Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

Another big news day, so another roundup.

(1) North Carolina’s Republican-controlled legislature manages to override its Democratic governor’s veto of a bill blocking medical treatment of children who identify as trans. And, as Legal Insurrection author Mike La Chance points out, the MSM covers this by saying the bill would ban “gender affirming care” for minors, which is an Orwellian euphemism.

The bill also protects women’s sports.

By the way, back in May a Democrat in the North Carolina House switched to the GOP, which gave Republicans a veto-proof majority in that body. They already had a veto-proof majority in the North Carolina Senate.

(2) One Georgia state representative has done this:

The same article at RedState mentions this, too:

Back in April, after Trump’s New York indictment, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer stated that he received two calls from Republican D.A.’s from Kentucky and Tennessee, both looking at ways to charge Joe Biden — and possibly other Biden family members — related to the ongoing investigation into family business dealings overseas.

(3) Rep Comer is requesting that NARA turn over some documents that are potentially extremely interesing:

House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) today is calling on the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to provide then-Vice President Joe Biden’s records regarding his duties as Vice President that overlapped with his son’s activities in Ukraine. Chairman Comer is requesting all unredacted documents and communications in which then-Vice President Joe Biden used a pseudonym; Hunter Biden, Eric Schwerin, or Devon Archer is copied; and all drafts of then-Vice President Biden’s speech delivered to the Ukrainian Rada in December 2015.

“Robert Peters, Robin Ware, and JRB Ware” appear to be among the pseudonyms used.

(4) Hawaiian Electric may be on the hook for failing to repair its aging power lines.

(5) Eighteen million views on YouTube and counting:

The left’s goals for Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Mike M” quotes me, and then wonders:

[Neo quote] I’ve said many times that the left wants Trump to win the nomination and wants to face him in the general.

[From Mike M] I think that theory is now obsolete? They want to destroy him and his supporters. If nothing else works, assassination will become the option. I really hope he has his own security.

Those things are not mutually exclusive, and I believe they are all goals of the left. There are a great many ways it could work, but here are some speculations for a possible chain of events.

(1) The majority of people on the right rally around Trump and he gains the GOP nomination. The believe him to have been a good president, and at this point an unfairly persecuted martyr. They also seem to believe that he can defeat Biden or any other Democratic nominee. I happen to think that is a huge error and that Trump would lose resoundingly in the general, but that’s irrelevant to the point of this post, which is to explore the left’s possible reasoning and plans for several contingencies.

Trump’s trials are timed so that it is unlikely that they will be concluded and Trump sentenced and imprisoned prior to the election. If I am correct about that and about the fact that Trump will be the GOP nominee but will lose the general, then the left – which I fear might get control of Congress in in the 2024 election as well as the presidency – would attempt, after the election, to imprison Trump and let him rot. Or let him be killed there.

And the imprisonments wouldn’t end with Trump. There would be others.

Or, the left’s plan might be somehow to try to break Trump psychologically either before or after the election he loses. Even Trump may have a breaking point, especially now that he’s older. Then the left would magnanimously let him go, once he’s come to love Big Brother a la Winston Smith at the conclusion of Nineteen Eighty Four. I don’t think this particular scenario is very likely, but I do believe it’s a possibility.

(2) But what if I’m wrong and Trump wins the 2024 election? Do you think he would be allowed to become president? I don’t think so.

I don’t think a Trump assassination would be in the cards – unless it’s by a free-lancer – although I would suggest nevertheless that Trump be careful about who prepares his food. But assassination would only allow some other Trump-friendly Republican, Trump’s VP, to become president. The left would consider that far from ideal and in fact unacceptable.

So something else would happen. Perhaps another coup attempt with a more sophisticated version of the Steele dossier, with the FBI and the DOJ cooperating once again to take down their enemy Trump. Chuck Schumer’s warning of January 4, 2021, once again comes into play:

Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,

Several other GOP candidates have talked about dismantling or greatly reforming those same agencies, and if elected, they would be targets too, of course.

(3) And in the unlikely event that Trump were to win and to somehow take office, the left will not cease in their attempts to take him down. I’ve said before and I’ll repeat here that this will be true for any non-RINO Republican president who might manage to be elected. They will lie about him, impeach him if they have the votes, and leak every bit of damaging information they can find.

[NOTE: I keep feeling I should apologize for the dark turn of many of my posts these days. I know that it may not be as bad as what I’m imagining – I certainly hope it isn’t as bad – but I call it like I see it and this is what I see at the moment.]

Where we’re headed regarding liberty – and half the population is just fine with it

The New Neo Posted on by

I saw this tweet highlighted on Instapundit today:

You saw it first in Idiocracy, that great work of prophetic vision:

The COVID lockdowns showed how compliant most people are, and accustomed the populations of the world to more and more governmental control, much of it quite capricious. Objections were labeled menaces to public health, a potent method of criticism.

And lately, I’ve noticed more and more of the people I know mentioning that they’d like a law passed against this thing or that thing, usually a rather minor pet peeve of theirs. Are they joking? Doesn’t sound like it. These are people who used to be – or used to portray themselves, but it seemed sincere back then – as free spirits, more or less on the libertarian side of things. Those days are gone. Now they have no trouble with petty and pervasive tyrannies as long as they are tyrannies that fit their own belief system and desires.

Mark Meadows files a motion to move the Georgia case to a federal court

The New Neo Posted on by

Mark Meadows is one of the defendants in the Georgia case against Trump. In case your memory needs refreshing, here’s some of Meadows’ history:

Mark Randall Meadows … is an American politician who served as the 29th White House chief of staff from 2020 to 2021. A member of the Republican Party, he also served as the U.S. representative for North Carolina’s 11th congressional district from 2013 to 2020. During his legislative tenure, Meadows chaired the Freedom Caucus from 2017 to 2019. He was considered one of Donald Trump’s closest allies in Congress before his appointment as chief of staff.[1]

A Tea Party Republican, Meadows was a founding member of the Freedom Caucus.

This is the recent move by Meadows’ legal team:

It’s just another way in which the current crop of leftist prosecutors, on their mission to stomp out Trump and anyone who would help him or advise him, misuse the law. They must figure that either the propaganda value of what they’re doing is worth the risk, or they really don’t think there’s a risk because they will get a friendly judge, or both.

They’re aiming to provoke another J6, only worse; plus some historical precedents

The New Neo Posted on by

J6 was simply a tremendous success for the left, in terms of both propaganda and golden opportunities for punitive lawfare against the right. Whether the demonstration/riot on J6 was serendipitous for the left, or whether it was encouraged or even orchestrated by the left through entrapment, they certainly took full advantage of it.

It seems pretty obvious to me that the left would like nothing better than another such incident, and one that features even more anger and violence from the right – and hopefully, firearms. That would give the left the license to really ratchet up both the propaganda and the anti-right vengeance.

The Reichstag Fire got the Nazis to the Enabling Act in short order, for example (translation of the name of the Act was, “Law to Remedy the Distress of People and Reich”). The timeline is of interest, as well: Hitler was appointed Chancellor in January of 1933, the fire was on February 27 of the same year, and the Enabling Act – essentially giving all power to Hitler and abolishing the Reichstag – was signed by March 23, 1933. In between, there was something called the Reichstag Fire Decree, which was issued just a day after the fire itself, when von Hindenburg was still at least nominally in charge:

The decree nullified many of the key civil liberties of German citizens. With Nazis in powerful positions in the German government, the decree was used as the legal basis for the imprisonment of anyone considered to be opponents of the Nazis, and to suppress publications not considered “friendly” to the Nazi cause. The decree is considered by historians as one of the key steps in the establishment of a one-party Nazi state in Germany.

Indeed. And it would be nice if more people in the US knew this history. I can pretty much assure you that many of those who capitalized on the J6 events are aware of the post-fire events in Germany in the 1930s.

And so at this point I fear a backlash of a more violent type from the right. What do I think should happen instead? I’m for a general strike, and have been for quite some time.

One of several ways in which I think that Trump’s judgment failed after the blow of the 2020 election outcome was that he encouraged the J6 rally and the march on the Capitol. No, I don’t think he was fomenting a riot or an insurrection rather than a peaceful demonstration. But he seemed unaware of the danger, unaware of the trap, and unaware of history. He played into the hands of the left – and they have made the most of that hand.

[NOTE: By the way, the Reichstag Fire analogy was obvious from the start as soon as J6 occurred. My first post making the analogy was this one on January 7, 2021, and I was hardly alone. A quote:

Some on the right are saying that the left will be using this like the Nazis used the Reichstag fire. If they mean “to stoke hatred against the right as well as to repress it further,” then I agree.

I made the Reichstag Fire analogy over and over when discussing J6, and it still seems appropriate.]

What has the GOP said about the Trump Georgia indictment? And what could the GOP do?

The New Neo Posted on by

First, we have commenter “Gregory Harper” declaring this:

This is not about standing with Trump, this is about standing for the rule of law and the Constitution of the United States. Unfortunately, there are too many Republicans who are so blinded by their dislike of Trump that they are willing to not only abandon any conservative principles that they once claimed to hold, but to abandon the very principles on which this country was founded.

Agreed.

Then commenter “Mike K” quoted Gregory Harper’s comment, and responded with this:

Yes. I have seen almost no response by the majority of Republicans in Congress.

I often see comments like Mike K’s, stating a perception that the GOP hasn’t said this or that or the other thing, and excoriating them for it. I, too, think every single Republican – and even most Democrats – should be speaking out forcefully against what’s happening, and although it no longer surprises me it continues to deeply disappoint and even anger me.

But my response to comments such as Mike K’s is usually this sort of thing: have you checked what the majority of Republicans in Congress have said? After all, there are 222 GOP House members and 49 GOP senators.

Obviously, my question is somewhat rhetorical, because it would take an awfully long time and a lot of work to check every Twitter feed, every GOP member of Congress’ web page, and videos on YouTube that might be relevant, and ascertain for oneself whether it’s the case that the majority of the GOP members of Congress had not responded at all.

In addition, it may be that some of them haven’t responded yet and plan to do so soon. But more importantly, not every single GOP member who does speak up is going to be spotlighted or prominently quoted. In fact, why would the MSM focus on their critiques of the indictment, especially if those critiques might be persuasive? Spoils the narrative. So there’s really no way to know how many people have spoken up, unless a person is willing to put in an enormous amount of time and effort.

But what I often do is to check some prominent GOP politicians who come to mind. For me, the first was Ted Cruz. Here’s what I found:

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas said Monday the timing of the latest indictment of former President Donald Trump by a Georgia grand jury is “nakedly political” and that it is another attempt of election interference.

“Of course, it is,” Cruz told Fox News when asked if the indictment is an effort to interfere with the 2024 election. “The timing is nakedly political. Every time more bad news comes out about Hunter Biden or Joe Biden, you can set a stopwatch within hours some clown goes in and indicts Donald Trump again.” …

… “It’s the same thing as Alvin Bragg, the wild George Soros partisan in New York. It’s the same thing as [Attorney General] Merrick Garland and [special counsel] Jack Smith. … What they want to do, they want a trial to attack Donald Trump; they’d like a trial in September or October of next year right before the election. The other people, I’m not going to speculate, the other nine. We’ll find out [this was before the names had been announced].

“Frankly, there were nine people who were unlucky enough to be standing somewhere in or around Donald Trump. Their target is political. This is not the rule of law. This is not enforcing the law fairly.”

Next up, Kevin McCarthy:

Marco Rubio:

Then I thought of Lindsey Graham – a sort of RINO who sometimes is sort of a Trump defender, and a search led me to this article entitled: “Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz lead Republican reaction to Trump’s fourth indictment: ‘I’m pissed,’ Sen Ted Cruz says in response to the indictment.” It’s interesting that it’s in a British paper. Some excerpts:

Mr Cruz (R – Texas), who led efforts to try and challenge the 2020 presidential election results, appeared on Sean Hannity’s Fox News programme decrying the indictment, before the release of any details.

“I’m pissed at these over and over and over again, if they’re indictments, it’ll be the fourth indictment of Donald Trump” Mr Cruz, who lost the Republican nomination for president to Mr Trump in 2016, said. “This is disgraceful. Our country’s over 200 years old. We’ve never once indicted a former president, or a candidate or a leading candidate for president and this is Joe Biden and this is the Democrats weaponizing the justice system because they’re afraid of the voters.”

Similarly, Sen Lindsey Graham (R – South Carolina) told Fox News how Mr Trump spent more on legal fees than he did on campaigning for president. Mr Graham had attempted to avoid testifying before Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s team as she probed into Mr Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia but ultimately testified in November of last year.

“The American people can decide whether they want him to be president or not,” he said. “This should be decided at the ballot box and not in a bunch of liberal jurisdictions trying to put the man in jail. They’re weaponising the law in this country. They’re trying to take Donald Trump down.”

Then the article quoted criticism of the indictment by Marjorie Taylor Greene, Kevin McCarthy, and Marsha Blackburn, as well as these members of Congress:

House Republican Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik called Ms Willis a “Far Left radical” district attorney who was weaponising her office.

“This blatant interference by the Far Left will not work,” she said. “President Trump will defeat these bogus charges and win back the White House in 2024.”

The X account for the Republican majority on the House Judiciary Committee, which Rep Jim Jordan (R-OH) leads, sent out a series of posts criticising the indictment.

I was surprised that even Chris Christie chimed in; I wasn’t expecting anything from him except “Goodie, goodie!” This actually is only marginally better than that:

Mr Christie explained that he believed there was no need for it after the federal indictment against Mr Trump that was handed down by Special Counsel Jack Smith’s Washington, DC grand jury investigation and argued Ms Willis was possibly driven by ego following her two-year probe at the state level.

Here are a few more:

“Another week, another sham indictment,” Rep. Eric Burlison, R-Mo., said. “This time it’s a radical prosecutor in Fulton County who wants nothing more than to stop President Trump from participating in the 2024 Presidential Election.” …

“Today’s indictment is just the latest political attack in the Democrats’ WITCH HUNT against President Trump,” [Jim] Jordan posted on X. “He did nothing wrong!”

As I expected, nothing from McConnell or Mitt Romney.

Then I got tired and stopped. But the point is that plenty of GOP members have spoken out, but the news doesn’t filter down to most of us very easily and we have to go searching for it. So it’s a bad idea to make any assumptions without doing some fact-checking of your own.

It’s also the case that all these angry words don’t mean much. What about action? This post is about Congress, and I’m not at all sure they can do much about a non-federal actor such as Willis. As we’ve discussed before, they could impeach Garland, but their margin in the House is paper thin and I’m not sure the impeachment effort would succeed. Up to this point, it hasn’t gotten very far. And of course, Garland would never be convicted in the Senate, so removal isn’t in the picture.

Leaving Congress aside for a moment, here’s a suggestion for what Republicans could try: Lawfare. In a previous discussion of that possibility, I was unable to think of a specific charge or venue where it was likely to work, but that article I just linked had some practical and specific suggestions. Some of them might work, and they involve very real violations rather than trumped-up (forgive the pun) charges.

Reciprocal lawfare of this type is probably necessary because the Democrats must be made to fear some sort of tit-for-tat consequences. But it must be done intelligently and in venues where it is likely to succeed.

[NOTE: “Mike K’s” remark was limited to GOP members of Congress, but along the way I happened across this article on the pool of GOP presidential candidates. Here’s an excerpt:

Ramaswamy went beyond attacking the Georgia prosecutors bringing the charges, suggesting he’d be willing to assist in the former president’s legal defense.

“As someone who’s running for President against Trump, I’d volunteer to write the amicus brief to the court myself: prosecutors should not be deciding U.S. presidential elections, and if they’re so overzealous that they commit constitutional violations, then the cases should be thrown out & they should be held accountable,” Ramaswamy wrote on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter.

On Tuesday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis denounced the indictment during a call with New England media outlets, promising to “end the weaponization of federal agencies like the DOJ and FBI.”

“I think it’s an example of this criminalization of politics,” DeSantis said. “I don’t think this is something that’s good for the country.”

More here on the further statements of DeSantis and others.]

Things fall apart: reflections on the Georgia indictment

The New Neo Posted on by

Now more than ever:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Late last night I read about the indictment of Trump in Georgia. You can read some of the details here as well as here. From the latter:

Former President Donald Trump orchestrated a sweeping criminal enterprise, committing more than a dozen felonies, as he tried and failed to overturn his defeat in Georgia’s 2020 election, according to an indictment handed up Monday by a Fulton County grand jury.

The indictment also lodged charges against 18 of Trump’s allies, who helped him spread false conspiracy theories and twist the arms of top state officials as he scrambled to cling to power.

Note the way that’s written. It’s a style with which we’ve become familiar over the past few years: the fraud accusations are “conspiracy theories” which were obvioulsy false, as though the idea that fraud may have occurred in such a close election – featuring many initial reports of fraud by election observers, and in which the new election rules meant that fraud could never definitively be proven or disproven – is some sort of obviously false act like stating that 2 plus 2 equals 5. We also know that Trump didn’t “cling to power.” When his legal machinations failed, he left office in the usual manner of presidents during a transition process.

The eighteen others who have been charged are Rudy Giuliani and Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, plus the following:

Also charged: state Sen. Shawn Still; attorneys John Eastman, Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis, Bob Cheeley, Ray Smith III and Kenneth Chesebro; former assistant U.S. attorney general Jeffrey Clark; former Coffee County GOP chairwoman Cathy Latham; Atlanta bail bondsman Scott Hall; former Coffee County elections director Misty Hampton; GOP strategist Michael Roman; publicist Trevian Kutti; Illinois pastor Stephen Cliffguard Lee; and Harrison Floyd, who briefly ran for a suburban Atlanta U.S. House seat before serving as director of Black Voices for Trump.

In other words, the people charged in the so-called conspiracy are Trump’s advisors, plus anyone in Georgia who had anything to do with Trump’s election results challenges, including many top GOP officials as well as the lawyers who believed they had some bona fide legal grounds to challenge the results. Perhaps one of the ideas behind charging so many is to get one or more of them to testify against Trump in exchange for leniency – and who knows? It just might work.

The word “lawfare” is appropriate for what’s going on now in Georgia. This has been done with the goal of obliterating Trump and his advisors, plus officials in the state who supported him, in order to serve notice that the Democrats now utterly control the legal process and there is no point in ever defying them again. Among other things, these charges certainly don’t increase anyone’s faith in the validity of the election results in Georgia in 2020, but that’s a side issue at this point.

This is also a big F-you to half of America. I feel that I’m on solid ground in saying that this sort of action against a former president would not have happened until the last few years – and of course it seems even more vindictive in light of the failure to legally pursue the Steele-dossier-FBI coup attempt on Trump, as well as the enormous evidence of Biden family corruption that includes Joe. That it’s happening to Trump now is another indication that the left feels itself to be not only in power at the moment but completely determined to remain in power indefinitely, and it sees its way clear towards accomplishing that goal. This is one of the major moves in the chess game the left has been playing. And I believe that they would welcome a backlash that involves armed resistance, because they are confident they can control that and crack down even harder, demonizing the right still further.

I haven’t seen any statements yet from Georgia’s Governor Kemp, who is a Republican. But he and Georgia’s Secretary of State Raffensperger – also a Republican – have never been Trump fans, and my guess is that they will not be on Trump’s side as the trial progresses. They may even be asked to testify against him, since an element of the charges involves Trump’s call with Raffensperger. And as far as the possibility of a pardon by Kemp goes – well, not that he’s interested in giving one, but in Georgia pardons are given by a board, and the person must have already served the sentence (among other requirements). That law could be changed by the legislature, however (and yes, the link is to Rachel Maddow’s blog, but that’s where I found the pardon information and I have no reason to doubt it’s legally correct).

I continue to believe that Trump will be the Republican nominee and that he will lose the general, and that these prosecutions have that goal as well as the desire to grind him into dust, to do the same to the people who advised and helped him, and to crow about it.

There are plenty of articles about the Georgia indictment. I’ll link to Turley’s, as well as this one at Legal Insurrection about Trump’s response, and this at Breitbart.

Last night I took a swing around the blogosphere and the MSM, reading comments here and there. What I saw is a great deal of vengeful celebrating from the left, and anger on the right. I’m both angry and very very sad, because I think that we’ve lost far more with these indictments than we ever lost because of any supposed crime of Trump’s.

Far, far, FAR more.

… somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

[NOTE: For details of Trump’s call with Raffensperger, here’s my main post on the subject. And in another post I wrote at the time (January 4, 2021), I said this:

Of course, there’s no reason to suppose it will end even if and when Trump leaves office. I have long thought that the left will be pursuing him and his family as long as he and they live, and that the main form this pursuit will take is an enduring attempt to convict him (or them) of something illegal.

Indeed.]

Tyrants don’t care about their people

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m up to episode number five of Jordan Peterson’s series on the Book of Exodus. It’s on YouTube, and it’s a fascinating in-depth analysis of the Biblical story in tremendous detail, along with philosophical and even political ramifications. I haven’t finished that particular video yet, but this part stood out when I heard it. It’s a discussion of the orientation of tyrants towards the people in their own countries, and it rang true to me. Here’s the clip:

And then later I read this observation from commenter “JJ” on the post about Biden’s non-remarks concerning the fire victims in Maui:

I’s really hard to believe that Biden isn’t trying to make some political capital for himself by leading the charge to get help to Maui. He doesn’t care. Not enough Democrat votes to worry about in Maui.

The I realized that they want this to be really bad. They can claim that climate change is responsible, and it demonstrates that climate change is an existential crisis. Cunning and despicable.

The Democrats really are the deplorables.
No compassion, no morals, and only a lust for power. When will the moderates and low information voters wake up?

When the power of corrupt men and women becomes entrenched, they can take their masks off and end the pretense of caring. In Joe Biden’s case, it’s probably helped along by his cognitive issues. But for Joe it’s not just an effect of creeping senility, and maybe not even primarily that.

My reading of Biden is that his motivation to become a politician has always been to get power and perks. Politics is pretty much the only adult life he’s ever known, and even in his early 20s he said he intended to become president, but that desire didn’t seem to have been in the service of any special goal involving the US and its destiny. That’s why he’s the perfect vessel for the leftists who control the Democratic Party these days.

But say what you will about the flaws of Trump, I don’t think it’s ever been in doubt that he cares deeply about America and Americans. Yes, he’s also a narcissist, but he was living a great (and narcissistic) adult life for a long long time before entering politics. He didn’t have to do run for the presidency to become famous or to earn tons of money or to marry a beautiful woman; he already had all of that and more. He became a presidential candidate because he felt America and Americans were sinking, and he thought he could make things better – could make America great again.

The worm turns

The New Neo Posted on by

This is straight out of science fiction:

Scientists have revived a worm that was frozen 46,000 years ago — at a time when woolly mammoths, sabre-toothed tigers and giant elks still roamed the Earth.

The roundworm, of a previously unknown species, survived 40 meters (131.2 feet) below the surface in the Siberian permafrost in a dormant state known as cryptobiosis, according to Teymuras Kurzchalia, professor emeritus at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden and one of the scientists involved in the research …

Five years ago, scientists from the Institute of Physicochemical and Biological Problems in Soil Science in Russia found two roundworm species in the Siberian permafrost.

One of the researchers, Anastasia Shatilovich, revived two of the worms at the institute by simply rehydrating them with water, before taking around 100 worms to labs in Germany for further analysis, transporting them in her pocket.

After thawing the worms, the scientists used radiocarbon analysis of the plant material in the sample to establish that the deposits had not been thawed since between 45,839 and 47,769 years ago.

This also reminds me of a recurrent nightmare I used to have years ago. In the dream, I would open a drawer and find some sort of desiccated creature there, all shriveled up and almost recognizable. Sometimes it was a pet I’d forgotten to care for, or a couple of times (particularly horrifying) a baby I’d somehow forgotten. Once it was an elderly person. I would hydrate the thing and try to revive it, but I never really learned whether these efforts were successful because I’d usually wake up in horror before that point.

Another repellent thing about this science story was that Shatilovich transported the worms to Germany in her pocket. Was there no better way to do it?

But you gotta hand it to those worms for survival strategies.