Monthly Archives: May 2020

I don’t know if this is irrelevant or a great lesson in policing, but I thought it was beautiful:

A Michigan sheriff joined protesters in Flint Township on Saturday, putting down his weapon and saying, “I want to make this a parade, not a protest.”

Genesee County Sheriff Chris Swanson spoke with demonstrators who were met by police officers in riot gear, local affiliate WEYI reported.

“The only reason we’re here is to make sure that you got a voice — that’s it,” Swanson said in video clips shown on Twitter.

“These cops love you — that cop over there hugs people,” he said, pointing to an officer.

He was speaking to the crowd protesting police brutality and the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

He smiled and high-fived people in the crowd, who responded by chanting, “walk with us!”

So, he did.

“Let’s go, let’s go,” Swanson said as he and the cheering crowd proceeded. “Where do you want to walk? We’ll walk all night.” [CNN]

Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times in northwest Iowa, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for editorial writing. It’s about 80 miles east of Sioux City, which I’ve visited often, last in 2016. For WaPo he sums up the situation in his home town, where a JBS meat-packing plant ran for weeks without protective gear or Covid-19 testing, and – my focus – as well as the multistate region:

Vasculotropic:

1. That is attracted to blood vessels [Wiktionary]

Noted in “Coronavirus May Be a Blood Vessel Disease, Which Explains Everything,” Dana G Smith, Medium:

“All these Covid-associated complications were a mystery. We see blood clotting, we see kidney damage, we see inflammation of the heart, we see stroke, we see encephalitis [swelling of the brain],” says William Li, MD, president of the Angiogenesis Foundation. “A whole myriad of seemingly unconnected phenomena that you do not normally see with SARS or H1N1 or, frankly, most infectious diseases.”

“If you start to put all of the data together that’s emerging, it turns out that this virus is probably a vasculotropic virus, meaning that it affects the [blood vessels],” says Mandeep Mehra, MD, medical director of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital Heart and Vascular Center.

I’d forgotten about this little incident of an appalling nature:

So President Trump has accused the WHO of being slow to respond to the coronavirus, and dominated by the Chinese. The first is debatable and is quite possibly yet another Trumpian projection of his own failings, while the second is silly. But let’s stipulate that the WHO didn’t perform up to standard.

Does walking away from the WHO make sense?

Is this what a supposedly competent businessman would do? Throw away the tool because it didn’t quite work as well as intended, and replace it with nothing? Especially when faced with health threats that do not respect international borders?

No. Enhancement and reformation is far more sensible, especially for an organization which, until now, has not seen any criticism worth noting; in fact, given President Trump’s consistent strategy of distracting public attention from his own failings, the independent observer must wonder if Trump is merely selling a fantasy – keeping in mind that’s what he did in his hit TV show The Apprentice – in order to keep his base stirred up emotionally.

My conservative friends, if you voted for the “successful businessman” to shake up Washington, well, he’s turning out to be vastly incompetent at running government. There is no doubt about that. From failing to pass effective legislation when Congress was held by his Republican allies^[1], to the utter lack of leadership that is arguably contributing to the tragic rioting across the nation today, President Trump is working hard at being the worst Chief Executive this nation has seen.

You still think we should leave the WHO? Well, we’ve seen what the amateur President has managed to do to this nation; it’s time to ask experts. Public health researcher and surgeon Atul Gawande and former UN Ambassador and National Security Advisor Susan Rice:

Unspeakably stupid and self-defeating https://t.co/R3Fbiq5GeL

— Susan Rice (@AmbassadorRice) May 29, 2020

Indeed, I suspect anyone in the public health and epidemiology sectors are aghast. Public health researcher Howard Koh, M.D., of Yale and former Assistant Secretary for Health:

This decision is really so short-sighted and ill-advised, and all it does is put American lives at risk. [NPR]

Defense technology journalist Kelsey D. Atherton:

“[M]aybe the weirdest thing about the right’s strategy of quitting international institutions is they were built, expressly, to give the United States an outsized role in shaping and directing the post-1945 international order, but they can only do that so long as the US stays in.”

It’s a polite way of saying that America is in the process of an immense neutering.

In fact, I’d like journalists at the next press conference ask President Trump why he’s neutering the nation.

Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN):

I disagree with the president’s decision. Withdrawing U.S. membership could, among other things, interfere with clinical trials that are essential to the development of vaccines, which citizens of the United States as well as others in the world need. And withdrawing could make it harder to work with other countries to stop viruses before they get to the United States.

At the same link I used for the Senator are a number of other such opinions from experts and political leaders, condemning this decision.

I’ll not burden my reader by quoting them, though, but, frankly, given the weight of opinion, it’s becoming more and more clear that, whoever President Trump was, he is now incompetent. To my conservative friends, do you really want to blot your honor by voting for such a man? Whether he’s mentally ill, malicious, or merely poorly advised, does it make sense to politically ally yourself with such plain and obviously flawed judgment?

¹ No, the tax reformation act of 2017 was not effective, as it never came close to equaling the benefits touted by then-Speaker Ryan (R-WI), et al, and in fact had no long-term benefit to the economy at all. If you disagree, go do the research and find a third party assessment that shows the economy boosted. And, while you’re at it, explain why the monstrous annual deficits caused by that legislation are good for the nation.

A Target Corporation news release:

We are a community in pain. That pain is not unique to the Twin Cities—it extends across America. The murder of George Floyd has unleashed the pent-up pain of years, as have the killings of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor. We say their names and hold a too-long list of others in our hearts. As a Target team, we’ve huddled, we’ve consoled, we’ve witnessed horrific scenes similar to what’s playing out now and wept that not enough is changing. And as a team we’ve vowed to face pain with purpose.

Every day, our team wakes up ready to help all families—and on the hardest days we cling even more dearly to that purpose. As I write this, our merchant and distribution teams are preparing truckloads of first aid equipment and medicine, bottled water, baby formula, diapers and other essentials, to help ensure that no one within the areas of heaviest damage and demonstration is cut off from needed supplies.

[My bold.]

I’ve noticed over the years that the news reports from time to time how Target dedicates some X% (I forget just what – 10%?) of their profits to local charities, and at least portions of the company founder Dayton family have been very socially active (and others not so much, of course). Between having the supply chain to pull this off and some sort of social conscience (I am always a bit suspicious of corporate social conscious/conscienceness, but let’s go with it here), they may come out of this an even more solid corporate citizen than before.

I wonder if Wal-Mart is doing anything similar.

Former Congressman, co-host of Morning Joe, and former Republican Joe Scarborough, currently the target of President Trump’s personal rumor mill in the form of a baseless murder accusation, claims to have no clue for the big circle on his back in this editorial defending himself and shaming President Trump:

It can be confusing talking to experts and specialists, because they have developed and employ a specialist vocabulary in order to be able to communicate with each other in a precise and compact manner. Unfortunately, amateurs and bad ‘experts’ – people of low quality, basically, who nevertheless have attained some position of respect in their field – can also employ jargon, and while experts in that domain of expertise will come to understand that these people are fakers fairly quickly, those of us who are not experts can often find the jargon impenetrable enough that we can’t assess the particular people using the jargon with any confidence.

But jargon must be precise and accurate, and I think we can designate Kevin Hassett as an amateur based on this recent pronouncement of his:

Senior White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett said on Sunday that America’s “human capital stock” is ready to get back work as the country takes steps toward reopening.

On CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, Hassett discussed future unemployment and America’s readiness to lift measures put in place to tackle the coronavirus spread.

“Our capital stock hasn’t been destroyed. Our human capital stock is ready to get back to work, and so there are lots of reasons to believe that we can get going way faster than we have in previous crises,” Hassett said. [BusinessInsider]

This rhetorical blunder has caused consternation and outrage for its callousness from many people (see my initial source on The Daily Kos if you need a ration of mostly liberal, highly justified outrage), but I’d like to draw attention to the scholarly academic implications of Human capital stock.

Human, in this context, is a modifier indicating the domain to which this description applies.

Capital refers to a resource.

Stock? A fungible (i.e., no individual identities) collection of units.

Getting by the dehumanization of the work force that is so implied (another step beyond Human Resources, for those few of us who still remember that Human Resources used to be Personnel), this abstraction of the work force is inaccurate. Why?

Resources are passive in the usual sense, such as mineral resources.

And human stock is not, like cattle, best characterized by a single, dominant attribute (“nutritious”). It is not, in a word, fungible. Humans have a diverse set of talents, skills, willingness to work, need to work, intelligence, motivations, and many other attributes which render them – ME! – a creature which must be regarded not with care, not with a measuring stick, but with … RESPECT.

But Human capital stock has a real expert ring to it, now doesn’t it? The psychology behind its use centers on the user. Because it’s an unusual phrase, it marks the user as an expert, as someone Who Has Studied the Subject. Or so they’d like you to think. Respect the dude, eh?

But, as we’ve seen, it’s a profoundly inaccurate bit of jargon to use. If it’s rampant in economic circles, it should be expunged after various and horrible rituals. I mean, as an engineer, I can go to enormous lengths to be accurate, even in something as trivial as a variable name.

And, I’ll tell you, Mr. Hassett’s phrase really caught my attention as a big ol’ red flag that this guy shouldn’t be trusted in matters economic. It’s horrendously inaccurate description of the work force is gob-smacking. And he’s exhibiting the behavioral characteristics that are congruent with just about all Trump advisors and appointees – second- and third- raters who long for respect that they never seem to get.

Much like their boss.

So, when you see Mr. Hassett pounding the lectern and trying to be profound, listen with a lot of skepticism.

I see President Trump is trying to keep the bonds of truth off his arms:

President Donald Trump signed an executive order targeting social media companies on Thursday, days after Twitter called two of his tweets “potentially misleading.”

Speaking from the Oval Office ahead of signing the order, Trump said the move was to “defend free speech from one of the gravest dangers it has faced in American history.”

“A small handful of social media monopolies controls a vast portion of all public and private communications in the United States,” he claimed. “They’ve had unchecked power to censor, restrict, edit, shape, hide, alter, virtually any form of communication between private citizens and large public audiences.” [CNN]

Because, heavens to betsy, the Republic might fall if he is forced to tell the truth.

So what sort of authority might he have?

The executive order tests the boundaries of the White House’s authority. In a long-shot legal bid, it seeks to curtail the power of large social media platforms by reinterpreting a critical 1996 law that shields websites and tech companies from lawsuits. But legal experts on both the right and the left have raised serious concerns about the proposal. They say it may be unconstitutional because it risks infringing on the First Amendment rights of private companies and because it attempts to circumvent the two other branches of government.

Is Twitter a conveyance of free speech, or the originator?

That’s the superfluous legal issue. The more important societal issue is how to deal with a congenital liar and cheat, who happens to hold arguably the most important elected government post, and has discovered, in Twitter, a fire hose for communicating with the public, compared to the old style pea-shooters, aka newspapers and televisions, that were in use before.

Not that they guaranteed truth, either, but their relatively limited reach and the presence of their gatekeepers (editors) made them more or less dependable; indeed, that “more or less” made for hours of vigorous debate for a couple of hundred years in those parts of the country affluent enough to support competing outlets.

In the Internet era, the fading of the importance of geography has erased questions of affluence; the old outlets have been fading, with a few newspaper exceptions such as The New York Times and WaPo, and the television outlets have seen some renaissance of late as well. But the social media platforms remain dominant, because they effectively have no gatekeepers; their feeble efforts are often mis-aimed (my Facebook account was recently disabled for no given reason, and then re-enabled) and appear to be entirely reactive. An editor at a newspaper gets to read contributions before they’re published; critically untrue at social media platforms.

Because there are no natural boundaries to the gaming field, it becomes the entire world, and it’s zero-sum because it’s not just a publishing platform, but also a communications platform – for nearly anyone. Judging a platform on its truthfulness is nearly useless, as it’s unable to control what is said – but because it’s the carrier and barrier of last resort, it becomes responsible.

So I suppose that’s a lot of blather just to get to my favorite quote coming out of this dustup, from a CNN article yesterday:

David Vladeck, a Georgetown University law professor and former top FTC consumer protection official, said any government push to restrict how private platforms moderate their websites could raise First Amendment questions.

“This is just another example of Trump thinking that the Constitution makes him a king, but it doesn’t,” he said.

What are these pictures of?

Maybe Mars from 100 million years ago?

I’ve only scuba-dived a little, but I know enough to know that stirred up silt can really make the experience frustrating. Similarly, business leaders prefer a clear vision of future conditions when trying to make plans for their firms. So this report caught my attention:

These make for a nice contrast.

Oooops! A cheeky stripenkatzen.

When I am debugging a program, especially when it’s someone else’s work and its substantial, I put a fair amount of time and effort into constructing a mental model of how the program works. It’s not exact, and quite often I’m looking for congruencies with models of how such tasks are accomplished in my experience.

Since this has met with a fair amount of success, I’ve tried to transfer the same approach to other situations, such as understanding how certain people’s brains work. In these situations, I’ve found it often helps to understand how each real person differs from a collection of iconic persons, to whom I’ve assigned certain attributes & values: an average value for truthfulness, a morality system that incorporates both traditional morality and a liking for prestige and prosperity, although for religious officials prosperity becomes less important, etc. All of this is idiosyncratic on my part; I have no idea how other people do these sorts of things.

The interesting part for me, though, came yesterday while reading Steve Benen’s latest conniption fit over President Trump:

Usually, when two politicians feud, at least one has the facts on their side. What’s amazing about the Trump-Sessions dispute is that they’re both wrong.

The president, for example, has repeatedly made it clear that he expected Sessions to be a partisan loyalist in the attorney general’s office, making Trump’s legal troubles go away whenever the president snapped his fingers. Indeed, he’s left little doubt that he believed it was Sessions’ job to interfere with the justice system on the president’s behalf.

In effect, Trump has spent years whining that Sessions wasn’t corrupt enough for his liking.

As Benen reminded me once again of the corruptive influences of President Trump, it finally became clear to me who President Trump most greatly resembles, if only in ambition:

The robber barons of the American 19th century.

Their overwhelming concerns were for personal prestige and wealth; they dedicated their lives to accumulating and building business empires. Conventional mores were for fools; laws were not boundaries for behavior, but obstacles to be neutralized in the pursuit of the envisioned empire. Such was Vanderbilt, JJ Hill, and those others.

This is a description of Trump right to the T.

And the robber barons didn’t come out of their era smelling of roses. Despite attempts to salvage reputations by descendants (think: Vanderbilt University), the robber barons are considered to have harmed society, even as they built and built. Carnegie may have built libraries, but coal miners died in his mines and in protests of his practices; the libraries were a late gesture of redemptive character. Other robber barons may not have done as much. They were cold, brutal men who cared for, at most, their own families. Perhaps this is overly generic; but it helps to keep in mind the general reputation of the robber barons.

And whether one such has any qualification for running a nation.

A conservative friend sent me an email with a link to a Forbes article from a few days back:

Another thing no one hears about.

Hi,

I thought you’d like this:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/gracemarieturner/2020/05/22/600-physicians-say-lockdowns-are-a-mass-casualty-incident/

600 Physicians Say Lockdowns Are A ‘Mass Casualty Incident’ – Forbes

From the article:

More than 600 of the nation’s physicians sent a letter to President Trump this week calling the coronavirus shutdowns a “mass casualty incident” with “exponentially growing negative health consequences” to millions of non COVID patients.

“The downstream health effects…are being massively under-estimated and under-reported. This is an order of magnitude error,” according to the letter initiated by Simone Gold, M.D., an emergency medicine specialist in Los Angeles.

“Suicide hotline phone calls have increased 600%,” the letter said. Other silent casualties: “150,000 Americans per month who would have had new cancer detected through routine screening.”

The response I began to write but decided to blog is this –

Oh, I’ve heard several variations on these arguments, actually.

But none of them are made by epidemiologists, but instead by just everyday doctors who don’t have relevant training or research experience.

So why pay attention to them?

Actually, there’s a very good reason: because they, by implication, condemn President Trump. He should be leading, which means communicating to us how to handle all these things. To tell people that when they are worried about a different health problem, go in and see your doctor. Just take precautions.

But has he?

Instead, we get these poor victims, and then we get all the idiots who decided Memorial Day weekend was for partying down, endangering themselves, their families, their colleagues and co-workers, and their friends. We get wicked lies about Trump’s rival, Joe Biden; ridiculous accusations that Morning Joe co-host Joe Scarborough, former Republican, former Republic member of Congress, murdered a junior aide; recommendations to take medications based on nothing more than a badly done study; musings on ingesting bleach; and threats against Michigan, Nevada, and North Carolina.

These are the actions of a President?

I think just about everyone, those who voted for him, those who voted against him, those who abstained from voting because of outrage at the candidates, even those who didn’t vote from simple political apathy, knew that it was going to be Amateur Hour at the White House when his Electoral College victory was confirmed, against the will of the popular vote. Those who voted against him feared what this could mean; those who voted for him hoped and even expected Trump and his people to grow into their jobs, learning day in and day out.

But now we know, don’t we? Now we know that it’s still Amateur Hour, that Trump never improved, that he was incapable of learning, of leading, of inspiration. And that it’s cost us lives, our morale, and our cohesion.

The Forbes columnist, Grace-Marie Turner, probably thought she had found a devastating critique of the approach we’re taking to a pandemic. She was wrong. Those 600 physicians, as much as they may believe they’re condemning a plan to slow the spread of the coronavirus, are actually silent accusers. By their actions, they accuse Trump of being a failure in an hour of great American – and world-wide – need. He should have been a partner to the epidemiologists, a guide translating their recommendations, a leader.

Instead, all he could do was think about reelection, and in the least effective, coarsest terms.

That group of physicians, whether they realize it or not, has condemned Trumpian leadership for the sheer fakery that is – or should be obvious – to all.

A bit of fun popping up in the garden.

On Treehugger Lloyd Alter is wondering about the future of physical cash in the era of the pandemic – and following it – as he compares it to various sorts of plastic cards.

Will this change after the pandemic? It is likely to. Cashless transactions are very quick and convenient for those who have money or credit, even more so if you have an Apple Watch. A lot of retailers aren’t interested in you if you don’t. People who previously used cash for small purchases like their cup of coffee are now paying with plastic. People who handle food and coffee should never have been dealing with dirty dollars in the first place. People may be reticent about handling money. People like me are getting really tired of collecting all that change. And people are really getting used to it; Nancy Skola of Politico talks to the head of Paypal:

PayPal’s Schulman sees all of this as part of a coming shift: Every transaction that we choose to do virtually instead of with cash builds up our muscles for the change, getting us comfortable with never touching that Alexander Hamilton bill again.

Or it could go the other way when people are poorer and less secure. It’s easier to track what you have when it is in your pocket or mattress. As Timothy Rooks wrote in DW: “In times of crisis, people like things they can trust. Things they can hold.” There is something to that.

As I read Alter’s quote of Rooks, it occurred to me that we need to put cash & plastic on the same footing for purposes of evaluation. Never mind that plastic is denominated in cash; it’s a valid point, but I think we can set it aside for the moment. Think of them as simply alternative currencies. Here are the points that Alter made in his post:

Plastic is more convenient than cash. True, and I don’t see this changing.

Plastic is less likely, in the minds of many, to transfer germs. That is currently true, but is this a permanent condition? I can easily envision – because we’re mostly there already – a machine that accepts cash and dispenses sterilized change. All we need to do is add the step that sterilizes the cash. Maybe a UV source, maybe a spray-down with an antiseptic? Folks, I think this would be easy. If we want to further reduce exposure, we could finally move on a proposal that my Arts Editor supports – non-production and even circulation reduction of pennies and nickels. Similar moves have taken place in the past with no disruption to the economy.

Now, moving on to an explicit lesson from a course I took in college 35 (!) years ago:

Plastic is far easier to trace and analyze than cash. And this will remain true. This is a trivial task for computers, and the results are demonstrated everytime you see an ad in your browser related to something you’ve recently bought. Cash, much like bitcoin, is anonymous – you take it out of your pocket, hand it to the retailer, and walk out of the store. Only store security cameras can vouch for what you’ve bought, and now we’re talking a far more computationally-intensive operation, because it’s facial recognition (however, the computer recording the transaction could be synchronized with the cameras).

When it comes to these comparisons, it may seem like plastic has an advantage. But it only takes one middlin’ disaster to render that advantage questionable, and that disaster is when they become unusable. Whether the credit card networks go down hard, for days on end (think: solar storm, terrorist attack, national adversary worming its way into the credit card companies), or some sort of mass corruption and/or theft of credit card data and funds occurs, the credit card industry is dependent on trust that they are up & running properly 24 hours a day. If they lose that trust, then all those retailers will walk away, because their customers may simply say You want credit card? I’m taking my business elsewhere. This demand happened to a local collection of eateries at the local mall Rosedale, BTW, before the pandemic hit.

But cash, for all of its faults – and they’re not all listed here! – remains operational in the midst of a credit card meltdown. Indeed, if a disaster occurs, the biggest trouble may be that banks cannot deliver enough cash to keep the economy well-greased. It’s not hard to be capable of handling cash 24 hours a day. The only, but substantial, concern is security.

And then what happens if & when a vaccine and/or cure is found for the coronavirus? Do we have permanent paranoia? Or do we return to prior norms?

It’ll be interesting to see.

I must admit I was fascinated by the term glacier mice:

In 2006, while hiking around the Root Glacier in Alaska to set up scientific instruments, researcher Tim Bartholomaus encountered something unexpected.

“What the heck is this!” Bartholomaus recalls thinking. He’s a glaciologist at the University of Idaho.

Scattered across the glacier were balls of moss. “They’re not attached to anything and they’re just resting there on ice,” he says. “They’re bright green in a world of white.”

Intrigued, he and two colleagues set out to study these strange moss balls. In the journal Polar Biology, they report that the balls can persist for years and move around in a coordinated, herdlike fashion that the researchers can not yet explain.

“The whole colony of moss balls, this whole grouping, moves at about the same speeds and in the same directions,” Bartholomaus says. “Those speeds and directions can change over the course of weeks.” [NPR]

But it seems to me that this is more than just another curiosity:

Each ball is like a soft, wet, squishy pillow of moss. The balls can be composed of different moss species and are thought to form around some kind of impurity, like a bit of dust. They’ve been seen in Alaska, Iceland, Svalbard and South America, although they won’t grow on just any glacier — it seems that conditions have to be just right.

Conceptually, this doesn’t seem to differ much from a collection of cells that makes up a multicellular organism. I wonder how far we could push the analogy. Perhaps it falls apart when we note that the various mosses, in more congenial environments, can live separate from the others, while could cells? I’m not enough of a biologist to really have an informed opinion.

And, while it’s probably more a matter of external physics than a shared internal set of rules that flocks of birds use, measurements of their movements was also fascinating:

The movement of the moss balls was peculiar. The researchers had expected that the balls would travel around randomly by rolling off their ice pedestals. The reality was different. The balls moved about an average of an inch a day in a kind of choreographed formation — like a flock of birds or a herd of wildebeests.

“When we visited them all, they were all just sort of moving relatively slowly and initially toward the south,” says Bartholomaus. “Then they all started to speed up and kind of start to deviate toward the west. And then they slowed down again and progressed even farther to the west.”

I’m easily suggestible, aren’t I? But I think that’s just so cool.

CNN reports on another Presidential Tantrum …

President Donald Trump began a solemn Memorial Day railing against North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, ahead of the 2020 Republican National Convention [RNC], threatening to pull it out of Charlotte, where the convention is expected to be held August 24 to 27.

Trump contended that Cooper is “unable to guarantee” that the arena can be filled to capacity.

“I love the Great State of North Carolina, so much so that I insisted on having the Republican National Convention in Charlotte at the end of August,” Trump said in a series of tweets. “Unfortunately, Democrat Governor, @RoyCooperNC is still in Shutdown mood & unable to guarantee that by August we will be allowed full attendance in the Arena. In other words, we would be spending millions of dollars building the Arena to a very high standard without even knowing if the Democrat Governor would allow the Republican Party to fully occupy the space.”

To which I can only tiredly respond,

Nobody important gives a shit, you half-baked twerp.

Sure, I know, there’s usually a big economic impact – positive, most of the time – for hosting a political convention. Humph. For closure, here’s Governor Cooper (D-NC – hah, I kill myself!) concerning the RNC:

In an interview last week, Cooper said that data and science will guide his decisions on whether the state can hold large gatherings like the convention. He said the Republican convention, which he supported bringing to Charlotte, will be treated like any other event.

“This is not political. This is not emotional. This is based on health experts, data and science and that’s it for everybody to see,” Cooper told CNN. “No one is being favored or disfavored over the other.”

And while some people cannot help but see everything through the political prisms permanently affixed to their foreheads, I can’t help but note that if Cooper opens too early, he is arguably responsible for the deaths of everyone who catches their deadly infection during that time period. That’s a heavy moral burden to bear for a moral person.

I doubt Trump is at all bothered at the thought, based on his remarks, above.

If it hasn’t already sparked some metaphorical fires, I suspect these efforts to change how our cities operate will ignite quite a few:

D.C. lawmakers are drafting legislation to make it easier for shutdown-battered restaurants to space out their tables by putting them on public roads, parking spaces and sidewalks at least for months, and to give neighborhoods a way to close streets to traffic to make walking and biking safer. A mayoral advisory group made similar recommendations Thursday.

The pandemic “has been terrible. But there are certain byproducts that, if we take advantage of them, will let us be more of an open city, more of a city that’s usable by all sorts of people, cafes and cyclists,” D.C. Council member Mary M. Cheh (D-Ward 3) said. “It’s an opportunity to stop doing things in the old polluting and unhealthful ways.” [WaPo]

The resurrected Minnehaha.

Why a flashpoint?

First, many, many people think they should be able to drive their cars anywhere. It’s a lack of a sense of history, really; just a few generations ago, car ownership was extremely limited, roads were far less available, and mass transportation was the best option for most transit. For example, streetcars out of Minneapolis had a connection to the town of Excelsior on Lake Minnetonka for use as a commuting option, and the docks at Excelsior connected to a collection of six Express Boats, which collected commuters from the lake shore for transport to and from Excelsior. On weekends, Big Island Park, located on an island in Lake Minnetonka, functioned as a weekend destination, although it was a financial failure. (See the Steamboat Minnehaha website for more information.)

Second, the tendency of American middle-class and upper-middle-class society to spread out, to have enormous lawns, four car garages, and big (but often character-less, as my Arts Editor often observes), big houses out in the exurbs, as outer-ring suburbs are called, often necessitates the use of cars to get to work – or mass transit, which is a little off-putting for those of us who see the coronavirus as something more than the flu. Indeed, Lloyd Alter on Treehugger expresses some concern that Covid-19 will lead to greater pollution:

… but things do have to change; we don’t have a choice, and we don’t have time. As cities come out of lockdown, more people are choosing to drive than ever before. According to Bloomberg News, “As lockdowns ease and parts of the world reopen for business, driving has emerged as the socially distant transportation mode of choice.” In Wuhan, China, private car use doubled compared to before the lockdown. “It’s a phenomenon that may begin to reverse the dramatic reductions in air pollution the world’s busiest cities have seen in recent months as travel and industrial operations ground to a halt.”

Alter fails to mention one of the lessons of the current pandemic, when it comes to work, is that there are a lot of jobs which can be performed from home. I’m one of the fortunate people whose job remains intact, and I haven’t been into the office since some time in March. The effects on commerce of this phenomenon will be difficult to predict, but easy to understand post-facto. Factors include negative impacts on the commercial construction industry, positive on fuel consumption, car-related air pollution, and road damage (although, as to the latter, the trucking industry does a lot of the damage to the roads, and I don’t see that terribly affected in the long run), and others not occurring to me.

Finally, the very fact that cities are taking this action will be a flashpoint for the culture wars. Whether organic (that is, earnest views expressed by Americans) or artificial (arguments induced by agents of foreign governments), there will be, I think, a lot of screaming by people who will see this as an infringement on their “rights” – after all, cars are a big investment! And it’s so American to drive cars! If that sounds incoherent, well, it is. We’ve seen a great deal of irrationality in the frantic protests against public health emergency declarations, placing their own individual rights above the right of everyone to have a good shot at public health. Given what little I know of social behavior during the deadly influenza pandemic of 1917-1918, this is actually not unusual. I’m hoping we won’t see the same tragic results of those demands as was seen 100 years ago – but I’m not putting any money on it. I sadly expect to see more spikes in infections and death counts / day as people who think “we have to be together” find out, again, that this is how the infection spreads.

So I’m looking wearily forward to this as a near-future cultural battleground between those folks desiring change, and those who fear change. And I’m wondering if the rational fear of public transit will continue into irrationality after a vaccine and / or cure for Covid-19 is found.

The dude in the white jacket plays two roles: the offensive stereotype, and the revenge of the offensive stereotype.

The Falcon’s Brother (1942) is part of a series of stories concerning a detective named Gaylord Lawrence and his sidekick, Lefty. Gaylord is known as The Falcon to the local New York City police. In this story, Gaylord’s brother, Tom, is returning after a stay in various places in South America.

Intent on meeting Tom at the dock side, Lefty must drag Gaylord away from the various ladies they meet on the way, but once there, they discover the police have cordoned off the ship. Being known to the police, Lawrence and Lefty are permitted to board the ship, where they find the police in Tom’s cabin, having found a body.

After staring at the face of the deceased, Gaylord is overcome with emotion – or so it seems. Exiting the ship, he and Lefty tail one of the women who had been on board and associated with Tom, but eventually Gaylord is sideswiped by a car, and is whisked off to the hospital.

At which point, Tom steps out of the shadows and resumes the investigation. It wasn’t him – and Gaylord knew it.

Bodies start to pile up, and eventually we’re in a little town up the coast, watching as an emissary to an organization of South American countries returns via flying boat – and is targeted by Nazi snipers. Gaylord and Lefty, who has recovered from his coma and sped up to the town following Tom, arrives just in time to take the bullet meant for the emissary, while Tom, captured by the Germans, has been distracting the snipers in an innovative manner.

The plot was nicely twisted, information held back until best revealed, but the characters felt a little bit too much like stock characters (the goofy sidekick, the ridiculously aggressive, yet incompetent, cops), and this is evidenced most strongly in their reactions, or more properly lack thereof, to the heroic death of The Falcon. This lack blunts the impact of the story, so it was not a story I’ll remember for months.

But it was an ok way to pass an hour or so.

Auteur:

a film director or producer who controls a production and gives the film its unique style [The Free Dictionary]

Noted in “The #SnyderCut of ‘Justice League’ was an Internet joke. Cinephiles should root for it.” Sonny Bunch, WaPo:

In one sense, Warner Bros.’ “Justice League” represents everything that is wrong with movies and the film industry in general. We’re talking about a giant corporate comic book movie the likes of which are, in a very real sense, snuffing out mid-budget movies for adults. That said, we all love our auteurs. Your Michael Manns and your Steven Spielbergs and your Ridley Scotts — makers of big, expensive, corporate-backed movies, sure. But movies with a personal vision and an aesthetic marker all their own. And once upon a time, “Justice League” was the product of an auteur: That’s right. I’m talking about Zack Snyder.

After my semi-rant concerning encrypted devices and communications a reader retorts:

I am pro-Apple on this one. Especially in light of the current administration.

And, of course, that’s a difficult objection to overcome. The rampant corruption in the Trump Administration makes it hard to foster the necessary trust that proper procedures would be followed if there was a way to defeat the encryption. I cannot fault my reader for their stance.

But I am still struck by the absolutist positions of Apple and their allies, as I cannot help but see the parallels with our political world at this time. And it worries me. Along with the rightly distrusted Trump Administration, I worry that its legacy will be distrust of the very government we hire to keep us safe.

And I wonder if that will turn out to be its worst legacy.

That dude in the background may be the biggest mystery of all.

I think Meet Nero Wolfe (1936), an early foray into the sub-genre of eccentric detectives who care not to leave their homes, had some potential to it. The lead character comes off as someone who recognizes the rules of society, and plays off them with a certain zest that I found charming. His assistant, Archie, may be a little bit too much of the standard dull assistant, much like the classic Dr. Watson of Nigel Bruce’s creation, opposite Basil Rathbone, but Archie’s insistent fiancee has her charms, and the balance of the cast, which is rather large, is nicely differentiated by purpose and actor; too often, I find such characters blend into a blur.

The plot, too, has some lovely twists to it. For example, suggesting a heart attack was caused by a poison dart fired from a golf club was quite lovely, while on a different note, having a police interview with Wolfe run entirely on his terms takes us off the standard slog through the usual and tired interview quite into something else – a look into how Wolfe manipulates, with the best of intentions, those in authority. I thought that it was, although a trifle labored, a clever bit.

But the film comes off a little flat. Scene segues, well, they’re not any, which has the result of peppering the film with staccato scenes that don’t necessarily make intuitive sense.

But, and more importantly, the lack of truly empathetic characters hampers the movie. Wolfe is a creature independent of real human relationships: he wants his beer, good food, his orchids, and the cash to continue procuring the first three. And little black books to fill with accounting notes. His assistant, Archie, is a little bit too much of a dimwit, and his fiancee does little to help. The other characters, while believably having their own lives, are too sketchy for a good connection – and, in any case, unlikely to show up in sequels.

We enjoyed this for what it was, but it wasn’t as good as perhaps it could have been.

If you’re looking for a bit of astrophysics education mixed with humor, you won’t go far wrong with Death By Black Hole And Other Cosmic Quandaries, by Neil deGrasse Tyson. Beginning with our sensory organs and progressing through how evidence can be accepted, refined, corrected, and replaced, Tyson takes the reader from zero to the state of astrophysics in 2007 (its publishing date; it’s possibly been updated, but I cannot point at evidence), and then uses the weight of what he’s so far discussed to rebuff those who would suggest that our areas of ignorance are evidence of God. He has no time for such foolishness.

Easy to read, short chapters, pithy remarks. You don’t need a PhD to read this. If you have one in Physics, you’ll probably not even be interested. But for me, it was a lot of fun.