Unsightly Mental Blemishes

Paul Fidalgo of, and soon to be a high muckety muck, at CSI has a question:

Oh hey, Newsweek reports on Mark Sherwood, “a Republican candidate for governor of Oklahoma [who] has called for a total ban on abortion without any exceptions, while arguing that life begins ‘before’ conception.” What does that even mean?

I do believe that this has already been answered, Mr. Fidalgo, by the intrepid philosophers of Monty Python. Every sperm is sacred, every sperm is great …

While non-alive things may be sacred, sperm flutter about under their own power, and so must be alive.

And Mr. Sherwood had best be careful in treading that particular path. Taken too far, too seriously, too honestly, and he’ll find that life is not sacred. Pushing broken premises right to the edge exposes their essential flimsiness.

The alternative of arresting all men for masturbation and “night emissions,” as involuntary orgasms while sleeping were once called, is going to prove troublesome, first for the men arrested, then for everyone who takes Sherwood seriously, and then Sherwood will find himself >plunk< down at the bottom rung of the power ladder he’s so enthusiastically clambering here.

When your assumptions have error bars of greater > 100%. Or even 1000%. Which makes for negative probabilities. Maybe that works, like the mathematical concept of i, which is defined as the square root of -1?

Oooops, there I go down the digression path. Here’s the quote:

The paper—which hasn’t been peer-reviewed—is called “Estimating the Prevalence of Malicious Extraterrestrial Civilizations” and was written by Alberto Caballero, a PhD student in conflict resolution at the University of Vigo in Spain and the author of a separate study published in Cambridge University’s peer-reviewed International Journal of Astrobiology earlier this month that attempted to analyze where the famous WOW! Signal originated. [Vice]

And it’s just gotta be asked – are these peers going to be representatives of the Malicious Extraterrestrial Civilizations?

How did the editor contact them?

Grounding your police in fantasies about a Divinity does not bring me comfort:

The police department that wrongly shot Breonna Taylor dead in her own apartment in 2020 had trained its officers just three years earlier that they are avengers who carry out “God’s wrath on the wrongdoer.”

New reporting by the Louisville, Ky., independent newspaper LEO documents that in 2017 Louisville Metro Police applied a Bible verse to a mandatory firearms training class. The verse from Romans 13:4 was superimposed over a “thin blue line” flag as the final image in the training slideshow. [Baptist News]

BN’s article seems at least faintly disapproving, but it’s not an opinion piece, but rather reporting. That this is a problem is apparent to some:

Bruce Williams, senior pastor at Bates Memorial Baptist Church in the Smoketown community of Louisville, told LEO he finds use of the verse by Louisville police an example of “weaponizing scriptures.”

“It’s more evidence of what’s kind of in the DNA of America,” he said. “And that is a history of weaponizing scriptures to justify violence sometimes and damnable ends.”

If we momentarily discard the question of whether there’s a Divinity at all, one of the problems of a difficult text such as the Bible having such authority is that most folks don’t really sit down and read it. Instead, they take the word of their cleric.

And if that cleric is ambitious?

Shit like this happens.

I don’t want my police officers fantasizing they’re God’s Avengers. I want police officers who are soberly aware of their responsibilities, and act accordingly.

Just a quick note that WaPo says we might have an amazing meteor storm – might:

The forthcoming Tau Herculid meteor shower ordinarily results in just a trickle of shooting stars between mid-May and mid-June, but there’s a chance it could be something extra special this year. Astronomers are focused on a clumping of cometary debris that — if positioned just right in Earth’s orbital track — could spark such an outburst of meteors. …

Astronomers have pinpointed the most likely time for the peak of whatever display may or may not transpire to be around 1 a.m. Eastern time next Monday night/Tuesday morning. The shower’s “radiant” point, or the part of the sky from which meteors appear to emanate, will be high in the sky over North America at that time, so there’s no specific place in the sky to look.

Happy watching!

The tenet: 2nd Amendment Absolutism, a tenet of the Republican Party. Mix with the religious zealotry known to infect the Republican Party. Apply to an irrational man-child and let loose.

And we have the sickening tragedy in Uvalde, TX, where twenty one were killed, and an unfolding aftermath, where the husband of one of the dead has already died of a heart attack, brought on by the violent killing of his wife.

Not “the passing.” Let’s give up that particular euphemism as a filthy way to hide the truth of the matter – these people died in terror as a madman ran around a school, killing children and adults, armed with a military-grade weapon.

So what do the zealous do when one of their tenets proves to be false? Not “under attack by the Godless liberals,” but actually leads to a tragedy such as Uvalde?

A zealot is someone who believes, without regard to evidence, in some sort of a tenet, a proposition if you will. Found often in the intensively religious and their theocratic leaders, along with the deeply arrogant, and the devotees of ideological positions who have built an intellectual castle of logic, often based on poor assumptions. When more than one of these positions come together in one group, and is seasoned with the anti-intellectual metric of extremism, aka You’re more pure if you’re more extreme!, then we see what we’re seeing now.

And what would that be?

If you consider Alex Jones, proprietor of the ridiculous InfoWars website, to be a conservative, rather than simply an amoral grifter and conman who’s now on the hook for immense monetary damages for his spreading the false idea that the Sandy Hook Elementary School Massacre was a hoax, then here’s sample #1:

1/Yes, America, Alex Jones is already insinuating that the murder of #Uvalde elementary school children today is suspect & was caused by some underlying politically opportunistic motive.

Alex #SandyHook Jones’s phone lines are open.

America, give him a piece of your mind: pic.twitter.com/JL5v2iQgFD

— Kelly Jones (@RealKellyJones) May 25, 2022

It’s the mindset that Surely it couldn’t happen without deliberately bad actors out to get us, so let’s call it that, ignoring the parallel conclusion that, in a world of bad actors and irrational people, which includes you and me, putting weapons into everyone’s hands simply encourages massacres.

More to the point is Texas Attorney General, and man indicted for misconduct in said office, Ken Paxton’s opinion:

“We can’t stop bad people from doing bad things. We can potentially arm and prepare and train teachers and other administrators to respond quickly. That, in my opinion, is the best answer.” [Fox News via Maddowblog, the latter providing transcript]

Thus exposing students to the dangerous, even fatal results of gun accidents and, yes, angry teachers. Worse yet, this is a teaching environment: what are students being taught? That students are worthwhile targets? What if one of these students is the proverbial bad apple?

Is this a good thing?

Let’s go back to the 1950s and ask the Republicans if all the teachers ran around with guns on their hips, did the students attend schools with existential anxieties?

No. Not that I’ve ever read. Except in the context of nuclear war, of which there will be more anon.

And this is back when lead poisoning remained an issue. Lead poisoning, brought on by leaded gas, causes violent behaviors.

But gun training and gun control were a part of gun culture at the time. Before the accession of Wayne LaPierre to the NRA (National Rifle Association) leadership in the 1970s, the NRA was a leading proponent of gun control – that is, of being responsible gun owners, of teaching same, and of being a responsible society in the context of guns. After LaPierre and his cronies took control, the NRA became all about, well, quite honestly, selling guns.

But let’s get on with some examples of Republican responses to Uvalde. Lt. Governor of Texas Daniel Patrick wants to go military:

Obviously we have to do more. We have to harden these targets so no one can get in ever except through one entrance. Maybe that would help. Maybe that would stop someone.

“But it’s really bigger than that, Tucker. We’re a core society. We’re a society that’s just at each other’s throats all the time. And we’re better than this as a nation.” [CNSNews]

First, let me note that, despite early reports, apparently there was no engagement with the shooter by a school security officer prior to the shooter’s entry into the school building. The early suggestion that “hardening” had already been implemented and failed is false.

But, returning to Patrick’s response, yes, extremists are often at someone’s throat. Extremism is a performative art, designed to gain power through manipulation of a vulnerable audience, and a classic performance technique is to attack someone, no holds barred, no holding back.

And that party of Daniel Patrick? It’s a party of extremists.

But his tone is definitely of someone who is really short on ideas. More and more guns was supposed to lead to a polite society, as some conservatives have put it, where the madman is swiftly gunned down with minimal damage. No kidding, this is a point I often ran into in my libertarian readings.

Hiroshima, Japan, after the American nuclear attack on the city in 1945.

It’s quite akin to MAD, or Mutually Assured Destruction, actually, the Cold War doctrine in which we assured the Soviet Union that if it engaged in a nuclear attack on us, we’d return fire and we’d, them and us, would all be dead, and they assured us of the same. The shooter in Uvalde, TX, did in fact end up dead, along with his numerous victims. But he achieved his objective, a revenge on children, a performance to be longed talked about, while we did not: we lost our children. MAD did not work, as it didn’t in Sandy Hook or the other school massacres. It’s logically wrong to declare MAD never works, as when it does work it doesn’t get the same news headlines, but it’s fair to say that it fails with dismaying and unacceptable frequency.

Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) takes one of Patrick’s ideas and mistakenly runs with it:

… Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) (who’s speaking at the NRA’s convention this Friday) argued yesterday that the problem isn’t that there are too many guns out there, it’s that schools have too many doors–more specifically, more than one door.

• Schools need to “harden” by “having one door that goes in and out of the school [and] having armed police officers at that one door,” Cruz told reporters during his visit to Uvalde. [TPM]

Harvard Law School, which awarded Cruz a magna cum laude, must be very, very embarrassed, because this guy can’t argue his way out of a paper sack. Oh, he’s got the performance part down, I saw a little bit of his verbal arguments for rejecting electoral votes during the January 6th counting of the electoral votes, and he has the tone of voice and arm-waving down pat, but this untidy bit of nonsense, which he’s repeated several times (see the TPM link), is unfit for public display. Shall we consider windows, multiple shooters, fire regulations, distributed campuses, school trips,and no doubt quite a few others, against his proposition? What a load of bullshit. But, for him, …

Anything, anything, but questioning that tenet of the Party. It’s worth recalling that Cruz’s father, Rafael Cruz, is a preacher of the born-again variety, and to wonder how much bleed over from that absolutist belief system into the secular belief system occurs.

This is getting over-long, but the response of Georgia Senate GOP nominee and former NFL star Herschel Walker is priceless and must be cited:

“Do you support any new gun laws in the wake of this Texas shooting?” [CNN Chief Congressional Correspondent Manu Raju] asked Walker and repeated the question when Walker indicated he hadn’t properly heard him.

“What I like to—what I like to do is see it and everything and stuff,” Walker replied.

“I like to see it,” Walker said before moving away. He may have been indicating that he wanted to know more about the incident.

“He didn’t engage further,” Raju wrote. [Newsweek]

And did Walker clarify his indecipherable response? In the next day or two, this came popping out:

Herschel Walker's solution to school shootings involves "a department that can look at young men that's looking at women that's looking at social media." pic.twitter.com/WAi7a4mwgz

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 26, 2022

I can say that, for myself, it’s just more gibberish.

But it’s worth noting that his response is congruent with someone who’s been told that any pro-gun control response will result in losing this chance to regain the fame that he had in his football days. He’s obviously not otherwise prepared, so he gushes utter nonsense and hopes no one notices.

This is the GOP nominee for Senate. How can anyone even consider voting for him?

Where is this leading?

Certainly, a few more members of the GOP will be leaving. But not many; those willing to embrace irrationality, so long as it leads them to wealth, power, and/or prestige, will remain, and those not so willing have generally already left.

For independents, some will buy the line of More guns! More guns!, but others will look at the truly irrational response of the Republican Party to this and other mass shootings, and ask why they should vote for Republicans who espouse such positions.

Which leads to the question of Why should they vote for Democrats? Some, for whom I have little sympathy, will point at the pro-choice position on abortion of the Democrats, forgetting that we are a secular, diverse society, and not a theocracy, and refuse to vote for a Democrat; others will point at the autocratic way transgenderism issues have been implemented by Democrats when in charge, and object to voting for such a political party, and for them I have considerable sympathy, believing that the Democrats abrogated their responsibility to have a debate on the issue, as dictated by the liberal democracy political model to which the United States aspires.

Some will sit out elections, tired of the perceived dirtiness of it all. Extremism on the right has ruined the Republicans; the Democrats have not been properly wary of extremists on the left, but are at least partially aware of them. That dirtiness, that rigidity, leads to negative perceptions, of autocratic impulses, theocrats of the wrong stripe, or better yet at all, and of disregard of public opinion and public debate. I can’t say I blame them.

And some will look for alternatives. I have to wonder if an independent candidate or two might win seats. We do have two nominally Independent Senators, Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine. Could there be more? Might we see some House seats come unexpectedly into the hands of Independents in 2022?

And will we see a new and popular party form? I accidentally ran across the last five minutes of a PBS documentary on the Nonpartisan League of North Dakota, existing 1915-1956, which controlled the North Dakota legislature and governor’s seat in roughly the 1916-1918 time frame, and had a mildly quasi-socialist flavor to it. For my purposes, the Nonpartisan League serves as an example that the major parties can be thrust aside, even if only temporarily, by angry mobs, aka parties, of citizens.

Both Democrats and Republicans had best be careful, or they may suddenly discover themselves excluded by citizens who want to be included in public policy discussions (transgenderism, gun control), who want parties that are responsive to citizen concerns rather than corporate profits (gun manufacturers, fossil fuel subsidies), and are generally responsible institutions.

The Republicans have already proven to be third-, fourth, and – see Herschel Walker – fifth rate politicians, in that they can win elections, but they have lost their way when it comes to actual governing, prizing extremism over moderation, arrogance over humility, purity over compromise. If there’s a Divinity, I would be surprised if it doesn’t appear one day, open a yawning chasm, and sweep all the Republicans into it, offended at what has been done in its name.

The Democrats, partly due to a legislature frozen by Senate Republicans’ intractability, also look less than impressive. The transgenderism blunder has an autocratic flavor, repugnant to Independents, and Critical Race Theory and the far left is full of arrogance that is easily punctured, except that the arrogant refuse to reform. If you want more on intrinsic Democratic woes, send Andrew Sullivan some money and read him, he’s more knowledgeable on that than I am.

Voting for Republicans and their inchoate responses to the disasters brought on by their heretofore unbreakable allegiance to Party tenets seems like madness to me. Especially if you’re in Texas, or voting in the Georgia Senate race. But are Democrats good enough alternatives? That’s the sad conundrum of today.

“Hey, dudes in the spaceship! We need a fourth for bridge!”

The War of the Worlds (1953) is the classic retelling of H. G. Wells’ novel of the same name. This version is far more conventional than the 2012 version, which was quite innovative, but the 1953 version has a certain charm in that the conventional approach makes the violence, both between worlds and between humans, and the imminent end of humanity a bit more shocking; the transition from dum-de-dum-de-dum to We just got the shit kicked out of us! highlights the change from humdrum world to a sudden, surprising, and horrifying end.

The understandable, yet deplorable, fight for individual lives leading to the last hope of humanity being trampled under the heels of people desperate for their individual survival has parallels in our current American political contretemps, although the latter speaks more to the fiercely me-me-me character of the basest human characters, rather than the more noble and effective communal approach.

Technically speaking, while there is an inevitable 1950s-vibe happening, and people of color apparently didn’t exist for this movie, it’s a well made flick: good acting, good script which knows when to be slow and when to pick up the pace, and the special effects are excellent for the era, winning an Academy Award, although the actual Martians, when seen, are almost cartoonish.

Representative of its era, but made to an excellent standard, if you have some historical curiosity then this one has to be on your Must Be Seen List.

For a feel of the scale of collapse we’re seeing in NFTs (non-fungible tokens, or how you can “own” a digital something that can be easily copied):

Meanwhile, from the same article:

“I think of NFTs as pure froth,” said Peter M. Garber, an economist and author of “Famous First Bubbles: The Fundamentals of Early Manias.” “It is more of a pump-and-dump, Wolf-of-Wall-Street operation than anything else.”

Garber seems to have a good head on his shoulders, to use an old, old saying.

Ya know, I wonder what Professor Turchin would have to say about this phenomenon, what parallels he’d draw to old Roman Empire corruption and decay.

While musing on yet another snark about Trump’s failure to upend Governor Brian Kemp (R-GA) in the primary, it suddenly occurred to me:

Will Trump endorse Kemp, or would he consider endorsing the Democratic candidate, Stacey Abrams?

There’s a mad bit of logic to the latter choice that leads to win-win. If Abrams wins, Trump gets sweet revenge on Kemp after all. And if Abrams loses, Trump can call it the Trump Curse and take credit for Kemp’s victory.

If only in his odd little world.

Out here in the real world, though, that might peel off a large chunk of the MAGA base. Kathy Barnette, defeated candidate for the GOP nomination to the open Senate seat in Pennsylvania, has already suggested that MAGA can live without Trump around.

But it’d sure upset the GOP’s world.

There have been reports of Trump’s rally crowds shrinking, and his influence becoming questionable, at least in some States. But the Tuesday (May 24) primaries in Georgia may have relegated the former President to the dustbin of history, outside of some possible legal entanglements stemming from the January 6th Insurrection – if I’m to believe Erick Erickson, who lives in Georgia and pays attention to local politics:

But here’s why this has a lot to do with Trump and “stop the steal”[.]

Trump went after three Georgia Republicans more aggressively than any other candidates in the nation: Governor Brian Kemp, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, and Attorney General Chris Carr.

That Brad Raffensperger won without a runoff tells me voters have had enough of Trump’s stolen election grievances. They are ready to move on. They want to look forward, not be pawns to Trump’s ego. Raffensperger’s win is the big indicator this really had more to do with Trump than I was first willing to believe.

Donald Trump literally told Brad Raffensperger that Trump would destroy him and Raffensperger even exceeded fifty percent of the vote in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s district. Raffensperger was the scapegoat, the villain, and the responsible party who cost Trump Georgia, according to Trump. And Georgia’s Republican voters just re-nominated him. His race was so close and there was a Democrat cross-over. So Trump could argue Democrats made it happen. But it does not matter. Trump failed to persuade enough Republicans to reject [Raffensperger].

Trump bullied and denounced Attorney General Chris Carr and Carr crushed his Trump-endorsed opponent. Trump and his team convinced a man who had retired from the practice of law to get his license back just to challenge Carr. It did not work out well.

Even John King, the state’s Insurance Commissioner, decisively crushed his opponent, Patrick Witt, whose campaign signs had, in big letters, “Trump Endorsed.”

Erickson doesn’t say it, but possibly the only primary winning, Trump-endorsed candidate was Herschel Walker, the former NFL star. Unlike most, or all, of the rest of the Trump-endorsed, Walker has his own, independent, and substantial reputation, and Georgia is part of the football-loving South. He owes nothing to Trump. But will he appeal to independents, or will his mental illness, his unfamiliarity with public life issues, allegations of domestic abuse, and his documented mendacity when it comes to his business claims obviate the football sentimentality? In this purplish state, the independents hold the balance of power.

Walker’s opponent, Senator and Pastor Warnock (D-GA), certainly has his own reputation. It’ll be an interesting contest.

But back to the point. I agree with Erickson, Trump was rejected by Georgia GOP primary voters yesterday. Some of this is attributable to who Trump endorsed: candidates with dim prospects but a strong and demonstrated allegiance to Trump. But as I noted here, if Trump wants a reputation as the man with the magic touch, it was absolutely necessary to go out and endorse nobodies. That brings the additional advantage, at least for the former President, of making the candidate dependent on Trump and not on their own accomplishments.

But it carries the risk of exposing the endorser as a charlatan, an electoral fraud, if those candidates fail.

So what happens next? Trump’s influence varies across American geography, so in some areas he’ll retain influence, but in others it’s going to wane. He’s been revealed as just another idiot with a big mouth. The Georgia GOP appears to be moving on, at least in part, and by that I mean that some of those who supported Perdue and other failed Trump endorsees may decide to take their toys and go home.

That is, not vote in the general election.

Will it be enough to affect some races? The state-wide races, yes. Incumbent governor Kemp is at a slightly increased risk of losing. Walker, already facing an incumbent Senator while carrying many burdens which, in a rational society, would invalidate his candidacy, has an increased risk – although his pre-existing reputation shields him, to some extent, from sore loser syndrome. District races, on the other hand, will depend on the district.

Similarly to the sore-loser voters, GOP candidates who pledged eternal devotion to Trump and Trumpism will also scream. After all, they’ve had their shot at, and in some cases their taste of, power, and they will bitterly resent that foreclosure, that invalidation that their notions of how their little bit of America should be run. To be returned to the bar stool after that little taste will be cruel, indeed.

But Trump-appointed judges and SCOTUS Justices will hang around, looking worse and worse as Trump’s incompetence and any crimes committed become more and more salient. But don’t look for any resignations, excepting those judges caught committing a crime themselves. I suspect we’ll see Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett blushing from time to time, should liberals choose to demonstrate when they are in public.

The Southern Baptist Convention logo. Soon to be retired?

And Trump? Another step closer to the dustbin. Add in his connections to the recently morally devastated Southern Baptist Convention, a cornerstone of his base, and two of the legs on his three-legged stool may be missing screws. Look for hot air from him and his coterie and devotees, but this may mark the beginning of the end for Trump.

Will he be smart enough to leave the United States? At one time, I thought the answer was yes, but with his long-time ally, or perhaps master, President Putin both ill and in danger of losing Putin’s War, he may have nowhere to go.

Which I don’t think is present any longer:

“Gucci, Gucci, Goo I said!”

Kung Fu Yoga (2017) is a fairly dull Jackie Chan epic / Indiana Jones riff. Chan plays China’s greatest, but very humble, archaeologist Jack. He and his retinue of young & agile students – I think they’re students – are recruited by Indian professor Ashmita to buy and evaluate a huge emerald. It’s stolen by Ashmita’s rival, evil and arrogant Randall, who might be a prince of India or something, and claims ownership of the emerald. There’s also the theft of a diamond from a trove, yada yada yada. I lost track.

Eventually, and there’s a lot of eventually here, fair warning, we find Chan recreating the third Indiana Jones movie’s scene of the invisible bridge. I think. At its end is a golden gazebo full of treasure – and after some acrobatic fighting, villagers abruptly appear, everyone, even evil Randall, says namaste, and they break into a Bollywood-style musical number. And that’s it.

Yeah. No kidding. I’m not making that up. It’s too insipid, really.

And the rest was sort of dull. Yes, lots of kung fu, escapes from tight situations, and I think my credulity was all stretched out of shape at the end. Don’t get me wrong, technically it’s well done, and the escape from the hyenas was fun.

OK, I hooted really loudly at the lion scene. I think I scared my Arts Editor, even. The lion might be worth the price of admission. If the price is fairly low.

But I won’t remember this ripoff of Jones for much longer, though.

Voyager 1, our first interstellar probe, is not only out beyond the heliosphere, but its warranty period as well, which is a compliment to the designers and builders of the probe. But now it’s having problems:

NASA has reported that while the venerable Voyager 1 probe appears to be functional, there does appear to be something up with some of its instruments. According to its recent press release, readouts from the Attitude Articulation and Control System (AACS) seem invalid.

For an as yet unknown reason, data received from the system doesn’t seem to match up with what’s actually happening onboard.

This piece of kit is vital for monitoring and controlling the 45-year-old probe’s orientation, and it is also vital for keeping Voyager 1’s high-gain antenna pointed precisely at Earth. This enables it to send data home, so is very important to keep working properly.

“All signs suggest the AACS is still working, but the telemetry data it’s returning is invalid. For instance, the data may appear to be randomly generated, or does not reflect any possible state the AACS could be in,” explains NASA. [Interesting Engineering]

A technical problem? A phenomenon interfering with the spacecraft? I wait with great anticipation.

Stephen Colbert has a hack at NFTs (non-fungible tokens) last night:

I liked Emo Emu.

On a more serious note, back in January Jason Bailey mentioned NFTs a few times:

The NFT explosion this year has created an arms race toward increasingly loud and fast-moving digital imagery jockeying for attention (and sales). Against this backdrop, Iskra Velitchkova’s work stands out in contrast to all the noise for how quiet, subtle, and meditative it is. [Artnome]

And

By mid-2021, despite my best efforts, I found it almost impossible to ignore the avalanche of cutesy PFP (personal profile pic) NFT projects featuring cartoon apes, cats, penguins, etc. Around that same time, generative art also captured the public’s eye, but sadly, it, too, quickly devolved, turning into a flood of hastily constructed, hard-edged geometric abstractions produced to meet the new market demand.

Never had I been surrounded by so much imagery that left me feeling so flat. I found myself craving the grotesque. I wanted to be shaken, made to feel uncomfortable, made to feel… anything, really. It was about this time that I discovered the work of Ilya Shkipin. His work makes me feel like I blacked out in a cheap motel room and woke up to find Polaroids under a dirty ashtray documenting the bad life decisions from the night before. Yet it also has its own deep sense of beauty.

Neither of which I quote to define NFTs, or more properly the art promoted under the NFT label. Remember Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of everything is crap.

But my Arts Editor continues to snort at the very mention of NFTs.

Kleptoparasitism:

Kleptoparasitism means parasitism by theft. What is parasitism? Parasitism is when an organism benefits at another organism expense. Kleptoparasitism is used in different ways e.g. bullying other organisms to give up their food they just caught, and steal collected or stored food. This way of obtaining food normally saves the kleptoparasite hunting time and also gives them the chance of food they might not be able to catch themselves. A negative part with using this as a feeding technique is the risk of injuries. Bullying someone to give up their food put you in the direction of their claws, beaks or teeth. [Ocean Adventures]

I’m not sure I would have used the word ‘use’, above. Kleptoparasitism is a behavior, not a tool, although sometimes distinguishing between the two is problematic.

Noted in “Jackals seen stealing kills from lynx as they expand range in Europe,” Josua Rapp Learn, NewScientist (14 May 2022, paywall):

According to new research, [golden] jackals have been seen scavenging carcasses of deer killed by lynx in southern Slovenia. While the evidence is limited at this point, it shows the first recorded incidents of kleptoparasitism — the act of stealing food — against lynx in Europe by jackals.

And a quick nod of provisional nominative determinism to Mr. Learn. Thank you.

Kicking off a new feature centered around the late Senator Goldwater’s (R-AZ) concerns about extremist clerics taking over the Republican Party.

The first entry is Republican candidate for the Michigan Senate Jacky Eubanks:

“We have to decide if we want to be the ‘party of me’ or the ‘party of us.’ And that’s what a lot of these primaries are going to decide.” – former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie (R-NJ) in WaPo.

The former, a ‘party of me,’ is what we see every time a losing candidate starts singing the “they cheated” song – in a primary!

Long-time readers will recall that I’ve chewed on Aussie Prime Minister Scott Morrison (Liberal Party) for his general reliance on God over science and his admiration for former President Trump.

Well, now it’s former Prime Minister Morrison.

In this parliamentary democracy, the Liberal Party lost enough seats to the Labor Party and a host of independents that Morrison is out as PM, and those independents are the story of the election:

Morrison not only lost seats to Labor but also lost a swath of seats to a group of female independents who adopted the color teal — a blend of Liberal blue (to signal they were economically conservative) and green (to signal they were progressives on climate change and the status of women.) The “teal independents” won seats in wealthy parts of Sydney and Melbourne that had long voted Liberal — including that of Morrison’s deputy, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg. [WaPo]

2021 Australian fires. Source: YCNews.

That independents concerned about climate change won in the heart of Liberal-land, the wealthy parts of Sydney and Melbourne, signals that the threat of climate change to human civilization is beginning to penetrate all the level of Australian society.

And while the obvious question is How far is the United States’ Republican elites behind the Australians?, a more interesting question is whether or not the United States, out of frustration at the elites of both parties, forms one or more new parties that return to an embrace of science and rationality while discarding rigid, even alien, ideologies and theologies.

It’s a tall mountain to climb, but I’m beginning to wonder, given the problems the Democrats keep inflicting on themselves in the face of wonderful political opportunity, if we may see that hypothetical party transition to reality. The Republican problems are increasingly becoming self-evident, especially if you, like I am, are in the process of political analysis of the Senate races this year. Refugees from both parties could join this third party, and it could become a mover and shaker.

If it’s in sync with American independents.

Ready to take on Ebirah, eh?

Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (1966)? What can it be? Why don’t we get to see Ebirah in the deep, but only at the surface? Does it keep a messy domicile? Are there human bones – shish kebabbed, to judge from Ebirah’s habits on the surface – scattered about?

And who are these classic Japanese villains running around on the island? They’ve kidnapped an indigenous tribe from another island, or at least some of them, and conveyed them to their island to make … Ebirah-repellent?

Maybe go to a different island, instead, and live in peace there? Or does Ebirah have a grudge against the bad guys?

And then there’s this pack of rescuers – not of the tribe, mind you, but from modern-day Japan, looking for the brother of one of them. Another is a lock breaker and the original thief of the boat, from whom the others thieved the boat. Our morals need a boost.

And then there’s guest star Godzilla, clomping his/her/its way through the landscape, aping for the camera, as it were. OK, it was supposed to be King Kong, but Godzilla had to step in at the last moment while King Kong attended to his mistress. Or financial matters. The record’s a bit cloudy on the matter.

And, just for fun, there’s yet another guest star. Ebirah’s outnumbered, but, see, it has this big ol’ claw. Yeah, the shish-kebab claw.

It’s all a mess, but it moves right along and almost makes a sort of sense. In a way, it’s another anti-nuclear story, but so subtle that it may not affect today’s audience, at this far remove from –

Oh, wait. Ukraine. Maybe it is relevant.

So it’s a bit of fun, a good pace on it, and a kaboom at the end is threatened. Maybe we care. Maybe we don’t. But, in today’s weather here in Minnesota, the thought of residing on a warm, South Pacific island is quite alluring.

Go for the island and the views!

And can you imagine the Disney ride? Wheeeeeeeeeee– gulp

Aphantasia:

As many as 3.9 per cent of people have aphantasia, the inability to picture images in one’s head. But formally diagnosing the condition is difficult. A simple physiological test involving a webcam could one day offer a solution. [“Simple webcam test could show whether you lack a mind’s eye,” Jason Arunn Murugesu, NewScientist (14 May 2022, paywall)]

In the GOP primary contest for the Senate seat in Pennsylvania, contested by Mehmet Oz (aka Dr. Oz of television fame), David McCormick, a businessman who is another Trumpian devotee, and Kathy Barnette, who claims to be a Trumpian while discarding the actual former President, the first two candidates are locked in quite a battle at the ballot box, while Barnette did not do as well as expected. In fact, the contest remains undecided.

And Trump is trying to game the system:

Ex-President Donald Trump is injecting his democracy-damaging fraud claims into a new election cycle, urging his friend Mehmet Oz to simply declare he won a too-close-to-call race for the Republican Senate nomination in Pennsylvania — a key state in Trump’s desperate bid to steal the 2020 election.

The cliffhanger contest between Oz and David McCormick, another claimant to Trump’s legacy, is the marquee race from Tuesday’s round of primaries — and carries calamitous echoes of 2020 election controversy and ill omens for 2024. [CNN/Politics]

Oz has not, to my knowledge, taken that advice, but a number of pundits are outraged. What struck me, however, is how this is really an attempt to take part of our electoral system away from the folks who are tasked with, and measured by, their partisan-less vote counting, and move that part of our system into, at best, a partisan operation, and, at worse, into the camp of a party involved in the contest.

Trump attempts to camouflage this by claiming the process is already rigged, as we all know. Here’s Trump on this race:

He’s at it again. pic.twitter.com/F7AGlfjAbC

— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) May 19, 2022

The usual sloppy thinking. France is a magnitude smaller than the US in terms of voting population. Less obvious is the spirit of volunteering in the two countries, which would certainly affect the number of volunteers available; interference and security concerns; monitoring concerns; requirements for overseas voting by military personnel and how they handle it.

And here Trump wants to discard the votes of Republicans that don’t meet his criteria, i.e., didn’t vote for Oz.

In the end, he wants his people to count the votes, to move vote counting under his control. Sorry, dude, it just doesn’t work that way.

And that’s the most important part of this race.

Colorado gubernatorial candidate Greg Lopez is in search of a way to help Republicans win in this heavily Democratic state, and it involves getting rid of the one-person one-vote paradigm and replacing it with an electoral college approach of peculiar character. He’s got it all worked out:

Lopez said his electoral college plan would weight counties’ votes based on their voter turnout percentage to encourage turnout.

“I’ve already got the plan in place,” Lopez said. “The most that any county can get is 11 electoral college votes. The least that a county can get is three.” [9News]

Onwards to the exceptionally dubious summation by Lopez:

“It’s not about one-person, one-vote,” Lopez said at the May 15 campaign stop. “It’s about true representation.”

It conveniently ignores differences in population, doesn’t it? If you’re in a ten person county, your vote will weigh far more than if you’re in a one hundred person county.

Then there’s that pesky winner-take-all stipulation implied in the proposal. A candidate wins an important county by a single vote and they get all the electoral votes. This is representation how?

It’s not, is it? Just a poorly thought out scheme to grab power.

9News, of course, analyzed how such a system would have changed the last election, for what it’s worth:

9NEWS analyzed how Lopez’s proposal could have impacted the results of the 2018 gubernatorial race. In lieu of details on the plan from the Lopez campaign, 9NEWS sorted the 2018 county turnout percentages in the gubernatorial race and sorted then into as equally-sized tiers as possible, assigning 11 electoral votes to the highest turnout tier and three electoral votes to the lowest turnout tier.

Under Lopez’s plan, that governor’s race would have been a runaway win for Republicans, who lost the actual race by double-digits when each vote was weighted equally.

Democrat Jared Polis defeated Republican Walker Stapleton by more than 10 percentage points. Lopez’s electoral college plan would have swung that race for Republicans by nearly 30 percentage points, resulting in the equivalent of an 18 percentage point victory for Stapleton over Polis.

And this dude is the best that Colorado Republicans can manage for the governor’s seat? They’re just crumbling into dust, it seems.

From before the hailstorm, some creeping phlox.

And more irises.

And these dudes, trying to be charming. One of them was lobotomized by the hail, later.

We’ve been seeing numerous Republicans exit the party as it skids to the right, but now, apparently, the fractures may be on the right.

Although I’m also inclined to read this as the whimpering of an immature and power hungry twerp:

“I am on a mission now to expose those who say and promise one thing yet legislate and work towards another, self-profiteering, globalist goal,” [Rep Madison Cawthorn (R-NC), defeated recently in a primary] wrote. “The time for genteel politics as usual has come to an end. It’s time for the rise of the new right, it’s time for Dark MAGA to truly take command. We have an enemy to defeat, but we will never be able to defeat them until we defeat the cowardly and weak members of our own party. Their days are numbered. We are coming.” [Maddowblog – I’m not going to link to the unreadable original Instagram post.]

While this could end in blood for certain Republican Party members that have displeased Cawthorn, I hope not. Cawthorn needs to go find an obscure job and just drop out – it’s clear that he’s not suited to politics or high responsibility.

Reading this:

The Oklahoma Legislature passed a bill Thursday that would ban nearly all abortions, the latest and most severe in a string of anti-abortion measures approved in the state in recent months.

Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican, is expected to sign the measure, HB 4327, which would prohibit abortions after “fertilization” with few exceptions, making it the most restrictive such law in the country. It passed the Republican-controlled House by a vote of 73-16. [NBC News]

It’s hard for me to avoid the impression that the Oklahoma legislature is trying to engage in one-upmanship. In other words, rather than incentivizing wisdom in governance, someone has said The winner will be the one who can be most extreme in casting out abortion!

Which seems despicable to me.

Extremism has been incentivized by the Republicans for half a century and more, and that’s what we’re getting: cartoon characters in State and Federal legislatures.

Or just file this under Toxic Team Politics, yeah?