Unsightly Mental Blemishes

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016) is a movie with most of the elements of an excellent film, but fails to mix them properly in the test tube. Intriguing characters, excellent visuals, a plot that doesn’t give away the game in the first ten minutes, dialog appropriate to the characters (although sometimes I failed to follow the accent of the main character), magical creatures exhibiting traits both appropriate and comedic, they’re all there.

What’s missing is a sense of the daring. The sense of exploring an intriguing theme. The idea that one should walk out of the theater chewing on the ideas behind the film.

Those are not in this film. There is plenty of something akin to deux ex machina, a sure sign of a failing story, and a main danger of stories involving magic, where the problems may be wished away – especially in a universe where the use of magic doesn’t even seem to require much in the way of resources.

But don’t let this scare you from this movie. There’s a lot of deliberate comedic elements, some excellent dramatic elements, and the visuals & special effects appear flawless. (Although I will complain that some intercharacter chemistry simply did not work for me.)

But you won’t be thinking about this movie an hour later. It’s like a luscious meringue, airy and sweet, but no nutrition.

And I should take them to task for that completely conventional ending. They could have done so much more with it.

ectogenesis:

Ectogenesis (from the Greek ecto, “outer,” and genesis) is the growth of an organism in an artificial environment^[1] outside the body in which it would normally be found, such as the growth of an embryo or fetus outside the mother’s body, or the growth of bacteria outside the body of a host.^[2] The term was coined by British scientist J.B.S. Haldane in 1924. [Wikipedia]

Encountered on The Crux by David Warmflash:

In 1924, British physiologist and geneticist John Burdon Sanderson Haldane coined the term ectogenesis. Haldane was thinking of an artificial process in which development, from fertilization to birth, could occur outside of a woman’s body.

He described ectogenesis in a work called Daedalus, where he predicted that about 70 percent of human babies would be born this way by the year 2074. Today, 92 years after Daedalus, judging by the pace of neonatology, genetics and other areas of biomedicine, it appears that we’re on track to have an artificial uterus-placenta of some kind within Haldane’s predicted timeframe.

In Fools’ Parade (1971) the Biblical admonition that we’re all sinners is elaborated upon. Three sinners are released from prison during the Depression, and because one of them has a just claim on a lot of money, some leading citizens of Glory, West Virginia decide the ex-cons should be deprived of that money, and similarly their lives.

Yep, those are the latest fashion from Pawtucket.
Source: Rotten Tomatoes

It’s a memorable meditation on how the lust for wealth and the unworthiness of the Other will excuse and distort the behaviors of those subject to it. As our nominal sinners complete their service to society, the hyenas of that same society, in the forms of a banker and a Sunday School teacher, begin to circle their prey. The dogs are loosed! (Actually, a bloodhound has a prime role in the movie, first tracking the ex-cons, but later coming to live with them, perhaps symbolizing the basic amorality of tools, or, in other words, morality is defined by intent and knowledge.)

One, the main gunner, must be reassured that the prey are “atheists”, and then his enthusiasm for the hunt knows no bounds, and he fairly drools when he encounters the unhappy men. But, unhappy they may be, they are not without wiles, and the hunter’s very source of morality is turned against him as an escape is made.

But make no mistake, the leaders of this betrayal of the morality they claim to uphold know what they are doing, even if they mutter about protecting the town in these tryin’ times. The wealth attracts them like flies to a dead horse, and unlike the flies, there’s some tearing at each other over the stench of the wealth.

But it’s interesting that the most despicable are the leading lights of Glory. It reminds me of an article from Skeptical Inquirer discussing those who disbelieve the evolution the strongest – it’s the best educated, not the worst. Here we see those who should know best, who should be most moral, who are most willing to capsize the ship of society in pursuit of their own bedizenment. This might escape the general attention, except that the storytellers make sure we end the movie with a mob scene in which it turns out the mob is not there to persecute the innocent ex-cons – but one of the instigators of foul corruption.

This movie greatly benefits from the skills of Jimmy Stewart, George Kennedy, Kurt Russell, Strother Martin, and Anne Baxter, who know how to bring a movie to life through the stuttering of men under the pressures of alcoholism, avarice, and many other such motivations.

This is not Lord of the Rings, or Pacific Rim.

No, it’s Fools’ Parade, and it has its own gentle lessons to teach, all the while entertaining you. Recommended.

The originalism vs living document argument amongst the judicial set is a very long running argument, with many facets I don’t understand. But this summation from retiring Florida Supreme Court Justice James E.C. Perry in the Miami Herald seems succinct in his rejection of the originalist position:

Flaws of ‘originalist’ doctrine

Racist thinking has also penetrated some judicial thought, namely the “originalist” judicial philosophy of many conservatives, embraced by the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, Perry said. That doctrine adheres to the notion that interpretation of law should be based on the original meaning of the text of the statute or the Constitution at the time it was enacted.

The doctrine was promoted by conservatives as a de facto litmus test for Gov. Rick Scott’s replacement for Perry on the court. Scott’s selection, C. Alan Lawson, described his approach as “very originalist.”

But to Perry, a descendant of slaves, the notion that jurists should interpret the Constitution through the lens of the original intent of the founding document is incongruous.

“They say that the Constitution is stagnant and I don’t think it is. I think it is living — like the Bible is living,” he said. “Should I want to be an originalist and go back to the original thinking of the Founders? No. Never. I’m not enamored by places called plantations. That doesn’t give me warm and fuzzies.”

Perry considers the Founders “flawed people” who were wise but not omniscient.

“They were slave owners,” he said. “These people didn’t have divine intervention. They had some great ideals, but it didn’t include poor whites. It didn’t include women. We weren’t even human beings, we were chattel. It didn’t include the Native Americans, and it didn’t include merchants. It included land owners, or planters, they called them.”

He noted that slaves were not allowed to marry, and black men had to submit to their owners at all costs: “They’d come in and want to have favors with your wife — whatever you call her — you would have to stand outside the door. Think about it, just in terms of human sense. How debilitating, how dehumanizing can you get?”

I wonder how he feels about stare decisis. While I appreciate that today bears little resemblance to 1776, I think what drives originalists a little nuts is that there’s no structure to constrain the power of judges.

Back in mid-December, Bruce Reidel assessed the Middle East from the viewpoint of the Saudis and Jordanians and doesn’t like the idea of moving the US Embassy to Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and writes in AL Monitor:

The [Saudi] kingdom has a full plate. Low oil prices have hurt the economy and raised unemployment. The king’s war in Yemen is an expensive quagmire, just like Nasser’s. Iran is today’s existential threat, and its proxies are on the march in Syria and Iraq. Tehran will hail an American shift in Jerusalem as validation of its decades of labeling Washington Israel’s protector. If [King] Salman is soft on Jerusalem, the Iranians will have a field day denouncing the king as a puppet of Zionism.

Jordan’s King Abdullah will be in an even hotter seat than Salman. He has his own claim to Jerusalem and a majority Palestinian population. Just a few days ago, the Jordanian monarch presided over a formal reinterment of the remains of Jordanian soldiers killed defending Jerusalem in 1967 in a martyr’s memorial in Amman. The king badly needs American help to cope with the Syrian crisis, but he can’t ignore what happens to Jerusalem.

The Arab world is in the midst of an unprecedented tsunami of chaos, terrorism, sectarian violence and civil war. Al-Qaedism is rampant even if the Islamic State is contracting. All the causes of the Arab Spring are still unaddressed. It is not the time to pour oil on the fire.

I suspect when the shouting’s over, the American symbol won’t be Uncle Sam, but a bull liberally adorned in china fragments.

With regards to one of the greater extremophiles, HuffPo reports the board he serves on wants to have nothing to do with him:

Paladino was Donald Trump’s New York campaign co-chair and currently sits on the nine-member Buffalo school board. In recent days, he’s faced intense criticism for his answers to a local newspaper’s questionnaire about what he would like to see happen in 2017. Paladino said he’d like President Barack Obama to die from mad cow disease and called first lady Michelle Obama a man who should go live with gorillas.

psychrophile:

Psychrophiles or cryophiles (adj. cryophilic) are extremophilic organisms that are capable of growth and reproduction in cold temperatures, ranging from −20 °C to +10 °C. Temperatures as low as −15 °C are found in pockets of very salty water (brine) surrounded by sea ice. Psychrophiles are true extremophiles because they adapt not only to low temperatures but often also to further environmental constraints. [Wikipedia]

Even folks not on the ACA can get hurt if the ACA is out and out repealed, as Joan McCarter on The Daily Kos notes:

[The ban on insurance caps is] probably gone with Obamacare repeal. Along with children up to age 26 being on their parents’ plans, employers with more than 50 workers having to provide insurance, free preventive care, affordable coverage regardless of whether you have a pre-existing condition, and seniors saving billions on prescription drugs. All in jeopardy now. “We view everything as being threatened right now,” said Kathy Waligora, director of the health reform initiative of EverThrive Illinois. That’s for the 156 million Americans who have employer coverage as of last year.

I was chatting with a Mayo Clinic programmer yesterday and he said Mayo’s executive team is not happy with the ACA, primarily because of Medicare reimbursements shrinking. I don’t know if that’s an official position or just scuttlebutt.

Steve Benen comments on right fringe House member Trent Franks’ (R-AZ) opinion that the theft of DNC materials by the Russians are less important than their release:

… a far-right Donald Trump ally for most of 2016, appeared on MSNBC earlier today and echoed Putin’s talking point:

“I’m all for doing what’s necessary to protect the election here, but there’s no suggestion that Russia hacked into our voting systems or anything like that. If anything, whatever they may have done, was to try to use information in a way that may have affected something that they believe was in their best interest.

“But the bottom line, if they succeeded – if Russia succeeded – in giving the American people information that was accurate, then they merely did what the media should have done.”

I get the feeling Trent Franks hasn’t thought this one through.

Maybe the congressman is confused about the basic details of the controversy. Someone – Russian agents, according to U.S. intelligence agencies – stole Democratic materials by way of a cyber-attack and released those materials in order to subvert the American political system.

There’s two problems with Steve’s remarks.

First, he’s letting Franks set the assumption that the leaked material was actually accurate. We don’t know that. All we know is Wikileaks released something. Frankly, we need a national conversation regarding the trustworthiness of such leaked material, since, by its nature, it cannot be verified. Honestly, we don’t know if the Russians just made shit up. In general, the same applies. Is Wikileaks actually one of the greatest con games ever concocted?

Second, the leaks really aren’t the problem. The real problem was the concerted Russian effort to subvert our news culture with its own versions of the news, tuned to discredit Russia’s greatest foes and support Russia’s allies in American culture. This has been documented and strikes me as far worse than the ethical confusion, real as it is, of Rep. Franks.

This all leads to the collapsing morals of the Fox News conservatives. Voting for a man whose lies per day during the campaign overwhelmed fact checkers, leading to Trump trying to ignore the Russia controversy, as noted by CNN:

Here are the foil lamé decorations, front and back.

This one’s currently still in use.

Jeff de Boer engages in, uh, well there doesn’t seem to be a word beyond Art.

Source: BoredPanda

That’s for a cat, and it’s cat sized. Here’s another:

Source: JeffDeBoer.com

More fascinating work here. Look in Galleries.

Politicians of all stripes are always claiming success, because admitted failures are rarely re-elected, and (just in case you haven’t stumbled across on your own) Trump appears to be striving for an Olympic medal in this event1, taking credit for a number of job creations and movements with little excuse, as Kevin Drum (among many others) [insert your adjective here, such as gleefully or in horror] notes:

The skepticism in these headlines turns out to be warranted. Trump did indeed desperately try to take credit for this, and you will be unsurprised to learn that he was lying. First of all, Sprint announced these jobs back in April. Here’s the Kansas City Star: “Sprint Corp. is launching a nationwide service to hand-deliver new phones to customers in their homes. The Direct 2 You service, which first rolled out in a Kansas City pilot, will lead to the hiring of about 5,000 mostly full-time employees as it spreads nationwide.”

Second, the Japanese owner of Sprint, Softbank, announced in October that it was creating a huge tech investment fund.

Third, in December, Softbank’s CEO announced the fund again after a meeting with Trump, and said that one part of the whole package was the creation of 50,000 new jobs. Today, Sprint reluctantly conceded that its 5,000 jobs were part of the previously announced 50,000 jobs.

And finally, these jobs were announced yet again today.

That makes four times these jobs have been announced. Donald Trump was responsible for none of them.

Let me move off on a more general tangent, though. It’s inevitable, even good, to fail. It indicates you’re working on a hard problem. Programmers fail all the time. So do artists. Other professions may fail less often (which reminds me of a horrid anecdote from many years ago, as I heard a software guy from India moan that he should have gone into civil engineering, as buildings were always falling down in India and no one was ever punished for it).

And governing is no different. Sometimes you try something hard and it fails. But a politician may not get re-elected if some project she or he champions fails. So then they go off and bury it.

It’s a conundrum. Almost makes term limits sensible.

Clean Technica is reporting, even celebrating, the move of Statoil out of it fossil fuel assets in Canada and into offshore wind in the US:

Norway’s state-owned Statoil oil and gas company won the right to develop an offshore wind farm in US waters last week, practically within hours of selling off its tar sands oil assets in Canada. The new wind area is off the coast of New York State, hard by New York City, which makes it a high status, high visibility site for the global energy giant.

Similarly, Sami Grover on Treehugger.com is also excited:

… is about perfectly designed to make my little TreeHugging heart sing: Norwegian oil and energy giant Statoil has spent the end of 2016 selling off its assets in Canadian tar sands, and securing rights to develop a gigantic offshore wind farm off the coast of New York State. …

But to emphasize the point, Statoil is state-owned by Norway, a country. I stop the sentence there to emphasize the point: Statoil is, to some extent, controlled by an entity which has more than just profit on its mind. More formally, Norway has a responsibility to assure the survival of its citizens in the future.

This is important in that most of the climate change offenders are public companies, such as ExxonMobil, and they are not necessarily concerned about climate change and the environment in general; their shareholders clamor for profits.

So I hesitate to become excited that this may be the start of a sea-change.

It does, however, bring to mind the problems that will occur if & when the sea-change comes: a multitude of workers out of work. Of course, there will be new jobs in the cleaner energy industries, but will there be enough? Will adequate retraining be provided, or do those who worked to provide us with energy just get pushed off the oil platform and told to swim for it?

Three cats, Carrie Fisher, Debbie Reynolds, David Bowie, and many others gone – and a very bad election.

I’m a little terrified of catching the news now.

Can’t wait for this year to end.

It may be the end of the practice saber lamé as it proves that resistance is, ummm, one way to the eternal barcalounger. On its way from competition to Social Security, my Arts Editor has used it as a casual canvas. While we wait to hear about one more road to salvation, or possibly hell, here’s the front side – quite reserved, I’d say:

And, far more dramatic, here’s the back side.

The practice foil lamé is much more ambitious. Someday we’ll have to post pictures of its kraken.

Lloyd Alter on Treehugger.com delivers a history lesson on the United States interstate system – and what Trump’s comment on nuclear arms may portend for our future:

On this thread, this is a rather amazing article from The News & Observer, entitled “North Carolina is no longer classified as a democracy.” It’s not hyperbole – the author, Andrew Reynolds, is a political science professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill who helped found the Electoral Integrity Project (EIP). First, about EIP:

… my Danish colleague, Jorgen Elklit, and I designed the first comprehensive method for evaluating the quality of elections around the world. Our system measured 50 moving parts of an election process and covered everything from the legal framework to the polling day and counting of ballots.In 2012 Elklit and I worked with Pippa Norris of Harvard University, who used the system as the cornerstone of the Electoral Integrity Project. Since then the EIP has measured 213 elections in 153 countries and is widely agreed to be the most accurate method for evaluating how free and fair and democratic elections are across time and place.

And so what happens? He’s asked to evaluate the North Carolina elections.

In the just released EIP report, North Carolina’s overall electoral integrity score of 58/100 for the 2016 election places us alongside authoritarian states and pseudo-democracies like Cuba, Indonesia and Sierra Leone. If it were a nation state, North Carolina would rank right in the middle of the global league table – a deeply flawed, partly free democracy that is only slightly ahead of the failed democracies that constitute much of the developing world.

Well, we knew North Carolina and its GOP were a special place – but at this juncture maybe it’s a special needs place. I’m not quite sure what “integrity of the voting district boundaries” might mean, but …

… no country has ever received as low a score as the 7/100 North Carolina received. North Carolina is not only the worst state in the USA for unfair districting but the worst entity in the world ever analyzed by the Electoral Integrity Project.

The professor is, I think, outraged, and has a prescription. Here’s one of the points:

Last, elected officials need to respect the core principles of democracy – respect the will of the voters, all the voters and play the game with integrity.

Integrity, meaning respect for your opponents.

Meanwhile, I am quite happy I’m not a user of the cloud, such as Amazon Web Services. How does that connect to the North Carolina issue?

Because a state that does not respect democratic principles generally doesn’t have principles at all, and that would mean any confidential data in the cloud that happens to be stored on computers located in North Carolina – a state with a certain amount of technology companies, such as Wells Fargo – is only as safe as technology can make it, not as safe as the law can make it.

And that’s important.

Of course, the GOP will scream foul, but this is a respected political science professor, not some obviously biased report. Sure, he could have a hidden agenda, but that would have to be revealed to invalidate this finding.

And as this sinks in, it’ll be interesting to see if the corporate world takes notice and pushes North Carolina to resume democratic ideals. Since the GOP has abandoned democratic principles, they are left with the only fuel for their own self-respect, at least in the secular world, being prestige, and in the United States there’s a significant amount of prestige associated with having big corporations in your State. If they start walking away, the state and the GOP, the responsible political entity of the last decade, will lose prestige.

A lot of it.

State legislators of the GOP persuasion may wish to postpone trips outside of North Carolina until they clean up this mess.

Paul Rosenzweig on Lawfare reports on some tactics under consideration if the two-state solution for Israel and Palestine falls through:

The Palestinians want a full state — with all the independence that entails. But the Israelis won’t permit that. They are scarred by the Intifada and the violence of that time still resonates strongly. Their idea of a state is a partially independent entity that remains subservient to their control for security matters. The two of these ideas just don’t mix.

That has led some Palestinians (particularly younger ones) to suggest a one-state solution: Agree that Israel has won and owns the land, and then wage a civil/human rights campaign to gain equal rights and treatment. “You want us,” they might say, “you got us. Now give us free health care; free education; and the right to vote.” I’m not sure if that position can be sustained — it is premised on passive civil resistance that is not culturally attractive — but if it can it would pose a deep problem for Israel. It’s commitment to liberal democracy would run straight into its commitment to a Jewish state — and I don’t know which would give way. My guess is that if the Palestinians called the Israeli bluff the Israelis would have to fold — and simply admit that they plan to occupy the West Bank as a protectorate for the foreseeable future. That, too, is not sustainable.

My bold. Would this result in a natal race, an attempt to out-reproduce the other side?

A key assumption is the commitment to a liberal democracy – not at all clear to me in a government so deeply entangled in religious demands. Paul then adds in the recent American refusal to veto a UN resolution condemning the illegal settlements:

The final straw, if you will, is the changing US policy that seems in these last days of the Obama Administration to be almost schizophrenic.  The outgoing President, perhaps in a fit of pique or perhaps in order to create his own facts on the ground, has allowed the UN Security Council to condemn Israeli settlements as unlawful — a change in US policy that is almost as earth-shaking as the President-Elect’s abandonment of the one-China policy.  Meanwhile, the President-Elect had lobbied against the resolution and has named as his envoy to Israel an appointee who strongly favors expansion of the settlements.  The US embassy may move to Jerusalem.  This radical shifting of American policy, after years of stability, can only be further unsettling in an already unsettled environment.

nutation (astronomy):

In astronomy, nutation is a phenomenon which causes the orientation of the axis of rotation of a spinning astronomical object to vary over time. It is caused by the gravitational forces of other nearby bodies acting upon the spinning object. Although they are essentially the same effect operating over different timescales, astronomers usually make a distinction between precession, which is a steady long-term change in the axis of rotation, and nutation, which is the combined effect of similar shorter-term variations. [Wikipedia]

Noted in A Matter of Degrees, by Gino Segrè.

The New York Times covers some particularly provocative commentary:

Carl Paladino, a western New York builder, one-time Republican candidate for governor of New York and political ally of President-elect Donald J. Trump, came under fire on Friday for racially offensive comments about President Obama and the first lady, who Mr. Paladino said should be “let loose in the outback of Zimbabwe.”

Mr. Paladino’s comments were published in Artvoice, a weekly Buffalo newspaper. They came in response to an open-ended feature in which local figures were asked about their hopes for 2017.

“Obama catches mad cow disease after being caught having relations with a Herford,” said Mr. Paladino, who ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2010, making an apparent reference to the Hereford cattle breed. He said he hoped the disease killed the president.

The title of this post is merely an attempt to give Mr. Paladino the benefit of the doubt, as it’s not entirely clear this is a racist comment; on balance, it’s far more likely that his only source of news is Fox News and sources closer to the fringe. He also claims he was merely trying to draw attention to President Obama’s “transgressions.” It may be time to consign him to a nursing home.

The Trump campaign disavowed his remarks.

Mattang:

Stick charts were made and used by the Marshallese to navigate the Pacific Ocean by canoe off the coast of the Marshall Islands. The charts represented major ocean swell patterns and the ways the islands disrupted those patterns, typically determined by sensing disruptions in ocean swells by islands during sea navigation. Most stick charts were made from the midribs of coconut fronds that were tied together to form an open framework. Island locations were represented by shells tied to the framework, or by the lashed junction of two or more sticks. The threads represented prevailing ocean surface wave-crests and directions they took as they approached islands and met other similar wave-crests formed by the ebb and flow of breakers. Individual charts varied so much in form and interpretation that the individual navigator who made the chart was the only person who could fully interpret and use it. The use of stick charts ended after World War II when new electronic technologies made navigation more accessible and travel among islands by canoe lessened. [Wikipedia]

Noted in a review of an exhibition of maps from the British Library in NewScientist (10 December 2016):

Inevitably, the categories can overlap. Better, perhaps, to get lost amid the cartographic cornucopia than try to follow a fixed path like the earnest pipe-puffing ramblers on the covers of inter-war OS maps. The leaps between culture and context yield mind-stretching views, as when Harry Beck’s “electrical circuit diagram” of the 1931 London Underground shares a space with a mattang, a navigational stick chart from the Marshall Islands. This time-honoured seafarers’ aid not only locates islands with a schematic audacity to rival Beck, but even indicates ocean swell.

This evening’s repast was Critters (1986), starring Dee “Hysteria” Wallace Stone, Mitt Romney, the lusty but more or less useless daughter, the plucky son, and a supporting cast including the eternal fat sheriff, “Forgetful” Davros from Doctor Who, a bar full of bellilgerent bowlers, and half the cast of the Tribbles episode of Star Trek.

Yeah, that half.

A sure-fire candidate for MST3K, the movie chronicles a pair of bounty hunters tasked with killing escaped convicts. The convicts make it to Earth and begin consuming … oh dear. That poor cow. Bull. Whatever it used to be. Anyways, the convicts scamper about looking like black tribbles, until it’s time to eat, in which case they suddenly have red eyes and fangs.

And grow faster than our plucky young hero once they get some chickens into them.

For all that, there’s some humor here. For one thing, the bounty hunters appear to be part of a big hair band. For another, the convicts have a certain awareness of the silliness of the whole thing, in contrast to this poor farming family, who plays the whole thing straight with a script which, unlike a Brit script, never takes advantage of the straightness to milk it for laughs. But it’s kinda weird that the special effects creatures get the best lines in the film.

Oh, well. We watched in mounting horror as the minuscule special effects budget was stretched way beyond credibility, as the milquetoast family scrambled for its life, the cat, the dead boyfriend (oops), the shotgun, the hammer, the couch (mmmmmmm, that couch is good eatins!)  … might want to ask them if they’re related to Fran Tarkenton, famed Vikings’ scramblin’ quarterback.

Honestly, I don’t know why we watched to the end. There was little enough to recommend it.

In what may be the spread of the North Carolina plague, Vermont Public Radio reports on an attempt by outgoing governor Peter Shumlin (D) to appoint a new member of the Vermont Supreme Court – before the retiring member actually, ummm, vacates:

In a Friday ruling, the Vermont Supreme Court temporarily blocked Gov. Peter Shumlin from appointing a new justice to the court.

According to the order from the court, the temporary halt to Shumlin’s appointing power comes after a legal challenge from Republican Rep. Don Turner, the House minority leader.

Shumlin is attempting to fill the vacancy that will be left by Vermont Supreme Court Justice John Dooley, who is leaving the job. Critics, including Turner, say Governor-elect Phil Scott should fill the vacancy once he takes office in January.

The supreme court seat in question will not be vacant until Dooley’s official retirement in April. Since Scott will be governor in April, Turner challenged Shumlin’s legal authority to appoint a new judge to fill a vacancy that will not exist during Shumlin’s tenure as governor.

The governor’s successor is Phil Scott (R). It appears that stretching the bounds of credibility is becoming something of a political sport this season, following in the footsteps of the North Carolina GOP-dominated legislature’s attempt to strip certain powers from the incoming Democratic governor. It’s a sad commentary on the state of affairs these days – paranoia dominates both sides of the aisle.

First Liberty has announced its filed for certiorari with SCOTUS for the case of …

… LCpl Monifa Sterling, a Marine convicted at a court martial in 2013 for refusing an order to remove Bible verses from her personal workspace.

The IB Times reported during previous, military court appeals:

Sterling was charged after she refused to take down a single Bible verse she used to decorate her cubicle in three locations. She later told the court she had posted them in a triangular shape to represent the Holy Trinity. …

“This is a case of insubordination,” Brian Keller, the attorney representing the federal government, told a five-judge panel Wednesday during the hearing. The judges are expected to weigh the arguments and release their decision later this year.

So it’s not entirely clear to me if the issue is the display of religious verses, or failure to obey an order. First Liberty, a conservative group devoted to religious freedom, suggests the issue is the former:

First Liberty attorneys argue that Sterling’s right to post Bible verses is protected under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) of 1993, a federal law that should apply to all American citizens.

But so far, every court to hear Sterling’s case has claimed that RFRA doesn’t protect Sterling’s right to display a Bible verse.

Chris Rodda on HuffPo points out that Sterling had also been court-martialed for other charges unconnected with the Bible incident, such as refusing the orders of a superior officer and lying about a medical treatment, and suggests this is all trumped up: