Oh, Madge. You need a timeout. You don't work or play well with others. From The Hill:

A classified briefing for House lawmakers on the Chinese spy balloon turned tense on Thursday when Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) went after administration officials for waiting days before shooting down the surveillance device. “I had to wait in line the whole time. I was I think the second to last person, and I chewed them out just like the American people would’ve,” Greene told The Hill. “I tore ‘em to pieces.” One lawmaker who attended the briefing said the exchange between Greene and the officials included profanities. “When she got to ask questions,” the lawmaker recalled, “she was yelling out saying ‘bullshit,’ and, you know, ‘I don’t believe you. Just screaming and yelling, irrational in my estimation,” the lawmaker added.

Time to put your head down on your desk for a while. Or not.

“I said the president may be a Democrat but he’s still the president of the United States and they made him look like a fool and made him look weak the week before the State of the Union — I’ve said that publicly, too — by not shooting it down,” Greene recalled. “And I said there was nothing I heard there today that gave me any confidence in what they did.”

"They tried to give me some more excuses and I said, ‘I don’t want to hear more of your excuses,’” Greene said when asked about how others in the room reacted to her time at the microphone. “He said, ‘well it’s a matter of opinion.’ I said ‘no, you’re nothing but excuses and it’s wrong and I’m just telling you, this is how the American people see it and it’s a serious problem.’”

Speaking as one American Person, I want it on the record that Marge doesn't rant like a third-rate radio host on my behalf. I may not be alone here, but tragically, she can probably say the same thing.

Meanwhile, senatorial nuisance Josh Hawley has swung back into action making as many lives miserable as possible. Also from The Hill:

“Starting immediately, your institutions must take steps to preserve all records, written and electronic, regarding gender-related treatments performed on minors since the opening of the Center,” Hawley wrote in a letter to Washington University in St. Louis Chancellor Andrew D. Martin, St. Louis Children’s Hospital President Trish M. Lollo, and Christopher Lewis and Sarah Garwood, the co-directors of the hospital’s transgender center. “Additional oversight inquiries and outreach will follow.”

And in case the effect isn't chilling enough, Hawley's after the support systems, too.

Hawley’s office is also requesting the number and percentage of minors treated at the Washington University Pediatric Transgender Center that have de-transitioned, or come to identify as their sex assigned at birth, and any sources of funding — federal and non-federal — the center receives for “gender-related treatments.” Hawley’s office has also instructed Martin and hospital leadership to name all individuals and entities — including but not limited to parents, schools, psychologists and therapists — to which the center has provided “training, funding or any other assistance.”

Here's a tip for the parents: If Hawley comes for you, just brandish a can of bear spray or wave a Confederate flag. Always works.

There was a fascinating report put out this week by Brookings about the amount of poison that was launched through podcasts in the days leading up to the January 6 insurrection. You'll never guess who the leading distiller was. From The New York Times:

In a study released on Thursday by the Brookings Institution, Mr. Bannon’s show was crowned the top peddler of false, misleading and unsubstantiated statements among political podcasts. Researchers at Brookings downloaded and transcribed 36,603 podcast episodes from 79 political talk shows that had been released before Jan. 22, 2022. When researchers compared the shows’ transcripts against a list of keywords and common falsehoods identified by fact checkers, they found that nearly 20 percent of Mr. Bannon’s “War Room” episodes contained a false, misleading or unsubstantiated statement, more than shows by other conservatives like Glenn Beck and Charlie Kirk. Overall, about 70 percent of the podcasts reviewed had shared at least one false or misleading claim, the researchers found. Conservative podcasters were 11 times as likely as liberal podcasters to share a claim that fact checkers could refute.

The extent of the conservative media network is like that massive fungus in Michigan that has spread itself over hundreds of acres. The Brookings report is one of those clumps from the mother fungus that pop up on the forest floor. I'm not sure we can ever dig it out completely.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "We Outside" (Flagboy Giz): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathé Archives: Here, from 1966, is the German National Democratic Party descending into chaos. Gott in Himmel! Dems in disarray! The National Democrats were a radically rightwing party, and this particular hooley took place in a beer hall. In Munich. History, while so cool, occasionally is a bit too on the nose.

I am more intrigued than usual by this Super Bowl. There's a chance for a genuine offensive fireworks display. At least for a while. But Philadelphia's offensive line is too talented and too strong. I can't see the Kansas City defense standing up for an entire game. I make it the Eagles by about 38-24, with a late rushing touchdown to make the margin fat.

Hey, we shot down something else! From the AP:

It was the second time in a week U.S. officials had downed some type of flying object over the U.S. On Saturday fighter jets shot down a suspected Chinese spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina. White House officials drew major differences between the two episodes. Kirby said it wasn't yet known who owned the object, and he did not say that it was a balloon. Officials also couldn't say if there was any surveillance equipment on it. He also didn't know yet where it came from or what its purpose was.

Let the wild and wooly speculation begin! Check out what's happening around Orion these days.

Print Collector//Getty Images

Said her own name in the mirror too many times.

Discovery Corner: There are cold cases, and then there are cold cases. From France24:

An international team of codebreakers said Wednesday they have found and deciphered the long lost secret letters of 16th-century monarch Mary, Queen of Scots, one of the most argued-over figures in British history. The long-rumoured missing letters, which were found mislabelled in the digital archive of a French library, were hailed by excited historians as the most significant discovery about the Scottish queen in a century. Mary Stuart, a Catholic, wrote the coded letters from 1578 to 1584 while she was imprisoned in England due to the perceived threat she posed to her Protestant cousin Queen Elizabeth I. Mary was beheaded in 1587 after being found guilty of plotting to assassinate Elizabeth I, marking the end of a dramatic life since portrayed in numerous movies and books.

And the culprit is revealed!

First, the codebreakers realised the text was not in Italian, but French. It also used feminine forms, indicating a woman. Phrases like "my liberty" and "my son" suggested it was an imprisoned mother. Then came the breakthrough word: "Walsingham". Francis Walsingham was Elizabeth I's principal secretary and "spymaster". Some historians believe it was Walsingham who later "entrapped" Mary in 1586 into supporting the foiled Babington Plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth I, Lasry said. Eight of the 57 letters found by the codebreakers were already in Britain's archives because Walsingham had a spy in the French embassy from mid-1583, Lasry said.

Zut alors! Look what we found!

Thing I learned this week: In 1914, when Kerry beat Waterford (because of course they did) for the All Ireland football title, the referee for the game was Harry Boland, who was a revolutionary leader and confidante of Michael Collins until they split over the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which occasioned a civil war in which both men were killed.

Hey, ScienceNews. Is it a good day for dinosaur news? It's always a good day for dinosaur news!

Now, a look at the fossilized feet of one nonavian dinosaur suggests that it may have hunted on the wing, like some hawks today. The crow-sized Microraptor had toe pads very similar to those of modern raptors that can hunt in the air, researchers report December 20 in Nature Communications. That means the feathered, four-winged dinosaur probably used its feet to catch flying prey too, paleobiologist Michael Pittman of the Chinese University of Hong Kong and colleagues say. Other researchers caution that toe pads alone aren’t enough to declare Microraptor an aerial hunter. But if the claim holds up, such a hunting style would reinforce a debated hypothesis that powered flight evolved multiple times among dinosaurs, a feat once attributed solely to birds. Toe pads are bundles of scale-covered flesh on the undersides of dinosaur feet, similar to “toe beans” on dogs and cats. Because the pads are points where the living animal interacted with surfaces, toe pads give paleontologists a “sense of where the rubber meets the road,” says Alexander Dececchi, a paleontologist at Mount Marty University in Yankton, S.D., who was not involved in the new study.

Killer crows! Somebody call American International about a deal. They lived then to make Saturday matinees happy now.

I'll be back on Monday as we embark on another week of committee clown-shows in the House. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line. Wear the damn mask. Get the damn shots, especially the damn boosters. And spare a moment for the people of Ukraine, and the people of the earthquake zone in Turkey and Syria.

Related Story

Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. 

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7pr%2FQrqCrnV6YvK57zZ6urGWgpLmqwMicqmion6G2tbXCrGaabGJtf3qCmG9mppmin7yztcRmq5qxnKS%2FbrPRnpynZaOlxm6uwKWjqKeeZA%3D%3D