Unsightly Mental Blemishes

A reader comments on the wreckage that used to be Iowa:

It was a derecho. A very large derecho: 770 miles long lasting 14 hours, starting in eastern Nebraska and traveling easterly across Iowa and Illinois. I worry that they may start occurring in MN more often. Climate change definitely involved. 115mph winds in eastern Iowa. Not much can stand up to that.

It took 250 years to hit 1°C of global warming by 2015, the fastest change in 65 million years.

It’ll take 25 years to hit 2°C by 2040.

Here’s what I was able to find, from Wikipedia, in turn from NASA.

Not the sort of curve you want to see on temperatures – unless you’re a fusion reactor developer.

And my Arts Editor reports that one of her Iowa contacts hasn’t had power for an entire week now.

Former Trump DHS Secretary Nielsen’s Chief of Staff Miles Taylor:

Miles Taylor, a former senior Trump administration official, endorsed Joe Biden’s presidential campaign on Monday, becoming one of the highest-ranking former Trump administration officials to do so. …

“Given what I have experienced in the administration, I have to support Joe Biden for president and even though I am not a Democrat, even though I disagree on key issues, I’m confident that Joe Biden will protect the country and I’m confident that he won’t make the same mistakes as this President.”

In the video, Taylor accuses Trump of directing FEMA to withhold disaster funding to California following devastating wildfires in that state because voters in that state had not voted for him for President.

“He told us to stop giving money to people whose houses had burned down from a wildfire because he was so rageful that people in the state of California didn’t support him and that politically it wasn’t a base for him,” Taylor says in the video. [CNN/Politics]

Meanwhile, far-right pundit Erick Erickson, in mail to unsubscribers on his mail list, teases for more money today:

Tomorrow, for everyone, I’ll explain what is really going on with the post office and why it is nothing to fret over. This is just a conspiracy theory loved by members of the media, so they’re treating it differently than QAnon even though it is no less nuts. If you get this, you’ll get that tomorrow. For the rest, you’ve got to click the subscribe button.

Nothing to fret over. Those weekly magazines of mine that aren’t showing up? Don’t sweat it. Meanwhile, someone with an inside view of the Administration is sounding all the alarm bells.

Erickson, for all of his claims that he’s not an apologist for the Administration, well, he is. And a bad one.

We’ve already seen a few high officials discrediting Trump, but I’m not sure I remember any of them explicitly endorsing Biden for President. Kudos to Mr. Taylor for – finally – getting up the gumption to do it. It’s the sort of thing a Responsible Republican should do.

And if this was strategically timed, all the more kudos.

An item in Steve Benen’s summary of campaign news made me think:

From a group email. The accompanying note was Be sure to watch all the way to the end credits.

If we had a metric for spontaneous creativity, I wonder if it would have increased measurably since the pandemic started.

Anadromous:

going from salt water to fresh water or up rivers to spawn: said of salmon, shad, etc. [Your Dictionary]

Noted in “These Prehistoric Ocean Animals are Still Around Today,” Ocean Currents:

Since lampreys are anadromous fish (fish that live in fresh and saltwater), they play a major role in healthy estuaries—transporting nutrients from the ocean to freshwater environments. Due to increased human disturbances, lampreys are severely declining, which has the potential to affect entire ecosystems.

The usage might be a bit inaccurate. Does the definition, as understood by marine biologists, include the requirement that the fish die after the spawning?

[h/t JN]

Apple trees – or at least the two varieties we have – are bi-annual. This is the non-productive year for ours, except, well:

I don’t keep up very well in many fields. For instance:

Via WaPo, by Lyz Lenz, a columnist for the Cedar Rapids Gazette:

Sunsets on other worlds and even stars:

More here.

The USPS story bears repetition, as Margaret Sullivan promptly does:

Satrap:

(in the past) someone who governed a province (= political area) in ancient Persia [Cambridge Dictionary]

Noted in “Trump refuses to learn the lessons of World War II,” Max Boot, WaPo:

Those were farsighted decisions, but the postwar order was also deeply flawed. The Red Army occupied Eastern Europe, turning the region into a Soviet satrapy for more than four decades. Joseph Stalin’s troops also advanced into Manchuria, China’s industrial heartland, helping speed Mao Zedong’s victory in China’s civil war.

I’m dreaming of a … glurg glug glurg

The Monster Walks (1932) is a rather limp murder mystery cum horror show, with beastly arms emerging from the headboards to strangle the lovelies in their sleep. Not that this is a bad thing, but this particular script could have used at least a couple of rewrites.

Don’t bother.

Stolen from The Weekly Dish’s VFYW contest – thanks to Chris Bodenner, I think. I had not heard of the Chinese ghost cities:

Bad planning? Leaders’ prestige? I wonder about the environmental costs.

Pentest:

Penetration testing is an offensive security exercise conducted by an organization with the intent to uncover security weaknesses and ultimately help strengthen their defense mechanisms, threat detection capabilities and response times. Traditionally, penetration testing is performed by an independent third-party with little to no upfront knowledge of their target organization. This is done to imitate an adversary who is targeting the organization with nefarious intent.

Penetration testing can be performed against something as small as a single tenant application and as large as a global enterprise network. Several methodologies frameworks standards and tools exist which are often motivated by or designed to satisfy a particular compliance or regulatory committee such as PCI and HIPAA. [Pentest Geek]

Noted in “Pen Test Partners: Boeing 747s receive critical software updates over 3.5″ floppy disks,” Gareth Corfield, The Register:

“Aircraft themselves are really expensive beasts, you know,” said [Alex] Lomas as he filmed inside the big Boeing. “Even if you had all the will in the world, airlines and manufacturers won’t just let you pentest an aircraft because [they] don’t know what state you’re going to leave it in.”

Groups frowned upon by established authorities, such as terrorist groups and revolutionaries, may find cryptocurrency alluring, but sometimes things like this can happen …

The Justice Department seized $2 million worth of cryptocurrency from terror groups in the Middle East, federal prosecutors announced Thursday, marking the largest ever US government takeover of online terrorist financing.

The funds from ISIS, al Qaeda and the al Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, would likely have been used by the groups to buy weapons and train would-be attackers, Justice Department officials said.

“Two million dollars is a lot of equipment that they can buy, a lot of weapons a lot of training that they can fund, a lot of tickets to fly people around the world,” said John Demers, the assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s national security division. “This is going to make a big difference in their operation.”[CNN/Politics]

The problem with hard currency is security: transportation and storage can be a chancy business. The ease of use and security of cryptocurrencies, though, have a counterbalance in ease of confiscation, or even just simple disappearance. If you’ve invested in bitcoin and the infrastructure disappears, too bad for you.

While hard currency can lose its value due to inflation, at least it still has some. Quick conversion into weapons or other supplies may be a wise move, depending on the stability of the country issuing the currency.

From NewScientist (11 July 2020):

Everyone is entitled to one good scare – and it may be good for us. People who watch a lot of horror films and those who are morbidly curious about unpleasant subjects seem to be more psychologically resilient to the covid-19 pandemic, a study reveals.

“Horror users tended to have less psychological distress,” says Coltan Scrivner at the University of Chicago. …

Fans of horror movies were less prone to negative mental states. “Which suggested to us, maybe with horror it’s about emotion regulation,” says Scrivner. Watching scary movies “allows me to give myself the experience of being afraid and then conquering that fear”. This may be one of the underlying reasons for people’s fascination with scary stories.

The prepper genres, which all feature society’s institutions collapsing, had an additional benefit. “We find that same decrease in psychological distress, but you also find an increase in preparedness,” says Scrivner. The team found a similar pattern for pandemic-themed movies. “People who’ve seen none at all were much less prepared than people who said they’d seen many.”

Some of it will be in the promptings of considering how things can go wrong, rather than how they can go right. Consider a fan of romantic comedies, searching for the right person to date, the anticipation of the pleasures and ecstasies, all that sort of thing.

Meanwhile, the horror fan is screaming “Don’t open that door where the fumes are coming,” because they’ve learned to think ahead on a more realistic level. The researchers note that just watching horror movies isn’t enough, as if seeing The Omen would be helpful in preventing social anxiety. No, it takes an active interest, in my opinion, the inquisitive mind that looks at how things may go wrong.

And figure out how bad it can get.

It’s the unknown that causes anxiety; the horror fan who thinks they have the worst figured out, right or wrong, can now take actions to mitigate the worst. And that leads to less anxiety.

I am not a horror fan, although I must say I enjoyed Alien and Aliens.

From SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory):

SOHO is no stranger to discovering new comets – via the NASA-funded Sungrazer Project, the observatory has discovered over 4,000 previously unknown comets since launch in 1995. Most of SOHO’s comet discoveries can be categorized into families, or groups, the most famous being the “Kreutz” sungrazer group which accounts for over 85% of the Project discoveries. Only around 4% -some 175 comets- do not appear to belong to any known group or comet family. However, these are often among the most interesting comets and this most recent discovery -SOHO’s 4,049th comet- was no exception!

The comet was first spotted on August 5th, 2020, by amateur astronomer Worachate Boonplod. At discovery, it was just a tiny faint smudge near the edge of the C3 coronagraph images recorded SOHO’s Large Angle Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO) instrument. As it neared the Sun over the next day or so, the smudge became increasingly elongated, ultimately hinting that it may be two comets pretending to be one!

This was confirmed as the comets entered the narrower field of view of the LASCO C2 camera, where the improved resolution confirmed that not only was this more than one comet, it was actually THREE comets! The two main components are easy to spot, with the third a very faint, diffuse fragment following alongside the leading piece.

And here’s the fascinating film:

And not from any known comet family. Wheeee!

Only watch if you want a glimpse into the far right GOPers spouting what they’ve read on right wing websites:

Adding to the story of Trump’s Postmaster General Louis DeJoy:

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy continues to hold a multimillion-dollar stake in his former company XPO Logistics, a United States Postal Service contractor, likely creating a major conflict of interest, according to newly obtained financial disclosures and ethics experts.

Outside experts who spoke to CNN were shocked that ethics officials at the postal service approved this arrangement, which allows DeJoy to keep at least $30 million in XPO holdings.

DeJoy and USPS have said he fully complied with the regulations.

Raising further alarms, on the same day in June that DeJoy divested large amounts of Amazon shares, he purchased stock options giving him the right to buy new shares of Amazon at a price much lower than their current market price, according to the disclosures. [CNN]

To the latter point, these fall into the class of stock trading known as call options. By buying these options while selling his current holdings, he expects to see shares of Amazon plunge in the near future, although the article doesn’t state an expiration date, so take “near future” as you will. As Amazon uses USPS for much of its delivery requirements, he may be banking on his “optimizations” on impacting Amazon in the near future.

Or, perhaps, he expects the Covid-19 pandemic to, again, negatively impact Amazon. Or even its cessation might. It’s difficult to say.

But it’s the former point that’s appalling. He should have been required to sell all of those holdings, and if USPS regulations are so lax that he can claim he’s in conformance with them, those regulations need reform.

In any case, even an appearance of a conflict of interest should be, and would be, avoided by public service employees. I would not be surprised if there’s criminal charges related to DeJoy in the near future.

Sinistral:

1. of, relating to, or located on the left side, esp the left side of the body
2. a technical term for left-handed
3. (of the shells of certain gastropod molluscs) coiling in a clockwise direction from the apex [Collins English Dictionary]

Noted in “Lefties get their day today,” Michael Pearson, CNN:

It’s National Left-Hander’s Day, a celebration founded by the Left-Handers Club to honor leftie style.

Now in its 17th year, the day has been celebrated with right vs. left sports matches, left-handed drinking events and other activities, the club says.

In honor of the day, some tidbits about sinistrality: …

You just wait until we get you home, young lady!

The Lady Vanishes (2013) is what I might call a typical British mystery thriller. Set in 1930s Europe, orphan and heiress Iris Carr, temperamental and unafraid of scandal, decides to leave a European resort for home. Dizzy and ill on the train, she’s taken under the wing of housekeeper Ms Froy.

Until she turns her back for a brief moment and loses track of Ms Froy.

This isn’t a problem until everyone from the old English ladies, eager to return home, across the pastor and his wife, to the minor noble family traveling with an ill family member, all swear up and down that Ms Froy doesn’t exist.

All of which nettles our woozy Ms Carr, a lass with little use for societal norms at even the best of times. In her search of the narrow, wobbling train, she stumbles into bridge-builder and linguist Max Hare, a young & somewhat charming man, and his Professor, also a linguist. This helps the search to proceed – both in the physical and theme spaces.

I reveal nothing even the casual audience member will miss, but the fun is somewhat enhanced by the notion that the ill passenger has a contagious disease and must remain isolated; that the consistent assertions that Miss Froy never existed rings so true as it comes from the pastor, and so menacing from the noble family’s matriarch; and the religious mania of the pastor’s wife leads to meditations on our current  crop of hysterics, urged on as they are by mega-church pastors such as Copeland, today, and, in the past, Oral Roberts.

Remember the dictum that In order for evil to triumph, good people need do nothing? It plays a part here, too. Miss Carr, acting on her certain knowledge, is doing something rather than nothing; but what of those who do not have that certainty, yet would be good, such as Max Hare, the bridge builder? While the movie hardly dwells on the question, it is an important question, and well worth considering when an Administration puts migrant children in cages while keeping them apart from their families; denies the reality of the novel coronavirus; and attacks vital public institutions for reasons dishonorable.

Sure, that’s a digression, a little adventure for the voter dubious of their duty, to remind them that voting is not only about casting a ballot, but of self-education concerning their choices and how government should be run.

Back to the story, this is well-told in the comfortable and competent British way. You won’t be knocked off your chair by it, but you’ll almost certainly enjoy it. But it is unsettling if you allow yourself to consider its parallels with today.

I like both colors, and so will you.

And then there’s this.

I believe we were told it eats milkweed. It almost looks like a cartoon.

The Democrats are a little excited at their victory in South Carolina last night in what they term the last special election before November, or so I infer from an email:

Democrat Spencer Wetmore was just declared the WINNER in the last special election in the nation before November!

This is a big one, too: Spencer’s landslide, 20-point victory is a huge upset in a South Carolina district that favored Donald Trump in 2016, and it’s nothing short of a disaster for GOP Senator Lindsey Graham’s reelection chances.

20 point victory? Well, yes it is. But there’s more than one way to look at data like this, isn’t there?

Obviously, turnout for the special election was low, but, still, more Democrats than Republicans showed up. Is it important?

I can’t make up my mind. A 20 point Democratic victory in a district that voted for Trump has at least some symbolic importance. On the other hand, the losing Republican, Josh Stokes, doesn’t appear to have wrapped himself around Trump, at least so far as I can tell from his campaign site, and his Facebook page. This may be more of a signal that the base won’t turn out unless you’ve sworn your allegiance to Trump.

And Stokes no doubt knows that. Perhaps he was testing the anti-Trump Republican waters. Perhaps he truly can’t stomach Trump and doesn’t feel simpatico with the Democrats – or couldn’t win their primary.

So I see this result as more obscure than revelatory.

On the QAnon angle, the Republican Party is now a smidgeon worse, a little closer to extinction and ridicule, members discredited, etc:

Marjorie Taylor Greene, a businesswoman who has expressed support for the far-right conspiracy theory QAnon and been criticized for a series of racist comments, has won the Republican nomination for Georgia’s 14th Congressional District.

Greene beat neurosurgeon John Cowan in a primary runoff for the open seat on Tuesday in the deep-red district in northwest Georgia, despite several GOP officials denouncing her campaign after videos surfaced in which she expresses racist, anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim views. [NBC News]

Or perhaps I shouldn’t use the adjective smidgeon, because, well, a smidgeon is a smallish quantity. Greene beat her challenger Cowan, and by quite a lot, while making her QAnon leanings known.

Source: Ballotpedia

A survey of previous primaries for this district yields little useful information, as candidates tend to run unopposed, and the Republicans usually win by large margins.

November should be perversely interesting in this case, as it’ll speak to the depravity with regards to ascertaining truth in the case of the Republican Party.