Unsightly Mental Blemishes

Malariotherapy:

Malaria itself was used as a treatment for tertiary syphilis in the early twentieth century before the germ theory of disease was universally accepted and before antibiotics were available. Patients were intentionally infected with malaria; the resulting fever killed the heat-sensitive spirochetes, and then quinine could be used to cure the malaria. Unfortunately, malariotherapy killed 15 percent of those treated with it. More recently, Henry Heimlich advocated malariotherapy as a cure for AIDS. Some small studies in China found that it reduced HIV viral loads, but it can’t be recommended. [“The World’s Most Deadly Animal,” Harriet Hall, M. D., Skeptical Inquirer (March/April 2022, paywall)]

Michael Le Page in NewScientist (19 March 2022) points out that potential food shortages caused by Putin’s War on Ukraine, one of the bigger food exporters around, can be alleviated through some simple legislation:

… Europe and the US could more than compensate for the loss of Ukraine’s exports by diverting crops destined to be made into biofuels into food production instead. This would bring food prices down and help prevent a major global food shock.

Quickly increasing the supply of food crops is difficult. But a large proportion of food crops aren’t eaten but converted to biofuels. Globally, 10 per cent of all grain is turned into biofuel, says [Matin Qaim at the University of Bonn in Germany].

It has always struck me as a little odd that we divert food into energy production, and I suppose this is a graphic illustration of why it is a little mad to do so. The connection to legislation is that this is often a result of a legislative mandate. The Czech Republic has already recognized this:

On 11 March, the Czech Republic ended its mandate requiring ethanol to be blended with petrol. It did this to reduce the costs of fuel rather than food, but [Ariel Brunner at Birdlife International] is calling for other countries to follow suit.

If you’re in the habit of using a biofuel, it may soon become scarce.

Helioseismology:

Helioseismology, a term coined by Douglas Gough, is the study of the structure and dynamics of the Sun through its oscillations. These are principally caused by sound waves that are continuously driven and damped by convection near the Sun’s surface. It is similar to geoseismology, or asteroseismology (also coined by Gough), which are respectively the studies of the Earth or stars through their oscillations. While the Sun’s oscillations were first detected in the early 1960s, it was only in the mid-1970s that it was realized that the oscillations propagated throughout the Sun and could allow scientists to study the Sun’s deep interior. The modern field is separated into global helioseismology, which studies the Sun’s resonant modes directly, and local helioseismology, which studies the propagation of the component waves near the Sun’s surface. [Wikipedia]

Seems obscure, doesn’t it? Yet as our technology dependence continues to advance, terminology such as this describes fields of study that are becoming more and more important to preserving the stability of our way of life. Noted on Spaceweather.com:

HELIOSEISMIC SUNSPOT ALERT: Researchers who use helioseismology to monitor the farside of the sun have detected echoes from a potentially significant sunspot group. It’s right here. The active region, whatever it is, will rotate into view early next week.

George F. Will helpfully pointed me at Herman Khan’s Escalation Ladder, of which I’d never heard:

A sort of psychological dissertation on how to intimidate civilian leaders is how I take it. It’s a bit fascinating and a bit horrifying.

It’s unsettling when scientists are wrong in an unhappy way:

An ice shelf the size of New York City has collapsed in East Antarctica, an area long thought to be stable and not hit much by climate change, concerned scientists said Friday.

The collapse, captured by satellite images, marked the first time in human history that the frigid region had an ice shelf collapse. It happened at the beginning of a freakish warm spell last week when temperatures soared more than 70 degrees (40 Celsius) warmer than normal in some spots of East Antarctica. Satellite photos show the area had been shrinking rapidly the last couple of years, and now scientists wonder if they have been overestimating East Antarctica’s stability and resistance to global warming that has been melting ice rapidly on the smaller western side and the vulnerable peninsula. [AP]

Is this evidence that their (our! We’re all in this together!) measurements have been underestimating reality? Or that we don’t understand the chains of causality in the area? I think the latter would be the preferable failure.

WaPo and many commentators are remarking upon the hijinks of Ginni Thomas, the wife of long-time SCOTUS Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, and well-known far-right extremist in her own, er, right:

Virginia Thomas, a conservative activist married to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, repeatedly pressed White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to pursue unrelenting efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election in a series of urgent text exchanges in the critical weeks after the vote, according to copies of the messages obtained by The Washington Post and CBS News.

The messages — 29 in all — reveal an extraordinary pipeline between Virginia Thomas, who goes by Ginni, and President Donald Trump’s top aide during a period when Trump and his allies were vowing to go to the Supreme Court in an effort to negate the election results.

On Nov. 10, after news organizations had projected Joe Biden the winner based on state vote totals, Thomas wrote to Meadows: “Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!…You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice. The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.” …

The messages, which do not directly reference Justice Thomas or the Supreme Court, show for the first time how Ginni Thomas used her access to Trump’s inner circle to promote and seek to guide the president’s strategy to overturn the election results — and how receptive and grateful Meadows said he was to receive her advice. Among Thomas’s stated goals in the messages was for lawyer Sidney Powell, who promoted incendiary and unsupported claims about the election, to be “the lead and the face” of Trump’s legal team.

Of particular concern here are the actions of the Associate Justice, as Steve Benen notes:

… while Ginni Thomas was pressing the White House to reverse Donald Trump’s defeat, and the White House was pursuing legal strategies to keep the losing candidate in power, Clarence Thomas was ruling on cases related to the 2020 election. …

Circling back to our earlier coverage, let’s also not forget that after the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack subpoenaed White House materials, Trump sued to keep the documents from his administration hidden. The former president ran out of options, however, two months ago: The U.S. Supreme Court rejected the Republican’s emergency appeal, clearing the way for disclosure.

While the high court did not release details on each justice’s conclusion, Clarence Thomas was alone in publicly acknowledging his dissent.

That looked bad at the time. It’s a bit worse now.

In other words, it looks like a scandal is brewing.

And what does that mean?

Why, I expect the far-right extremists will use a familiar go-to move: cast aspersions on the Democrats, attempting to make the actions of Justice Thomas, ethically dubious as they are, appear unimportant next to the terrible actions of the Left. It’s all about moral equality. Have you noticed how often the far-right has to cover for an unforced error?

Will one of the two liberal justices on the court, excluding the retiring Breyer, become the target? Or will Judge Jackson, now finished with her SCOTUS confirmation hearings and whose confirmation is reported to be nearly assured now that Senator Manchin has stated he will vote for her confirmation, be the target of some terrible imaginary secret finally revealed?

Or does the position of the target matter less than the revelatory nature?

I’m almost afraid to look at right wing websites now.

I cannot help but feel that Utah’s government, along with some other States, is fulfilling one of the requirements of a liberal democracy is an exceedingly clumsy and, perhaps, ineffective way:

Former Secretary of State Albright died today. Her death, along with the recent passing of former Secretary of State Colin Powell, is actually a bit of a blow to the United States, because, as experienced foreign affairs hands, they will have had plenty of advice to hand out on a variety of topics; neither was a rank amateur.

Unlike another former Secretary, Rex Tillerson. I suspect no one calls him asking for diplomatic advice.

Rest In Peace, Secretaries Albright and Powell.

Such exquisite beauty deserves not the caption.

Gutboy: A Badtime Story (2017) is a sequence of marionettes that –

No, that’s not right.

A causal chain of marionettes?

That like having sex with humans ten times their own size?

While seeking revenge on the guy who stole a fishing pole?

And the hulk who’s the town cop?

Eyeballs must mean something, but brain exchanges, nothing.

If this sounds like a review by a whack-job

This movie’s whack-job is a professional

While the review-writer isn’t even a gifted amateur.

Recommendations are meaningless. It either exists in your head, or doesn’t. See, or see not.

Definitely not.

Hell, my Arts Editor refused to watch more than five minutes of it. I think she deserves a donut for that sort of perseverance.

A donut with eyes. And extra brains.

Don’t bother to try to enjoy. Grit your teeth, swallow if you’ve gottem, and don’t bother to wonder if the makers had more to swallow than you. They did.

Today, or perhaps it was yesterday, former President Trump withdrew his endorsement of Rep Mo Brooks (R-AL) in Brooks’ pursuit of the GOP nomination for the open Senate seat, which is opening up because of the retirement of Senator Richard Shelby (R-AL). The former President was disgruntled that Brooks no longer wished to wallow with Trump in The 2020 Election was Stolen from Me! mud-pit. Trump is confident that the people of Alabama would prefer to swelter in that particular falsehood, and I doubt Brooks will prove him wrong, as Brooks campaign is not doing well at all; in fact, nothing will be proven if Brooks fails to win the nomination.

Brooks, to his credit, returned fire, but it was really quite unsatisfying, once you stop and analyze it.

“President Trump asked me to rescind the 2020 elections, immediately remove Joe Biden from the White House, immediately put President Trump back in the White House, and hold a new special election for the presidency,” Brooks said in a statement. “As a lawyer, I’ve repeatedly advised President Trump that January 6 was the final election contest verdict and neither the U.S. Constitution nor the U.S. Code permit what President Trump asks. Period.” …

Brooks responded that when Trump asked him to help him overturn the election he knew “full well that it might cause President Trump to rescind his endorsement.”

“But I took a sworn oath to defend and protect the U.S. Constitution. I honor my oath. That is the way I am. I break my sworn oath for no man,” Brooks said. “I’m still the most conservative candidate in the race.” [The Hill]

First, I doubt that Trump would have asked a minor back-bencher like Brooks to “rescind” an election. I doubt Trump would view him as having the moxie – not the power, but the moxie – to attempt such a stunt. It feels more like a “look at me!” claim.

Second, rescind is hardly the proper word. Brooks claims he’s a lawyer, so why isn’t he using the proper word? That’s puzzling.

Third, and most important, the faux-association between honoring an oath and conservatism is an attempt to self-validate being a far-right extremist. After all, he claims he’s the most conservative, just after his verbiage concerning never breaking his oath. If you read that and allow it to pass, then the careless reader ends up with the notion that Brooks must be the most honorable candidate in the race. Why?

Because, uh, he’s the most conservative … ?

That’s not how a wise person measures honor, however, not only because it’s a proxy, but it’s not clear how the two are connected – and, meantime, we can directly measure his honor by examining his record of promises made / promises broken. Screw proxies when direct measurements are available, says I.

At this point, I can say that he gave a speech encouraging the January 6th insurrection, so I think his connection of honor to conservatism is at least a bit damaged. But that’s really all I know of Brooks, who has a TrumpScore of only 88%.

That, and his riposte really seemed to be a bit weak. Perhaps he’s still trying to hold onto MAGA voters?

This article in WaPo suggests that the tenets of liberal democracies still stand a chance in the academia of the United States, or at least at UPenn, where a safe space for having discussions is being provided:

A White, male student said that some of the country’s resources should be reserved for Americans. A Latina student named Alejandra felt like he was accusing undocumented people of taking resources. She said that assumption was flawed: Undocumented immigrants faced numerous barriers when they arrived, she explained. They often couldn’t access resources at all. Her own parents had come to the United States undocumented from El Salvador, she said, and it had taken them years to build their lives up from nothing.

Others in the breakout room agreed with her, but the male student pushed back. He said every country had borders and a right to enforce them. America could try to be humane, but it had to restrict people. That was reality.

Alejandra and her opponent went back-and-forth. At one point Alejandra grew so emotional that she turned off her camera to compose herself. The facilitator for the group shifted the conversation in a different direction, and she turned her camera back on. Everybody moved on, amiably enough.

Just before the session ended, the White student spoke up. He apologized to Alejandra. “I hope I haven’t offended you,” he said. “If I did, I’m sorry.” …

Since Gen Z began entering college in 2015, a growing number of academic institutions have started to look critically at their own campus culture. They’re asking how, amid intense national polarization, divergent student voices can speak and be heard. The answer has taken shape as a civil dialogue movement — a collection of courses, orientation programs, workshops and events — that help students communicate across differences.

In other words, discussion as a way to grow, rather than a chance to scream Politics!, followed up by Bigot!

But I think it helps to revisit the purpose of certain rights that come under the rubric of liberal democracy. The right to free speech comes to mind, and its misuse – not abuse, but misuse – is important. There’ve been a few incidents of late, such as the loud shutdown of Professor Shapiro at Hastings College, and the attempt to disrupt a panel on civil liberties at Yale Law School. On the latter, here’s the Washington Free Beacon:

More than 100 students at Yale Law School attempted to shout down a bipartisan panel on civil liberties, intimidating attendees and causing so much chaos that police were eventually called to escort panelists out of the building.

The March 10 panel, which was hosted by the Yale Federalist Society, featured Monica Miller of the progressive American Humanist Association and Kristen Waggoner of the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a conservative nonprofit that promotes religious liberty. Both groups had taken the same side in a 2021 Supreme Court case involving legal remedies for First Amendment violations. The purpose of the panel, a member of the Federalist Society said, was to illustrate that a liberal atheist and a conservative Christian could find common ground on free speech issues. …

When a professor at the law school, Kate Stith, began to introduce Waggoner, the protesters, who outnumbered the audience members, rose in unison, holding signs that attacked ADF. The nonprofit has argued—and won—several Supreme Court cases establishing religious exemptions from civil rights laws, most famously Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission in 2018. …

With the fracas intensifying, Stith reminded the students of Yale’s free speech policies, which bar any protest that “interferes with speakers’ ability to be heard and of community members to listen.” When the protesters heckled her in response—several with their middle fingers raised—she told them to “grow up,” according to video of the event obtained by the Free Beacon.

And, oddly enough, the key lies in Professor Stith’s remark of “grow up.”

Her remark suggests, or reminds us, that there’s a purpose to ‘free speech’ in the context of liberal democracy. Liberal democracies are not autocracies, are not theocracies, are not monarchies. They are, by both nature and definition, dedicated to the notion that by working together, we can govern ourselves far better than the primitive and brazen ‘strongman’ approach of the autocracy, or the more covert, but still ‘strongman’ approach of monarchies, and the imagined notions of a Divine entity which refuses to provide proof of its existence, much less an objective message concerning its desires, that underlies theocracies.

The liberal democracy requires tough-minded people who recognize the failure of the strongman and the theocrat when it comes to the immensely difficult task of governance.

And I don’t toss in difficult task of governance as a rhetorical flourish; instead, that oft-ignored reality is key to understanding Professor Stith’s remark.

Look: In order to solve large, difficult problems, we can try throwing a single person at it, aka the strongman, but, as noted, they have a terrible record. Looking at all the strongmen, they are overwhelmingly remembered with fondness neither by those who survived their depredations, nor historians. The best of them might have been Napoleon Bonaparte, who draws wide admiration for his improvements in civil administration, but his military ambitions took France into disaster not once, but twice. After him, there’s a big drop off, and even those with “great” reputations are definitely questionable individuals once the rose colored glasses are taken off.

Or we, the citizens of a country, can work on them as a team. Teams, when well-led, bring to the fore everyone’s best ideas, their careful investigation and judgment, their ideas as to how to deal with an uncertainty, and join it all together into a solution. Thus, we have a Constitution which can be modified, surely a marvel all on its own, as it dispels the hubris which surrounds so many human endeavours. Indeed, it is the principle upon which many have rejected Kendi’s proposed Constitutional Amendment, and while its harshness might be excused on the idea that his is a first draft, a better first draft would include the concept and strategies of dealing with inherent uncertainties.

And what is the grease that enables the cumbersome machinery of teams?

COMMUNICATIONS.

Whether it’s letters or voice or telecom, our primary tool for working on the great project of governance is speaking. We use it, at its best, to present rational discourse on difficult topics; in its lesser forms, we use communications to cajole, badger, and, worst of all, mislead and endanger.

The reason we call it ‘free speech’ isn’t because we can make any noise we wish at any volume. Try that at two in the morning with a bullhorn in the middle of a suburban street, and the cops will haul your ass to jail and let you cool for a few hours, and any lawyer will tell you that, no, you don’t have an infringement of your free speech rights over which you can sue.

No, ‘free speech’ means discussing any public topic, and if my reader can point at certain political topics and claim they cannot be discussed, welcome to a country that aspires to be a liberal democracy, but hasn’t achieved it.

So, when a group of students shouts someone down, there is understandable and valid outrage. That shouting is not communications but of the crudest kind, and its function as a weapon actually supersedes it. Denial of access to the intellectual public square, in which matters of import are debated and decided, is violence to the body politic akin to that of the old battle cry, No taxation without representation!

Rather than using it to communicate reason, they seek to dominate their opponent(s) on the stage. Rather than defeat them in serious and frank discussion, in which they might lose, they turn to intellectual violence, the kind that violates the tenets of liberal democracy.

I mentioned the Professor scolding the students with the hoary old grow up, and I’d like to add that it reminds me of one other thing: these are, after all, students. This is a part of the process of maturing in knowledge, and suggests where their lessons should go next. While smacking them on the muzzle and yelling Bad student! may be frowned upon in polite society – that is, those who are paying the tuition and believe education is a transactional process – the various colleges do need to perform this exercise, analogously of course, with these students. A reminder that violence, intellectual or otherwise, is not a salient feature of liberal democracies. It is not forbidden, but should only be used as a last resort.

Loitering munitions:

Robert Cringely reminds everyone why Putin is unlikely to use nuclear weapons:

The simple lesson here is that nobody is going to have time to move out of the way of tactical nukes.

Source: I, Cringely

If you are wondering what the damage of such a limited nuclear war would look like, the Chernobyl nuclear accident from 1986 provides a pretty good example, since that disaster site lies between Kiev and Russia and Belarus.[To the right] you’ll find a map showing the Cesium 137 fallout from Chernobyl. If you want to know what bombing Kiev would do, just move the Chernobyl spot down and a little to the right and see where the blotches fall.

But tactical nukes aren’t a nuclear accident, you say, the map would be different. Yes, it would be BIGGER. Chernobyl melted DOWN while bomb and missile and artillery fallout bounce UP into the atmosphere and spread much farther.

Most of the fallout of a Kiev attack, in fact, would land in Russia. The cities of Bryansk (427,000 population), Kaluuga (338,000), Kursk (409,000), Orel (324,000), and Tula (468,000) would all be hit, not by weapon strikes, but by fallout. That’s just under two million people exposed in those five cities, not counting folks in the countryside between.

The smear of toxic effects from a battleground is amplified by technology. The arrows and ballistae used at Masada are little more than desirable archaeological artifacts and collectors’ items, as are the bullets found on many American Civil War battlefields. Some categories may be reused, but they are not still in action, as it were, days, weeks, and even years later.

But do collectors try for today’s weapons? Only the foolish collector. Even those weapons from World War I, primarily hand grenades, are still found and are dangerous. World War II bombs dropped by the warring air fleets are still found in cities today and are a menace, as are certain of the shipwrecks.

The amplification of the nuclear age has made the dangers less obvious, more potent, and longer lived. Along with nuclear bombs there are also depleted uranium tank rounds littering battlegrounds, radioactive for how long? That link notes the US Army has lost its supplier of such ammunition. This all along side relatively mundane grenades and land and sea mines,  waiting to kill decades into the future.

Hell, I wonder if there are drones being built to “crash” and then wait for a booby to come along and collect it. Don’t be a booby.

In a very real sense, even if Putin loses this war, he’s already inflicted decades of future pain, death, and suffering through his purification of those he’d prefer to think of as his people. “Putin’s War” will be, and is, a terrible curse. If he launches nukes, according to Cringely, then he’ll ensure his own people share the suffering.

In the category of It’s really unlikely but not impossible, my brain is connecting my comments regarding a possible invasion of Russia by China with today’s tragedy:

Long time readers may recall that SCOTUS Chief Justice Roberts, in a previous life, led the effort to make private justice an acceptable and viable option to our standard justice system. This often results in employment agreements in which the employee is not permitted to sue, but must go through and accept the results of arbitration. Class action suits are especially forbidden.

Controlled by the employer.

In an attempt to remedy the situation, last Thursday the House worked at fixing the situation:

The Democrat-led House voted 222-209 to pass the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal (FAIR) Act over the objections of Republicans and business groups who say it will deprive workers, consumers and companies of a faster and cheaper alternative to court. [Reuters]

I do not seriously expect the GOP caucus in the Senate to permit this bill to be debated; it’ll be filibustered, instead.

But it’s worth noting that an appeal to economics, rather than justice, is coming from the GOP. There is some justice inherent in timely justice, yes, but it is easily overwhelmed when a party to the suit has influence over the judging apparatus.

And I’m not familiar with the wording of FAIR, but it’s not hard to see how it could be worded such that arbitration is available when both parties request it voluntarily.

In other words, I’m not impressed in the least with House GOP objections to the bill.

Or perhaps “dropped word of the day”, and it goes to Paul Fidalgo of The Morning Heresy:

A new video by Kite & Key Media explains the ridiculousness of the anti-GMO movement, especially when one considers how many billions of lives the “green revolution” of genetically modified crops.

Read creatively, I think he achieves the opposite of his intention.

Or perhaps he’s just frantically signaling the heroic conspiracy theorists for help.

In case you were wondering, Wikipedia provides a map of NATO’s reach:

(The black background should be white, and is an artifact of converting from PNG to JPG format. The blue is actual NATO members; the balance of the key is at the link.)

Russia is the orange. Keeping in mind that the United States lies across the Bering Strait from Russia, it’s clear why Russia feels threatened by NATO, but then NATO was created to counter the Soviet Union, which included Russia as the dominant member way back when, and was also the dominant member of the Eastern Bloc.

Now it’s just Russia and whatever it can acquire. And it turns out that an autocracy doesn’t lead to a dominant military, for what are becoming obvious reasons.

The Old Bailey, of London, England, has a database of the cases it’s sat on:

The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913

A fully searchable edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing 197,745 criminal trials held at London’s central criminal court.

At some obscure level, I find this disturbing:

The Digital Panopticon: The Global Impact of London Punishments, 1780-1925

This new AHRC funded website traces the lives of 90,000 convicts sentenced at the Old Bailey between 1780 and 1875, linking Old Bailey trials to relevant entries in fifty databases of criminal justice and civil records, including the census. The ‘Life Archives’ allow users to discover both the pre- and post-trial histories of Old Bailey convicts. They allow users to see differences between the punishment sentences handed down by the court and the punishments convicts actually experienced, and make it possible to compare the impact of the punishments of imprisonment and transportation on convicts’ lives.

A physical panopticon looks like this:

Image Credit: Designing Buildings

The central tower houses the guards on duty, and the surrounding walls have the prisoner cells. The concept of privacy, as dubious as some would see it for the inmates, disappears. Some prisoners suffered mental breakdowns.

Sure, I get that the Old Bailey people are trying to say nothing’s hidden, but it sends shivers up my spine.

In NewScientist (12 March 2022, paywall), Lucy Cooke recounts the natural history of female animals sleeping around, and then misinterprets the bigger picture:

When Patricia Gowaty began doing DNA paternity tests on songbird eggs in 1984, she discovered that each nest frequently contained multiple fathers, despite the apparent monogamy of their parents.

Members of the male ornithological establishment responded by insisting the females had been “raped”. But radio trackers subsequently revealed females actively seeking sex with neighbouring cocks. Since then, a polyandry revolution has revealed that multiple mating is the norm for females, from lions to lizards. The reason is quite obvious: don’t put all your eggs in one basket – greater genetic diversity means healthier offspring.

Gowaty, like me, has never tried to hide her politics. She believes in equal representation of both sexes. But, as Darwin’s Victorian values show us, science is always political. A feminist perspective is urgently needed to topple centuries of androcentrism and rebrand female sexual agency, in lionesses or songbirds, from unexpected to a winning maternal strategy.

Not political, but culturally biased. The intellectual error of projection, of anthropomorphism, is a well-known problem in science, from physics to natural history, by which I mean the study of animals’ social structures. Early scientists grew up in societies in which females were nominally monogamous. This is a cultural tradition. They made the mistake of applying cultural mores to turtles, and that just doesn’t fly.

Politics is about governance. Science is about reality, wherever that may lead. Her ornithologists were using bad assumptions. But to call it politics is just wrong.

But I think what we’re seeing here is the influence of the far-left’s view that everything is politics, particularly if someone’s feeling offended by it. Call it politics, turn the weapons du jour upon all those who happen to hold such a view, and pull the trigger.

It’s crude, it’s intellectual bullying, and, unlike in many areas, it doesn’t really get the job done. Science depends on studying reality and coming to conclusions based on evidence, not imposing a conclusion and then twisting the evidence to match. That disastrous approach has been tried a time or two before, most notably by Soviet scientist Lysenko.

Call it misapplication of cultural mores and be done with it. Call it politics and end up paying for that mistake for decades.

For those who are unaware, Dr. Oz, a TV celebrity and surgeon, is running for the Republican nomination for Senator from Pennsylvania, and it appears he’s well and truly in the grasp of the Sirens of Greek myth. Here’s HuffPo’s take on the matter:

Mehmet Oz, the celebrity TV surgeon better known as Dr. Oz, used to write and tweet about the health benefits of coconut oil, lavender oil, CBD oil, MCT oil, avocado and olive oil.

He also appeared to be a strong opponent of fracking, warning his readers  in multiple articles about the potential health risks associated with one of the more controversial fossil fuel extracting technologies.

And now?

But now that Oz is a GOP Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, he is apparently less concerned about fracking’s possible health effects on his potential constituents and more interested in preserving an industry active in the state.

“Back off Biden! Give us freedom to frack!” Oz said Wednesday in a rambling TikTok video while pumping gas somewhere in the Keystone State.

Oz’s campaign is even denying that he ever voiced any concern about fracking in the first place, claiming that he had no part in any of those earlier columns — even though he is listed as their primary author.

That denial calls into question which of Oz’s medical advice columns he actually stands behind and raises questions about his brand as a trusted health professional.

If he’d said, Well, on further investigation, my team found that fracking does not introduce dangerous chemicals into aquifers, then at least he’s be showing some smoothness and planning. People do accept that viewpoints evolve as more information is discovered. Although we’d be depending on his truthfulness.

But, no, like his brethren, he’s a fourth-rater. Maybe he’s a great surgeon, like Dr. Carson, but as a politician goes, he’s in thrall to the sweet flavor of political power.

And I think his opponents will use that to beat him at the polls.

Foreign Policy reports on GOP hijinks in the US Senate:

In recent weeks, the Biden administration and key Republican lawmakers have forged a rare consensus on the need for a tougher response to Russia’s war in Ukraine, advocating for providing deadlier weapons, imposing ruinous sanctions, and promoting vigorous efforts to address the worst refugee crisis in Europe since World War II.

Yet, at the same time, Republican lawmakers, including Sens. Rick Scott of Florida and Roger Marshall of Kansas, have placed holds on the confirmation of several key Biden administration appointees with critical roles in addressing Ukraine’s crisis, including top officials destined for the U.S. State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development as well as who are responsible for managing U.S. policy on sanctions, humanitarian relief, refugees, and nuclear and chemical security.

Let’s add in some Gallup data:

Americans are following the Ukraine situation closely, as might be imagined given its dominance of daily news coverage. A recent Wall Street Journal poll shows 89% of U.S. voters are following the situation there very or somewhat closely. Pew Research shows 69% of Americans have read or heard a lot about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with most of the rest saying they have read or heard at least a little.

The next time these Senators are up for re-election, their opponents, both intra- and inter-party, have a ready-made attack available. Here’s my interpretation:

Senator, you personally did your best to cripple the American response to the Russian attack on Ukraine, and by extension autocrats everywhere. For how long have you been anti-American?

The Gallup data indicates that most Americans will know precisely the context of the question: The innocent victim status of the Ukrainians, the brutality of the Russian attacks, the bravery of the Ukrainians, etc.

And, with a little careful messaging by the Democrats, the importance of stifling an autocratic regime – a regime to which Americans should be automatically allergic.

An ambitious messaging operation would attempt to use the incompetency of the Russians to connect incompetency with autocrats everywhere. It’d be a difficult pull, but not outside the realm of possibility.

And to what important issue are the Republicans so desperate as to interfere in defending against an attack on freedom?

Scott, who has placed the largest number of holds, has blocked [several nominees essential to the Ukraine situation] confirmation, demanding that the Biden administration first take action on an unrelated issue: the Cuban government’s practice of siphoning the salaries of Cuban doctors exported to other Latin American countries.

No doubt annoying to the doctors, but not of earthshaking importance. Indeed, it’s not a critical American priority.

But here’s the thing: the Gingrichian strategy of opposition to the Democrats at every point, from stealing SCOTUS seats to denying necessary tax increases to denigrating climate science conclusions with utter nonsense, has brought us to this idiotic point in our politics. Prior to Gingrich, these sorts of things would have been dealt with by quiet contacts between Senators and President, regardless of Party. A disappointed Senator might have made noise about it, but holding up essential personnel or other such extreme measures? It wouldn’t have crossed their minds, in most cases.

But the days of collegial governance are gone, abolished by the ego of Gingrich^[1] and his ideological inheritors, and opposition politicians can no longer hope to have a quiet talk with the Executive in hopes of getting something done. Instead, it’s all about profile and interference in a domain in which the Senate, frankly, has little official reach: foreign policy is an Executive function, with only advice and consent from the Senate.

The ego endangers a nation’s response. Can’t say it’s the first time, but it’s still a shame on the honor of these Senators.

¹ A politician most notable for his lack of accomplishment.

Ecology of fear:

The ecology of fear is a conceptual framework describing the psychological impact that predator-induced stress experienced by animals has on populations and ecosystems. Within ecology, the impact of predators has been traditionally viewed as limited to the animals that they directly kill, while the ecology of fear advances evidence that predators may have a far more substantial impact on the individuals that they predate, reducing fecundity, survival and population sizes.^[1][2] To avoid being killed, animals that are preyed upon will employ anti-predator defenses which aid survival but may carry substantial costs. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “How a rodent’s fear of cats shapes rainforests in Panama,” Jake Buehler, NewScientist (12 March 2022, paywall):

A game of cat and mouse is playing out in Panama’s rainforests, with large rodents called agoutis using their keen sense of smell to avoid ocelots that hunt them. The fear the rodents have for these predators and the ways it directs their behaviour have ripple effects that could alter the diversity of plants around them.

Most research on this “ecology of fear” has been centred on temperate ecosystems, says Dumas Gálvez at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama City. To see how the phenomenon could play out in the tropics, he and Marisol Hernández at the University of Panama looked to Central American agoutis (Dasyprocta punctata) and ocelots (Leopardus pardalis).

Mr. Popper bronzed and displayed the first batch of penguins. The second batch were put through BodyWorks. The third were coated in plastic in life-like positions and used for small arms practice. The fourth batch were the charm.

Mr. Popper’s Penguins (2011) is a pleasantly derivative story of how a pack of penguins save the soul of Mr. Popper, a corporate drone who’s already lost his wife in the backwash of his ambition, and is now in danger of losing his kids.

To Godzilla.

Just kidding! Checking to see if you’ve read this far. There’s nothing particularly offensive, and while penguins are cool and all that sort of thing, there’s nothing innovative here.

I blame it all on my Arts Editor, who wanted to see this.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld of Yale has continually updated lists of companies that have, sort of, or have not withdrawn from doing business in Russia. The last category includes consumer brands such as Subway, LG Electronics, and Young Living, as well as lesser known companies such as Gruma and the far-right Koch Industries.

If you’re invested in them, or use them, give them hell. Remember, Ukraine’s getting hell just for existing.