Unsightly Mental Blemishes

Erick Erickson has a lovely piece on current social dynamics:

We’re in an Age of Betrayal.

We know fewer people personally. We connect to people online. We become “friends” with the person on Instagram and obsess about their lives. All we know is what they show us on social media. When it turns out they have views diametrically opposed to ours, we hate them. They betray us. We’ve created our connection, to a degree, in our heads by extrapolating ancillary information to what is presented. When they provide the actual ancillary information and it does not match that which we conjured in our heads, we feel betrayed.

Celebrity culture, even in the church, can do that. In politics, we spend time in battles with people fighting alongside us. Then one day we find ourselves on opposite sides and feel betrayed. More often than not, we cannot agree to disagree. We must be aggrieved and launch subtweets.

And I’d take it further. The behavior of joining forces with those of apparently like-mindedness in politics is what has brought victories to the left and the right. The Senate these days is merely this lesson writ large: the actions of Murkowski, Collins, Manchin, and Sinema have been shocking because they are betrayals of their side – at least to the zealots of each side. Most of the time, the Senate and the House votes in political blocs, careful to remain loyal to the leader – rather than their judgment.

This isn’t how it’s always been. Sparing you the white cane and quavering voice^[1], it was not unusual, forty or fifty years ago, to see Democrats and Republicans often voting for each other’s legislation. “Reach across the aisle” was neither unusual nor betrayal; it was simply how important things got done.

It was called politics, and it ended not too long after the Soviet Union collapse, thank you Professor Turchin^[2].

These days, rather than discuss across the aisle, in order to avoid being called Traitor! you stick to the team charter and don’t deviate.

Erickson cites Dave Chappelle and Joe Rogan as two who’ve acted as betrayers, and while I’m not overly familiar with either of them, I’ve gotta say that if Rogan is busy boosting anti-vax people, that endangers people’s lives. While the omicron variant seems far less dangerous than delta, and I hope we can dispense with the masks soon enough, it’s becoming clear that 900,000 people dead, from all walks of life and age, isn’t enough to get some folks’ attention.

And that’s just fuckin’ dangerous.

But before I go too far astray, I’ll restrain myself. I think Erickson’s observations concerning social dynamics interacting with social media are accurate. Speaking for social media prior to its migration onto the Internet (i.e., BBSes), most social media was strictly local, and that meant there was a greater chance of meeting the people on the other side of the modem screech than there is today. That often humanized your opponents – I vividly remember a rather cantankerous, even bitter, online dude turned out to be a skinny guy with big ears, who was dragged out of a party by his girlfriend – she grabbed him by the ear and told him to settle down.

It’s hard to be mad at a guy after witnessing that.

So, remember, there’s a good chance that your “opponent” is a human being with the same foibles that you have, next time you’re thinking of digging into the Team Tactics Book. Maybe they deserve a gentler thrashing, eh?

¹ There, that should be lodged in your brain for the rest of the day.

² See his Secular Cycles.

From the description (abstract?) from a while back for “New fossil reveals early and rapid evolution of giant Mesozoic ichthyosaurs,” Martin Sanders, et al, an article published in Science, but this description published on EurekaAlert!:

Although whales are now the largest of Earth’s creatures, they were not the first ocean giants to ply the seas. In a new study, researchers report the discovery of new and exceptionally large ichthyosaur fossils, which hint at an early and rapid burst in the evolution of extreme body size in Mesozoic oceans. While it took whales about 90% of their 55-million-year history to evolve into the ocean giants we know today, ichthyosaurs evolved to similar sizes in the first 1% of their 150-million-year history on Earth. The findings suggest that Triassic marine food webs could support such massive creatures, despite the absence of many primary producers following the Permian extinction 252 million years ago.

All it takes is finding an ichthyosaur fossil a hundred million years earlier to mess up the conclusions.

But upon finding a unique fossil, conclusions have to be drawn, don’t they? If only to challenge the current wisdom, to get researchers thinking and questioning assumptions.

And the skull of this specimen is bigger than me. There’s a bunch of pics out there, but I think they’re all protected under copyright, so I’ll let them be. Here’s a useful search.

For years, and much like cryptocurrency, I’ve been puzzling over the exact advantages brought by self-driving cars, especially as such a subsystem consumes substantial amounts of energy. David Zipper, who studies such topics at Harvard Kennedy School’s Taubman Center for State and Local Government, shares my bewilderment:

It’s understandable that companies want to maximize shareholder return; that’s their role in a market economy. But automakers are still struggling to explain why, exactly, we should be excited about this technology, rather than alarmed by it. We shouldn’t let them off the hook unless we have a convincing answer. [WaPo]

And if such technology was “successfully” introduced, I can’t help but remember the movie WALL-E (2008) in which the humans had been reduced to blobs of near-helpless protoplasm, until the automated systems had taken over because they couldn’t accomplish their primary mission without doing so.

Not that I’m saying that our future robotic overlords will be that Tesla sitting in your driveway. That’ll be something else.

But I’m really quite hesitant about this technological advance, particularly in view of this:

Book Of Love (2022) is easy enough to summarize.

squirm
Squirm
SQuirm
Oh, that was a little funny.
SQUIRM!
Thank goodness, it’s –
NO NO NO SQUIRM!
squirm
Squirm!
SQUIRM-stop that-SQUIRM!

The End.

And a few more pics before scampering off to the grocery store:

Admirable precise detail!

A beautiful reference to an unfortunately morally compromised Olympics.

Perhaps a bit puzzling, but intriguing.

Simple, yet evocative.

I want to say Lovecraftian, but probably not.

And God’s sneeze begat Minnesota?

A snoot of honey for you, my friend.

Lovely!

Not exactly sure.

We’ve saw you earlier, camera-hog!

And that’s it for 2022 sculpting! Congrats to everyone who braved the cold to indulge the artistic impulse!

Professor Richardson provides a useful transcript of Steve Bannon, a Donald Trump associate and former editor at Breitbart, discussing his view of former Vice President Pence and his former staff members talking to the January 6th Insurrection investigation committee:

Certainly, Trump loyalist Stephen Bannon recognized Pence’s words as a defection. On his podcast, Bannon addressed Pence, saying: “You are a stone cold coward…. My head’s blowing up…. I can’t take Pence…and Marc Short and all these Koch guys up there ratting out Trump up on Capitol Hill right now.”

I’m not one to romanticize our history, but it does seem worth noting that it was on this day in 1789 that the Electoral College unanimously elected George Washington the first president of the new United States. It seems that we might be able to choose better leaders than ones who are leaving us at the end of this day in 2022 with the truly legitimate political question: “Ratting him out for what?”

And, for those readers unfamiliar with the phrase ratting out, it’s an old-fashioned reference to former members of the Mob releasing information to law enforcement concerning crimes committed by Mob bosses and their minions.

Bannon is, essentially, admitting crimes occurred, as many pundits are recogniziing.

But I think it’s also interesting in that it’s an admission that a significant portion of the Republican Party is ready and willing to commit crimes to gain and retain power. This means that a significant portion of a political party which has controlled, and probably will control again, portions of the State and Federal governments does not have respect for the law by which we run this country.

That means, in essence, that they are unpredictable, that the rules of society will change if they are put in charge, and that’s something most of society hates, because it changes the societal realities we’ve come to depend on.

Bannon’s remarks have more relevance than just to Trump, but also to the entire MAGA cult and a significant portion of the Republicans. He may come to regret letting his mouth run his life.

Kilonovae:

A kilonova (also called a macronova or r-process supernova) is a transient astronomical event that occurs in a compact binary system when two neutron stars or a neutron star and a black hole merge. Kilonovae are thought to emit short gamma-ray bursts and strong electromagnetic radiation due to the radioactive decay of heavy r-process nuclei that are produced and ejected fairly isotropically during the merger process. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “How does the sun shine? Here’s why we are still a little in the dark,” Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, NewScientist (22 January 2022):

Generally speaking, the reason stars shine is that gravity has pulled a sufficient amount of hydrogen atoms into such close quarters that they start to fuse together into helium. Every star starts this way. When the hydrogen runs out, the helium starts fusing together, and so on, producing heavier and heavier elements.

This is where we humans begin. The majority of the elements we are composed of are made in stars and, during supernovae and kilonovae, the exploding deaths of those massive stars.

This sounds like a simple matter of gluing elements together, but it isn’t: the conditions have to be just right. The hydrogen has to be hot enough and close enough together to fuse. And the fusion happens in stages. The theories that describe how all this happens aren’t the classical Newtonian physics that describes, for example, two football players colliding when they both want to control the ball. Instead, we need quantum mechanics and nuclear physics.

Josh Barro shares my viewpoint, but far more articulately, on cryptocurrencies:

While I hate the aesthetics of crypto, my complaint here is not principally aesthetic. As someone who is in general more favorable to the social value of finance than a lot of commentators these days — especially on the left but sometimes on the right too — I want finance to be useful, serious, and furthering the production of useful products and services in the real economy.

I want banks lending for the construction of new buildings; equity markets making it possible for the most promising companies to raise funds to build useful products; bond markets making cheap and efficient financing available for public and private activities that will support payment of interest on the bonds. I was a big champion of the Fed’s actions to rescue the financial system in spring 2020 because I know a robust and liquid financial system isn’t just something people on Wall Street like — it’s something that makes it possible to get a mortgage, use a credit card, remain employed at a company, and generally enjoy all the things made possible by a modern economy.

And I am concerned that tens of millions of Americans investing in a stupid market with no such thing as fundamental value — and where prices should not keep going up and up and up, though I’ve grown weary of saying that and watching them do so anyway — is likely to lead to significant financial dislocation and reduced trust in the financial system when a lot of them lose their shirts.

Which sort of reminds me of the bursting of the Internet bubble in 2000. Or 2001. Whenever. A lot of people lost money when that pus-filled balloon finely finally blew up, including me.

Barro knows more about finance than I do. Go read him.

Continuing the show:

The Jetsons and their pickup truck.

Tasty tidbit time.

A bit of manic music.

I like the detail, but the nod to Disney’s Aladdin somehow irritates me.

Surreal, to be sure. Or your brain on ice cream.

Aldous J Pennyfarthing on The Daily Kos has some remarks on Trump’s Troops that are interesting, although I’m not entirely certain who he’s quoting:

Many of the GOP candidates Trump is backing in open-seat races are struggling to raise significant funds as well against better-funded opponents—and every single one of the GOP candidates Trump has endorsed against a GOP incumbent is getting crushed in fundraising, according to newly released campaign finance reports.

Oh, things aren’t going quite so swimmingly for Bone Spurious the Betrayer? Let’s see. Should I take pity on the big, dopey animal or … go in a different direction?

How should I put this? …

Even strong-performing Trump allies are getting lapped in fundraising. Trump-backed Georgia Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker raised almost $5.4 million in the past three months and has about the same amount in the bank. That’s a huge haul, but Georgia Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock far outpaced him, bringing in $9.8 million in the same time period. Warnock has $22.9 million in the bank for what’s sure to be one of this cycle’s most expensive Senate races.

Every single one of the House candidates Trump has endorsed against a GOP incumbent is getting shellacked in fundraising as well.

Oh, but that’s not all.

Rep. Mo Brooks, who’s running for U.S. Senate with Trump’s endorsement, raised less than $400,000 from October through December, and two of his primary opponents, Katie Boyd Britt and Mike Durant, each have $4 million war chests—double Brooks’ $2 million in reserves.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who voted to impeach Trump last year—thereby rousing his black, bloodless knot of a heart to something resembling movement—has $4.3 million in the bank, or seven times her opponent Kelly Tshibaka’s meager $634,000 haul.

And there’s more, but that’s enough. The interesting question is: Why?

Is MAGA cult members becoming tapped out?

Are they losing interest in politics?

Or are the endorsees simply so repulsive that they can’t attract strong donations?

I’m going for the last, but that’s a case of confirmation bias; I think we’ll have to wait to see what the real answer might be. Regardless, while votes are not usually buyable, they do bring attention to candidates. A failure to attract money is like a corpse not attracting flies: What’s going on here, and do we need to worry about it?

Or “So Wrong She’s Not Even Wrong.” Maybe she’s just desperate to squeeze a bit more cash out of the audience:

Sherri Tenpenny is an influential religious-right anti-vaccine activist who has testified before the Ohio state House, appeared on Charlie Kirk’s podcast, and been a speaker at multiple ReAwaken America events, where she has shared the stage with the likes of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, Eric Trump, Mike Lindell, Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, and Alex Jones.

Despite the fact that Tenpenny is osteopathic doctor with no expertise on vaccines, she regularly appears on right-wing programs where she spreads wild conspiracy theories about COVID-19 vaccines.

Recently, she has begun to claim that COVID-19 vaccines are designed to create “quantum entanglement” between those who take them and the internet in an effort to turn humanity into “transhumanist cyborgs.”

“The stated goal is to depopulate the planet and the ones that are left, either make them chronically sick or turn them into transhumanist cyborgs that can be manipulated externally by 5G, by magnets, by all sorts of things,” Tenpenny said during an appearance on “The Stew Peters Show” Thursday night. “I got dragged through the mud by the mainstream media when I said that in May of last year in front of the House committee in Columbus, [Ohio]. Well, guess what? It’s all true.”

“The whole issue of quantum entanglement and what the shots do in terms of the frequencies and the electronic frequencies that come inside of your body and hook you up to the ‘Internet of Things,’ the quantum entanglement that happens immediately after you’re injected,” she continued. “You get hooked up to what they’re trying to develop. It’s called the hive mind, and they want all of us there as a node and as an electronic avatar that is an exact replica of us except it’s an electronic replica, it’s not our God given body that we were born with. And all of that will be running through the metaverse that they’re talking about. All of these things are real, Stew. All of them. And it’s happening right now. It’s not some science fiction thing happening out in the future; it’s happening right now in real time.” [Right Wing Watch]

Ummmm, no. But not “just no.” The need to giggle and even applaud this ridiculous person is a bit overwhelming.

I mean, yes, taking advantage of an audience who doesn’t know what it means to be in a quantum entanglement is desperately unethical and immoral. This is a woman whose moral model is so terribly at odds with that of the vast majority of Americans, political leanings irrelevant, that she should probably be placed under restraints for both her own safety and the safety of others. That’s how bad it is.

But, in terms of communications style, she’s a little like Erick Erickson and his ilk, who I’ve observed using phrases like objective evidence and scientific arguments as if they’re magical incantations. Tenpenny has evidently gathered up some of the terms from one of the least intuitive and most difficult to understand scientific fields out there, thrown them at the side of a building covered in old bubble-gum, and taken what’s stuck in random order in order to bamboozle an audience that may not even have heard of the field, despite the fact that the very computers they use are built on pivotal parts of quantum mechanics.

But, invoking the classic We’re all victims! approach to communications, she declares she was ridiculed, and yet She Was Right! As much as I’d love to be able to writer Ah, if she were only right, but the consequences for reality might be devastating, as in Why did the Moon just become a black hole that’s about to suck us-

While I expect that, someday, her audience will wise up to her grifter tactics and chase her out of town, it won’t be on this one. Much like fake pastors who proclaim themselves prophets because there’s no likelihood of someone listening in on their convos with the divine, she’s wisely kept her path way out where no one else but quantum physicists will tread, and I don’t doubt the audience has already been vaccinated against trusting most scientists. She’ll trip over something else someday in her greed and immorality, but not this grift.

More than a year ago, Eitan Hersh published this in The Atlantic:

In the aggregate, the political right is making donations more strategically than the political left. As political scientists have long described, conservative funders such as Charles Koch have spent decades planning for the long term. They have invested in the next generation of state and municipal politicians and organizers across the country. They invest in state legislative lobbying. Understanding the political value of local church groups and gun clubs, they don’t see grassroots organizing as parochial and beneath them. They see it as key to durable control of government. Meanwhile, the biggest and most notable spenders on the Democratic side include Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer, who sometimes invest in worthwhile long-term grassroots strategies, but who will be best remembered for together spending nearly $1.5 billion on their own long-shot presidential bids: short-term, top-down, and vain.

And for all their planning and money, what did they get? Long-time readers know the names: Gaetz, Greene, Boebert, Cawthorn, Gohmert, Nunes, Risch, McConnell, Kennedy, and dozens of others. At the Federal and State levels, the far-right conservative donors have discovered that the brethren they funded are a bunch of fourth-raters who think winning a seat was the goal.

And then ring the bell and let their inner-nuts loose.

And so Hersh, or at least his political scientists, should be embarrassed. Winning is merely a stepping stone; the goal is effective and wise governance. The right advocated for absolutist gun rights and now hide out on luxury yachts when the fear of being picked off takes them, they participate in ludicrous lies and hypocrisy about SCOTUS, they believe their broken abortion logic should be inflicted on everyone, and then there’s the 30,000 lies of the former President!

This is not wise investing, is it?

Not that he’s wrong about “rage-donating,” a description of Democratic fund donation “strategy”, which was fun to read. It reminds me that a lot of Americans have thoroughly ingested the philosophy of the private sector, where virtually everything can be bought and sold. Sadly for the Democrats who gave money to long-shot candidates in incredible volume, It Just Doesn’t Work That Way when it comes to voting.

But to suggest that the fact that the conservatives often control the legislatures due to wise investments is to ignore the part that gerrymandering and many other morally dubious strategies have played in the drama of American politics, and, worse yet, to fail to understand the nature of victory. Putting the current pack of half-wits in charge of the legislatures of the nation isn’t victory for the Republicans.

It’s disaster, for the nation and the Republicans.

Some pics of the recent St. Paul Winter Carnival’s snow sculpture competition. These were taken near dusk, which explains why some are a little gray.

I’m not sure what that might be.

Sorry, dude, but that’s a bit big even for you to lift off the ground.

Lovely.

Didn’t make it to the toilet, did he?

Singin’ the blues.

Sadly, I think this is the last day of display for the sculptures.

WaPo reports on the latest remarks from former President Trump:

Former president Donald Trump on Tuesday advocated a new focus for congressional investigators: why then-Vice President Mike Pence did not take steps on Jan. 6, 2021, to reject electoral college votes from several states won by Joe Biden.

Trump’s exhortation came two days after he created an uproar with a statement suggesting Pence should have “overturned” the election as he presided over the counting of electoral college votes by Congress.

In a fresh statement Tuesday, Trump offered a more nuanced take on what he would have liked to have seen from Pence, saying he “could have sent the votes back to various legislators for reassessment after so much fraud and irregularities were found.”

And you know what? I think Speaker Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Majority Leader Schumer (D-NY) should offer the Republicans the opportunity to form their own Select Panel to investigate the former Vice President.

Make them vote on it.

Watch them squirm.

Because if they vote for it, they stay in the former President’s good graces while shit-canning the former Vice President. He’ll have been implicitly rejected by both Trump and the Republican establishment. His supporters will be mortally offended and never vote Republican again, or at least not for the MAGA-oafs.

And if they vote against establishing such a panel, every NO! vote will be considered a betrayal of  the former President, and both he and the MAGA cult will never forgive them.

And on top of that, every legal expert in the country will tell us that there’s nothing to find. Pence’s role was purely ceremonial. All of the faux-controversy over the votes was finished. The conclusion of such a panel will be that Pence never had the opportunity to indulge in such a betrayal of the nation.

Go on, Speaker Pelosi, Leader Schumer. You know you want to.

WaPo has a report on that mysterious phenomenon known as extreme lightning:

The World Meteorological Organization announced on Monday that it had confirmed two new mind-blowing lightning “megaflash” records. The findings, which come after careful data-checking and rigorous certification processes, include one record event that occurred over the Lower 48 states.

On April 29, 2020, a sprawling mass of strong to severe thunderstorms produced a 477.2-mile-long lightning strike over the southern United States. It stretched from near Houston to southeast Mississippi, a distance equivalent to that between Columbus, Ohio, and New York City.

The record beats out a 440-mile-long megaflash that occurred over southern Brazil on Halloween of 2018.

The WMO also identified a new world record for the long-lasting lightning flash. It lit up the skies over Uruguay and northern Argentina for 17.1 seconds on June 18, 2020, surpassing a 16.73-second flash recorded over northern Argentina on March 4, 2019.

And that question would be: are these phenomena sensitive to climate change?

In the midst of an ennui affliction, this, from nearly a year ago, made me laugh:

A Missouri lawmaker facing federal fraud charges is learning what legislative exile is like.

Days after Rep. Tricia Derges was kicked out of the Republican caucus for allegedly falsely promoting a medical treatment that could treat COVID-19, House leaders assigned her new office space — in a windowless broom closet.

“Yes, I’m in a closet,” Derges told the Post-Dispatch Thursday.

The cubbyhole, listed as Room 400D, is located in a space near the House gallery, a sometimes crowded and loud corridor in pre-COVID times.

They also moved Derges’ seat on the House floor to be next to a fellow exiled Republican, Rep. Rick Roeber of Lee’s Summit, who was booted from the GOP caucus amid allegations that he abused his children. [St. Louis Post-Dispatch]

And is her situation improving? Not recently.

Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No! (2015):

Political Celebrities In Movie!

Citizens Ignoring Other Cities’ Disasters!

Pigs In Space!

Sharks In Space!

Definitely: Watch at your own peril.

Certain to cause some outrage:

Critical theory should be treated more like creationism in public schools than scholarship: an unfalsifiable form of religion, preferably banned outright, but if not, always accompanied by Darwin. – Andrew Sullivan, The Weekly Dish (paywall)

Of course, then you’d have to prove that it’s unfalsifiable, and then teach why that’s bad. I’m not sure the first point is yet established, but so far this is an interesting start.

We mustn’t be seen together, whoever you are!

Agatha Christie’s 11 day disappearance in 1926 may never be publicly resolved as to its true nature, but it does offer one thing: a gap in the famed murder mystery writer’s life into which speculation may descend, and that is the basis of Agatha And The Truth Of Murder (2018). The author, distraught over her husband’s repeated requests for a divorce, takes on a murder mystery brought to her by a fan: the brutal murder of Florence Nightingale Shore, the goddaughter of Florence Nightingale, to whom the fan, Mabel Rogers, was a companion.

A real life murder, this story is less about the resolution of the murder itself, and more about how the process of solving the murder brings more maturity to Christie. From a better perspective on life and how other people’s lives are lived, and the importance of misleading appearances, to the salience of apparently trivial loose ends, what may have been an emotional breakdown becomes a pivot for Christie to take the next step on her extraordinary life’s journey.

There’s nothing weighty or amazing in this story, but there’s no denying that it is fun, with competent acting and story-telling. You’ll enjoy it if you give it a chance – and like murder mysteries.

Kurt Andersen has an interesting article in The Atlantic on ritual sacrifice, and how the right’s resistance to vaccination equates to various societies’ use of ritual sacrifice (of people) to solidify ruling structures. While noting the prominent role that belief in the supernatural, formal or informal, plays in ritual sacrifice, more importantly he notes the real goal:

A long-standing theory of human sacrifice, the “social-control hypothesis,” has argued that social elites used it to keep the hoi polloi subservient. But the evidence was scattered and anecdotal, untested by the most rigorous modern scholarship. One big question: What distinguished the cultures that practiced human sacrifice from those that did not? Thanks to a massive historical database of the social and genetic particulars of a hundred traditional societies spread over a sixth of the planet, from the eastern Pacific to Australia and East Asia, in 2016 we got one definitive answer: “Ritual human sacrifice,” an official summary of the research said, “played a central role in helping those at the top of the social hierarchy maintain power over those at the bottom.”

The entire article is worth your time, but I’m not sure if it’s entirely relevant. For example, I don’t know how to work in the role of It’s all a hoax!, especially from those who are on their deathbeds, and still cry our Hoax! It feels like a loose end.

But I enjoyed the article, as I know little about ritual sacrifice.

Erick Erickson sent out an email blast this morning entitled Will Republicans Blow It? It’s meant to entice recipients to subscribe, as it’s a teaser and a link to his radio show segment on the question, but what little he did write dovetails with my expectations:

I have a well-founded fear that I probably share with a lot of you. If history is the best indicator of future events, this fear may soon materialize. The fear is Republicans blowing it in November.

Sure, Democrats are in a bad spot. Inflation is surging and Biden can’t get anything accomplished. But in order for Republicans to have a chance at taking back both chambers, they need to nominate quality candidates who can win. We’re not seeing quality candidates in an alarming amount of races.

Nevermind the mischaracterization that Biden can’t accomplish anything, as that’s a running line in Republican propaganda with no connection to reality. The real point here is the lack of quality Republican candidates. As I’m a working dude, I can’t go out and evaluate candidates, so I’ll take Erickson’s more experienced view as good information, contingent on other views.

And, as long-time readers will know, this isn’t a surprising development. The Republicans who are, or were, quality people, who took governance seriously, have either left the Party, or have gone into hiding. Many are now independents or are even forming groups dedicated to defeating the Republicans.

Meanwhile, the outliers, the folks who cling to far-right positions such as sovereign citizens, the Democrats are communists, free market absolutism, all regulation is evil, corporate profits are more important than the environment, it’s the End Times, I’m a Prophet and God told me to run, etc.^[1], are streaming into the Republican Party. Not just because they’re hungry for power, although that’s certainly true.

But because they can.

Nobody is kicking them out of the Party. The folks who enforced standards, such as the importance of rationality over bigotry, are gone.

Thirty years ago, candidates for the Senate might have included people with degrees in government, perhaps diplomats with extensive foreign or military experience. These days? Football star Herschel Walker, who is literally mentally ill, is considered the leading Republican candidate for the Senate seat that will be decided this November, now held by Senator Warnock (D-GA). Or consider Senator Tuberville (R-AL), a former college football coach with no experience in government.

This is the best they can do? Yes, the Republican Party is truly going down the tubes in the clutches of amateurs who spit upon experts and don’t understand the job doesn’t end when the general election is won.

And the sad part is the Democrats, through their hubris on various issues, may end up losing in November. If Biden doesn’t announce a nominee for Justice Breyer’s soon to be vacated seat before the term is over and Breyer rides off into the sunset, we may see another SCOTUS seat occupied by yet another third-rate Republican legal personality. I think I’ll barf if I have to see Senator McConnell (R-KY) preen once again over his dishonor.

¹ I do not include the anti-vaxxers as there is significant resistance to vaccination all over the political spectrum.

Much to the relief of many Democrats, 83 year old Justice Stephen Breyer has announced his retirement at the end of the current term. While some folks are trying to put an excessive spin on this, such as Erick Erickson’s interpreting this to mean the Democrats are in big trouble – and not that he’s an old man who’s decided it’s time to move on – I am wondering how the Republicans plan to react to this.

I mean, the Democratic reactions to Kavanaugh and Barrett were fairly hot, even chaotic. Will the Republicans do the same?

In a word, they shouldn’t. I’m not saying they won’t, as a lot of conservative wannabe leaders will see this as a chance to stir up trouble and look like, if only in their minds, leaders. But if the Republican leadership is smart – yeah, I shook my head, too – they’ll keep everyone calm.

Why? Because it’ll impress the independents that the Republicans are the grownups in the room. It won’t be true, of course, as Senators McConnell (R-KY) and Grassley (R-IA) have been dribbling lies about when nominees can be confirmed for years now. But most independent voters won’t be aware of that, while the near-riots and protests and the drama during the confirmation hearings of Kavanaugh and Barrett were loud and, frankly, embarrassing.

The Democrats and the left like to think they’re the adults in the room, and, given the quality of the conservatives these days, they have a point. But their public behaviors have not proven the point; in many independents’ eyes, they’ve been reprehensible. This is where the left falls down: they think everybody’s political.

They’re not. Back in my youth, most everyone wanted to work and then go to bowling league. These days, I’m not sure about the bowling, but having a political discussion hasn’t replaced bowling. A lot of people don’t pay attention to politics, so it’s only the loudest things they remember when they’re forced to think about it – and the Democrats have been both loud and frantic.

If the Republicans are smart, they’ll play that up, because they can’t stop a nominee from being confirmed through brute force. They might stop it by raising valid points about the nominee, if the Democrats are still taking their role in government seriously, but otherwise this is only an opportunity to patch up a Party reputation that has taken some serious damage over the last twenty-five and more years, as they’ve showcased a whole lot of substandard politicians, such as Gingrich, Trump, McConnell, Grassley, Gaetz, Palin, oh this list gets too long so I’ll stop right here.

It’ll be interesting to see how this goes.

Tara Palmeri reports the former President thinks he needs more than one ticket in the endorsement game:

THE DOUBLE DIPPER — DONALD TRUMP has floated the idea of doling out dual endorsements in some of the key midterm races as he becomes increasingly suspicious of his advisers who are pushing competing candidates.

The GOP kingmaker-in-chief has grown so distrustful of all the advice he’s getting from various aides — and so wary of being lured into picking the wrong horse — that he’s floated an idea that would essentially dilute his endorsement.

“He feels like he’s being penned in,” said a person close to the former president, explaining that Trump’s logic is that dual endorsements would mean, “I get two chances to win.”

Another source of Trump’s endorsement apprehension: He isn’t clear about which advisers have significant personal or financial ties to the candidates they’re bending his ear about.

“He’s at times suspicious of the recommendations that people give him when he knows they’re being paid,” an adviser to the former president added. “He’s been asking who is paying who.” [Politico]

“I get two chances to win”? While I’m no statistician – one class in college, thanks for the ‘C’, professor – I do recall that only works with independent outcomes. A primary is not filled with independent outcomes. Because there are a limited number of votes available, the performance of each outcome, i.e., candidate, is inversely related to the performance of the others in aggregate in “first past the post” elections^[1].

Which means, as many have already pointed out, that there is a chance, a good chance, that the MAGA vote will split if Trump chooses to endorse multiple candidates. If this happens, then the winner may be damaged goods, not because of their far-right credentials, but because the factionalism in Republican politics has, so far, been quite bitter. MAGA voters decide that if their personal favorite candidate didn’t win the primary, well, they’re not going out to vote.

They may even think the vote was rigged.

Not that this is going to happen. The fallaciousness of Trump’s claim to have two tickets to the lottery, rather than one, is obvious, and I’m sure someone will inform him quickly as to how this all works.

But it’s a consequence of the rank amateurism inherent in Trump and MAGA. He doesn’t get it. That very amateurism may end up blunting the entire movement, disappointing them and driving the base away. It all becomes self-reinforcing. Ironically, he does understand that he’s at the center of corruption, because he wonders who is getting paid off. This is evidence of the way he views the world – it’s all about the money.

Think of it this way, Donald. Your influence is sharply limited. Diluting it just makes it that much less effective.

¹ The equivalent statement in ranked choice voting scenarios is considerably more involved, and I won’t take a stab at it.

I’ve mentioned Trofin Lysenko a time or two on this blog, most recently here, but now Skeptical Inquirer’s David Robert Grimes has published a lovely article on this walking disaster of a scientist that I really enjoyed:

Lysenko’s 1928 announcement of a new way to hugely increase crop yield, dubbed “vernalization,” was music to the Party’s ears. Inspiring stories of ingenious workers solving practical problems by wits alone were a trope of Soviet propaganda, so this agronomist from peasant origins without any formal scientific training outsmarting a bourgeois scientific establishment was widely embraced. Bestowed with political and scientific awards, he was elevated up the Party hierarchy. Such praise was premature; Lysenko’s lack of scientific training translated into poorly controlled, subpar experiments. Nor was he above bolstering his heroic image with fabricated data.

Still, Lysenko was an unimpeachable Party darling, and the audacity of his claims increased steadily. He insisted that the offspring of seeds treated with his process would inherit wondrous properties, allowing wheat to transmute into barley. This caused consternation to biologists, as it pivoted on Lamarckian evolution. This obsolete theory suggested acquired characteristics of an organism could be passed down to descendants, so a plant plucked of leaves might have leafless offspring. Biologist Julian Huxley pithily observed that “if this theory is correct, it would follow that all Jewish boys would be born without foreskins.”

Bold mine.

And where did it all lead? Not well for his critics:

As World War II consumed Europe, Lysenko began purging scientists who contradicted his grandiose claims. Arrested on overblown charges, his mentor and early champion Vavilov ultimately died in prison from malnutrition. In 1941, Germany attacked Russia, putting Lysenko’s crusade temporarily on ice. At the war’s end in 1945, Lysenko still held dictatorial sway with the Party—but closer evaluations of his work by others began to reveal unjustified and blatantly falsified claims. Apprehensive of his position, Lysenko implored Stalin for support, promising to increase the country’s wheat yield tenfold. Despite ample evidence this was impossible and Lysenko incompetent, Stalin bowed to this much-vaunted genius of the proletariat, bestowing the entire political machinery of the Soviet Union on Lysenko.

But after Sakharov unloaded on him, as I mentioned previously, the Soviet Union dismissed him to dishonor and obscurity, and began clawing its way out of the feverish swamplands of quackery and ideological allegiances into which his ideology had led them:

The state press, which had once heralded his genius, now damned him absolutely. Lysenko retreated into obscurity, dying quietly in 1974. His cult of personality had stifled advances in genetics, biology, and medicine across the Soviet Union. His peaceful end was a stark contrast to that of the scientists whose destruction he had authored in his violent purges. The Lysenko affair was, in the words of scientist Geoffrey Beale, “The most extraordinary, tragic and in some ways absurd, scientific battle that there has ever been.”

And I fear this is what we’re seeing again, only a lot closer to my porch, as the folks who are characterized as anti-vax, or anti-science, might be better considered as alt-world people. They’ve had a taste of cultural power and, if only imagined, social superiority, and damned if they’re going to let a pandemic knock them out of their seats of power. It’s a hoax, medicines pushed by their leaders are effective, the vaccines don’t work or are morally flawed or will kill them. We’ve seen people die of Covid, whispering with their last breath that it is all a hoax, that if only the doctors gave them the real medicine, they’d get better instantly.

It’s all of a piece with the rejection of experts, as advocated by former Speaker Ryan (R-WI), isn’t it? He told the conservative base they could figure out anything, they didn’t need experts, and when an overwhelming problem descended upon them, they sought a magic cure, because that’s what they wanted and Ryan told them they could find it. And then out come the vultures who prey on such people, the latest appearing to be, in an imperfect analogy to Lysenko, the highly credentialed Dr. Robert Malone:

Timothy Caulfield, the Canada research chair in health law and policy at the University of Alberta, said Malone injecting himself into a conversation with the kind of credentials he has, and “cherry-picking rotten data,” was “a worst-case scenario.”

“You have this individual who has all these credentials and this history in the biomedical world, so that looks impressive. And he’s referencing a study that, on the face of it, may look impressive. But you don’t know that the study is fraudulent,” Caulfield said, adding that Malone has “weaponized bad research.”

In November, Malone shared a deceptive video to his Twitter followers that falsely linked athlete deaths to coronavirus shots. The video suggested that coronavirus vaccination killed Jake West, a 17-year-old Indiana high school football player who died of sudden cardiac arrest. But the vaccine played no role in West’s death. The teen died of an undiagnosed heart condition in 2013. [WaPo]

But when Malone says

“Regarding the genetic covid vaccines, the science is settled,” he said in a 15-minute speech that referenced the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy. “They are not working.”

It’s red meat for a base hungry for victory over those annoying liberals, and finding Covid doesn’t obey their wishes, their prayers, their earnest demands, not of themselves, not from the movement leaders, such as Trump or Copeland, they’re looking for confirmation of their alt-world fantasy.

The Soviet Union died, in part, from motivated reasoning: where the tires met the road, their technology and social management miserably came up as third-rate. Will the far-right conservatives, such as Trump and Speaker Ryan, who put their narcissism and ideological priorities, respectively, over the opinions of the best trained people available, suffer a similar fate?

And how much damage will their fatally flawed machine do before it’s finally abandoned?