Monthly Archives: June 2020

Sonja Eliason and Bridget Alex investigate the characteristics of plague from an archaeological viewpoint, comparing how societies differed before and during the the granddaddy of them all, the Justinianic Plague, on The Conversation, and come to an unsurprising conclusion:

While encouraging economic and technological gains, urban development and trade created ideal conditions for an epidemic in Constantinople. Vulnerability to plague was an unintended consequence of this society’s lifestyle.

Meanwhile, it seems earlier cultures [that didn’t experience “over-congestion] unwittingly shielded themselves from the same threat.

The harsh reality is that it’s exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to control a pathogen, its possible mutations or its next outbreak. But understanding how human behaviors affect the spread and virulence of a disease can inform preparations for the future.

As a society, we can take organized measures to reduce the spread of infection, whether by limiting over-congestion, controlling food waste, or restricting access to contaminated areas. Human behaviors are just as critical to our disease susceptibility as are the characteristics of the pathogen itself.

Keep in mind that congestion will be a relative term, dependent on the characteristics of the pathogen under examination; the more infectious the pathogen, the lesser the necessary population density to qualify as congested.

We make unconscious tradeoffs when we centralize in cities: commerce of many kinds becomes much more efficient, but at the cost of disease and death for those who stumbled into the wrong situation, whether it be the cough of those already infected or the contaminated shared water source. Medicine has acted as the neutralizing agent since it came under modern scientific management, but rarely can medical researchers react quickly to a new pathogen; it’s only by luck that a medicine already through safety trials (or, worse, grand-daddied out of those trials!) can be successfully applied to a new pathogen.

And, of course, medicine is impotent when public health is not prioritized by those in power, as we’re beginning to vividly realize. In a way, the current … I cannot call it debate … dispute over whether the economy should be reopening even as multiple American states are experiencing novel coronavirus infection surges (click here to see the overall American contretemps) writes large the tradeoffs those people of so long ago experienced.

An occasional pet peeve of mine is the subject of expectations. Let me give a quick concrete example: When the Metro Light Rail went in here in the Twin Cities and initially opened up, the local media was all agog as they announced that more than twice the expected number of people had ridden the light rail in the first X months.

We’re all supposed to get excited with them, right?

But, to me, being slightly cynical, I had to ask, first, On what are these expectations built? and then, even worse, Is this even the right metric?

The first question is a technical question about how a metric is estimated, and this takes place without discussion of what they’re trying to measure. Think about it: the number of people riding the light rail relates to what how?

The unvoiced, and either assumed or, insert dark music, unexplored causal chain here is how that estimated number captures the percentage of goal achieved. Removing some of the abstractions here, we don’t choose to install a light rail system, or widen the interstate, or for that matter polish the Capitol building, because we have an excess of money flowing out of our wallets. We do it because there’s some a problem to solve, a problem of such magnitude and impact on society that it seems worthwhile to spend many millions of dollars to solve it.

So, as an engineer, it seems far more logical to me to quantify the problem, estimate the impact that this solution, which may be a partial solution (and that’s fine), will have on the problem, and then measure the actual impact. That, not so incidentally, is how we’ve gradually realized that widening the interstates as a solution to commuter gridlock is not the solution we’d like to think it should be. How do we know? Because we did it, we’ve widened interstates, and gridlock simply continues. Remember Build it and they will come? Yep, that’s what happened.

All of this came to mind when a reader sent me a pair of links concerning police body cameras. Here’s the first, from Governing:

Police Body Cameras Aren’t Having the Effects Many Expected

For years, many people hailed body-worn cameras as a potential key to improving police transparency and strengthening often-fractured relationships with the communities they serve. But so far, academic research suggests the technology largely hasn’t lived up to those expectations.

That’s the conclusion of a new report from the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy at George Mason University.

Researchers reviewed 70 empirical studies on body cameras’ effects, ranging from officer and citizen behavior to influences on law enforcement agencies as a whole. While much of the research remains mixed, it counters some promised benefits of body cameras at a time when departments are increasingly adopting the technology.

And then this one from NPR:

Body Cam Study Shows No Effect On Police Use Of Force Or Citizen Complaints

Having police officers wear little cameras seems to have no discernible impact on citizen complaints or officers’ use of force, at least in the nation’s capital.

That’s the conclusion of a study performed as Washington, D.C., rolled out its huge camera program. The city has one of the largest forces in the country, with some 2,600 officers now wearing cameras on their collars or shirts.

“We found essentially that we could not detect any statistically significant effect of the body-worn cameras,” says Anita Ravishankar, a researcher with the Metropolitan Police Department and a group in the city government called the Lab @ DC.

“I think we’re surprised by the result. I think a lot of people were suggesting that the body-worn cameras would change behavior,” says Chief of Police Peter Newsham. “There was no indication that the cameras changed behavior at all.”

Perhaps, he says, that is because his officers “were doing the right thing in the first place.

But was it realistic to expect behavioral changes by the police because they wear body cams?

Look: body cams have been in the process of adoption because of dissatisfaction with certain outcomes involving police and the public. As a proud member of the Instant Gratification Generation, I can understand why everyone wanted to believe that having a body cam would cause the police to … improve.  That’s what I hoped for when I heard about body cams. Having fewer poor outcomes might be the metric we desired.

But I think what we need to realize is that body cams are a documentary tool, not a corrective tool. They are not analogous to a cattle prod, zapping an officer who’s not performing properly right when they commit an impropriety; in order for body cams to function as a corrective tool, the officers would have to be thinking about how they’re reacting now and how it’s going to look on the body cam, all while reacting to a situation which may be life and death right now.

That’s too much to expect.

But I have to take issue with Michael White, cited in the NPR report, on this statement:

The big question about cameras now is, White says: “Is it worth the cost?” Besides buying the actual cameras, cash-strapped police departments have to pay to store and manage many thousands of hours of video footage. “I think a big part of the answer to that question is going to come from what the police department and the community want to accomplish with the rollout of body-worn cameras.”

Even as I agree with him that the footage from body cams will generally have little long term value, I have to say I think that as a documentary tool, they may prove to be initially highly valuable. Not as a tool for evaluating if this or that police officer is performing well or poorly, but as a general documentary tool for evaluating whether police are the proper response to categories of situation. I and readers have touched on this subject before with regards to the Eugene, OR long term experiment with CAHOOTS, a agency trained to respond to situations for which police often prove ill-suited, such as the mentally ill. They are not armed, but they are equipped for their specific emergency situations.

This body cam footage may turn out to be invaluable for deciding which categories of incidents warrant police response, and which categories call for response by groups other than police, such as mental health professionals. Ideally, those categories in which the police simply do not perform well could be reassigned to non-police forces specialized for those situations, much like the CAHOOTS force, above, leaving others for police to work on. As most police forces complain about their burden these days, they should welcome this approach to police reorganization.

The metric changes from quantification to classification.

That said, it remains true that police are one of the vectors for system racism. I think body cams are turning out to be an inefficient tool for documenting and evaluating officer behavior when it comes to undesired incident outcomes. Along with the difficulty in understanding just what is happening, especially during an altercation, my main objection is that the body cams are under the control of the subjects under study – the police. No competent scientist would permit this if at all possible. All it takes is for a body cam to mysteriously not work for a moment or two in order to lose key data.

If we really want to pursue direct observation of officers’ performance, ideally we’d like to have God observing each incident and sending us a written summary. Lacking that, how close can we get?

Without much idea of how expensive and difficult this would be to implement, I’d recommend an independent agency of drones and drone monitor operators. They would not be members of the police, and the drones would not be weapons platforms. They’d only carry cameras, and they’d launch whenever the police responded to an incident. Perhaps based on the roof of the police cars, the drone, controlled by its operator, would be responsible for filming the incident from advantageous angles in order to evaluate performance and, in tragic cases, convey the recordings of the incident to the District Attorney for follow up and prosecution. The drone operator would not be at the scene of the action, but remote, instead.

Is this perfect? Of course not. Police could “accidentally” shoot the drone down and then shoot their suspect down in cold blood. Their are other ways to defeat the drone, which I shan’t bother to enumerate, which would be more subtle. But this should improve the situation at least somewhat.

A lovely, if incomplete, chart, from WaPo:

What’s missing? A scaling factor. Here’s what you need to know – the United States has a population of roughly 330 million, he European Union of 444 million. If that graph was scaled to take into account population differences, the US would look even worse.

Same source:

“There is no second wave coming,” White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow announced Monday, almost exactly four months and 118,000 deaths after he infamously declared the virus “contained” and “pretty close to airtight.” Vice President Pence made a similar declaration in a self-back-patting op-ed last week: “Whatever the media says, our whole-of-America approach has been a success.”

That’s all. Our leadership wants us to believe in something other than reality. Do so at your own risk.

Last time I looked in on the Montana Senate race back in March, it was basically deadlocked. Now? Hard to say, with no polls in June, at least so far. But back in early May, maybe six weeks ago, Governor Bullock (D-MT) was showing some heavy hitting capability, putting the incumbent, Senator Daines (R-MT), under pressure:

A new poll from Montana State University shows Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock leading Republican Sen. Steve Daines by seven percentage points in Montana’s high-profile 2020 U.S. Senate contest.

The online poll, which surveyed 738 Montanans in mid-to-late April, asked registered, likely voters who they would support, if the election for Senate were held now. Just over 46 percent said they’d choose Bullock and 39 percent supported Daines.

Seven percent said they were undecided, while another 6 percent said they would vote for someone else. A Libertarian and Green Party candidate also are on the ballot.

David Parker, the chair of the political science department at MSU-Bozeman, said the poll confirms that the Bullock-Daines contest will be a close, hard-fought race – one of the most-watched Senate matchups in the nation.

“I think it’s certainly reasonable to assume that the race is probably within the margin of error and too close to call,” he told MTN News. “So, while we show a lead (for Bullock), it’s within the margin of error, so I would say, yeah, this is a competitive Senate race.”

The poll’s margin of error is plus-or-minus 4.6 percentage points. [KTVH]

I’m not sure how a plus/minus of 4.6 makes a 7 point lead within the margin of error, but there you go. It’s still a long ways to election day, but Bullock has the numbers running in his direction at the moment. In fact, a little digging turned up this:

So Bullock has progressed from down 9 points to up 7 points. If he can push this into double digits, it may be safe to assume he’ll become a US Senator come next January. Daines, meanwhile, must carry the burden of being of the Party of Trump, and while a TrumpScore of 85% shows some independence from the President, the Party of Trump does love its slavish adherence to the President – while Montanans greatly value independence. This will be a tricky cliff for Daines to negotiate.

PS: And finally, Governor Bullock has been endorsed by The Lincoln Project, a group of Republicans dedicated to be rid of Trump.

In the case of General Michael Flynn, who plead guilty, twice, to lying to FBI agents before changing attorneys and then changing his plea, which [breath] was followed by Attorney General Barr deciding to withdraw the entire prosecution, precipitating Judge Emmet Sullivan into putting that matter on hold in order to collect opinions and hold a hearing on whether to accept that move, [breath again] resulting in Flynn and the DoJ appealing to the next level up in the federal judiciary, it turns out a panel of the DC Court of Appeals doesn’t think that’s important, uh, “that” being the lying:

U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan cannot scrutinize the Justice Department’s decision to drop its long-running prosecution of President Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn and must dismiss the case, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday.

In a 2-1 decision, the court said it is not within the judge’s power to prolong the prosecution or examine the government’s motives for its reversal in the politically charged case. Flynn twice pleaded guilty to lying to federal agents about his pre-inauguration contacts with Russia’s ambassador before the Justice Department moved in May to dismiss the charges.

When your family goes to court to block a tell-all book by a family member – because it’s largely accurate. Here’s Steve Benen:

If you’re new to the story, Mary Trump’s book, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man,” is scheduled to be released next month. According to her publisher, Simon & Schuster, the book is a “revelatory, authoritative portrait of Donald J. Trump and the toxic family that made him.”

It’s also likely to shed some interesting light on one of the more embarrassing revelations surrounding the president: the New York Times reported that Mary Trump’s book is expected to say she was “a chief source” for the newspaper’s coverage of the president’s finances, “and that she provided the newspaper with confidential tax documents.”

As regular readers may recall, the Times‘ exhaustive research uncovered evidence of “dubious tax schemes” and “outright fraud” that Trump exploited to receive hundreds of millions of dollars from his father. The findings painted a picture in which the president, far from the self-made man he pretends to be, relied heavily on legally dubious family handouts.

There has to be an element of embarrassment to realize the quality of family traditions may not be up to snuff – especially for Donald J. Trump, who is reportedly driven by the opinions of those he perceives as higher on the social ladder himself.

My Arts Editor, that is. The headpiece.

Venetian doctor during the time of the plague. Museo Correr (Wikipedia)

It sits in the entryway hanging from a hook, vaguely menacing. Some night I’ll awaken to see someone slinking around in it.

It’ll be weird.

Paul Krugman at The New York Times, commenting on conservative culture, reminds me of something:

In the early 20th century the American South was ravaged by pellagra, a nasty disease that produced the “four Ds” — dermatitis, diarrhea, dementia and death. At first, pellagra’s nature was uncertain, but by 1915 Dr. Joseph Goldberger, a Hungarian immigrant employed by the federal government, had conclusively shown that it was caused by nutritional deficiencies associated with poverty, and especially with a corn-based diet.

However, for decades many Southern citizens and politicians refused to accept this diagnosis, declaring either that the epidemic was a fiction created by Northerners to insult the South or that the nutritional theory was an attack on Southern culture. And deaths from pellagra continued to climb. …

There continues to be a flurry of controversy over President Trump allegedly ordering testing to be slowed down:

While I regret that Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) represents California, a state Biden can count in his column and thus doesn’t need any help winning, I think Harris should be Biden’s selection as VP running mate. Perry Bacon, Jr. presents quite the analysis of why Democrats prefer this or that candidate; not being a Democrat, I think I can simply state the reasons I think she’d be a good pick, if not for the traditional reasons of attracting more votes in the election:

1. Biden owes the black community. Without the black community, Biden would be in his basement with no camera coverage. A lack of gratitude would impact him in many ways, some of which are not obvious, yet are critical.
2. Harris, as successful State AG and Senator, and being of Black / Asian heritage, presents a positive role model for black and brown women of all ages – in fact, women of all ages.
3. Harris is young, a couple of years younger than me, in fact. A whipper-snapper. And an important backup to Biden, if he should become ill, or worse. She is active, quite forward in her opinions, and experienced – all important attributes.
4. She is attractive to moderate Democrats. For all the yakkity yak about Warren, she makes the Democratic middle nervous. She’s whip-smart, but too old to be a backup to Biden – and I think she’s effective as a Senator, so why waste her when she’s problematic in the VP role? Progressives may love Warren, but Harris will attract more votes – or at least not drive them away.

For me, the most attractive attribute is #2, because it’s a long-term good. She brings enough to the table to help Biden win the contest, but it’s her long term impact which will best benefit the United States.

I realize there’s nothing insightful in my list, but sometimes it helps just to enumerate reasons for the various candidates. Those are most of mine.

John Bolton in an interview:

“Having seen him in operation for 17 months, I just cannot vote for him again,” Bolton told Inskeep. “I’m planning to write in the name of a conservative Republican, identity to be determined yet. But I will not be voting for Donald Trump, and I will not be voting for [presumptive Democratic nominee] Joe Biden.” [NPR]

If you do not vote for Trump, that’s a single vote subtracted from his vote total.

If you vote for Biden, the only serious challenger, that’s a two vote swing, and you’d be voting for basic governing competency.

But he can’t do it. Just another reason not to trust “Bomb Them” Bolton. He has no real dedication to his country, only to his predilections.

Not a recent pic, but impressive.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team (STSci/AURA)

NGCs 2936 and 2937.

It’s rather like the legendary Cake Wrecks website, only without the class.

Izzat a giant eyeball staring out of its ass, or what?

It’s the dormant Crappy Taxidermy website. My advice? View with only one eye open. No updates since 2015, and that’s perhaps for the best, eh?

NewScientist (13 June 2020, paywall) notes a mystery in our technology:

Ships around the world are reporting false locations, seeming to circle Point Reyes near San Francisco when they are actually thousands of kilometres away.

The locations are broadcast by each ship’s Automatic Identification System (AIS). These are required under international law to signal a vessel’s identity and GPS location. Bjorn Bergman of the environmental watchdogs SkyTruth and Global Fishing Watch discovered the anomalies from a historical database of AIS information.

Bergman was tipped off when he noticed records from 2018 and 2019 of satellites receiving AIS locations outside areas they cover, for example, a satellite over West Africa picking up a ship supposedly off California. Vessels affected included a livestock carrier near Libya, a cargo ship in the Suez Canal, a small boat off Chile and a Norwegian tug.

Most incidents lasted just a few hours, but a boat carrying oil workers to installations off the coast of Nigeria spent two weeks apparently circling Point Reyes, then veered off inland to Utah, occasionally jumping back to a Nigerian oil terminal. Most vessels appeared to circle off California, but others were displaced to Madrid or Hong Kong.

The obvious explanation, detailed in the article, is some sort of malicious attack, although exactly why Point Reyes is significant is not apparent. Not noted is the possibility of some sort of flaw in the system.

What lurks in the back of my mind is that this is a symptom of new physics, of something we thought we knew thoroughly, but didn’t. Call me a child, if you like. Sure, it’s not going to be that – but I refuse to stop hoping until hard evidence comes in.

Today I found my link to the conservative bloodstream had sent me a link to an article on Solomon Samuel Simone, which starts …

Solomon Samuel Simone (aka RAZ from CHAZ or CHOP) is the proclaimed warlord of CHAZ, the multi-block area located in Seattle.  Raz hates America but owns multiple guns, luxury automobiles, millions in real estate.

More importantly, Raz is supported by the Islamic government in Dubai. [Notorious conservative site The Gateway Pundit]

So I decided to do a bit of research on this dude. According to the non-conservative websites, which mostly seem to consist of entertainment news and fandom sources, he appears to be a rapper and Seattle resident who has joined the semi-autonomous area of Seattle that is centered around the abandoned Seattle Police precinct. Here’s a WaPo article on the area.

According to the conservative sites?

Solomon Samuel Simone (aka RAZ from CHAZ or CHOP) is the proclaimed warlord of CHAZ, the multi-block area located in Seattle. Raz hates America but owns multiple guns, luxury automobiles, millions in real estate.More importantly, Raz is supported by the Islamic government in Dubai.The leader of CHAZ, Warlord Raz Simone was previously identified running guns …

I don’t have to identify the site I took the above from, because the DuckDuckGo search revealed multiple conservative sites using the same verbiage; in fact, the only site that didn’t in the first couple of pages is the Chinese-oriented, Trump-boosting The Epoch Times. I investigated their article, but they wanted my email address to see it, and I declined the opportunity to be harassed with yet more conservative spam.

So this topic has evolved from a search for truth, which could be difficult to complete, to a statistical evaluation of communications. In this case, we’re seeing multiple conservative sites waging what appears to be a war to discredit a black leader of a protest movement. This is a coordinated effort, not independent investigations, and should at the very least raise suspicions in the mind of the careful reader that anything these sites put out are not worthy of trust – or even of investigation. Given the context, we need only remember that a group without a leader is (sorry, anarchists) usually an ineffective rabble. That’s why leaders are often targeted.

Now excuse me while I chastise my conservative friend for being a sucker.

For Americans, the entire subject of testing for Covid-19 is fraught with Federal government incompetence and mendacity. But how about in other places? NewScientist’s (13 June 2020) Adam Vaughn reports on UK testing efforts:

Officially, more than 5.7 million tests have been conducted in the UK so far, with 142,123 tests on 6 June. However, those simple totals mask a complex series of different tests.

A sizeable chunk of that daily count, 26,802, are antibody tests carried out under testing strategy pillars 3 and 4. These tests are used to see if someone has previously had the coronavirus, and for research on the virus’s spread. Such tests aren’t informative for detecting or tracing new cases, or advising someone on whether they should self-isolate.

The bulk of the daily number, 79,685 on 6 June, are “have you got it” nose-and-throat swab tests for people outside of hospitals, known as pillar 2. Those include tests posted to people at home, although these may not ever be taken or processed. There has also been a degree of double counting – for example, if a person’s nose and throat is swabbed separately, that may be counted as two tests.

The remaining 35,636 on 6 June were swab tests to confirm infection among hospital patients and staff, called pillar 1.

When tests are combined and counted up in this way, the government has been able to say it has met its targets – the most recent of these was 200,000 daily tests by the end of May. But without knowing how many people are being tested and to what extent double counting and unprocessed tests contribute to the totals, it is difficult for independent experts to say whether enough testing is taking place to understand and control the UK outbreak.

“Early on, what we really wanted to know was how lethal this condition was and we can’t get anywhere close to that until we know how many people have had the infection. If we wanted to know the infection fatality rate, we can only guess at the moment,” says Jason Oke at the University of Oxford.

Additionally, for monitoring how the country comes out of lockdown, Oke says “what we really need to do is have a system where we can monitor potential spikes in positive cases. We can only do that if we have clear data on who’s getting tested and how many people are getting tested, not just total numbers of tests.”

And more and more. It all smacks of political check-marking, which is not useful to scientists trying to understand the nature of the epidemic. Understanding leads to more effective reactions on our part, from treatments to prevention, and if we don’t let it be guided by science, rather than politicians frantic to meet goals set by other politicians, then we’re not going to have an effective response.

One item I wish the article had addressed but did not was the matter of economics: is testing constrained by financial concerns? The attentive reader will note that I used a very standard phraseology as not to activate the fight or flight response, but my own reaction is that letting financial concerns play into testing is a mistake: wealthy countries such as the UK and the US should be able to attack problems like this head-on, not cutting corners and thus endangering data completeness and integrity.

In other words: No accountants should be anywhere near the top of the decision making pyramid! We’re not the sort of societies which must make a choice between lives and wealth.

In case you weren’t aware, this offensive sort of thing was once a thing:

More at T. A. Cisco’s Black Americana Collection. My Arts Editor and I have occasionally seen such items at antique stores, which left me staring in disbelief.

(h/t RW)

When it comes to November, it appears Senator Jodi Ernst (R-IA) remains vulnerable, according to a Civiqs Poll conducted for The Daily Kos:

Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA)

1. If the election for U.S. senator from Iowa were held today, who would you vote
for?

Theresa Greenfield, Democrat 48%
Joni Ernst, Republican 45%
Someone else 3%
Unsure 3%

A Des Moines Register/MediaCom poll also puts Senator Ernst in the danger zone:

Fresh off a four-way primary race that drew millions in outside spending, Democrat Theresa Greenfield leads Republican Sen. Joni Ernst by 3 percentage points in Iowa’s hotly contested U.S. Senate race, a new Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll shows.

According to the poll, 46% of likely voters say they would back Greenfield if the election were held today, and 43% say they would back Ernst.

“This is definitely a competitive race,” said J. Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co., which conducted the poll. She said the poll contains other “warning signs” for Ernst and noted that this is the first Iowa Poll conducted since Ernst first ran in 2014 in which she has trailed her general election opponent.

Vulnerable but not yet firmly put in the upset column, unlike Senator McSally (R-AZ), whose deficit continues to widen into double digits as November approaches. If Ernst’s gap becomes larger, will Ernst decide to throw President Trump under the bus and strike out on her own, showing independence and disapproval for his behaviors, or would that be political suicide? In the face of the unexpectedly low turnout for the Tulsa Trump rally, it might be a viable option.

A reader responds to my remarks that traffic stops shouldn’t necessarily require the officer carry a gun:

Sorry Hue, this one is plain dumb.

The Castile incident had problems on both sides I give Castile 60% of the blame, maybe a bit more, and it could have just as easily resulted in death for your unarmed traffic stop only cop. Read the report on the death again. Hell, even use the CNN one – that was pretty accurate – if you want to avoid conservative bias. The Wikipedia entry is also valid. If indeed Castile had been stopped :”more than 40 times” in that area, he knew the drill. Dunno about you, but on the rare times I’m stopped by the time the officer gets to my car I have my license and insurance in hand, with hands on top of the steering wheel and window down, with wallet on dash in case he needs anything else. Castile knew that, but probably because he was so wasted he didn’t do that, and instead says “I have a gun” and goes digging on his strong side for his wallet, failing to stop the motion when the officer yells at him to do so. Change this scenario to the all to common one where a driver or passenger _does_ go for a gun, and your unarmed cop has about two seconds to run for cover before becoming a statistic. The whole unarmed police in the US argument is completely invalid.

I’m guessing you have no one in your family who’s a LEO? Or know anyone who is? ANY incident can go from calm to deadly in the space of a few seconds. And the “we’ll have social workers respond to mental illness calls” and “medical staff respond to OD calls” is also deadly. We already have too many ambush setups in the US against responders. The police are the first response people to, among other things, evaluate the security of the situation. In my EMT-B training it was very explicit: Make sure the police have secured a situation before entering it. If you send medical before police you risk completely helpless medical staff. Sorry, I reiterate, this was plain dumb.

I must admit, I’m fascinated by how my correspondent has been trained to perceive the cops as a trigger-happy, dangerous group who must be carefully managed, and I don’t like it. I don’t have any sort of cure for it, but I deplore it and I think it is symptomatic of the current distrust between the citizenry and the cops these days.

Concerning the actual incident, my reader’s summary agrees with my recollection of the various summaries I’ve read since the incident. Yeah, it wasn’t smart to be high while driving, and carrying while driving also seems unwise. But he apparently was complying with the law by announcing he had it.

Whether or not it’s dumb to not send armed police to all incidents appears to be already up for experiment, as I noted in this post when corresponding with a different reader:

* The “Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets” (CAHOOTS) of Eugene Oregon. CAHOOTS is a part of the 911 system such that they will be selected as the first responders — ahead of police — for situations involving mental health. Eugene Police Officers say ” [CAHOOTS provides] resources not available to the ordinary cop…They are an invaluable resource”.

I haven’t had time to track down CAHOOTS to see if it’s still in use and its record. OK, I did a quick search, it appears to be associated with the White Bird Clinic of Eugene, OR:

CAHOOTS (Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets) provides mobile crisis intervention 24/7 in the Eugene-Springfield Metro area. CAHOOTS is dispatched through the Eugene police-fire-ambulance communications center, and within the Springfield urban growth boundary, dispatched through the Springfield non-emergency number. Each team consists of a medic (either a nurse or an EMT) & a crisis worker (who has at least several years experience in the mental health field). CAHOOTS provides immediate stabilization in case of urgent medical need or psychological crisis, assessment, information, referral, advocacy & (in some cases) transportation to the next step in treatment. CAHOOTS offers a broad range of services, including but not limited to: …

This link has some articles on CAHOOTS from 2019. There’s a Wikipedia page, but I don’t see any sort of assessment of results. This link suggests they have a long history, actually.

On July 4, 1989, CAHOOTS began its first shift funded by the [Eugene Police Department] with a second-hand beat-up van. When emergency dispatch received calls that required help but not law enforcement, they routed the call to CAHOOTS. At first, the group worked 40 hours a week, and they have since expanded to 24-hour service, four crisis vans and a total of nearly 50 employees.

1989? And I’ve never heard of them. You’d think Whole Earth Review would have mentioned them at least once. But with that sort of longevity and apparently moving on to other cities, according to Wikipedia, such as Austin, TX, Denver, Oakland, NYC, and others, sending in specialized groups rather than armed police may be a compelling model. Perhaps not for traffic stops, although I still am dismayed at the entire procedure my correspondent feels is necessary, but perhaps for some situations.

My Arts Editor wants morning glories, but she started with a couple of already-growing specimens, not from seed. They seem to be moving right along.

Gotta like that light blue one.

Science folks often try to be precise by admitting to a certain imprecision, generally expressed as “plus / minus”, or ±. You see it in polling, in measurements of physical quantities, just about anything. This, however, seems a trifle excessive when it comes to biology:

Puertasaurus

“I don’t think the scaling equations are wrong,” says Wedel. “I think they’re imprecise.” The main problem is the margin of error, which can be 30 tonnes or more for a gigantic sauropod. Despite its imprecision, the method is popular among dinosaur palaeontologists because it is easy to use, even without a good understanding of sauropod anatomy. They aren’t necessarily concerned by its shortcomings. Biologically and behaviourally speaking, a 30-tonne sauropod was probably similar to a 60-tonne one, says Campione, and pinning down body mass more precisely arguably has limited scientific value. [“The biggest dinosaur ever may have been twice the size we thought,” Colin Barras, NewScientist (13 June 2020, paywall)]

So, off by 30 tonnes for a 30 ton sauropod? Perhaps ±15 tonnes for an estimate of 45 tonnes, just so we don’t end up including an infamously weightless dinosaur when we’re doing the math?

ooof.

And that Puertasaurus above? Deduced from …

[The only specimen] consists of four well-preserved vertebrae, including one cervical, one dorsal, and two caudal vertebrae.

Visually, again from Wikipedia …

I have no problem with deduction, but working from all of four – monstrous – vertebra seems amazing.

You may think you know the situation, but here’s Kimberly Latrice Jones to set you straight.

Regarding the much-discussed Tulsa, Oklahoma Trump Rally last night, Heather Cox Richardson reports:

The other big story today was, of course, Trump’s rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, designed to jumpstart his campaign and reunite him with the crowds that energize him. His campaign manager, Brad Parscale, along with the president himself, has spent days crowing that almost a million tickets had been reserved, and the campaign had built an outside stage for overflow crowds.

But far fewer than the 19,000 people Tulsa’s BOK Center could hold showed up: the local fire marshal said the number was just under 6,200. Young TikTok users and fans of Korean pop music (so-called “K-Pop stans”), along with Instagram and Snapchat users, had quietly ordered tickets to prank the campaign. The technological savvy of their generation has turned political: they knew that the Trump campaign harvests information from ticket reservations, bombarding applicants with texts and requests for donations. So they set up fake accounts and phone numbers to order the tickets, then deleted the fake accounts. They also deleted their social media posts organizing the plan to keep it from the attention of the Trump campaign.

And while it’s great to make this President, corrupt as he is, look this bad, it makes me wonder about the character of future contests. More of the no-holds-barred corruption of each others’ events? Or will technology be developed to stop it?

Or will everyone who’s actually an American just stop being assholes?

There is a hidden blessing in the reduced attendance, artificial or not: that’s fewer people available to catch and spread Covid-19, in a space that’s not as crowded as anticipated. It’s not worth breathing the traditional sigh of relief, but it’s still a slight blessing, saith the agnostic.

Kevin Drum:

But worst of all, it sounds like Trump’s schtick is boring. Apparently he can’t even get much applause when he attacks Joe Biden.

Rayne on EmptyWheel notes another potentially impeachable offense:

He’s made comments before about the number of tests correlating to the number of cases. Comic Sarah Cooper has famously riffed on this.

But this time he’s expressed an intent to withhold health care from the public for personal aims — to keep the reported number of cases artificially low, without regard to the effect this would have on actual reduction of COVID-19 cases.

Aside from revealing again he’s so utterly toxic, this statement needs investigation. It’s impeachable if he both demanded a reduction or slow-down in tests, especially if he did so for the purposes of improving his polling numbers.

More generally, the campaign is not drawing rave reviews. Here’s National Review’s Andy McCarthy:

It’s an old story: fighting the next war with the last war’s battle plan, as if prior success guarantees future victory. So here was President Trump after the Supreme Court gave him another thumping on Thursday, vowing to release “a new list of Conservative Supreme Court Justice nominees” in September — i.e., around the back stretch galloping toward the Election Day finish line.

The president reasons: “Based on decisions being rendered now, this list is more important than ever before (Second Amendment, Right to Life, Religious Liberty, etc.).” Lest we miss the characteristically Trumpian subtlety, he adds, “VOTE 2020!”

If you needed a laugh to get you through just-another-day-at-the-Apocalypse, our “Conservative” president then proceeded to post no fewer than 21 tweets describing the combined hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure spending he plans to shovel out to states he hopes to win in November.

By the way, with Trump in the White House and the McConnell-led Republican Senate having slyly buried periodic public debates over the debt limit, the nation is now over $26 trillion in the red. If you’re keeping score, that’s an increase of over $6 trillion since January 20, 2017. Obama spending was unprecedented, but Trump is on pace to exceed it. And don’t tell me about the unforeseen coronavirus crisis; debt was already accumulating mountainously before the lockdown, and the president keeps saying more infrastructure spending is imperative — it may be the only thing he and congressional Democrats can agree on.

And Steve Berman on the conservative The Resurgent (home of Erick Erickson) with an early historical overview of the debris field of President Donald J. Trump:

President Trump’s irresistible urge regarding institutions is to smash them. Whatever useful purpose they serve is only important to Trump when those purposes serve him. One example, the “police” as a concept is great when Trump is preaching Law & Order, but the FBI (and by extension, the DOJ) is a Deep State hive of Obamaites shovel-ready to bury the glorious reign of MAGA.

Another: the Supreme Court is the most important institution in America, carving legal protections for Americans besieged by liberal activist judges who create rights out of whole cloth. That is, until “but Gorsuch” sides with the enemy, forcing us to navel gaze at our conservative values as we are betrayed by the institution.

Gotta love the lead-in, as well as the finish:

Trump’s presidency will, in hindsight, likely be framed as the old man kicking down the last of the fences established by the WWII veterans who craved order, institutions, and traditions to guide our culture. In turn, the mobs against Trump are fed by the same streak of hedonism and anti-institutional need to smash. This is the fruit of Trump’s tree.

Against this, the institutions, and those who maintain them, are pushing back for their very survival. This president, who needs the institutions to defend, protect and preserve the Constitution, continues to spend his days undermining the very thing he swore to protect.

Which all comes out to me as a description of Trump as an immature, self-centered brat. Back in 2016 when he was running, an old friend noted, rather in horror, that Trump exhibited all the characteristics of a pathological narcissist, and it appears that time has borne her out.

This truth is apparent to those who force themselves to stare at this President. But what about those who don’t, who still think he’s a heckuva President? CNN had interviews with three 2016 Trump supporters, and I was struck by how they seem unmoved by Trump’s missteps and failures. I think the first interview would be particularly useful for study by Democrats:

“We put Democrats in office and she turned around and forgot completely about us,” [Scott] Seitz told Van Jones back in 2016. “We are what makes this world go ’round. We built the tanks and bombs that won this country’s wars and for you to come through here and completely neglect us, we would have rather vote for anybody instead of her.”

Today, he’s very troubled by Trump’s reaction to the protests and walk to St. John’s Church.

“I think he handled it like an arrogant businessman that he is, showing lack of compassion for people. What he did out in front of the church and making those folks move and smoke bombs and tear gas or whatever it was. Just so he can get to that vista and have that shot of him holding that Bible up with that prop. … If he’s any form of religious guy like he says, then he wouldn’t have done that,” said Seitz, adding, “that was about the last straw for a lot of folks.”

Still, Seitz says while he has reservations, he plans to vote for Trump.

“I dislike Biden that much and don’t feel he’s going to lead our country. I only support him about 10%. Trump’s only about 25%,” he said.

Addressing his concerns might go far to bring his and his fellows to the Democratic side of things – but it can’t be empty. Just as black community concerns about police and system racism cannot be given a hand wave in the event of a Democratic win in November, neither can this guy’s.

And it’s worth talking about previously forbidden topics, such as nullifying free trade agreements. I recall the mainly libertarian arguments from years ago that free trade would reduce duplication of effort and accelerate the development of new technologies as nations specialized and concentrated on what they did well. While the accounting for these attributes holds up well, I believe, it’s time to ask if they are worth the unaccounted for negatives, and even if they are positives as well. Some factors include concerns Covid-19 has exposed about supply lines collapsing; the collapse of local farming communities as cheap foreign food floods markets; and the failure to retrain workers in local sectors that have been flooded with foreign goods.

Underlying much of this is the existence of a fabulously cheap cargo transit system which contributes to anthropogenic climate change.

All of these factors and more need to become part of a discussion that includes these dispossessed workers. Is free trade just another tool for the ultra-rich to simply increase the definitional lower limit of their category, leaving everyone else with little or nothing in their mad quest to accumulate more and more? It’s time to sit down and soberly tot up the results, good & bad, of free trade.

And I say this as someone who thought free trade sounded good when NAFTA was proposed.