* This is an archive of my own online blog and notes, with weekly entries collected by month.
* THE WEEK THAT WAS: The other shoe dropped this week, with the House voting to establish a select committee to investigate the 6 January Capitol riot. Only two Republicans voted in favor: Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois.
As defined, the committee has 13 members, including 8 Democrats and 5 Republicans. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi named seven Democrats: Pete Aguilar, Zoe Lofgren, Elaine Luria, Stephanie Murphy, Jamie Raskin, Adam Schiff, and Bennie Thompson -- while reserving the right to appoint a Republican to the eighth seat.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy denounced the committee as a sham, and warned that any House GOP who accepted Pelosi's appointment would lose seating on committee assignments. Kinzinger shot back: "Who gives a shit?" The GOP selection was, to no surprise, Liz Cheney -- giving the committee seven Democrats and six Republicans. McCarthy will, in principle, select the Republicans, though Pelosi holds veto power; clearly, she will not accept any GOP opposed to investigating the Capitol riot. What will happen if McCarthy won't make the appointments? I'm sure Pelosi already knows what to do in that case. Whatever it is, McCarthy won't like it.
If he doesn't like it, too bad for him. Pelosi invested a lot of effort trying to get an impartial independent commission set up, but it was shot down by the Senate GOP. Even before the vote, she was talking about setting up a select committee -- broadly hinting that if the GOP didn't want the commission, they'd get something they liked much less. It appears that Pelosi had little expectation of the commission getting through the Senate, since she was remarkably agreeable to concessions asked for by the GOP. Why not? It wasn't likely to happen anyway. Pelosi ending up just feeding them rope.
I was wondering who the chair would be, thinking Adam Schiff would be picked -- he prominently had led the charge on the first Trump impeachment trial, demonstrating a high level of skill as a prosecutor. It turned out that Bennie Thompson of Mississippi got the chair, since he was the primary architect of the ill-fated independent commission. I was thinking it might be fun to have Liz Cheney as the chair, but that didn't happen. We'll still have fun. Every time McCarthy spews out trash talk, Cheney will shove it right back down his throat. She'll enjoy it, and so will we. We'll also enjoy seeing who gets hit with subpoenas to testify to the committee, and how they'll react to it.
How long until the Thompson Committee reports? Pelosi says: "As long as it takes." That's the right answer; it's not drop-dead urgent, and they need to do the job right to make sure Trump and his enablers don't get away. Six months sounds reasonable, but it might take more.
* As the US economy sputters back to life, there's been anxiety over inflation and other economic challenges. An essay by Jordan Weissman of SLATE.com ("Seven Reasons To Be Extremely Optimistic About The Economy Right Now", 29 June 2021) suggested that there's no good cause to be too worried. True, there are problems:
QUOTE:
The US economy is in the middle of an awkward transition. Like a groggy bear roused from hibernation, the country is no longer dormant due to the pandemic, but isn't quite back in full form either. Millions remain unemployed, businesses are having trouble hiring, workers are still avoiding the office, and shortages of everything from lumber to computer chips have helped push up consumer prices. Economists are barking at one another about whether inflation could get out of control, and Republican governors are booting their residents off of unemployment benefits to make them look for work. Some have wondered if the Biden administration spent too much money, too soon in its relief effort, setting us up for a hard landing down the line.
END_QUOTE
Weissman then outlined seven reasons for confidence:
ONE: The USA is beating the pandemic. True, it's not over by any means, and the obstinate reluctance of Red states to get vaccinated is slowing the recovery. However, overall the trendline is down, and more down in Blue states. Cases are down or flat in 21 states and the District of Columbia, while deaths and hospitalizations are both still headed down nationally. The pandemic is effectively over in a handful of states. We haven't been in such good shape since March 2020, just before the pandemic first wave took off.
TWO: Inflation may have peaked. The Fed's Jerome Powell has suggested the inflation that has afflicted the USA over the past few months is on the way out -- though former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers insists there's chronic trouble ahead. In reality, the inflation has been spotty, localized in particular industries, and due to temporary problems: fuel prices are high because tanker companies can't find drivers. The trendline for most prices is falling.
THREE: Consumer spending is up and staying up, higher than it was in February 2020, and close to its pre-pandemic trendline. There are concerns that the spending is being driven by the government aid supplied to the pandemic -- but on the other hand, households saved up record amounts of money while they were stuck at home, while total wages and salaries are way up.
FOUR: There's absolutely no shortage of job openings. Business owners are having trouble finding workers, some blaming the government's generous employment benefits for the hiring shortage. Maybe so, but with so many job openings, those hunting for work have more options, and they're opting not to take jobs that have miserable pay levels. Big corporations like Amazon.com have jumped on the $15 USD minimum wage bandwagon, and are hiring like mad; business that are offering less can't keep up.
FIVE: Accordingly, service industries are raising pay. In that sector, wage growth has shot up by about 5 percent since January, which notably is less than the increase in the consumer price index. America's waiters, cooks, bartenders, and hotel maids are getting a welcome pay bump. Will that mean inflation? Probably somewhat -- but again, the big corporations have already bitten the $15 USD an hour bullet. Eating out may get more expensive, but service industry workers will have more to spend. It's hard to complain about a marginally pricier hamburger if that means workers are getting a liveable wage, and have money to spend themselves. To be sure, many will still complain.
SIX: Even with the threat of inflation, service industries are getting back on track. The service industries of course took a hit during the pandemic, while sales of durable goods shot up. Can't travel? Work on home improvements instead. Spending on durable goods is now trending down, while spending on services is trending up. Overall, the service industries have a bright outlook -- though it is a good question whether movie theaters, which were in decline before the pandemic, will ever really recover in the age of Netflix.
SEVEN: Business productivity is booming. By the end of the first quarter of 2021, output per hour was up 4.1% compared with a year earlier, the biggest increase in a decade. Part of the jump was due to the fact that, a year ago, workers in service industries, which are noted for low productivity, were laid off. However, now that the service industries are coming back on line, we'd expect productivity to fall again, which is the opposite of what's happening. The reality is that the pandemic drove a remarkable level of innovation -- not just among the trend-setters, but in the laggards as well.
Consider the revolution in Zoom videoconferencing and remote work. Not all businesses like that revolution, but many have found it efficient and entirely to their liking. Will this technology revolution end with the pandemic? Possibly, but don't bet on it -- and if it continues, it will provide a basis for an energetic economic run.
* The Pacific Northwest, where I grew up, got hit by an unprecedented heat wave this last week -- reaching temperatures of like 46 degrees Celsius (115 degrees Fahrenheit) in places, with road buckling and other heat damage. Climate change is here, and pounding at the door.
I ran across a Seattlite on Twitter who said he was "still on the fence" about climate change. Huh? I had to ask for clarification. He replied: "Well, maybe it's part of a natural cycle ..." Oh no, not this trash again. So where do you get your facts? Fox News? "Can't cure ignorance."
It hasn't been too hot in Colorado, but the pollen counts are up. One of the few good things about the pandemic is that it got me into wearing masks, which do a good job of stopping pollen. "You mean I could have spared myself decades of hacking and coughing just by wearing a mask?" The pandemic, though unfortunate, has had its useful lessons.
Oh, and one last thing -- concerning Scott Adams, the cartoonist behind the DILBERT comic strip, who is completely bonkers. He was the subject of a Twitter exchange:
QUOTE:
01 JUL 2020: Scott Adams / @ScottAdamsSays: If Biden is elected, there's a good chance you will be dead within the year.
01 JUL 2021: Declan Garvey / @declanpgarvey: We made it.
END_QUOTE
Garvey, it seems, is fond of dry, understated humor, as am I. I suspect he pinned that tweet for a year, just waiting for the opportunity to reply. Things have indeed been on the uptrend over the past year, though everyone's nerves are frayed. Sometimes, when I do my morning calisthenics, I honestly feel good for a little bit of time -- but then it fades, and I'm back with the dreary burden of a time and place where things are just not working right. Fortunately, the uptrend is likely to continue. I'm looking forward to the Thompson Committee report.
* As discussed by Rohit Prasad -- a senior researcher at Amazon's Alexa Artificial Intelligence lab -- in WIRED.com ("The Three Ways Alexa Is Going To Get Smarter In The Next Decade", 28 January 2021), Amazon sees its artificial intelligence technology as getting smarter in a number of specific ways over the next decade.
At present, as Prasad notes, machine learning is based on handing an AI system a set of data inputs, along with outputs that are linked by labels to the inputs. In principle, once the learning is sufficient, the AI system will then be able to take any new input and link it to a known output. This is laborious and time-consuming, with a push in AI system design to allow them to learn from much smaller datasets, one way being self-teaching via interaction with users.
Prasad's top concern is, of course, Amazon's Alexa AI assistant. Right now, Alexa can competently interpret user commands, such as: "Turn on the lights." -- and questions such as: "What is the route to the supermarket?" However, users want more than the mere ability to understand simple commands, thinking in terms of broader commands, such as: "Find the best smartphone cameras." -- and questions: "Any ideas for the weekend?"
The first approach towards a smarter Alexa is "semi-supervised learning". This is a form of "boostrapping", where a small amount of labeled data is combined with large amounts of unlabeled data, and used to teach an AI system. For example, in an Alexa effort for improving automatic speech recognition, a large "teacher" model was first trained on thousands of hours of labeled speech data. The teacher was then used to train a "student" model on millions of hours of unlabeled data.
The second approach is "self-supervised learning", where the AI learns by predicting one part of the input from what it knows about another. "Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT)" for natural-language processing, created by Google, for example, uses large unlabeled data sets to "pre-train" a general language model, which can then be optimized for a specific task using a small amount of labeled data.
The third, and arguably the most significant, approach will be AI self-learning from user feedback. If an AI assistant does something wrong, users may ask again, or rephrase their inquiry. The AI will apply the lesson in the future. In any case, AI assistants promise to become much smarter in the future.
[ED: The idea of AI "bootstrapping" has similarities to curve fitting: given a set of data points, an equation defining a curve can be obtained, with new data points falling around that curve. A bootstrapping AI similarly uses a relatively small data set to establish a framework that should correctly determine the outputs for new data, with the new data resulting in a more robust AI.
The problem with curve fitting is that it falls down for data points that don't really fit on the derived curve. A bootstrapping AI has much the same problem, having no way to match data points that are outside of its experience. It would be good for an AI to be able to notice data points that seem anomalous, and pass them up to a human for inspection.]
BACK_TO_TOP* THE WEEK THAT WAS: I take my morning walks down to the local shopping mall, and go past a cow pasture to the southwest of it. The owner had a put a small billboard with TRUMP labeled in big bold letters on it. It used to annoy me a bit, but then I realized: "Sooner or later, it will come down. I'll wait for the day."
Much to my surprise, the sign came down last week. I wasn't expecting that to happen until next year. As it turned out, a few days later I realized it had blown down -- but it was still significant that there was no rush to put it back up. It'll probably go back up, but then it will blow down again ... and eventually, won't go back up.
Maybe I'm reading too much into the matter, but I've seen another neighborhood TRUMP sign come down recently. I'm beginning to suspect that the MAGAbots are starting to tire of Trump's bogus act. Hey, Trump's been talking about being restored to the presidency in a few weeks -- I don't think so.
Allen Weisselberg, CEO of the Trump Organization, is now facing charges of tax fraud. The rumor is that the Trump kids are next, which is very plausible. Trump's niece Mary thinks they will rat on Daddy. House Representative Bennie Thompson's select committee on the Capitol Riot is setting itself up and getting ready to roll. It's unlikely the Thompson Committee will report its findings until early next year -- but Trump sits like a fat spider in the center of a network of enablers, and the committee is going to uncover a lot.
In the meantime, Trump has been promoting a class-action lawsuit against Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, claiming they are engaged in unlawful censorship -- of him, of course. The case has zero merit and will go nowhere, but it is unlikely that Trump expects it to. He clearly plans to get his loyal fans to fund the exercise, and will spend as little as possible on the lawsuit. Indeed, he may stretch the case out, just to keep the scam going.
* I was noticing that little strange things were happening on my Windows PC, and were happening increasingly often. On Thursday afternoon, I got a particular error message, and hunted it down via Google -- to find, to no surprise, that I had done an update that had gone wrong. When and how, I didn't know, but the only thing I could do was reset Windows.
That was effectively a re-installation. My first problem with getting Windows working again after the re-installation was restoring my personal environment variables, since I've got a ton of batch files that are dependent on environment variable definitions to work. There was also a question of copying the GnuWin tools programs, plus some other utilities and batch files, to the Windows directory, so they would run when I invoked them -- but that was easily done.
The reset process assured me that I would keep my settings and apps, but not really. I had to re-install most of my apps:
And then, after I was all set, I had to log in to all my online accounts again, set up file associations, re-install fonts, plus other nuisance housekeeping. I was certainly better off after getting my PC back to a stable state, but I wasn't happy about being put out of action for over a day. I'm writing it all down here, to make sure next time won't be as troublesome.
* As discussed in an article from CNN.com ("AI And Smart Traffic Lights Could Transform Your Commute" by Ana Moreno, 23 December 2020), work on smart traffic control systems is accelerating, with designers incorporating artificial intelligence technology in their systems.
Michael Ganser -- an engineer with Kapsch TrafficCom, an Austrian company that provides intelligent transportation systems -- says: "Building new roads or adding new lanes is not sustainable." Ganser believes the gridlock can be reduced by a combination of smart traffic lights, connected vehicles and congestion charges, all informed by AI.
In cities including Buenos Aires, Madrid, Mumbai, Kapsch TrafficCom has implemented a system where roadside sensors, traffic cameras, and vehicles collect data on things such as roadwork, accidents, and congestion. The information is fed into a central system, with a prediction model creating a comprehensive view of traffic conditions in real-time. The system then adjusts the timing of traffic light signals to optimize the flow of vehicles. In the future, drivers will be able to use an app to tell them the best routes to a destination, as well as the optimum driving speed.
Kapsch, along with other companies, has worked with cities such as Singapore to implement a variable congestion charge that makes it cheaper to travel outside peak times, encouraging drivers to avoid rush hour. Ganser says combining smart lights, connected vehicles, and congestion charges "leads to a traffic system that, under good conditions, allows almost jam-free roads." He estimates that combination could reduce congestion by around 75%, saving big cities billions of dollars every year.
Along with direct savings, there are also savings from improved productivity. American commuters waste about 99 hours a year on average, while British commuters similarly waste about 178 hours a year. Damon Wischik -- who researches traffic flow optimization using AI at Cambridge University in the UK -- is developing software to control traffic signals in Britain's cities. He likes to think of "queues of cars at traffic lights as blocks in Tetris," which can be re-routed using AI, adding: "If you treat cities like a computer game, it can learn to clear congestion."
Wischik believes that the solution involves more than technology, suggesting that drivers also need to alter their customs: "It all comes down to: can you change people's behavior, and can you make people willing to accept some slight change in behavior if it's imposed on them?" Of course, digital technologies are a big help as well, Ganser saying: "They are inexpensive and easy to scale. So if society wants a quick win that brings down carbon emissions and gets rid of congestion, this is the way to go."
BACK_TO_TOP* THE WEEK THAT WAS: Donald Trump remains at the center of US public attention, as demonstrated by new books on the last year of his presidency. CNN's Stephen Collinson examined them ("New Trump Revelations Underscore His Undimmed Danger", 15 July 2021), and found the picture they painted frightening. The book I ALONE CAN FIX IT -- by Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker -- focused in part on Army General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff, who was so appalled by Trump's refusal to concede defeat that Milley feared Trump might attempt a coup.
Milley told his deputies: "They may try, but they're not going to fucking succeed. ... You can't do this without the military. You can't do this without the CIA and the FBI. We're the guys with the guns."
Trump did try, inciting a mob to overrun the Capitol Building, though it accomplished nothing but to discredit him. However, since then, the Republican Party has been taking Trump's cue, and is trying to subvert state electoral systems. There is the question of whether Milley is on the level, or just trying to cover his historical tracks. Since the Joint Chiefs reacted angrily to Trump's attempts to get the military to take on urban unrest, it seems likely he is sincere and accurate.
Of course, much of what the books write about is no surprise:
QUOTE:
... Trump's behavior as depicted here is familiar from other new accounts of how a defeated President lashed out like a toppling dictator late last year. In those books, which back up contemporary reporting, including by CNN, Trump comes across as delusional, self-pitying, desperate, angry, and vindictive -- seeking to save his political skin while ignoring the democratic will of voters, all while negligently refusing to deal with the real emergency: the murderous and worsening coronavirus pandemic that would claim its 400,000th victim before he left office in January.
END_QUOTE
The books highlight that there were parts of the government, particularly the military, that Trump had failed to place under his control. Leonnig and Rucker found out that the Joint Chiefs discussed a plan to resign, one-by-one, rather than carry out orders from Trump that they judged to be illegal, dangerous, or foolish. Milley feared that Trump would fire FBI Director Christopher Wray and CIA Director Gina Haspel in order to strengthen his control over the intelligence services. That didn't happen, but there was a precedent -- when Trump fired (former) FBI Director James Comey, Trump actually publicly announced Comey was fired because of the Russia investigation. If Trump had been re-elected, he would have installed his stooges all through the government, and then would be able to do anything he wanted. [ED: Trump came back four years later and purged the government, imposing a reign of chaos.]
In parallel news, the British GUARDIAN newspaper reported on documents supposedly leaked from the Russian government that outlined the Kremlin's plans to install Trump as US president in 2016 -- the documents saying that Trump was an "impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual who suffers from an inferiority complex". The documents referred to compromising materials or "kompromat" that the Russians had on Trump.
The GUARDIAN article was interesting, but it wasn't credible. Nothing gets leaked from the Kremlin unless the Russians want it leaked, and then they deny it -- meaning there's no way to know if it was really leaked or not. The most that could be said about it was that it was not a revelation, simply saying things that anyone with sense effectively already knew. The same could be said about the new books on Trump. It was good to know specifics, and also to get a reminder: the USA is not out of the woods yet. Trump and the Republicans are in a weak position that's continuing to degrade, but they can still raise a lot of hell.
* I got to playing games on my Amazon Fire TV Cube, using a bluetooth game controller. The Cube is an Android computer, and it can run Android games -- but it's dodgy trying to download games to the Cube from anywhere but Amazon.com, and their game app selection is limited. I then got to wondering if I could just run a web browser in the Cube and play HTML 5 games instead. They're usually simple games that don't take a long time to play, which is what I want, not having a lot of time to spare for games. There's literally thousands of HTML 5 games out there.
The Cube has a Silk web browser, but trying to run HTML 5 games with it just didn't work. That failing, I thought I could a browser on my old XBOX 360 / Kinect, hooked up to the alternate HDMI port on my TV set. It's a Windows PC, and I could in principle download Internet Explorer to run on it. However, in practice I got a cryptic error message when I tried. I looked it up, and found out it meant: GAMEBOX IS TOO OLD NO LONGER SUPPORTED! Well, why didn't you just tell me that?
I wondered if I should get a new gamebox instead, but figured that was expensive and didn't really meet my needs. Why would I need a zippy game machine to run HTML 5 games? I finally concluded that I should get a little cheap "brick" PC, hook it up to my TV HDMI, and run a web browser on that. I accordingly bought a really cheap BMAX PC from Amazon for about $145 USD. It had a dual-core processor, base clock speed of 1.6 GHz. I figured there wasn't a PC I could buy these days that couldn't keep up with HTML 5 games.
I got the BMAX PC, and set it up. The first hangup was that, when I initially booted, I tried to use a wireless keyboard; that doesn't work, Windows didn't recognize the wireless USB dongle, so I plugged in a USB keyboard instead. Second problem was some confusion over logins, a clash between my desktop and my new little game PC.
That done, I struggled to run games on it. Struggle was the right word, since to my surprise, the PC was too sluggish to do the job. Fortunately, it died on me just before the return window closed, so I sent it back and got a refund. I bought a CHUWI brick PC that had a dual CPU running at 3.2 GHz, and an Intel Iris graphics coprocessor. I got it, and it was much more satisfactory -- indeed, the CHUWI PC was defined as a game machine. The end result was that I spent about as much as I would had I bought a Nintendo or such, but it was still better tuned to my needs.
In the meantime, I had been considering other issues in getting the game PC. I'd only wanted to run HTML 5 games, but then I remembered: "Duh, of course there are plenty of games that run on Windows." I got into the Windows store online, to find that the pickings were sparse. Further poking around, however, revealed that I was missing something obvious: the PC gaming site named "Steam" that supports gaming on Windows and Mac PCs.
Duh again, I hadn't realized the -- obvious in hindsight -- fact that there's still plenty of gaming on desktop PCs, with Steam set up to serve that market. Steam meshed with another issue: I had assumed that my bluetooth game controller would normally work like a mouse under Windows, since it does on the Fire TV Cube. No, by default, Windows doesn't know about it. Games on a PC will only work with a controller if they've been designed to do so, otherwise only working with a mouse.
Fortunately, Steam includes a downloadable environment to control the gaming experience and access to a user game library, and it allows configuration of a bluetooth controller to act like a mouse. That led to the next problem, in that the controller joystick was too hysterically sensitive to be useful. Steam didn't seem to have any way to slow down the joystick -- but then I realized that, since the controller was emulating a mouse, I needed to configure the mouse settings via Windows. I set the speed to minimum, which was a bit too slow, but the next setting up was too fast.
Having got the CHUWI PC and the game controller working, I was flying on HTML 5 games, the performance being perfectly adequate. I decided to buy a Windows game to try that out, and selected DISNEYLAND ADVENTURES -- one reason being that it was cheap, only $20 USD. I also had liked playing it on my XBOX 360. It has an environment which involves running around a virtual Disneyland, which is only really fun for kids, but also has sets of "mini-games" standing in for rides. I got particularly fond of the SPACE MOUNTAIN, BUZZ LIGHTYEAR, and MATTERHORN BOBSLED mini-games.
It was slow downloading the game over a wi-fi connection, but no worries, I could let it download and go do other things for an hour or two. When I ran the game, after some initial fumblings, it ran just fine, no performance problems at all. I had played the game with the Kinect interactive scanner on my XBOX 360; I found playing it with the bluetooth controller to be more controllable and fun, though figuring out the control mappings was a bit of a chore. I'd discovered that I could use the Kinect scanner with the game PC if I bought an adapter, so I did -- but I decided not to bother. I stuck the scanner and adapter in a box and put it away, in case I decided to play with it later.
The big problem now for me is sorting through the thousands of games available to find ones I want to play. I can do that on my desktop. I vaguely recalled that it was possible to send a link over email from Firefox; I'd never done that, but a little investigation showed it was simple. I could send a link to my Gmail account, and read it using Firefox on the game PC. Windows 11 is coming out in the not-too-distant future, and it will support Android apps, so I think I will have all the access to games I could ever want.
Incidentally, a "Steam Deck" handheld game box has just been introduced, along the lines of a Nintendo Switch, but for running PC games. I've no interest in it right now -- but if I get more into gaming, maybe one of these years. PC gaming is not dead, not by a long shot.
BACK_TO_TOP* THE WEEK THAT WAS: Some weeks back, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi set up a committee under Member of House Benny Thompson of Mississippi to investigate the 6 January Capitol riot. She appointed six other Democrats to the committee, plus fiery Republican House Member Liz Cheney of Wyoming, and invited GOP Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to appoint five more Republicans.
After some weeks, McCarthy came up with his appointments -- the most noticeable being Jim Jordan of Ohio. Jordan has worked hard to obtain a reputation as loudmouthed, belligerent, ignorant, dishonest, and generally obnoxious; all he would do on the committee is try to subvert it. Another appointment was Jim Banks of Indiana, who is not as notorious as Jordan, but made it clear he was cut from the same cloth with an announcement in response to the appointment:
QUOTE:
I have accepted Leader McCarthy's appointment to this committee because we need leaders who will force the Democrats and the media to answer questions so far ignored. Among them, why was the Capitol unprepared and vulnerable to attack on January 6?
If Democrats were serious about investigating political violence, this committee would be studying not only the January 6 riot at the Capitol, but also the hundreds of violent political riots last summer when many more innocent Americans and law-enforcement officers were attacked. And of course, the committee would not overlook the Good Friday murder of USCP Officer Billy Evans that was perpetrated by a far-Left extremist.
Make no mistake, Nancy Pelosi created this committee solely to malign conservatives and to justify the Left's authoritarian agenda.
Even then, I will do everything possible to give the American people the facts about the lead up to January 6, the riot that day, and the responses from Capitol leadership and the Biden administration. I will not allow this committee to be turned into a forum for condemning millions of Americans because of their political beliefs.
END_QUOTE
Pelosi, who had veto power on the appointments, rejected both of them, announcing:
QUOTE:
With respect for the integrity of the investigation, with an insistence on the truth and with concern about statements made and actions taken by these Members, I must reject the recommendations of Representatives Banks and Jordan to the Select Committee.
END_QUOTE
One witness in Pelosi's office described the relevant conversation between Pelosi and McCarthy as a "wall of screaming". Another witness said more mildly that there were "raised voices". McCarthy publicly shot back:
QUOTE:
Denying the voices of members who have served in the military and law enforcement, as well as leaders of standing committees, has made it undeniable that this panel has lost all legitimacy and credibility and shows the Speaker is more interested in playing politics than seeking the truth. Unless Speaker Pelosi reverses course and seats all five Republican nominees, Republicans will not be party to their sham process.
END_QUOTE
Pelosi did not change her mind, with McCarthy yanking his nominations, and then adding that "we will run our own investigation," focusing on the Capitol's lack of preparedness for the riot -- to be blamed on Pelosi, of course -- and prevention of a future attack.
It was all very predictable. McCarthy could have had no doubt that Jim Jordan would be rejected; there was never any serious intent to support the investigation. Pelosi could have bet on the outcome, and she immediately moved on to an alternate play -- first reaching out to Republican House Member Adam Kinzinger to the committee and then, it appears, casting a net for retired GOP House Members. At a press conference, Pelosi brushed off questions about McCarthy, saying: "I'm not talking about him. Let's not waste each other's time." She then said:
QUOTE:
This is deadly serious. It's about our Constitution, our country. It's about an assault on the Capitol that's being mischaracterized for some reason at the expense, at the expense of finding the truth for the American people. It is my responsibility as Speaker of the House to make sure we get to the truth on this, and we will not let their antics stand in the way of that.
END_QUOTE
Liz Cheney, her demeanor like thunderclouds while speaking from the steps of the Capitol Building, also fired back at McCarthy:
QUOTE:
I think that any person who would be third in line to the presidency must demonstrate a commitment to the constitution and a commitment to the rule of law. And Minority Leader McCarthy has not done that.
At every opportunity, the Minority leader has attempted to prevent the American people from understanding what happened to block this investigation. Today the speaker objected to two Republican members, she accepted three others, she objected to two, one of whom may well be a material witness to events that led to that day, that led to January 6, the other who disqualified himself by his comments in particular over the last 24 hours demonstrating that he is not taking this seriously, he is not dealing with the facts of this investigation, but rather viewed it as a political platform.
This investigation must go forward. The idea that anybody would be playing politics with an attack on the United States Capitol is despicable and is disgraceful.
END_QUOTE
This is only the beginning: every time McCarthy spouts off, Cheney will immediately shove it right back down his throat. It will be interesting to see how long he will persist in this game.
It will also be interesting to see how McCarthy's "Junior Woodchuck Capitol Riot Whitewash Committee" will fare -- not well, I suspect probably comically. [ED: As of November 2021, not a peep about it.] Incidentally, one Republican Member of the House -- James Comer of Kentucky -- told a reporter, in response to the ruckus, just what needed to be done about the 1-06 investigation:
QUOTE:
The best thing to do, in my opinion, is to have an independent commission that we know who's going to be on it. It doesn't need to be political people.
END_QUOTE
Of course, that is precisely what Nancy Pelosi tried to set up, and the GOP refused to go along. Indeed, Comer voted against it. It is impossible to figure out if Comer had some reason to talk such trash, or if he was so dense that he didn't realize it was trash.
As part of this exasperating dark comedy, JD Vance -- who wrote the best-seller HILLBILLY ELEGY, and who is after a Senate seat under the MAGA banner -- claimed that the "culture wars", so enjoyed by the MAGAs, were actually created by the "childless Left". With the tweet in reply:
QUOTE:
The INS home office / @INSHomeService: Um, [Pelosi's] grandkids outnumber most states' congressional delegations.
END_QUOTE
This with the photo of Pelosi being sworn in as Speaker, surrounded by her grandkids and the kids of friendly House members. I replied: "OK, that makes my blog posting for Monday." Joe Biden has made it clear that he regards Trump as a distraction, and is leaving that concern up to Pelosi. She seems more than agreeable, even enthusiastic. Trump is no match for the Dragon Queen.
* On another front, the Biden Administration is becoming increasingly frustrated with the continuation of the COVID-19 pandemic because people are failing or refusing to get vaccinated. The White House has put pressure on social media to clamp down on trolls spreading vaccine misinformation, and put enough pressure on Fox News to get them to back up a bit.
Alas, it's hard to see that much will change. The Right, thanks to Trump, has decided, somehow, that it serves their interests to undermine efforts to get the COVID-19 pandemic under control. As evidence, GOP Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky attacked the Bush Administration's pandemic guru, Dr. Anthony Fauci, while Fauci was speaking with Congress. The trolls have made much of the fact that the US provided some funds to the biomedical research lab in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the pandemic broke out -- in particular claiming that the US funded "gain of function" research on the SARS-CoV-2 virus to make it more dangerous. There was a hot exchange between Paul and Fauci:
QUOTE:
PAUL: Dr. Fauci, knowing that it is a crime to lie to Congress, do you wish to retract your statement of May 11th where you claim that the NIH never funded gain of function research in Wuhan?
FAUCI: Senator Paul, you do not know what you are talking about quite frankly, and I want to say that officially -- you do not know what you are talking about. This is a pattern that Senator Paul has been doing now at multiple hearings, based on no reality. He keeps talking about gain of function. This has been evaluated multiple times by qualified people to not fall under the gain of function definition. I have not lied before Congress, I have never lied, certainly not before Congress.
You are implying that what we did was responsible for the deaths of individuals. I totally resent that. And if anybody is lying here, senator, it is YOU!
END_QUOTE
Fauci goes Full Brooklyn when angry, and he was visibly angry. It appears the government and other responsible entities are going to take more severe measures to get people vaccinated, and soon.
As for myself, I'm feeling relaxed about the pandemic, since it's now at a very low level in Colorado. However, I've been thinking of taking a road trip to Seattle in September, but if things remain unsettled -- maybe not. Instead of ending on a discouraged note ... THE DAILY SHOW's Desi Lydic offered a "GOVERNMENT ANNOUNCEMENT" to reassure vaccine skeptics that there are, despite their fears, no microchips in the vaccines:
QUOTE:
We at the US government know that there's a lot of vaccine hesitancy. In fact, a recent poll shows that 20% of Americans believe that the government is using the COVID-19 vaccine to microchip the population. Which is why the government wants to assure you we are absolutely NOT microchipping the vaccine -- because, well, we don't need to.
Trust me, we already know everything we need to know about you. Big Tech lets us read your emails. Your phone tells us your location. Your toothbrush sends us a detailed map of your teeth. Every time your puppy licks you, it collects your DNA for our lab, and everyone you've ever kissed was a Federal agent.
So please, get the vaccine. It's safe, it's effective, and besides, we've already microchipped you through your vape pens. YEAH -- that was us.
END_QUOTE
* Incidentally, I was originally going to try to transcribe this video by ear, which is time-consuming. I got to thinking there had to be an app to transcribe text out of videos, and a little searching showed me there were a number of them out there.
However, I then got to wondering if there was a plugin for the Firefox web browser that would do the job. I found one immediately, titled simply TRANSCRIPT DOWNLOADER for YouTube videos, by one Raj Shekhar Dev. It works very simply, with a scrolling text window popping up to the right of the YouTube video. The text goes into the system Clipboard, and can be pasted into any editor.
Of course, the text needed formatting and spell checking, but I expected that much. This is yet another one of those little things that I wish I had thought of doing ten years ago.
* As discussed in an article from CNN.com ("Astronomers Find Galaxy Similar To Milky Way More Than 12 Billion Light-Years Away" by Ashley Strickland, 12 August 2020), astronomers used the Atacama Large Millimeter-submillimeter Array (ALMA) microwave telescopes in to find a more than 12 billion light-years away that looks very much like our own. That would mean we see the distant galaxy only 1.4 billion years after the creation of the Universe in the Big Bang.
Traditionally, it was believed that orderly spiral galaxies like the Milky Way are a relatively recent innovation in the Universe. The galaxy, named "SPT0418-47", has two features of our Galaxy, including its rotating spiral disk structure and a central bulge. A central bulge has never been seen before in such early galaxies.
SPT0418-47 was found through "gravitational lensing", the bending of light around a nearer galaxy. It was imaged as a ring around another galaxy, with computer power used to reconstruct the true image. Simona Vegetti -- of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany, one of the astronomers involved in the research -- says that the distant galaxy is very active, which is not consistent with its tidy structure:
QUOTE:
What we found was quite puzzling; despite forming stars at a high rate, and therefore being the site of highly energetic processes, SPT0418-47 is the most well-ordered galaxy disc ever observed in the early Universe. This result is quite unexpected and has important implications for how we think galaxies evolve.
END_QUOTE
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