Believing they should behave like jerks

My second cataract surgery was yesterday. It went smoothly. However, once the anesthesia on the eye wore off it was quite painful, more than with the other eye. I went to bed early and slept for close to 11 hours. Part of that was the general sedation I had been given, part of that was I hadn’t slept well the night before. So now I’m seeing the world without glasses – and confirming I still need glasses. New lenses might be available tomorrow, certainly by Monday. My Sunday movie was Corsage (the French word for corset even though this is a German language film). This is a completely fictional (thanks IMDB) story of Empress Elizabeth of Austria when she has passed her 40th birthday in 1877 and considered “old.” She is tired of the constraints of being the wife of the Emperor (the corset is a symbol too) and through the course of the story she does something about it, though until the last scene I didn’t guess her solution. Because she is expected to have a small waist (and there are lots of comments in the press speculating whether she’s gained weight) during most of the meals seen in the film what we see on her plate is a small amount of food that she mostly ignores. Her son, about age 20, and her daughter, a preteen, both chide her for actions unbecoming of an Empress. There are a lot of constraints for her to rebel against. The completely fictional part means, according to IMDB, that the real Elizabeth was nothing like the woman presented here and didn’t do these things. The film was nominates for lots of film festival awards and won a few of them. Yeah, it’s highly regarded. I enjoyed it, though at times it seems rather slow paced. Last week Michigan had temps that topped 80F, 20 degrees warmer than average. Monday, just two days later, temps were in the 40s, 15 degrees cooler than average, and we had snow flurries. Meteor Blades, in his Earth Matters column for Daily Kos wrote about the EPA proposing new emissions standards for cars. These standards will essentially require automakers to switch to EVs faster – though not all that much faster than previous laws and their own plans prompted them to do and not fast enough as our climate requires. These standards are now in the phase of getting public comment, which lasts 60 days. Then various groups (though not so much car companies) will sue. Blades also discussed an article by Amy Westervelt at the substack Drilled that explained Big Oil is now facing two dozen climate liability lawsuits by various cities, counties, and states. They are trying to shift these cases out of state courts and into federal courts. Blades wrote:

So, why are the fossil fuel companies so desperate to see these cases in front of the Supreme Court? A few reasons: first, they have successfully argued before that the Clean Air Act preempts any state action on greenhouse gas emissions. Second, they believe they have a better shot at this pro-industry bench siding with them than any left-leaning state court judges. Third, they'd like to put an end to the barrage of lawsuits they've been facing over the past five years. But fourth, and this is where I've seen almost no one connect the dots: they want to further expand corporate free speech. In almost all of the climate liability cases, the fossil fuel plaintiffs, once they get past arguing jurisdiction, are making a free speech argument that goes roughly: Anything we've ever said about climate change was said with the intention of influencing policy; that makes it political speech (or in legalese "petitioning speech"), which is protected by the First Amendment.

Greg Dworkin, in a pundit roundup for Kos, quoted Jonah Goldberg of The Dispatch discussing the behavior of young Republicans

Everywhere I look these days, I see young conservatives believing they should behave like jerks or like the body parts they cover with those red ties. Because they have no frame of reference, no meaningful political experience or memory of politics prior to this shabby era, they think being shabby is normal and smart.

In another roundup Dworkin quoted several commentators remarking how much the abortion issue has put Republicans into a corner, which Democrats are now working hard to exploit. At the top of this post is a picture of a person protesting the expulsion of Justin Pearson and Justin Jones from the Tennessee Legislature. The sign he’s holding says, “No Justins No Peace.” SemDem of the Kos community discussed why the Tennessee legislature was so eager to expel Justins Jones and Pearson. The expulsion was shocking and didn’t make sense to the rest of the country. But state residents saw this coming and knew it wasn’t about decorum:

The GOP lawmakers were tired of constantly being called out on the House floor by these two Black men and saw an opportunity to get rid of them. Thankfully, their plan backfired spectacularly.

SemDem included the transcript of a recent exchange as an example:

John Ragan (R): “My belief is in God. I settle other things with facts and data. The fact of the matter is, sir, this bill is not racist. It is not unconstitutional. Justin Jones (D): “You keep bringing up God. but God says in Isaiah 10: ‘Woe to those who pass unjust laws that hurt the poor and robbed them of their rights. And so stop using God to justify your bigotry. Stop using God to justify hatred and racism.” [Speaker] Cameron Sexton (R): “You are out of order!”

Jon Stewart hosted Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks at the War Horse Symposium, a journalism and public policy forum held in Chicago, to talk about the nation’s defense budget. Hicks did a lot of dodging and weaving, trying very hard to not directly answer Stewart’s questions. They talked about the inability of the Defense Department of being audited. It took a while for patient Stewart to get to his main point:

When I see a State Department get a certain amount of money and a military budget be ten times that. And I see a struggle within government to get people, like, more basic services. And then that department that got that, I mean, we got out of 20 years of war and the Pentagon got a $50 billion raise. Like that's shocking to me. Now, I may not understand exactly the ins and outs, and the incredible magic of an audit, but I'm a human being who lives on the Earth and can't figure out how $850 billion to a department means that the rank and file still have to be on food stamps. Like, to me, that's f---ing corruption.

Merriam Webster, the dictionary company, asked people whose first language is not English to share a word in their language that has no equivalent in English. They shared their favorites and out of those here are mine: Verschlimmbessern, a German word for making something worse by trying to make it better. Kabalsalat, German for cable salad, the mess of tangled cables under your computer desk. Qti maz, an Armenian word for “nose hair” and also someone concerned with details that don’t matter. Fargen, a Yiddish word that means to support someone in a warm and loving and non-judgmental way. Apapachar, a Mexican Spanish word for “hug with the soul,” to cuddle, support, console, to throw all your love to someone when they need it most. The list also includes a video of an ASL sign that means something like “authentic,” “open up,” “unmask,” and “share my raw feelings.” Amazing Maps tweeted a map of the US with every county colored according to life expectancy. The data came from GHDX with the darkest red an expectancy of 66.8 years up through cream to a darkest blue at 86.8. Much of the Northeast and central Midwest is cream to blue. The West is a bit mixed (though I suspect the darkest reds highlight Native territory). And most of the South – east Texas and southern Oklahoma to Georgia and the Gulf to eastern Kentucky – is quite red. Several months ago while pondering what to do while visiting Sister and Niece for a holiday I contemplated printing out maps of Europe and Asia and seeing how many countries we could name. They agreed to this diversion. Map data with coordinates in latitude and longitude are easy to find online. The map of Europe was fairly easy to print using Mercator projection (I’m not sure that’s accurate, what I did was convert latitude and longitude to x and y and scale it so Spain didn’t look squished). But when I did that to the map of Asia Russia looked huge! So I looked up other projections. The one that looked like it might correct the size of Russia also had mathematics that looked too complicated to program in a hurry. During that holiday we named the US states and the countries of Europe and that was enough. Tomas Pueyo tweeted a thread about map distortions. The standard Mercator projection makes the countries away from the equator seem larger than they are, places like Russia, which does look huge, but also the US and Europe, want that because it shows they are more important than they actually are. That also means the countries around the equator – most of Africa and South America are smaller in comparison and are seen as less significant. So Pueyo starts with a map where all the countries are scaled by their true size. Russia and Canada do look considerably smaller. He then shows various other things: A human face distorted as it would be in a map (cool hair and chin!). The east-west length of Russia is shorter than Morocco to the Horn of Africa. Papua New Guinea is as long as the distance from London to Moscow. How the projected sizes of Greenland and Mexico would change if they traded places on the map. The Mediterranean Sea is about the same east-west size as Australia. The land area of all the continents would fit inside the Pacific Ocean. How the world map would look if it was centered on Antarctica. And what the world would look like if mapped by fish. Kos of Kos discusses what Pueyo’s thread says about Russia. Standard maps greatly exaggerate Russia’s size.

Americans don’t take pride in our country’s size, but in its accomplishments. Russia has few of those to point to, hence the obsession with land, and hunger for more of it. ... Yes, Russia is big, but it’s no longer the globe-dominating behemoth we’ve been conditioned to expect. But when a country bases its self worth on the amount of land that it holds, it certainly has all the wrong incentives when dealing with its neighbors.

The US can work with allies towards common goals, but it can’t dictate terms. Russia doesn’t understand that. So the Belarus partnership with Russia is only a step towards full integration. And we know what Russia is doing in Ukraine. Kos went on to discuss the latest pronouncements from Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the mercenary Wagner Group that has been trying to take Bakhmut for eight months. Prigozhin wants to call a cease fire so that Russia can consolidate the territory it already holds. Of course, in his call he belittles Ukrainians and talks big about Russians. Strangely, Prigozhin isn’t taking his own advice and still attacking Bakhmut. Mark Sumner of Kos reported that Russia appears to be gaining in Bakhmut – only because it seems Ukraine is withdrawing. Is Ukraine withdrawing because they see holding the town is hopeless or are they repositioning troops for the big offensive? If Russia’s victory there strengthen its resolve to fight off the coming offense? Those questions don’t come packaged with answers. Sumner also reported that a few US analysts are feeling gloomy about Ukraine ultimately being able to expel Russia. They give lots of reasons. They call for plans for what the US should do if that happens. They call for those plans to include doing about the same thing Prigozhin is calling for – freezing Russian gains and somewhere within Ukraine creating a DMZ. Sumner responded to all that by saying look at all Ukraine has accomplished in the last year. And as for that coming offensive let’s see what Ukraine can accomplish. And if Ukraine can’t drive Russia out in a few months...

What Ukraine deserves then is … more months. Months in which any suggestion that a solution less than full defeat of the Russian military is at all acceptable, must come from Ukraine. It is way too early to talk about handing over more of Ukraine to Putin and giving him the weakened, divided Ukraine he wanted a year ago. If the West slackens in supplying Ukraine, or pressures the government in Kyiv to look for a peace plan that they don’t want, we won’t just be failing the people who have done yeoman’s work in making the whole world a better place, we’ll be extending a lifeline to Putin, and to the whole concept of war for territorial gain.

Prigozhin said he is making his call so that there can be lasting peace. The problem with that statement is this is Russia we’re talking about. Give Putin any gains at all and in a few years he’ll be back for more. The gains and cease-fire in 2014, which gave him control of Dobass and Crimea, only prompted him to try for the rest in 2022. The world does not want to fight this war again in 2030. Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos quoted late night commentary. Here’s one:

President Biden has officially declared the covid national emergency to be over. I learned a lot during the pandemic. I learned that people who are most resistant to the government telling them what to do also happen to be the people who most need the government to tell them what to do, and they're ironically the same people who are most supportive of the government telling other people what to do. There were some positives. People helped each other. We found out who in our community cares about others. And maybe most importantly, we have enough toilet paper to last the rest of our lives. —Jimmy Kimmel

Artist David Hayward tweeted a cartoon of Jesus taking a selfie as he kisses a rainbow colored sheep. Hayward added:

This is a reminder to my LGBTQ+ friends: You deserve to be loved loudly.