The annals of mythic “B” movies.
It Came Out Of The Cheese Drawer.
Successive families had been found murdered in this house, set in a quaint, secret Finnish village in Queen Maud Land. Silently tolerated by a Norwegian government that was flabbergasted at this foreign outpost in its ancestral lands, the locals sucked in their cheeks and looked the other way, hopeful that the screams emanating from the ancient petrified structure were nothing more than playful …
Fantasy? Real? Does it matter?
The Hellsquid.
For those readers who recall the case in SDFLA concerning the juror who stated the Holy Spirit had told him the defendant was innocent, in which the defendant appealed based on the juror’s dismissal was unfair and lost the first appeal, the defendant, former Rep Corinne Brown, has won the second appeal, a rare en banc reconsideration by the 11th Circuit:
The panel in a 2-1 decision affirmed the conviction (Rosenbaum for the majority and Pryor for the dissent). The en banc court lined up as you would expect it, with the 7 conservative judges saying you can’t strike a juror based on a religious vote, while the 4 moderate judges dissented … [SDFLA Blog]
Dissenting Judge Rosenbaum states it best:
Every judge of this Court agrees on this much: the same rule governs dismissal of both the juror who says his religious authority told him the defendant is not guilty on all charges and the one who says his religious authority told him the defendant is guilty on all charges. So let’s be clear about what we’re really doing today: we are holding that a district judge is powerless to dismiss a juror who, on a record like this one, says the Holy Spirit told him the defendant is guilty on all charges and he trusts the Holy Spirit—even though the judge finds after investigation that the juror is not capable of basing his guilty verdict on the evidence but instead will base his verdict on what he perceives to be a divine revelation. Just think about that. We are prohibiting district judges, on records like this one, from dismissing jurors they find beyond a reasonable doubt will return a guilty verdict that is not based on the evidence. Why bother with the trial? Yet while the Majority Opinion guarantees this result, it invokes the grandeur of the right to a jury trial, ironically dedicating an entire section to how its decision protects the rights of defendants to unanimous jury verdicts.
Indeed, why bother with a trial? It’s not a rhetorical question. Rosenbaum has pointed at a key intellectual mistake by the majority in this case, the confusion of the best, shared efforts of a representative group of humanity, vs the alleged message of an alleged all-knowing Divine creature.
This is a category error.
And a tragedy. All it takes is one juror – earnest or bribed – to invoke the Holy Spirit, and a defendant, hands red with blood, can walk free.
What to make of Erick Erickson’s remarks on Facebook’s conundrum regarding former President Trump? I found them a slight puzzle:
Facebook has decided for now to keep Donald Trump off of their website. This story was misreported by the media that it was a permanent ban. It’s not a permanent ban as you will see.
But then he quoted WaPo:
Facebook tried to pass the buck on former president Donald Trump, but the buck got passed right back.
For several years, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has pushed the idea that he and his company shouldn’t be in the position of creating the rules of the road to govern the personal expression of billions of people. He went so far as to dedicate $130 million to fund an independent panel of outside experts to which the company could outsource the thorniest decisions about what types of content — and voices — should be allowed to stay up on Facebook.
When the company banned Trump on Jan. 6 for social media posts encouraging the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol, Zuckerberg turned that hard decision over to that newly formed independent panel, the Oversight Board, for review, hoping it would make the final determination.
But on Wednesday, the 20-member panel punted the decision back to Facebook, recommending the company decide within six months whether to permanently ban or restore Trump’s account. He is currently suspended “indefinitely,” a one-off penalty outside Facebook’s usual rules.
Clearly, WaPo says nothing about this being a permanent suspension; indeed, that’s the point.
But Erickson is part of the propaganda leadership of the conservative movement, and since part of the task of that ministry is to discredit the opposition – the mainstream media – he has tacked on the customary discrediting statement and then plunged on with his own thoughts on the matter.
And trusts that readers don’t actually pay attention.
As for the rest of his post – he advocates for special privileges for former Presidents and that sort of rot – as a former social media provider myself[1], I say that this is clearcut. FB is corporate, not governmental, so they get to set the rules of the road and enforce them as they will.
And if their users don’t like their rules or their enforcement, they can state the same by taking their trade elsewhere. That’s the free market for you.
I suppose Erickson can special plead all he wants, but quite honestly that’s a quagmire just waiting for FB CEO Zuckerberg to fall into it. I recognize that Zuckerberg is trying to dance the line between alienating one group and alienating another group, but right now he’s in danger of alienating both. He should simply state that Trump crossed the line and is out, and if that pisses off his supporters, well, it’s a group that’s small and getting smaller, and he’ll just have to live with it.
This ceaseless agony isn’t good for FB’s rep, though. I’ve noticed the FB feed is getting sparse, and I have to wonder if this is a contributing factor.
1 Yep, ran a BBS back in the early 1980s to April of 2002. I never tried to make a dime directly off it, though. It was a lovely learning time, at least the first three quarters of it. Then the Web came and swallowed us.
Remember my post or two on the prophetic community? Julia Duin says it’s quite, ummm, large:
I’ve been amazed at how this large Pentecostal chunk of American Christianity — and there are roughly 65 million Americans that belong to this group — is being ignored by much of the media. Trump’s spiritual advisor, the Rev. Paula White-Cain, is part of this segment, so it’s not an obscure bunch. [GetReligion]
Really? If true, ouch. That’s a lot of marks.
And, yeah, that’s condescending of me. As an agnostic, I should simply profess ignorance and let it go at that; historically speaking, though, there is no evidence that proclamations of prophecy have any connection to the Divine, if any, so far as I know. There’s been the lucky guess, which falls well within the scope of probability, and, of course, I have to wonder how many of the leading prophets in this movement actually forecast Obama would win, or Hillary Clinton would win. There would be no points given for getting the first right, and when Clinton lost, I’m sure it made the reputation of a lot of prophets who bet against the odds.
Always bet on your man is what it taught them.
It’s hard to be polite to them, given the history of mankind, and so I’ll own that remark above, without embarrassment, but with a bit of shame that I can so easily justify the remark. Not for myself, of course, but shame on all those marks.
Thomas Reese doesn’t seem to understand that politics can exist in virtually any arena, as he tries to explain why anti-Biden no Communion for you! news isn’t news at all:
Recently, a handful of American Catholic bishops have issued statements questioning whether anyone who supports abortion rights should be receiving Communion, and journalists immediately pounced: Will President Joe Biden, they wanted to know, be denied Communion by the U.S. bishops’ conference because of his pro-choice position on abortion?
Journalists, here’s your answer: This is a stupid story for canonical, theological and political reasons.
First, and foremost, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops does not have the canonical authority to tell Biden that he cannot go to Communion.
During the papacy of John Paul II, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, emphasized the limited authority of bishops’ conferences. Who can or cannot go to Communion in a diocese is to be decided by the local bishop, not the bishops’ conference. The most the conference can do is make recommendations to local bishops. [Religion News Service]
While it’s lovely to think that Catholicism, one of the most political of animals, runs by the rules, the truth of the matter is that even if the rules are followed here – and I’m sure that, in the glare of world-wide news coverage, they will be – it’s not the rules that matter.
It’s the influence.
Something called a U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is going to have influence simply because it’s an aggregate of important people. They wield influence over the affairs of the church, they’ll remember who crossed them, and they’ll stay in communication with each other.
And if someone has ambition to move up the clerical ladder, they’ll have to remember who not to cross.
And that’s why I can’t take Reese’s claim seriously.
Because … cheaters wouldn’t think to use the proper paper?
John Brakey, an official helping oversee the audit of the 2020 Arizona election, says auditors are looking for bamboo fibers because of a baseless accusation that 40K ballots from Asia were smuggled here. #AzAuditPool pic.twitter.com/57UOBYIehg
— Dennis Welch (@dennis_welch) May 5, 2021
I noticed he tries to cover up by citing everything he’s done, but I notice he doesn’t claim any victories. Anybody can sue if they have brass balls. It doesn’t mean they have any kind of credibility.
And bamboo paper used for election fraud? Really? Come on.
As I’ve written about at tiresome length, the Republican Party has been taken over by extremists because of a culture of toxic team politics, combined with a loathing of experts, at least experts whose pronouncements are in disagreements with one of the Holy Tenets of the Party, whether that be taxes are evil or regulation is an economy killer or something out in authentic holy land, such as abortion is evil.
This combination results in the rejection of the idea that competency is relevant; we instead see deeply incompetent extremists, such as Boerbert and Greene and Gohmert and so many others, who do think the 2nd Amendment Jig or the anti-tax polka really well, convince the zealots who often guide the candidate selection process that they’re loyal to the ideology, and so we see idiots on the ballot.
But as I contemplated this article on ranked choice voting, it occurred to me that it was too bad the writer aimed it at progressives rather than who really needs to see it – conservatives.
Ultimately, ranked-choice voting facilitates more productive, issue-driven campaigns. And New York is far from the only place in the United States that could benefit. Other major cities like San Francisco and Minneapolis have used ranked-choice voting for years. Both Maine and Alaska recently implemented the system statewide through ballot measures. And just this past weekend, Austin voted to adopt the system, though the city will still need to overcome statewide legal limitations. [WaPo]
By letting voters assign votes to several candidates, such as, say, moderate Republicans, it might result in the repudiation of extremists such as Gohmert and Gosar, and that in turn could lead to a culture transformation as the leaders who permitted the extremists to take over are kicked out. Team voting may still exist, but if there are several on the team, maybe you pick the experienced, moderate candidate, rather than the one with the hair on fire.
The problem, of course, is that many moderates are already gone from the Republican Party.
Or, does Rep Cheney (R-WY) have enough self-respect to exit the Republican Party if removed from leadership? She’s currently #3 in the House GOP caucus, and is the GOP Conference chair. She easily survived a challenge shortly after she voted in affirmation of the second impeachment of former President Trump three months ago. But a new challenge is anticipated in the wake of undiplomatic remarks she has since made. Now she may have lost more support:
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said Tuesday he’s “lost confidence” in Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) during a moment of candor caught on a hot mic, a tape reviewed by Axios shows.
What he’s saying: “I think she’s got real problems,” McCarthy told Steve Doocy off-air ahead of a live “Fox and Friends” interview. “I’ve had it with … I’ve had it with her. You know, I’ve lost confidence. … Well, someone just has to bring a motion, but I assume that will probably take place.” [Axios]
I hope, when the vote is brought up, she has a chance to present a statement, and that it’s this:
This is a vote about morality. I represent truth, decency, and democracy. My opponent, a Trump supporter, therefore represents mendacity, immorality, a hostility to democracy, and all the things we despise in Democrats.
Vote carefully, because this is how you’ll be known.
It’d infuriate Trump supporters, because all but the bit about the Democrats would be true.
A reader writes regarding Cellebrite:
Oh, it’s even more interesting. Cellebrite sells their software to anyone with money, because of course they do. Do angry ex-boyfriends and redneck sheriffs would qualify if they had the cash, certainly larger law enforcement agencies in the US. But even better is that Signal took some “exception” to being included in the software and data that Cellebrite’s products could crack. One of the leaders at Signal posted a nice blog post taking them to task, but more importantly, he mentioned how Signal would now ship with random blocks of data that were neither used by the app or would have any effect on the mobile device on which the app resided. Implied in that description, however, is how those blocks of data would hack Cellebrite’s software, and do as-yet unspecified things — but clearly once in, could do anything, like corrupt the veracity of all Cellebrite data extraction from that device.
In short, Signal +10, Cellebrite, 0.
Cellebrite is evil, amoral, greedy, stupid, and incompetent.
A selection of attributes which often go together.
After reading this article on no-vaxxers and their self-centeredness, and then this article on vaccination hesitancy among Latino evangelicals, it occurs to me that statements like this need a rejoinder:
“I thought for a while ‘I’m not going to get it’,” Miranda said in Spanish to an audience of about 100 Latinos, largely from the Caribbean and Central America. “Not because I thought there was something harmful, sinister in the vaccine, but simply because God has brought me here without having to use any kind of medicine. God has protected me,” he said, as people nodded and applauded with excitement. [WaPo]
And it’s roughly this:
How many here have been exposed to smallpox and not become ill? I see no hands going up, no hands going up – no, you haven’t, put your hand back down. Do you know how I know that? Smallpox has not been seen in the wild for decades. And do you know why?
Vaccination.
You, all of you, didn’t suffer agony, you didn’t have terrible disfigurement inflicted upon you, you didn’t die a hideous death from smallpox, because hundreds of millions of people underwent smallpox vaccination – and thus benefited themselves, their children, their friends, and you.
Don’t prance about proclaiming God would never let you become ill with Covid 19. Vaccination is how you haven’t had smallpox.
Now it’s time. Now it’s time to pay forward your debt to those people who ensured you didn’t have to endure the tragedy of smallpox. Whether vaccinations are the work of Man or the work of God, either get your Covid vaccination, or admit you’ve spat upon a gift.
Especially if you take it seriously. In India, which is currently in desperate straits, the Haridwar Kumbh Mela religious festival took place early in April of 2021 (yes, just a couple of weeks ago), and has contributed to the Covid-19 wave currently tormenting and kill Indians.
Shuddhabrata Sengupta is furious.
Kumbh Melas are held every 12 years. The last Haridwar Kumbh Mela was held in 2010. The actual due date for the ‘current’ Kumbh at Haridwar was 2022, not 2021. So how did it get advanced by one whole lethal year at a time India’s second Covid wave was expected? And when epidemiological studies indicate that second waves of infection are always worse than the first. Let me tell you the reason.
It was ‘advanced’ by a year, to 2021, because the ‘astrological configurations’ of the ‘Sun entering Aries’ and ‘Jupiter entering Aquarius’ were available for 2021 this time. This happens once every 83 years, and it happens because of the need to reconcile astrological configuration charts to calendrical years. The calculative arcana of this ‘adjustment’ is beyond my capacity. I suggest none of you try it if you don’t want to give yourselves a headache. [The Wire (India)]
They do take their astrology seriously in India, as I learned during a business trip to Pune years ago. Unfortunately, I fear that this time it’s going to cost them: in lives, in wealth, even in prestige.
But it’s of a piece with various forms of quackery, from acupuncture to therapeutic touch to whatever your favorite form of pseudo-medicine might be. They may seem like a harmless alternative medicine, but there’s often a hidden danger to them. This one is rather exotic, but that neither invalidates nor excuses astrology.
Reuters notes an important ruling by SCOTUS:
The justices decided that federal immigration law requires authorities to include all relevant details for a notice to appear for a hearing in one document rather than sending the information across multiple documents. While a technical issue, the ruling could affect hundreds of thousands of immigration cases.
“In this case, the law’s terms ensure that, when the federal government seeks a procedural advantage against an individual, it will at least supply him with a single and reasonably comprehensive statement of the nature of the proceedings against him,” conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in the ruling.
Gorsuch was joined by the court’s three liberal justices as well as conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett.
And this is important because:
Under federal law, immigrants who are not lawful permanent residents may apply to have their deportation canceled if they have been in the United States for at least 10 years. The time counted to reach that threshold ends when the government initiates immigration proceedings with a notice to appear, a limit known as the “stop-time” rule.
In 2013, eight years after he entered the country, police stopped Niz-Chavez for a broken tail light on his vehicle. The federal government followed up with a notice to appear for a deportation hearing.
After the Supreme Court in 2018 found in another case that notices to appear that omitted the time and date of the hearing were deficient, Niz-Chavez cited his faulty notice to argue that the stop-time rule had not been triggered in his case.
And so Niz-Chavez gets past the decade mark. Seemingly trivial rules can have outsized impact in the judicial system.
Ow, this one hurts. By Jennifer Rubin, “Hey, whatever happened to the border crisis?”:
The administration is facing a crisis — two, in fact. And it is working on both. The first is that the violence, hunger and damage from hurricanes in Central America remains so bad that children are forced to flee. Vice President Harris has been meeting with the Northern Triangle countries to address the underlying problems that cause the mass migration and working on ways to abet the suffering. She is also trying to involve other countries, such as Finland and Japan, to find solutions and provide international assistance to the Northern Triangle. She has been intensifying coordination with humanitarian groups, too. There is no easy fix.
My guess is that abet should be abate.
I admit to a certain amount of amusement about this software, new to me, made by Cellebrite, as analyzed and published on Signal:
Cellebrite makes software to automate physically extracting and indexing data from mobile devices. They exist within the grey – where enterprise branding joins together with the larcenous to be called “digital intelligence.” Their customer list has included authoritarian regimes in Belarus, Russia, Venezuela, and China; death squads in Bangladesh; military juntas in Myanmar; and those seeking to abuse and oppress in Turkey, UAE, and elsewhere. A few months ago, they announced that they added Signal support to their software.
Their products have often been linked to the persecution of imprisoned journalists and activists around the world, but less has been written about what their software actually does or how it works.
Wait for it …
Anyone familiar with software security will immediately recognize that the primary task of Cellebrite’s software is to parse “untrusted” data from a wide variety of formats as used by many different apps. That is to say, the data Cellebrite’s software needs to extract and display is ultimately generated and controlled by the apps on the device, not a “trusted” source, so Cellebrite can’t make any assumptions about the “correctness” of the formatted data it is receiving. This is the space in which virtually all security vulnerabilities originate.
Since almost all of Cellebrite’s code exists to parse untrusted input that could be formatted in an unexpected way to exploit memory corruption or other vulnerabilities in the parsing software, one might expect Cellebrite to have been extremely cautious. Looking at both UFED and Physical Analyzer, though, we were surprised to find that very little care seems to have been given to Cellebrite’s own software security. Industry-standard exploit mitigation defenses are missing, and many opportunities for exploitation are present.
As just one example (unrelated to what follows), their software bundles FFmpeg DLLs that were built in 2012 and have not been updated since then. There have been over a hundred security updates in that time, none of which have been applied.
Oh! That’s a burn. It’s beginning to taste like a company that concerns itself with nothing but making money, doesn’t it?
And that’s worth considering. At the highest ethical standard, a company marketing a software package should endeavour to deliver software with no security holes, now shouldn’t it? Oh, sure, given today’s primitive technology, security holes are a given – but the ethical marketers and developers should make the least little effort, right?
But, then, ethical developers shouldn’t be developing software for the “we’ll use it to torture our journalists” market either, wouldn’t you say? People signing on for that work … probably are not all that ethical.
So, in the end, it’s all not much of a surprise. Low class software because doing it properly requires a mindset that would refuse to do it in the first place.
Interesting how that all works out.
WaPo’s Margaret Sullivan profiles Harrisburg, PA’s WITF, a public radio station devoted to news:
The journalists at WITF, an all-news public radio station in Harrisburg, Pa., made a perfectly reasonable decision a few months ago.
They decided they wouldn’t shrug off the damaging lies of election denialism.
They wouldn’t do what too many in Big Journalism have done in recent months: shove into the memory hole the undemocratic efforts by some Republican elected officials to delegitimize or overturn the 2020 presidential election. …
But Harrisburg’s WITF has gone a different route: They want you to remember. …
The deadly culmination of that anti-democratic lie, the Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6, solidified their thinking. In late January, the station — whose newsroom includes six reporters and two editors — posted an explanatory story stating that they would be regularly reminding their audience that some state legislators signed a letter urging Congress to vote against certifying the Pennsylvania election results, and that some members of Congress had voted against certifying the state’s election results for President Biden, despite no evidence to support their election-fraud claims.
While some might argue that this constitutes a journalistically impermissible bias in WITF reporting, I find that position hard to credit: the deliberate actions of conspiring to obstruct the confirmation of President-elect Biden in the face of 60+ failed lawsuits, most of which were little more than obstruction, is not a rumor or opinion, but a fact that should be considered an important part of the next election, especially if the members involved run for reelection. In other words, it’s ongoing news that needs to be considered over the long term.
And this is a direct blow at one of the defects of a democracy, one that the Republicans are depending on, if Erick Erickson is any authority:
Continuing down the path [Democratic strategist James] Carville wants of tying the GOP to the January 6th insurrection may make Democrats feel good, but it won’t actually work because (1) the GOP will control redistricting in most states; (2) voters generally like their own congressman; (3) most of the GOP has plausible deniability on the issue; (4) memories are short; and (5) 2022 will be about Biden and Woke-O Haram, which Carville knows isn’t going away and is regularly now amplified by the media and corporate America to the seething resentment of the American public.
The seething resentment of the America public should be that their Republic was endangered by the emotional five year olds who were manipulated into an attack on the US Congress on January 6th, and Erickson, I note without surprise but great sadness, acknowledges this happened and then proceeds to assert that the Democrats are still more evil than his own cohorts.
If the Republicans howl foul, tough shit. You talked the talk, now you walk the walk. The only part missing will be the heads down in shame. Kudos to WITF!
For the record, Minnesota Representatives voting not to accept the Presidential election results: Michelle Fischbach (R) and Jim Hagedorn (R). Current National Republican Congressional Committee chairman Tom Emmer (R-MN) did not join his Minnesota colleagues, so color me a little surprised that he’s now chairman of the NRCC. The list of Minnesota Representatives who signed on in support of the ludicrous Texas v Pennsylvania lawsuit is comprised of Hagedorn and Emmer.
In case you were thinking of changing careers to Christian prophet, you should be aware that someone out there thinks you should be meeting a set of standards in order to assume this prestigious role. Here’s their lead-in:
WE BELIEVE that the gifts of the Holy Spirit, including the gift of prophecy and the ministry of the prophet, are essential for the edification of the Body of Christ and the work of the ministry, which is why Scripture exhorts us to earnestly desire spiritual gifts, especially that we may prophesy (see 1 Cor. 14:1, 39). Prophetic ministry is of great importance to the Church and must be encouraged, welcomed, and nurtured.
Or, in other words, We want to be prophets because it’s easy work, so here’s why we’re essential workers.
But they do recognize that the greedy and undisciplined may endanger everyone’s livelihood:
WE RECOGNIZE the unique challenges posed by the internet and social media, as anyone claiming to be a prophet can release a word to the general public without any accountability or even responsibility. While it is not possible to stop the flood of such words online, we urge all believers to check the lives and fruit of those they follow online and also see if they are part of a local church body and have true accountability for their public ministries and personal lives. We also urge prophetic ministers posting unfiltered and untested words purportedly from the Lord to first submit those words to peer leaders for evaluation.
There’s more, but that’s enough. As an agnostic who’s quite dubious about any of the current religions being anywhere close to reality, I find it hard to take this seriously; still, I can see how someone writing this may be in earnest. I don’t want to be too unfair in mocking them, but it’s still important to realize that belief is not proof, and that prophecy, being fundamentally based on private knowledge rather than public knowledge, should be recognized as an unsound basis for communications with the Divine, should it exist. A Divine creature is unconstrained by definition, and thus prophecy is a form of communications completely uncalled for and ultimately damaging, even destructive, of a belief in the Divine.
Prophecy should simply be ignored as untrustworthy.
Drew McCoy, via Friendly Atheist, diagrams successful Protestant church services:
It’s worth noting that the development is not a priori, but rather an example of social evolution. Competing designs of church services have varying levels of success; those designs that are less successful are tweaked or discarded. It’s not surprising that a common sequence of segments is shared across churches.
Codicil:
- a supplement to a will, containing an addition, explanation, modification, etc., of something in the will.
- any supplement; appendix. [Dictionary.com]
Noted in “From former Soviet archives, chilling new details of the Cuban missile crisis,” Max Boot, WaPo:
Such close calls spurred Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev into intensive diplomacy to defuse the crisis. Their publicly announced deal was for the Soviets to withdraw their missiles in return for a U.S. pledge not to invade Cuba. But there was a secret codicil: Kennedy agreed to withdraw Jupiter missiles from Turkey that could reach Moscow as quickly as Soviet missiles in Cuba could reach Washington. Interestingly, Plokhy writes, Khrushchev got the idea of asking for the removal of the Jupiters from an article in The Washington Post by columnist Walter Lippmann, who was privy to White House discussions.
Because the Jupiter deal remained secret, Kennedy was widely seen to have ended the crisis with a display of strength. Khrushchev was humiliated and forced out of power two years later. In reality both men deserve credit for making concessions to save humanity.
Put anyone in 21 inch heels and they look tall. Too tall. To tell the truth, her distant cousin is Godzilla.
Angel-a (2005), a French film, follows the travails of Parisian André Moussah, in hock up to his eyeballs to Parisian gangsters of various flavors. We open with André pleading his case to officials of both legal and illegal nature, but all leave his fruit jar empty, and soon he is on one of the famous Parisian bridges over the Seine, crawling over the railing and onto one of the supports, taking the long stare down into the dangerous, polluted –
But there’ll be a brief interruption of this suicide attempt, as there is a competitor on the next bridge support over, glaring at André for usurping her moment in the burst of a spotlight: Angela. After a brief and acrimonious exchange, she takes the plunge.
With André, one armed and all, directly following her. How he saves her with only one functioning arm, I’ll never know.
Having landed his monstrous fish, she now promises to help him with his fiscal problems, and she does so with gusto: first, advice, and then whoring herself out in such volume and prices as to excite envy – or, perhaps, disgust – from any true professional. But there’s an interesting undercurrent: this is a job, a duty to be performed. It may amuse Angela, and André’s bounty of character defects may add to her complex reaction to her entire situation, but this is a function for her, a reason to exist.
And, as André’s situation improves, Angela becomes less and less satisfied. No past, she claims; no future? How does André figure into Angela’s needs?
How can one love a man with André’s many and manifest faults?
The plot becomes more and more organic, but the dialogue never becomes natural, and that’s a real burden on a story in which the action is the dialogue. It gets worse if you don’t speak French and the print you’re seeing is not dubbed; captions made this a bit of a challenge to thoroughly understand. But it remains intriguing, from the Parisian criminals who become victims, if you will, to André, Angela, and the unseen puppet master orchestrating it all. It may leave you unsatisfied, but boredom is less likely.
A lovely yellow.
The attempted scandal of the week:
Republicans have seized on a recent claim that former Secretary of State John Kerry told Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif about Israeli strikes on Iranian interests in Syria. Zarif made the allegation in leaked audio, a claim which, if true, would undermine the US relationship with Israel.
Though Kerry has flatly denied that any such conversation took place, a group of Republican senators have asked the President to investigate the allegation. A handful of other congressional Republicans are calling for Kerry’s resignation from his current position on the National Security Council if the allegations are confirmed. [CNN/Politics]
This may be a compliment to President Biden by the Iranians, a recognition that the President, despite the recalcitrance of Republican leaders, has indeed proven an effective leader at this early date in his term. How so? By attempting to introduce doubt about the Democrats in the minds of the public.
It’s also an attack on Kerry, a known force in the American foreign policy world, whose expertise and long experience marks him as a target of anyone wishing to introduce confusion and impotence into the American sphere.
And, no doubt, the Iranians recognize the greedy grasping after power of the Republicans, having seen more than enough of that quality in their own political elites.
In the end, I expect this to quietly fade away, as so many supposed Democratic scandals have done of late, being tenuous creatures of their opponents. Time will tell.
The surges are big enough to capsize a continent:
Australia, right now, feels a little biblical. There was a terrible drought, then the worst bush fires ever recorded. A flood came next. Now it’s the turn of the mice.
The scale of the mouse plague is hard to comprehend. In the western districts of New South Wales (NSW), the country’s most populous state, millions of mice are now on the march. There are also serious infestations in southern Queensland, Victoria and South Australia.
On social media, farmers post videos showing the swarm in action, while farming organizations say the cost is already in the millions. [Richard Glover, WaPo]
Oh dear. Oh dear.
According to the Country Women’s Association, farmers have been bitten in their beds, with some protecting themselves from incursions by placing each leg of their bed or child’s cot in a bucket of sand or water.
In three towns, the mice even managed to invade the local hospital, biting patients.
Then, a month ago, there was a second flood, which some thought might drown the mice in their burrows. The impact varied. In some places, the rain stabilized mouse numbers, but in other places the populations continued to boom. Worse, the flooding drove the mice indoors, with some eating through doors and the silicon around windows to gain entry.
And then this:
Not that they don’t now have some competition. In breaking news, the mouse plague has now created a snake plague.
Don’t think of it as a joke. Think of it as our future.
Steve Benen notes that Montana, in the wake of the Census results, is picking up a second seat in the House of Representatives – and former Secretary of the Interior Ryan ZInke (R-MT) is already gearing up for a run. Benen summarizes Zinke’s tour under former President Trump:
Arguably no cabinet secretary from the Trump era was more controversial than the Republican secretary of the Interior. Roll Call‘s report noted that Zinke “came under at least 15 different investigations” before resigning, and that is not an exaggeration.
In Dec. 2018, the New York Times published a round-up of pending investigations into the Montana Republican, and it was a strikingly long list. Media Matters also put together a timeline of “the Interior secretary’s questionable actions and controversies,” and that list was even longer.
And, if he does, I’ll really wish I was a journalist, if only to ask a series of snarky questions, such as:
Because we know that neither shame nor notoriety will stop a member of the current crop of Republicans from running.
