Category Archives: Uncategorized

Rep MT Greene (R-GA) testifying at a hearing concerning whether or not she advocated the overthrow of the Republic, which, if true, would technically render her, by Constitutional Amendment, unqualified for her position:

Greene on Friday:

Question: Did you advocate to President Trump to impose martial law as a way to remain in power?
Greene: I do not recall
Question: So you’re not denying you did it?
Greene: I don’t rememberpic.twitter.com/bXC5c9Su2M via @Acyn https://t.co/kghbFS8hdN

— andrew kaczynski (@KFILE) April 25, 2022

In other words, she can’t remember a damn thing. To which I can only ask, If you can’t remember anything, doesn’t this render you intellectually damaged and thus unqualified for your position?

Just another reason to dislike her. I still like her Jewish Space Lasers conspiracy theory, on the other hand.

Jeff Greenfield remarks on Politico concerning the prophetic powers of … George Orwell:

In the most provocative segment of [The Road to Wigan Pier], Orwell also cites “the horrible, the really disquieting prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw toward them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.” And he notes the prospectus for a summer Socialist school in which attendees are asked if they prefer a vegetarian diet.

That does make me laugh. I’ve never read The Road to Wigan Pier, so perhaps Orwell later identifies the reason the Left attracts the ‘cranks,’ but for me it’s due to the facts that the Left is almost always devoted to toppling the de facto power and compelling its own vision of the future on the populace.

And so, too, is the crank: vegetarians, quacks, even pacifists all have their militant members who passionately believe the world would be greatly improved if only their philosophy, their dogma is widely adopted.

Combine that with the Left’s commitment to upset the old Order, and the cranks will gather like maggots to a body, hoping to inflict their vision of the future upon the world.

This would seem less likely to happen with conservatives, but then I look at some of the flakes frantically running for elective office, and I have to wonder.

And so we see the value of gatekeepers.

This makes me laugh:

Initial brain scanning studies used too few human subjects to ensure that real patterns in the data stood out from the noise. Matters came to a head in 2009 with a study apparently showing that pictures of humans in emotional situations could trigger neural activity in a dead Atlantic salmon. The researchers had used the fish to test that their scanner worked, but then wrote up the faux “study” to show how easy it is to get false results. “That was an important message,” says Gould van Praag.  [“The replication crisis has spread through science – can it be fixed?” Claire Wilson, NewScientist (9 April 2022, paywall)]

dead Atlantic salmon, indeed. I wonder if it had a fashion sense as well.

A drop hitting a surface:

More here.

Modern travel these days is cutthroat.

Train to Busan (2016) is a high quality zombie movie that uses its premise to illuminate, I suspect, some shortcomings of South Korean society. Seok-woo, father to Su-an, estranged husband, financier in South Korean society, and a man strongly in the grip of the importance of being successful, has been badgered into delivering his daughter to her mother for her birthday, a task requiring a train trip to Busan and back, a trip that takes him away from his precious offices, subordinates, and … successes. Those successes that, despite their ease, have failed to make him a great husband or even a legendary father. And, yet, who can abandon them?

So, against his better judgment, they hop on the express to Busan, and behind them Seoul bursts into a bloody shambles. Seok-woo, though, is not worried until his mother calls, and then it dawns on him, in the final gurgle of her voice, that perhaps those reports of rioting are of importance.

These are not your father’s shambling zombies, either. These are those new-fangled sprinting kind, the sort who redouble their pace when needed, who fight harder if need be, and … you get the point.

Getting from one end of a rolling train to the other is a problem when these zombies are aboard.

But don’t count the uninfected out. Seok-woo, along with a few others, are bright, motivated survivors, who notice today’s monsters are a little blind in the dark. Their maneuvers, in the brightest of days, are little short of inspired. It’s as if they’re hitting home runs.

But corporate villainy lurks in the empty eyes of the zombies, doesn’t it? Seok-woo isn’t the only wannabe corporate magnate. And what awaits them in nearly fabled Busan, not to mention those intervening towns? Is Su-an’s mother ready and waiting? And how do I mean that, anyways?

Train to Busan is a thoroughly modern retelling of the unsettling zombie story, rejiggered to be the tool of the South Korean social critic. The heads-in-buckets maneuver of some zombie movies is not present, for which I give heartfelt thanks, but the utter ferocity of this version is heartbreaking in its own special way.

I won’t give a general recommendation to see this, but if you’re a fan of the zombie, this should be front and center on your bucket list. You won’t be disappointeded.

In the digital realm of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), commonly used to make digital Art ownable, there’s some cheeky Ukrainians messing with Russian minds:

My Arts Editor was fascinated with this Jack White performance on Colbert.

I believe the adjective was consummate. I enjoyed it, as well, particularly the percussion.

Although she did say the guy with the ukelele was a little puzzling.

A big shout out to Rep Tom Emmer (R-MN) for at least initially pushing to do the right thing, according to journalists Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin:

McCarthy’s reaction was similar. Burns and Martin wrote that in a phone call on January 10, McCarthy said he planned to call Trump and recommend that he resign. “What he did is unacceptable. Nobody can defend that and nobody should defend it,” he told a conference call of the Republican leadership. He also said he wished that social media companies would ban certain Republican lawmakers because they were stoking paranoia about the 2020 election. Other leaders, including Representative Steve Scalise (R-LA) and Representative Tom Emmer (R-MN), talked of moving Trump out of the party. [Heather Cox Richardson, Letters From An American]

Rep Tom Emmer (R-MN)

The problem with the toxic team politics of the Republican Party is that running around and going it on your own appears to be only viable for the far-far-right extremists who are waiting for the Party to continue its mad skid to the right, and not for the folks like Emmer, who, while obviously an extremists to us Minnesotans – who can forget his gubernatorial run of 2010, in which he seemed to think waiters made far too much money – might now be classified as a middle of the roader in today’s MNGOP.

And tomorrow, as too moderate. (I have a friend who was ejected from the MNGOP for being “too moderate” back in the day. These days that friend is a lefty.) The ties that bind in the Republican Party suppress free thought and public debate, and that is much to the detriment of the Party and Country, something Party leaders must take to heart.

So congrats to Rep Emmer for at least making a little bit of noise about doing the right thing.

When an eclipse occurs, everyone stops and stairs – even the robots.

Jonathan Rauch surprised me by not jumping up and down, hob-nailed boot clad, on this set of statements he quotes on American Purpose:

As Helen Joyce argues in her book Trans (2021), radical gender ideology (or gender identity ideology, as it’s also called) is a horse of a different color. It is not at all the same as trans rights. Nor is it any one thing: It’s a conceptual mess, propounding some ideas that make sense (gender is socially conditioned) but also wild claims, such as that (as Joyce writes) “depending on its owner’s identity, a penis may be a female sex organ.” I take its central claims to include these:

·      Trans women are women and trans men are men, no difference, full stop;

·      Human gender and sex are social constructions and are not a binary but on a continuum, so concepts like “male” and “female” are relative and subjective;

·      Gender and sex are chosen identities, and an individual’s declared choice can never be doubted or challenged;

·      Denying or disputing any of the above is violence.

Any useful hypothesis, as any well-trained scientist, i.e., familiar with philosopher Karl Popper’s work on the nature of hypotheses, should jump up and down upon encountering these statements, particularly the last. Popper’s work and arguments are that a hypothesis that cannot be considered scientific and useful if it cannot be falsified, which is to say proven false. For example, the hypothesis that a divine being, all-powerful, created the Universe would be unfalsifiable, at least on its face.

Rauch?

Even if you don’t agree me that the first three propositions are false and the fourth is intolerant, you might concur that they are not the only or best way to think about transgender civil rights. Rather, they are extrinsic notions that escaped from academia and attached themselves, limpet-like, in the same way that left-wing politics parasitized gay rights a generation ago.

It’s also possible to ask why such a proposition is presented in a society in a liberal democracy, as the tenets of liberal democracies include the ability to debate any political proposition. Clearly, Joyce, the author, feels so uncertain concerning her assertions that she cannot tolerate the least little critique, much less the sometimes raucous debates that lead to improvement and justice.

I’m left wondering why, in fact, they published this book at all. Books usually inspire conversation, but this one will inspire terror, in those afraid of hollow accusations, and disgust in those who value honest debate.

But this has been worth reading if only for the remark about leftist politics “parasitizing” gay rights. I’ve run across this before, just recently, including the observation that there is a considerable proportion of the gay community that votes conservative, even in the face of homophobia. It’s a vital reminder to the Democrats that conflating sexual orientation with political ideology is a minor unforced error, and the recent promotion of racial groups as being solid political ideological groups will turn out to be a major unforced error – in my view. So long as the far-right can continue the masquerade of being reasonable, Hispanics, Asians, and Blacks will consider voting conservative, especially if the more hateful and mistaken ideologies of the left come forward.

From the Bangor Daily News:

The International Cryptozoology Museum just opened its new Bangor outpost on Hammond Street this week, after first announcing the bookstore and gift shop last fall, and Bigfoot hunters, paranormal enthusiasts and the merely curious have already stopped by to visit.

Oh, that’s nice. Good luck storming the –

Some of the more eye-popping things on display at the shop include Frosty, a huge sculpture of a Yeti head that’s mounted on the wall, and a replica of the Minnesota Iceman — a six-foot, hairy hominid originally believed to have been found in Vietnam — whose supposedly frozen body was displayed around the country throughout the 1960s.

The Minnesota WHAT???

Oh, slow down, my slammin’ heart. That hoax Viking carving out in Kensington, MN, is enough for us. That and those skeeters that carry away small –

WAIT WAIT – I’m a big human! PUT ME DOWN-

Palaeo-poetry:

[Professor Matthew Bennett of Bournemouth University] stresses there is always a risk of pushing [fossil] footprint analysis too far in pursuit of a captivating story – what he calls “palaeo-poetry”. It is tempting to argue that the woman hurried because she was wary of roaming sabre-toothed cats, but we will never know for sure. Still, footprints do pitch us closer than ever to the emotions of ancient people. [“How fossil footprints are revealing the joy and fear of Stone Age life,” Colin Barras, NewScientist (9 April 2022, paywall)]

Hey, who could resist such a great word?

After reports that a large number of Ukrainian civilians have been killed and/or deported by Russian occupiers, which is a classic ‘depopulation’ move for when the time comes to discuss who the current population wants as their overlords or government, and while Russia is reeling from the loss of its Black Sea fleet flagship Moskva, and reports that the United States is considering labeling Russia a sponsor of international terrorism – a label of some practical consequence, it turns out – I think it’s time, even past time, that an encouragement to stop hostilities and right, to the extent that Russia might do so, the barbarities it has visited upon the civilians of Ukraine.

By putting punishment prices, payable by Russia, on those civilians.

So – just spitballing here – we could say concerning the status of a civilian:

• Displaced – $500,000
• Besieged – $750,000
• Missing – $10,000,000
• Dead – $5,000,000
• Deported – $20,000,000, but with a return discount of, say, 50%

The point is that a tactic known to be often used by Russia is punished, and that punishment is directly tied to its usage.

I suggest that this list be announced, with suitable values, to be applied when Russia exits Ukraine, all of Ukraine, by the end of May. If they do not leave by then, the punishment rates go up.

Yes, there’s a risk in this sort of tactic. But Russia believes that depopulation of Ukraine is a winning tactic in the long run, a tactic that’s worth a heavy price. It’s necessary to make that price as heavy as possible – and tie that price directly to the implementation of the tactic.

And then broadcast it to the Russian populace.

This sort of language – from a supposed political scientist, no less – has to make every serious agnostic and atheist squirm:

Deputy of the State Duma Vyacheslav Nikonov (a grandson of Vyacheslav Molotov) claimed: “In the modern world, we are the embodiment of the forces of good. This is a metaphysical clash between the forces of good and evil… This is truly a holy war we're waging and we must win.” pic.twitter.com/B8C7ILH1O8

— Julia Davis (@JuliaDavisNews) April 17, 2022

Marrying this massively unjust war with the language of holy wars, well, it certainly pulls into focus a horrendous and tragic depopulation event.

And after that? A population that is convinced it should have won, a capering cleric, such as the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, or evangelical Paula White who’ll find a way to explain their terrible loss in terms that doesn’t involve a wretched self-examination of the terrors of living under the metaphorical, if not actual, theocratic regime.

If you’re unaware of Strandbeests, do yourself a favor:

TIME’s Charlotte Alter, two Julys ago, interviewing Fox News‘ Tucker Carlson:

Near the end of our call, I asked Carlson if he’d been vaccinated against COVID-19. He paused. “Because I’m a polite person, I’m not going to ask you any supervulgar personal questions like that.”

I told him he was welcome to ask me whatever he wanted.

“That’s like saying, ‘Do you have HIV?’” he said. “How about ‘None of your business’?” He broke into a cackle, like a hyena let loose in Brooks Brothers. “I mean, are you serious? What’s your favorite sexual position and when did you last engage in it?” (This has apparently become his go-to line when asked whether he’s been vaccinated; Carlson offered the same retort to Ben Smith of the New York Times.)

Recommended comeback, which Alter apparently didn’t have ready:

Why, dear boy, who do you think my sexual positions endangers, life and limb?

From there he can only frantically quibble and look like an idiot. Pity Alter was not prepared.

Temperatures going up, California is in flames, big weather events are becoming larger, fisheries are depleted or destroyed, reefs are bleaching, pigeons and coyotes are invading American cities, and the poles are melting. Who’s inheriting what appears to be destined to be a world whose ecology is damaged enough to endanger wildlife populations and, therefore, a badly overpopulated humanity?

Not me.

No, it’s folks like the members, if involuntarily^[1], of the Millenials and Gen Z and whatever other generations have garnered as names. And, as I’ve written before from time to time, all these younger generations have a key advantage over the Boomers and Gen X folks, and that’s this:

They’ve observed the status of the world’s ecology and economy, and they’ve observed, close up and personal, the philosophies, practices, economic theories, and all the other paradigms by which we operate these days. Because of their age, and I might argue the advent of The Age of Skepticism & Rationality, their investment in those paradigms is not nearly as high as that of the predecessor generations, such as the Boomers. In fact, disaffection with some of

But, uniquely, from nearly their beginnings they’ve had telecommunications and social media at their fingertips, and even better, or worse, pick your adjective, it’s unmediated by communications gatekeepers. That is, publishing is unmediated by those who think, and sometimes do, know better. In some ways, it’s like evolution, which is notorious for exploring solution spaces by trying all of them until one works.

What brings this up is a couple of articles in WaPo. First up is Jennifer Rubin, discussing the recent successful effort to unionize an Amazon Corp shop:

The newly formed Amazon Labor Union won the day on Staten Island not with the help of traditional union behemoth such as the Teamsters Union. Instead, the New York Times reports, the Amazon organizers “relied almost entirely on current and former workers rather than professional organizers . . . [and] turned to GoFundMe appeals rather than union coffers built from the dues of existing members.” It was an intensive person-to-person effort using everything from social media to employee barbecues to win over the support of the workers.

Given the success of these campaigns, major unions and progressive politicians (whose appearance in a failed Amazon organizing effort in Alabama proved ineffective) might want to steer clear. Instead, progressive groups and donors can lend financial support.

I’ve bolded the part that really caught my attention. If senior progressives cannot move the needle for a unionizing matter, what does it mean?

And then there’s this article by Philip Bump on the puzzling loss of popularity by President Biden in the face of economic success and a Republican Party positively packed with fourth- and fifth- raters who have little allegiance to democracy or to competency – but only broken ideologies:

The first poll was from Quinnipiac University. Released on Wednesday, it measured Biden’s approval with those ages 65 and older as about even — as many viewed his job performance positively as negatively. Those under 30, though, were more than twice as likely to view his performance with disapproval.

That’s Quinnipiac, the pollster that Biden’s team once went out of its way to disparage as an outlier. Then, early Thursday morning, new polling from Gallup showed a similar pattern. It was among the youngest Americans, not the oldest, where Biden was struggling most. What’s more, it was with those Americans that his approval had fallen the most over the course of his presidency.

Here’s that Gallup poll:

For me, what we’re starting to see is the rejection of the ways of the previous generations. Old wisdom, particularly that which does not fit with reason, as well as that which does not fit with the spewings of “social influencers,” is likely to be disputed and, often, discarded.

And there’s going to be a lot of anguish and gnashing all along the political spectrum as the American youth, watching disaster unfold, observing their wishes are not immediately satisfied, and communicating thoughts, pictures, and video in real time, begin to come together more and more cohesively than ever before.

¹ I am, technically, a tail-end member of the Boomers, who are somewhat reviled for greed, selfishness, and such things as First World problems. Much like some small percentage of the Millenials, et al., towards their own imposed group memberships, I have felt not one iota of kinship with the Boomers.

Here’s an event that looks to introduce NFTs to those with lots of money to spare:

“And our dessert course features wrapped mummy. Everyone bring their spoon?”

Time Walker (1982) is this awful, even grotty, if I may walk a bit of time myself, tale of an Egyptian mummy found by an archaeologist, brought back to greenish life when exposed to the radiation of an X-Ray machine while on campus at CalTech (oh, they wished!) California Institute of Sciences. Much like Pac-Man, it has to collect some baubles stolen from its sarcophagus by a grad student in a total 1970s haircut, stomping whoever gets in its way, before assembling said baubles into …

A communications device.

Bad story, bad acting, bad idea. My Arts Editor liked it. Go figger.

Knout:

A leather scourge (multi-tail whip), in the severe version known as ‘great knout’ with metal weights on each tongue, notoriously used in imperial Russia. [Wiktionary]

Noted in “Ukraine’s military culture is its biggest advantage over the Russians,” Max Boot, WaPo:

Two of the Russian weaknesses identified by the Economist [in 1854] particularly leap out. First: “The Russian armies are often armies on paper only. … The colonels of regiments and officers of the commissariat have a direct interest in having as large a number on the books and as small a number in the field as possible — inasmuch as they pocket the pay and rations of the difference between these figures.” Second: “Common soldiers … have no love of their profession, and no interest in the object of the war.” That was because the typical Russian private was “torn from his family and his land, drilled by the knout, neglected by his officers, fed on black bread, where fed at all, always without comforts, often without shoes.”

Joan McCarter on Daily Kos has a bone to pick with Senator Hawley (R-MO), as does Senator Schatz (D-HI), concerning Hawley’s persistent blocking of Biden’s nominees in an era of near-war with Russia:

Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley is gearing up to run for president in 2024. That means going full QAnon against the most qualified Supreme Court nominee in a generation, and it means going where Trump goes: in alliance with Putin. That includes undermining the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. State Department.

One Democrat had enough on Thursday, and is tearing up the internet with his takedown of the odious Hawley. Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) came to the floor to request unanimous consent to confirm Christopher Lowman as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Sustainment at the Department of Defense, whom Hawley has been blocking since his nomination in November. Hawley objected, with a rant criticizing President Biden’s foreign policy and defense strategy.

Schatz blew.

“So, what Senator Hawley wants is to go through his litany of criticisms of the Biden administration, and the truth is that every senator has that right without blocking the logistics guy from the Department of Defense,” Schatz said.

“But he’s doing a very specific thing. He is damaging the Department of Defense. We have senior DoD leaders, we have the Armed Services Committee coming to us and saying, ‘I don’t know what to tell him, I don’t know how to satisfy him, but he is blocking the staffing of the senior leadership at the Department of Defense.’”

So Hawley is – unsurprisingly – being a dick even when it endangers the United States. Young people often think there’s no real danger in the world except their ideological opponents, such as Schatz. They don’t understand monsters lurk where they think they see green pastures.

So here’s an idea. Round up all the nominations to the DoD Hawley’s refusing to fast track because Hawley, poor boy, doesn’t get to dictate the behavior of other branches of government. Get Senate Majority Leader Schumer (D-NY) to schedule a late session.

Notify the press that something important is going to happen at that session.

At the session, once again move for unanimous consent to approve the first nominee. Hawley stands to object and, as McCarter puts it, repeat his litany of complaints. The moment he’s done, move for the second nominee. If Hawley tries to reference his earlier speech, tell him that’s not allowed because the Senators have already forgotten his speech.

Rinse, lather, repeat.

At some point, Senator Schatz can leap to his feet and make a very short speech, noting that anyone objecting is being recorded by the press, and that recording will prove the anti-American activities of those objecting, because the nominees are critical to the DoD mission.

Hawley’ll be angry and flustered and might just say something he really shouldn’t. While the Republican base may not believe press recordings, independent voters will look at them and, mostly, shake their heads at the juvenility of Hawley, and write him off as a serious person.

I’m sure Steve Benen regrets this:

I’m not sure that helps, and it’s certainly not what the governor actually said. As the video of his comments shows, the Republican didn’t just say he and Abrams share different ideologies, he said, “I just want to be honest, that will be a cold war” between the two states if Georgians elect a governor he disagrees with.

The metaphorical sense of the word ‘share’ has to do with likeness, not loathed differences.

But, in the bigger picture, DeSantis has not only given Georgians some electoral interference to think about, but, assuming Georgia Gov Kemp (R-GA) wins the nomination, he’s then irritated former President Trump, who hate Governor Kemp.

Fun!

Have you heard of the Internet of Things, where your lunchbox will talk to the Internet because, uh, it must be cool?

This is really cool – the Internet of Animals:

Icarus stands for International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space. Scientists taking part in the Icarus-initiative are working together to study the behavior of animals.

Scientists want to use Icarus to find out more about the life of animals on earth: the migratory routes they take and their living conditions. These findings will aid behavioural research, species protection and research into the paths taken in the spread of infectious diseases. The information should even help to predict ecological changes and natural disasters.

In the process, the Icarus researchers will attach mini-transmitters to a variety of animal species. These transmitters then send their measurement data to a receiver station in space. The receiver station in turn transmits the data to a ground station from where it is sent to the relevant teams of researchers. The results will be published in a database that will be accessible to everyone: movebank

NewScientist (2 April 2022, paywall) interviewed the founder of ICARUS, Martin Wikelski, and this bit stuck in my brain:

Could animal networks also help with more mainstream predictions, such as weather forecasting?

Yes, many systems are really ripe for animal predictions. For example, the gannets and the shorebirds in the western part of Mexico – they tell you in spring how the harvest of anchovies and other fish will be in the fall, because they are already tuning in to the fry production early in the season. Or boobies in the Indo Pacific will tell you how strong the next El Niño will be because – months ahead of time – they all give up their breeding schedules. They either abandon the eggs or they don’t even lay eggs. And then you know it will be a strong El Niño. We already have those kinds of long-term predictions, but we have not brought them together yet on a global scale. And that goes back to the internet of animals. That is what’s coming.

That an entire population chooses, so to speak, not to lay eggs speaks to a communications mechanism, if we assume that only some of the members are encountering conditions that prompt the choice. That, in itself, is interesting – a sort of natural communications network.

New Hampshire Public Radio (nhpr) reports on someone who sent a postcard to every single address in New Hampshire. Here’s the content:

The postcard, which contains photos of celebrities ranging from Johnny Depp to Jim Gaffigan, includes false statements and claims the “world will end” on Good Friday. The mailer includes a QR code and email address.

A person claiming to have sent the postcard declined NHPR’s request for an interview, and wouldn’t disclose their name or state of residence. According to the postcard, the person who mailed says they are taking refuge in Kansas, though the return address was a P.O. Box in Portsmouth.

And here’s the desperate attempt to rationalize what appears to be a quite silly postcard:

When asked how much they spent on the mailer via email, the person responded, “A lot. An amount of money that crazy people don’t have.”

Well. Except crazy people who inherit money. Or made it while sane and then lost that sanity.

Or, like Howard Hughes, defied their mental illness to become rich and, well, successful. Although that example tries to draw me to walk down the road of trying to define success, when he spent his last days in a room full of pots of his urine. Is that really success? Or just the part when he founded and ran his own airline?

The point is, though, is that this is an example of trying to get blatant silliness past everyone’s common sense by making an easily falsifiable claim, i.e., that crazy people don’t have money, by stating it as, well, an obvious truism. Always examine obvious truisms; they’re often not neither.

Poor dude, or so I assume this is a dude. If we don’t implode or explode on Good Friday, will they have the intellectual honesty to mail another postcard apologizing for their silliness? Or will they be stubborn and continue to try to accumulate social capital by making sillier and sillier claims?