Unsightly Mental Blemishes

From AL-Monitor:

Bloomberg reported Thursday that a Qatari consortium is preparing an approximately $6 billion bid to buy Manchester United. The group includes Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, a member of the royal family who previously led the Qatar Investment Authority, according to the outlet.

And …

The Saudi Public Investment Fund bought the Newcastle Football Club in 2021.

Plus …

The Financial Times reported Wednesday that Iranian-American billionaire Jahm Najafi is preparing a $3.75 billion bid to buy the Tottenham Hot Spurs.

Hot investment properties? Diverting hobby for billionaires?

Readers with an interest in politics and government have no doubt noticed recent reports on the suit Dominion Voting Systems (DVS) has brought against Fox News, a suit asking for well more than $1 billion in damages, for, it alleges, knowingly and maliciously spreading lies about the electronic voting systems which DVS manufactures and sells. It’s come to the fore because the release of various intra-company communications of Fox News that indicates the inside opinion did not jibe with what the reporting and the talent were publicly saying. Here’s Paul Waldman of WaPo:

On screen, Fox News personalities paint a world of clear heroes and villains, where conservatives are always strong and right and liberals are weak and wrong. But the extraordinary private communications revealed in the $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox show who they really are. Panicked over Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election, those same hosts, and the executives who run the network, cowered in abject terror.

They feared the same monster that keeps House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) up at night, the monster that conservative media and Republican politicians created: base voters who are deluded, angry and vengeful. …

At the same time, Fox News tried to suppress the truth. Reporters for the organization who corrected false claims were reprimanded and threatened. One reporter who fact-checked Powell and Giuliani was told by her boss that executives were not happy about it and that she should do a better job of “respecting our audience.” When Fox truthfully reported Joe Biden’s victory, Carlson texted his producer: “Do the executives understand how much credibility and trust we’ve lost with our audience? We’re playing with fire, for real.” When another reporter fact-checked a Trump tweet spreading lies about stolen votes, Carlson demanded that the reporter be fired.

They feared losing viewers to other cables news purveyors such as notoriously far-right NewsMax and OAN. Why? Not because of some sort of ego-trip over the number of viewers Fox News has, which generally is more than any of their competitors, but because each and every viewer represents money for Fox News. Does this seem obvious? Sure, but it’s worth remembering and repeating, and I’ll tell you why.

A sampling of the sectors of society on sale today.

For those readers who haven’t struggled through my Sectors of Society series, I’ll summarize it thusly: the importation of methods developed to service the goals of one sector of society, such as the private sector and its goal of making money^[1], do not automatically well serve another sector. Why? Because measuring optimality, which is the foundation of such a claim, is entirely dependent on the context in which the method was developed. Thus, when a businessman proclaims themselves, as a successful CEO, well-suited for a legislative or government executive seat, it’s entirely appropriate for voters to shake their heads in extreme doubt. If that’s the extent of their claims to government competency, then they have none at all.

This extends to selection of metrics. In order to have an excellent and essential free press sector, we need to select metrics that encourage what we desire from the free press news reporting function: truth, whole truth, and nothing but the truth, yes?

Yes.

Money, as a metric in this context, does not encourage excellence; it encourages free press new function as fantasy-satisfaction. If your audience desires to be told that climate change is a fantasy of the left, that crime is caused by the inferiority of those committing same rather than the result of inferior societal policies, that owning more and more guns brings you more and more protection, well, guess what?

The news purveyor who desires money as their most important goal will arrange to convey these messages, overtly and covertly, to their viewers, confident that money may be made off their viewership^[2].

And, as might be surmised, the individuals making up Fox News also place money over other less tangible values, as becomes apparent from reading the summaries of the depositions in the DVS suit. Hannity clearly has little use for honesty; Tucker Carlson, perhaps at the apex of the Fox News front line world, is notorious for minimizing the January 6th Insurrection, claiming it was instigated by the FBI or antifa, and for opposing aid to Ukraine, almost as if he were an agent of Moscow. In the current suit, the filing of importance notes:

Meanwhile, later that night of November 12, Ingraham was still texting with Hannity and Carlson. In their group text thread, Carlson pointed Hannity to a tweet by Fox reporter Jacqui Heinrich. Heinrich was “fact checking” a tweet by Trump that mentioned Dominion—and specifically mentioned Hannity’s and Dobbs’ broadcasts that evening discussing Dominion. Heinrich correctly fact-checked the tweet, pointing out that “top election infrastructure officials” said that “‘There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.’”

Carlson told Hannity: “Please get her fired. Seriously….What the fuck? I’m actually shocked…It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.” Tucker added: “I just went crazy on Meade over it.” Id. at FNN035_03890512. Hannity said he had “already sent to Suzanne with a really?” He then added: “I’m 3 strikes. Wallace shit debate[.] Election night a disaster[.] Now this BS? Nope. Not gonna fly. Did I mention Cavuto?”

Hannity indeed had discussed with Scott. Hannity texted his team: “I just dropped a bomb.” Suzanne Scott received the message. She told Jay Wallace and Fox News’ SVP for Corporate Communications Irena Briganti: “Sean texted me—he’s standing down on responding but not happy about this and doesn’t understand how this is allowed to happen from anyone in news. She [Heinrich] has serious nerve doing this and if this gets picked up, viewers are going to be further disgusted.” By the next morning, Heinrich had deleted her fact-checking tweet.

This suit may be a devastating blow to Fox News, and their devotion to the false goals of money, money, and more money, with allegiance to truth nowhere in sight, will not be of any help to them. After all, the free press news functions ideally operate under the flag of truth, even in America. Thus, their devotion to a goal inappropriate to their sector is coming around to damage them, and, hopefully, to an extent that gets the attention of their audience. Indeed, firing the entire on-air crew would not be inappropriate punishment, as their relentless pursuit of profit, indifference to truth, and the consequential polarization of America is certainly a matter of importance: One does not piss in one’s own living room.

And, returning to an earlier point, a good metric? Maybe start with Pulitzer Prizes.

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¹ Itself a dubious goal.

² It may be argued that the audience should have higher standards, especially since there are alternative media sources that provide closer renditions of the facts on the ground. Such is the frailties of mankind, eternally prey for the confirmation bias monster.

Ah! Protesters! I think thou protesteth too loudly!

Night Of The Living Deb (2015) is, as one might guess, a parody of Night of the Living Dead (1968). Goofy Deb spends the night with a discontented heir to a fortune, who is a little embarrassed to find her in his bedroom in the morning. Upon spilling her out on the street, she discovers that a zombie plague has descended on the city, and, in her goofy way, she needs to find her way to a safe place.

Which just might be the heir’s father’s place.

As we all learned long ago, no place can stand forever against slavering zombies, and soon enough everyone’s piling into vehicles, intent on leaving the city before becoming lunch. However, discovering that the city is now in quarantine was not on anyone’s bingo card, and, worse yet, it’s not even official.

Because it’s not being reported on the news.

And Deb does work at the news station in the city. And what’s the difference between a camera operator and a newscaster? Fifteen, twenty feet max?

So it’s time for her promotion, and boy is she ready for it. But don’t number the zombies among her fans; they want a bite of her, not just a selfie.

All in all, it’s more than a little silly and doesn’t stick enough pins in enough bloated egos. But it’s an earnest, cute effort that saves the night in the end. Sadly, lacking the noir gravitas of Night of the Living Dead does it no favors: this will not stick in your mind, never mind your teeth, for days afterwards.

And that’s too bad.

Anisotropy:

[Thanh-Son] Pham said the speed likely differs [in the core] based on the wave direction due to a physical property known as anisotropy, which allows a material to possess different properties in different directions. We commonly see anisotropy in wood, which is easier to chop along its grain than against it. [“Scientists have discovered a new core at the center of the Earth,” Kasha Patel, WaPo]

For readers interested in the Wisconsin Supreme Court primary for an open seat:

Daniel Kelly is a former state Supreme Court justice with connections to a plan hatched by the former president’s allies to reverse the 2020 election results in Wisconsin through the use of “fake electors.” He was one of two candidates to advance in Tuesday’s Supreme Court primary, according to projections by The Associated Press.

The other to move forward was liberal candidate Janet Protasiewicz, a Milwaukee County circuit judge who was endorsed by the Democratic abortion rights group Emily’s List. [NBC News]

Nominally non-partisan, if Protasiewicz wins then the Court flips from a 4-3 conservative majority to a 4-3 liberal majority. Because of this, I expect it’ll be a highly active tilt, with proclamations of doom if the other side wins, irrespective of source.

I must say, those proclamations of doom quickly become tiresome.

The Republicans, aware that they recently lost the state’s governor, attorney general, and lt. governor races, will probably be more desperate, since a liberal leaning state supreme court will undoubtedly take up the question of whether or not the gerrymandering of the state is constitutional, and those races suggest a more balanced drawing of districts could result in the movement of several Republican-held House of Representative seats into liberal hands.

Beyond that, there’s not much insight to mention. The general election is in April. Will the losing Republican of the primary, Jennifer Dorow, endorse Kelly? Campaign for Kelly? That’s become an open question in Republican post-primary seasons across states, and has no doubt resulted in the loss of a few seats to liberals. But it’s the nature of the current Republican Party to do so, as I noted in the prior post. If Kelly makes clear a known connection to the fake elector scheme connected to the January 6th insurrection, or a glowing endorsement of the Dobbs decision, he may doom himself.

And for those wondering about that Minnesota forecast wherein we get buried in “historic” amounts of snow, here’s a pic of the last snowstorm:

Today’s snow is not as sticky, and we’re having some winds, so we may not see the coated power lines phenomenon.

I can’t help but wonder if Capitol Police Chief Manger would dare to arrest McCarthy for this faux pas and, I suspect, criminal act:

Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s apparent deal to grant Tucker Carlson access to thousands of hours of Capitol security footage from Jan. 6, 2021 came as a surprise to at least one official with oversight responsibility over those files: Capitol Police Chief Thomas Manger.

A person familiar with the matter said Manger told associates he didn’t learn of the arrangement between McCarthy and Carlson until it began publicly circulating Monday. Capitol Police have been extremely reluctant to share large swaths of their security footage, citing potential risks to lawmakers, aides and officers tasked with protecting the building.

House Sergeant at Arms William McFarland also told associates he learned about it around the same time Axios broke the news Monday, the person familiar said. [Politico]

I think that if Manger has the nominal authority to arrest McCarthy for overstepping his bounds, then Manger ought to do so.

Sure, the right wing would utterly lose it, as that’s how to harvest money from their listeners, just as if a similar situation were to happen to the Democrats. But that shouldn’t affect Manger, just as the thought of upsetting a powerful politician – and that’s McCarthy, no matter how much damage he’s absorbed from the fringiest of his party in order to gain the Speaker’s position – happens to be.

If he has the authority and doesn’t use it, well, that sounds quite Roman, bowing to power when he shouldn’t.

And I would be deeply amused to see McCarthy’s mug shot.

Nosocomial:

Nosocomial infections, also called health-care-associated or hospital-acquired infections, are a subset of infectious diseases acquired in a health-care facility. To be considered nosocomial, the infection cannot be present at admission; rather, it must develop at least 48 hours after admission. These infections can lead to serious problems like sepsis and even death. [Osmosis]

Noted in “The Hospital-at-Home movement,” Eric Topol, Ground Truths:

In 1946, George Orwell wrote in How the Poor Die that the hospital is a sort of “antechamber to the tomb.” While we have been well aware of the escalating costs of hospitalization, along with nosocomial infections (acquired in hospital), the unnecessary procedures performed, and the medical errors that are frequently made, it took the pandemic to awaken the fledgling hospital-at-home strategy in the United States.

Only works if the poor have access to telemedicine, if I understand the article properly. And I wonder about the mess that accompanies hospitalization…

Charlie Sykes, former Wisconsin radio host, on the primary for the open Wisconsin Supreme Court seat that happens this Tuesday:

But now we get to the strangest twist in this high-stakes story: After decades of ignoring or downplaying crucial judicial elections like this one, Democrats and their allies are very much focused on the Wisconsin contest.

Meanwhile, Wisconsin conservatives have chosen this moment to crack up.

While progressive dollars pour into the state, Republicans have launched a bitter, high-stakes, and often quite personal, civil war that seems designed to take out the candidate who may give them the best chance to hold onto control of the state’s high court.

The increasingly divisive campaign between the two conservatives — Dan Kelly and Jennifer Dorow — is not about ideology, or even much substance at all. Both are committed conservatives, on the right edges of the legal spectrum, and are even graduates of the same low-ranked law school.

But this has not stopped an increasingly vitriolic right-on-right slugfest.

And etc.

What’s going on? My favorite and belabored topic – apologies and that sort of thing – of course: the toxic culture of the GOP coming to the fore.

• The libertarian streak of justifying selfish behavior as being good for society (read a decade of REASON Magazine and that’s the strongest lesson coming out of your experience, I’ll just about guarantee it);
• A belief that compromise, much like taxation & regulation, is an evil practice, in this case applicable to the idea of voting for the Republican who you didn’t support, but who won the primary;
• The Gingrich motto, Win at all costs!, leads to a willingness to do or say anything to win even a primary, a tactic alienating independents and Republicans that still believe in civility, not civil wars.

This is reinforced by the induction of new GOP members who fit the above bill, who think politics is absolute war and not The Art Of The Possible, and that their arrogance means they’re right.

A war between the Republican candidates? This is not a surprise. And there’s no gerrymandering this race, as it’s state-wide. So long as the Democrats don’t strain the conservative leaning independent segment of the Wisconsin electorate with their nominee, I expect we’ll see the Democrats narrowly winning the Supreme Court seat in the general election this April. And this would lead to a 4-3 liberal dominance of the Court.

A liberal victory may result in another go at redistricting in the State, while a conservative victory seems likely to be status quo.

Hey, paper covers razor!

Vengeance (2022) explores the fluid morality of today’s America, and finds that even that fluidity, that morality-of-convenience, cannot cloak the monster of morbid injustice, the creature Narcissism, strides the field and destroys what it touches.

Of course, it involves young people, story-teller and feeder of the contemporary maw of the podcasts Ben, and Abilene, eponymous daughter of the Texas town, whose fate it is to end up suddenly, chaotically dead. But unlike so many victims, Abilene has a family that knows she is gone, and now hungers to know the why. Ben, as the boyfriend, is called on to investigate.

And so the tale wanders from casual sex to opportunism to the importance of relationships, and then up the lonely road of human expendability, and the joy that one person takes in it. Indeed, its poetry entrances him, as it were.

This thing kept our attention as it fused modern and ancient sensibilities into one smoldering mash of morality, of anger, and of … vengeance. Well acted and well done, I’d say. But while it can be characterized as a whodunit, it’s really more of a whydunit.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt provides evidence to suggest something is going wrong with Gen Z, which Wikipedia more or less defines as … the mid-to-late 1990s as starting birth years and the early 2010s as ending birth years., or something like ages 10-20. Haidt has some headwinds, as he should when suggesting something out of the ordinary, but he deals:

I began this essay by taking the burden of proof upon myself. Given the long history of tech panics, you should come to this question and this blog with skepticism. Your default assumption should be the null hypothesis so often asserted by my critics: this is just one more unjustified freakout by older people about “kids these days.”

But as I have shown in this post, the evidence that this time is different is very strong. In 2010 there was little sign of any problem, in any of the long-running nationally representative datasets (with the possible exception of suicide for young teen boys). By 2015––when Greg Lukianoff and I wrote our essay The Coddling of the American Mind––teen mental health was a 5 alarm fire, according to all the datasets that Jean Twenge and I can find. The kids are not alright.

But this gave me pause:

In sum, it’s reasonable to start with skepticism of my claim (with Jean Twenge) that there is an epidemic of mental illness that began around 2012, and that is related in large part to the transition to phone-based childhoods, with a special emphasis on social media.  It makes sense to embrace as a null hypothesis the skeptics’ view that there is nothing to see here, just another moral panic, and the kids are fine. I am in full agreement that the burden of proof falls on me.

Sure, phone-based childhoods is a possibility. I’m not operating on data here, but rather a long history of blundering while analyzing bugs in software, coming often from the classic After this, then that logic error – yes, yes, there’s a Latin phrase I should use, and I forget it. The point is, a cause must be postulated and analyzed, and it’s important to keep an open mind.

So other causes to consider: overpopulation, the climate change crisis, American societal polarization between agnostics, or “Nones,” and fundamentalists, and the consequent appearance of a breakdown of society. Kids are quite vulnerable to all sorts of things. Sure, it could be phones. Maybe social media is a terrible thing. I’ve been a little troubled by it myself, given the innate urge of humanity to compete in any arena that comes along.

But whatever the cause, it needs analysis. The real question is whether it can be discerned from statistics, or if interviews with Gen Z members on a large scale will be necessary.

Probative:

The legal term probative describes something that tends to demonstrate or prove something. A weapon with the accused’s fingerprints on it would be considered probative evidence at a trial. [Vocabulary.com]

Noted in “Proud Boys move to subpoena Trump in seditious conspiracy trial,” Rachel Weiner, WaPo:

And I don’t mean become an omnivore, which biologists tell us we are naturally. No, no, I mean actually go out, buy a gun, get the training that terrifies the NRA, and go hunting.

It’s what Dana Milbank of WaPo is doing, and his reasoning echoes what I’ve been working out over the last decade:

But I do plan to be an armed vigilante. I will be wielding my gun against a brutal foe — one that destroys our forests, kills our wildflowers, sickens humans and threatens the very survival of birds, mammals, insects and amphibians.

I am becoming a deer hunter.

Yeah?

In the part of the Virginia Piedmont where I have a home, there are between 40 and 50 deer per square mile — compared to only 27 people per square mile. To get things back into ecological balance, [Bernd Blossey of Cornell] estimates, we would need to get the deer population down below 10 per square mile.

And …

None of this is the deer’s fault. They’re doing what they’re supposed to do. It’s our fault for removing their predators, leaving [the deer] free to multiply to unnatural levels. And now it’s our responsibility to fix the mess we’ve created.

A possible sighting of a the infamous winged miniature deer. It’s been attacking pedestrians in the neighborhood for months.

For a liberal pundit like Milbank, it’s the independent thing to do, really. Replacing the predators with anything but ourselves will be unacceptable to certain groups of people, so the next best thing is to resume the hunting which we used to do.

Incidentally, I shan’t be joining him, and not for an ecological or ideological reason. The simple fact of the matter is that I’m an exceptionally clumsy individual; I’ll be the first one to fall out of a deer stand, if I’m so foolish as to go up the ladder, and that’s if I’m lucky. If I’m unlucky, I’ll accidentally shoot someone. So no guns for me.

But Minnesota needs more hunters as well. Milbank cites an annual drop in hunter numbers:

“We’re losing about 3 to 4 percent a year over the last 20 years here in Virginia,” Katie Martin, the head deer biologist for the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources, tells me.

I believe we’re seeing the same in Minnesota.

Griefbacon appears to read their life’s tea leaves through a coffee-besmirched lens:

I’ve never felt like I’ve succeeded in loving myself, at least not with any consistency, but some mornings I wake up very early and I’ve left a big mug of yesterday’s coffee in the fridge overnight because I knew I would want it in the morning. Maybe it tastes good or maybe it tastes bad but most importantly it tastes cold, and it helps me wake up, and I get to be grateful for it. Imagine being able to give yourself exactly the thing that you need. It doesn’t matter how small the aperture is, or whether this gesture leads to some larger consistency. It usually doesn’t; after all, it’s just coffee. But for maybe ten minutes or maybe a whole hour, love is a fixed point of arrival. Someone left coffee for me to find in the morning; someone loves me.

I’ve never felt this sort of affection for coffee, but I am a late-comer to the stuff. Enjoy.

Win at any costs.

Including their honor.

Rep George Santos (R-NY) is perhaps the surprise politician of this Congress, caught in so many lies and deceptions that his inner life is hard to comprehend. My Arts Editor claims he’s really a head feint, a distraction from some far more important scandal.

Then along came Rep Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), whose account of a hard childhood has been questioned.

And now we have a third member of this elite group:

If you believe Middle Tennessee’s newest congressman, he’s not only a businessman, he’s also an economist, a nationally recognized expert in tax policy and health care, a trained police officer, even an expert in international sex crimes.

But an exclusive NewsChannel 5 investigation discovered that Andy Ogles’ personal life story is filled with exaggerations, a story that’s often too good to be true. [NewsChannel 5/Nashville]

When the slogan of the national party is Win at any cost!, this sort of result is, or should be, unsurprising. For those who can live with that dictum, they have the electoral advantage, as temporary as it may be, so long as they are liars who know their limits and how to play on their fellow citizens’ biases.

But this is going to be a short-term tactic, because voters will tire of being embarrassed. They will prove unwilling to re-elect such candidates, and then questions will be asked of newcomers.

And how much bigger will this group grow? Will the contagion of repulsion extended beyond the borders of the affected districts? Will this cause yet another wave of anti-Republicanism, joining the ripples caused by the misguided Dobbs decision, of the disastrous January 6th insurrection?

Are the Democrats once again setup by Republicans’ toxic culture to outperform?

Time will tell. My $5 is on Yes. I think James Carville’s remarks concerning the Republican Party are spot-on:

Democratic political consultant James Carville on Wednesday described Republican lawmakers who heckled President Joe Biden during his State of the Union speech as “white trash.”

“I tell people I have the equivalent of a PhD in white trashology, and we saw real white trash on display,” Carville told MSNBC anchor Ari Melber.

I’m beginning to sense another imminent Republican disappointment. The next election is a long ways away, but so far the weeds are not blowing the way of the Republicans.

AL-Monitor’s Salim Essaid reports that ChatGPT, the AI chatbot, is beginning to make its own way in the world:

The Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA) announced on Wednesday that it will use the conversational artificial intelligence agent ChatGPT to improve its offerings, claiming to be the first UAE government entity and the first utility company globally to do so.

The electric and water service provider will use the technology released in November last year to support customer and employee services, but did not provide further specifics.

This may be a bit worrisome for those dependent on correct answers:

Kurt Muehmel, a strategic advisor at Everyday AI company Dataiku, said that using the AI tool for anything considered a critical function would be unlikely and premature.

“I would advise them to proceed with caution,” he said, because much remains unknown about how these technologies perform.

These current models are very good at producing text, but even though they’re correct a lot of the time, they can’t be guaranteed to be truthful, he told Al-Monitor.

It’s possible that this announcement is merely the exhalation of hot air by a company looking for a temporary advantage. I think what really catches my eye, though, is quite predictable: on a planet which is overpopulated, we employ an artificial intelligence rather than real people to answer the phone and provide answers.

I suppose that speaks to the temperaments and pay rates.

Red clump star:

While [exoplanet] 8 Ursae Minoris b was discovered in 2015, follow-up work by [Marc Hon of the University of Hawaii] and his colleagues shows that the host star had already been a red giant and is now shrinking, a phase in which it is called a red clump star. It would have expanded to reach about 70 per cent of the distance between Earth and the sun, which should have consumed 8 Ursae Minoris b in the process. “This planet is in a forbidden place,” he says. [“‘Forbidden’ planet somehow escaped consumption by its dying host star,” Jonathan O’Callaghan, NewScientist (4 February 2023, paywall)]

Captured since the red giant phase? Alien artifact? Splotch on the telescope’s sensors?

When that damn uncle insists on telling you the Moon landing was faked by alien reptiles.

Dudes and Dragons (2015) is, well, a sort of parody of Dungeons and Dragons. The humor is genre-specific, and the whole thing is a little twisted. Still, I liked the side-orc. And that’s about it. Unless you love the D&D genre, or are a James Marsters completist, you should probably give this a skip.

When Biden announced for 2020, I reluctantly stated that I liked Biden best because I felt the experience of being a Senator forever, as well as a member of the House for a short time, and VP for eight years, equipped him to play against the nut-cases representing themselves as Republicans these days.

This is ice on polished granite.

I trust he’s proven my case, even beyond my expectations. Those pundits who’ve felt they need to present a balanced view, if only to keep their paying jobs, have really had to stretch to find a way to that mythical land. And I have little pity for those pundits who cater to the far-right sensibilities, such as my favorite, poor ol’ Erick Erickson – here’s his latest on the unidentified object shootdowns (UFOs, or UAPs to use more modern jargon), but you’ll have to read a bit before finding the part that leads to this:

Team Biden is showing itself to be dithering and weak.

I’ve been scanning his public blog posts for weeks with little commentary, but it’s telling that Erickson is having to critique the far-right for their indulgence in conspiracy theories of all stripes, and their willingness to frantically defend churches of dubious reputation, nearly as much as he attacks the Democrats – and has to rush to his own judgment on them. His task of keeping the far-right together enough to keep voting for chosen candidates and not indulge in self-cannibalism is not nearly as easy as it ought to be, and he has to be careful not to alienate those he tries to call back to reasonability.

Me? I’m gonna wait out these reports, ignore and/or laugh at these biased analyses, and see how much information is released to the public.

But in the meanwhile, Biden’s biggest burden remains what I talked about six years ago: his age. He seems sharp as a tack, but he’s reaching that age (currently 80) where he might not wake up tomorrow morning, and it’s not clear to me who, if not VP Harris, will replace him on the 2024 ticket.

It’s a matter that should concern Democrats, but it’s also worth remembering that Presidential contenders are not always nationally prominent when they run and win. Carter was an obscure Georgia governor when he ran and won. Clinton was less obscure, but still a governor from Arkansas. Obama? An obscure, half-term Senator. On the other hand, Mondale, Gore, Kerry, and Hillary Clinton were prominent politicians – and lost. The Democrats’ next Presidential candidate may be an obscure governor who I’ve never heard of.

But here’s an important difference between the 2024 election and previous elections. I think, deny it as they might, that the Republican members of Congress, and consequently – yes, I mean that, consequently – the Republican candidate for President, are such a pack of mediocrities or worse, third- and fourth- and even a few fifth- raters sprinkled among them, that, unlike earlier elections, Biden’s sophisticated attack strategy, and the competence that he continues to demonstrate, may cause permanent and crippling damage to what currently constitutes the Republican Party.

Contingent on continued competency, and perhaps what worries Andrew Sullivan (paywall),

But Biden’s party is far further left than Clinton’s, and although Biden’s talk has changed quite a lot, he has yet to do anything that would provide a clear clash with the far left. Maybe he fears he would break his party. Maybe he just doesn’t want to go there.

But if he can avoid letting the far-left propositions, those that justifiably alarm independent voters, become part of his narrative, there’s a chance that not only will the Democrats retain the Presidency, which I rate as a very good chance, but they may beat the odds in the Senate and retain control as well, and take back the House. That’s how badly Republicans are coming off so far.

How can I make these guesses, which I shan’t dignify with the term predictions, without madly giggling at myself? I’ve discussed special elections before, that they are highly vulnerable to low turnouts, local politics, bad weather, & etc. And those that I’m about to cite are early in the cycle and were for state legislature seats that lean Democratic. But it’s still worth taking a look at the margins in comparison to how Biden did. This is from Daily Kos:

What these say is that the Democrats greatly exceeded predicted margins in these three races. Is this predictive of anything? Yes – for three local districts in Pennsylvania, a state that endured not one, but two state-wide races between Democrats and rabid Republicans.

But it may mean that the Republicans’ bleeding, which began in 2018 with the loss of the House in a shocker, continued in 2020 with the loss of both houses of Congress and the Presidency, and continued in 2022 when they just barely won the House in the face of a predicted “red wave”, while horrendously losing a seat in the Senate, is set to continue. Every moment the House is in Republican control means it’s in danger of being lost in 2022. There are enough loose Republican lips and egos, nurtured in their epistemological bubble, to suggest that voters who get a snoot full of them won’t even consider voting for the current crop of power-grabbers.

And, in that case, if Biden were to change his mind and not run, it may not matter much. Put anyone competent up and the Republicans may end up spinning their bald tires like mad, burn out their engines, and leave their wreck of an ideology smoking on the highway.

But we’ll just have to see. I now see questions being raised about the veracity of Rep Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL). If these questions pan out, she may join Rep Santos (R-NY) on the gangplank to obscurity – and her district is thought to be not so safe.

And the House won’t be in 2024.

I still back Biden, but I won’t be surprised if he opts out, and a Democrat I haven’t considered, haven’t even heard of, comes out of nowhere to win the Presidency. The Republicans have surrendered to the barstool occupants, full of opinion and bluster – but neither expertise or, frankly, the ability to think.

Leaving only the question: can the Democrats, beyond Biden, out think them?

And, sirrah, which metric do you wish to lose by?
Oh, I think the purity of the silver will do.
Oh, rubbish, sir, rubbish!
Yes, that would be your’s.
Mocking the archetypal British adjective is hardly darts, sir!
Works for me, you impostor.

The Emperor’s Candlesticks (1937) is a somewhat complex tale from the late 1800s, as a message must get to the Czar of Russia, passing through screen of the aristocrats and guards who do not wish the Czar to receive said message. Both a messenger from those who’ve kidnapped the Czar’s son, a certain Russian Baron Wolensky, and a messenger from the Russian secret police chief giving evidence that Wolensky is a traitor to the Czar, are making the trip, and in the same train, too.

They happen to use the same candelabra to conceal their messages.

And said candelabra – quite a nice piece, according to my Arts Editor – forthwith disappears, taking its messages with it.

Perhaps a bit light and fluffy, it’s still an interesting glimpse into the history of cinema, and how cinema treated then-recent history, and for those who are completists concerning William Powell or Robert Young, this will be a must-view. Fortunately, this won’t hurt even a little bit, as it’s a nicely made bit of fluff.

Naturally, the integrity of currencies of all kinds is dependent on the ethics of both users and issuers. It turns out that last month, a would-be rescuing ideology, as it were, announced itself, as Salim Essaid notes in AL-Monitor:

As FTX’s former CEO faces US criminal charges for defrauding investors and stealing billions from customers before filing for bankruptcy in November, new Islamic finance-based coins are being launched by companies claiming that their checks and balances can help reinstate faith in cryptocurrencies.

“Islamic finance can help provide protections with its ethical practices, using the transparency of blockchain technology,” said Mohammed AlKaff AlHashmi, co-founder and chief business officer of Haqq Association, a nonprofit digital financial services company that follows Islamic law.

From my reading of history, corruption is a pan-ideology phenomenon. Anywhere positions of trust are necessary in order to enable a project or institution, there must be safeguards instituted, or those positions become targets for those of a weak moral disposition. Essaid further notes:

Yet community-centric guidance alone cannot replace the role of regulators to hold companies accountable. AlHashmi explained that they do not have the full authority to tell a company that their project is not compliant with Islamic finance, mainly because that defeats the purpose of using decentralized tools such as crypto and blockchain. But the Sharia verification mark will show the label of community trust.

Which is more or less an acknowledgment of my point.

We shall see. I expect that in a few years the project will be shut down for unpopularity, inefficiency, or corruption. Or because crypto has been discarded.

Looking at the Eye of God. Right in the Eye.

Hard To Be A God (1989) examines the problem of subjective, emotion-ridden creatures attempting to assume the guise of objective investigators. Subjectivity refers, in my mind, to the phenomenon of applying our preconceptions and automatic judgments to our observations, often without being cognizant of it, and it tends to skew our observations away from accuracy and proper analysis. Subjectivity can have negative or positive survival value, and as it tends to be much faster than objectivity, it has a certain advantage over objectivity in the great game of survival.

Except when it doesn’t.

Our pawn in the game of observation is Anton, a scientist who has traveled from Earth to an unnamed planet, populated with indigenous folks of a barbaric nature, who happen to strongly resemble humans. This permits Anton to enter the planet’s society as Rumata, an exiled aristocrat from another country, with a convenient reputation.

The society is rife with political factions and personal animosities, all existing within a royalist government framework, sometimes competing with theological forces, and it’s an existential competition up and down the board. Into this welter of emotion, power-chasing, and undisciplined corruption wades Anton as Rumata. Along with his observations, relayed in real time to an orbital space station populated with fellow anthropologists, he’s searching for a missing colleague who has removed himself from communications with the station, and a local who appears to be in the process of inventing the printing press, a potentially planet-changing advance.

And existing power structures hate uncontrolled advances. He’d best watch his step.

For all of the violence and corruption of the society, Anton cannot help but be drawn in. These are, after all, people like himself, but not benefiting from the advances in government and ethics which his people have achieved. That raises the sticky question that faces the colonialist: when is interference ever tolerable? Is it a meaningful question when the balance of power is a teeter-totter with an adult on one end, a child on the other?

But what can one man do? Especially the guy with the nickname, The One Who Does Not Kill?

It’s an interesting story, but there are some jolting problems. For one, it’s not in English, so get ready to do a lot of caption-reading or learn German. Second, the story style is a collage of German and 1980s tropes, which means segues are painfully abrupt, story background is non-existent, and sometimes it seems that characters pop out of nowhere. Oh, and the hair of the indigenous is terrifying.

But it remains an interesting exploration of a plausible question: How do we explore other societies? You may want to explore this story.

Plasmasphere:

The plasmasphere is a lopsided donut of cold plasma inside Earth’s magnetic field. It is created by leakage from the top of Earth’s atmosphere (the ionosphere). The outer surface of the plasmasphere is called “the plasmapause”–and that is where the tides have been found.

“We can think of the plasmapause as the surface of a ‘plasma ocean’ surrounding Earth,” says one of the lead authors Quanqi Shi of Shandong University. “Using a 40-year database of satellite observations, we report the first identification of lunar tides on the surface of this plasma ocean.” [“STRANGE TIDES IN THE PLASMASPHERE,” Dr Tony Phillips, Spaceweather.com]

I’ve been noticing that liberal pundits have observed and been talking about how the federal deficit is only of importance to Republicans when the Democrats are in power, and here it comes:

Our debt is 125% higher than our gross domestic product. That is not sustainable. What is not feasible or practical is trying to reduce the debt through tax increases, which would slow the economy and cause the debt to be an even higher percentage above GDP.

What is possible is freezing the debt.

It is possible for Congress to embrace a pay-go system, much like we had in the first Bush Administration that carried through the Clinton Administration. Freeze spending and require either tax increases or spending cuts thereafter. Couple that with deregulation and other incentives to spur economic growth and the debt becomes a lower and lower percentage of an ever-expanding GDP.

Growing our way out of the problem is a far better solution than taxing our way out of a problem with no propensity to slow down spending. [Erick Erickson, Confessions of a Political Junkie]

The first thing to ask is, You guys had control of the Presidency and both wings of Congress in half, or more than half, of both the Bush and Trump Administrations. Why didn’t you folks fix the problem then?

Filibuster, you say? Please, don’t make me laugh.

Don’t dare raise taxes? I live in Minnesota, long the home of ruinous taxes, if you believe the local Republicans, and we’re just zipping along.

Can’t protect ourselves? The Bush Administration certainly didn’t let it stop them from starting two wars.

The hypocrisy is giving me a headache. Literally.

And it’s another reason to ignore the Republicans until they reform themselves out of their morality-free hole in the ground.

When it comes to the Chinese balloons appearing in American skies, whether they’re meteorological or more menacing in their vital nature, it rather appears to depend on what you want to see as to what anyone wants to see. The liberals – and maybe the American military – sees it as a mistake that happens from time to time:

The top U.S. general responsible for protecting North American skies said Monday that past incursions by Chinese balloons went undetected by the Pentagon, exposing what he characterized as a worrisome deficiency that must be addressed.

The Defense Department has acknowledged that the craft shot down Saturday off the South Carolina coast after a days-long journey across the U.S. mainland marked at least the fifth time in recent years that Beijing has breached the nation’s airspace using such technology. Officials informed lawmakers over the weekend that, dating back to Donald Trump’s presidency, there had been similar breaches near Texas, Florida, Hawaii and Guam. [WaPo]

Erick Erickson doesn’t buy it – but, then, he’s followed right-wing instructions most of the time over the years I’ve read his public blog, and this seems to be a classic example:

The larger issue of the Chinese balloon is a test to see how we would respond. We failed the test. We could have taken action over the Pacific as it wandered into Alaska. We could have taken action as it wandered into very rural northern Idaho and Montana, where the loss of lives would be virtually non-existent. Instead, we waited until it traversed the whole United States, floated over the Atlantic, then shot it down.

Biden ordered the shootdown on Wednesday. It happened on Saturday.

In the run-up to the shootdown, several defense sources said these balloons also happened in prior years, predating Biden. Also, several made clear that they were not sure what was actually on the balloon, so it was better to wait for the ocean in case there were biological or radiological issues, particularly with power. But considering the solar panels, that seems to be excuse-making. And, with a seven-mile debris field possible, the damage of impact on the land would not have been much different.

Culminating in …

That Joe Biden’s gut still tells him to go with the advisors who keep leading him astray is a problem with Joe Biden, not with his advisors. He looks weak.

Erickson’s problems? You mean, besides the report from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics that the US blew by professional estimates for employment gains … “Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 517,000 in January, and the unemployment rate changed little at 3.4 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today.“?^[1]

Yeah, this analysis from CNN:

As the new year got underway in China, hopes appeared to be running high that an easing of tensions with the United States could unfold in the months ahead.

China’s Foreign Ministry expressed as much late last month when it said China would “welcome” a visit from US Secretary of State Antony Blinken – an expected visit that analysts say Beijing viewed as an opportunity to help strengthen its economy and repair fraught diplomatic ties.

So when a high-altitude balloon from China carrying a payload the size of three coach buses equipped with what American officials have described as surveillance equipment was spotted over the continental US, visibly hovering above a state with key military assets and ultimately sparking an international incident – it naturally raised critical questions about just what had happened, and why.

China maintains the vessel, which was shot down by the US over the Atlantic Ocean on Saturday, was a weather balloon thrown off course. And it has shown signs of both being caught off guard by the incident and wanting to stem the potential damage, analysts say, not only framing the situation as the result of factors beyond its control, but also offering a rare expression of “regret” over it in a statement Friday.

Indeed, if China’s government is having internal problems stemming from its response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and exacerbated by its inferior CoronaVac vaccine and a national pride that prevented its use of Western-developed vaccines, then this analysis makes a great deal of sense. Needing to cool a heated relationship that might otherwise result in sanctions could easily be at the top of Chinese priorities – at least for top leader President Xi Jinping. Autocracies are stable right up until they fly apart, and so for all I know Xi is trying very hard to hold together China, and doesn’t need the USA making things worse.

But his rivals might risk it. Just like this.

Finally, Professor Richardson, a professional historian and a liberal, has a bit of scorn to serve up:

It’s Saturday night, so I will be a bit snarky: [right wing critics] need to get a grip. A key aspect of any country’s national security is spying, and of course China and the U.S. are spying on each other. Shooting the balloon down as soon as it was spotted would have endangered Americans and made learning anything from it more difficult.

That being said, it’s not at all clear to me what this balloon was designed to accomplish politically. Secretary of State Antony Blinken canceled his planned visit to Beijing over it, giving the U.S. a reason to back out of a visit that certainly seemed likely to bolster President Xi Jinping’s government. Scholar of international relations Daniel Drezner notes in his Drezner’s World it appears to have been a screw-up at a level below that of President Xi. China has been trying to cool tensions with America, not heat them up.

That being said, the visible spy balloon predictably sparked Republican attacks on President Biden, so the incident has the potential to weaken the administration’s strong steps to counter the growing power of China.

For those who think the balloons are of a sinister nature, it’s worth noting that analysis of their remains will yield useful information for the USA, and monitoring their communications prior to their elimination may yield even more information. The Chinese had to know that, eventually, they’d be detected and knocked down, so why would they send high value surveillance technology into American airspace. Out of context, that is a puzzle.

So what’s the context? These balloons are flying at around 60,000 ft and moving fast. They may actually be above the North American jet stream, or they may spend time in it. And here’s the final piece that I’ve yet to see mentioned anywhere:

What if this really is an accident brought on by weather that’s slowly becoming more and more extreme?

Yes, all this squalling could be the result of climate change. Sure, right-wingers like Erickson will squawk and laugh and ignore such an idea because it doesn’t fit with their tenets of how reality works, but I think it’s worth considering in all this learned analysis. Accidents do happen, and that’s what we may be seeing here.

¹ Naturally, one should not trust the first cut numbers of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, given its history of issuing revisions. Still, half a million new jobs is a bit of a gob smack when the projection was short of 200,000 jobs, enough so that I wonder if someone screwed up the count. And … it certainly weakens Erickson’s sniping at Biden’s advisors, doesn’t it?