Unsightly Mental Blemishes

It must be that time of the year, when the little green guys comes spilling out of their flying saucers, looking to renew their supply of … sigh … Hamm’s beer. How do I know? The Onion waved a flag:

Details have begun to leak about an upcoming Pentagon report declassifying government intelligence about unidentified flying objects, which must be released in accordance with a provision of the coronavirus spending bill President Trump signed into law in December 2020. The Onion provides some of the most intriguing details from the upcoming report on UFOs. …

• Confirmation of existence of Jon Hamm and other Hamm-like beings.

But that’s not my favorite consequence. Here it is:

• List of cities government has authorized to offer as sacrifices to aggressive extraterrestrials.

Just like I said earlier today. Sort of.

Enjoy.

Post storm.

I couldn’t help but laugh at this remark:

I first met Jesuit Brother Guy Consolmagno, head of the Vatican Observatory and sometimes called “the pope’s astronomer,” after an event on science fiction and theology we did at the Sheen Center for Thought & Culture.

We ended up talking a lot about aliens. He agreed with me that the Catholic intellectual tradition would have absolutely zero problem with the idea of intelligent life — that is, substances of a rational nature (the classic definition of a “person” in my field) — on other planets.

But when asked in a later, more in-depth interview on these topics if he would be willing to baptize an alien, he said, “Only if she asked.” [Religion News Service]

And, quite seriously, what happens if they whip out a frazzlesnoozle and offer to induct you into their religion?

A polite No, thank you! is assumed.

I was a little perplexed by this remark, though:

I’ve heard lots of folks over the years speculate on what the reality of nonhuman persons on other plants would mean for religious belief — implying that it would be some kind of challenge or problem. But I agree with Ezra Klein, who argued in a recent New York Times column that the challenge is actually more profound for his own secular worldview, which positions humanity as a kind of cosmic accident in an empty cosmos.

If Mr. Klein’s “secular worldview” suggests that humanity is the only intelligent life – or, worse, just life – in the Universe, then it’s not secular.

It’s religious.

Look: A secular, or better yet agnostic, world-view has at its heart an acknowledgement of a lack of knowledge. Based on our limited knowledge of the requirements of life, and the frequency with which those requirements are satisfied in the cosmos, any statement as to whether we’re unique or terribly common in this Universe is, in either case, a statement of faith, not evidence. And faith, when studying reality, should be meticulously minimized, although I doubt it can be entirely omitted. For example, the idea that reality can be understood to any substantial degree is, in itself, a statement of faith.

So, for me, the existence of aliens is a speculative statistical claim, not a claim of certainty, but rather that of hope – because aliens would be cool right up until we’re all running for our lives – and to think that we’re unique in the category of intelligent creatures in the Universe is an unpleasant, even tragic thought. I’d like to think there are aliens, but, until we catch one of these UFOs and open them up and prove they’re occupied by aliens rather than Russians, I also openly acknowledge that it’s merely a hope of mine.

But Klein’s intellectual world-view, if it has not been misstated, is profoundly broken.

For those wondering as to the lure of lots of cash when it comes to vaccination, here’s the first of the Ohio results:

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine’s $5 million lottery to encourage vaccinations appears to be an early win.

State health officials said Monday that more than 25,400 Covid-19 vaccine shots were administered Friday, two days after the program was announced, making it the highest vaccination day in three weeks.

Maybe more telling were the people who got vaccinated. Vaccinations for residents ages 30 to 74 spiked by 6 percent after weeks of steady decline.

“Not only have we achieved our goal of increasing public awareness and interest, but we have slowed what was a consistent decline, and in certain age groups we’re seeing an increase again,” state Health Director Stephanie McCloud said. “This is doing exactly what we intended it to do.” [NBC News]

It’ll be interesting to see more nuanced analysis, and perhaps surveys to see how many people were vaccinated but told their friends that they had not.

Update: New York and Maryland are now using this strategy as well.

What goes up must come down? All bubbles eventually implode?

From Buy Bitcoin Worldwide

Not always, but it appears some crypto investors may share my mind on this matter: cryptocurrencies may not be inherently stable. Other currencies are following suit:

Bitcoin, the most popular and valuable token, fell by more than 20 percent in early morning trading before recovering some of its losses. It sank below price levels not seen since January. Many other top tokens followed suit. Dogecoin investors, who had enjoyed astronomical growth this year, seeing their holdings skyrocket by roughly 10,000 percent, were hit especially hard. The meme-inspired cryptocurrency tumbled by more than 30 percent. [WaPo]

And this must have been particularly alarming for folks with big stakes:

Coinbase, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, reported service disruptions Wednesday morning. An error screen displayed when Web users traveled to the homepage. Customers reported that they were unable to log in, see their balances or trade their tokens, the company said.

Practicalities aside, the real question remains whether or not cryptocurrencies deliver a substantial advantage to its users and the world economy, while remaining relatively isolated from governments and other institutions hostile to its mission. So far, there’s nothing that impresses me – cryptocurrencies appears to blow in the wind, value-wise, while consuming vast amounts of resources. The latter may not be a permanent problem as the various currencies can pursue “proof of stake” mining strategies which should reduce resource consumption, but the former?

And this has been gnawing at me all day:

A couple of days ago I was discussing the collapse of political morality occurs when a political party would rather defeat the legitimate aims & responsibilities of governing rather than give a rival party a victory. Perhaps it’s petty, or perhaps Senator McConnell is correct in suggesting that a victory for the Democrats endangers the Republicans, but there it is.

And here we have an example. The Des Moines Register wrote an editorial to Senator Grassley (R-IA), imploring him to support the Democratic plan for expanded funding for the Internal Revenue Service:

In fact, leaders like Sen. Chuck Grassley, who say they champion rooting out fraud and abuse, should be leading the charge to ensure tax scofflaws are pursued.

Iowa’s senior senator attended an April Senate Finance Committee hearing with testimony from IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig.

He certainly heard Rettig estimate the federal treasury is losing approximately $1 trillion in unpaid taxes each year, more than the annual defense budget. He certainly heard Rettig say that additional mandatory, predictable funding from Congress would “absolutely” help the agency plan, hire workers and catch tax cheats.

Grassley understands a starved agency cannot do its job, whether that job is guarding against fraud on a child tax credit crafted by Democrats or implementing tax cuts crafted by Republicans.

Estimates that an increase in funding of $80 billion would lead to collection of more than $700 billion – a magnitude profit on investment, for those prone to the monetary approach to evaluation.

And, I might add, an IRS unable to conduct appropriate audits, answer questions, or even pick up the phone – the Register estimates the IRS only answers 25% of the calls it receives, and whether those are satisfactory transitions is not at all clear –  has more than a monetary impact. Discontent is a powerful force in electoral politics, and while underfunding the IRS may not be visible, or meet with knee-jerk approval, the suspicions that the big corporations are underpaying their obligations, or the wealthy are getting away with ignoring there obligations, leads to an unhappy electorate.

So the Register’s editorial is important.

And Senator Grassley’s response? After citing what are basically Band-Aid responses and irrelevancies, such as claiming that Congress has given the IRS more funding than it requested recently – a response lacking context, such as what happened before 2020, when Trump tried to strangle the IRS – he turns his response into a political attack:

The Biden administration claims more money for enforcement would allow the IRS to collect at least $700 billion. Outside experts have disputed this rosy revenue scenario. Even if this pipe dream is realized, the extra revenue is dwarfed by the Democrats’ $6 trillion spending agenda. And businesses of all sizes would incur new and burdensome compliance costs and reporting requirements along the way. Instead of promising a chicken in every pot, Biden’s plan promises an auditor at every kitchen table.

The IRS also has a trust deficit. During the Obama administration, the IRS was weaponized to target conservative political organizations, and wasted millions in taxpayer dollars on elaborate conferences, and bonuses for IRS employees who failed to pay their own taxes. The IRS also burned through tens of millions of dollars on software that never got off the ground. Americans are right to be wary about further investment in the IRS without significant controls.

It’s hard to know where to begin. This is definitely a scare-mongering response, between kitchen auditors and the fictitious weaponization of the IRS during the Obama Administration. Even if these are true, and at least some of his reasoning relies on studies from Forbes, a reliable right-wing, tax-skeptical media source, increased funding has nothing to do with abuse of the function of the IRS.

The bottom line: An inefficient, underfunded IRS becomes a very leaky boat for the funds it’s supposed to collect and account; those leaks by turns scare and infuriate us, the passengers; and all of this leads to, counter-intuitively, a discontented populace in which it appears the elite, fixated as much of it is on its wealth & position, has passed on fulfilling its responsibilities.

And this isn’t hard stuff to figure out. Grassley should, and probably does, know all this. But he’s in a Party devoted religiously to lower taxes and paranoia of the government. Yes, we could have a happier populace. But Grassley can’t let that happen. It goes against his political/religious tenets.

Iris? Tulip? This is from last week. Just to prove the garden is still alive.

When you find your own side of the political spectrum harbors extremists and others who are digging up the very foundations of government, well, if you can’t admit to it, this is what Erick Erickson speaks, he claims on the air:

The Democrats have internalized orange man bad. The Democrats fundamentally believe that Donald Trump is the villain. They really believe people like Jay Rosen, the well-respected New York University journalism professor who admitted he believes that the United States is on the verge of turning into a white Christian nationalist state. It’s bet [sic] poop crazy nonsense, but the Democrats have internalized it.

Let’s see: Charlottesville, Covid-19 response (it was all magical thinking), NATO, 2017 “tax reform”, climate change, there’s probably a dozen more examples of Trump doing nothing more than playing to the biases of his base rather than doing what’s best for the nation. Orange man bad? Incompetent, unjustifiably boastful, mendacious, oh so many other adjectives, or bad? Pick it, Erickson.

The same people who are scared of a virus and can’t take their mask off are, of course, emotionally and mentally scarred by the events of January 6th and have internalized the worst possible scenario. They have no reason to want to know or understand Donald Trump’s voters. They think they’re all racist. They have internalized that it’s a bunch of white people and white people are bad, therefore, Donald Trump’s supporters are all bad and need to destroy them. They are overplaying their hand on this.

Look at that first sentence and then start reciting the Holy Litany: Smallpox, TB, polio, measles, mumps, whooping cough. Hell, let’s add Long Covid, Just To Freak Erickson Out. All of these are caused by pathogens^[1], and Erickson trying to portray them the independents and Democrats as weak-minded over a serious health problem that not only is directly threatening to our personal health, but to the stability of our societal health system, marks this passage as desperately broken and ineffective – unless you’re emotionally inclined to believe his fallacious first point. This is not known as leading; this is known as playing to the audience, and it’s not an honest thing to do when it comes to the important subject of governance.

I think this generates backlash. I do think when the New York attorney general, the Manhattan district attorney, and a Georgia district attorney, all pile on Donald Trump, it begins to look like a vendetta, not a legitimate prosecution. It looks like they’re trying to punish Donald Trump for existing and that draws a backlash from the American public, who tends to get outraged by this sort of stuff.

This is probably in reaction to this news:

The New York attorney general’s office said Tuesday that it is pursuing a criminal investigation into the Trump Organization, in addition to the ongoing civil probe.

“We have informed the Trump Organization that our investigation into the organization is no longer purely civil in nature. We are now actively investigating the Trump Organization in a criminal capacity, along with the Manhattan DA. We have no additional comment at this time,” Fabien Levy, a spokesperson for the office, said in a statement. [NBC News]

This may be the terror point for Erickson. If a jury were to find Trump guilty of a criminal offense, well, then his radio audience would be faced with a real dilemma: do we continue to believe Trump is some great leader? Or do they finally recognize him as the greedy man-child that he is to the left?

And, either way, does Erickson retain his audience?

And notice how Erickson dispenses with context. Trump has been to court many times over his refusals to pay for work done, which is easily interpreted as fraud. His charity admitted to fraud. He’s been caught perjuring himself in Court. These are all indicative of a personality which pays little attention to the law and could easily have committed a criminal offense because he thought it profitable – as if refusing to pay people who’ve done work for him isn’t really criminal when it comes right down to it.

Yes, Erickson doesn’t want his audience to think about the central terminal sickness of what constitutes the conservative movement these days. He’ll lose listeners.

So he says, on the radio, crap like the above.

¹ Anyone quibbling over some of these diseases being caused by bacteria may go sit in the corner until they learn to understand overarching points.

Just yesterday I was writing about the GOP approaching purity of corruption, but it turns out there’s still Republicans who protest the antics of their fellows. This would be in Maricopa County, Arizona, where the State Senate has forced a recount, which is being conducted by obscure Trumpist firm Cyber Ninjas, who have drawn vast amounts of criticism for their methods so far.

The Board of Supervisors of Maricopa County, of whom four of the five members are Republicans, are incensed at having their counts, recounts, and verifications questioned by the state Senate, and have written a letter in protest. Money quote:

6. Your “audit” is harming all of us, and we ask you to end it.

Finally, we express our united view that your “audit”, no matter what your intentions were in the beginning, has become a spectacle that is harming all of us. Our state has become a laughingstock. Worse, this “audit” is encouraging our citizens to distrust elections, which weakens our democratic republic.

Your “auditors” began the “audit” unaware that using blue pens on ballots could harm them, and apparently would have distributed blue pens to those conducting the recount of ballots had a reporter not informed them. It has gone downhill from there. Your “audit,” which you once said was intended to increase voters’ confidence in our electoral process, has devolved into a circus.

You are using purple lights and spinning tables. You are hunting for bamboo. These are not things that serious auditors of elections do.

You are photographing ballots contrary to the laws that the Senate helped enact, and you are sending those images to unidentified places and people. You have repeatedly lost control of your twitter account, which has tweeted things that appear to be the rantings of a petulant child—not the serious statements of a serious audit.

The Senate GOP members are reportedly regretting their demand for an audit, but they keep plunging onward, and it’s hard to not see this as corruption at its finest – an audit run by a conspiracy theorist, a Senate that demands to know why the result isn’t what they want, and methods that are ludicrous.

This, BTW, also has all the hallmarks of being run by people who loathe experts. They know what results they want and they’ll find them, by gum. And methods and protocols are for, ummmm, experts! If only those damn judges will stay out of the way!

There’s more in the letter on the three ring circus. Truly, it sounds like that damn curmudgeon next door got themselves elected and is now doing what they prattled on about for all those years.

The only thing missing from this letter from honorable people is a demand that every Senator that still supports the audit to step down in shame.

More than a year ago, Trump ally Representative Devin Nunes (R-CA) sued a parody cow account on Twitter for, ah, being mean to him. Now there’s news that the Barr DoJ got a grand jury subpoena to try to force Twitter to reveal the identity of the person behind the account, and that anonymous person now has a response:

There's nothing remarkable about me. I'm a basic smartass with a Twitter account.

So then why am I being sued by a US congressman? Why would the DOJ ever target me?

Is it the mean tweets and bad memes?

It's not about me or this silly account. It's about silencing all of us. https://t.co/kdU87LVZI2

— Devin Nunes' Alt-Mom (@NunesAlt) May 17, 2021

Silencing is just the surface tension. Autocrats succeed because good people let them, and that happens because of the respect of the distracted or frightened.

Ah, but a good mockery, it’s a rare person who doesn’t like a good mockery. It’s a social signal that there’s something wrong with someone else in the opinion of the mocker. Sometimes it’s purely malicious, of course, but the more easily someone is mocked regarding a serious issue, the more likely there’s something seriously wrong.

And an autocrat, who by definition is wrong, hates the mockery because it not only signals that they should be investigated and booted out of power, but because it pricks the ego inside them: someone doesn’t respect them. And that, in turn, feeds that little impostor syndrome that often also resides there: the suspicion that they are not worthy of respect.

And they hate that.

He’s called the Cerne Abbas Giant.

Source: Wikipedia

There’s some evidence that his phallus was added at a later date.

But I mention this simply to state that I think it’s just a big piece of graffiti. A glorious, big piece of graffiti.

And here’s a WaPo article on him. It. Whatever.

Bubbles, in economic terms, are generally fast inflation of prices for a general category of the market, followed by a deflation that is at least as fast as the inflation, if not faster, caused by the realization that the prices achieved are unsustainable. Over the twenty or so years, I can think of the Internet Bubble at the turn of the century, as investors frantically threw money at firms in hopes of hitting it rich, and the real estate investment bubble which terminated in the Great Recession of 2008.

And now I’m wondering if we’re seeing another one in the cryptocurrency market. This suggests that the market can be overly impacted by certain individuals:

Antistar:

There could be several stars made of antimatter in our solar system’s neighbourhood. There have been small hints that these strange and unlikely objects, called antistars, could exist, and a search for the gamma rays that they are expected to produce has turned up 14 candidates. [“Antimatter stars may lurk in the solar system’s neighbourhood,” Leah Crane, NewScientist (1 May 2021)]

Professor Richardson’s daily post last night is well worth a full read. But for me, the important part wasn’t so much the sordid details of Republican members’ malfeasance, alleged or admitted, as the sociological backlash of the Gingrichian focus on win, win, win that came to the fore.

Look: The effects that former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-GA) had, and perhaps still has, on the culture of the GOP is undisputed, constituting an inflection point, if not a change in direction, of the GOP from a party that tried to exercise responsible governance, to a party that bent every effort to winning elections – and if that meant scanting on good governance or abandoning allegiances to democracy, that was a valid approach, too, for them.

This may seem counter-intuitive, but it’s worth remembering two points:

1. Good government policy is often an obscure business. For example, if high government debt is a concern, doesn’t it make sense for the government to print itself out of trouble? At one time, this was common sense, here and abroad, but now we know that this can and often does result in ruinous inflation. The human organism’s desire for quick fixes is often at odds with what turns out to be wise government policy. Additionally, even though this is the age of Turbo-Charged Communications, the fact of the matter is that information concerning what’s really going on in the major political parties is occulted, and often deliberately.
2. Government policy, at its most effective, is tuned to reality. The electorate, in most nations including the United States, often has its perception of reality refracted through the prism of religion. There’s enough religions out there to know that most, or, if my reader is an atheist, all religions are false. This deduction, in fact, is the basis for many bloody conflicts. This electorate’s prism, or prisms, means that expectations of the proxies of good government will diverge from reality and each other, and sometimes this divergence is quite marked. Playing to these divergences, or biases, is not good governance, but it will please that portion of the electorate to which they’re tuned, and thus attracting their votes.

There is a sense of what are the rules of politics among most Americans, often listed piecemeal and in reaction to perceived breaches of those rules. For example, depriving voters of the chance to vote through supposedly innocuous rule changes breaches those rules. Thus the attempts to divert attention from such changes when legislatures bring such rules to the fore.

The Democrats allege that many breaches of this sort have occurred since the days of Gingrich. Some have become the subject of lawsuits, such as gerrymandering cases (and one case sponsored by Republicans involving Maryland has accused Democrats of the same malfeasance), while others are the focus of intense legislative battles.

But the real point here is that those Republicans who’ve retained a sense of ethics, of morality, when it comes to politics, have been leaving the Republican Party over the years in reaction to these tactics, when they’re not being forcibly ejected via the RINO mechanism. In point of fact, the Republican Party has been approaching a pure form of what is best described as corruption. The missive from Professor Richardson reads like a condemnation sheet: Gaetz endangered by the confessions of Greenberg; hints from Cheney that McCarthy may have things to hide; a random claim from the mendacious Trump that a Maricopa elections database has been deleted, immediately refuted by Republicans in Maricopa; McConnell reprising the lessons of Gingrich, putting Party before Country; and then there’s the national embarrassment of Rep Greene, Rep Clyde, dah di dah di dah.

The beat goes on, and it’s all bad.

With Cheney removed from the House leadership, the last of the Republicans with a shred of ethics may be gone, and so now we can wait to see if the Republican Party explodes from sheer built-up bile and mendacity as they raise their hands once more to grasp the levers of power, or if they actually manage to achieve their goal and inflict upon America a veritable tidal wave of frenzied ideological & theological office holders, who’ll prove their unsuitability for office through incompetence, mendacity, criminality, and ephemerality (think: half-term Governor Sarah Palin (R-AK)).

It’ll be like those 100 year floods meteorologists like to use as adjectives.

That’s how Professor Richardson, in conjunction with 25+ years of watching politics, leaves me feeling today. The Republicans have only their ideological & theological positions to offer, and they are repugnant. They offer no reason for me to trust them, to think they are competent, to consider them worthy of elective office.

This is a dangerous situation for a big country like the United States.

From Democrat and former cop Eric Adams, candidate for the mayoral nomination of New York City:

The 60-year-old, who is Black and has said he was beaten by police as a teenager, also touts his credentials as a reformer inside and outside the New York Police Department. But police reform, he said, ranks lower among voter priorities. “It’s number three or four,” he said.

And Adams has not been afraid of appearing out of step with the reform movement. He has said stop-and-frisk — a much-maligned practice for which former mayor Mike Bloomberg apologized — can be a “great tool” when used correctly.

It is activists, Adams said, who are out of step with voters — especially those in the working class Black and Brown communities that have been his base.

“I’ve never been in a situation in which I hear people say ‘I want less police,’ ” Adams said. “Just because you’re the loudest and most organized doesn’t mean you’re in the majority.” [WaPo]

I suspect there’s a lot of civilians in the Twin Cities who’d agree with Adams’ statement enthusiastically, regardless of color. In the wake of Mayor Bottoms’ surprise announcement that she’d not be seeking reelection in Atlanta, from the same article:

… Felicia Moore, the city council president, who said in an interview that rebuilding the police department — which has lost more than 400 officers amid sagging morale — would be among her highest priorities.

“The number one issue across the city has been the rise in crime,” said Moore who, like Bottoms, is a Democrat. “People want to feel safer in their community.”

The collapse of the effort to defund the Minneapolis Police Department is another piece of what’s happening, and the use of the word defund by those looking for reformation of law enforcement was, and is, a bad choice, as former British Prime Minister Tony Blair notes:

“Defund the police” may be the left’s most damaging political slogan since “the dictatorship of the proletariat”. It leaves the right with an economic message which seems more practical, and a powerful cultural message around defending flag, family and fireside traditional values. To top it off, the right evinces a pride in their nation, while parts of the left seem embarrassed by the very notion.

His British perspective doesn’t invalidate his opinion for Americans: Communication choices directly influence perception, and ‘defund police‘ implies a weaker police force. With a big jump in gun violence in much of the Nation, this all plays out negatively. And this is unfortunate, because police reformation remains a promising approach to more effective first responders. Locally, Brooklyn Center just took a step towards reformation following the death by police shooting of Daunte Wright, who was wanted on armed robbery charges, as I understand it.

The City of Brooklyn Center on Saturday passed a sweeping public safety resolution that will change how policing is performed in the city, following the fatal April shooting of Daunte Wright. The resolution passed by a 4-1 vote.

The resolution, backed by Mayor Mike Elliott, intends to create new departments for community safety, which would oversee the existing police and fire departments, as well as create divisions of unarmed civilians to handle non-moving traffic violations and respond to mental health distress calls. [WCCO]

But it’s not clear that law enforcement is on-board.

Jim Mortenson, the executive director of Law Enforcement Labor Services, the union that represents Brooklyn Center police, says law enforcement was left out of the conversation on coming up with the resolution’s reforms.

“[Elliott] went outside of the city government to create this document and quite frankly, there’s a lot of errors in it when you look at the statutory issues in this document,” Mortenson said.

Elliott says input from local police was taken into account and that the city’s done its legal due diligence.

The live report on WCCO TV seemed to indicate a more vociferous response by the local union. The success of CAHOOTS should motivate law enforcement to endorse these reforms. But will they? I suspect unions will see the reduction in responsibility as a reduction in prestige and influence. In this respect, their opinions become a conflict of interest.

For readers interested in the Brooklyn Center action to remove traffic stops from police responsibilities, here’s a WaPo opinion piece on the subject from Yale Law student T J Grayson and Yale Law professor James Forman, Jr. Money quote:

Correlate of protection:

WE ARE getting closer to answering one of the most important remaining questions in the pandemic: how can we quickly test whether somebody is immune to the virus?

This elusive measurement of immunity is known as the correlate of protection: a simple, surrogate appraisal of the entire immune response that tells you whether somebody is protected against disease or infection. “So, for example, you measure the number of antibodies in blood and find that if you have a specific number you are protected,” says Christine Dahlke at the University Medical Centre Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany. That number is a correlate of protection, or CoP. We don’t yet have one for SARS-CoV-2, says Dahlke, but we urgently need one.

CoPs are a standard tool in vaccinology and, although difficult to nail down, we have established them for numerous conditions, including measles, influenza and hepatitis. Getting one for covid-19 would be a boost to our efforts to end the pandemic, says Dahlke. It would allow us to bypass big vaccine trials that compare a vaccine candidate against a placebo to see the difference in infection rates. Instead, we could do simpler and quicker tests that identify whether a vaccine elicits the CoP. [“We’ll soon be able to tell whether you are immune to covid-19,” Graham Lawton, NewScientist (1 May 2021, paywall)]

NewScientist recently interviewed Professor Suzanne Simard of the University of British Columbia, whose Ph.D. thesis in 1997 made the case that “…  forest trees share and trade food via fungal networks that connect their roots.” Since then?

[NewScientist] Is it too much to suggest that, like in a brain, there is intelligence in this network, even wisdom?

From a purely biological, physical analysis, it looked like it had the hallmarks of intelligence. Not just the communication of information and changes in behaviour as a result, but just the pure, evolved, biological chemistry and the shape of the networks themselves spoke to the idea that they were wired and designed for wisdom.

If you look at the sophisticated interactions between plants – and some of that happens through the networks – their ability to respond and change their behaviours according to this information all speaks of wisdom to me.

What about awareness? Are trees aware of us?

Plants are attuned to any kind of disturbance or injury, and we can measure their biochemical responses to that. We know that certain biochemical pathways are triggered to develop these cascades of chemicals that are responses to stresses and disturbances, like chewing by herbivores. And if they are so attuned to small injuries like that, why wouldn’t they be attuned to us? We’re the dominant disturbance agent in forests. We cut down trees. We girdle them. We tap them.

If I injure trees so much that they start to die, they start sending their carbon through their roots to their neighbours. They are responsive to us. We’ve proven it by doing our experiments. People go: “Oh, that’s kind of scary”. But why wouldn’t plants be aware of people? They are aware of everything else.

Which could be argued is simply a conserved trait of trees and not intelligence in itself. The trick behind the assertion is that we don’t know how to define intelligence, operationally or functionally – and whether or not only a single operationality applies, now do we?

This all leads to the question of whether we should respect trees for an asserted innate intelligence for which we have no method of interrogation, or because they are an integral part of our ecology, and if we imperil the forests further, we imperil ourselves?

I still have to wonder what part an apple tree plays in the intelligence of a forest.

But perhaps I am. For years I’ve been saying the RINO effect would eventually leave the Republican Party with three members – and two would be on probation. Well, the Party continues to shrink, as recent Gallup polling shows, but the ideological direction appears to be taking a turn – left, right, down, up, take your pick – as Daily Kos‘ Kerry Eleveld reports:

“What they’re going to open the door to is a situation where nobody’s Trumpy enough,” said former GOP Congresswoman Barbara Comstock, who lost her suburban Virginia seat in 2018 in the blue wave of anti-Trump sentiment that swept the nation. “It’s a problem for everybody.”

What I should have recognized is that there’s a limit to how far right one can go. It’s just an ideological certainty. But now it’s Trumpism that’s the goal, and that necessitates a change in ideological direction because there’s a fundamental difference between allegiance to principles and allegiance to personality.

Indeed, the latter is a lot like an absolute monarchy. The kind for which we held a Revolution, and it wasn’t a celebratory Revolution.

Trumpism is actually rather ill-defined, being characterized by a xenophobia – except when Trump likes your autocratic leader – and a provincialism, except when Trump thinks he can make money – and an allegiance to the latest in evangelical theology, such as an emphasis on prophecy – no apologies to those readers offended by the statement – and an even more important emphasis on Biblical verses involving Cyrus, a Persian king who accidentally delivered the Christians from Babylon, and functions as a Get Out Of Jail Free card for sanctifying evil.

So the new membership requirement of the GOP is a certain flexibility, and a concurrent willingness to accept that occasionally their beloved Leader will spit on them and prefer someone else, based on the treatment of former Rep Roby (R-AL). This will become a smaller and smaller segment of the electorate, as it’ll be emotionally taxing to live in that sort of atmosphere – and it leads to actions by the leaders that are absolutely at odds with reality, such as this dude, who has puzzled his own GOP colleague.

Right at the moment I’m foreseeing that in the next five years the Republican Party shrinking into irrelevance as people such as Amanda Chase (R-VA) destroy it from within. The noteworthy part will be the puzzlement of those involved. They’ll cry out that they had been Godly, that God had spoken to them, that they had done the right things.

And everyone else was evil.

And thus we’ll see the mistake of dragging dubious divinities into the project of wise governance.

The trick will be for the American electorate to see it for what it is, and to not permit single issue voters, the unsung weapon of the GOP – think gun control and abortion – to derail the country from selecting wise governance.

Aquaterra:

[Jonathan Benjamin at Flinders University] is part of a small band of underwater archaeologists who are raising their ambitions. To them, the seabed isn’t an inconsequential backdrop on which wrecks fester. It is a vast and complex drowned landscape, scattered with the remnants of ancient human lives. Since the ice sheets were at their peak about 20,000 years ago, rising seas have drowned at least 20 million square kilometres of coastal territory around the world – an area almost as large as the North American continent. Some even think of it as a lost, fragmented continent. They call it Aquaterra. [“Exploring ‘Aquaterra’, the drowned continent walked by our ancestors,” Colin Barras, NewScientist (17 April 2021, paywall)]

Ever wonder just how many members of a species has lived? A bunch of scientists wondered about that … for the venerable Tyrannosaurus rex. Here’s the abstract on their paper:

Although much can be deduced from fossils alone, estimating abundance and preservation rates of extinct species requires data from living species. Here, we use the relationship between population density and body mass among living species combined with our substantial knowledge of Tyrannosaurus rex to calculate population variables and preservation rates for postjuvenile T. rex. We estimate that its abundance at any one time was ~20,000 individuals, that it persisted for ~127,000 generations, and that the total number of T. rex that ever lived was ~2.5 billion individuals, with a fossil recovery rate of 1 per ~80 million individuals or 1 per 16,000 individuals where its fossils are most abundant. [Science]

Wow! But what’s the confidence level?

The uncertainties in these values span more than two orders of magnitude, largely because of the variance in the density–body mass relationship rather than variance in the paleobiological input variables.

Two orders of magnitude is a lot. But what fun, thinking of 2.5 billion hungry Tyrannosaurus rex critters running around .. looking for a bite to eat.

There’s been a culture war going on over the recent disappointing jobs report:

The U.S. economy added just 266,000 jobs in April, a disappointing month of growth that fell well below economists’ estimates despite declining virus caseloads and increased vaccine distribution around the country.

The April unemployment rate remained relatively unchanged at 6.1 percent, although economists caution that the number is misleadingly low, given how many people have dropped out of the labor force in the past year.

The news increased political pressure in Washington amid concerns about whether a labor shortage, reported in some pockets of the economy, is slowing down the recovery. The White House rejected that notion Friday, calling for patience and saying it will take the economy many months to recover from last year’s trauma.

For example, on the fringe-right, which is the only organized component of the right at the moment, Erick Erickson has an opinion:

I think we need to accept, at this point, that the Biden Administration and Democrat willingness to continue subsidizing Americans to stay unemployed is part of a plan to either force an employer-led increase in the minimum wage or try a universal basic income.

At this point, the evidence is too overwhelming that people are staying out of work because the federal unemployment benefit is so big. In fact, right now people do not even have to show proof they are attempting to find work in order to get the federal supplemental unemployment benefit. Nonetheless, as recently as Friday, Joe Biden insisted this was not true.

The Democrats are arguing that if employers just boost their wages, they’ll incentivize people coming back to work. The problem is many employers are already doing that and still cannot get workers to come back to work. Some people are fine making less on unemployment while doing no work and not having to worry about eviction thanks to additional federal policies.

But Adam Chandler disputes that:

And that’s not only because I’ve never heard of this before:

TikTokers are using Grabovoi codes, also known as “cheat codes” for the universe, to influence their health, wealth and love lives.

It’s no secret that manifestation, or the spiritual practice of bringing something tangible into your life through attraction and belief, is huge on TikTok right now. It is, in its most basic form, thinking about something really hard until it comes true (or doesn’t).

It might not magically work, but it certainly doesn’t hurt, and it orients your mind toward a goal that often benefits from that kind of focus anyway. For instance, if you try to manifest your soulmate, you might find your mind more open to the possibility of meeting new people, which could actually lead you to a lovely relationship. [Kelsey Weekman, Yahoo! Sports]

The first thought in my head?

The prosperity church movement’s Name it and claim it notion.

With which President Trump is infected.

Do they really want to wander down that slack minded hellpath?

Grump, grump, grump.

sui generis:

Sui generis (/ˌsuːiˈdʒɛnərɪs/ SOO-ee JEN-ər-iss,^[1] Latin: [ˈsʊ.iː ˈɡɛnɛrɪs]) is a Latin phrase that means “of its/his/her/their own kind, in a class by itself”, therefore “unique”. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “Don’t blame George W. Bush for the GOP’s authoritarianism. It’s Trump’s fault,” Max Boot, WaPo:

Was President Donald Trump sui generis? Or was he merely the product of forces that had been gathering in the Republican Party for years?

Anti-vaxxers are, at last, facing the full power of the State, and I predict they’ll be losing big time.

The State is Ohio.

And the firepower?

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine on Wednesday announced a novel incentive program for people in his state to get vaccinated — a $1 million lottery.

DeWine, a Republican, said only people who’ve gotten the vaccine will be eligible to win the prize, which will be paid for by federal coronavirus funds.

“Two weeks from tonight on May 26th, we will announce a winner of a separate drawing for adults who have received at least their first dose of the vaccine. This announcement will occur each Wednesday for five weeks, and the winner each Wednesday will receive one million dollars,”DeWine said in a series of tweets. [NBC News]

Screw the free beer bribe – Governor DeWine (R-OH) knows how to get people to the needles. And if you’re young?

While the cash is for Ohioans 18 and older, he also added an incentive for younger residents — they’ll be entered into a drawing “for a four-year full scholarship to any of Ohio’s state colleges and universities, including full tuition, room, and board,” he announced.

I feel like shouting with admiration. The only question is whether it should have been a bigger prize. While Governor DeWine is a bit of a flake when it comes to abortion rights, you have to love this maneuver.

The anti-vaxxers will shrilly whine, but a whole lot of people who’ve been teetering on the edge will jump in for a chance to win some cash.

And it sure seems like the GOP Governors are far more competent than just about any of their brethren in Congress, doesn’t it? Maybe it’s because they have concentrated responsibilities and can’t just mutter that Fred will take care of it for me.