It's Bad to Elect Authoritarian Lunatics as President

Here’s some more interesting stuff it would have been nice to know at the time. From the New York Times:

The day before a mob of President Donald J. Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff called Mr. Pence’s lead Secret Service agent to his West Wing office. The chief of staff, Marc Short, had a message for the agent, Tim Giebels: The president was going to turn publicly against the vice president, and there could be a security risk to Mr. Pence because of it.

The stark warning — the only time Mr. Short flagged a security concern during his tenure as Mr. Pence’s top aide — was uncovered recently during research by this reporter for an upcoming book, “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America,” to be published in October.

Mr. Short did not know what form such a security risk might take, according to people familiar with the events. But after days of intensifying pressure from Mr. Trump on Mr. Pence to take the extraordinary step of intervening in the certification of the Electoral College count to forestall Mr. Trump’s defeat, Mr. Short seemed to have good reason for concern.

It is bad to elect authoritarian lunatics to be president. We have proof now.

Mr. Trump tweeted on the morning of Jan. 5 that Mr. Pence could reject electors. He had tried to persuade some of his informal advisers outside the White House to go to the Naval Observatory, the vice president’s official residence, to seek an audience to pressure Mr. Pence. That day, Mr. Trump spoke with Mr. Pence again, pressing him to do what the vice president said he could not.

It was that day that Mr. Short called Mr. Giebels to his office.

Compared to these guys, Andrew Jackson and John C. Calhoun were two of the Osmonds. And Jackson once said of his vice president, “John Calhoun, if you secede from my nation I will secede your head from the rest of your body.” That also wouldn’t have been a peaceful transfer of power.

Amid the rising tension, Mr. Short reached out between Christmas and New Year’s Day to Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, asking how he could defuse what was becoming an untenable clash between the Pence and Trump camps. Mr. Kushner deflected the outreach, saying he was wrapped up in negotiations in the Middle East.

Then again, Jackson and Calhoun might have been genocidal slave-drivers, but nobody could say they were feckless weasels.

Hey, we got some good news from NASA via the brand-new Webb space telescope. Although we may have to work with NASA to come up with a common vocabulary. From SciTechDaily:

Imagine if Earth were much, much closer to the Sun. So close that an entire year would only last a few hours. So close that gravity has locked one hemisphere in permanent searing daylight and the other in eternal darkness. So close that the oceans boil away, rocks begin to melt, and the clouds rain lava. While nothing like this exists in our own solar system, planets like this—rocky, roughly Earth-sized, extremely hot, and close to their stars—are not uncommon in the Milky Way galaxy…

...Included in the investigations planned for the first year are studies of two hot exoplanets classified as “super-Earths” for their size and rocky composition: the lava-covered 55 Cancri e and the airless LHS 3844 b. Scientists will train Webb’s high-precision spectrographs on these planets with a view to understanding the geologic diversity of planets across the galaxy, as well as the evolution of rocky planets like Earth.

I’m sorry but I don’t think there’s anything “super” about a “Super Earth” on which it rains hot lava and where the rocks melt. Mega Mercury, maybe. Mustafar System, perhaps.

The Webb is hard at work. NASA Getty Images

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: “Change My Ways” (Honey Island Swamp Band): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here, from 1963, are some stunt drivers at the Florida State Fair. (Florida. Boy, I dunno.) I’d like to point how the clown there really earned his money. History is so cool.

There’s some fine TV out there right now. The Offer, the series about the making of The Godfather, is right in a sweet spot between being a guilty pleasure and being a prestige project. David Simon’s We Own The City, the true story of the baroque corruption of elements of the Baltimore Police Department, a scandal we followed at the shebeen thanks to the terrific reporting in the Baltimore Sun, was another demonstration of the Simon team’s great gift for casting. Every actor was pitch-perfect. The brooding mood of Obi-Wan Kenobi is enormously compelling, and Star Trek: Brave New Worlds may be the best production out of that franchise since Wrath of Khan. And bringing back the lizardy Gorn as a primary villain is an interesting choice.

Is it a good day for dinosaur news, phys.org? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news!

The claws of the new species of therinizosaur, Paralitherizinosaurus japonicus (reaper reptile by the sea from Japan), were compared with claws from many other therizinosaur species. Analysis of the data placed P. japonicus among the derived therizinosaurs based on four shared, derived characters. An analysis of the morphology of the claws, including their length and shape of the base of the claws indicate that the claws of basal therizinosaurs are generalized and not for specific use, while the claws of derived therizinosaurs were specialized to hook and pull vegetation to the mouth for grazing.

How great is this? Even the vegetarian dinos were scary beasts with weed-whacker claws. They grazed with their own personal scythes. That’s the way to live then to make us happy now, and also to clear some brush, too.

I’m off to DC next week to sit in on the January 6 hearings. This should be quite a show. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line, wear the damn masks, get the damn shots, especially the damn boosters, and spare a moment for the people of Ukraine.

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