Unsightly Mental Blemishes

There’s something about what Steve Benen wrote about former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s (R-MT) run to represent the new 1st Congressional District of Montana in the US House of Representatives. For those readers of doubtful memories – like mine – Zinke’s time as the Interior Secretary was marked by numerous scandals, although he didn’t match up with the legendary Scott Pruitt of the EPA.

Anyways, over to Benen:

In the abstract, Zinke’s many scandals would dim his future political prospects. But in contemporary GOP politics, the Montanan believes red-state voters won’t much care, because accountability for Republican misconduct is a quaint nicety with little relevance in 2022.

The commercial writes itself, doesn’t it? Appeal to the ethical nature of Montanans by quoting Benen, heft up the bolded (which is mine) text to drive it home, and annoy the declared Republicans, while making everyone else think.

And then deliver the essence of ethical message of the competing candidate. Remind the audience that Zinke’s time in office was not marked with probity and seriousness, but by questionable behaviors, even rapacity.

And, finally, tie a vote to Zinke to an endorsement of embarrassingly bad, even criminal, behavior.

And it’s an ad for both primary and general election seasons. I do hope someone gives it a run. Zinke should, but won’t, be desperately embarrassed by his behavior. That’s what made him a fine member of the Trump Cabinet.

My Arts Editor declared she was going to have to wash her eyes out with bleach after this was on Colbert.

The Democrats have succeeded in excising some unpopular officials from their seats in San Francisco:

Three San Francisco School Board members were removed from their positions by voters on Tuesday, CNN projects, following a tough recall campaign that pitted Democrats against Democrats as interlocking controversies over school closings and renamings fueled a well-funded backlash.

The recall is among the most dramatic examples yet of parents’ frustration spilling into local politics. School closures and debates over masking children, along with discussions about race and gender in classrooms, have made education a central political issue.

More than 70% of voters supported the recall of School Board President Gabriela López, Vice President Faauuga Moliga and Commissioner Alison Collins as of Wednesday morning, according to preliminary results from the San Francisco Department of Elections. Their temporary replacements will be named by Mayor London Breed, a Democrat who in announcing her support for the recall last year said the city was at a “crossroads” and called the board’s priorities “severely misplaced.” …

The seeds of anger that led to the recall effort were planted early in the coronavirus pandemic, when the board considered changing the names of as many as 44 public schools in a city that was still grappling with how to safely reopen them. The discussions, which became the subject of some head-scratching in national media, touched off angry confrontations between the city’s liberal establishment and movement progressives. [CNN/Politics]

The progressives have unfortunately marked themselves as Angry Others, virtual enemies of the common citizen, for the action of punishing heroes of the Republic for their now-offensive crimes, without recognizing that they also performed heroically and intelligently in the face of overwhelming force, and triumphed, thereby winning the right to self-government.

In other words, yes, some of the Founding Fathers were slaveholders. But, unlike the traitor Confederate General Richard E. Lee, they also rose above their cultural training when they fought for freedom from the English Monarchy.

The Democrats have ejected the progressives from their seats, not only for insulting the Founding Fathers, but for the perception of ignoring the real business of the district, even though the former seat holders deny it. The next step for the progressives is to follow their brethren down the path of redemption. They need to publicly acknowledge the intellectual mistake in evaluating the Founding Fathers only on their moral failings, which were common for the time, and not including their accomplishments, which were deeply uncommon and even visionary.

Without such a public display, the independent voters will continue to remain suspicious of the progressive politician, thus inhibiting their chances of even winning primaries, much less general elections.

When you’re meeting a Lovecraftian monster, you might as well pack big heat, if only to build up to the greatest let-down possible.

The Last Case of August T. Harrison (2015) is definitely an amateur hour effort. Yet, this retelling of an H. P. Lovecraft story didn’t drive us away, because despite the uneven acting, odd cinematography, and outre story, the basic humanity of the eponymous character, a retired police detective who is asked to take on a private case by his son, carries the story.

Harrison’s son, an artist named Jason, relays a request from another artist, Eleanora, for Harrison to find some film, actual film. The content of the film is not clear, but the woman specifies it as important and irreproducible, filmed during a research project into an odd corner of physics, led by a local professor of same, Professor Hobb. She also specifies that a young man, Drake, was last known to have it.

Harrison’s searching is fruitless, until he picks up on a final clue that leads him to an obscure academic conference room, where he finds Drake. He’s covered in tattoos that he claims conceals him from Eleanora, whom he labels a witch.

And then the monsters come, and Drake ends up dead.

Harrison leaves in a hurry, but he has the film. But the next day, the film has disappeared, and Harrison is left with nothing but an angry Eleanora, a now-missing son Jason, and a mess of monsters that are always just out of sight, as if they’re in another dimension.

Which reminds him of his wife, so mysteriously in a near-coma: not speaking, just staring. What is she seeing?

And what is Harrison not seeing?

This isn’t noir, this is horror, and it isn’t going to end well for those involved. Harrison’s devotion to those he cares about makes the film plausible, despite the bad audio and sometimes cheesy effects, but there are limits. There are plot holes, such as the missing film, which is never explained. They’re annoying.

But most importantly is it almost comes across as a slice of life, of lives ending in what may be the worst possible ways. Don’t go into this expecting to be amazed, but it does have its own brand of creepiness playing throughout.

When your signaling mechanism is visual, such as the naval use of flags, smoke is often a useful way to break up communications. So I’m a little surprised that Steve Benen is surprised at Republican outrage over planned retraction of certain restrictions on public life:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell delivered floor remarks yesterday, rebuking Democrats, not for scaling back Covid restrictions, but for scaling back Covid restrictions for the wrong reasons.

“Now, obviously, the scientific facts have not changed in the last few weeks…. The only science that’s changed in the last two weeks is the political science. The only data that’s changed in the last two weeks is Democrats’ polling data.”

As a quantitative matter, the Kentucky Republican is clearly wrong. Two weeks ago, according to The New York Times’ tally, the daily national average for new infections was over 425,000. Now, it’s about 155,000. Hospitalization numbers have also improved dramatically. …

But even putting the data aside, what’s surprising is the fact that Republicans who want to see a rollback on restrictions are admonishing Democratic officials who are rolling back restrictions. As Jon Chait recently noted, this has become especially common in conservative media.

“This is not about science — this is about Democrats looking at polls and panicking at their diminishing midterm prospects,” claims the Washington Examiner. “Why are we seeing this shift now? The science has not changed, but perhaps the internal polling has,” surmises the American Spectator. “Only one circumstance has changed, and it has nothing to do with science and data — unless the science was an experiment to test parents’ patience and the data is the number of infuriated Americans calling B.S. on Democrats’ twisted games,” charges the Federalist. “The thing that’s changed is the calendar year. It’s 2022, and Democrats are beginning to evaluate the numbers: the number of months left until November.”

As I’ve noted before, we have competing world-views here. The conservatives, possessed of the inferior theory of reality, in which they have pastors & prophets running around proclaiming themselves and their flocks immune to Covid-19 because, well, God loves them, and then becoming ill and even dying a few weeks later, and the hucksters and grifters out in force, focused on shearing the flock through hoax treatments, are faced with a problem.

The other side is winning.

The decision to begin retracting restrictions is based on a reduction in numbers, as Benen notes. No one should be surprised at the caveat that politics has a role to play, too, but the Democrats are going to be hyper-sensitive to the possibility that we see yet another run-up in numbers, which would be a disaster for them. That’s why I’m not too worried about a retraction, because most Democrats are committed to the science and the advice of public health professionals.

But this also means the traditional, even conservative, approach to public health worked: get the professionals’ advice, follow it, and wait for the pharma to come up with a solution using the latest in development and testing tools. And hope none of the variants of Covid-19 become deadly, like its cousin MERS. Yeah, click on the link and see what we were risking every time someone turned down a vaccination.

And it proves the somewhat incoherent world view of the far-right to be utterly wrong. Ivermectin and its ilk did not work. Praying did not work. Being dumb assholes at town council meetings and school board meetings did not work. People still got sick, overloaded the health system, sometimes died, sometimes ended up with long-Covid, and sometimes had to attend funerals.

And that’s political poison for Senator McConnell and the Republicans. If the liberals (read: traditionalists!) were right about public health, what else might they be right about?

Maybe some of the far-right will think about that.

And McConnell can’t have that. So he accuses the Democrats – the conservatives in this case! – of corruption, while the folks on his side have been sick, dying, and straining a health system to the limit, all while risking the mutation of one of the Covid-19 family of viruses into something far more deadly. They’ve been mislead and endangered the nation.

Who’s the corrupt one here, Senator McConnell?

And that’s why this is not surprising.

Erick Erickson is caught up in a flap and I think reveals that he’s so firmly embedded on the right that he can’t the obvious:

It’s not David French’s fault per se, but I’m starting to hate Sundays. David writes something at The Dispatch. It infuriates friends of mine. My phone buzzes the entire day with people sending me links demanding to know what I think. It is more a Sunday routine of late than church. We’ve been going to Sunday School and avoiding church the last couple of months as omicron swept through. I’m ready to go back. But it just means when I get out of church at noon my phone will be having seizures from all the messages flooding in if David has been near a keyboard. …

I do want to note that I disagree with David’s tweet below.

As I’ve documented, I am really alarmed with the growing desperation on the left. I actually think much of the political radicalism David is writing about will fade, in large part because it is premised on one man.

No. It appears Erickson has bought into his own propaganda that his religious movement is based on cool, rational reason, a notion that would probably fatally stricken Paul Fidalgo of The Morning Heresy if he were to hear about it.

Look, without objective evidence to argue over, it’s difficult to make progress and resolve matters, and there isn’t any such evidence. It’s religion, it’s faith – no evidence required. Add in the fact, as observed by Senator Goldwater more than 50 years ago, that this possibly-imaginary God is involved and is taking sides – at least so claim many extremist pastors, supposed prophets, and congregation members, all based on evidence which is, at worst, fake, and at best is based on private information, meaning it cannot be examined by neutral observers, but instead may be nothing more than some odd-ball feeling that popped up after a twelve hour bender.

But so long as evidence is not demanded, there is no reason to believe the former President – or St. Trump, as some deluded believer will call him when he passes away – will fade away completely. He satisfies the desires of a lot of people, valid or otherwise, and quite a few power-hungry people recognize this and are positioning themselves as his successor.

Or, we can take a look at this from the other direction. Since at least Reagan, and possibly Nixon, the irrationality and dangers of the right have been increasing. From assassinating abortion doctors, sometimes in their own worship centers, onwards to the bombing by Timothy McVeigh, to the January 6th insurrection, the right has been increasing in violence.

Add in God, and it’s increasing in the certainty of their cause.

And, yet, Erickson doesn’t get it. There will be a shrinkage in the Trump base, as demographics are inevitable, and some people will leave in shame of what they’ve been supporting. But don’t expect the Trump movement to disappear. It’ll be sticking around, sustained by those who are not happy with the results of democracy, and certain that God backs them in any power plays they may entertain.

She’s a minx. You just know it.

The classic How To Train Your Dragon (2010) is a master’s class in the basic kid-against-all-societal-norms story form. The protagonist is the young and runty son of the chief of a Viking village, named Hiccup. His father, Stoick the Vast, must direct the defense of the village, which is assailed periodically by their enemies, a collection of flying dragons that carry away the villagers’ sheep and even the occasional villager; it’s implicit that Hiccup’s mother is dead.

Hiccup, being smaller than your average Viking, has to make up for his shortcomings in the usual way: being smarter than everyone else. In his role as intern to Gobber the Belch, village blacksmith and all around engineer, short a leg and an arm himself, he’s had the opportunity to construct a weapon of war: a machine that will fling a net hundreds of feet.

And, tonight, the dragons are arriving.

The night is lit with great belches of fire, and the cries of sheep who are experiencing flight for the first, and perhaps last, time. But for all the fires, when Hiccup hears an attacking dragon, all he can see are the flames it shoots, and can only use that for targeting.

The next day he finds an excuse to leave the village and hunt his prey, and finds to his shock the net in an unused valley with a lake, and in it? A black dragon, injured and befouled, of a description unknown to him or the village. It’s time for the kill! These things have killed man and beast! This one is helpless and easy prey for the knife.

Too easy. Hiccup can’t do it, and, instead, releases it.

And does he become the prey, instead?

The audience can guess; the kid has displayed bravery, intelligence, poise, and, most importantly, forgiveness to the dragon which supposedly threatens him. Their sympathy is won; would any dragon, even Toothless, as the black dragon is named by Hiccup, dare to go against the audience’s wishes and devour he who released him?

Well, he’s awfully darn thing, all elbows, really, so Toothless spares Hiccup. Soon enough, Hiccup’s doing his darndest to not kill a dragon, much to the dismay of Stoick and Gobber and just about everyone else. Even if he does seem to be a magician with captive dragons.

There’s much more to this plot, including antagonistic teenagers with whom Hiccup begins training, and the winning of Stoic’s respect, and it’s all played very well. For those of us who love the obscuring of information until a key moment, this important element of story-telling is performed professionally.

The result is a story that should win the hearts of all but the most cynical. It’s a delight.

Recommended.

N. S. Lyons on The Upheaval addresses the question of whether wokeness is over with, and in the negative. In so doing, they manage to drag in, among other reasons, overpopulation, a favorite of mine, as a reason for the unstoppable nature of wokeness, whether you like it or not, and I cannot resist quoting someone referencing Professor Turchin:

14. Elite overproduction is still in overdrive. In what is rapidly becoming one of my preferred explanations for the Revolution, the evolutionary anthropologist/mathematician/prophet of doom Peter Turchin has identified “elite overproduction” as having been one of the top drivers of revolution and civil conflict throughout history. He points to the tendency for decadent societies to produce far more overeducated elites than there are elite-level jobs, leading to large numbers of underemployed, resentful elite-class intellectuals of the type who tend pine after the position and status they “deserve” and eventually start spending their free time starting revolutionary cells. Or as James Lindsay has put it, all the children of the upper-middle class bourgeoisie “fake elites,” who find they will likely never be part of the truly wealthy elite (e.g. Bezos) that they aspire to be, have quickly become “a breeding ground for ressentiment in society” instead.

But, scrabbling desperately with one another for status, and horrified at the idea of ever falling into the ranks of the mere working class, the overproduced elites have found another solution: they’ve set themselves up, not as the nobility, but as the First Estate, the new clergy, where they can labor diligently to produce basically nothing but the “right” opinions to police our collective moral rules. And now they’ve succeeded in creating their own job market (e.g. critical theorists, diversity consultants) out of thin air. Or as Mary Harrington recently put it succinctly: “Once you start seeing the calls for moral re-evaluation of everything as a mass job application on behalf of an ever-expanding surplus of arts graduates it’s difficult to unsee.” And in this crowded, hyper-competitive world of the bourgeoisie, the surest way to move up is to take someone else down – hence “cancel culture” and the vast, elaborate, ever-changing, mandatory “correct” vocabulary that functions as a way to help weed out any of the competition (or dirty proles) who can’t keep up. Thus Wokeness.

Have young people stopped trying desperately to make it into Harvard or Yale and join the smaller and smaller share of the population that represents the elite? No way. It’s just that, thanks to the latest expansion of a huge, growing industry of administrators and consultants, the professional managerial class has an array of profitable new fallback options after investment banker. Now instead of having to labor through something difficult, like medical school, in order to achieve a respectable, well-paid career, one can always become a Chief Diversity Officer (average annual salary in Northern California in 2021: $231,500 to $329,500).

Which makes for a gripping argument for the mistake of having an overeducated citizenry, I suppose. True? I’m not sure. Being mildly educated myself – yes, yes, just a Bachelor’s in Computer Science, plus a lifetime of inquisitive reading – I’m somewhat horrified, but I can also recall reading, some thirty years ago, about resentful English PhDs who could not get a full time job at a higher education institution, and instead had to split their time between various part-time teaching jobs.

Entitlement is always a bit disturbing, isn’t it? Especially when it infects those who, themselves, are shouting against it. American humanity is a funny gig.

Anyways, that’s just one of more than 15 points Lyons is making. Interesting stuff, although some of it seems to be beyond my comprehension. And I ran out of gas. Go read it to catch up on the phenomenon.

Epistolary:

Epistolary comes from a Greek word, epistolē, which means “letter.” Epistolary is a literary genre pertaining to letters, in which writers use letters, journals, and diary entries in their works, or they tell their stories or deliver messages through a series of letters. Though the usual format of epistolary is letters, writers sometimes use other forms of document such as newspaper clippings and diary entries. Recently, writers also use electronic documents like emails, blogs, radio broadcast, and recordings. [Literary Devices]

Noted in “What to Read: Shaun Usher is curating history’s most memorable mail,” What To Read [On Substack]:

You’ve been obsessed with letters since you and your now-wife began writing to each other 20 years ago. Why did you start an epistolary relationship, and how did that format differ from traditional dating?

As sad as the recent crime wave makes me, somehow a reminder that this is nothing new, well, cheers me up:

From a wider historical perspective, of course, students in the 21st century really are pathetic saps — a shadow of their forebears. As testimony to this decline, today is the anniversary of the biggest student unrest in English history; not 1968 but 1355, the day of the St Scholastica Day Riot in Oxford, which began when two students were served ‘indifferent wine’ in a tavern and fell into an argument with the innkeeper. By the time that the authorities restored order, more than ninety people were dead. …

The row started, according to a chronicler, when some students were served ‘indifferent wine’ in the town’s Swyndlestock Tavern. The two student-clerics, Walter de Spryngeheuse and Roger de Chesterfield, had objected to the quality of this wine served by one John de Croydon, the landlord. After asking for something better, they were refused and ‘several snappish words passed’ before Croydon gave them ‘stubborn and saucy language’.

One of the students then threw the wine in his face, and the brawl went out into the street where locals rang the church bells and huge numbers on both sides joined in. The town folk attacked the students ‘some with bows and arrows, others with divers weapons’.

The fighting then broke out again the following morning, and all the scholars fled after ‘some innocent wretches’ were killed and ‘scornfully cast into the house of easement’ – that is, the toilet — a deed the chronicler says was done by ‘diabolical imps’. Those who were injured limped away ‘carrying their entrails in their hands in a most lamentable manner’. As you would. [“When student protests weren’t dominated by ‘snowflakes’,” Ed West, Wrong Side of History]

Follow the link to see just how long it took for the city of Oxford and the University to make up.

Emma Collins has some complaints about sex during, and she fears following, the pandemic:

I want sex to feel holy again. I want kissing to feel like prayer. I want the bed to be an altar, and oral sex to become worship. I want the physical act of love to feel like what it actually is— a glimpse into the part of someone’s soul that transcends their social self, a look behind the veil of their constructed personality. I want sleeping beside someone to take on the quality it had the first times I tried it— when, at seventeen, I was shocked to find that my dreams had intertwined with my lover’s during the night, as though our subconscious voices had spoken to one another.

So why do I feel like Collins is implicitly demanding that I feel the same things as she? There is, perhaps unintended, a subvocalization against natural human variation. I sympathize when she says,

People need a chance to embrace again, without having to fret over contracting a fatal disease or that a spontaneous kiss will be misconstrued as sexual assault. There may be value, at the right moment, in remembering a certain kind of recklessness, in ceasing to demonize our need for each other. Constraints on passion never completely prevail.

But when that spontaneity is threatening or dangerous, then it’s wrong.

As ever, morality is not context-free. In other cultures and other realities, sex can be a ritual, a drab requirement, even a weapon, and I cannot help but remember that when I feel she is demanding that I treat it as ‘holy.’ Sure, go ahead and do that – but, as an agnostic, I’ll take my own path, thank you.

Freddie de Boer, who I’m happy to see is still around, has a recognition of a behavior in leftists that’s the same for the right:

One of the things I discovered early, in my little political niche, was the obsession with magic words. Leftists were forever throwing emotionally loaded terms around, like when the coffeehouse didn’t have raw sugar and they called it fascism. It’s not really hard to understand why: when you have no power, you resort to mysticism. You instill words with powers they can’t really have because you’re desperate to feel in control of something, anything. That’s what “eugenics” has become online; it’s not much different from your average depressed wine mom talking about Mercury being in retrograde. They all just want to feel a little bit of power.

And I’ve seen right-wingers waving around phrases like objective evidence and scientific arguments (or maybe it was scientific evidence) to uphold views on Jesus and abortion, as if they invoked the magical phrases of the era, maybe they’d gain more prestige.

And I don’t doubt they’re right. Not that they’re right about Jesus and abortion, but they probably did gain more prestige.

So now I see the left is doing that, too. It’s not just weaponization, like using BIGOT! on people like J. K. Rowling and Richard Dawkins for attempting to start debates on transgenderism, but by claiming to recognize eugenics in anything, they can make claims of intellectual insight, and thus climb their ladder of power and prestige.

It’s worth noting that there’s more than one ladder of power and prestige in the nation, it’s just a matter of which one people respect, and which ones are not respected, by the people you want to be respected by. Got that?

Good. Tell me what I’m trying to tell you.

Have I ever mentioned that I think Tom Waits’ video for Hell Broke Luce is a masterpiece?

If you hadn’t heard, there’s a blockade of Canada at Port Huron by people protesting the recent requirement by Canada that truckers be vaccinated against Covid-19. This blockade is impacting the car manufacturing industry in Michigan negatively. Given this requirement would impact Canadian truckers, you might think this is an organic^[1] protest, but think again:

Although Canadian drivers have a high vaccination rate, the Canadian Trucking Alliance contends many of the Freedom Convoy protesters “have no connection to the trucking industry and have a separate agenda beyond a disagreement over cross border vaccine requirements.” [MLive]

Yes, the wording is a little odd. This is rather remindful of the George Floyd protest in Minneapolis in 2020, where the property destruction and violence is thought to have been instigated by a right-wing extremist. But the right-wing is pushing the blockade for all they’re worth, and their commentators are without nuance on the matter, as Erickson demonstrates in a piece that has really no virtue to it, nor is it worth quoting. Yeah, it’s that bad.

This is a risky move for the right-wing. Endorsed by conservative elites such as Fox News, former President Trump, Senator Cruz (R-TX), Senator Paul (R-KY), and no doubt others, if the independent voters, who hold the balance of power in the United States, discover commerce with our siblings to the north is being sabotaged by right wing extremists masquerading as Canadian truckers, it could result in a deeply negative view of what passes for the conservative movement these days, and that would mean lost votes and elections.

The Democrats do have a story to tell, if they can make it stick. Senator Cruz (R-TX), up until the end of 2021, was “slow-walking” nearly all State Department nominees in a spat over the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which is a new pipeline running from Russia to Germany. Meanwhile, Senator Hawley (R-MO) is doing something similar with Pentagon nominees. These two Senators, by ensuring the inadequate staffing of the Pentagon and the State Dept, are basically betraying the United States.

Combining these stories with the Canadian truckers story and a potentially imminent war in Ukraine with Russia, and it’s not hard to make the case that the Republican elite only cares for power, and not the safety of American interests here and overseas. Connect that with jobs lost and economic growth hurt, and that could be a powerful brew to use against the Republicans.

And economic growth is at the heart of it all. It’s a bit shocking, but this story from yesterday tells me that the economy is doing enormously well:

The U.S. government posted a $119 billion budget surplus in January, the first in more than two years, amid strong growth in tax receipts and a sharp drop in pandemic-related outlays, the Treasury Department said on Thursday.

The January surplus compared to a January 2021 deficit of $163 billion, a record for the month as direct payments to individuals from COVID-19 aid legislation enacted in December 2020 were distributed.

The surplus last month was the first since the $83 billion reported in September 2019 and the largest since the $160 billion in April 2019. April and September are traditionally months with high tax collections. [Reuters]

Obviously, there are one-time contributors, and no guarantees that February will continue the trend. In fact, I doubt it will continue.

BUT, for the Republican Party, which for decades, nearly a century, claimed to be the superior economic manager of the country, the terms of Presidents Clinton, Obama, and now Biden are turning into disasters for the Republicans. The latter’s quasi-religious tenets on the evils of taxation and regulation have been proven to be nothing more than sloppy, fallacious slogans of little worth, and their proponents to be power-hungry frauds.

The Democrats, which have their own host of demons they refuse to acknowledge, have a story to tell. And if they can connect it to the internecine warfare mentioned in Secular Cycles, so much the better. The basic post-modern denial of truths inherent in the Republican Party these days is deeply offensive to the typical American citizen trying to raise their kids and run their lives these days, in the shadow of the Web that brings content of unknowable trustability into their lives every day. By connecting that post-modernism to the deep-seated, pathological need for power demonstrated by Republican elites, and how it is usually incompetents who practice corruption for a living, the Democrats could put a permanent hole in the ship that is the Republicans. If they do it well enough, the moderate Democrats may also damage the post-modernists to their left as well, an important step to freeing themselves from a political force which, because of its disdain for grounded truth, is unpredictable and could turn on them in an instant, if it perceives that doing so will bring it more power.

The next three years should be most interesting.

¹ By which I mean organized by Canadian truckers for Canadian truckers. I’m sure there’s a better word than organic, but I cannot think of what it should be.

“kick and kill” strategy:

Now, a drug already used to treat cancer has been found to make HIV reactivate. To be turned into a cure, it would have to be combined with a second kind of medicine that kills the immune cells churning out viruses. No such medicine is yet proven to work, although some experimental versions are in development.

The idea that dormant viruses could be reactivated before being destroyed is sometimes known as a “kick and kill” strategy. In the latest work, Sharon Lewin at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and her colleagues studied people with HIV who also had cancer and were being treated with a relatively new medicine called pembrolizumab. [“Cancer drug could one day help cure HIV by waking up dormant viruses,” Clare Wilson, NewScientist (5 February 2022)]

Apparently, a dormant virus, such as HIV when it’s in hiding in immune cells, is not vulnerable to drug therapies. So, wake up the dino and kill it, eh?

Sounds a bit scary.

You want to do what with my step-daughter?

At the center of The Red House (1947) lies the disasters caused by unrequited love. And requited love. Maybe just love. The little town that serves as the backdrop of this story may seem idyllic, but just because 12th graders Nath and TIbby seem like a sure thing doesn’t mean they are, for high-school drop out, but attractive, Teller has caught Tibby’s eye and helped write on her secret t-shirt Manipulative Bitch, as my Arts Editor observed. Teller has certain rights to the small forest owned by the Morgans, and there his secret love lives, which would be … himself.

But Nath is at the center of unrequited love as well. His father long gone, his mother has been playing with the affections of a high school sweetheart, and is last seen going thataway with him, leaving Nath to work for the Morgans, Pete, his sister Ellen, and their adopted daughter Meg.

Meg, who is developing a fancy for Nath. Ellen, who has a finger in the game in the character of the town’s Doctor Byrne, who scuttles hither and yon and occasionally sees Ellen, thus inflaming the old spinster’s passions all the more.

And Pete? His leg, long lost in an accident, still yearns after a woman who disappeared in the forest long ago, but now his heart is set on … Meg, his adopted daughter. Squirm if you must. It’s the right thing to do.

Especially as Pete’s vision of being in love is quite territorial.

None of this is going to turn out well. Maybe Nath’s mother does OK, but the rest are having a hard time, between familial duties keeping them from pursuing their happiness, to an all too frenzied pursuit of, well, their own happiness, leading to a police pursuit and an unhappy ending.

Still, Nath is brave when it counts, even when the red house is screaming at him and let’s not mention the time he hid in the Morgan’s barn, yeah?

Full of anxiety and suspense, The Red House isn’t quite compelling, but it’s a pleasant little descent into psychosis that you may very well enjoy.

Have fun, and leave some breadcrumbs to follow.

Representative Nancy Mace (R-SC) makes her pitch – literally:

One day after former President Donald Trump endorsed one of her Republican primary challengers, South Carolina U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace stood outside Trump Tower in New York City to make her case.

In a video posted to Twitter Thursday morning, Mace defended her political credibility, touted her ties to Trump and questioned Republican Katie Arrington’s ability to deliver for Republicans, even after Arrington secured Trump’s endorsement.

“If you want to lose this seat once again in a midterm election cycle to Democrats, then my opponent is more than qualified to do just that,” Mace said in her video, looking straight into the camera as the 68-story glass skyscraper that is also home to the Trump Organization loomed behind her.

Here’s that video:

I’m standing in front of Trump Tower with a message this morning…#SC01 #LowcountryFirst pic.twitter.com/CpmMYA63qt

— Nancy Mace (@NancyMace) February 10, 2022

And all this despite claiming, with regard to the January 6th Insurrection, “I hold him accountable for the events that transpired.” It says something about her judgment and morals, and none of that story is good. Yet another tale of the flexibility of morals when it comes to power.

Yep, that’s gotta be a fantasy. No one wears facial hair like that!

The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty (1947) presents Mr. W. Mitty, a man smitten with his own dreams, and perhaps not his mother, her friends, and his fiancee. An ominous beginning.

But his job as a copy-editor and ‘idea man’ at a publisher of story magazines isn’t so bad. Usually. And then his life brightens considerably when a corpse pops up and then disappears. Meanwhile, Mitty himself is finding a mystery woman to be a bit of a handful, not to mention rather assertive, as she hunts for a major secret on the world stage, which is nearly as important Mitty’s dignity.

It’s witty, fun, and forgettable, but if you need to waste a couple of hours, it’s not a bad choice.

Exposomics:

Success in mapping the human genome has fostered the complementary concept of the “exposome”. The exposome can be defined as the measure of all the exposures of an individual in a lifetime and how those exposures relate to health. An individual’s exposure begins before birth and includes insults from environmental and occupational sources. Understanding how exposures from our environment, diet, lifestyle, etc. interact with our own unique characteristics such as genetics, physiology, and epigenetics impact our health is how the exposome will be articulated.

Exposomics is the study of the exposome and relies on the application of internal and external exposure assessment methods. Internal exposure relies on fields of study such as genomicsExternal, metabonomicsExternal, lipidomicsExternal, transcriptomicsExternal and proteomicsExternal. Commonalities of these fields include 1) use of biomarkersExternal to determine exposure, effect of exposure, disease progression, and susceptibility factors, 2) use of technologies that result in large amounts of data and 3) use of data mining techniques to find statistical associations between exposures, effect of exposures, and other factors such as genetics with disease. External exposure assessment relies on measuring environmental stressors. Common approaches include using direct reading instruments, laboratory-based analysis, and survey instruments. The extent to which internal and external exposure assessment will contribute to our understanding of the exposome is being debated as each approach has certain merits. [CDC]

Noted in “How our environment is making us sick – and what we can do about it,” Graham Lawton, NewScientist (29 January 2022, paywall):

Now [geneticist Michael Snyder of Stanford] and others are attempting to spearhead a revolution in understanding how our environments make us sick. “It might sound similar to what has been done in the past, but now we’ve got this big concept,” says Michelle Bennett at the US National Cancer Institute Center for Research Strategy. Its name is exposomics, and big it certainly is – it aims to measure everything we are exposed to throughout our lives and link this with effects on our health. Can that ever succeed?

Why does Minnesota experience a spike in crime every winter?

Hudson mayor thinks ice fishing leads to prostitution! Put your poles away boys!*

*Same guy who thinks creative writing classes are child pornography. pic.twitter.com/9N0R2tVri6

— Amanda Weinstein (@ProfWeinstein) February 9, 2022

Evidently, the good mayor has no experience with ice fishing.

I thought Steve Benen summed up the pathology of the corpse of the conservative movement quite nicely:

If the Republican National Committee was striving for party “unity,” it failed spectacularly. Late last week, the RNC not only censured two of their conservative members without cause, it also accused the Jan. 6 committee of engaging in “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”

Ever since, leading Republican voices have been forced to take sides, either endorsing or criticizing their party’s avoidable mess. Yesterday, as NBC News reported, Congress’ most powerful GOP official decided it was his turn to weigh in.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell disagreed Tuesday with the Republican National Committee’s recent censure of two GOP lawmakers, as well as its characterization of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

“We all were here; we saw what happened,” the Kentucky Republican told reporters, referring to the events of Jan. 6. “It was a violent insurrection for the purpose of trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after a legitimately certified election, from one administration to the next. That’s what it was.”

Denial of reality is a prime symptom of madness, but also of incompetency. By admitting to it, one loses social prestige, so that course is avoided at all courses. And the incompetent often feel put-upon, discouraged by their lower positions on the power ladder. Better to make shit up than return to the pit of sadness.

When an entire organization, such as the RNC, is incompetent at all the key positions, this is what we see: a denial of reality writ large. As Senator McConnell (R-KY) notes, anyone who was at the Capitol on January 6th, 2021, is well aware that mob violence took place, police officers were injured, one died and others committed suicide later, and that it wasn’t instigated by the left, but instead was a phenomenon of the right. As he says, it was a violent insurrection.

And the RNC is hopping up and down in their frenzy of denial. House Minority leader McCarthy (R-CA) is reportedly running away from reporters. Senator Minority Leader McConnell is outright disputing the RNC’s message.

This is a movement in meltdown.

This is not to say the Democrats don’t have their own set of problems, leading off with their botching of the transgenderism debate – or, more accurately, lack thereof – and, more recently, their muddling of Critical Race Theory, and what’s turning out to be mismanagement of the crime problem, exacerbated by the shrinkage in the number of law enforcement personnel. I’ve mentioned their cognitive problems after the Virginia debate.

But the Republicans’ problems appear to be far worse. They’re symptomatic of the incompetent and the amateur, determined to retain that status, getting their paws on the levers of power and, discovering that their actions are inadequate to the problems of governing, deny the problems and redouble their ideologically driven efforts.

Adults would, at some point, reject or modify their ideologies. For these folks, their ideologies are their identities, and so they cannot be rejected, for with that comes social prestige degradation.

Go get some popcorn. Both sides are going to provide entertainment. My most sincere condolences to those who are actually hurt by these buffoons.

Prodrome:

In medicine, a prodrome is an early sign or symptom (or set of signs and symptoms) that often indicates the onset of a disease before more diagnostically specific signs and symptoms develop. It is derived from the Greek word prodromos, meaning “running before”. Prodromes may be non-specific symptoms or, in a few instances, may clearly indicate a particular disease, such as the prodromal migraine aura. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “We are finally beginning to understand migraines and how to treat them,” Jessica Hamzelou, NewScientist (29 January 2022, paywall):

Migraine attacks can begin with what is known as a premonitory phase, or prodrome, which can involve a range of symptoms, such as mood changes, neck stiffness and yawning. My prodrome is marked by a vague feeling that something bad is going to happen.

… when you die, sometimes you get this picture sent in response.

(h/t BP)

WaPo reports on an ad for the SuperBowl:

Americans tuning in to the Super Bowl on Sunday will be inundated with ads from cryptocurrency companies, including the trading platform FTX, which plans to give away millions of dollars in bitcoin.

FTX has spent heavily on sports partnerships to try to make itself a brand name in crypto, including an ad with NFL star Tom Brady, a sponsorship with Major League Baseball and a $135 million deal to rename the Miami Heat’s stadium the FTX Arena.

Co-founder and chief executive Sam Bankman-Fried, who recently moved FTX’s headquarters from Hong Kong to the Bahamas, says the ads are as much about courting U.S. regulators as getting customers to download its trading app.

“We want to make sure that we’re painting, hopefully, a healthy image of ourselves and the industry,” said Bankman-Fried, 29, who has a net worth of more than $24 billion, according to Forbes. “We’re optimistic that we’re going to be able to grow our U.S. business — a lot of that is working with U.S. regulators on bringing new products to market.”

There’s nothing more American than buying your way into consumer hearts via marketing. Doing so with fake money is a bit more unusual, though.

Which brings us to this CNN/Business story:

A New York couple has been arrested and charged with conspiring to launder $4.5 billion in stolen cryptocurrency funds. Law enforcement officials have seized $3.6 billion of those funds in what US Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco called “the department’s largest financial seizure ever.

Ilya Lichtenstein, 34, and his wife, Heather Morgan, 31, are accused of trying to launder money taken in a huge hack of cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex in 2016.

The arrests and money seizure mark a win for US law enforcement amid a slew of heists from cryptocurrency platforms. Hackers have in recent years made off with hundreds of millions of dollars at time in attacks on virtual currency exchanges.

Lichtenstein and Morgan are charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering, which carries up to 20 years in prison, and conspiracy to defraud the US, which carries up to five years in prison, according to Justice officials. An attorney for the couple could not be immediately reached for comment.

Besides illustrating the vulnerability of cryptocurrencies and the volume that can be lost, it leaves me a bit bemused to consider they’re trying to launder fake money. Oh, I know, the gold bugs would argue the same happens with greenbacks, but there’s a key difference: the US Government stands behind the greenback.

There’s nothing behind the cryptocurrencies but dreams. Or delusions.

Which means that today’s $4.5 billion could become far less tomorrow.