Being mainstream hurts you, being extreme helps you

The computer I have is now eight years old. I think it was at that time I also bought an external hard drive. Part of the reason (if I remember right) was to help me transfer files from the old computer to the new. Another part was I could do backups on the external drive so if the house was in danger I could (theoretically) grab the external drive on the way out the door. Thankfully I haven’t needed to test that premise. A couple weeks ago I downloaded a backup program, mostly for the incremental backups it provides. I did a full backup of files I keep on both the internal and external drives. This took about three hours. Three weeks later I did an incremental. Then I decided it was time to copy those backup files onto my thumb drive. That’s even easier to take with me when the house is threatened. That’s when I encountered a big problem – those backup files, big things of 4Gb each, produced disk read errors when read. In an hour of chat with the backup program’s company we determined that external drive is going bad. A downloaded program shows 8% of sectors are damaged. So I copied all the files I want to keep to the internal drive (do I really need to copy 8 years of backups?). I bought another external drive. The old one had about 300Gb of usable space and (with all those old backups) I used a bit over ¾ of it. I think the smallest drive now available is 1Tb – one terrabyte or 1,000Gb and about three times what I have now. My nephew asked me to send a lot of files – too much data to ship across the internet. I thought an 8Gb thumb drive would be more than enough. The smallest available is 32Gb at the price of about 4Gb for a dollar. I better not get started on the tiny amount of memory in the computers I used in my first professional job as a computer programmer. I finished the book The Editor by Steven Rowley. I had enjoyed his book The Guncle so looked for other books he had written. And this is also a good one. I recommend it. Rowley’s novel is about James Smale, who wrote a novel, got it accepted for publication, and, as the story starts, meets his editor who will shepherd the book through to publication. The editor is an important character, what movies or theater would call a featured role, but not who the story is about. It is about James. A fun part of the book is the editor is – Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. The former First Lady was indeed a book editor after her second husband died. She didn’t need to work, but wanted to contribute, and loved books. One of her big problems with the job is everyone around her treated her like royalty, which meant she could be lonely. Back to James and the story of publishing his book. That book is a fictionalized version of his relationship with his mother. When James came out as gay his father had a big problem with it and told his wife the kid goes or I do. She put the father’s stuff on the lawn. She chose the son over the husband. But Jackie senses the end of the book suffers because James, in spite of his mother’s unwavering support, still has unresolved issues with her. Jackie says the book’s ending will come into focus when he deals with his issues with his mother. I was pleased this wasn’t another romance or rom-com. This isn’t about the awkwardness of James and Daniel meeting and falling in love. Their relationship is already well established, though there are a few bumps along the way. Joan McCarter of Daily Kos discussed the commission Biden put together shortly after he was nominated to recommend what he should do about the court system and the Supremes in particular. The commission as a whole, including its Federalist Society members, suggested a bunch of things but endorsed nothing. But since their report came out Biden hasn’t acted on even the suggestions. Which has led some commission members to say why did Biden bother forming their group? That’s especially true after the Court’s recent horrible rulings that were about power, not legal reasoning. Those ruling have prompted a couple commission members to change their stance. Yes, it is time to do something about the Supremes. Does Biden not recognize this Court is different, that they intend to dismantle democracy? Biden’s defenders say that nothing will get through this Senate so Biden shouldn’t waste his political capital. But disgust of the Supremes is now so high doing nothing could damage Democrats’ election chances. Hunter of Kos reported that a ballot referendum has been launched in Ohio. Its purpose is to prevent the state government from requiring vaccines. Not just the COVID vaccines. All vaccines. Welcome back, polio. To get on the ballot they need to collect 443,000 signatures. Might they do it? Well, this is the Republican Party in Ohio. If they do, it will go in the 2023 ballot. Hunter reminds us vaccine mandates have not been controversial for a long time. Until a couple years ago. There are lots of signs that Christian Nationalists would be delighted to turn America into a theocracy. metro50 of the Kos community says we tried it. Didn’t work. Other places have tried it too. Didn’t work there either. Back in the 1700s each colony had its own state religion. Anglicans in Virginia, Puritans in Massachusetts, Quakers in Pennsylvania, Baptists in Rhode Island, and so forth. After the Revolutionary War, when these separate colonies started to form a united country there was a lot of fighting between the religions of the colonies. The only way past that was to declare there is no state religion. As for another place where this was tried and failed, see Northern Ireland and its Troubles. Georgia Logothetis, in a pundit roundup for Kos, quoted a few sources discussing the fall of Boris Johnson. He’s the Prime Minister of Britain who just resigned, though hanging on until a successor is chosen. Though he survived a no confidence vote a while back, recently many of the other members of Parliament who ran the government resigned from their government jobs. The main question in many of these articles is why didn’t something like this happen in the US? Why did Republican members of Congress not confront the nasty guy? Why did they choose the nasty guy over the principle of democracy? It looks like Britain will right the ship of state. Will the US? Meteor Blades, writing the Earth Matters column for Kos, discussed the Kochtopus. Back in in 1904 Udo Keppler drew an octopus to characterize how Standard Oil poked its appendages into everything to control everything. That cartoon is now used to describe what Koch Industries, a huge oil and chemical conglomerate, have created since the 1970s in response to the Clean Air Act. The EPA has been their target since it was established. And, 50 years later, they might be close to getting rid of it. Blades wrote:

Making polluters clean up their own messes instead of making the bystanders and downwinders pick up the health, social, and environmental tab is anathema to a mess-maker who believes economic externalities are somebody else’s problem. And there is no bigger mess-maker than the fossil fuel industry. For the big government-hating Kochs, that made the EPA a special enemy. But certainly not their only one. ... The concentration of economic power in fewer hands was once of great concern to American leaders, including both Roosevelts who served in the White House. But these days that concentration has soared beyond the inequality levels of the Roaring Twenties and the pushback against the political clout of that concentration has remained, at best, sporadic and weak. ... David Koch is already gone. Charles Koch soon will be. But, as much lasting damage as these men have done, the fight is not about them, Kochism will survive without them just as Trumpism will survive without Trump. The fight is with a system that permits such men free roam to impose their anti-democratic and sometimes lethal obsessions on the nation.

Blades also quoted Neil McCulloch at The Conversation. High gas prices have caused a screeching reversal of many of the energy policies to reduce fossil fuels around the world. If we want to reduce the use of fossil fuels an effective way to do that is to keep them expensive. David Pepper tweeted a thread saying there are two separate battles going on in America. One side assumes democracy is intact, its political views are mainstream and popular, so it focuses on election outcomes. The goal is to get something done. This battle is fought at the federal level and is covered at the federal level. The other side recognizes that democracy can be subverted into minority rule. Its political views are of a minority and extreme. In a robust democracy with fair elections it would not succeed. Because of that their battle is against democracy (which they don’t hide). They believe democracy and freedom [their freedom to discriminate] are not compatible. Their battle is fought at statehouses. It is in statehouses where their big issues – abortions, guns, schools, climate, and more – are contested. It is statehouses that control democracy – who can vote, how district lines for themselves and Congress are drawn. Voter suppression and gerrymandering can lock a minority party into a legislature. Individual seats are never contested. They can pass the most extreme and toxic bills and stay in power.

So after a decade of Statehouses being rigged in this way, it turns out almost every incentive we assume leads to good public service is turned upside down: public outcomes don’t matter; being mainstream hurts you; being extreme helps you. Which leads to a downward spiral. But of course, since all those terrible behaviors would guarantee they’d lose in a real democracy, this new generation of statehouse “leaders” know that they must keep gerrymandering and attacking democracy in order to stay in power. So they do that non-stop, and fiercely. ... BOTTOM LINE: until the side on the left sees that it’s in a full-fledged battle for democracy itself, requiring it to engage in the fight on the front lines (states, statehouses) where democracy is shaped, everywhere, all the time, w plans & passion that match that reality that side is not going to win. Yes. We must win every federal seat too, because they are key to protecting democracy. But once you see the big picture I’ve laid out, you see what a disaster it is that for so long, we haven’t focused on much BUT those federal swing seats.

Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, quoted late night commentary.

Men have had all kinds of reactions to last week's abortion ruling. Ever since the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade urologists have seen a spike in vasectomies. I've never personally performed a vasectomy, but I'd like to try my very first one on Samuel Alito. —Jimmy Kimmel Live guest host Chelsea Handler Justice Stephen Breyer retired and Ketanji Brown Jackson was sworn in as the newest Supreme Court justice. Justice Jackson made history as the first Black woman and the first person to make people cheer for the Supreme Court in the past two weeks. —Jimmy Fallon

Mark Sumner of Kos has started a column about things he has been able to photograph in space using a new type of telescope. The user doesn’t aim it. Instead, the user describes what to look at and it aims itself, then takes a long exposure picture. The images that come out are good at showing objects the eye can’t see. Here’s a post with a photo of the North American Nebula with a discussion of it. That discussion included the story of William Herschel, who cataloged 2,000 nebula, including this one, in the late 1700s. He also discovered Uranus. Sumner also discussed William’s sister Caroline. Caroline had typhus as a child, so was barely over four foot high. She also lost vision in her left eye. Yet, she became William’s astronomical partner. When he died she continued their work.

In 1828, the Royal Astronomical Society presented Caroline with the Gold Medal for her lifetime of work. No other woman would receive the award until 1996. In 1835, she was one of the first two women inducted into the Royal Society. In 1847 the King of Prussia presented her with a Gold Medal for Science. When she died in 1848, at the age of 97, Caroline Hershel was one of the most famous women in the world.