any are even functional at this time, much less in service.

Motte-and-bailey [fallacy]:

The motte-and-bailey fallacy (named after the motte-and-bailey castle) is a form of argument and an informal fallacy where an arguer conflates two positions which share similarities, one modest and easy to defend (the “motte”) and one much more controversial (the “bailey”).^[1] The arguer advances the controversial position, but when challenged, they insist that they are only advancing the more modest position.^[2][3] Upon retreating to the motte, the arguer can claim that the bailey has not been refuted (because the critic refused to attack the motte)^[1] or that the critic is unreasonable (by equating an attack on the bailey with an attack on the motte). [Wikipedia]

The article, above, is fascinating for those who, like myself, have wondered at the advancement of such philosophers as Foucault and their what often appears to be philosophical nonsense. I recall once, long ago, reading that a graduate student assistant to one of them had once muttered something like, “It must be important, it’s so hard to understand!” Unless it’s quantum physics, it shouldn’t be.

Noted in “Two Men Falling,” Andrew Sullivan, The Weekly Dish:

[Biden’s critics] say they’re just decrying the way we left [Afghanistan]; but of course, this is the motte, not the bailey. Read any of their screeds, and you’ll see they still want us to stay. They still think they are right and that the American people are wrong, still believe they have the moral high ground, even as their morality has led to strategic blunders, and hundreds of thousands of innocent deaths. Bill Kristol — I kid you not — actually wrote another article condemning the withdrawal, quoting Churchill and Munich! How dead can a brain be?

Reading this WaPo article on Facebook’s measures of page popularity made me uneasy:

We all know what kinds of posts we see when we open Facebook. But what is everyone else seeing in their personalized feeds? And just how much of it is divisive, misleading, or outright false?

Those questions have never had a definitive answer, partly because Facebook keeps secret much of the relevant data. Analytics tools such as Newswhip, which is independent, and CrowdTangle, which Facebook owns, provided windows into what’s trending on the social network. And a Twitter account called Facebook’s Top 10, run by New York Times technology columnist Kevin Roose, drew on CrowdTangle’s data to produce weekly lists of top-performing U.S. Facebook pages — many of which turned out to be conservative or even right-wing political personalities. Meanwhile, Facebook has endured harsh criticism from President Biden and other officials who view it as teeming with conspiracies and misinformation.

Facebook has long argued such“top 10”lists present a skewed view of its platform, making conservative commentators such as Ben Shapiro, Dan Bongino, and Franklin Graham seem more popular than they really are. But it struggled to back up its claims without offering more data of its own.

On Wednesday, the social giant announced that it will begin publishing a quarterly report of its own, called the “Widely Viewed Content Report,” that slices its data along new lines to produce a very different set of rankings. Instead of presenting Facebook as a hotbed of right-leaning politics, the company’s inaugural report presents a far weirder, messier, and spammier picture: the news feed as a junk-mail folder.

And then comes this:

“It’s like ExxonMobil releasing their own study on climate change,” said a former Facebook employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to a nondisparagement clause. “It’s something to counter the independent research and media coverage that tells a different story.”

Pravda. Pravda was, and is, the name of the lead political newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and was well known, during the Soviet era, for hardly ever telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Today it has faded into obscurity.

And that’s what Facebook CEO Zuckerberg and company may be practicing.

I have to wonder if this quarterly report is going to sink right into the ocean and be ignored, or if it’ll be picked apart by Facebook observers who find its results to be ridiculous.

Yeah, sort of a rather large Protoceratops. The lack of nose protrusion makes identification with a Triceratops species a dubious adventure. The spinal ridge does raise questions concerning cross-breeding with a Stegasaurus species, but those critters had these tiny little heads, so the deduction may be on shaky ground. Although not shaky because of Godzilla, as the big guy does not make an appearance in this episode of Let’s Kill a Kaiju! Reportedly, his demands are considered excessive, and he may never make an appearance.

Gamera vs. Jiger (1970) exemplifies the dangers of archaeological theft. A fair-sized statue on a far away island is being removed for display at Expo ’70, being carried away by jet-powered helicopters. Even the displeasure of Gamera (“Friend to all children!”) doesn’t discourage the weaseling. Conveyed to a waiting ship, it begins the journey to Tokyo. On the way, the crew begins to fall ill, much to the puzzlement of the ship’s surgeon.

Meanwhile, Gamera finds himself (herself?) attacked by a kaiju emerging from the sand on the island, and is left squirming on his backside when the attacker, Jiger, shoots spears from her face into the legs of Gamera, thus incapacitating the eponymous kaiju. But Jiger doesn’t take the time to slit the great turtle’s throat – perhaps a wise decision, given the flamethrower implanted in Gamera’s mouth, which opens questions in my mind as to whether the plastic surgeons are going too far these days – and immediately sets out swimming across the ocean in pursuit of the statue. Or perhaps he’s an Expo ’70 fan.

He’s clocked at 190 MPH, surprisingly, at least to me, lacking a bow wave. Upon arrival in Japan, the local forces try to discourage his attendance, but Jiger’s heat ray is an unwelcome surprise and the local forces back off.

Back on the island, Gamera shows some cleverness in removing the spears, and sets out in pursuit of Jiger via his spinning rocket mode of travel. Once in Japan, he bounces Jiger around a bit, but in an ill-considered move, he ends up on top of her and suffers a piercing wound to his lung. He drags himself off to the beach, where he appears to begin suffering white nose syndrome, which is really more of a bat thing than a flying turtle thing, but, you know, poetic license and all that rot.

But the kids! Oh, again there are kids. Grabbing that submarine from the last episode, they slip into Gamera’s mouth and go to the lung, as directed by the scientists who somehow took an X-Ray with only half a device, and discover the piercing wound deposited an egg, which has already hatched and is killing Gamera from the inside. They discover that the baby is susceptible to white noise, which matches up with what the ship’s crew had claimed had made them sick: noise coming from the statue. The statue had served to keep Jiger quiescent for millions of years.

Bad archaeologists!

The adults rig up speakers that spit out white noise on a bigger scale, making Jiger dormant while the kids close up their incision and Gamera recovers from his surgery. Then the battle is on, with a highlight being Gamera sticking telephone poles in his own ears.

Yeah. Almost worth watching the movie just for that little bit.

Eventually, the statue kills Jiger and the fun is over with.

Thank god.

I was trying to get a picture of a bumbler, but all I really trapped was tomato blossoms a couple of days ago:

In this short feature I’m examining parts of an email from the conservative email bloodstream, and the first is here. Here’s the second:

So this one seems harmless enough out of context. But in context?

This is a reinforcement of natural, but socially undesirable, xenophobic impulses. The idea that the world’s richest country should not be helping out unlucky countries, along with being desperately un-Christian, is also undiplomatic. By being generous, we earn favorable views of America and Western Civilization from the citizens of other nations – an important consideration in an era where autocratic, or -leaning, governments such as those of China, Russia, Hungary, Iran, and The Philippines, are making the case that autocracy is a better form of government than old, slow liberal democracy.

Never mind what has happened in the past to citizens of autocracies (see: Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, or most absolute monarchies), or is happening today to the Uighurs of China, the Tibetans, disfavored minorities (pick your country), etc. Just don’t look, keep favoring the strong-man style of government, surely that can’t happen to you, hey?!

And, for those readers who think foreign aid is overwhelming the Federal budget:

Opinion polls consistently report that Americans believe foreign aid is in the range of 25 percent of the federal budget. When asked how much it should be, they say about 10 percent. In fact, at $39.2 billion for fiscal year 2019, foreign assistance is less than 1 percent of the federal budget. [George Ingram, Brookings.edu]

The careful stripping of context, which is a regular feature of these conservative messages, and the constant din of xenophobia, look innocent enough, but reinforce anti-government messages such as They’re throwing our money away! and It’s all a hoax! and They’re taking away our rights! (but don’t look at the alternative).

Well, no. This is a fallacious view of reality.

Maybe it’s all just Halloween fun?

The Creeping Flesh (1973) combines some fine acting, competing subplots, excellent cinematography & generally good-to-excellent technical work, with a plot that seems to careen along mostly on coincidence, bad science, and, well, general yuckiness, all bookended by suggestions that this is the delusion of a madman.

The story opens in Victorian England on the occasion of Dr. Emmanuel Hildern returning home from New Guinea with a monstrous, huge skeleton in tow. What has he found? He believes he’s found the source of all evil, and he hopes to use this skeleton to produce a vaccine for evil in the usual way, producing antibodies for it that can then be used to inoculate sufferers.

But he arrives to find his rather magnificent home in figurative disarray: half the staff dismissed, his finances in ruin, although there’s a lovely prize dangling out there for the next big scientific breakthrough, a letter stating that his wife has passed away, and his twenty year old daughter, hopped up on the usual hormones, desperate for his attention even as she continues to desire to know more about her long-dead mother.

Who died last week.

E. Hildern must visit the insane asylum, run by his most ambitious half-brother, Dr. James Hildern, who informs him  that, along with the death of his insane wife, he is also no longer supporting his brother’s research. This is but one more worry for E. Hildern, already trying to study pure evil, concerned that his daughter has inherited her mother’s madness, his own petty delusions when it comes to his late wife’s former occupation as a dancer and flirt in the raucous houses of Paris, the lack of staff.

And, it turns out, the sticky fingers of one half-brother.

And what about this painting habit of his? Aren’t we worried about that, too?

But this all seems curiously unconnected. Perhaps his wife went mad; why worry about the daughter? Is she going off her rocker? How convenient it is that a madman breaks loose and terrorizes the town, is it not, just as the daughter finds said rocker, along with a piano to play?

And why does he fear that rainstorm?

In the end, the plot seems to be a mishmash with no unifying theme. It’s a pretty movie, as in it looks authentic, and the actors take creditable turns, but in the end it’s hard to take seriously. Perhaps, for a horror aficionado, this is a delectable piece of pie, but it all left me a bit cold.

Robert Carlin on 38 North discusses the correspondence of former President Trump with North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un. Communicating with the DPRK is via a slender thread: these letters and dubious propaganda are two of the more common methods. Carlin’s money quote on this particular collection:

The amount of attention commentators and reporters devoted to the unctuous opening sections in the letters has helped foster the sense that this was an effort by one leader to tap dance on the other party’s head. To be sure, President Trump’s letters reflected what some in the business world might consider good psychological tactics, buttering up the opponent. It’s not clear how effective this was with the North Korean leader. Some of Trump’s tactics, oozing praise for Kim, may have struck Pyongyang as belittling, in effect patting Kim on the head—nice doggie. Thus, concerns that Kim was trying to bamboozle the president with flattery need to be balanced against the realization that the president was playing the same game. If Pyongyang was only judging by the president’s glowing public characterizations of Kim’s letters, it might have concluded its approach was working. However, a close reading of Kim’s letters to Trump makes clear the North Korean leader could see that, whether or not his flowery words really touched the heart or fed Trump’s ego, they were clearly not having an impact on US policy.

And how much was that Trump being smart, and how much of that was his advisor’s digging in their heels? Maybe we’ll know in twenty or thirty years.

It’s been a while, but one of my conservative contacts finally sent some toxic email. Rather than ripping apart as is my wont, I’m going to take this series of cartoons and explain why each is toxic in separate, daily posts.

To the right is the only one that made me laugh.

So the first that annoyed me involves the deliberate mis-statement of science.

But, until the recent advent of the delta variant, a vaccination trumped all else:

The NBA and the Players Association agreed to change their health and safety protocol for those within the league who have received their full COVID-19 vaccine, according to ESPN.

The changes, per the report, will apply to anyone who is “two weeks past their final dose” and for “any team where 85% of players and 85% of staff are fully vaccinated.” The NBA and NBPA sent a memo with the new protocols to teams on Wednesday night. [Yahoo! Sports]

I didn’t see any recent changes, but an exacting account of the rules isn’t really the issue here, since this is almost certainly a couple of months old. The real point of this picture is to encourage disdain and distrust for science. Never mind the actual rules and facts on the ground, this is the sort of propaganda that encourages folks to stick their noses in the air and practice their haughty My common-sense is better than your science! pose.

It’s crap like this that gets people killed, injured, and crippled.

If my conservative reader is offended at my skepticism concerning the superiority of their common-sense, I suggest they consult a bit of history which happens to be most entertaining: Nuts! (2016).

A reader writes regarding my provision of a source for finding out about future gerrymandering with a personal experience:

The city of Chaska[, Minnesota] was horribly gerrymandered when we lived there. It still is today, but less so. For the curious, look at the linked map. Notice that the downtown section, bottom center, is split between 2 wards. It used to be split between 3 or 4 of them. It really should be not split at all. But doing that gives the “up the hill” suburban types all the power to fuck things up, regardless of the amount of opposition from the downtown folks.

Oh, a link to that map. Sorry.

The problem of representative democracies, at least in my mind, is how to be representative, isn’t it? Arrange lines one way, one group is in control. Arrange in another way, the other group has control.

And a third way, and a relatively minor group holds the balance of power.

Even with limited government, it’s still a mess.