Unsightly Mental Blemishes

The assassination of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will no doubt stir up the far-right for at least a dozen reasons. The gun-rights absolustists absolutists (make of that typo what you will, which I’ve left in on purpose) should probably quit the hyperventilating, though, as CNN notes:

[The assassin] used a homemade gun in the shooting, and authorities confiscated several handmade pistol-like items from his apartment, police said.

Due to stringent gun control, as you can find at the same link, this disgruntled person was forced to make his own gun. Police haven’t said, but I doubt it was useful for more than a couple of shots.

Incidentally, in the recent past attempted Japanese political assassinations have involved the use of swords.

Do Japanese gun control laws work?

Gun violence is extremely rare in Japan.

In 2018, Japan, a country of 125 million people, only reported nine deaths from firearms — compared with 39,740 that year in the United States.

Measuring the non-existent is always a tricky business, but the numbers are noteworthy.

The Organization of American Historians has issued an important statement regarding Dobbs, the decision overturning Roe v. Wade:

In September 2021, the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association submitted an amicus curiae brief to the US Supreme Court presenting the relevant history to the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case. We are dismayed that the Court declined to take seriously the historical claims of our brief. Instead, the court adopted a flawed interpretation of abortion criminalization that has been pressed by anti-abortion advocates for more than thirty years. The opinion inadequately represents the history of the common law, the significance of quickening in state law and practice in the United States, and the nineteenth-century forces that turned early abortion into a crime.

Historians might note that the Court’s majority opinion refers to “history” sixty-seven times, claiming that “an unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion on pain of criminal punishment persisted from the earliest days of the common law until 1973.” Our brief shows plentiful evidence, however, of the long legal tradition, extending from the common law to the mid-1800s (and far longer in some American states, including Mississippi), of tolerating termination of pregnancy before occurrence of “quickening,” the time when a woman first felt fetal movement. The majority of the court dismisses that reality because it was eventually—although quite gradually—superseded by criminalization. In so doing the court denies the strong presence in US “history and traditions” at least from the Revolution to the Civil War of women’s ability to terminate pregnancy before the third to fourth month without intervention by the state.

These misrepresentations are now enshrined in a text that becomes authoritative for legal reference and citation in the future. The Court’s decision erodes fundamental rights and has the potential to exacerbate historic injustices and deepen inequalities in our country. We expect that historians will continue to correct the Court’s misinterpretation about the history of legalized abortion in the US in their own research, teaching, and public speaking, while also addressing the multifaceted dilemmas presented by this decision.

Which correlates in my own notes regarding the history of abortion.

But this really clarifies the need, the legal requirement, that those portions of Dobbs dependent on this specious version of history must be retracted, and immediately. Information that masquerades as true facts, when it is, in fact, false, has been observed to impact other cases, as not only are the false facts cited, but additionally the relaxing of the strict requirements of accurate information means that other false information will be introduced, and accepted, into other cases.

This will foil the mission of proper law enforcement in the courts, not to mention the case for actual justice.

If these Justices recognize these errors mean the case needs reconsideration, and act on it by withdrawing the decision, all well and good.

But if the Justices who voted to overturn Roe plunge onwards, heedless of the damage they do to their own institution, as well as the nation, then they must, in all honor, resign, or be impeached and removed en masse. We cannot tolerate this corruption of the institution.

Truth is often buried deep, but is vital.

I haven’t had time to monitor the situation at GERD, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, and the anxieties it causes downstream in Egypt and Sudan, but now comes word of a new alliance for Egypt – Saudi Arabia:

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia officially declared its support for Egypt’s position in the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) crisis, backing all measures taken by Cairo to protect its national security regarding this crisis.

Riyadh has strong economic influence in Addis Ababa and highly values Egypt’s cooperation on many issues, including the confrontation with Iran. …

The Saudi stance on the GERD comes in light of Emirati-Saudi competition especially for obtaining investments and buying assets in Egypt. For its part, Cairo is tapping into Saudi support on the GERD crisis to counter the United Arab Emirates’ stance, which seems to have taken a neutral stance. [AL-Monitor]

Egypt’s goal?

Observers believe the Saudi support is a trump card Egypt can use to encourage the UAE [United Arab Emirates] to play an influential role in resolving the GERD crisis and breaking its neutrality. This is especially true in light of Abu Dhabi’s attempts to overcome its predicament with Cairo and broker a deal between the three GERD countries, namely Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia.

And then get the United States to get involved by pressuring Ethiopia. I am not aware of any particular leverage the United States may have on Ethiopia, but maybe we do.

Petroform:

A shape or pattern made by arranging large rocks and boulders over a relatively wide area. [Wiktionary]

Noted in “Letter from Georgia: Soaring With Stone Eagles,” Eric A. Powell, Archaeology (July/August 2022):

“I wasn’t sure what to expect,” says [Johannes Loubser of the archaeology firm Stratum Unlimited]. He notes that piled-stone features, also known as petroforms, have often been a source of controversy among archaeologists who study the southeastern United States, many of whom assume they were left by European-American farmers clearing their fields of stones. But, like [Jackson County deputy sheriff Kevin Thomas], Loubser’s first thought on visiting the site was that it was unusual and that at least the largest stone mound had very likely been made by Native Americans, not by farmers removing stones before plowing.

Another loathsome addition to this line of classics …

• There’s both worry and action concerning the candidacy of disgraced former Governor Eric Greitens for the GOP nomination to the open Missouri Senate seat, as the Missouri Stands United PAC, controlled by former Missouri Senator John Danforth (R), is spending heavily in support of the independent run of John Wood. It’s interesting that Danforth is ignoring the other Republicans in the primary race and is going with Wood. Are the Republicans simply too far-right for the retired Senator? He has no obvious entry in On The Issues, so a graphic representation of his own standing is not available. The Missouri race is rapidly becoming an unexpected bonfire in this Republican stronghold. Personally, I’d like to see Greitens win the nomination and then get his butt kicked by Wood or the Democratic nominee, as that would expose the far-right extremism that has taken hold of the GOP. However, that would not expose the underlying toxic culture of the GOP, and I’m not sure anything would. Processes are hard to expose.
• Arizona Republicans appear to lean far to the right, unlike, say, the Colorado GOP, as young, inexperienced, Trump-endorsed, and Thiel-funded Blake Masters has a big lead in a weekend poll among Republicans. This may be good news for incumbent Senator Kelly (D).
• Speaking of Colorado, an early June poll is now available and shows Senator Bennet (D) leads his GOP challenger, John O’Dea, by 12 points, but 28% of the respondents were undecided.
• Trump remains a popular bit of kitsch for the GOP, as many unendorsed candidates, at all levels of government, are sending out campaign literature referencing the former President, to the extent that Trump’s lawyers are being kept busy calling campaigns and sending out cease & desist letters. Will this continue if he’s indicted? If he looks worse and worse in the televised January 6th Committee hearings? Are these campaigns inadvertently attaching anchors to their candidates’ ankles? So far, I think the lack of good judgment will continue in the MAGA base, and so the misleading advertisements will also continue, even if this article claims small-dollar donations are dropping off, a trend attributed to inflation pressures and exhaustion. They’re probably right.
• When I wasn’t looking New York canceled its GOP primary for the US Senate, leaving pundit Joe Pinion as the survivor for whom everyone else presumably withdrew. His political experience appears scant, consisting of a single failed run for a State Assembly seat a few years back. While the The Buffalo News likes him, I do not think incumbent Senator Schumer (D) need worry about losing this race. And that’s how it starts, sometimes, not worrying.

Tomorrow at Seven (1933) gets off to a smart start, even if it seems a bit artificial, as novelist Neil Broderick notes a woman reading one of his books on the train. He blandly asks how it is, and gets quite the nasty review in riposte. Revealing himself to be Broderick, he opens himself up for a similar situation as he criticizes a rich man’s secretary, who happens to be the woman’s father.

His reverse ingratiation pays off in that he’s present when the rich man, Thornton Drake, receives a highly credible death threat, which only suffers in that it’s incorporated quite unrealistically into a jigsaw puzzle; only poetic license kept us from throwing up.

But this marks the beginning of the end for this plot, for a dated trope of the era, the clownish cop duo, arrive to check out the threat. When the woman’s father, Austin Winters, is killed, rather than Drake, the cop duo endeavour to control the situation, but are merely ineffectual and unfunny while another possible suspect, a pilot named Simons, also gets offed. The latter was probably just as well as Simons didn’t seem to have a real part to play here.

The plot is game, despite its burdens: why, after a flight to Louisiana from Chicago, is Broderick surreptitiously signaling with his lighter out the window? How did that coroner find that letter so fast, and why didn’t he finish his job? Why are the cops still trying to assert authority when they’re out of their jurisdiction? Was there a point in making the housekeeper a mute?

And how does the killer manage to turn off the lights so easily without being spotted?

It’s not a bad story, but some reworking would have done wonders for it.

How did I miss this for the last sixty years?

Bonus! My source for this, Annalee Newitz in NewScientist (25 June 2022, paywall), remarks:

Most of the pitches I get for NFTs and crypto-coins sound like they are coated in prefabulated amulite. As long as we stay thirsty for scammy tech that promises us the world but gives us empty wallets instead, the encabulator will never get old.

Yep.

Extradosed bridge:

An extradosed bridge employs a structure that combines the main elements of both a prestressed box girder bridge and a cable-stayed bridge.^{[1][2]: 85 [3]} The name comes from the word extrados, the exterior or upper curve of an arch, and refers to how the “stay cables” on an extradosed bridge are not considered as such in the design, but are instead treated as external prestressing tendons deviating upward from the deck. In this concept, they remain part of (and define the upper limit of) the main bridge superstructure. [Wikipedia]

Total gibberish to me. From a friend’s LinkedIn post, so I’ll omit the link and just quote:

A precast extradosed bridge, St. Croix Crossing is a hybrid of a concrete box girder structure and a cable-stayed structure. The extradosed design minimized environmental impacts by allowing tower heights to be below bluffs, while reducing the number of piers in the river. Minimizing environmental impact is important on any construction project, but especially so in this beautiful corridor which is protected by the National Wild and Scenic Rivers Act.

My Arts Editor remarks:

It’s the sordid and dramatic tale of a yellow leaf.

It seems a bit much.

And sometimes those costs come from mistaking a lion for, say, an anteater. A puzzling remark, you say? Not if you’re Salvadoran:

Bitcoin’s value has plunged by 22 per cent in the past five days [late June – haw] as investors rush to sell the cryptocurrency amid fears that an asset bubble is bursting.

The average bitcoin buyer is now in the red after the world’s most popular cryptocurrency shed a trillion dollars in value in two months.

For El Salvador, which staked its economy on the success of bitcoin when it became the first country to make cryptocurrency legal tender in September 2021, the crash has wiped out more than half of its bitcoin holdings – and could be the death knell for its national crypto experiment. [“What will the crypto crash mean for ‘bitcoin nation’ El Salvador?” Luke Taylor, NewScientist (25 June 2022, paywall)]

Volatility is about the last thing you want in your national currency, so mistaking a volatile cryptocurrency,   which may be little more than a sophisticated wealth-drainer, as a currency replacement turns out to be a critical intellectual failure.

And, one would think, easily predictable.

It’s worthwhile to note that most Salvadorans were great skeptics of the great experiment:

Prior to the latest price crash, El Salvador’s national bitcoin push was already failing. A study published in May found that most Salvadorans abandoned the national bitcoin wallet after receiving a sign-up bonus and most who continue to use it trade dollars, not cryptocurrency.

Whether those who did hold on to bitcoins were the working poor, the slender middle class, or the top of the heap is not clear. Will El Salvador try to apply muscle to make this experiment, apparently on its way to failure, work?

“They are never going to accept that they [president Nayib Bukele] have failed on this,” says Mario Gomez, a developer who was detained by police for criticising the bitcoin law.

For better news concerning cryptocurrencies, we can turn to Washington, D.C.:

A wave of notoriously risky cryptocurrency firms could one day be integrated into the traditional banking system under a little-noticed provision in a new bill that is raising alarms among financial experts about potentially destabilizing consequences.

The provision — part of a sweeping proposal to regulate the crypto industry that Sens. Cynthia M. Lummis (R-Wyo.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) introduced in June — would force the Federal Reserve to grant so-called master accounts to certain crypto firms seeking them from the central bank. The accounts give holders access to the Fed’s payment system, allowing them to settle transactions for clients without involving a separate bank.

Two Wyoming-based crypto firms championed by Lummis stand to benefit. Both companies, Custodia Bank and Kraken Financial, have been stymied over the last two years in bids to gain Fed master accounts. But financial regulators and experts say the measure’s impact would cascade through the industry and beyond. [WaPo]

I freely admit that I do not ken (grok for you SF fans) all the consequences of such legislation, but then we pay financial regulators to be experts in this sort of thing. I can’t help but notice that, given the failure of cryptocurrencies to behave like traditional currencies, this seems like quite the foolish action. Is someone inserting a shunt into our financial system?

And how is bitcoin doing these days?

CoinMarketCap

Not recovering since last time I checked. I don’t sense this to be an opportunity.

Phenological mismatches:

Phenological events are often synchronised between species. The classic example is a food chain comprised of the pied flycatcher (Ficedula hypoleuca), caterpillars and oak trees. Every spring, the birds produce large broods that eat vast quantities of caterpillars – the adults must deliver as many as 60 an hour over the 18 days it takes for the chicks to fledge. But caterpillars are an ephemeral resource, hatching to coincide with the emergence of oak foliage. The birds have thus evolved to breed so that their chicks hatch during maximum caterpillar abundance. The cue they take is temperature, which also precipitates leaf unfurling and caterpillar hatching.

This tightly coupled sequence is being disrupted by climate change. Even though all three events are triggered by rising temperatures, they are responding differently to warming. In some parts of Europe, birds are hatching too late to catch peak caterpillar, reducing the chicks’ chances of survival.

It is problems like these, known as phenological mismatches, that are bringing [UN Environment Programme] out in a cold sweat. We have long appreciated that phenological changes can spell trouble for individual species or pairs of species. But there is a dawning realisation that this is a widespread problem that could presage the breakdown of whole food chains or even ecosystems. “This is truly a global problem affecting plant and animal species in mountains, oceans, tropical and temperate forests and polar regions,” says Kappelle. [“How climate change is knocking natural events wildly out of sync,” Graham Lawton, NewScientist (25 June 2022, paywall)]

If you have an affinity for the Sun-God, such as Egypt’s Re, that is:

The sun goes through cycles of high and low activity that repeat approximately every 11 years. During periods of high activity, it blasts out charged particles and magnetised plasma that can distort Earth’s magnetic field.

These so-called solar storms can cause glitches in our power grids and bring down Earth-orbiting satellites. A handful of studies have also hinted that they increase the risk of heart attacks, but these were too small to be conclusive.

To explore further, Carolina Zilli Vieira at Harvard University and her colleagues analysed records of deaths between 1985 and 2013 in 263 US cities. They then compared heart-related fatalities with solar storm data.

They found that more heart disease deaths occurred on days when solar storms had disturbed Earth’s magnetic field.

For each year of high solar activity during that period, they estimate that an additional 5500 people in the US died of heart attacks or other cardiovascular complications. [“Solar storms may cause up to 5500 heart-related deaths in a given year,” Alice Klein, NewScientist (25 June 2022, paywall)\

Which is about the last thing I would have expected from the mild-mannered species of solar storms.

Maybe the folks in tinfoil hats are on to something after all.

In the following age-sorted list^[1], C = member of the conservative wing, L = liberal, M = moderate conservative.

The point being that two of the most regressive Justices are the most aged. I’ve been struck by the number of articles moaning about a new, conservative era of the SCOTUS, and how many generations will be affected, etc etc. But, as I point out in this Word Of The Day post concerning the legal term dicta, SCOTUS decisions need not be permanent:

All I can add is that the conservative justices themselves have demonstrated the solution for the mistakes they’re making: overturning these problematic rulings. The raw political power being practiced here by the conservative wing of the Court has a number of shortcomings in a democracy, while persuasive arguments do not suffer permanently from its inherent problems like raw political power.

Which is not to say that irreversible damage is not done by them, such as women dying of flawed pregnancies, but only that these decisions can be corrected.

And, as the two^[2] oldest conservative Justices are now in their 70s, an age where, well, age starts becoming a concern, it’s not a guarantee that they’ll be around for another twenty years. Or ten years. Or five years.

I wish them all well, but retirement beckons.

The Democrats hold the Senate and the White House, and I expect they’ll be adding to their majority in the Senate in January, if I may indulge in an unconscionably long distance prediction.

I cannot help but meditate on the role of the judiciary in society. To my mind, it is to enforce, correct or void the law for, and, on occasion, lead, the common societal morality. Stare decisis, or precedent, helps build the edifice of wisdom, and should lend stability to the interpretation of the law.

The application of obscure and exotic interpretations does not contribute to that desired stability.

The chart on the right reinforces my belief that most Americans share my interpretation, or would after some discussion. The failure of the conservative wing of SCOTUS to uphold settled law and Constitutional interpretation in Dobbs, Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, Carson v. Makin, and most recently West Virginia v. EPA, in which the right of Congress to expressly delegate its authority is questioned, has led to this situation.

And it also marks a serious intellectual failing of these supposed conservatives: selecting the wrong goal in a liberal democracy.

One of the marks of a liberal democracy is its system of error correction. No mature governmental model should be without such a system, but, historically, nearly all theocracies and absolute monarchies feature leaders, singular or plural, that cannot admit mistakes and failures, at least not as such. Why not? Hey, they’re backed by God, dude! That’s right, and God is never wrong. Autocrats, too, having proclaimed themselves the only one capable of leading, find themselves in a similar constriction, and that’s why these systems of government tend to end in various amounts of tears, rather than a peaceful transfer of power that marks prosperity.

But liberal democracies have error correction, which means a couple of things:

1. The far-right extremists, having overturned Roe v. Wade, have not only proclaimed victory but even think they can contemplate a nation-wide ban. These folks are so far out over their ski tips that they’re tumbling – and they don’t realize it. As noted, these decisions can be overturned; that is, error correction with popular support can be applied. Thomas, et al, believe that SCOTUS is the final word, even as they demonstrate that it is not.
2. The citizenry has the real final word, but the far-right only sort of understands that, as we see in the gerrymandering of Republican-controlled states. If they really understood, they would be making as persuasive a case as possible before SCOTUS rules on each of the issues. In some cases they have, such as abortion. They failed, as public polling clearly indicates, and many folks have applied considerable intellects to the question and come up pro-choice. It’s not unfair to say that the pro-choice solution is the rational conclusion, although I will not say that it’s an easy conclusion. But the bane of a liberal democracy, founded as it is on honest attempts to be rational, are those who are determinedly irrational, depending on little more than easily mislead intuition, or an arguable interpretation of a religious text, itself of dubious authenticity.

This is the heart of the problem with those who call themselves conservatives these days – they don’t understand how liberal democracy works. Their appeal to autocratic traditions are alien to our ways, no matter how much they dress them up in charismatic leaders^[3], or black robes and smoothly written opinions; they break with tradition and sometimes even with the facts on the ground (see Kennedy and Sotomayor’s dissent) to achieve their goals, and the hell with their fellow citizens and traditions of honesty.

Trust in error correction doesn’t mean Don’t worry, but it does mean there’s always a way forward in liberal democracies for those steeped in liberal democracy traditions. If we’re willing to calmly and wisely take that step.

¹ All names and ages taken from Wikipedia. Ages valid only yesterday.

² If we, perhaps ill-advisedly, adjust for expected life span for men vs women, then Roberts joins Thomas and Alito in the top three. However, applying statistics to individuals is always a chancy business.

³ Or so I’m told; generally, I’m immune to charisma.

And you thought RadioShack was gone.

Gen Z may not be familiar with the RadioShack of their grandparents, but they’re getting to know its replacement. The 100-year-old retailer reintroduced itself on Twitter this week with a stream of often-profane tweets — some since deleted — filled with crude comments and drug references.

Variations of, “What in the world is going on?” peppered the comment threads, but a glance of the company’s Twitter profile partly held the answer: RadioShack is no longer the electronics store Americans ran to for generations, but rather an online cryptocurrency company that also happens to sell batteries. [WaPo]

It used to be a respectable entity, which, for those readers whose eyes just skip over respectable as meaningless, actually means trustworthy.

I still have my RadioShack multimeter that I must have bought thirty years ago.

Ummm, touchdown?

For a bit of slightly unfocused fun, Forbidden Empire (2014; aka Viy) isn’t a bad choice. English, but with a strong Russian influence, this early 18th century story of an aspiring English cartographer who is chased from his lover’s bed to his chosen task, to map the dark interior of Ukraine, is certainly colorful enough, with the clash between reason and the supernatural sparking the emergence of monsters from the very skins of the villagers.

Or maybe it’s the potent local drink, eh? Sort of the same, now isn’t it?

Populated with vividly stereotypical villagers, there’s a failure to strongly differentiate each character from the next, so all these guys with fabulous mustaches and exotic hairstyles, who talk much alike and drink with the same gusto, are hard to keep apart in my mind, and when the bashing of skulls begins it’s hard to remember who is who and why they’re bashing. Or getting bashed.

The plot is told with some conventions not familiar from standard Hollywood fare, as scene segues are erratic, even jumpy, just sketching in the journey from village to the cursed church on the lake in a couple of seconds. Sometimes the plot is a whirlwind.

And the expectations of the English cartographer are so at odds with the villagers, their religious conventions, and their fears of the Devil’s minions, that it can be a bit mind-bending if the audience isn’t prepared through historical associations, or at least a warning.

Technically, the special effects are beautifully well-done, the sets are very good, I liked the acting, and the English wigs, ah so beautiful. While at some point I thought this was dubbed from Ukrainian or Russian, I now think this is a true English version, and there is a slight problem in the audio in which the lips don’t match the dialog, quite, at a couple of points.

But, in the end, the failure of this story is in theme, at least for this viewer. The cartographer isn’t given a theme consonant with that of the villagers, or at least so I felt. He’s more or less a bumbling scientist who runs into a village of grinding poor, who fight over money, not necessarily because of greed, but through the need to survive. It’s hard to see how it’s supposed to come together and be powerful and memorable. He’s driven to achieve, but the bad guy is driven to clutch after power. It doesn’t work together.

But it was rather fun.

Rockoon:

Image: Wikipedia.

A rockoon (from rocket and balloon) is a solid fuel sounding rocket that, rather than being immediately lit while on the ground, is first carried into the upper atmosphere by a gas-filled balloon, then separated from the balloon and ignited. This allows the rocket to achieve a higher altitude, as the rocket does not have to move under power through the lower and thicker layers of the atmosphere. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “On the Ball,” [review of Off The Edge, by Kelly Weill], Glenn Branch, Skeptical Inquirer (July/August 2022, paywall):

Not to be unduly captious, but there are a handful of minor problems with the book. The description of a rockoon as a “rocket attached to weather balloons that would carry it upward after the rocket fuel burned out” (153) is backward—the rocket is fired after the balloons carry it as high as they can—which suggests a deficiency in Weill’s grasp of basic physics. Toward the end of the book, Weill speculates that flat-earthers are motivated in part by a desire for a cozy cosmos; perhaps so, but a similar diagnosis is available to flat-earthers, who have been known to argue that mainstream astronomy’s insistence on the vastness of the universe is intended to scare, and thus enable control over, the public. And it is annoying that there is no index. But these, again, are minor problems. Weill’s Off the Edge is not only a worthy successor to Garwood’s Flat Earth and Schadewald’s The Plane Truth but also a worthwhile contribution in its own right.

Continuing the saga of the seamy underside of human greed:

More in this series of updates…

• The savior of the Missouri GOP? A top investigator for the January 6th panel, John Wood, has resigned his position and is making an independent run for the open Senate seat in Missouri. Proclaiming both parties as too extreme, while he’s been a life-long Republican, Wood thinks he can get the job by appealing to the common-sense independents and Party members alike. If he can pull this off, he may become one of the most powerful members of the Senate as a swing-vote member with no iron-bound Party loyalties. And he’ll be a savior because the Missouri GOP won’t have to suffer the abject humiliation of being responsible for Eric Greitens as Senator. But Wood is a long shot, and in fact is not yet on the ballot. Assuming he makes the ballot, he may end up splitting the conservative voters and handing the election to the Democrats, but once again If only the Democrats can field a strong candidate.
• Utah incumbent Senator Mike Lee (R) won his primary on June 28th, but an incumbent only winning 62% of the GOP voters’ ballots suggests discontent in the ranks. As his general election rival is Evan McMullin (I), who has picked up the Democrats’ endorsement, more out of desperation to derail the far-right Senator, Lee may be skating near open water. Lee appears aware of the danger, as his post-victory speech was conciliatory towards the disaffected Republicans, the AP reports.
• I somehow missed the fact that, in Nevada, Adam Laxalt won the GOP primary to win the right to challenge the allegedly-vulnerable incumbent Senator Catherine Cortez Masto (D), and, while he attained a majority victory, it was only 56%, so if that was a bitter battle, he may have lost some GOP support already. Cortez Masto, on the other hand, won her primary with 90% support. I haven’t seen any polls yet, but Laxalt may start down a strike, as The Nevada Independent acquired a recording of Laxalt making anti-abortion remarks: Earlier this month, Republican U.S. Senate candidate and former Attorney General Adam Laxalt called the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision “a joke” and said it’s “sad” that Nevada is not anti-abortion. That will not endear him to the independents who value the availability of abortion medical procedures.

Hopefully there’ll be nothing over the Fourth of July weekend. But just in case …

Yes, you’re right: a bug on the wall.

I see the desperate are becoming a bit more desperate, much to the distress of educators in Florida:

Several South Florida high school educators are alarmed that a new state civics initiative designed to prepare students to be “virtuous citizens” is infused with a Christian and conservative ideology after a three-day training session in Broward County last week.

Teachers who spoke to the Herald/Times said they don’t object to the state’s new standards for civics, but they do take issue with how the state wants them to be taught. …

… trainers told Broward teachers the nation’s founders did not desire a strict separation of state and church, downplayed the role the colonies and later the United States had in the history of slavery in America, and pushed a judicial theory, favored by legal conservatives like DeSantis, that requires people to interpret the Constitution as the framers intended it, not as a living, evolving document, according to three educators who attended the training.

“It is disturbing, really, that through these workshops and through legislation, there is this attempt to both censor and to drive or propagandize particular points of view,” said Richard Judd, 50, a Nova High School social studies teacher with 22 years of experience who attended the state-led training session last week. [Miami Herald]

This is the sort of thing that can be hung around Gov. DeSantis’ (R-FL) neck if he runs for President in 2024.

But I appreciate the distress of the educators, and for that reason I suggest some billionaire step forward and fund a new school called, oh, maybe George Washington Corrective School. It would run during the summer months and supply school lessons that correct the mis-taught lessons propagated by the State propagandists.

For extra credit, they could provide specialists that would trace exactly why the traditional teachings are more accurate than the new State-led teachings.

DeSantis and his backers pissed? Too bad. Private enterprise. Parents enroll children for, say, $50 a head, with a need-based scholarship available.

Shameful lies like these really deserve a boot to the crotch.

The anti-abortion movement, blinded by its temporary success in SCOTUS, is feeling its oats and trying to extend its reach:

It’s no doubt too early for this sort of speculation, but I cannot resist. I’ve watched the January 6th hearings, seen at least some right-wing media evaluate the hearings as devastating for the former President, and now the first few polls have come out indicating a shift in independent voter sentiment, from Republicans to Democrats. Will it be both seismic and persistent?

Let’s assume so. Further, if this is a well-deserved disaster for Trump, it’s not unreasonable to assume his allies in the elected official pool, at least those running for election or reelection, are facing their own disasters, even if they don’t comprehend it just yet. Well-deserved guilt by association.

And the Republican Party is splashed with dishonor, not because Trump was a member in good standing, but the nauseating personal allegiance that so many members had to him, loudly proclaimed.

Who will be the first Republican member of Congress to leave the Party?

Senator Murkowski.

If any do, my guess is the most likely is Senator Murkowski (R-AK), who, as a moderate politician of independent mien, does not get the respect she deserves from an Alaska GOP that appears to be out of its mind. Further, she voted ‘aye’ on the Alito, Gorsuch, and Barrett nominations to SCOTUS, leaving her mighty embarrassed by Dobbs. Given that she won the 2010 campaign as a write-in candidate after being primaried, she almost certainly has the strength to leave the Republicans and set up shop as a successful independent. And I can’t imagine she’s delighted by many of her fellows in the Republican Party – it’s not the Party of her father, Senator and Governor Murkowski.

Senator Collins.

But she may have a competitor in Senator Collins (R-ME), who has made public her dismay at the poor behavior of the four Justices for whom she voted (Kavanaugh in addition to those for whom Murkowski voted) who lead her to believe they respected stare decisis, or judicial precedent, and then have proceeded to overturn several rulings that the Federalist Society has hated.

As independents, these two Senators would join Senators Sanders (I-VT) and King (I-ME), making for four independent Senators, each a power in their own right as they don’t, or no longer, owe allegiance to either Party.

If Even McMullin (I-UT) were to defeat Senator Mike Lee (R-UT), that’d make five. That’s almost a bloc in itself. And Senator Romney (R-UT), although formerly a steadfast Republican and even Presidential nominee, has over the last few years seemed more and more out of place. A sixth?

But it all has to start with some Republican. I won’t speculate about House members, as I don’t track them much. But it’s my guess the first defection, if any, will be in the Senate, and won’t take place until very near the election, or shortly thereafter.

Longtime Senator Republican leader Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) may be facing more losses than he anticipates, and not entirely his direct fault. Not that I am sympathetic about it, as he’s been a destructive force all of his own.

This was momentarily distressing:

To complicate things even further, there have been documented cases of zoos faking panda bears. For instance, a zoo in Taiwan was reportedly caught dying a sun bear black and white and marketing it as a panda in the late 1980s. An Italian circus was also caught dying puppies black-and-white in an effort to pass them off as pandas in 2014. Such incidents clearly have given skeptics ammunition to believe that panda bears as a whole aren’t real. [RollingStone]

The word they want is dyeing, I believe, and if it’s not, it should be.

Dicta:

Dicta are judicial opinions expressed by the judges on points that do not necessarily arise in the case. [The ‘Lectric Law Library]

Noted in “GOP-appointed justices make combating climate crisis much harder,” Steve Benen, Maddowblog:

In biting dicta, [Associated Justice] Kagan poked her conservative colleagues for their casual indifference to their purported principles. “Some years ago, I remarked that ‘[w]e’re all textualists now.’ It seems I was wrong,” she wrote. “The current Court is textualist only when being so suits it.”

See here for my commentary on how SCOTUS has achieved this depressing low in public opinion.

All I can add is that the conservative justices themselves have demonstrated the solution for the mistakes they’re making: overturning these problematic rulings. The raw political power being practiced here by the conservative wing of the Court has a number of shortcomings in a democracy, while persuasive arguments do not suffer permanently from its inherent problems like raw political power.

And apparently the extremist conservatives failed in persuasion, and so are moving on to the flawed raw political power phase of their failing political movement.

Having just watched the Colbert interview of Rep Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), who is not running for reelection, all I can say is that maybe Illinois Republicans should wage a write-in campaign for him.

Articulate and principled. He makes Greene, Gaetz, Boebert, and that crowd look like children who lit their hair on fire at the urging of a pyromaniac.