Category Archives: Uncategorized

It might even be so sophisticated that its perpetrators don’t actually realize its just such an attack.

On Upworthy, Tod Perry notes there’s something called a post-truther era:

A lot of talking heads have remarked that we live in a post-truth era. In 2016, the Oxford Dictionary defined it as “Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

And moves on to a … conspiracy … theory …

Yep, Birds Aren’t Real is a thing. A pretty big one, too. Birds Aren’t Real has over 300,000 followers on Instagram and 66,000 on Twitter. Plus, there are local Birds Aren’t Real chapters sprouting up all over the U.S.

The theory postulates that in the ’50s, the CIA began killing off America’s bird population and replacing them with flying surveillance robots. Birds Aren’t Real estimates there are currently 12 billion birds watching us from above.

Sure, it’s a joke. But it’s a joke that seems calculated to pull in the intellectually vulnerable, and then the next time they see a bird and its non-technological innards – say, hanging out of Fluffy’s mouth – it’s like a crowbar upside the head.

Think about all those conspiracy theories you’ve indulged in!, it screams.

Or maybe it’s just a joke.

A reader comments on the misleading warnings that the filibuster protects progressive programs and priorities as well:

And remember, the GQP killed the filibuster for judicial appointments specifically so they could ram through their agenda of appointing favorable judges. This has been one of Moscow Mitch’s frequently stated goals: to screw future D legislators by having life-time judicial appointments beholden to his ideology.

For those readers who are wondering, GQP is not a typo, but a reference to the increased influence the QAnon conspiracy theories appears to be having on Republicans.

Insofar as the filibuster’s application to judicial nominations goes, I found this in Wikipedia’s page on former Senator and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV):

On November 21, 2013, under Reid’s tenure as Majority Leader, the Democratic majority Senate voted 52–48 to eliminate the 60-vote requirement to end a filibuster against all executive branch nominees and judicial nominees other than to the Supreme Court. A 3/5 supermajority was still required to end filibusters unrelated to those nominees, such as for legislation and Supreme Court nominees. The Democrats’ stated motivation for the “nuclear option” was expansion of filibustering by Republicans during the Obama administration, in particular blocking three nominations to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

It’s a little difficult justifying blaming Republicans and not Democrats, as they both have indulged in removing filibuster requirements.

Remember, costume parties always lead to unwanted marriages!

Lady Behave! (1938) is a farcical bit of a comedy that left me a little flat. A little too much partying leaves Clarice with not one, but two husbands. This is an era in which such a drunken mistake like this can lead to serious legal consequences, so older sister Paula, the responsible one, sends Clarice off on an overseas trip, and conspires with her lawyer to make this all work out by pretending to be her young sister. A little pretending, a flourish or two, a minor divorce, and all should be well.

But she finds herself tangling with a very, very rich man, Stephen Cormack, his butler, and his two precocious children. The kids hate her; the butler isn’t quite sure what’s going on. And the would-be husband? Distracted by work and bemused at his own unwise behavior – apparently, he’s a repeat offender, at least since his first wife passed away – he has to admit that Paula has her own set of charms.

Throw in Clarice’s real husband, who is a hustler of dubious ethics as well as a fancier of the horses, and this all should be fun. But there’s not enough background to Clarice and Paula, and, for that matter, Stephen, to really feel a connection. The kids are surprisingly interesting and charming, but even they feel a bit more arbitrary than they should, perhaps playing to the stereotypes of the era. But it’s not enough, and the butler and the rest of Stephen’s staff is hardly more than cardboard cutout.

You may enjoy this more than I, but I found it a bit of a struggle to get through.

As a later-in-life diabetic, this gives me hope:

Meanwhile, Ali Tavassoli at the University of Southampton, UK, has found a small molecule known as compound 14, which indirectly activates a metabolic sensor called AMPK. To see if compound 14 might be a good treatment for metabolic disorders, he and his colleagues fed mice a high-fat diet so they became obese and developed diabetes-like symptoms, then gave them compound 14.

“The results floored us,” says Tavassoli. After just seven daily doses of the drug, the mice lost weight and their diabetes symptoms disappeared. By comparison, people whose diabetes is treated with metformin, which works through a similar pathway to compound 14, tend to gain weight. In more recent, unpublished work, Tavassoli and his team showed that patterns of gene expression in the animals’ fat cells no longer reflect obesity, but resemble those of normal-weight mice. Compound 14, says Tavassoli, appears to be “profoundly reprogramming” the metabolism of these mice.

So far, these substances have mostly been tested in non-human animals. But the relevant metabolic pathways are similar in people, which makes Evans optimistic that activating PPAR-delta or similar master switches could “reboot physiology” in us too. He says pressing such switches could be all it takes to go from sluggish and overweight to fit and athletic. [“Exercise pills: Should we use drugs that mimic benefits of a workout?” Jo Marchant, NewScientist (24 April 2021, paywall)]

Given I became type 2 diabetic after surgery and heavy antibiotic use, and it’s apparently common for type 2 to kick in after a big jolt to the system, I have to wonder if this Compound 14 reactivates an inadvertently shutdown metabolic pathway. Or turns it off.

Ah, but if I were a mouse!

Hatch a scheme to accuse an agency head of being illegal? Check.

Add in the part that all of his decisions, which have robbed deprived you and your wealthy fellow investors of billions of dollars? Check.

End up at SCOTUS, where the conservatives should deliver those billions of dollars? Check.

And win?

Well, sort of. Mark Joseph Stern of Slate explains:

In 2016, a group of wealthy investors hatched a lawsuit to dislodge $124 billion from the United States treasury and transfer a chunk of the money to their own pockets. The investors attacked the Federal Housing Finance Agency, a powerful executive agency that regulates Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Their plan was to force a settlement that would enrich shareholders by transferring billions of dollars back to the mortgage giants and release them from government control.

It is difficult to overstate how badly this scheme backfired. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court affirmed the investors’ constitutional theory—then rejected their effort to claw back billions while deregulating the mortgage industry. In the process, they allowed President Joe Biden to appoint a new head of the FHFA, a progressive who will keep Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac funneling money to the government (instead of shareholders) indefinitely. The plaintiffs, in other words, did not just lose this case. They inadvertently defeated their ultimate objective, entrenching the very system they tried to topple.

Sometimes, you emphatically don’t want what you wish for.

And you know, “wealthy investors” really should know better. You’ve already got your first billion bucks? Maybe it’s time to find a new vocation, because, baby, chasing extreme wealth is really a cold, empty path to walk.

Live in someone else’s shoes for a whlie.

Ramsha Jahangir on coda reports on the growing phenomenon of fake news in Pakistan:

“With clapping hands and cheering crowds, with beating hearts and smiling faces, international cricket is back in Pakistan,” said a man, dressed in a cricket jersey, to camera. The three-minute video was uploaded to the Facebook account of a news organization called CJ Post, which has 316,000 followers, and was posted hundreds of times on Twitter.

There was only one problem: CJ Post is not a real news outlet and the presenter is not a journalist, but an actor.

“Andrew Hamilton,” who has appeared in multiple videos shared by CJ Post, is a fictional newsreader played by a Cuban-born American man hired on the freelance platform, Fiverr.com.

Fake news, fake newscaster. But a real company providing the service. The goal?

According to Jack Stubbs, director of investigations at Graphika, such practices help PR companies to further their client agendas while preserving some degree of anonymity. “Outsourcing the work is often easier and safer for political actors who want to remain one step removed from the hands-on-keyboard operation.”

“All this shows how political groups can trade on the values of a free press to covertly advance their own interests,” he added.

AlphaPro’s clients include the Pakistan military’s media wing, Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), state-owned Chinese infrastructure firms, NGOs, universities and other government agencies.

That Pakistan’s military is involved is unsurprising but chilling. The Pakistani military is often an important element of the political scene. I wonder how important they think that the news be authentic in Pakistan, and I’m guessing Not very.

And what’s the business ethics of the company’s that produce these fake newscasts?

The hollyhocks are in bloom, which can be gorgeous. They still have a ways to go so far, though.

Quite lovely, unless The Day of the Triffids (1962) gives you nightmares. Oh, my Arts Editor once said something similar.

If the people are having troubles, sometimes you have to bring in the big guns.

As the first wave of COVID-19 spread through India last June, Anilan Namboothiri, a resident of the southern state of Kerala, set up a new idol in his home shrine that he honors as “corona devi,” or corona goddess: The unusual polystyrene figure, resembling the spiky COVID-19 protein, found its place alongside established Hindu deities such as Krishna and Shiva in the 48-year-old journalist’s shrine.

“In ancient times, contagions were attributed to the wrath of goddesses… that needed to be propitiated,” said Namboothiri in Malayalam. “The message I wanted to send people is that you can stay at home and worship god. God exists everywhere.”

Across India, people are worshipping female divine forms of the coronavirus, variously called “corona devi,” or by other forms of respect such as “corona mata” (corona mother) or “corona mai.” Incidents of idol worship or rituals to a coronavirus-inspired female deity have been reported from the southernmost states of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu to Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand and Bihar in the north and Assam in the east, all apparently springing up organically and unrelatedly. [Religion News Service]

It doesn’t say that social distancing and vaccination were the decrees of the goddess, so they’d better get around to it quickly.

It’s a bit of a big, blunt social tool, but if it works, then it’s at least tolerable.

Every time someone ‘betrays’ him, he blows. It doesn’t matter if it’s former Vice President, Mike Pence, refusing to decline to honor Electoral College votes that didn’t conform to Trump’s wishes, or obscure Michigan GOP elected officials who didn’t find that for which Trump’s searching.

Speaking of …

Former President Donald Trump took aim at two Republican Michigan lawmakers in a statement issued Thursday after a report led by Sen. Ed McBroom, R-Vulcan, debunked several false claims surrounding the results of the 2020 election.

Trump’s email hit the inboxes of his supporters one day after a Michigan Senate committee unveiled a report Wednesday morning that found no evidence of systematic voter fraud in the 2020 general election.

In the statement, Trump called the report – which used hours of public testimony and “countless” documents to conclude the 2020 general election was free from fraud – a “cover up.”

“Michigan State Senators Mike Shirkey and Ed McBroom are doing everything possible to stop Voter Audits in order to hide the truth about November 3rd,” the former president wrote.

The report also suggested Attorney General Dana Nessel look into individuals who used fake claims to raise money “for their own ends,” to be investigated.

Trump used the recommendation to accuse the Republican-led committee of wanting to “investigate the Patriots,” who he claims are fighting to expose what he maintains was “a very possibly Rigged Election.” [m-live]

It’s rather fascinating that the Michigan GOP, at least in the persons of the 3 (out of 4) members of the committee, announced they had confirmed the success of the Michigan election effort, or, if you’re the former President, the failure to find fraud.

This has earned them the easily forecast expulsion from Trump’s affections. Old Faithful, he is.

Obviously, the opinions of three Republicans doesn’t represent the Michigan GOP as a whole, but it does indicate that those motivated to find fraud failed to do so – which reassures me that there was little enough fraud to find in the first place, although I hardly needed such reassurance.

It also suggests that, at least in Michigan, local Republicans faced with realities on the ground will admit to them, regardless of political pressures, and that suggests they still understand that reality beats fantasies hands down. Look for this to play out in other localities, perhaps even Arizona, while Trump will try to head off any more admissions in some way dreadful and, yet, amusing.

It’ll be interesting to see if the Michigan GOP splits asunder the pressure of reality v fantasy.

Mark Sumner on Daily Kos summarizes some interesting findings involving various Covid-19 vaccines and China:

Joy Oladokun:

I had heard that Senator Sinema (D-AZ) had argued that it’s important to keep the filibuster because it protects progressive laws, and I thought, Well, that’s stupid reasoning. But now I see a Professor David Super of Georgetown is making the same argument:

This perspective is remarkably shortsighted. Although the filibuster has blocked central parts of the Democratic program in recent years, it has done the same for key features of the Republican agenda, too. At a time when the Republican Party is becoming ever more extreme, and when other constraints on irresponsible action have fallen away, the filibuster is more important than ever as a tool to protect hard-won legislative gains of the civil rights, environmental and consumer revolutions. It is the filibuster alone that protects the Endangered Species Act, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Legal Services Corp. [WaPo]

And this is convincing … how?

What is stopping the Republicans from killing the filibuster rule and enacting their desired legislation?

Their honor?

Or did the Democrats win the flip of the coin that decides who has dominion over the filibuster rule in this session of Congress?

Arguing on the basis of the status quo is a lost argument; there are variables at play here, and ascertaining them, their current values, and their resistance to change is key to building a realistic model of the situation. I think that the respect the Republicans have for their colleagues across the aisle, based on the comments of GOP leader Senator McConnell (R-KY), indicate that the filibuster’s predictable lifetime is now fairly short.

The question is whether the Democrats want to harvest the riches that may come of removing the filibuster, or, in the unfortunate instance of the Republicans taking the Senate back, it goes to the Republicans.

I like this lily because of its color palette:

When I was a cub reporter, my city editor was an H.L. Mencken clone who laughed at Bible-thumping hillbilly preachers. One day, as a young truth-seeker, I asked him: You’re correct that their explanations are fairy tales, but what answer can an honest person give about the deep questions: Why are we here? Why is the universe here? Why do we die? Is there any purpose to life? He eyed me and replied: You can say: I don’t know. That rang a bell in my head that still echoes. It’s honest to admit that you cannot explain the unexplainable. – James A. Haught, “The Long, Slow Death of Religion,” Daylight Atheism.

Sure wish I could have met that editor.

Hemant Mehta of Friendly Atheist expresses amazement that one of the far-right grifters preachers has admitted that Christian persecution doesn’t actually exist in the United States:

Christian hate-preacher Steven Anderson has been mostly banned from YouTube, but in a sermon today, he admitted that Christian "persecution" (as conservatives use the term) doesn't exist.

"Out of 100, we’re at, like, Persecution Level 3."

More tomorrow, but here's a mash-up: pic.twitter.com/cOtYeNIbMG

— Hemant Mehta (@hemantmehta) June 21, 2021

And here, where he provides a partial transcript of Mr. Anderson, sadly protected from copying. However, my summary above is sufficient.

I have to wonder if Anderson’s parishioners have been looking around and noting the lack of Christian persecution, and he found it necessary to, shall we say, adjust the message? It must be tough to adjust your cap for being dragged off to jail for howling forth the Word, but if the jackboots never come for you, well, it’s gotta be a little deflating.

And, of course, noting that the lack of persecution didn’t change when Biden took office, well, at some point only the most steadfast adherents will stick around. Anderson, having been banned from YouTube, has enough on his plate to mark him as an extremist preacher; he can let this particular message go with little to no damage to his reputation. In fact, Australian organization Voice of the Martyrs has a useful map: of Christian persecution in the world:

Look for this entire class of Christian messaging to fade away as reality wreaks its usual havoc. The real question will become: what’s the replacement message, designed to keep the faithful in line?

Erick Erickson has been on a campaign to claim real people for the Republicans. For instance, today’s advance is against Twitter, a platform for which I have little sentiment:

Eric Adams won in New York City [this is premature, but I’ll stipulate to it as the polls had him in the lead going in to last night. -haw]. Had you followed along on social media, you’d have presumed he would lose. He had two percent of Andrew Yang’s Twitter support and Andrew Yang was the first candidate to drop out last night after the results started coming in. …

The data more and more shows Twitter is not real life. Election results are showing those who equate Twitter with reality will wake up to cold hard truths on Election Day. Journalists, if they have an ounce of self-reflective abilities, should realize they need to spend less time searching the thoughts of Mordor on Twitter and get out into real America.

He bases some of this on this:

Pew Research has done an in-depth report on Twitter. It turns out that Twitter is overwhelmingly not of the left, but of the very left. Were Twitter a state, it would be the most progressive state in the nation — further left than Hawaii or Vermont — and if it were a congressional district, it’d be the most Democratic congressional district in the country.

All of which ignores one little elephant: the Elephant named Trump. It’s indisputable that Trump, as much as anyone could, dominated Twitter until he was banned from the platform.

Shall we apply the Erickson’s judgment to the Twitter Trump followers, even Trump himself, and deem him and them as unrepresentative of conservatives?

Erickson can jump up and down as much as he likes, claiming that “real people” are Republicans, but the polls suggest otherwise: not many people like having insurrections happen to their country, and there’s no reasonable way to interpret the actions of most of the Congressional GOP as not being supportive of the insurrection, to which I’ll add denying the realities, as discovered by the FBI, of the insurrection amounts to supporting the insurrection.

Since I’m here, I’ll also note he takes a shot at ranked-choice voting (RCV):

Lastly, the popular wave of rank choice voting, which will cause New York City to spend weeks determining a winner of the Democrat primary and ultimately the mayor, got started by academics and was picked up by the horde of Mordor rushing across Twitter. Everyone on Twitter thinks it is a good idea. New York City embraced it because the nerds said everyone on Twitter liked it. Now the city realizes it probably should not have done it. Too late.

Minneapolis, just down the road for us, uses RCV, and I have yet to hear any complaints. Quite honestly, while this is not a hard and fast rule, my suspicion is that if you don’t like RCV, you may be an extremist. RCV is, I think, a path towards victories by moderates. The capture of a political party by extremists, along with the implementation of toxic team politics, a subject I’ve discussed too much, is not sufficient to capture an election in a vulnerable district where RCV is used. Let a moderate enter a race and get their name on the ballot – or even run a Murkowski-esqe write-in campaign – and they’re likely to capture the first votes of the moderates and the second votes of the extremists. But the moderates may not vote for the extremists at all, leaving the moderate with all the votes on that side of the spectrum.

And leave extremists, like Erickson and most of the GOP leadership, sitting on their ass at the bus station, thumb out, looking for that ride out of town.

Erickson is tasked with helping make the Republicans look good and win elections, and he has a long ways to go.

Gallup recently released a new poll:

After doubling last spring and staying elevated in December, the percentage of Americans who believe that religion is increasing its influence on American life has retreated to 16%, in line with pre-pandemic levels.

I suppose a lot of questions could be asked about what this means. Does the big leap in late 2019 and early 2020 reflect the stress of the pandemic? If so, why does it fall off until now it’s back to the old mean?

I’ll be interested in seeing the next couple of data points.

If it stays at the mean, then we can guess there’s not much change in the fundamentals of Americans’ perceptions of the influence of religion on American society.

But if it falls below substantially? That might suggest that the pandemic, after its initial provocation of folks to turn to religion for comfort, began causing religious adherents to realize that religion’s promises were hollow. This graph may reflect a fear that I believe afflicted many clerics: without the in-person meetings, the strengthening of social bonds that are useful for engendering compliance with religious tithing, people lose that urge to attend religious institutions. After all, at least here in the United States, we look for payoffs for what we do, whether it’s using coupons, helping the poor, going to work, or seeking to propitiate the deity of our choice.

If you pray for you and yours to be delivered from Covid, and then Uncle Ray dies of it, miserably alone in a hospital, that may bash a hole in your faith, no matter how much we chant that dismaying phrase, God has a plan….

But that’s all speculation. We shall see. I actually expect it’ll stabilize right where it’s at.

And it’s milkweed. I got a couple of odd perspective pics.

However, they’re starting to pop up in the lawn. Not so good.

Mucormycosis:

“It’s a form of flesh-eating fungus that destroys tissues as it grows,” said Akshay Nair, an oculoplastic surgeon treating mucormycosis patients in Mumbai. Before the pandemic, Nair would see 10 such patients in a year, but since January, he has treated nearly 100 affected patients. “If it involves the sinus, they have to be cleared. If it involves the eye — the eyeball, lids, muscles around the eye have to be removed, leaving behind the bare, bony socket.” [“The deadly black fungus striking India’s recovering covid patients,” Ronny Sen and Niha Masih, WaPo]

I’m at a loss for words.

I wish I subscribed to the Wall Street Journal so’s I could read a particular opinion piece with my own two eyes, but instead I’ll have to depend on Professor Richardson:

More telling, perhaps, is an eye-popping op-ed published yesterday in the Wall Street Journal by Mike Solon, a former assistant to [Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY)], and Bill Greene, a former outreach director for former House Speaker John Boehner; both men are now lobbyists. In order to defend the filibuster, they argue that the measure protects “political nobodies” from having to pay attention to politics. If legislation could pass by a simple majority, Americans would have to get involved. The system, they suggest, is best managed by a minority of senators.

“Eliminating the Senate filibuster would end the freedom of America’s political innocents,” they write. “The lives that political nobodies spend playing, praying, fishing, tailgating, reading, hunting, gardening, studying and caring for their children would be spent rallying, canvassing, picketing, lobbying, protesting, texting, posting, parading and, above all, shouting.”

The authors suggest misleadingly that the men who framed the Constitution instituted the filibuster: they did not. They set up a Senate in which a simple majority passed legislation. The filibuster, used to require 60 votes to pass any legislation, has been deployed regularly only since about 2008.

Presuming this is accurate, I’d have to respond that Monitoring the Senators and Representatives who we, the citizens, have voted for is among the most important duties incumbent upon the citizens of the United States, as with any democracy, along with taking action when their competence is unsatisfying, or their positions lead to poor results.

Solon and Greene are basically advocating for the citizens to fail in their duties, to become not unlike foolish chikldren.

Solon and Greene are little more than wannabe autocrats, terrified of the change that actual citizen participation might bring.

Curious about soil dampness over the centuries? The Guardian has a neat presentation here. Money quote:

But here’s the astounding part: Williams and his team also estimated what drought conditions would look like if human activities had not caused global warming … and they found that we would still likely be living through a once-in-a-century drought – but human activity accounts for about 46% of the severity of the current megadrought.

I tend to see the weather as a massive non-linear system ala Chaos Theory, so I’m not quite sure I can sit comfortably with that assertion. Still, the last few years in the graph was quite instructive, wasn’t it?

Peter Beinart, another in a list of writers recommended by Andrew Sullivan (h/t, in other words), thinks we’re entering an era of illiberalism:

Now, as Netanyahu’s twelve years in power come to an end, there’s reason to believe that he was right [that the future belongs to authoritarian capitalism]. Over the last decade, leaders in his mold have sprung up across the globe. When Netanyahu returned as Israel’s prime minister in 2009, his chauvinistic, free market hyper-nationalism appeared anachronistic. Then, the following year, Viktor Orban reclaimed the prime ministership of Hungary. In 2012, Putin returned as President of Russia and Xi became General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. In 2014, Narendra Modi became prime minister of India. In 2017, Donald Trump became president of the United States. In 2019, Jair Bolsonaro became president of Brazil. All of a sudden, Netanyahu was elder statesman of a club of authoritarian, populist bigots. That’s his global legacy. In Israel-Palestine, Netanyahu will be remembered for having dug the two-state solution’s grave. But internationally, he’s done something bigger: He’s helped to father our illiberal age.

He may be right, but I have suspicions about extending trend lines with no interrogation of those people on the backs of which these extensions rest. As they observe a lack of disaster when the coalition replacing Netanyahu take power, as Biden continues to provide quietly competent leadership, etc etc, these folks who previously supported these dubious characters, at least in the democracies, may quietly give up on them, even refuse to admit to having supported them out of simple embarrassment.

Be that as it may, I prefer a different label, based on Beinart’s own statement, and that would be The Era Of Enormous Fucking Egos:

And, like Trump, Netanyahu’s communication style has always included large doses of lying. From the British officials who nicknamed Bibi “the armor-plated bullshitter” to Bill Clinton aide Joe Lockhart, who recalled that Netanyahu “could open his mouth and you could have no confidence that anything that came out of it was the truth” to Netanyahu’s own former aide, Limor Livnat, who Caspit and Kfir quote as saying that, “You cannot believe a word he says,” people who dealt with Netanyahu have long noted his fraught relationship with the truth. Which helps explain why, when prosecuted for corruption, Netanyahu responded with a campaign of brazen deceit that threatened to delegitimize Israel’s judicial system.

The irony is that Netanyahu has long seen himself as this era’s Winston Churchill, the man courageous enough to stare evil in the face when other leaders preferred appeasement. The two men do have things in common: Churchill was a racist too. But, nonetheless, Churchill helped lead a global coalition that defended liberal democracy in its hour of peril. Netanyahu has done something closer to the opposite: He has helped to lead the coalition of authoritarians that now imperils liberal democracy across the globe.

Sure, leadership nearly always requires an ego at the national level. But when it involves chronic mendacity, a fixation on reputation rather than essential truth, then it’s intolerable in a leader.

Sessile:

In botany, sessility (meaning “sitting”, used in the sense of “resting on the surface”) is a characteristic of plant parts that have no stalk.^[1][2] Flowers or leaves are borne directly from the stem or peduncle, and thus lack a petiole or pedicel. The leaves of most monocotyledons lack petioles. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “Debunking the ACLU’s ‘4 Myths About Trans People’,” Colin Wright, Reality’s Last Stand:

Is sex binary? The use of the term “binary” is one that many seem to trip over. According to the dictionary definition, binary means “consisting of, indicating, or involving two.” As a biologist, I can confidently say this definition accurately describes biological sex. That is because the sex of an individual refers to one of two—and only two—functional roles that an individual may play in sexual reproduction. Males are defined as the sex that produces small, motile gametes (sperm), and females produces large, sessile gametes (ova). There is no third gamete between sperm and ova, and therefore there is no third biological sex apart from males and females. Intersex is an umbrella term that refers to external sex ambiguity or a mismatch between internal sexual anatomy and external phenotype, but it is not a third sex.

While reading Noah Smith’s summary of disasters that didn’t happen during the pandemic, it occurred to me that Senator McConnell (R-KY) might be a trifle disappointed in this one:

4) State budgets are healthy

The Great Recession clobbered state budgets, and they never really recovered. It was natural to expect that the COVID-19 recession would have the same effect. Most people predicted giant budget gaps and called urgently for a federal bailout of the states. Here’s Brookings, from April 2020:

[I]n the coming months, states will experience large declines in tax revenues and increased enrollment in safety-net programs as disruptions caused by COVID-19 drive incomes and consumption lower. Without assistance from the federal government, states will likely be forced to make deep program cuts, enact substantial tax increases, or both.

But fortunately, the crisis never happened. The relief bills raised income, and that income got taxed, filling states’ coffers. Capital gains taxes resulting from the big stock market boom helped too. This May it was reported that California has a $75.5 billion budget surplus. New York has a more modest surplus, as does Texas.

In fact, by the time Biden gave states a big dollop of federal cash, most probably no longer needed it.

It’s a known rumor that Senator McConnell would love to see state budgets, plural, get into trouble, because then the judiciary might assign a judge to supervise a state’s budget – and that might result in the big slashes in those budgets that he’d like to see.

No such luck this time, Moscow Mitch.