Unsightly Mental Blemishes

This is not the movie poster for which you search. Try down corridor Z. What? You’re not looking for The Lost City of Z. Well what the hell Lost City do you think you’re searching for? What? Stop dangling my participles? Fuck you. Answer the question. Just The Lost City? Never heard of it. Let me consult the index. Uh….. surely you mean some other Lost City, eh? No? OK, it’s down the corridor labeled Forbidden Movies that Will Make You Claw Your Eyes Out. Yes, that’s an exaggeration. Maybe. Don’t come back to me to complain, you brought this on yourself!

The Lost City (2022) is in the same class of movies as Jungle Cruise (2021) in that it wants to evoke the same passions as did Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), and again around archaeology, divinity, and romance. However, it’s not nearly as good as the enjoyable Jungle Cruise because replacing the driven archaeologist Dr. “Indiana” Jones of Raiders with a bereft widow, Loretta Sage, a romance book writer in career interruptus, who is annoyed by a smitten book cover model, while being kidnapped by a nutcase who has more money than sense (take a breath here), just ruins the story: rather than wonder just where the obsession will take her next in the absence of, well, obsession, the audience just tires of the schtick.

Which is not to say the movie is a total loss. The former military man hired to rescue Sage, Jack Trainer, was a source of endless amusement in a role of remarkable brevity, and the cover model’s reaction to him at least made me giggle a bit.

I wonder if I was supposed to giggle.

The nutcase, on the other hand, has no real life of his own; he exists to pay the bad guys who are pursuing the romance writer and her, uh, admirer around. He’s a poor replacement for Raider’s René Belloq, the Nazi’s French archaeologist who something of a cipher symbolizing the worst of archaeology prior to the modern age of archaeology. His pursuit of the object, rather than knowledge, invalidated his entire professional standing in Raiders, but heavens know if the general audience member realized that.

In the end, The Lost City needed at least two more drafts, and maybe three, along with a better title. The main story contains a number of ideas that might have worked, but feel like they came out of a bag labeled Plot Twists As Needed, with little organic or thematic movements to them. Even the supporting cast’s subplots, which can often outshine the primary plot line in a movie of this quality, were a disappointment. They felt tacked on as necessary distractions, rather than logical consequences of the antecedents to, and/or the developments during, this plot.

Too bad. I think the movie needed more Nazis, like Raiders of the Lost Ark had. And how often do you get to say that? As it is, it’s limp and forgettable, and the characters, who improbably manage to become cardboard stereotypes, exit stage left without attracting the least applause.

Well, excepting Jack. Jack Trainer. What a guy. We’ll miss. Him. No, miss him. For about a minute. Two minutes.

I wonder if a movie about Jack Trainer is in the works.

One of the sub-themes of this blog is to demonstrate how to deal with the modern world as a working person who doesn’t always have the time and/or training to minutely research every topic that comes across my plate. I’ve done this with the right-wing mail stream (search on ‘mailbag’), politics, artificial intelligence, skepticism, etc.

So today, when we ran across an episode of Tasting History with Max Miller that we didn’t immediately recognize – we did, five minutes into it – we watched it and I was delighted to see Miller talk about the problems of false “facts” and how he tries to deal with them.

And he’s just fun. Here it is.

This is a forgotten composition, with the last draft dated 20 October 2022, which I’ll post as a service to the reader.

A recent release of a nationwide poll by The New York Times and A rated Siena College has stirred up the countryside pundit world of late. Why? It showed a tremendous shift among independent women from favoring Democrats to favoring Republicans. A 32 point shift, to be generally in the ballpark.

In a month.

The impact on the pundits? Depends on who they are. Some ignore it. Some have a panic attack. And some analyze it. That’s what Kerry Eleveld on Daily Kos did, and they found it wanting.

But for today’s purposes, if you compare the Times/Siena poll to other polls fielded around the same time, Oct. 9-12, the survey’s generic ballot R+3 result is an outlier. Here are results from a couple other reputable polls:

• Fox News (Oct. 9-12), RV, 44%-41%, D+3
• Economist/YouGov (Oct. 8-11), 48%-46%, D+2

At the end of the day, this midterm continues to be a competitive race that is likely to hold some surprises that go both ways on Election Day. No single poll at this point disrupts that reality. It’s still possible that independents break one way or the other in the final weeks but, again, we won’t know that until November either.

The lesson here? Even the best polls can be outliers. This can be due to a breakdown in procedures, calculations, or respondents being dishonest, as sometimes MAGA Republicans claim they do. For all we know, a bunch of anti-MAGA women lied to the surveyers in an effort to mislead Republicans.

Yeah, seems unlikely.

But pundits necessarily rely on polls. Erick Erickson is convinced the Republicans are going to clobber the Democrats based on generic Congressional ballot results:

I’ve been talking about this so much on the radio and here that several listeners and readers complained. I’d like to say now I told you so. The wind the Democrats thought was at their back turned out to be an economic hurricane building that will sink their ship of state.

In the Real Clear Politics polling average, there are now only three polls that give Democrats a lead, two of which are still registered voter polls. Five of the remaining six have a GOP lead and one has a tie.

I mistrust those sorts of polls precisely for the same reasons that the Senate’s often controlled by something like 40% of the population, that is, the problem that California and Wyoming each have two Senators, despite the huge difference in population.

And that’s it. The important point here? The right’s belief that the polls for the generic Congressional ballot forecast disaster for the Democrats. No such thing occurred. If New York and Florida had been better organized, we might be seeing an imminent election of Rep Jefferies (D-NY) to the Speaker of the House, rather than the mystery of which Republican will be Speaker, a mystery brought on by their far smaller than forecast margin.

So be wary of generic Congressional ballots, especially when the interpretation confirms the pundit’s desires. Confirmation bias can lead to egg-on-face syndrome.

Ya remember how you could go to a garage sale and buy most anything, free & clear? Things are a little different in the Digital Age. Renting software has become a popular business strategy, at least for those who write the software.

And non-fungible tokens (NFTs)?

What exactly are buyers of the Trump Trading Cards purchasing? Yes, they are NFTs, but unlike others of these digital art pieces, the people foolish enough to purchase a Trump Trading Card don’t actually own the things they paid for, at least not in the traditional sense. If any buyer decides to sell their Trump card in a secondary market, they don’t get all the proceeds. The fine print reveals that 10% of every secondary market sales goes right back to Trump and his fellow grifters. For more details, buyers are told to click the link to terms and conditions. [Kurt Eichenwald, The Threats Within]

And Eichenwald claims the page containing the terms and conditions is a Page not found. Maybe they fixed it.

It looks like Trump isn’t selling these cards, he’s renting them out on an unlimited time, transferable-for-a-fee basis. Of course, outrage may not be called for if the value of these cards sink into mire.

Long-time readers of this semi-dormant thread will recall that the CO₂ monitor on Mauna Loa in Hawaii has been showing rises in CO₂ levels for a long time now. Here’s the latest:

No improvement in trend. But now this monitor is being forced offline:

Lava flow from the ongoing eruption of the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii has knocked out power and cut off access to an observatory that has recorded the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere since 1958.

Mauna Loa started erupting the evening of 27 November. Initially, the lava was confined to the volcano’s summit caldera, but on 28 November, the Northeast Rift Zone – a section on the side of the volcano where the surface can crack and split – also started erupting. This caused lava to flow upslope of the Mauna Loa Observatory, according to the US Geological Survey.

At 6.30pm local time on 28 November instruments at the observatory lost power, according to a statement from the University of California, San Diego. The observatory is run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and hosts instruments measuring changes in the atmosphere including the flux of greenhouse gases. [“Mauna Loa eruption interrupts key record of atmospheric CO2,” James Dinneen, NewScientist (10 December 2022, paywall)]

The article also states that

The observatory was located on Mauna Loa to ensure measurements weren’t impacted by local changes to CO2, such as emissions from cars or cities. The lack of plants on the volcanic rock meant records also wouldn’t be affected by the respiration of nearby plants.

But they don’t address emissions from local volcanoes, so I wonder.

A horrible thought, eh? Presidential election politics already?

But it’s true, the ambitious are already in play. Governor DeSantis (R-FL) and Trump have been working at it for months, as seen in the governor surreptitiously flipping positions on vaccines, and the former President following up his entry into the race announcement with <strangled laughter> his announcement that he will sell NFTs of pictures of his head on various muscled bodies.

I kid you not. Maybe it’s the joke that Philip Kennicott thinks it to be:

Another name mentioned nationally is Governor Youngkin (R) of Virginia, the man who led the upset of the Democrats in Virginia in 2021. In the following 2022 election, he chose to compete with the former President in the endorsement arena, and it didn’t go well:

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) defended his record in only five of the 15 GOP gubernatorial candidates he campaigned with winning their races in the midterm elections last month.

“We picked hard races, races where the states were set up a bit like Virginia, where Joe Biden had won by 10 points, and we went to work to try to flip those states,” he told Fox News’ Martha MacCallum in an interview.

Youngkin said Republican candidates’ performances showed that their message “carries,” but unseating an incumbent is difficult.

In the midterms, Republicans were only successful in defeating one Democratic incumbent governor, Steve Sisolak in Nevada. GOP nominees failed to win races in key states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. [The Hill]

A brave, even smart thing to do, but while it may seem like your message got through despite losing, it’s important not to fool one’s self: the Republican message is primarily anti-Democrat, followed by hollow echoing of the religious tenets of lower taxes and less regulation will lead to prosperity, unless you’re Trump, in which case it’s whine whine whine about the 2020 election.

The truth of the matter is that the last three national elections, which are 2018, 2020, and 2022, the Democratic performance has exceeded expectations, and the Republicans have failed to meet expectations. In the 2022 election the Republicans predicted a gain of sixty seats in the House, and gained … nine. Worse yet, the Democrats gained a seat in the Senate. Republican expectations of retaining the Pennsylvania Senate seat while flipping Senate seats in Nevada, Washington, New Hampshire, and a few other States ended in bitter disappointment, often by large margins. Even consolation was bitter as victory margins in several traditional strongholds didn’t match their historical norms. For example, Senator Grassley of Iowa once again won reelection, but fell far short of his average victory margin of 33 points.^[1]

Youngkin’s endorsements didn’t work out? He might want to consider it an important lesson. He simply doesn’t have enough influence to lift underdog candidates to victory, meaning his national reach is not forceful. On the other hand, Virginia governors are term-limited at one term, meaning he can only serve non-consecutive terms. Maybe he needs a hobby.

But conservative leaders are apparently appraising their movement and have decided some careful management of the herd base is necessary, starting by tossing the former President out on his ear, while assuring everyone that No, there’s nothing really wrong with the conservative movement. Erick Erickson chose the Start with unhappy truths and finish with a fantasy approach to this challenge:

We now have the USA Today and the Wall Street Journal polling — both, I would note, were pretty reliable in 2022. Those outlets and their pollsters suggest most Republicans are ready to move on from Trump. From USA Today:

By 2-1, GOP and GOP-leaning voters now say they want Trump’s policies but a different standard-bearer to carry them. While 31% want the former president to run, 61% prefer some other Republican nominee who would continue the policies Trump has pursued.

Over the past two years, and really after the midterms, callers to my radio show have also begun to move on.

The consensus is that people want Trump policies, but they are not sure he is the best standard bearer moving forward.

People genuinely do appreciate what President Trump did for the country. They appreciate his fight. They appreciate his judicial picks. They appreciate his robust defense of the United States worldwide and his tough stance with China, Iran, and others.

But, as he notes in his graph on the right here, the MAGA conservatives have no intention of moving on from Trump. The red arrow is the day he posted an anti-Trump screed to his paying subscribers only, and the graph shows the impact on his paying subscriber base.

Up to here, Erickson’s putting the best spin he can on a bad situation, and if he chooses to ignore some gaping chasms, such as the SBC debacle, the abortion disaster, the precarious problem of GOP leadership in the House, and a number of other conundrum, well, self-delusion can be its own punishment.

But this is the sort of thing I’d classify an outright lie:

The media is going to elevate the loud voices of NeverTrump and OnlyTrump. To stay relevant, any good candidate will be defined as the second coming of Trump by NeverTrump, and a weak-kneed establishment sell-out hack by OnlyTrump. Both need Trump to stay relevant.

The upside for the GOP and the nation is that neither do. The Republican Party has a very deep bench of talent. While the midterms were not what we wanted.[sic?] The future is bright.

My bold, and follow that with No, it’s not. The future, that is, for the GOP. Oh, I could be wrong. Maybe all the good future candidates aren’t yet apparent. But the lesson from this election, and the January 6th Insurrection fallout, is that if your leadership is McCarthy, McConnell, Cruz, Hawley, Gaetz, Greene, Madison Cawthorn, Boebert, Ralph Norman, and other folks who, in some cases, managed to put safe Republican seats at risk, well, you don’t have enough intelligent people to fill the seats you’re winning. Gohmert, Gosar, Biggs? No, no, and no. Here is CO-3, Rep Boebert’s seat, results:

And Erickson knows this. From a different post:

It is official. Republicans have taken back the House of Representatives. They gathered yesterday to announce their first official act: an investigation into Hunter Biden.

Dumbasses.

What a bunch of idiots. The American people just rejected the GOP “own the libs” strategy. They signaled they’d love to have responsible adult Republicans in charge. In fact, from NEW YORK STATE !!!! to Arizona, voters elected Republicans who ran on local issues tied to the economy and crime.

I think it's clear that the GOP suffers from a poison at its very heart. Senator Goldwater (R-CO) knew it 60 years ago. It manifests as blind arrogance, as team politics, as an adherence to political positions as if they're religious mantra. This all leads to deeply substandard candidates being elected, repelling the independents who are often key to winning elections.

The question isn't really about the GOP, is it? No. It's about the Democrats. Are they swirling down their own vortex?

¹ I think Grassley was fortunate to win at all, and my friends to the south have committed a major foul by nominating and then electing him again, given his recent history of mendacity and/or dementia.

Particoloured:

1. Made up of sections having different, often bright, colours. [Wiktionary]

And there wasn’t much out there for definitions of particoloured, I was surprised to say, although there was a blog called Particolour. Noted in “Flying squirrels carve nuts to store them securely in tree branches,” Michael Le Page, NewScientist (10 December 2022, paywall):

They then set up 32 infrared cameras to monitor some of the stored nuts. They found two species of squirrels came to check the nuts or retrieve them: a subspecies of the Hainan flying squirrel called Hylopetes phayrei electilis and the particoloured flying squirrel (Hylopetes alboniger).

A fascinating article on these two species of flying squirrels chewing grooves in their food nuts in order to securely store them in tree forks.

The diligent student is interrupted by the janitor, who is about to shoo him out of the parlor and into the study hall. There, he finds fifteen potential victims, and, as part of his final exam, he’ll need to ascertain the most likely reason each victim will be heedlessly slaughtered before midnight. The time is 11:30pm. Ready? Set! <bang!> Uhh … uhhhhh….

If you value plausibility, even logic, in your murder mysteries, then you may want to give Murder at Midnight (1931) a pass, although I think a really inquisitive mind could make it all seem to work. But this many unsympathetic, in some cases “oh, please kill them, too!” characters, made it hard to take the story seriously. It quickly devolved into the morbid game of How many will be dead at the end of this?, followed by And will they kill off that damn cop who spreads peanut shells everywhere?

Sadly, the answer is No.

However, while it may have been common in the era the movie was made, I’ve never seen a game of Charades in which it actually looked like the players were putting on a little drama. It was charming.

But that’s not nearly enough to save this story from the trashcan of the mundane.

Plebiscite:

A plebiscite is a vote by the whole people and is often used synonymously with a referendum. In the most recent literature a plebiscite has been defined as “an instrument, which allow[s] a government to appeal to people to express themselves with a yes or a no”[i].’ [sic] The two terms do not always overlap in the legal, political and diplomatic literature as will be shown below. [Encyclopedia Princetoniensis]

Noted in “Thursday’s Mini-Report, 12.15.22,” Steve Benen, Maddowblog:

* Puerto Rico’s future: “The House voted Thursday in favor of the Puerto Rico Status Act, which seeks to resolve the U.S. territory’s status and its relationship to the United States through a binding plebiscite. In a 232-191 vote, the bill was passed by 216 Democrats and 16 Republicans. All votes against the bill came from Republicans.”

As the Republicans were supporting statehood for the Puerto Ricans about a decade ago, it’s a puzzling vote. And while the Democrats may not find the Puerto Ricans to be as liberal as they might like, the current flavor of Republicans may be equally disappointed.

Damn heavy snow makes for nice tableaus.

Now if the shoulder would stop hurting.

In the Dobbs decision, Justice Thomas exhibited some remarkable reasoning regarding history and the law when he suggested that, without evidence of abortion being legal in the days of the Founders, it could not be a Constitutional right today; Erick Erickson tried to take it further and fell on his face.

But now we’re getting the first ripples of this Dobbs reasoning from the inferior judges, as this article summary makes clear:

Federal judge in Texas rules that disarming those under protective orders violates their Second Amendment rights

U.S. District Judge David Counts signed another opinion Thursday that cited a lack of historical record on laws relating to domestic violence to justify disarming abusers. Advocates fear the ruling will put more victims in harm’s way. [The Texas Tribune]

The idea that someone already considered to be violent and irrational should continue to be armed is painfully silly.

But the real point here for me is an almost reverence for a supposed position of the Founding Fathers, a reverence that is directly and fatally repelled by a simple reading of the Constitution. Remember the part where it specifies that the Constitution may be amended by 2/3 of each House of Congress, followed by approval by the States?

In that very statement lies the information that should result in the dissolution of his order.

It is the acknowledgment of doubt, of the possibility of error, the recognition that, as society changes, so should the law of the land, in small particulars and great generalities.

This is the kind of ruling that is a regression, after the progress, the changes in which the 2nd Amendment, itself not an unlimited right in a country of limited rights, which brought us through the 1950s, a regression of dubious worth that could easily result in the deaths of estranged spouses and responding police officers. It ascribes a holiness to the alleged beliefs of the Founding Fathers that is uncalled for, and, in fact, a barrier to the necessary critiques and adjustments to our laws that are necessary to improve our country.

And it’s sad, really. Whether Judge Counts thinks this is a necessary ruling in the wake of Thomas’ ruling, or it was his own idea, there’s a good chance people will die because of it.

On Lawfare Martijn Rasser is discussing increasing pressure put on China by the USA when it comes to semiconductors:

The Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) published a rule with five main parts. One part banned any entity or individual from supplying leading-edge graphics processing units (GPUs)—a type of integrated circuit that accelerates the creation of images—and electronics containing them to any other entity or individual in China. These controls were imposed because GPU chips play an important role in the development and use of artificial intelligence applications, particularly the deep learning methods that are the main driver of the current AI boom. This ban applies to all foreign-made GPUs as a result of a modified extraterritorial jurisdictional rule called the foreign direct product rule, or FDPR for short. The new FDPR subjects any such chip made directly from American technology or software, or produced, even in part, from U.S.-made semiconductor production equipment to U.S. jurisdiction.

Because all semiconductor fabrication facilities use at least some U.S.-made equipment, every such GPU on the planet is now subject to U.S. controls. The Biden administration needed to apply this part of the rule extraterritorially because these GPUs are not made in the United States and no other country subjects them to any form of export control given their widespread commercial applications. No supply of these chips to a Chinese entity can take place without a U.S. government license. Unlike the Trump administration’s policy of granting licenses to Huawei and the Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) for certain types of older-generation consumer applications, the Biden team’s announced licensing policy is to presumptively deny all such licenses.

This was imposed October 7th, so it was before the China-wide protests over the zero tolerance Covid policy, but it certainly contributes to the pressure on the Chinese government. It says, Enough copying! Figure it out on your own! And the Chinese government is not known for encouraging widespread creativity; down that path lies forbidden thoughts.

But given their sudden change of policy when it comes to Covid, from zero tolerance to a dropping of many restrictions, which according to NPR has confused and discouraged Chinese citizens, one has to wonder how close they are to a tipping point when it comes to the government.

They’re probably a ways away. The Communist Party retains control of the armed forces, and I have yet to see any evidence, credible or otherwise, of the Chinese military be willing to turn against the Party.

On the other hand, I’d be surprised to see any such evidence. It seems very likely that senior military leaders are well aware of what would happen to the leaders of a failed coup. A whisper cannot released until the deed is done; don’t expect to hear rampant rumors that the Chinese military is restive.

Talking Points Memo (TPM) took advantage of access to the texts and messages of then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows (R), the former Congressman from North Carolina, that he sent and received during and after the January 6th insurrection, to analyze and publish some of them. Of particular interest to just about every one was this:

One message identified as coming from Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) to Meadows on January 17, 2021, three days before Joe Biden was set to take office, is a raw distillation of the various themes in the congressional correspondence. In the text, despite a typo, Norman seemed to be proposing a dramatic last ditch plan: having Trump impose martial law during his final hours in office.

Mark, in seeing what’s happening so quickly, and reading about the Dominion law suits attempting to stop any meaningful investigation we are at a point of � no return � in saving our Republic !! Our LAST HOPE is invoking Marshall Law!! PLEASE URGE TO PRESIDENT TO DO SO!!

For me, there’s insight in the phrasing. This is not a malevolent entity looking to take control of the government despite the election going against him.

No, this Rep really does think the election has been stolen. The mindset is not clear, but it’s clearly congruent with the worries of Senator Goldwater (R-AZ) of the 1960s: a man convinced that God has promised them the election would, of course, worry that cheating by the corporation providing the ballot counting systems might steal away an election. It’s more than a little shallow-minded, but it makes a lot of sense.

It’s also more than congruent with a politician who has foolishly bought into the Republican propaganda concerning the Democrats. One is tempted to ask him if he thinks Democrats are spending evenings in their comfy chairs, smoking jackets holding in their stomachs as they suck on the marrow of dead babies. He’d probably say he hadn’t thought of the smoking jackets, but it seemed likely.

Any way this goes, it’s the sort of mindset of someone who’s given in to the idea that a political adversary is, in fact, an enemy. This is a toxic fraction of our national bloodstream, and Rep Norman should probably simply resign and go back to whatever it was he was doing before he became a politician, because this sort of mindset is simply not appropriate, left or right, in a politician.

At least, without evidence.

… and it’s Obstruction.

Every morning my Arts Editor is muttering about him being in the way.

Girl in camo.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle (2018) is a mystery. Late 1940s, perhaps, small-town America, and who murdered the parents of 18 year old Merricat Blackwood and her older sister and owner of the house, Constance? Why are they loathe to go into town to get supplies, and why do the townspeople, in turn, loathe them? Is this why Merricat is practicing a type of magic to protect her, and does it work? Is Uncle Julian, who lives with them and is confined to a wheelchair, completely sane, or has he caught on to the secret of his brother and sister-in-law’s death, and it’s made him unbalanced? Is this new guy, Charles Blackwood, really a cousin, or is he something else? Or is it bad enough that he’s … a member of the family?

And, while we’re at it, why? Why do I care about this story concerning two mentally challenged women, living in their inheritance as if in a ship lost in a sea of chaos?

Or do I?

In the end, there’s nary a sympathetic character to be found, as it seems that everyone, from townsperson to children to the Blackwood parents, cousin Charles, and even Uncle Julian seem fully capable of enacting violence, incoherent, terrifying violence.

And perhaps that’s the point – understanding that when no one’s perfect, rejection of the imperfect leaves one in a precarious position. And that sometimes, rather than hating in an unforgiving furor, a little forgiveness may make more sense.

Maybe.

Well done, but mystifying rather than uplifting, be in an inquisitive mood when watching this one. Black depression definitely contraindicates this story.

Late last month there came a potential scandal involving SCOTUS:

Long time readers may remember my complaints of 4+ years ago that then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp (R-GA) neither recused himself from management of the 2018 election in Georgia, nor did he resign from his position. Why? Because he was running for the Governor’s seat that year, and thus it was a reasonable argument that Kemp had a conflict of interest when it came to overseeing his own election.

So why bring this up? Just moments ago, I discovered the same situation arose in the 2022 cycle, and I missed it. It involves Democrat, candidate for the Arizona governorship, and current Secretary of State for Arizona Katie Hobbs, who gained a narrow, narrow victory over former newscaster and MAGA Republican candidate Kari Lake. The margin is less than 1 full point, and it took quite a long time to call the race.

Sigh. It appears politics in Arizona is a messy business. Indeed, Wikipedia notes this:

Hobbs faced the Republican nominee, former KSAZ-TV news anchor Kari Lake, in the general election. She limited access to reporters, sometimes going out of her way to avoid them, and held small-scale campaign events. She declined to debate Lake, saying she wanted to deny Lake the opportunity to spread election denialism. Hobbs narrowly defeated Lake with 50.3% of the vote. After the election, Lake refused to concede, and is assembling a legal team to contest the election results.

Refusal to debate leaves voters less informed. While it’s true a website and other resources can inform the persistent voter as to candidate positions, a debate gives the audience an up-front display of performance in the face of confrontation, and may even demonstrate inconsistency, ignorance, or ideological kant infesting the positions of the candidate.

By refusing to recuse or resign for this election, Hobbs has given Lake a leg to stand on, although I don’t know that there was any more than that. Still, the appearance, as well as her behavior, stinks.

The online article title differs, and isn’t as good, as the paper copy from NewScientist:

Death metal singing technique is also used by chatty bats

Chortleable.

I speculated that one or two Senators might go independent after the recent election, and it appears that I was right.

Except for the who part. From azcentral:

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema said Friday she is leaving the Democratic Party and will formally become an independent in a move that more fully places her at the center of a narrowly divided chamber.

She announced her decision in an opinion piece published Friday in The Arizona Republic.

“I have joined the growing numbers of Arizonans who reject party politics by declaring my independence from the broken partisan system in Washington,” she wrote.

Sinema maintained she doesn’t plan to change her voting habits: often aligning with Democrats but backing Republicans on certain issues. And she won’t dispense with the legislative filibuster that has led many Democrats to call for her to face a primary challenge in 2024.

And so much for a primary challenge. As many have pointed out, her desire to be reelected may be at the center of this strategic move, and if she does choose to run again, it’ll place the Democrats in a quandary: endorse Sinema, which will infuriate progressives, or run a Democrat and risk handing the seat back to the Republicans?

Her term ends January of 2025.

I wonder if she believes she’s working for the forces of moderation and reconciliation. If so, the radicals of the Republican Party hardly seem likely to meet her halfway. No, I see this as a tactical move to improve her reelection chances.

And I don’t really expect her to be joined by Republican Senators Murkowski and Collins.

The People We Hate At The Wedding (2022) chronicles one of the most self-centered and neurotic American families, going to a wedding. Wisdom, heartbreak, laughter in equal, if predictable, parts. See it if you’re a Kristen Bell completist or you love cheekbones.

And that’s all I really have to say for it.

Weening:

archaic
: to hold as an opinion : SUPPOSE, BELIEVE
Little did he ween that these wretched rags he now wore, were but suitable to that long career of destitution before him … Herman Melville
Since primal Man was fashioned / To people ice and stones, / No pair, I ween, had ever been / Such chums as I and JONES. P. G. Wodehouse [Merriam-Webster]

No, no sightings. The word overweening, meaning arrogant, had occurred to me yesterday as a bit of verbiage I hardly ever encounter on the Web, and, as it seemed likely to be a word constructed from others, I then wondered as to the meanings of weening.

I have read Melville, and I have the bloodstains to prove it. While I enjoyed Moby-Dick, at the end of Pierre I seriously considered clawing out my eyes.

No matter how bad they are. Like me.

Erick Erickson is appalled that Senate Minority Leader McConnell (R-KY) is backing a law that, well, it depends on how you interpret social media links to news sites:

Breitbart News says sources credit McConnell with adding the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA) to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The NDAA is a must pass appropriations measure for national security. The JCPA is a federal welfare program for the very media that hates Republicans. It is a bailout for dying publications to be funded by Silicon Valley ad dollars generated from you. If McConnell is behind this, he needs to reverse it.

You know how you can go on Facebook or Google, find a news headline, and click through to the news site to read it? The JCPA would make Facebook and Google pay the news outlets for the kindness of displaying their news headlines and generating traffic for those news outlets. It would effectively create a “link tax.” It is nuts.

Nancy Pelosi is a big fan of it. Why any Republican would vote for this is beyond me. It sure as hell is not conservative.

Skipping over the linkage of the JCPA to the NDAA, which sounds to me like two very disparate subjects and thus shouldn’t be in one bill, let’s talk about the definition of buyer/seller, the very heart of capitalism. Sellers come in one of two varieties: an entity that produces a product or service, or an entity that buys, perhaps combines with other product, and then resells it with some sort of added value.

Notice that, in the era of Radio and Television, the tangible product or service, aka the radio or television program, is not the actual product, but was rather the empty space between content scenes or segments, dictated originally by the needs of drama, and this became commercial time, desirable for companies desiring to advertise services and products. In the Internet era, an analogous source of revenue is derived from the sale of commercial space on web sites. And for paper publications, predecessor to the these three, the product for consumers was the paper and its contents, both of which had value, which they bought, while advertisers bought space from the publisher in their publications to place their advertisements; publishers were paid coming and going.

Content commerce in the Internet Era, moreso than Radio and Television, functions to separate consumers from the mostly honest transaction of paying the producer of content for that content, substituting the considerably more questionable commercial model to the transaction.

So, back to the point, your generally capitalist system has consumers paying the original producers for their services and/or product, and resellers paying them as well from their revenue made via reselling.

So, what is Facebook (or Google, or other sites in this category, for which we’ll use the iconic Facebook)?

A producer? No.

Do they pay for the links they provide to other news sites? From context it appears that’s no, as well.

In fact, this exposes a hidden contradiction in Erickson’s screed, although he may not be aware of it himself. Consider the contradiction in these two statements: It is a bailout for dying publications to be funded by Silicon Valley ad dollars generated from you, and The JCPA would make Facebook and Google pay the news outlets for the kindness of displaying their news headlines and generating traffic for those news outlets.

The contradiction is the assertion that Facebook, et al, are keeping those publications alive, and yet they are dying. When a contradiction like this comes popping out of an argument, that usually means there’s a serious problem with the characterization of the situation.

Again, is Facebook producing the news, or is it reselling the news? Well, the fact of the matter is that, in a commercial sense, Facebook is thieving it. Let’s think about Facebook’s motives: they’re not putting those links up out of the kindness of Facebook’s wooden little heart. Their visitor analysis has, without a doubt, revealed they can drive more traffic with links that make them look local than without that characterization. Most, though not all, humans desire a sense of familiarity. Why do many inhabitants of small towns lament the demise of said towns? Because they’re familiar and they know everyone and gives a sense of extended family. So Facebook sprinkles everyone’s feeds with reader-local content. I’m in the Twin Cities of Minnesota, and I see ads from Senator Klobuchar and a number of local businesses, along with an occasional news story from various sources.

Facebook also sprays me and my neighbors with high-revenue links that they hope we’ll click on. (I try not to do so.)

It’s not about the content, per se. It’s about building an ambiance that sharpens the addiction to social media, along with message “likes” and all that well-described social media goal: keep the eyeballs on the screen as long as possible. As a former social media addict of roughly 40 years experience, this is not incredible, but quite credible.

And if you don’t have to pay for the links, it’s another penny in the corporate pocket to invest in the Metaverse. This is irrelevant, but, hca      ey,hey, Facebook’s clever in many ways, but so far their future product, Metaverse, appears to be a smoking crater.

I’m not sure what motivated Erickson’s misguided anti-legacy-media rant. Maybe he simply misinterprets the currents of media commerce, itself a confusing subject because the traditional, if misguided, private sector metric of money money money just doesn’t work so well in the free (liberty sense) press sector of society, because money doesn’t measure excellence in that sector. If you want to know about excellence, ask about Pulitzer’s Pulitzers, and ask if Fox News has any (none mentioned on their Wikipedia page). If you want to read my laboriously worked out conclusions on sectors of society and the results of metric confusion, Sectors of Society at the top of the page is the starting point for that.

Or maybe he hates legacy media. He certainly uses a lot of negative adjectives, such as sclerotic, to describe them. He has that contemptuous attitude that makes me suspect that, as a confirmed extreme rightist, he’s appalled that a news service doesn’t support this positions, and therefore they must be condemned. That many of them are not surviving this new era of “free information” must be gratifying, and the easy conclusion that they are incompetent causes him to skip reanalysis that would reveal false characterizations. It’s an insidious form of confirmation bias.

He also doesn’t seem to be aware of the degraded journalism product that is being brought on, in part, by the lack of revenue from Facebook, etc, offered by local news providers. In this case, degraded can mean complete disappearance, such as news of strictly geographical interest like changes to city zoning regulations, the police beat, etc. These are serious degradations as they can function as oversight of police and other governmental institutions.

To Erickson, the old media are just sclerotic because he persists in applying improper metrics to legacy media, without realizing that his preferred media, which offers at least some support to his extremist positions, does not and can not offer the journalism product that the old line media does with excellence.

Here is Perry Bacon, Jr.’s proposal to find a way to preserve legacy media.

Gotta love Zefrank:

Senator Warnock’s (D) margin of victory in his reelection campaign in Georgia is coming in at nearly three points, giving Democrats a majority in the Senate, which is worth noting they lacked before the red wave. While some liberal pundits are celebrating, I find it difficult to get around the fact that his challenger, former NFL star and Trump-endorsee Herschel Walker (R), nearly won.

After decisively beating all of his primary rivals.

Mr. Walker demonstrated such skills as mendacity, fornication, and rhetorical gibberish during the campaign, and still won well more than 40% of Georgians’ votes. It’s embarrassing. That many Georgians thought that Walker somehow was better equipped than Warnock for the Senate. I’m aghast.

The Democrats now have an important question in front of them. Why was this race so close? Some possible answers:

• The American electorate distrusts Democrats.
• The Georgian electorate distrusts Democrats.
• The Georgian electorate thinks a Senate seat is a prize for the mantle and not a serious position of responsibility.