"For people without solid structures of existential certainty, the predictable nature of the interlocking cosmic clocks of astrology can provide a scaffold..."

"... upon which to build meaning, purpose, and focus.... For me, the astrologers I spoke with for this article, and a majority of those I consider to be colleagues, responsible astrological prediction has several key factors: it is either helpful, compassionate, or (preferably) both, and it repeatedly re-emphasizes the inherent and unavoidable uncertainty of any prediction. By deliberately trying to be helpful and humble, the harms and hubris that are possible within astrological prediction are immediately minimized. There’s responsibility here, sure, but there’s also relief—by making room for what can be considered chance, we leave the door open for what some call fate."

From "How Do You Practice Responsible Astrology?/For millennia, rulers and ordinary people alike have used the method to predict the future. Translating celestial movements requires great care—and compassion" by Diana Rose Harper (Wired).

Pick a structure, any structure. It's better than chaos. Any meaning is better than meaninglessness. Is that the idea? 

But I don't believe that what passes for astrology these days has gone on "for millennia." My understanding is that it was trumped up to write an amusing story about baby Princess Margaret!

Do you believe Mike Pompeo lost 90 pounds in 6 months by working out in his home gym for half an hour a day and eating healthy foods?

I know I silently called bullshit when I read about it, so I laughed when I saw the editors of the Kansas City Star openly call bullshit:

We asked weight loss experts, and people who have lost large amounts of weight themselves, whether it’s possible to lose 90 pounds in six months simply by eating better and hitting a humble home gym for half an hour five or six times a week. Their response? Absolutely not, almost certainly not, and hahaha. ... 

“He would have to be on a massive starvation diet,” [said Micah LaCerte, a top personal trainer] probably taking in no carbs at all. And even then, “no way with only a half-hour workout. Ninety in six is unbelievable, especially for his age, unless he’s working out for hours every day. The numbers just don’t add up. Dude, just be honest. Mike, come on, man.”... 

While it may be theoretically possible, “it’s just not likely” without surgery, drugs or other extreme measures, says Al Rose, a longtime New York bodybuilder, trainer and coach... "His face is sunken and his skin doesn’t look good. He’s gone from one extreme to the other..." Rose said....

"For the fourth day in a row, Wisconsin on Friday recorded a record-breaking number of new COVID-19 cases driven by the highly contagious but milder omicron variant."

"The Wisconsin Department of Health Services reported 12,293 new confirmed cases, the highest single-day case count of the entire pandemic. The previous record was set Thursday when 11,547 new cases were reported.... Friday’s seven-day average was more than double what it was just two weeks ago, the health department said. At 7,637 cases, the average was also the highest of the pandemic. Deaths are lower than they were this time last year, with 12 new COVID-19 deaths reported Friday, according to the department. Last year, 32 new deaths were added on Jan. 7. But the seven-day average for COVID-19 deaths is comparable. Friday’s seven-day average was 20 deaths per day, the health department reported. Last year at this time that number was 22 deaths per day.... The number of ICU patients — 472 — was just shy of the pandemic all-time high of 475 reached on Thursday, according to the association."

The Wisconsin State Journal reports.

The strange case of Grichka and Igor Bogdanoff, who have now both died (of Covid).

 

Here's the NYT obituary for the twins. 

Jabbing with a sharp object — tolerated and not tolerated.

This is not about hyperdermic needles. Not another post about vaccines. This is about 2 movies I encountered last night, and the sharp objects involved — a surgical scalpel and a harpoon.

I began watching the 1950 movie — written and directed by Joseph Mankiewicz — "No Way Out." Sidney Poitier plays a young doctor, working in a prison ward, and Richard Widmark is his no-good racist patient. It's unfolding well enough. Here are some early scenes...

... but then a tray of medical instruments is left right next to racist Widmark so that it's easy for him to grab a scalpel. I had to turn it off. I wouldn't subject myself to the cheap suspense of waiting for Widmark to whip out the scalpel and stab Sidney Poitier!

I switched to a different movie, "Terror in a Texas Town." This is a 1958 western that's of interest because it was written by Dalton Trumbo during the blacklist days, and it stars Sterling Hayden and Sebastian Cabot. But it's an absurd refuge from that scalpel, because it's absolutely no secret — it's shown in part at the beginning of the film — that in the final showdown between hero and villain, the hero is armed with a harpoon! Watch the ending here:

I watched that entire movie. All that harpoon action. The harpoon was displayed and described again and again. It's so weird that I wouldn't put up with the scalpel business, but I watched an entire movie that was about one man harpooning another man. Unlike Sidney Poitier's character, the harpoonee deserved skewering.

Now, you're probably thinking that the harpooned villain was played by Sebastian Cabot, a fat actor who always played a fat man. He was a villain — an evil capitalist — isn't a cartoonish capitalist always fat? He's fat, and a harpoon is displayed over and over again, and Sterling Hayden is getting more and more focused and determined. Cabot must be his "whale."

If you watch the clip, you know — spoiler alert — that guess is wrong. In fact, Sebastian Cabot filmed all his scenes inside a single room — a hotel room. He didn't attend his own shootouts. He hired people, while he remained ensconced indoors with copious room service food and a beautiful secretary. Luxurious for the character and low-budget for the filmmakers.

The Ray Epps conspiracy theory story is powerfully viral — so let's see how it's handled by The New York Times.

I saw this, linked at Instapundit, here. My instinct is to compare what the NYT says about it, and there's a substantial discussion in a piece published yesterday: "The Next Big Lies: Jan. 6 Was No Big Deal, or a Left-Wing Plot/How revisionist histories of Jan. 6 picked up where the 'stop the steal' campaign left off, warping beliefs about what transpired at the Capitol." 

I'm reading this for the first time, so I'll excerpt and react as I go. There's a heading, "The Case of Ray Epps," but the first 2 paragraphs are general material about who is inclined to believe conspiracy theories about January 6th, so it's not as substantial as it looked at first glance. 

Next:

Adherents have built up characters to support their claims that antifa infiltrators or federal agents were the ones who whipped up the mob, in some instances doing so as events were unfolding in Washington. One is a man named Ray Epps, a Trump supporter who was captured on video the night of Jan. 5 urging his compatriots to “go into the Capitol” the next day.

Some in the crowd responded approvingly: “Let’s go!” rings out one reply.

“Peacefully,” Mr. Epps said, just before others began chanting “Fed, Fed, Fed!” at the man, who at age 60 stood out in the far-younger crowd.

There's no link to the video, so readers can't see how much "urging" there was or why there was enough to provoke some people — "others" — to call him out as a federal agent and to do it by chanting — as opposed to confronting him and arguing with him. The only reason I'm not linking to the video myself is that I didn't easily find something that wasn't either cut down or edited into commentary.

Mr. Epps, who lives in Queen Creek, Ariz., where he owns Rocking R Farms and the Knotty Barn, a wedding and event venue, according to PolitiFact, appears in another video taken the next day. He is seen yelling to a crowd: “OK, folks, spread the word! As soon as the president is done speaking, we go to the Capitol. The Capitol is this direction.”

No link for that video either.  

Both moments went largely unnoticed until June 17, when a poster on the online message board 4chan put up the video of Mr. Epps from Jan. 5, writing, “This Fed was caught on camera encouraging the crowd to raid the Capitol on the next day.”

Ah! Video this time. I watched the video (which I've seen before), and I get the sense that the man speaking, whoever he is, is insincere. By the way, the reaction of the people around him indicates that people did not come to the event with a plan to enter the Capitol. They seem as though they'd never even thought of the idea and consider it obviously stupid.

The anonymous poster added, “Who is this man?”

Another person then identified him as Mr. Epps. Soon after, the video and Mr. Epps’s name were posted in a Twitter thread, and a new conspiracy theory began its journey into the Republican mainstream.

The NYT has independently verified that the man is Ray Epps, right? I myself do not know.

Four months later, on Oct. 21, the video was being shown during a congressional hearing. There, Representative Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, used it to question Attorney General Merrick B. Garland about whether federal agents had acted as agitators on Jan. 6.

Within days, stories about Mr. Epps began appearing on websites like Revolver News... The Epps story gained further promotion on the far-right cable network One America News... and, far more widely, in [Tucker] Carlson’s “Patriot Purge.”

The NYT doesn't link to those places. I presume it has a policy about which sites get links and which don't. Readers can easily find those places if they want. Question whether it's good journalism to link to some but not others — to have, apparently, a black list (or a white list).

To date, no evidence has emerged linking Mr. Epps to the F.B.I. or any other government agency.

The absence of evidence is never going to convince people that there's no connection because one can easily make inferences from the lack of evidence. The connection, if any, would have been hidden. Perhaps it was hidden competently. Perhaps those who should have looked are in on the conspiracy.  

In fact, his known connections are decidedly anti-government: In 2011, Mr. Epps served as the president of the Arizona Oath Keepers, the largest chapter of the militia group whose members were among the mob that attacked the Capitol, though it is not clear if he remains a member of the group.

It's not clear? Find out! Let's hear more about that. How do we know he didn't infiltrate the group? The NYT set out to demonstrate that the Ray Epps story is a conspiracy theory, but it isn't doing what it needs to do to convince a close reader that there's nothing here. I realize it's hard to prove a negative, but if you want to squelch an actively spreading conspiracy theory you have to do much more than assure complacent readers that there's nothing to see here. You have to provide suspicious minds with reason to believe that you investigated to the point that if he were a government agent, you'd have figured it out.

Yet in the days leading up to Thursday’s anniversary, and on the anniversary itself, the speculation around Mr. Epps only seemed to snowball, amplified on countless social media posts, on Mr. Bannon’s podcast — part of a possibly “massive false flag operation,” as his website put it — and on Mr. Carlson’s prime-time show on Fox News on Wednesday and again on Thursday. “Is this guy going to be charged? Where is he?” Mr. Carlson asked. “It’s a legitimate question, why won’t they answer it?”

The section of the article on Ray Epps ends right there, with Carlson's questions, and no answer to them. I'd say at this point that I don't like referring to the story as a "conspiracy theory." I'm rewriting my post title. It's only a conspiracy theory if it's augmented with assertions of fact that are not backed up with evidence.

Here’s a post where you can write about whatever you want.

It will have to go with a photograph, because once again, it was too cold for a sunrise run.