Yearly Archives: 2018

Ya know, at one time this was a country that really respected education, knowledge, and the research of scientists. There was a time – no kidding – when Albert Einstein was a rock star, a figure of learning and insight that inspired thousands to try to follow in his footsteps.

These days? I’m appalled.

On Tuesday a large crowd outside the [West Virginia] state Senate chamber loudly chanted slogans — including “United we stand!” and “Where is justice?” — and waved homemade posters as a walkout that began last Thursday escalated.

“We are fed up. Enough is enough,” said Jamie Heflin, 38, a single mother who teaches at Lenore K-8 School in Williamson. “We’re tired of the disrespect.” …

“We can’t be doing our jobs for less and less and less money,” said Carmen Soltesz, 37, a middle school social studies teacher in Williamson who has been on the job for a decade.

The strike began a day after Gov. Jim Justice signed legislation giving teachers and some other state employees a 4 percent raise over three years. They would receive a 2 percent raise starting in July, followed by a 1 percent increase in fiscal years 2020 and 2021, according to a news release.

That legislation has been sharply criticized by teachers’ unions and their members, who say the pay increases are too stingy. The raises, they say, would not cover cost-of-living spikes and the rising cost of health care.

“The proposed raise … doesn’t even keep us up with other states,” said Dale Lee, the president of the West Virginia Education Association.” [NBC News]

I think the treatment of teachers in this country is reflective of the general American attitude towards knowledge and learning, and I fear it’s just another step down the path to banana-hood. Against the challenges of tomorrow, how are we going to solve them if our children, by and large, are not getting a good education because we won’t pay our teachers enough?

For some of these legislators and school board members, it’s being parsimonious, although I’d call it penny-wise, pound foolish. The same can also be seen, to some extent, in the rising tuitions and falling share that taxpayers pay for the privilege of having people with college degrees in society – although in previous discussions on college tuition I’ve acknowledged other factors in rising tuitions.

People may complain about the cost of education, but perhaps they should concentrate on the price of having adults with no education in society.

And now, for a peep of sanity … in the above, I don’t necessarily get upset over West Virginia being ranking 48th in teacher pay, although it stirs the hackles a bit – some State has to be last, because it’s a relative metric. But when you hear that teachers have to take a second job on top of an already exhausting first job, that’s when the red lights flash – because that’s a fairly good proxy for an absolute metric. The wrong metric can raise the blood pressure unnecessarily, y’see. But it’s OK to be upset when you hear their raises don’t even keep up with the cost of living.

That’s just stupid disrespect. Education brings prosperity, ignorance brings poverty. Don’t these yahoos in the Legislature know how to think?

In New York Eric Levitz reports on the latest step along the path of logical insanity:

… on Monday night, Freedom Caucus chair Mark Meadows floated a compromise:

[Tara Golshan] One idea @RepMarkMeadows floats on gun control: tax credits for volunteers — like retired law enforcement — who want to offer security for schools.

This proposal gives something to both sides: It leaves teachers unarmed, just as liberals requested, while also giving a targeted tax cut to any patriotic American with a gun, too much free time, and a longing to legally pump bullets into another human being — or, in conservative parlance, to “a well-regulated militia.”

Well, my goodness. You’d think they’d eventually make sense.

But no. I wonder if they’ve realized that these “patriotic Americans” don’t have to be patriotic. They could easily just be one – or even more – sickos desperate to shoot themselves some kids.

The fact that the perpetrator of the Parkland massacre was giving off signals that he was dangerous doesn’t mean everyone else will.

If this proposal somehow goes through, I foresee a lot more massacres in our future.

Stertorous:

: characterized by a harsh snoring or gasping sound
[Merriam-Webster]

I’ve been encountering this word in Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, and finally decided I’d better find out what it meant.

And, yeah, I’m enjoying the book, too. First foray into Chandler.

In Slate Mark Joseph Stern is bitter about a case about to be decided by SCOTUS about the old problem of free-riding on union efforts:

On Monday, the Supreme Court heard arguments in Janus v. AFSCME, a case designed to let the court’s five Republican appointees kneecap the Democratic Party. Everything about Janus reeks of illegitimacy. The legal claim is laughable, the outcome preordained; even the ostensible plaintiff, Mark Janus, is a puppet. At a recent event, Janus revealed that he does not understand the case at all and in fact supports collective bargaining but incorrectly thinks his union fees are supporting political campaigns. His lawyers seem to have lied to him—much like the court will soon lie to us in proclaiming that the First Amendment somehow prohibits the agency fees at issue in this case. Don’t believe it. The conservative justices can dress up their gibberish in whatever legalese they wish. The reality will remain that Janus is a partisan vehicle designed to serve partisan goals, carried across the finish line by five justices who might as well admit that the Constitution has nothing to do with it.

The background of this deeply cynical case is straightforward. In 1977, the Supreme Court rejected the exact argument being made in Janus. Its decision, Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, involved a virtually identical challenge to agency fees in public sector unions as compelled political speech. These dues, also known as “fair share” fees, support the cost of collective bargaining. Unions are prohibited from using this money to support political activity, like campaigns and candidate contributions. The Abood court found that these fees—meant to prevent “free riders” from benefiting from union negotiations without having to subsidize them—do not violate the First Amendment, because they do not compel political speech.

Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy, upon whom liberal hopes often hang, seems to have dealt himself a black eye on this one during arguments:

In light of this unseemly background, you might expect all of the justices to shy away from the politics of the case. But Justice Anthony Kennedy embraced them head-on in a series of jaw-dropping exchanges. The first arose after Illinois Solicitor General David Franklin asserted that his state has an interest in “being able to work with a stable, responsible, independent counterparty” that “can be a partner with us” in contract negotiations. A look of disgust spread across Kennedy’s face, and he barked at Franklin:

It can be a partner with you in advocating for a greater size workforce, against privatization, against merit promotion, for teacher tenure, for higher wages, for massive government, for increasing bonded indebtedness, for increasing taxes? That’s the interest the state has?

He reveals his failure to keep up with an admittedly large number of issues^[1] – and, in fact, issues which are, at best, tangential to the case. That is, decisions should be rendered from settled law and the Constitution, not from projected outcomes. And, I should note, some of those outcomes are desirable. Does Justice Kennedy really believe that a tenured teacher, experienced in both subject and educational pedagogy, is inferior to some fresh out of school teacher?

Really? This would be a condemnation of our children to sub-standard education.

The issues cited by the Associate Justice, when they are problems, can be resolved without knifing the baby.

All that said, the unions had better begin planning on how to survive in this new world, assuming none of the conservative break ranks (I always hold my breath for the Chief Justice). I think their best (and perhaps most obvious) approach comes from this Steve Benen observation:

And what happens if/when AFSCME loses this case in another 5-4 ruling? Millions of public-sector workers will be able to opt-out of their agency fees, which in turn would further weaken unions, which in turn would undermine workers’ ability to negotiate for better benefits.

The union appeal should be if you don’t join the union and help fund our efforts at collective bargaining, your wages will not rise, they may even fall. Everytime you think you’re saving money by not joining us, you’re endangering your future instead.

And unions might benefit from offering a second membership status, one with reduced dues that are guaranteed to only be used for collective bargaining and, perhaps, paying for the officers of the union.

But I think bitter whining about Janus will serve only to alienate potential members of unions, because those folks who resented paying dues, even reduced dues, had a point. In the Land Of The Free, they were forced to remit dues to an organization which may have engaged in activities they found repulsive.

And the unions had a point – piggybacking is a problem.

Sometimes freedom for imperfect humans is tough.

¹For for the record, privatization has proven to not be the panacea envisioned by the libertarians, as they do not understand the importance of process optimization and how it one sector’s optimization is another sector’s disaster (see for-profit prisons for a stark example); merit promotion need not be negatively impacted by unions; tenure exists to retain talented people when it’s properly implemented; teacher tenure I addressed above; higher wages are hardly a negative, when earned, in that they help the economy keep moving along (see the recent research on raising the minimum wage and how that has affected the economy); and the rest is financial without examining the context of “skilled labor” (and it can be very skilled) is very important – I don’t want enthusiastic but unskilled laborers desperately trying to solve problems in government.

And while we’re sitting here, Associate Justice, shall we begin to discuss the various indignities (including the Pinkertons, of course) laborers have suffered when unprotected by the unions? If you’re going to sling shit, you’d better be willing to accept it as well.

Keith Whittington of Princeton University gives an overview on the Constitutional issue of departmentalism via Lawfare:

“Departmentalism” is the somewhat archaic name for the theory that each branch, or department, of the government has an equal and independent authority to interpret the Constitution for purposes of guiding its own actions. While the term “departmentalism” was likely coined by the constitutional scholar Edward Corwinduring the battle over the New Deal, the concept itself has deep roots within American constitutional history.  …

As Jefferson later emphasized to the Virginia jurist Spencer Roane, who was doing battle in the press with Chief Justice John Marshall over the court’s opinion in the McCulloch v. Maryland, “each of the three departments has equally the right to decide for itself what is its duty under the Constitution, without any regard to what the others may have decided for themselves under a similar question.” Otherwise, the Constitution “is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please.” Andrew Jackson drew on such arguments directly, but even Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan nodded to departmentalist doctrines.

Departmentalist doctrines have sometimes been invoked by those who felt the courts had misinterpreted congressional powers under Article I of the Constitution—as the Jeffersonians did. In such cases, proponents of departmentalism argued that the courts had allowed Congress to do by statute what it had been barred from doing under the Constitution. Under such circumstances, presidents with a stricter understanding of congressional powers insisted on their duty to act on those beliefs and keep Congress within its proper limits.

It’s an interesting conceptual question regarding the American form of government. I mean, we’re taught that the three branches of government are co-equal, but there are implications that catch me by surprise. After all, the judiciary has the final word on the Constitution and the law, and doesn’t that mean they’re truly the superior branch in the government?

But how does one measure equality? Only the legislature can truly make laws, while the Executive has a few powers similar to laws, and the judges have to be extraordinarily creative to make any real laws – and are always subject to superior courts reversing those judgments. The entire equation becomes a matter of the time element, checks by a whimsical populace, and admission that powers may not be precisely co-equal – but are inferior or superior to the others depending on the situation.

Apparently the state legislators in the great state of Georgia are a bunch of hand-puppets, if I read this report from CNN/Money properly:

Image: Georgia.gov

Delta’s decision to cut ties with the NRA could cost it a generous tax break from the state of Georgia.

The state’s Republicans — including a major candidate for governor— are threatening to kill part of a bill that would eliminate a state tax on jet fuel. If it passes, the provision is expected to save the Atlanta-based airline tens of millions of dollars.

“We felt that it was wrong for them to single out one company,” said Chuck Hufstetler, chairman of the state’s Senate Finance Committee. Delta (DAL) on Saturday announced that it would end discounted rates for National Rifle Association members.

Hufstetler told CNN on Monday that if the airline does not reverse its stance on the NRA soon, he and others will push for the tax break to be stripped from the bill. The bill still needs to pass the Senate before it can be signed into law.

If Delta holds its ground, he added, “I don’t think [the bill] will pass as it is.”

Of course, it’s rather dubious that Georgia was going to hand a tax break exclusively to Delta. Government entities shouldn’t be in the business of handing advantages over to select companies, so this already smelled of corruption. But now Delta gets to see the flip side of winning a tax break – it can be taken away for all sorts of reasons, some of them having nothing to do with public policy, because this is power politics, baby. But that’s a rant for another day.

The twin facts of the matter is that Delta is the largest airline in the world, depending on how you measure it, and Atlanta, Georgia’s Hartsfield – Jackson airport is the busiest in terms of sheer numbers of passengers. Georgia’s Republican Party let its temper get the better of it – will Delta have the balls to signal that it’s thinking about moving operations elsewhere? That would be a symbolic slap in the face, even if it was mere rhetoric.

Georgia’s knee deep in corruption. First, a tax break that’s certainly nothing a principled conservative would dabble in, and then taking up advocacy for a private organization which has undoubtedly funded and supported many of their campaigns.

The swamp’s deep in Georgia’s capital of Atlanta.

Max Boot, stalwart conservative, hails goodbye to today’s conservatives in WaPo:

In the past I would have been indignant at such attacks [from the left] and eager to assert my conservative credentials. I spent years writing for conservative publications such as the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Commentary magazine and working as a foreign policy adviser for three Republican presidential campaigns. Being conservative used to be central to my identity. But now, frankly, I don’t give a damn. I prefer to think of myself as a classical liberal, because “conservative” has become practically synonymous with “Trump lackey.”

Richard Brookhiser, a longtime stalwart at National Review, summed up the Trump effect: “Now the religious Right adores a thrice-married cad and casual liar. But it is not alone. Historians and psychologists of the martial virtues salute the bone-spurred draft-dodger whose Khe Sanh was not catching the clap. Cultural critics who deplored academic fads and slipshod aesthetics explicate a man who has never read a book, not even the ones he has signed. . . . Straussians, after leaving the cave, find themselves in Mar-a-Lago. Econocons put their money on a serial bankrupt.”

Principled conservativism continues to exist, primarily at small journals of opinion, but it is increasingly disconnected from the stuff that thrills the masses. I remember as a high school student in the 1980s attending a lecture at UCLA by William F. Buckley Jr. I was dazzled by his erudition, wit and oratorical skill. Today, young conservatives flock to the boorish and racist performance art of Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter. The Conservative Political Action Conference couldn’t find room for critics of Trump, save for the brave and booed Mona Charen, but it did showcase French fascist scion Marion Maréchal-Le Pen.

I suppose it’s the ultimate repudiation of team politics – by leaving the team completely. Yet, as a professed conservative over the years, he must have been aware of how the GOP was moving from responsibility to extremism, all through the lure of power and money. To jump ship at this late date is unfortunately a bit late.

Source: Gallup

Not that I know how Gingrich, Ryan, and Co. could have been stopped, but I think the loss of the Republican Party as a responsible and respectable party (see previously cited Gallup poll on the right) and potential governing entity will be an enduring wound in the side of the United States. Will the probable accession of the Democrats to power in the halls of Congress in a bit less than a year resolve the problem? Not necessarily. As a country we need responsible voices on both the side of liberalism and conservatism. We do have some voices on the liberal side, but they need responsible critiquing by a serious opposition party. Did we see that when Obama was in power? Sadly, not. What we saw was No No No No No Fuck No! It’s not us so screw you!

Extremists are too much in love with themselves and their ideology to honestly and responsibly critique the other side. This group listens too much to their echo chamber, which, as Boot notes, seems to be populated by people who “… must be ever more transgressive to get the attention they crave. Coulter’s book titles have gone from accusing Bill Clinton of “High Crimes and Misdemeanors” to accusing all liberals of “Treason,” of being “Godless” and even “Demonic.””

The failure of the Republicans is a failure of the United States, and is going to hurt the United States until the GOP returns to sober responsibility – or a sober and responsible successor party emerges to take its place.

And I must confess I have trouble visualizing just how that is going to happen without some truly earth-shattering revelations concerning some of the leading lights of the current GOP.

A peeping Johnny? A peeping Salvatore? Either way, it’s an unpleasant experience.

Salvatore Giordano goes from Sicilian chieftain to a hitman for an American mobster, but while he survives his faux-death in the Sicilian hinterlands, will he survive his sojourn in the States? Such is the central question of Johnny Cool (1963), a sordid tale of the conversion of a fiercely independent Sicilian into a methodical and nerveless killer. He was a man who defended his homeland with some sense of national independence, some patriotism. He had a sense of bravado then, appearing in a village to swagger and brazenly dance the first dance at a wedding, before running from the forces of the State.

But his killing, faked by a bribed Army officer, results in him becoming a prisoner of an American mobster, Johnny Colini, hiding out in Rome. Salvatore learns all he needs to become the virtual son of the Colini – the names, habits, and places of those men in America who sorely belabored Johnny, a man who never forgets an insult. And through this, he washes all that might have redeemed him, the good intentions, the affection for his countrymen, all that might have spared him Hell, and becomes a man on a mission that can only be satisfied with blood. Life is no longer full of color and bluster, just bitterly new needs.

And as the new son of Colini, Salvatore gets a new name – Johnny Colini.

Or Johnny Cool.

His knowledge of his targets is near perfect, his assassination and fighting techniques insightful, and his weapons varied. Thus is Johnny ready for anything but the woman named Dare Guinness, a directionless woman who encounters Cool at a very vulnerable moment – and becomes his mistress, his woman, his tool – but never his confidante. She is mostly uninvolved as the bodies begin to pile up according to Johnny’s frightful plans, but when a target presents himself early, Johnny makes the fateful decision to involve her. Speeding off from the bombing which kills the target and endangers two young boys, they split up, but all Dare can do is think of her role and her allegiance to Johnny, going against all she learned about being good in the world.

Her fateful phone call leaves Johnny hanging in the balance.

It’s a sordid tale of men unconstrained by the rules of civilization. For them, the power and prestige are everything, and little do they care for anything but themselves. Their endings are equally appalling.

It’s an OK story, especially at the beginning, but it became somewhat predictable in the middle. Painful in its decisions, it’s a noir film, especially for those caught up in the backwash; for those at the controls, they deserve what they get. It goes on a little too long, but if you like your noir relentless and conscienceless, you’ll like this.

Kevin Drum helpfully covers all the proposals from the right for stopping school massacres. His summary:

Have I hit the high points? The insanity here is jaw dropping. I could at least respect an argument that says gun rights are so important that it’s worth protecting them even at the price of more mass slaughters. I wouldn’t especially agree, but it’s the kind of argument I might make in some free speech cases. This flat-out lunacy, however, is beyond belief. Do the NRA folks really believe this stuff? Or are they just getting so desperate that they’re willing to toss out anything that might muddy the waters?

I want to know one thing. Back in the 1950s, back before my time, the American Golden Age as it were – did schools have armed guards, just waiting for the next shooter to come leaping out of the bushes?

Or did we have the guns under control and none of this happened, or at least not as much?

Sure, it’s not really useful to compare two such different time periods – but it’s so tempting to think about a time when the extremism wasn’t quite so prevalent.

Telson:

Source: Wikipedia

The telson is the posterior-most division of the body of an arthropod. It is not considered a true segment because it does not arise in the embryo from teloblast areas as do real segments. It never carries any appendages, but a forked “tail” called the caudal furca may be present. The shape and composition of the telson differs between arthropod groups. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “Meet Your New Nightmare: Ancient Spider With A Tail Preserved in Amber,” Gemma Tarlach, Dead Things:

Known from four specimens, the ancient arachnid’s formal name is Chimerarachne yingi. Its genus name, from the mythic Greek Chimera, is a nod to its unusual mix of features. There’s that one feature you’ve probably noticed already that you might not expect to find at all in a spider: a long, segmented, whip-like tail that resembles the telson found in scorpions.

I was gonna say you could tell which way the wind was blowing yesterday …

And then the boss showed up and I had to get back to work!

Peeper was a little grumpy about me leaning on my shovel!

Greg Fallis was trained as a medic by the Army, and learned this:

The 9mm pistol rounds easily penetrated the first [pig] carcass, making a tidy little entry wound. The M1’s heavier .30 caliber rounds made a similar entry wound, but several of the rounds completely penetrated through the front carcass and entered the second [pig carcass]. Most of the M-16’s smaller and lighter .223 rounds failed to penetrated through the first carcass into the second, but they created really big, savage, gaping wounds in that first one. Those few rounds that did completely penetrate the carcass left massive, ragged exit wounds.

This is where ballistics comes into play. Remember, a bullet displaces air as it travels through it. Similarly, a bullet displaces flesh as it travels through it. When you fire a gun, you want a bullet that remains stable as it flies through the air towards the target — a bullet that will go where you aim it. The big difference between all these weapons is their terminal ballistics — what happens after the bullet hits its target.

Both the 9mm and .30 caliber rounds remained stable as they hit — and sometimes passed through — the carcass. They had tremendous penetrative power, displacing a relatively small amount of flesh. In other words, they poked holes in the carcass. The .223 rounds, on the other hand, were stable until they hit the carcass, at which point they became wildly unstable. That instability causes extensive cavitation — displacing a lot more flesh. That cavitation meant organs and blood vessels near the bullet’s path were also damaged. The energy of the bullet was expended IN the body instead of passing THROUGH the body. The result was a much nastier wound.

There’s more to a gun than shooting a bullet. You may survive being hit by a bullet from a pistol or a long rifle – but a hit in the same location by a weapon of war can kill you just because it’s designed to do so.

I was unaware of this facet of the credit card industry, but Andrew Sorkin of The New York Times proposes to take advantage of it in the wake of the Parkland massacre:

Here’s an idea.

What if the finance industry — credit card companies like Visa, Mastercard and American Express; credit card processors like First Data; and banks like JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo — were to effectively set new rules for the sales of guns in America?

Collectively, they have more leverage over the gun industry than any lawmaker. And it wouldn’t be hard for them to take a stand.

PayPal, Square, Stripe and Apple Pay announced years ago that they would not allow their services to be used for the sale of firearms.

“We do not believe permitting the sale of firearms on our platform is consistent with our values or in the best interests of our customers,” a spokesman for Square told me.

The big financial firms don’t even have to go that far.

For example, Visa, which published a 71-page paper in 2016 espousing its “corporate responsibility,” could easily change its terms of service to say that it won’t do business with retailers that sell assault weapons, high-capacity magazines and bump stocks, which make semiautomatic rifles fire faster.

The big credit card companies have already cut off purchases of Bitcoins, although to some extent that feels like simply refusing to have intercourse with the enemy. It’s an interesting approach – as a retailer, I’d be aghast at the thought that one of the primary methods of payments these days would put limits on what could be bought with credit, and yet there is some sense in the issuers of credit putting limits on what may be bought – seeing that some purchases may indicate an imminent failure to pay by the borrower. It’s a legitimate interest. WaPo’s Avi Selk remarks:

Some have also suggested that banks could throttle gun makers from the supply side, by cutting off credit. In the past, that proposal has been a nonstarter. In 2012, Snopes investigated a report that Bank of America was cutting off credit lines to gun manufacturers. A spokeswoman for the bank denied the report, saying it had no policies against doing business with the firearms industry and pointing to a $250 million deal with a gunmaker that month.

Six years later, amid the growing outrage over the Stoneman Douglas massacre, the bank’s rhetoric sounds a bit different.

Axios reported Saturday that Bank of America was “reexamining” its relationship with AR-15 rifle manufacturers that do business with it. “We are joining other companies in our industry to examine what we can do to help end the tragedy of mass shootings,” the bank said in a statement.

This world we’re living in is getting more and more interesting. Companies sporting a conscience? How long can that last?

On D-brief Nathaniel Scharping notes a report that some of the planets orbiting Trappist-1 may be water worlds:

A series of papers out today gives us further insights into the TRAPPIST-1 system discovered in 2016.

The seven planets that make up the system orbit a dim red dwarf star much smaller and cooler than our own Sun. The planets’ orbits are much tighter than in our solar system, and they’re all closer to their home star than Mercury is to the Sun. Three of them are thought to be in the “habitable zone” where liquid water could exist.

Credit: Trappist-1 website

What really sharpens my interest in this report is what goes unmentioned here: red dwarfs, which is the classification of Trappist-1, tend to be very long-lived stars. If these planets came into existence at the same time as their star, and the star is well along in its lifetime, well, that’s a lot of time to exist with one of life’s requirements – water – available in what’s considered the system’s habitable zone. I don’t know how old Trappist-1 might be, although I see Wikipedia’s page on Trappist-1 is estimating 3.8 billion years, while the website dedicated to Trappist-1 says 7.6 ± 2.2 Gyr, which is rather longer.

I thought of being an astronomer as a child, until Dad came home one day and said I’d have to earn a Ph.D. or wash test tubes all day. I didn’t have the math for this sort of thing anyways, but I remain fascinated.

Global Fishing Watch as mentioned in WaPo:

Humans are now fishing at least 55 percent of the world’s oceans — an area four times larger than the area occupied by humanity’s onshore agriculture.

That startling statistic is among the findings of a unique, high-tech collaboration that is providing a massive amount of new data about global fishing operations. The results, published Thursday in the journal Science, offer a powerful glimpse of the problem of overfishing on the hard-to-regulate high seas. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 31.4 percent of global fish stocks were overfished or fished unsustainably, as of 2013, while another 58.1 percent were “fully fished.”

Thursday’s findings relied on data from Global Fishing Watch, a collaboration encompassing Oceana, SkyTruth and Google. Researchers compiled billions of data points from tracking systems that the International Maritime Organization requires for about 70,000 fishing vessels.

Here’s a sample map. I have not deeply explored it.

And we can guess “fully fished” may be overfished, as such labels are often heavily lobbied for by political representatives who are looking at calorie supply problems. And as the population continues to increase, over-fishing will also increase.

Oh, yeah? Who’s your agent?

King Kong, intubated.

Yep. Never thought I’d be typing that sentence. But there he was, post-fall from the World Trade Center (yep, Jessica Lange shows up ever so briefly), hanging out with a tube in his mouth and a cardiologist in attendance in King Kong Lives (1986), as he somehow survives that 1300+ ft fall to the asphalt below – in reality, he should have been splashed by the impact.

And while he slowly wastes away in his storage facility, another Kong is discovered in Borneo, named Lady Kong, and they ship her back to the States so she can provide blood for a transfusion.

Big mistake. King Kong swiftly recovers, breaks out, locates Lady Kong, show his intrepid chivalry through a quick but gentle courtship. Meanwhile, the government is on the hunt and chases him into a river, where they believe he’s drowned – although they never find a corpse. Meanwhile, Lady Kong is captured and begins to pine away for the ape she went ape over.

Never fear, King Kong has been feasting on alligators too dumb to leave the river, and, with the help of the cardiologist and her lover, he fights his way through a regiment of troops to be with his mate and she, of course, gives birth.

I’ve skipped all the cheesiness, but I must admit my calcium levels are far higher than when I started this woofer of a movie. It all starts and ends with the plot, which is ridiculous, and features characters who have no existence outside of the needs of this story. Hackneyed and uninspired, it’s not even fun to poke fun at.

OK, I laughed when eating a human who had been torturing him seemed to give him heartburn. But that’s the only time.

Blech.

On Science Sushi, affiliated with Discover, Christie Wilcox pummels Slate’s Ethan Linck over a claim that backpackers do not need to purify water they find in streams:

While we like to think of ourselves as rational creatures, there’s no doubt that human beings are actually quite awful at assessing risk. So I can understand why Ethan Linck thought to contextualize the risk of drinking from backcountry streams with data. “Life is triage, a constant series of negotiations between risks of varying severity,” he wrote. “And how we talk about those risks matters.”

Yes, it does—which is exactly why his piece in Slate last week was so damaging. It was anything but a careful, scientific evaluation of the risks. Wes Siler over at Outside Magazine already pointed out a myriad of issues with the article, but I want to zero in on the actual data, because Linck claimed to be looking at the matter scientifically. Instead, he cherry-picked sources to argue against doing one of the simplest things you can do to protect yourself from some truly awful diseases when you’re backpacking: treating your water.

She goes on to thrash him over his data, his methods, and pretty much his entire outlook on life. At this point, I’m just glad I’m not into the whole Nature Is Good And Wholesome! movement, as this would jolt me right out of it.

Looks a bit deep out there. Good thing my neighbor likes to run his snowblower, or I’d be shoveling all day.

The abstract for A good life for all within planetary boundaries, O’Neill, Fanning, Lamb, Steinberger, Nature Sustainability:

Humanity faces the challenge of how to achieve a high quality of life for over 7 billion people without destabilizing critical planetary processes. Using indicators designed to measure a ‘safe and just’ development space, we quantify the resource use associated with meeting basic human needs, and compare this to downscaled planetary boundaries for over 150 nations. We find that no country meets basic needs for its citizens at a globally sustainable level of resource use. Physical needs such as nutrition, sanitation, access to electricity and the elimination of extreme poverty could likely be met for all people without transgressing planetary boundaries. However, the universal achievement of more qualitative goals (for example, high life satisfaction) would require a level of resource use that is 2–6 times the sustainable level, based on current relationships. Strategies to improve physical and social provisioning systems, with a focus on sufficiency and equity, have the potential to move nations towards sustainability, but the challenge remains substantial.

I suspect the part about 7 billion people (and still rising) makes this equation impossible to solve – although I hope they do figure it out.

What am I saying? I hope we figure it out. It’s the inclination to wait for other people to figure it out which is part of the problem. Although, honestly, only a small part. Mostly humans just don’t think on the scale of worlds, and we probably never will. Not enough of us.

As hysteria over the Parkland massacre heightens in right wing extremist circles, Kevin Kruse provides a little historical background in a Twitter comment:

When nine black teenagers integrated Central High School in Little Rock, many segregationists insisted they were paid protesters who had been imported from other states.

In a reply, Heather Richardson notes similar behavior during the American Reconstruction period (1865 to 1877).

Not only are they a little nuts, they have virtually no imagination. I suppose this is a reaction to the idea that members of the immediate community are not entirely happy in their roles, a thought repugnant to those who find their positions in society to be more than satisfactory. Rather than admit to imperfections in their creations, they create an imagined external enemy which wishes to crush them, thus saving themselves the hard work of actually reforming society into something more equitable – and the personal cost in wealth and prestige which would inevitably accompany such an endeavour.

That was then, this is now, and I’m not so sure such an analysis necessarily applies, although the meaning of immediate community has certainly changed. Paul Waldman supplies a somewhat different explanation in The Plum Line in connection with the Parkland survivors’ protests:

The idea of the paid actor criticism, like the charge that the students must be using PR agents to book their interviews, is that if you can find some reason that their words aren’t a pure expression of their feelings without any strategic intent behind it, then their testimony is no longer valid and need not be addressed substantively. So either they’re just emotional and naive and therefore need not be listened to, or they’re too savvy and strategic and therefore need not be listened to.

Sounds reasonable enough to me. Anything to avoid the substantive issues facing you, eh? And, you know, everyone is tempted by this sort of behavior. Reforming society – especially when you hold an advantageous position – is unappetizing work. And when your notion of justice supports your position, well, why do the hard work? Just condemn those pricking your conscience and move on.

Otherwise, it’s God Sneeze on me, and that’s disturbing.

And one without the flash, just for fun.

And not from tonight, either, but the previous storm.

According to Lizzie Wade in “How To Survive Climate Change,” an unfortunately offline article in Archaeology (March/April 2018), the Moche were a South American empire in which the leadership depended on their communications and propitiation of the gods

Then climate change came in the form of droughts.

The Moche began to falter. Cities turned away from traditional Moche rituals and architecture, and new ceramic styles sprang up, [archaeologist Michele Koons at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science] says. By the time El Purgatorio [a city located in what is now Peru] was built, around A.D. 700, after about 150 years of climate chaos, the Moche had definitively lost their grip within the southern part of their territory, which had once extended to just north of the Casma Valley. “If you have a government that is built on claiming to have control over what seem to be supernatural events, climate change can lead to real political instability, [Clemson University archaeologist Melissa] Vogel says. People start to say, ‘You’re  not doing your job. You told us you could take care of us.

Vogel thinks the people living in the Casma Valley saw the need to do things differently. “They’re taking their lives back,” she says.^[1]

They were succeeded by the Casma in Peru, who were less interested in the gods.

That really rings a bell for me. A substantial chunk of the United States, in denying that anthropogenic climate change is occurring, has effectively withdrawn from science. Where will they go? Religion, of course.

I wonder how long before a major American city is substantially affected by climate change. Will the deniers apologize? No. I foresee your big ol’ religious revival, instead, where they’ll try to pray away the problem.

And that’ll be a heckuva mess.

¹Typos almost certainly mine.

From WaPo:

The moment he saw the brilliant light captured by his camera, “it all clicked” for Victor Buso: All the times his parents woke him before sunrise to gaze at the stars, all the energy he had poured into constructing an observatory atop his home, all the hours he had spent trying to parse meaning from the dim glow of distant suns.

“In many moments you search and ask yourself, why do I do this?” Buso said via email. This was why: Buso, a self-taught astronomer, had just witnessed the surge of light at the birth of a supernova — something no other human, not even a professional scientist, had seen.

Alone on his rooftop, the star-strewn sky arced above him, the rest of the world sleeping below, Buso began to jump for joy.

His discovery, reported Wednesday in the journal Nature, is a landmark for astronomy. Buso’s images are the first to capture the brief “shock breakout” phase of a supernova, when a wave of energy rolls from a star’s core to its exterior just before the star explodes. Computer models had suggested the existence of this phase, but no one had witnessed it.

Great story, worth reading in full. And it serves as a reminder that science is not an occult occupation, only open to those who skilled in divine prognostications, but is a vocation open to all who study and work hard – and get a little bit lucky. Our protagonist here is not a scientist – he’s a locksmith who built himself an observatory! A devoted amateur, his name goes down in the history books.

I was fascinated to read that some folks who suffer from epilepsy can be trained to think themselves out of the seizures, as NewScientist (10 February 2018, paywall) reports:

SOME people with epilepsy can be trained to boost their mental alertness to avoid having a seizure. The technique may work by strengthening nerve pathways that can damp down overactive parts of the brain.

Epileptic seizures happen when brain cells become too excitable and start firing out of control. This sometimes starts in just a small region – most often one of the temporal lobes, at the side of the head – and then spreads.

Medicines can keep epilepsy under control, but they don’t work in around a third of cases. This has prompted interest in psychological approaches such as yoga or mindfulness training to control or alleviate the condition – not least because it can be exacerbated by stress.

Several studies have suggested that seizures can be reduced by a form of biofeedback training: techniques that give people information about their body, such as their blood pressure, to help them try to control it. But the use of such training in medicine is controversial, with some suspecting it works mainly through a placebo effect.

It’s fascinating, both from a functional perspective and from the placebo-effect perspective – and, for that matter, it deals another blow to the mind-brain dualism theory (is that dead yet?).

Because scans of the brain indicate it changes in response to the training, it suggests that the physical matter of the brain is influenced by how it is used, much as our muscles grow or become flabby depending on whether or not we exercise, and do it properly. This, in turn, suggests such an undeniable link between mind and body to render the entire theory that the two are distinct as so much rubbish.

And the ever mysterious placebo effect, how does it play into this? I’m not sure. One must assume the placebo effect is some change rendered by the brain to the rest of the body, whether palliative or curative, but I don’t think I, or anyone else, has ever really understood just how it works. And now we’re essentially discussing a treatment of the brain, which in turn may be using the attention it is receiving to modify the body, of which the brain is a part. It sounds like a feedback loop in some ways, but just how that might play into this entire scenario, physically and ethically, is not in the least clear to me.