Better late than never - please read.

This is a post I drafted back on July 12 and just now realized I never posted. So I'm posting it now hoping it will get read - certainly more than it would if I backdated it to the 12th. I'll leave it to the text to explain what it's about - so if I'm going to do that, I should get to it. What follows, then, is that July 12 draft.

==

I finally submitted my comments on the proposed federal rule that would concentrate control of federal research grants in the hands of a hand-picked presidential political team while requiring, among other things, that grantees act as if trans people don’t exist. One advantage of my slowness is that I got to notice how may comments had been submitted - as of about 11pm on Sunday, it was a touch under 279,000. A good rule of thumb is the greater the number of comments, the greater the opposition. [I learned later that the final total was near a half-million, a truly extraordinary number, and preliminary estimates were 80% of them were in opposition to the rule.]

Personally, I would not be the least surprised if the royal court of The Orange Overlord just said “We don’t care, we’re doing it and this was just for show, anyway.” But hope springs and all that and at least one proposed rule during TOO’s first term - about imposing transphobia on emergency housing met enough opposition that it was never acted on and the Biden administration withdrew it. (They’re trying again.)

I did have some weird moments. For one,I submitted the comment and got told it exceeded the allowable limit. Okay, but until then, no limit had been mentioned. When I edited it enough to fit, I got a notice that it contained “invalid characters.” No indication as to what they were. And everything was regular characters unless they wanted to call braces (used in editing a quote) “invalid” which is weird. To top it off, I submitted just a two-sentence summary plus a .doc file (okay, actually a .wpd file ‘cause yes, I use Word Perfect if only not to use Microsoft) for the full text - which uploaded with no problem. Still don’t know what the issue was.

Anyway, here is the text of my comment.

—

I write to oppose in full the proposed rule “Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance.”

I expect much of what I say has already been said amid the over 200,000 comments submitted so far but the importance of opposition must be emphasized.

This proposed rule would replace robust, open, scientific inquiry and “promoting the general welfare” with a weaponized, politicized approach centered on advancing the prejudices and political purposes of whoever happens to occupy the White House. Indeed, it says so in just those words, saying that “activities performed under Federal awards [must be] consistent with ... policy” - which is already defined as “the President’s policy priorities” - and must “demonstrably advance” those interests.

So contrary to what is claimed, this has nothing to do with “improv[ing] transparency, accountability, and oversight for Federal awards” but rather intends to establish centralized control over essentially if not all discretionary federal grants across a wide range of agencies overseeing an even wider range of programs, with such control being held by a small group of hand-picked agents of the president, who are free to overrule any and all scientific and other expert judgement regarding the requested funds. That is not about transparency, that is not about accountability. That is about power.

What’s more, the proposal makes no secret that those “priorities” include continuing and further entrenching the current administration’s racial/ethnic and gender biases, as the White House seeks to redefine any efforts to uplift marginalized communities as discrimination against people who aren’t members of those communities. This is visible in the number of provisions that go far beyond anything to do with “transparency, accountability, and oversight” to set rules for what is and isn’t acceptable in grant requests, rules that serve to strip funding for anyone doing work to support, or do research relating to, those very communities in the greatest need of attention.

For example, the (again hand-picked) presidential appointees performing the “pre-issuance review” are explicitly instructed to screen for and block awards for anything that might “fund, promote, encourage, subsidize, or facilitate ... racial preferences or other forms of racial discrimination.” This amounts to a blanket rejection of any and all funding related in any way to DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) or similar or related programs, as the administration has repeatedly labeled DEI programs in exactly those terms.

This proposal effectively demands that any grant applicant act as it racism does not exist. An administration that cut refugee admission slots by 94% and reserved most of the 7,500 remaining for white Afrikaners “fleeing” a non-existent “white genocide” in South Africa and then added 10,000 more, all of them for Afrikaners, may embrace that concept. Rational humans do not. This denial of social reality in the proposal must not be accepted.

For another, those same apparatchiks are supposed to scan for any hint of “[g]ender ideology [including] theories or ideologies that deny the biological reality of sex or the sex binary in humans, or endorse or advocate for the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic.” Meanwhile, the proposed rule refers to gender transition as “so-called,” bars all gender-affirming care for anyone under 19, and calls standard, well-established, medical treatment protocols as “chemical and surgical mutilation of children.”

This, bluntly, is attempting to write pseudoscientific nonsense with no greater grip on reality than that held by Holocaust deniers into the federal regulatory framework. It must not be allowed.

But there is yet another danger here. The regulation explicitly instructs the political appointees to screen for “denial by the recipient of the sex binary, etc.” Note: not a denial in the grant or grant application, but by the recipient. I am prepared to assume that those who drafted the proposed rule are aware of the meaning of their words, and if the intent had been to limit the screening to the grant request, it would have been easy enough to say so. But it doesn’t. It says “recipient,” clearly suggesting that the entire institution, organization, research center, or other entity making the request must be expunged of such unacceptable “ideology” or be denied funding.

So just as some entities must behave as racism does not exist, those here must behave as is transgender people do not exist, must not be mentioned, even by suggestion, even indirectly, even from areas unrelated to the funding.

Enough. This proposed rule change is not about “transparency, accountability, [or] oversight.” It is about writing racism and transphobia into federal regulations while giving a cabal of hand-picked presidential acolytes the power of near total control over discretionary federal grants and the control of scientific research that provides. It is unconscionable and must be rejected.

News Worth Knowing (which you may have missed) #3

For something over a year, on every Tuesday we’ve had a one-hour lunchtime vigil downtown. Over that time we’ve developed some you could call them traditions, one of which has become me taking about 5-7 minutes on “News Worth Knowing (Which You May Have Missed),” reporting on three or four things outside the main headlines, which I’ve taken to posting here. So here is News Worth Knowing (Which You May Have Missed) #3. Comments are always welcome.

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Meaningful actions

Just not meaningful in the way you might have thought, but full of meaning nonetheless.

Here’s an incident which seems to summarize a lot of what’s happening in and around Israel. It happened on April 28, but I learned of it on June 2, which is why it’s here.

Lebanon and Israel announced a ceasefire on April 16. Twelve days later, on April 28, Israel declared new yellow line, pushing its military control further north, further into Lebanon.

As a result, Ain Arab, a small farming village nestled in the plains near the southern border, was now inside that line and IDF soldiers went door to door giving the people of the village hours to leave, telling them, according to one villager, “You either leave right now or you die.”

Over 1.2 million people have been displaced in Lebanon since March 2, many of who have no idea if or when they will be able to return to their homes.

Israel is engaged in active ethnic cleansing of southern Lebanon, with significant indications it intends an on-going, indefinite, occupation of the area and oh my haven’t we been here before.

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Multifront resistance

Israel could not conduct its repeated egregious actions Gaza, Lebanon, the West Bank, and - as we keep forgetting - even Syria without US arms and aid. That military aid should stop, and legislative attempts to that end have been made, but they haven’t gotten far, so far, but there is another front to this: direct nonviolent civil disobedience protests against weapons shipments.

There have been such protests at ports in France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, and last year in Oakland, California.

I raise this because the latest port action occurred on May 22, in Elizabeth, New Jersey, at the Port Newark-Elizabeth Marine Terminal. The port is routinely used by the major shipper Maersk and the Israeli-owned company Zim to transport tons of weapons and spare parts to Israel.

The protesters called on the International Longshoreman’s Association to refuse to load Zim-owned ships destined for Israel. They succeeded in blocking the port for over three hours; ten people were arrested for the civil disobedience.

The action didn’t stop the shipments - which was not really a surprise - but hopefully it can serve as one more link in a growing chain of solidarity.

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Another part of being an informed voter

Judd Legum and the folks at Popular Information have figured out that two supposedly progressive PACs are actually linked to House GOPpers.

One, California Blue, appears to have been active in a single California Congressional district.

The other, Real Change, which describes itself as “dedicated to electing grassroots candidates who are committed to progressive values,” was active in several Congressional district primaries. One was the 7th CD in New Jersey, where they attacked the Democratic frontrunner, Rebecca Bennett, while promoting her opponents.

They sent out mailers accusing Bennett of “STANDING WITH ICE” and “CASHING IN ON TRUMP’S TERROR,” employed AI images of her in a MAGA hat, and used footage that was previously used by the Congressional Leadership Fund - which is the super PAC of House Republicans.

(The effort failed; Bennett won the primary by a comfortable margin.)

This is an update of an old right-wing tactic dating back to at least 1972, where it was the root of Watergate. GOPpers thought George McGovern was the weakest Democrat among those striving for the party’s presidential nomination, so they set out to build him up while undermining the others.

So just remember if you see any ad claiming to be from “Real Change PAC,” it’s a false flag and don’t believe it.

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If they’d only do it the white - I mean right - way

For over 50 years, foreign nationals with legal status in the US - individuals married to US citizens, holders of work or student visas, refugees, political asylum seekers, and others - have been able to apply for and complete the process of obtaining permanent legal residence, that is, a green card, from within the US.

On May 22, Citizenship and Immigration Services said those who want to apply for green card have to return to their native country and apply from there.

The agency didn’t say when the change would come into effect or if individuals would be required to remain outside the US throughout the entire process or whether the policy impacts those whose green card applications are already underway.

But the central fact here is once those folks leave the US to apply, there’s no reason to think they would be let back in again.

The changes come on top of steps already taken (and challenged) to restrict and limit entry for people from a total of 39 African, Asian, Latin American, and Middle Eastern countries - note what they all have in common - who have either been outright denied entry or barred from final decisions on their asylum, work permit, green card, and citizenship applications.

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And speaking of that

Pete Hogsbreath has announced the number of religions to be recognized by the US military has been cut from over 200 to just 31, with such as desists, humanists, wiccans, Unitarians, and atheists vanishing into “Other” or “None.”

Of the 31 categories remaining, 21 - maybe 22 - are sects of Xianity.

And so we continue toward being a white Xian fundamentalist ethno-state.

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So what? Climate change is a hoax, anyway

The National Science Foundation is planning to remove hundreds of ocean monitoring instruments from four sites in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

These instruments are part of observational network, gathering data on a number of factors affecting the health of the oceans and marine life - but most particularly for studying climate change and monitoring effects on the oceans, including on the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, an ocean system that some warn is at risk of collapse.

This follows firing of entire National Science Board, which is the advisory committee to the NSF.

The potential (partial) saving grace is here is that The Orange Overlord tried cut funding for program by 80% in both 2025 and 2026 and failed both times. Hopefully that losing string will continue.

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You have the best week you possibly can and we’ll see you then.

Remember, comments and reactions are always welcome.

So I said... #18 for April 15-21

Another more-or-less weekly compilation of comment replies and random thoughts posted on other sites, this one covering April 15 to April 21.

Two notes on style: As always, at the top of each item I try to include some context, at least enough to make it clear what I'm responding to. If I need to add context here to what I originally said, it will be in square brackets ([ ]) in italics.

Also, both relies to my comments and my replies to other comments on the same original post (if you follow that) are grouped together. 

With that said, let's get to it. And oh yeah, comments and reactions are always welcome.

== 

2026-04-15
[Re a WaPo op-ed on a proposal in Connecticut to limit/regulate self-service grocery checkouts.] 

It is, of course, not surprising that a newspaper with an openly declared editorial bias in favor of "the free market" - that is, favoring corporations over the public and the bosses over workers - would carry something from "a newsletter on the consequences of overregulation" without a whisper of a concern about the consequences of under-regulation.

But as to the particular case, I refuse to use the self-checkouts on principle because I am aware of how they are marketed to the corporations.

Simply put, the pitch is that the company can boast about "service" and "speed" and "convenience" while the real impact is to get customers to do more of the work so the company can hire fewer workers. The net effect is that they are job-killers, especially of the sort of entry-level jobs long lauded by corporate America as a "way into the job market" for the young and those lacking specialized skills.
So limit them. Regulate them. It's probably unrealistic, but I'd say get rid of them as not only imposing costs on the jobs market (meaning our neighbors) but because those costs are unnecessary, recalling how long and how well we got along without them.
In the meantime, I'll deal with the "slowness" and "inconvenience" of waiting in a grocery store line. So should you.
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2026-04-15
[“So should you?” Wow, talk about sanctimonious.]

1. There is nothing either smug or condescending about my statement. There are occasions where the wider impacts of our choices makes YMMV inadequate as a response. I say this is one. (If you want to mentally add "unless limited by physical inability/disability" to my closing, go ahead.)

2. Attempting to wave off my argument with a dismissive sneer is not a rebuttal.
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2026-04-15
[Let the businesses run themselves and legislature keep your nose out if what they’re doing isn't illegal.]

Did it ever occur to you that everything is legal until it's not? "Don't act unless it's illegal" would have blocked every law ever passed anywhere. Say what you will about this proposal, but the principle you're applying needs much better definition.
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2026-04-15
[proposal of 8 regular checkout lanes per 4 self-checkouts required 4 cashiers on duty at all times regardless of traffic; cashiers are "jobs for buggy whip makers."]

Just for clarity, as I read this, a store with (for example) eight self-checkouts would not have to have four cashiers always on duty at a register regardless of traffic but rather that it would have to have a minimum of four such lanes that could be staffed if traffic called for it.

If it did intend what you say, I'd agree that was silly. But I strongly suspect, indeed expect, it does not but was if anything (and assuming there is an issue) the result of sloppy language that could easily be corrected by amendment.

As for the rest, as the AI-driven self-checkout wonderworld you image for grocery stores inevitably starts to spread to the rest of retail, I'd advise you to be careful what you wish for.

==

2026-04-15
[WaPo article: SCOTUS making religion outweigh all other considerations; here, allowing exemptions from public school vaccination requirements.]

I will say this and only this: We told you so. 

If you're surprised by any of this: You were warned.

If you say "I didn't know," you just weren't paying attention.

And most particularly if you say anything like "I voted for Trump, but I didn't vote for that," yes you did. It's on you. Because we told you so. You were warned. And you just wouldn't listen.
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2026-04-15
[Atheists have worst of it. Discrimination not only tolerated, celebrated; have to follow ALL laws, can't pick/choose."]

In at least some ways, the legal question about atheists has already been answered. In US v. Seeger (1965), SCOTUS ruled that conscientious objector status under the draft was available to non-theists if they had beliefs that if I recall the term correctly "occupied the same position" in their life as a traditional religion would. In Welsh v. US (1970), the Court expanded that to make explicit that those beliefs need not be religious or called such, that a personal moral code would suffice.

In short, if you had a set of core beliefs that would guide your judgment in the same way traditional religious principles (supposedly) did, you were eligible for CO status. (It was still tough to get for anyone not a member of a traditional "peace church," but you were eligible.)

It'd be very interesting to see someone pursue a demand for an exemption from some civic duty on the grounds of their atheist beliefs being as valid as those of right-wing Xians to see if the Court would be true to its declared principles. The downside is I'm afraid such a suit would be successful, ripping out another support from the already-rickety concept of community responsibility. 

==

2026-04-15
[re article on decision of MT SupCt state constitution provided broad protection for trans rights, wondered if GOPpers in Congress would try to pass law overruling it.]

The "supremacy clause" in the Constitution says federal law can (depending on the particulars) override state law and the same is generally true about state versus local law - but here we're not talking about a state law but a state constitution and federal law cannot override that. And as I think the article notes, the guiding principle is that your rights within a given state are protected to the extent guaranteed by the state or federal constitution, whichever is greater.

This is why the efforts of The Orange Overlord and RFK "My father would be ashamed of me" Jr. to cripple trans health care have revolved not around outright bans but through threats to cut off various sources of funding, i.e., banning it through fiscal blackmail, making such care inaccessible, even though not technically illegal.

==

2026-04-16
[oral arguments on CO SupCt case ordering reopening of trans health care clinic noted trial court sympathetic to the plaintiffs, denied relief for fear of potential reactions from feds re hospital financing.]

District Court [trial] Judge Ericka F.H. Englert was wrong. She was not being asked to "call the bluff of the federal government." She was being asked to rule in accordance with the Colorado constitution without relying on speculation of what actions the feds might take outside the court system.

And, oh yeah, there is no federal law involved here. Neither an Executive Order nor an agency declaration is a law.

It's an indication of how far were have come towards authoritarianism that even a state judge is treating whatever foams out of the mouths of RFK "My dad would be ashamed of me" Jr. and hydroxychloroquine fan Mehmet "I really am from" Oz as instantly becoming law.

==

2026-04-17
[DOJ demanding Reddit turn over personal info re user who criticized ICE]

"Be careful what you say" is exactly what we should not do. Be honest, yes. Be truthful, yes. If you are asserting particular facts (as opposed to expressing opinion), be correct or at least have a reasonable basis to believe you are correct. (In other words, don't just make crap up. There are more than enough hard facts to suffice.) In any event, do not engage in the self-censorship of "be careful." Rather, be defiant.

As for this particular case, the latest news I can find is that John Doe is going to file a motion to quash the subpoena. Personally, I would think the absence of any legitimate law enforcement purpose would suffice, but we'll have to keep watching.

==

2026-04-18
[comment on YT vid: "I never imagined I'd see the rise of the 4th Reich in this country." response: because people "got complacent," ignored warning signs. then: "not that simple; super rich have been undermining the system."]

"It's not that simple" is a truism, but we should never forget that it implicitly acknowledges that the original assertion [i.e., that people got complacent] is indeed part of the cause. Shifting blame does not absolve us of our responsibility as citizens.

==

2026-04-18
[meme cited CNN story to say 62M cishet men "attend" "online rape academy" re sex with women either drunk, drugged, or asleep]

First, I found the link to the original CNN article. I also found an analysis by Snopes.

(The link is to a re-posting because Snopes.com is now behind a paywall.)

The criticism Snopes had is that the “62 million” figure is an estimate of the total traffic to the entire website over that month, which safely does not consist of 62 million individual cishet men going once each.

And please don’t anyone try to claim I’m downplaying or minimizing the horror here. It’s rather my conviction that when what you can prove is bad enough, exaggeration only invites dismissal.

Footnote: What was not clear from either the CNN article or Snopes was if the whole site is the sort of stuff that is the topic here or is it a pornsite where that is one part.

So I bit the bullet and went there.

It is indeed a site with what I suppose would be the usual range of material; I didn't even find a link on the main page to "sleep" content, although I may well have missed it or it might be deliberately buried. (The main page being as far as I went.)
 
I think this reinforces my concern about exaggeration. You never want to be in a position where your argument leans on a number where a more accurate figure could generate the response "Actually, it's only such-and-so," thereby trying to dismiss your entire argument even if the "only" number is more than enough to make the point.

==

2026-04-18
[re-post opened "Republicans just introduced a bill to force doctors [to] build a government list of trans people."]

Links, dammit! What GOPpers? Where? This reads like it’s referring to a state-level proposal in which case “where” matters in terms of resistance.

Certainly it is painfully obvious to anyone who looks that the ultimate goal is to wipe trans folks from society altogether, to drive them so far into the closet that they couldn’t even find the door even with a flashlight. But while resistance is rooted in awareness, it requires actionable knowledge to bloom.

[Posts and memes with no source provided is an on-going complaint of mine.]

==

2026-04-18
So the real estate salesman who became The Orange Overlord convincing people to vote for him on a promise of “no more wars” is now saying the federal government “can’t take care of day care ... Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things.”

Why? “We’re fighting wars.”

So everything that doesn't involve being ever-more ready to kill ever-more people has to be up to individual states.

I'd say "Any questions?" but if at this point you still have any, it's too late for you.

==

2026-04-18
[Re why some folks don't realize are trans until well into adulthood.]

I thank you for this even though as a cis male I have little to add to the conversation.

I do have one passing observation: When folks say "I always knew," I don't think they're saying they had "independently formulate[d] an entirely different theory of gender" but rather that looking back later, they "always knew" that things just felt, well, wrong; not that they always knew "I'm really a boy" or "really a girl," but that what was expected of them didn't fit somehow.

Thanks for adding to my understanding, including to some degree of myself.

==

2026-04-19
[Re April 17 The Fucking News.]

This certainly up to your usual standard. (How's THAT for a politician's answer?)

However, the phrase "will 'restore the GOLD STANDARD OF SCIENCE at the CDC'" sent a little shiver through me.

"Gold standard" is a term used regularly in trying to deny gender-affirming care on the grounds that the evidence is "low quality" - most commonly by people who don't know the first thing about the scale or what it's for. 

The term "gold standard" in this context is usually taken to mean blind randomized controlled studies. The problem is that a great deal of modern medicine is not based on such studies but on observational studies, i.e., "what has been tried, what worked, what didn't," which are by definition lower quality.

What's more, it is sometimes impossible to do those kinds of controlled studies in an ethical manner. Consider puberty blockers and hormone therapy. It's well-established that they work and how they work. Doing such a study today would mean denying people needed medication, giving people undesired medication, or both.

And blind? How is a young person to not know if they are or are not going through puberty? If they are or aren't experiencing the effects of prescribed hormones?

Hearing The Orange Overlord reference "the GOLD STANDARD OF SCIENCE" in the context of the CDC does not give hope; it gives me pause. We need to watch this space.

==

2026-04-19
[Oligarch Watch: AI cos push use chatbots for guidance on personal health care.]

I thought this might be worthy of inclusion. Back in November I took a YouGov survey related to public perceptions about the use of AI in healthcare. Three of the questions asked for general responses rather than picking from among multiple choices. This is quoting my responses.

Q: What ethical considerations are most important to think about when adding AI tools to healthcare?
I was told by my surgeon some years ago “You treat the patient, not the X-ray.” The more we use AI, the more that adage is reversed. During my recent hospitalization my PCP came by on their rounds, during which they displayed not through words but tone and demeanor a genuine personal concern for my health, something of which AI is incapable of expressing or feeling, at best offering instead merely an algorithmically-driven facade of concern, a programmed pretense, which well could be likened to the comforting reassurances of the scammer.

Q: What is your overall impression of AI in healthcare?
Not ready for prime time. For now, it’s a bandwagon promising what it can’t (and perhaps never will) deliver, driven less by public health than by the profit-driven preferences of the corporate spectrum of health care (i.e., hospitals and the insurance industry) who pursue a goal of “efficiency” (read as “fewer employees”) and would, as I suggested earlier, “treat the X-ray, not the patient,” with us coming to exist less as patients than as datasets.

Q: Is there anything else about AI in healthcare that you would like to share with us?
AI is good for, indeed excellent at, analyzing large amounts of data, producing results that can be viewed and considered mathematically because that’s what they are - mathematical derivations from mathematical data. But healthcare in general and medicine within that reach involves more than mere data but also includes personalities and foibles and trust and other human interactions along with unavoidable judgment calls driven by such non-mathematical considerations, all of which are beyond its capabilities. Which makes the use of chat boxes by consumers for health information advice fraught with risk and worse as shown by recent suits against various companies whose chat boxes are accused of having encouraged teenager users to commit suicide. AI simply is not up the task to which the health care industry is trying to set it in pursuit of profit.

==

2026-04-20
[Open ended YouGov poll Q: "How do you feel about the use of AI in making movies?"]

I can see its use as a tool in areas such as special effects in ways similar to how previous technologies have been used to make them more realistic. Beyond such areas, that is, where it functions as an improved version of already-existing tools employed under the same sorts of conditions, direction, and control as those, I would strongly prefer it was not used at all.

==

2026-04-21
[Ruling en banc, 5th CCoA upheld TX law requiring 10 Commandments in every classroom.]

Wait wait wait.

"They compared it to the Pledge of Allegiance - which is also religious, with its “one Nation, under God” line - to argue that students aren’t forced to say it."

Did they actually say the part about the Pledge being religious? You say they made the comparison but don't present it as a quote, so it's not clear.

Because if they did, I clearly recall a SCOTUS decision that said the Pledge was NOT religious and "under God" was a mere "civic exercise" which had at most a "tinge" of religion - which was why having to say it did not intrude on the rights of atheists.

In either event, I have to say I disagree on one point: The majority was not "delusional." That knew damn well what they were doing and they did it consciously and deliberately.
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2026-04-21
[SCOTUS will deny cert, and it will stand.]
Just to make it clear, it will stand in the 5th Circuit, nowhere else. However, the danger there is that it will serve as precedent for other circuits to consider. So either it will spread to significant parts of the country or at some point there will be a split in circuits, at which point SCOTUS would feel entirely justified in stepping in, even feeling obligated to.

So I said... #16 for March 31 to April 7

 So another variegated conglomeration of perspectives and postulates from your couthy sesquipedalian. At or least I think it is.

As always, I’ve included context where I thought it would help understanding the comment itself along with links to the original if you’d like to check it out. With that, here we go.

2026-03-31
[Most comments in WaPo on SCOTUS oral arguments re Trump’s birthright citizenship order supported the 14th Amendment being read literally. Supporting Trump, someone wrote dismissively “Please tell me which Supreme Court case ruled where the plaintiff’s parents were in the US illegally. This reminds me of being told the 14th amendment case about getting Trump off ballot was a slam dunk, only to lose 9-0.”]

I expect this will not satisfy you but US v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) involved a child who was born to parents who were subjects of the Emperor of China and so had neither US citizenship nor allegiance but yes, were here legally. But his parents had no diplomatic exception (they were “not employed in any diplomatic or official capacity under the Emperor of China”), so he was “subject to the jurisdiction” of the US - interpreted to mean “required to obey US law.” So yes, the Court did rule on that very point. Thus, the Court ruled, Wong Kim Ark was a citizen by birth.

Bluntly, it’s hard to imagine a space in there where the argument “Yeah, but they were documented so that doesn’t count” would fit unless you were to argue that being undocumented means you’re not required to obey the law, an argument I doubt would find much support.

Oh, as for those “legal scholars,” a phrase I strongly suspect was used sarcastically, you should have asked me. I predicted it would fail, albeit on a different basis.(1)
-
[Wong Kim Ark was actually a test case. In 1884, a person named Look Tin Eli had sued the government in the US Circuit Court for the Central District of California over his citizenship. He won, as the court affirmed that a native-born person is a US citizen regardless of race or ancestry. Some supporters were disappointed that the US declined to appeal because they wanted to get the matter before SCOTUS and the case of Wong Kim Ark provided the opportunity. The Look Tin Eli case was cited by SCOTUS in its favorable opinion.]

==

2026-04-01
There should be a requirement that any client considering conversion “therapy” should be given accurate information on all risks involved, including psychological harm and increased risk of suicide, and the success rate. Then they can make an informed decision and bluntly I wonder how many would continue in that event.

==

2026-04-01
[A woman in Kansas named Samantha Boucher noted Trans Day of Visibility by openly defying the state’s new bathroom ban.]

Bravo to her.

I wonder if [Gov. Kris] Koback would try to dodge the whole thing by saying he doesn’t want to bring attention to a “stunt” so will do nothing because she didn’t really “use” the restroom, just went in and right out.

I doubt he’s that clever, but these kinds of laws are often passed with the idea that trans folks will simply disappear from the restrooms and there will be no consequences that might get attention or even some sympathy among the public.

==

2026-04-03
[Referring to a list of suggested responses to being challenged for using the “wrong” restroom.]

I’ve re-written this three or four times because I keep thinking it could by misunderstood. This is my last shot at this.

I doubt the situation described will arise for me (I’m cis and in a safe state) since the freakage level over transmen in restrooms seems quite muted (which I say supports my contention that a lot of this is old-fashioned, albeit an extreme form of, sexism) but if it ever did I would be the bystander.

I think in that case my first instinct would be to blurt out “Why?” and if anything about being trans figured in a response, follow with “Prove it.” That is, “put up or shut up,” intending to shield the target from the harassment. (It occurs to me now that a better response would be “And?”)

But my favorite among the proposed bystander responses is #3 - actually, forget the first part as unnecessary; just use the second.

[The whole #3 was ”Who polices other people’s restroom use? You’re being really weird right now.”]

==

2026-04-03
[The Ohio House passed a bill to outlaw drag shows. Someone argued that some provisions could make it illegal for transgender folks to appear in public.]

The bill is indeed bad and hopefully will be killed or at least significantly modified, but I have to say I think your description in some ways goes too far.

Specifically, the section on “adult cabaret performance” (lines 153-173 of the bill, found at https://search-prod.lis.state.oh.us/api/v2/general_assembly_136/legislation/hb249/02_PH/pdf/) repeatedly uses the terms “performance,” performers,” and “entertainers.” Applying that to “a transgender individual simply walking down the street wearing makeup” stretches the wording (the “legislative intent”) far past the breaking point.

But! That “cisgender woman playing a guitar in a park” wearing “too masculine” clothing? Oh, yeah. Just call her a performer and bang, covered by the law. Um, except wait - the section also says the performance must be “harmful to juveniles or obscene,” so just playing a guitar in a park isn’t enough, regardless of the clothing. (Yes, I looked up the definitions of “harmful to juveniles” and “obscene.” They’re all about “prurient interest” and “arousing lust.” https://codes.ohio.gov/ohio-revised-code/section-2907.01)

I wholeheartedly embrace your (implied but accurate) argument that actually defining what constitutes “masculine” and “feminine” expression is a fool’s errand and I also agree that any attempt to do so, even by implication, is a threat to trans rights.

But here I’d focus on the obvious intention to ban drag shows by regarding them as de facto sexual and thus obscene. One thing I think the attempt shows is how difficult (if it’s even possible, which I very much doubt) to do that without trampling on basic rights and opening the door to “guilt by personal opinion of a cop.” Such bills can and should be rejected outright.

==

2026-04-03
Ben Meiselas reports that in a talk at George Washington University, Karoline Leavitt told the audience that her advice is to always be the most well-read person in the room - then said Trump always is.

I used to call her Levity because no one should take her seriously but this goes beyond that. She is either a pathological liar or in some other way deeply mentally disturbed.

==

2026-04-03
[The Georgia legislature ended its session with all of the nearly 15 anti-trans bills having failed.]

This is excellent news and everyone involved in this achievement should savor the moment and accept congratulations.

In passing, this raises something I’ve wondered about. This isn’t the first time a state legislature has come to the end of a session with a whole bunch of anti-trans laws dying without action.

So do some of these people sometimes introduce such legislation without really caring if it passes or not, they just want to be able to use “I introduced” or “I supported” such-and-such on the campaign trail, avoiding both the possibility of being “out anti-transed” by some opponent and the stronger pushback from the other side that could arise if it actually passed?

Just speculating; as a practical matter, I doubt it makes any difference.

==

2026-04-04
[Referring to forgiving MAGAs: “My gut instinct is to NEVER forgive them for their cruelty and greed.”]

I’ll just offer a variation on what I said about this very topic several days ago on a different site.

I’m what used to be called a fallen-away Catholic. In fact, I fell so far I fell away from theism altogether. But I can remember from my Catechism what’s required for forgiveness in Confession: contrition and penance - genuine regret and a sacrifice to make up for what you did.

The penance was pretty invariably symbolic, saying some prayers and the like, but still was a necessary part of the process of forgiveness.

The same should apply here. You want me to “welcome you into our tent?” First, give me good cause to believe you sincerely regret what you’ve done. (I think of the woman in that viral clip who said she voted for the Orange Overlord three times, punctuated with “That’s on me. Obviously, I’m an idiot.”)

Second, tell me what you’ll now do to make up for - more importantly, to undo - the harm you’ve helped to cause. Note that “I’ll never vote for another Republican” is not good enough. It is not penance and will not serve the purpose any more than a convicted robber saying “I’ll never steal anything else” does not excuse them from consequences. Tell me what positive action you will take (or have taken).

Then we can talk about forgiveness.

==

2026-04-04
So Gregg Phillips, associate administrator for FEMA’s Office of Response and Recovery, has doubled down on his claim of having been repeatedly teleported and connected it to his religious beliefs, claiming that the Bible refers to being “translated” or “transported” - that is, he got to a Waffle House through divine intervention.

“Here’s the real question,” he said. “What’s harder to believe? That God could move in a moment during a spiritual battle, or Jesus Christ rose from the dead and is coming again?”

In other words, which is harder to believe: 1+1=5 or 2+2=pi?

==

2026-04-04
[Various extremist Xians want women to be unable to vote.]

Whenever I read about this sort of bigoted insanity presuming a Biblical basis for their anti-democratic, anti-freedom, male-supremacist crackpot notions, I recall seeing (as part of my job at the time) a marriage manual from either the late 16th or early 17th century advising that, as near as I can quote from memory, a man who marries a woman from who he can’t get advice has a fool for a wife - and she has a fool for a husband.

==

2026-04-05
[In a comment, a parent told how their trans daughter, despite having adopted a new name at school, had declined using it at home until some time later.]

I can understand how that would hurt. But I suspect there was a reason: The whole purpose of the sort of social transitioning she did at school could have well been for her a matter of, if you will, trying it on, seeing if it fits, if it feels right, “is this me.” You said it yourself: She “tried” new pronouns and a new name.

Doing it with you, OTOH, isn’t a trial or a test, it’s a conclusion. A decision. She just needed more time to make it.

So when she did come out to you, she was saying “This is who I am. I’ve decided.” By giving her that time, you did the right thing.

==

2026-04-05
My response to “Yeah, well, all lives matter!” was to say “Yes, all lives matter. And if we actually acted like all lives matter, it wouldn’t be necessary to say ‘Black lives matter.’”

[I also used to say that in saying or thinking the phrase, the stress should be on the last word, not the first.]

==

2026-04-05
[“Some Democrats soften or side step trans rights. It doesn’t read as strategic. It reads as hesitation in the face of coordinated attacks.”]

“It doesn’t read as strategic. It reads as hesitation.”

More accurately, it reads as fear. The same old fear that has plagued the Democratic party for decades, the fear that the reactionaries might say something nasty about you in a campaign, so better to downplay the issue, even better to avoid mentioning it at all and be forever prepared to yield ground if it comes up. Consider it a political version of “duck and cover.”

Transgender rights are not the only example. There have been many over the years. The issue here, narrowly defined, is not trans rights but institutional cowardice, the kind of stark political cowardice that has had a major role in getting us into our current mess.

I know I have several times on this platform recalled seeing a survey from all the way back in the Gingrich era finding that people didn’t dislike Democrats for what they stood for but because they didn’t seem to stand for anything.

Well, that remains true today, as the intensity of Democrats’ active opposition to The Orange Overlord (TOO) is pretty much in inverse ratio to his favorability rating and the safer it looks politically on a given issue the more willing they are to go after him.

(I still cringe when I recall Hakeem Jeffries, around the time of the OBBB - the Obnoxious Barbarous Bigoted Bill - actually saying something to the effect that the Dems were waiting for TOO’s favorability rating to drop below 40% - in other words, when it was safe enough - promising that then, they’d really go after him. You can decide for yourself how well they followed through on that.)

I’ve said this before, perhaps even here, but I think it bears repeating. It’s not necessary for Dems to make trans rights the or even a centerpiece of their campaign, particularly as it ranks low on lists of people’s concerns and even Republicans in some polls say their party spends too much time on the issue.

What is necessary is to say clearly that you support trans rights and when challenged don’t evade and don’t back down.

And don’t settle for defense. Instead say something like “Of course I support trans rights because they are human rights. Trans folks have every bit as much right to grow and flourish, to go through their lives smoothly, without discrimination, and to be treated with respect and fairness the same as anyone else does. The really important question is why the other side is so damned focused on people’s genitalia instead of on” whatever issue or issues seem appropriate at the moment.

I’ve gone on long enough. Probably too long. So I’ll stop.

==

2026-04-06
The Pentagon has failed its department-wide financial audit eight years in a row.

Admittedly, US military operations are very complex, so clean audits are a challenge.

But if any “woke” program had a record anything like that, Faux News would be melting TV screens with the heat of its rage.

==

2026-04-06
I was watching the live NASA coverage of the Artemis mission. As the crew went to the Moon’s dark side (losing contact for 40 minutes) one of them just had to invoke Jesus to say “love your neighbor,” punctuated by ground control echoing the statement and adding “How great Thou art.”

:sigh:

==

2026-04-07
[Erin Reed demolished a study claiming to prove GAC actually harms the mental health of trans youth.]

Okay, I gotta be honest. I got as far as the percentages (the 9.8% before vs. 60.7% after) and a vibrantly bright red flag started flying.

Phrased rather more coherently than my initial response, it was “Wait - they’re comparing the mental health of folks who got and didn’t get GAC based on psychiatric visits after an initial one? But if someone was at that initial visit to obtain GAC, getting additional counseling would be a pretty normal part of the process of transitioning. Of course they’d have more visits than the general population!”

And that was before learning that they might have years of visits before they could even start actual medical transitioning (i.e. GAHT) - not to mention the history of the study author.

And this tripe got published? Just wow.

==

2026-04-07
[A commenter responded to Megan Rapinoe saying “They lost the battle on gay marriage” with “If they don’t lose hard enough over transgender issues, they will level their political guns to reverse that loss.”]

“they will next level all their political guns to reverse that loss”

They already are. The “LGB without the T” folks who think they’re safe are fools.
-
2026-04-07
[They are. I do think that attacking us is distracting some of the SoCons efforts from that though...]

True enough. But the reactionaries have already legitimized the notion “transgender = drag queen = sex” and it’s not that far a reach to reprising “disgusting” descriptions of “disgusting” gay/lesbian sex of the sort I remember from not that many decades ago.

The LGB/noT crowd should remember that Martin Niemöller’s poem is not just about Germany.

THAT’S IT! SEE YA IN A WEEK OR SO!

---

 

1 The 14th Amendment, Section 3, says that anyone who “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the US is ineligible for public office. The argument was that Trump was thus disqualified and Colorado tried to remove him from the ballot. The Court ruled that it was up to Congress, not the states, to make the decision about ballot eligibility. I had predicted they would rule that for Constitutional purposes he couldn’t be held to have “engaged in insurrection” absent a conviction on a relevant charge.

So I said... #15 for March 22 to 30

The next issue of my occasional comments on various topics on various sites over the past week or so with, as always, enough additional context for folks to be able to tell what’s going on. A note on style: If within a comment something is in brackets - [ ] - it’s as the comment originally appeared and signified I was editing something inside a quote; if it’s in italics it’s something added here for added context.

Let’s go.

2026-03-21
[Chris Giedner (Law Dork) posted about a recent court action in a case involving employees of the US Agency for Global Media who had been placed on administrative leave during the DOGE days of defenestrations.]

Your last line - “it is likely that a number of employees have left the agency for other work” - raises something I think hasn’t been considered enough.

The minions and jesters of the court of The Orange Overlord don’t have to outright win to do significant damage to the ability of the federal government to do useful work, they just have to stall long enough for the employees booted out to be unable to wait for a resolution.

Suppose half of those employees have gone on to other jobs. The result would be a court-approved 30% cut in USAGM staff with no requirement (or reason to expect) that those open positions would be filled.

For a similar reason, I’m also concerned about another topic up for discussion which I will make bold to refer to here: The Orange Overlord’s half-brag, half-threat to issue an EO federalizing the midterms. I keep hearing it said that in that event he’d be sued and he’d lose because the law, the Constitution, and history are so clear on the matter.

But my worry is that, just like with DOGE (which I always pronounce “dodgy,” because it was/is), he doesn’t have to win - he just has to cause enough confusion and delay to screw things up, disrupt the whole voting process, in enough places to give him a reason (not a good one, just a “reason”) to declare a national emergency and start seizing ballot boxes and declaring the vote void.

This doesn’t mean he’d succeed or even that he’d try; maybe he’ll think the FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) raised by his constant ranting about “voter fraud” will be sufficiently useful to convince the faithful the election was “stolen” and enough others that elections are “insecure” and voting must be restricted.

But either way, it is a potential for social chaos that we ignore at our peril.

==

2026-03-22
[YouTuber Farron Cousins posted about a report that the USPS is within a year of bankruptcy. Just to be clear, Cousins was speaking in support of the USPS.]

Thanks for the attention to this, but you left out the part about requiring the USPS to pre-finance retirement benefits out to 75 years - meaning the USPS is putting aside money to pay future benefits for future retirees who haven’t been born yet. Oh, and the rules limiting how much the prices for stamps and services can go up. And how Congress can make all these rules for how the USPS operates while - as you note - not putting a single damn dollar toward the cost.

That last is particular infuriating because the wingnuts are forever going on about how people too poor to pay federal income taxes should have to pay them in order to have “skin in the game.” Shouldn’t the same apply here?

==

2026-03-23
[A discussion about Flat Earth brought in a reference to Einstein and the Theory of Relativity.]

Just a correction about the history: Einstein did not think the universe was shrinking. He thought it was eternal, steady, neither shrinking nor expanding - because that was the accepted belief at the time. But someone (I’m embarrassed to admit I’m both unable to remember the name and too lazy to look it up) [Credit is usually given to Russian mathematician Alexander Friedman in 1922.] proved that Einstein’s universe was unstable, it had to be growing or shrinking. So he created the so-called “cosmological constant,” an arbitrary factor inserted to keep the universe stable. When it was proved the universe is expanding,, he took it out, calling his failure to trust his own work his “greatest blunder.”

==

mis2026-03-24
[A meme criticized using “they” as 3rd-person singular - and used it that way in the meme.]

Use of “they” as a third person singular has been in use since the 14th Century. At some point, apparently in the mid-1700s, some tight-ass grammarians decided it was wrong or low-class or some such crap.

The meme only serves to puts an exclamation point on how stupid the complaint is.

==

2026-03-24
[A video showed a dog aggressively defending a stray kitten during a rainstorm. A passing driver rescued both. People claimed it was AI because the dog appeared to have an extra paw.]

The argument is not entirely convincing because if the dog was leaning against the curb with its back legs sprawled out to the other side, that “extra foot” could easily be the foot of the left back leg folded under the dog’s body - particularly because the “extra” paw is turned in the way that such a paw would be in that case.

However - my problem is that I can’t see a way to trace that paw back to a leg. Maybe there is, but I’m not seeing it.

My conclusion: AI? Yeah, I suppose more likely than not - but not for the reasons people here have cited. And I’m not convinced it is.

What’s sad is not only that now we have to think “Is it real or is it AI” (Anyone else old enough to recall “Is it live or is it Memorex?”) but that it’s become an ego game to pore over details of cute but ultimately unimportant videos in order to be the first to shout “AI!” and thus demonstrate your supposed cleverness. Or cynicism, whatever.

==

2026-03-24
So now it’s “extermination” rather than “obliteration” in Iran? What, did The Orange Overlord turn the page on his “Word of the Week” desk calendar?

==

2026-03-25
A the risk of appearing in a future video about odd comments, I have to dispute one assertion you made about sex and gender. They are indeed different things, but gender is not a social construct. Gender expression, what behaviors, dress, and the like mark “masculine” and “feminine” in a given culture, is. But the concept of gender itself is not.

==

2026-03-28
[Kentucky is about to pass a bill declaring trans people to be mentally ill and barring them from being teachers. A response referred to a likely veto by Gov. Andy Beshear.]

GOPpers hold super-majorities in both Houses of the Kentucky legislature. Beshear’s likely veto is for them a mere momentary glitch.

There was a time - not even all that long ago - when it was possible to regard moves like this as cold-blooded political calculation driven by selfish interest and rooted in the the notion that it was good for votes.

But we have gone far past that. There is nothing cold-blooded about this; rather, it is the fiery blood of hatred fueled by fanaticism - and, I strongly suspect, the self-loathing over guilty fantasies turned outward.
-
2026-03-28
[By the time the red and blue states finish passing their “Soft Secession” laws, there will be no “United” in United States.]

Tgerue enough. You can get a reasonable sense of the geographic nature of that division by examining a map of the US Courts of Appeal and looking at the 5th, 8th, 10th, and 11th Circuits, removing Minnesota, Colorado, and New Mexico, and adding Montana and Idaho.
-
2026-03-28
[A different comment on the same post referred to the Kentucky bill as “stupid” because of the mixture of standards it uses.]

It’s not stupid. Offensive, hating, vicious, lots of other noxious qualities, but not stupid. They know exactly what they’re doing, picking and choosing what works and words serve their twisted impulses.

It’s much like Humpty Dumpty, who said “When I use a word” - or a citation - “it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.”

I look to the time when these Humpty Dumptys have their great fall and can’t be put together again.

==

2026-03-29
[At a hearing on March 26, Minnesota State Rep. Mary Franson dismissed a panel discussing climate change because “my faith is not in climate change ... my faith is in Jesus” and the world doesn’t end that way. The post also referred to Sen. James Inhofe who once carried a snowball onto the Senate floor to deny climate change.]

To Rep. Mary QuiteContrary, who says “My faith is not in climate change.” That’s because recognizing climate change does not require faith. You have actual physical evidence and records; you have observations and measurements; you have predictions borne out by later observations and measurements. You don’t need the “evidence of things not seen” if the things are seen.

Oh, and climatologists are not predicting the end of the world, you dumb bozo. They are predicting mass damage to human civilization. You may in your delusion think they’re the same. I suspect both those who die from the coming changes and those who manage to survive them will think differently.

You might do well to contemplate Mark 8:18 - “Do you have eyes but fail to see, and ears but fail to hear?”

(As a footnote, I clearly remember five-time winner of my “Clown Award” James “RocksInHisHead” Inhofe - my appropriate name for him because his middle name was no joke “Mountain” - and his being repeatedly mocked by Sheldon Whitehouse after his stunt by going through a list of proofs for climate change and punctuating each by saying the Senate could believe the science or “the senator with the snowball.”)

==

2026-03-30
A few brief thoughts on my New Kings day.

All the expected adjectives - exciting, invigorating, enthusiastic, simultaneously joyful and angry, and more - all apply. The crowd was larger than the last time (although the organizers did fall short of their hope to double it) but the growth in energy clearly outstripped the growth in numbers.

I have a decent degree of confidence in my own crowd size estimates but I do lean toward being conservative because I envision a protest crowd as a measure of potential energy and I like thinking that the energy present is more than I’m estimating rather than less. With that in mind, I estimated 4,000 were present.

Beyond that, I was surprised even maybe taken aback by the overwhelmingly favorable response by the cars coming by on this busy roadway to the point that I didn’t hear a single vulgar shout and my housemate only noticed two - and it wasn’t just a single beep going by, it was people riding the horn the length of the line.

But what really did my heart good is that when things broke up, I hopped in my car to catch the last quarter hour or so of another rally because it was in the town I grew up and the idea there was one there, well, I had to see that. As I approached, I saw a small group at one corner of an intersection, okay, maybe they turned out 200 or maybe more - only to then realize that the line actually stretched out in all four directions and there were by my guess pushing 1000 people there. And yes, that made me smile. To steal a phrase, bigly.

Next up big day: May 1.

And another thing: quick evolution

 

"And another thing" was the title I always gave to science-y stuff that I found interesting. So why not start with one of those. Consider it a way of easing back in to heavier stuff.

 

So this comes from Smithsonian magazine, which brings news of evolution occurring in real time - in this case, about ten generations.

 

The study involved was published in the May 21 edition of Global Change Biology and related to Anna's hummingbirds (Calypte anna), a species found in California.

 

Simply (probably oversimply, so read the article) put, the proliferation of hummingbird feeders since World War II has provided the birds with a plentiful supply of nectar, resulting in longer, larger, beaks - the better to take advantage of the feeders - as well as enabling them to expand their range from southern California up the coast to British Columbia.

 

So take that, creationists: Yeah, evolution can take tens or hundreds of thousands of years, but it doesn't have to. The argument "no one has seen evolution" just won't wash. Not that it ever did.

043 The Erickson Report for December 2 to 15, Page Three: Noted in Passing

Now, a few things Noted in Passing, just a minute or two on a couple of things I wanted to mention.

First up, at last, it appears the government is taking corporate crime seriously.

Too bad it's the government of Sweden.

On November 11, prosecutors in Sweden indicted two executives of the Lundin Oil corporation for complicity in war crimes perpetrated in Sudan between 1999 and 2003.

In essence, the charge is that Chairman Ian Lundin and former CEO Alex Schneiter turned security for an oil field where the company had a claim over to the Sudanese military either knowing or criminally indifferent to the fact that the change would (and did) result in war crimes including massacres.

The case marks the first time since Nuremberg that prosecutors have brought “grave war crime” charges and indictments against individuals.

As a footnote, the company released a statement saying "There is no evidence linking any representatives of Lundin to the alleged primary crimes in this case." In other words, "We didn't actually pull the trigger, so nothin' to do with us."

Sorry to tell you, gang, that ain't how it works.

=

Here's something interesting. On November 23, the DOD announced it is establishing a new group to investigate reports on the presence of UFOs in restricted airspace.

The formation of the group comes after the government released a report in June, encompassing 144 observations, which concluded there was a lack of sufficient data to determine the nature of mysterious flying objects.

This comes after decades of officialdoms deflecting, debunking, and discrediting observations of UFO's.

What I personally find interesting is that he new group, the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group, refers not to "unidentified flying objects" but to "unidentified aerial phenomena" or UAPs, which I find interesting because I have been calling them that for a number of years, speculating that they are actually some sort of natural phenomena that are rare enough that we haven't learned yet to recognize them, much like the UFOs that commercial pilots learned not to report for fear of being grounded but which are now known by the names red sprites and blue jets and are types of lightning that strike upwards from the tops of thunderstorms.

Wonder if I'll get any credit for the name.

=

Finally, in April 2015, Dan Price, CEO of Gravity Payments, a credit card payment processing company, raised the minimum wage at his company to 70,000, which he paid for by cutting his own pay to the same level.

He was mocked as a "socialist," "lunatic of all lunatics," whose employees would soon be on bread lines.

Six years later, company revenue has tripled, the customer base has doubled, 70% of his employees have paid down debt, many bought homes for the first time, 401(k) contributions grew by 155%, and turnover dropped in half.

What's more, when the pandemic broke out, the company lost 55% of its business in one month. Price said the company was four months from bankruptcy. Instead, his employees voluntarily took pay cuts of an amount they each chose, seeing the company through until things improved.

And they have - to the point where those employees have all been given back the amounts they passed up.

Apparently being a socialist lunatic is not such a bad thing.

One final note: When Price made the announcement, Rush Limbaugh declared that he hoped this would become a Harvard Business School cast study of how socialism fails. It is a Harvard Business School case study - just for the opposite reason.

036 The Erickson Report for April 22 to May 5, Page Four: And Another Thing

036 The Erickson Report for April 22 to May 5, Page Four: And Another Thing

We're going to take a break now for something I keep meaning to make more common but never seem too. We call it And Another Thing, where we step aside from politics and social commentary to look at some science thing that I think is cool.

This time we start with the first picture to the right. It's a recently enhanced photo made from an original plate taken in May 1919 in Sobral, Brazil. It is, as I expect you guessed, of a solar eclipse.

It has some added color so that nice solar prominence can be easily seen. The original, of course was in black and white. But that's not the interesting part.

The second photo zooms into the lower right corner of the picture. Notice the two bright spots circled in red.

What's so special about these spots? Well, as I'm sure you knew, they are stars. What's important is that they shouldn't be there. Or more exactly, they shouldn't be where they are.

Which brings us to Albert Einstein and his Theory of Relativity. Relativity has the reputation of being extremely difficult to understand and indeed the mathematics involved in having a deep understanding of the theory are quite advanced and well beyond certainly my comprehension. But the concepts of the theory can be understood by any reasonably intelligent person. You may have to focus a bit, but you can understand it.

The basic concept to understand is that Einstein realized that we do not exist in a universe of three dimensions of space and a separate one of time, but a universe of four-dimensional spacetime. That space and time are interwoven, that each affects the other, and neither is absolute but can be distorted or warped - specifically, warped by the presence of mass.

His original Theory of Relativity, which later became the Special Theory of Relativity, described the effects of that insight in what are called non-accelerated frames of reference. That is, with objects moving in a straight line at a constant speed; more technically, objects moving at a constant velocity, so their acceleration is zero. Thus, a non-accelerated frame of reference

It became the Special Theory of Relativity because Einstein later expanded it to include accelerated frames of reference, where objects are changing their speed or direction of motion or both. That was the General Theory of Relativity - which served as Einstein's theory of gravity.

Newton described gravity as an attractive force between two objects, with the strength dependent on their masses and how far apart they are. Einstein, however, described gravity as the result of the warping of spacetime by mass. So anything traveling close enough to a massive enough object would have its path bent by the warping of spacetime. That means anything - even light.

Okay. The eclipse of 1919 was an excellent opportunity to test Einstein's idea. During an eclipse, astronomers can observe stars appearing close to the Sun, which otherwise would be lost in the glare. By comparing their positions with observations of those same stars at times when they are visible in the night sky, the amount by which their light has been deflected by the Sun can be measured.

Two expeditions went out, one to Sobral and one to the island of Principe off the west coast of Africa. There are great dramatic stories of the scientific struggles and frustrations involved, including the Principe expedition waking up to thunderstorms and getting only occasional glimpses of the Sun in breaks in the clouds and multiple plates in Sobral being ruined because it was hot enough to warp the lenses in the camera. But they managed to get enough plates to get results.

Now, Newton also predicted that light would have its path be deflected by gravity - but Einstein predicted more than twice the effect. Newton's theory predicted a deflection of 0.8 arc-seconds. Einstein predicted 1.8. An arc-second is 1/60 of an arc-minute, which is 1/60 of a degree, which is 1/360 of a complete circle. So yeah, an arc-second is small, but the size is unimportant, it's how closely prediction matches actual measurements.

The stars in this photo are deflected by just under 2 arc-seconds. The ones from Principe were measured at 1.6 arc-seconds. One a little above Einstein's predictions, one a little below, but both in line with it and far removed from Newton's.

These results, that is, were the first observational proofs of the General Theory of Relativity.

They made Einstein a figure known worldwide and other predictions of his theory, such as black holes, have been subjects of both scientific study and sci-fi ever since.

Which brings me to the third image. Almost exactly 100 years later, in April 2019, a worldwide collaboration of scientists produced this, the first ever image of, the first direct observational evidence of, a black hole.

With a mass roughly equal to 6.5 million of our Suns, this supermassive black hole is located in the galaxy M87, some 55 million light years away from Earth. By the way, M87 just means Messier 87, or number 87 in the Messier catalog of deep-sky objects.

Recall you can't see the black hole itself; the gravitational strength of a black hole is so great that anything passing the event horizon, even light, can't escape. Which is why it's called a black hole. As matter is drawn into the black hole, it swirls around, spiraling in, becoming extremely hot and becoming what scientists call luminous, giving off electromagnetic energy such as radio waves and X-rays. That's what you're seeing here.

The image was obtained using something called the Event Horizon Telescope, which linked together eight ground-based radio telescopes, effectively turning the Earth into one giant virtual radio telescope and creating a resolution sharp enough to focus on an orange on the surface of the Moon.

It also provided an extraordinary test of Einstein's theory of gravity and its underlying notions of space and time. One hundred years later and we are still getting observation evidence related to the General Theory of Relativity - and Einstein is still right.

As a footnote to this, what gave me a hook to raise this now, is that at he end of March of this year, 2021, the team that did the black hole picture followed it up with the final one here. Those visible swirls are in effect an image of the structure of the magnetic field in the event horizon of that black hole.

The image is enabling astrophysicists to analyze the nature and strength of that magnetic field and through that provide important insights into the still-mysterious nature of black holes. Because yes, they are still in a number of ways mysterious and even as more and more is learned there is a considerable amount still unknown about them.

 

And I think that is really cool.

036 The Erickson Report for April 22 to May 5, Page Three: Noted in Passing

036 The Erickson Report for April 22 to May 5, Page Three: Noted in Passing

Next, an occasional segment called Noted in Passing, where we touch on a couple of things we wanted to make sure got mentioned even if only quickly.

First up, the Ohio legislature is considering a GOPper-backed bill to change the name of an Ohio state park from Mosquito Lake State Park to Donald J. Trump State Park.

So basically changing the name from referencing one disease-carrying pest to another. Doesn't seem like much of a change to me.

It does remind me of the earlier efforts by GOPpers to have something named for Ronald Reagan in every single county in the US. But at least they had the decency to wait until he was dead.

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And here we go again: Sen. Witless Romney is proposing legislation to deal with the - according to the right-wing - supposed looming financial crisis of Social Security and Medicare, a disaster that is forever imminent but never actually arrives.

This time it's to be bipartisan 12-member "Rescue Committees," one for each of the trust funds with a deadline of 180 days to draft legislation to "improve" each program while securing long-term funding, with any such legislation receiving "expedited consideration" in, that is, to be rushed through, Congress.

It's claimed that this is a "bipartisan" effort because three of the 12 co-sponsors in the Senate are Democrats. The three are Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, and Mark Warner. Truly a varied group.

Oh, and we have long known the way to secure the long-term funding for SS and Medicare: remove the cap on income subject to the taxes, a change that would only affect those making over $143,000, that is, the richest 8% of Americans.

 

But wait, that's the rub: It would mean taxing the rich, so that's obviously off the table.

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Elizabeth Warren

On a happier note, here's another sign that Israel is finally losing its stranglehold on US policy in the Middle East, as progressives and even liberals become more open to questioning the so-called "special relationship."

On April 19, Elizabeth Warren, while continuing to support military aid to Israel, proposed conditioning the aid on none of it being used in the occupied territories. Quoting her: "By continuing to provide military aid without restriction, we provide no incentive for Israel to adjust course."

Not a very radical proposal by any means - personally, I would simply end military support altogether - but it wasn't that long ago that even suggesting Israel had to "adjust course" was beyond the pale.

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On an unhappy note, the Arkansas House of Representatives has overwhelmingly passed a resolution specifically allowing the teaching of creationism in public schools.

Federal courts - including in a case directly involving Arkansas - have repeatedly held that teaching creationism in the public schools is unconstitutional on the grounds that it is religious instruction, a fact to which the bill's main sponsor responded by saying she hoped the newly reactionary SCOTUS might feel differently.

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Finally, while most Americans have weathered the pandemic financially, about 38 million say they are worse off now than before the outbreak began in the US.

Overall, 55% of Americans say their financial circumstances are about the same now as a year ago, and 30% even say their finances have improved, but 15% say they are worse off.

Not surprisingly, the problem is more pronounced at lower income levels and among non-whites. Some 29% of Americans living below the federal poverty line say their personal finances now are even worse that they obviously were a year ago, while 47% of Hispanics and just 39% of Black Americans say they have been able to put aside some money recently, compared to 57% of whites, and. Black and Hispanic Americans are about twice as likely as white Americans to say they have come up short on bill payments.

Despite some recent degree of recovery, the United States still has 8.4 million fewer jobs than it had in February 2020, just before the pandemic struck.