Unsightly Mental Blemishes

I couldn’t help but wonder where these are located:

South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster (R) said he was prepared to fight Biden’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration proposal to “the gates of hell to protect the liberty and livelihood of every South Carolinian.” His office didn’t respond to a request for more information about his views on whether there are instances when vaccine requirements should be put in place. The governor has encouraged residents to get vaccinated against the coronavirus but said that decision is up to them. [WaPo]

Are the gates of hell located at Governor McMaster’s (R-SC) home? The South Carolina legislature?

Mar-a-Lago, the residence of the former President Donald Trump? The home of the chair of the Republican National Committee, Ronna Romney McDaniel? I’ll note that Senator McConnell (R-KY) has strongly endorsed being vaccinated, so the gates of hell opening into his office seem unlikely, though not completely out of bounds.

Maybe Florida’s governor’s mansion where, presumably, resides Governor Ron “Death” DeSantis (R-FL)? Texas’ governor’s mansion where, presumably, resides Governor Abbott (R-TX)? Or would it be more likely that Abbott’s Lt. Governor, Dan “Let’s sacrifice all the seniors on the altar of the Economy” Patrick, would host the gates of hell?

My goodness, there are just so many options, and many more if we cast our net to sexually abusive conservative clergy. My oh my.

And I’m being informed that Rolly the Ghostly Red Octopus was never paid for her role in this Shakespearean drama, because, you know, Shakespeare.

Gamera 2: Attack Of Legion (1996) is a step back in the progression of the Gamera franchise. In our last breathless episode, you’ll remember, it was clear that the producers had come into a few extra bucks, which they spent mostly on the scriptwriters and the actors, with just a couple of extra dollars invested in the special effects. The result was a story that felt more adult and less silly than the average Gamera episode up to this point.

In the current episode, I fear the story is a little less interesting. Part of the problem is the reversion to a space-based monster, Legion, which is basically a giant insect with a tremendous swarm of electricity-sucking, mosquito-like children. There’s some chemistry involved in their birth and eating habits, but it didn’t add to the tension. The acting was maybe a little worse, and definitely not a further upgrade. For those who remember the character Asagi Kusanagi, the girl with the connection to Gamera in Gamera: Guardian of the Universe, she makes an appearance, maybe acting as a communications conduit for a pack of children to beg Gamera to wake up and fight, but it’s a triviality: we could have had the kids throw rocks at the giant turtle with equal dramatic effect.

It is true that the storytellers reveal one more Gamera capability after he (she? it? – do bioweapons – see previous episode – have a gender?) has been utterly skewered by laser beams, but this had the repulsive taste of a deux ex machina, and not a legitimate plot machination.

So, two guys in rubber suits have a tussle. Watch out for the kids, who make gory messes out of a few humans. My sense of More improvements? was disappointed. Yours may be, too.

The next pic from the toxic email is deceptively this:

The hidden reference is to the changes happening in society today, such as the decision to retire certain books written by “Dr. Seuss” (Theodor Seuss Geisel) by the owners of the properties, the private Dr. Seuss Enterprises, for supposed racist or sexist imagery, or the offering of a gender-free Potato-Head toy by toy maker Hasbro. Both of these changes were seized upon by conservative media, not to bring forth a conservative intellectual response, but to stir the emotions of the conservative base.

Add in the conservative belief that mankind would not work if it does not have to, i.e., that the unemployed are just too lazy to tolerate, and this is an adroit spoon in the bowl of batter that is the conservative base, and that liquid being drizzled in is contempt, with a leaf of moral superiority.

A moral superiority that is hardly earned in the face of a leader like Donald Trump.

And so the point is to up the hormones of the conservative body – and not let it think.

Jungle Cruise (2021) is a highly derivative story, from the spirit of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) or Romancing the Stone (1984) or any of a number of adventure serials throughout the years, to the entertainment ride of the same name that is available at several Disney theme parks.

And, you know, if you haven’t seen the sources, then derivative doesn’t really matter; it can still be a lot of fun. Jungle Cruise’s script certainly provides some snappy dialog, strong characters, and comeuppances that will make you giggle, and certainly the actors deliver what they are asked to provide. They’re solid, even if they nibble a bit on the scenery.

But there’s a hint that an opportunity was missed in this telling. At the risk of spoiling certain surprises, there’s a conflict: On one side a collection of ancient Spanish explorers, lead by Don Aguirre, searching for a fabled Amazonian tree, the leaves of which heal all disease and injury. Opposing them is a river tribe, sworn to protect and respect said tree.

The analogy with Ponce de León and the Fountain of Youth is obvious. I would have found the film to be more interesting if an exploration of what drove Aguirre and his men, and by implication Ponce de León, in contrast with the alleged connected-to-Nature local tribes. The monomania of the Spanish in their drive for gold and mystical plants – was it a cultural pathology, or what?

But, hey, Jungle Cruise is fun. The river it cruises isn’t deep, but it has its share of odd fish.

Remember my observation that Erick Erickson, inheritor of Rush Limbaugh’s dubious mantle, seems to be snapping himself right off at the moral ankles in his frantic pursuit of audience? His latest post , criticizing President Biden’s vaccine mandates (employers with more than X employees, etc) suggests he’s donating his soul intellectual honesty to Satan in honor of his goal, which is to say his arguments are specious and lurid. Let’s take them one by one.

Progressives, not too long ago, championed getting rid of laws that made it a crime to knowingly transmit HIV to a sexual partner, but they want to ruin your life and deprive you of your livelihood if you choose not to get vaccinated. This is absurd. It is also far more tyrannical than anything Donald Trump tried to do. It won’t hold up in court.

His link is dated 1997 … no, 2007 … no, that’s right, 2017. Per Andrew Sullivan’s frequent comments, AIDS is no longer a death sentence. You take your daily medicine and your life expectancy is generally the same as everyone else’s.

But Erickson wants to implicitly equate a difficult to catch illness, that is easily treated, with an illness that is easily caught, hard (but not impossible) to treat, that has a death rate in excess of the flu’s, and, in combination with our health system’s fragility, pushes hospitals and medical personnel to the limit and beyond. Is it fair that non-Covid-19 patients are being pushed out of hospitals because the unvaccinated are flooding those facilities?

Glossing over key points that get in the way of retaining one’s audience is intellectually intolerable.

And, just for fun, what does tyrannical mean?

[2a] a ruler who exercises absolute power oppressively or brutally [Merriam-Webster]

And, by implication, to satisfy the selfish passions of said rulers.

My point? This is not the selfish passion of Biden, or a brutal arbitrary abuse of power, but rather Biden trying to fulfill his duty to safeguard the citizenry and economy of the United States against a known threat.

Next:

Right now, congressional Democrats are trying to pass an additional $5 trillion in spending for transgender goats, vegan burgers, and unicorn fart powered airplanes. Instead of offering financial incentives or tax credits for vaccines, they want to force you to vaccinate. …

Joe Biden could have found a way to incentivize vaccines. Instead, he will use government bullying, which is going to drive up vaccine hesitancy among the already hesitant. After all, some will claim the vaccine cannot be sound if the government is going to force us to get it.

First, along with roads, bridges, electric charging stations, and whatever else Senator Manchin will permit. Erickson’s list is intellectually dishonest, intended to roil emotions rather than provoke discussion. Is childcare really an infrastructure element?

Second, no, financial incentives do not appear to work as well as needed. See the attempts in Maryland, Ohio, Minnesota, and no doubt elsewhere. There was a lovely initial surge, but it appears to have petered out.

But, most importantly, third: Why should Biden have to offer financial incentives?

Look, American rights are not shorn of their balancing concept: responsibility. That is the word Erickson conveniently forgets. Americans, like just about any community in which people live close together and interact frequently, have a responsibility in the area of public health. That responsibility requires Americans to follow the advice of public health professionals at those times they issue same.

That substantial numbers of the unvaccinated, awash in their fallacious tales of woe and fear, often fed by ignorance, are a signal of how much Americans are acting in bad faith. The public health officials and experts have done, and are continuing to do, their duty; it’s up to Americans to do the same by taking the vaccine.

And not have to be bribed into doing so. Perhaps we need to put the hospitalized Covid-19 unvaccinated sufferers into iron lungs to vividly illustrate the public need.

Onwards:

Whatever happened to “my body, my choice?” For those saying the unvaccinated can kill others, an abortion literally and scientifically kills another human being. The double standard is amazing.

Note that Erickson is clumsily attempting to use a magic word of our era: scientifically. But he doesn’t get it right, for a fetus is not a human. Cut a fetus out of a woman, flop it on another lactating woman’s breast, and will it suckle?

Not until the eighth or ninth month. We’re not talking about a human, just a fetus. It has the potential to become a human if Mother Nature permits it. But it’s not a human by the most basic of definitions and tests.

So the comparison is a failure. On the other side of the board, yes, the unvaccinated can injure and kill other unvaccinated people, and unvaccinated people are petri dishes as well: it’s only during virus reproduction that variants are created, and it’s the variants – as we should all understand at this point – that may carry a bigger threat than the original strain. As the delta variant may be proving.

“My body, my choice” works for the mother who chooses not to carry a fetus to term. The feelings of the father might be injured, but that’s as far as damage goes. But for the unvaccinated, it’s “My body, my choice to endanger you and you and you and you …”

And then Erickson makes up, out of whole cloth, this point:

We are twenty years and a day removed from 9/11. The Taliban, thanks to Joe Biden, have reoccupied Afghanistan and put in positions of power several people previously held in GTMO. Americans are at each other’s throats. The President is encouraging the hate. We are more divided than ever. It is hard not to think the terrorists won.

So many things are wrong with that paragraph. For example, it’s Trump, not Biden, who made the agreement with the Taliban and caused to be released 5000 Taliban troops from Afghani military prisons. But the fairy tale? That hate is being engendered by this decision by Biden. Hate is a decision made by people who choose to hate. Biden has said over and over that he’s trying to get rid of a pandemic that is crippling the nation. No hate there.

But all Erickson can say, since he only wants more and more audience, is that it’s all about hate.

He also thinks this is the hill Biden will die on, but that broken logic is its own topic, and thus I’ll omit it.

Atavistic:

A reader expands on the fetal heartbeat post:

Cell differentiation starts at about 4 weeks. Cardiac tissue cells immediately start doing what they’re meant to do, contract in rhythm with electrical signals — no surprise — even before they’ve formed any kind of enclosed pump, much less 4 chambers of a heart. And it only makes sense from an evolutionary point of view. If a multi-cellular organism wants to get any more complicated than 2-cells thick back-to-back floating in a medium (e.g. sea water) which will provide oxygen and food to both sides of that tissue, it has to come up with some kind of pumping system to nourish those future “inner” cells.

Here’s a perfectly good editorial (via Maddowblog):

Sometimes we’re blind to the applicability of things we write about others to ourselves. Consider Erick Erickson’s latest:

As progressivism secularizes, politics becomes religion. Virtue signaling replaces a Christian ichthus fish on the back of a car. Outrage becomes a signal for identifying heretics. If one is not outraged, one just might be a heretic to secular progressive religious zealots.

So what does Erickson think an ichthus fish might be? A signal of evil? No, it’s a virtue signal. It says I belong to the cult of Jehovah.

That said, Erickson’s not wrong in his larger point. There’s a fierce need to belong at the core of the modern human being, and to prove that one belongs. We see it every day stitched into our clothing, in our bumper stickers, on our walls – those emblems by which we identify ourselves to ourselves and, almost as importantly, to others.

I suspect – I’m no evolutionary anthropologist – that this is a result of social evolution. Prominent display of identifying alliances functions, mostly, to advertise membership to other members, to advance one’s fortunes, even to keep one alive in existential crises, although certainly a mistaken display can also get one killed.

And it has its dark side. It is not allied with rational thought, as it demands a loyalty that is often unreasoning – and that’s not from other members, but from one’s self. Because its background is existential in nature, even appearing to think about one’s loyalties may appear to be disloyalty in the perceptions of fellow members.

Who may then eject one out into the barren wastelands of not-membership. Better to hug the emblem without regard to the toxic sludge dripping off of it.

This can lead to terrible broken thinking, as Erickson himself, a leading member of the far-right conservative movement known as the Evangelicals, demonstrates:

Undeterred, instead of blaming the plaintiffs for their collective screw up, progressives assailed the Court, Texas, Donald Trump, conservatives, and babies. They fixated on the worst case scenario — rape. According to progressives, women who are victims of rape will have to carry their babies to term and face untold psychological trauma. They patently ignored that Texas cannot stop a woman from traveling to another state to terminate her child. Nor did they care to point out that rape accounts for, at most, one percent of abortions. To listen to the commentary on television, one would think rape and pregnancies therefrom happen constantly. Meanwhile, one doctor admitted to killing dozens of children in the run up to the law taking effect, none because of rape, but because of the mother’s convenience.

Between ignoring the fact that some pregnant women live far from Texas borders, cannot afford to go, cannot dare to go, may find the next door state has replicated the Texas law, and the misleading use of the faux-synonym of children for fetuses, Erickson’s fealty to the far-right forces his reasoning down paths that are obviously wrong – and fosters mistrust in his other arguments.

Which is a pity. His is the second conservative voice (here’s the other) – I’ve also read a liberal’s concurring opinion – suggesting SCOTUS is correct in rejecting the initial appeal concerning the Texas abortion law:

The Supreme Court let a Texas law stay in place because the plaintiffs in the case sued the wrong people. The Supreme Court refused to halt the law because the Court does not stop laws. The Court only stops people from enforcing the laws. When the wrong people are sued, the Court has no power to stop them. Progressives insisted, despite the dereliction of duty by the plaintiffs, that the Court should stop the law anyway. While four justices would have done so, they would have deviated from legal precedent.

And Erickson was a lawyer at one time, so he may be right. But with his long exhibited stream of broken logic, it’s difficult to take him seriously. This is not a matter of opposing views; it’s a matter of shaking one’s head over a lack of serious thought.

Me: Grape jelly, strawberry jelly, or honey? These are the questions that make the man!

Arts Editor: These are the questions that make the man rotund!

Reading how Rep L Graham (R-SC) thinks we’ll be returning to Afghanistan before too long …

The Gamera “cheesecake” shot. He/She/It has always been ashamed of it, but they needed the money.

In Gamera: Guardian Of The Universe (1995) the Gamera series finally gets an upgrade: a better, even coherent story. Perhaps a reboot of the Gyaos from Gamera vs Gyaos (1967) of nearly thirty years previous, this time we learn from an ancient inscription found buried in Gamera’s shell that the Gyaos appear to be bio-engineered weapons which seem to have escaped the control of their makers thousands of years previously. In desperation, the no-doubt well-meaning creators then built Gamera, or perhaps better Gameras, to defend humanity against the Gyaos; incidentally, they included telepathic communications devices so that, apparently, anyone wearing said device can share in Gamera’s injuries. Oh, and cheer him on.

Which, silly as it sounds, is oh so much better than the Gyaos from outer space story, thematically speaking. Even the cheering on is now done by a teenager who can act, rather than a sub-ten year old who shrieked loudly, and then sang the Gamera theme song, which made my Arts Editor bury her head in the couch cushions. Which is all a bit unfair, as the kids didn’t do too badly in previous installments, but the teenagers are just a bit more believable.

The Gyaos, of which there are three babies this time, come equipped with what appears to be a noise-generated laser beam (feel free to say “What?” here) which slices off pieces of Gamera, while Gamera’s ability to blow flame out his mouth has been transformed into explosive fireballs, which are actually mildly impressive; and Gamera’s mode of flying, still a rocket spinner, has also been upgraded to be more impressive. However, there’s little improvement beyond that: a guy in a rubber suit vs what might be hand puppets. But if you’re one of Gamera’s fan club who worries about his booze problems, his eyeballs remain clear in this episode.

Overall, the improved story, a couple of scenes which had my Arts Editor exclaiming, and the much better drawn characters, makes the entire production feel more adult, although we occasionally had trouble keeping all the characters straight. For those who care about tradition, the old slogan (“Gamera, friend to all children!”) was omitted, but Gamera does put himself on the line for a screaming brat, so all’s well and good on that front.

Should you see it? That depends on how much punishment you deserve for your last malfeasance. It’s not nearly as bad as previous episodes, as it appears whoever owned the copyright devoted a few more resources to the storytellers than normal. But the special effects are still a disappointment 25 years on. I guess I’m saying that I enjoyed it more than the other episodes, but I still cringed a lot.

Adduce:

to give reasons why you think something is true:
None of the evidence adduced in court was conclusive. [Cambridge Dictionary]

Noted in “Geocentric in Ghana: An Antiscience Lawsuit,” Glenn Branch, Skeptical Inquirer (September/October 2021, paywall?):

The bulk of the evidence [Johnson] Anane adduces against the motion of Earth and evolution is scriptural in nature: his motion teems with chapter-and-verse references to the Bible, although he ecumenically refers to the Qur’an once and the Bhagavad-Gita twice. A few sophistical arguments are also offered: for example, Anane quotes one dictionary as defining a planet as “a very round object in space” and another as defining space as the “region beyond the earth[’s] atmosphere,” triumphantly concluding that Earth is not a planet. Conspicuously lacking is any reference to scientific evidence.

I like the guy’s educational background:

… a lecturer in the Department of Wood Technology—which apparently specializes in carpentry, joinery, and furniture design and construction—at Sunyani Technical University. He is listed on the university’s website as having a bachelor of science degree in wood technology and management.

While I understand the purpose and, to some extent, methods of gerrymandering, I actually have problems with the opposite: what constitutes a fair redistricting? Math Professor Moon Duchin of Tufts University has been working on that problem, and her team has taken the approach, from what I can gather, of generating hundreds, thousands, even millions of maps, and then evaluating them against a set of criteria. Those criteria?

“The opposite of gerrymandering isn’t proportional representation; the opposite of gerrymandering is not gerrymandering,” Jordan Ellenberg, a math professor at the University of Wisconsin and a co-author of the 2019 mathematicians’ brief to the Supreme Court, wrote in an essay in Slate that Duchin likes to quote.

And although Duchin advocates computing power as a potentially game-changing tool, she doesn’t propose taking humans out of the process.

“In all the different states, as we approach redistricting now and into the future, we need to keep on having these debates about what principles we want embodied in our maps,” she said. “Different states will come to different ideas about local fairness, about what fairness looks like there. I hope that they’ll use techniques like this to help them get closer to those ideals.” [WaPo]

In other words, the professor has punted on that question.

And that’s OK. The question seems to be hard, and rather than decreeing an answer and then fighting about it, Professor Duchin presents a collection of possible answers and stands back.

Duchin and her team have a website here.

Campion:

Moss campion (Wikipedia)

any of several plants of the genera Lychnis and Silene, having white, pink, or reddish flowers. [Dictionary.com]

Noted in “Connecting with nature is good, but can apps help us do it better?“, Richard Webb, NewScientist (28 August 2021):

I’m lost. Against my better judgement, I’m using a trail app to guide me on a run along the north Devon coast that probably should have been against my better judgement, too. This is supposed to be a holiday.

This gorse thicket came as a surprise. According to my plant identification app, there have been various campions – sea, red and bladder – all the way up the hill. And goldfinches, says the birdsong app. I can’t help thinking that the multiple distractions is why my phone now seems to know where I am, but I don’t.

Continuing the examination of the toxic conservative email stream, here’s the next entry from the email under the microscope:

As ever, context is everything, and I’ll start with this: the Minnesota electric grid easily handles nights of at least -50, and no doubt more – I’m simply being conservative in my estimate. I know it does because I’ve seen nights that cold and our electric grid is not a matter of worry.

But, more importantly, the writer is not mentioning that this is a reference to the recent debacle in Texas, in which the power grid did, indeed, suffer failures related to the lower than normal temperatures. Here’s what’s important to know about the electric grid: it is a nationally distributed grid in which power can be moved from areas in which it is excess to areas which are wanting.

Except in Texas.

In the name of independence, Texas made it law that the electric grid could not join the national grid. Additionally, relentless pressure has been exerted to drop rates for electricity.

The result is a brittle electric grid that does not receive the investment for upgrades and weather hardening required for a twenty first century likely to see severe weather events not encountered by Americans before. Precipitated by the use of fossil fuels, a rational, competent person might expect a message like this to advocate for a switch from fossil fuels to other fuels.

And not crassly suggest the electric grid can’t handle EV (electric vehicle) recharging, based on misrepresentations and omitted information.

This sort of ad appeals to a mythical Golden Age often celebrated by a conservative movement resentful of being told that change is coming. it’s an attack on the myth of perfection, the idea that we’re the apex of civilization.

And not just another creaking, flawed step up the ladder of progress.

It also appeals to the conservative ethos of amateurism, of common-sense winning the day, rather than the painfully acquired expertise of those citizens who’ve devoted decades to the study of such problems. This is an ethos for self-destruction, and not that of a successful society. It’s rather like asking a ten year old to work on the engine problem of a $60,000 SUV, rather than a trained mechanic.

The words of H. L. Mencken ring true:

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

I just sneezed my face off! Must have been faulty clips.

Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008) is, to take the easy route, a dystopian tale of capitalism gone mad, of a legal system built of iron unleavened by justice, a contractual enforcement system entirely private and unconstrained by notions of humanity, and a medical profession entirely dedicated to blind profit.

Rotti Largo runs this society from his position as founder and President of GeneCo, the company that can cure almost every ill, transplant every organ – for a price. For just a few convenient, monthly payments, you can buy life extension.

But repossession is a bitch.

But this is not a honeyed life fro Largo, and it’s not just the foul clutch of offspring he’s raised. Years ago he fell in love with the pregnant wife of one of his medical researchers, Nathan Wallace. Thwarted, he arranged for her death through the unwitting agency of Wallace, and, post-mortem, Wallace is transferred from research to … Repossession.

But the daughter, Shilo, was saved even as her mother lay dying, and stricken by a genetic disorder of her own. Restricted to her home for near twenty years, society’s swift degradation under the predation of Largo is a story, a fable for her – a fable of a terrifying nature, as new medicines are derived from the rotting corpses underlying the streets, and the Repo men seem to be everywhere. Yet, she yearns to join society, much to Nathan’s dismay.

And now Largo himself is fatally ill.

And it’s all done as an opera.

It’s wild, crazy, and depressing. If violence or gore is a bugaboo for you, avoid, avoid. But for a mockery of the holy book of capitalism and private actions, all sung with gusto, this may be the place for you.

I wonder what was ordered.

If you’re outraged that SCOTUS chose not to take a pre-enforcement appeal of the Texas abortion law, like this dude here, this opinion from Professor Volokh of The Volokh Conspiracy might be a bit of a cool-off:

I think the civil liability scheme imposed by Texas’s SB 8 is likely unconstitutional: It’s inconsistent with the abortion rights recognized in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), and the “undue burden” defense in the statute is likely too narrow to save it. Moreover, I think such state “private attorney general” laws that basically allow any person to sue over alleged illegal conduct are unfair to defendants. …

But when it comes to the procedure for challenging state civil liability schemes (focusing here on schemes where lawsuits are brought by nongovernmental plaintiffs), the legal rule seems to me to be quite well-settled. If you think that some civil liability rule is unconstitutional, you can challenge it—but only as a defense when you’re sued, not through a preenforcement challenge.

In other words, while the liberal wing + Chief Justice Roberts may have wanted to take the case now, the five justice majority that refused to may simply be following procedural rules.

If the first defense against this so-called law does make it to SCOTUS, is accepted, and finds the law unconstitutional, the liberals who are currently exhibiting pulsing veins in the forehead will have some explaining to do.

And it does suggest some guilt to the liberals when it comes to the polarization wars.

A reader responds to my commentary vis a vis getting out of Afghanistan:

I’ve been having similar thoughts Hue. Patience is antithetical to our culture, we want things resolved by the end of the hour. But if we think of it more as a long series with hour-long episodes, we might be able to take a longer view. I think by getting out of the way the Afghans and other influencers may have to actually deal with each other. China, Russia, Pakistan, India and others need to figure out where things go.

And if I’m really Pollyannaish maybe we can hope for the Taliban to actually govern millions of people, including women and girls, who have been educated, worked in society, etc. over the last 20 plus years.

We can hope. In the end, we may see the Taliban “ruling” an Afghanistan which mutates into a form more to our liking. I doubt they’ll ever become a democratic republic, but their incarnation of twenty-plus years ago didn’t work out so well, either. Between the people and ISIS-K they may have to change and improve, or die.

In case you thought a fetal heartbeat means, ya know, a heart beat:

“At six weeks, the embryo is forming what will eventually develop into mature systems. There’s an immature neurological system, and there’s a very immature cardiovascular system,” says Jennifer Kerns, an ob-gyn at UC San Francisco and director of research in obstetrics and gynecology at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. The rhythm specified in the six-week abortion bans, she says, “is a group of cells with electrical activity. That’s what the heartbeat is at that stage of gestation … We are in no way talking about any kind of cardiovascular system.” [Wired]

So it turns out fetal heartbeat is a misnomer, as nothing at all is being pumped, and yet it’s used throughout America to sow confusion and doubt concerning abortion.

Next time you’re accosted by someone blustering about fetal heartbeats, remember the above.

Save us from these roles! Or give us cinnamon rolls!

Gamera: Super Monster (1980) is a really terrible collage of material from previous entries in the franchise, into which has been added a clumsy plot involving good and evil space women, and a little boy in whose dreams Gamera appears and fights monsters brought by the evil space woman and her commander. For reasons known only to them, they want to destroy Earth, and apparently use a star cruiser rented from the Star Wars franchise to get around.

Incidentally, judging from Gamera’s eyeballs, the great friend to children is off the booze – they’re not bloodshot! I have to wonder if he’s a member of AA or just has tremendous will power.

In any case, if you need to see this for your film class, make sure your platform can fast forward through the bits from other films. It cut my view time by nearly half.

And probably saved my sanity.

The editors of the Journal of Free Black Thought have a nice summary of Critical Race Theory (CRT) within the realm of law schools – at least, it clarifies things for me:

… a review of the legal studies literature suggests that when CRT “questions the very foundations of the liberal order,” this is no grad-school intellectual exercise, but rather a strategy for transforming our entire legal system into one that privileges group rights over individual rights. If you want to transform the foundations of American society (without using rifles), you need a theory of the law, and you need a farm system for training federal judges. (Just ask the Federalist Society.) This, in a nutshell, is why CRT emerged from legal studies. In this essay, we’ll examine what that theory of the law looks like as well as a dissent in a recent federal circuit court case that reflects its spirit.

Liberalism in the civil rights tradition seeks to minimize racial gaps (e.g., in homeownership, education, employment, representation in corporate leadership, and income) with narrowly-tailored affirmative action and broadly-applied (colorblind) social welfare policy—what Delgado and Stefancic disparage as “incrementalism and step-by-step progress.” CRT, by contrast, wants to use the law to force-close all racial gaps: “The critique of color blindness may, one day, persuade the U.S. Supreme Court to accept race-conscious measures in employment and education, leveling the playing field for those [racially defined groups] who have long been excluded from society’s bounty” (Delgado and Stefancic, p. 134).

They go on to examine the recent decision Antonio Vitolo, et al v. Isabella Guzman, which has to do with how money distributed by the Small Business Administration for restaurants impacted by Covid-19. The majority of the panel found its bias towards restaurants owned by “socially disadvantaged” individuals, defined as Black, Hispanic, Native, Asian Pacific, and Asian “subcontinent” Americans, to be unconstitutional; a dissent is examined in detail as being representative of CRT thought.

The results of their examination?

This CRT vision has an intuitive appeal: Whatever its wonders and triumphs, history, including American history, is also a gaping abyss of evil and inhumanity. There is no one alive, from the lowliest to the most exalted, who does not owe her position to injustices visited upon or by her ancestors, however near or distant. The urge to redress history itself is understandable and deceptively simple. All one must do is establish classes of citizens that have illegitimately benefitted from history and classes that have unjustly suffered due to history, and use the instrument of the law to balance the scales between them.

But this unconstrained vision of justice suffers from practical limitations. It’s hard to imagine that even the most ambitious new legal paradigm can “fix” human history, undoing endless centuries of individual and collective decisions and their consequences in the present. Moreover, given that disparity is the rule, not the exception, in every society that has ever existed, it is hard to imagine that disparities, even those manifestly owing to centuries of oppression, can ever be erased.

Perhaps most importantly, any paradigm that privileges essentialist groups over individual human beings, in all their messy particularity, is bound to produce as many injustices as it redresses.

Indeed, members of groups that are not on the list of socially disadvantaged, which is to say those that haven’t gained favor with the elite, will be permanently nettled and dissatisfied. After all, one does not change one’s skin color at will, at least not in a manner convincing to said elites.

And that dissatisfaction may not be permanent, but may easily transform into an even worse condition, a hatred that leads to violence, death, and societal disorder.

Which may translate to revolution. The goal of society is not permanent revolution, regardless of the philosophy of the Cuban government. The goal is figuring out how to live peacefully, and justly, together. It may be one of the most difficult challenges humanity has ever faced.

Not unexpectedly, the Texas anti-abortion law has attracted corporate attention:

Ridehail companies Lyft and Uber said Friday they would cover legal fees for their drivers who are sued as a result of the new legislation. Citizens can sue abortion providers for alleged violations, and plaintiffs will receive $10,000 from the accused if successful. The law also impacts anyone who “aids or abets” an abortion, which could potentially include a driver who unknowingly drove a woman to an abortion clinic. Lyft also said it would donate $1 million to Planned Parenthood.

Dating apps Bumble and Match said Friday they would create a relief fund for people affected by the law. Both are based in Texas.

“Bumble is women-founded and women-led, and from day one we’ve stood up for the most vulnerable. We’ll keep fighting against regressive laws,” Bumble tweeted. [CNN/Business]

And the host of a site dedicated to collecting tips concerning abortions, GoDaddy, has dumped the web site for violating host rules.

Obviously, these are companies with a direct stake in the controversy. Phase 2 of a rejection effort would see companies lacking that obvious exposure joining with Lyft and Uber. Will that happen? I hope so – after all, anyone who can give advice is theoretically vulnerable. And while simple abuse of the law and its supporters may be enough to see its retraction, I’d prefer to see corporate political donors picking up the phone and letting their reps know about their displeasure.

It’d simply be cleaner that way.

Source: Gallup

But we can also expect certain companies, such as Hobby Lobby, pitch a fit when the retraction effort becomes obvious and threatening. The question is whether the vast majority of Americans who do not want laws like these will stand up and be counted – or stick their heads in the ground.