Kevin Drum ruminates:

As near as I can tell, the most common reaction from most high-profile, movement conservatives to the toppling of Confederate statues is . . . sarcasm. Hey, how about toppling statues of Margaret Sanger? Burn! Why aren’t we toppling statues of Marx and Engels? Burn! How about the Hollywood Walk of Fame? Burn! And your hero Lincoln was just a big ol’ racist too. Why aren’t we toppling statues of him? Burn!

Is there something in the water that prevents so many conservatives with big media platforms from taking this seriously? There is, obviously, a perfectly good case for tearing down Confederate statues but leaving nearly everything else alone. I should know, since it’s pretty much my position. After all, it’s one thing to have been racist in the past, when explicit racism was all but universal, and quite another to literally fight a war of secession in defense of Black slavery.

1. The current conservative movement tends to operate as a team.
2. Partially due to the movement’s religious element, they are arrogantly sure they are right.
3. They hate change, as it implies they were wrong about something, even that they’ve sinned.
4. Their leader, President Trump, is vociferously supporting that revulsion at change. His motivations may not be congruent with the movement’s general motivations – he may be, in fact, a racist and a neo-Confederate – but he’s not talkin’.
5. The “left” wants the statues down, and the right’s current operating mode is to oppose whatever they want, on no particularly noteworthy principle. It’s the same reason the ACA is continually under attack, even now when it’s been most useful.
6. Finally, the big media conservatives cannot be seen as breaking ranks – or they’ll lose their jobs. Remember, Rush Limbaugh has publicly stated he’ll say anything for money. No doubt, the rest feel the same. The smaller fry are not always in line – I’ve seen Erick Erickson rebuking some of the Covid-19 skepticism memes, for instance. But the big boys, oh, money is their God and they adore it, so they’ll say The Right Thing in order to keep their cred up with the “conservatives”.

I don’t know Drum, but I suspect he’s the sort who’s more interested in truth than kant, who’d rather find the proper solution than back the ideological solution. He claims to be center left, and I’d believe it.

In a sense, if you’re going to pay attention to pundits, stay away from those doing it for big bucks, because that’ll twist their “truths”. For example, the very few times I’ve had the stomach for Mark Thiessen or a couple of other pundits of his ilk, both at WaPo and National Review, it’s very hard to reconcile their facts and arguments with a search for truth. It’s just a defense of their ideology. Obviously, there’s a tension because it takes time to have valuable opinions and more time to write them up in a comprehensible manner, so a modicum of pay is both reasonable and necessary. But pleasing the audience’s preconceptions is a corruptive influence, and so is buying into the emotional belief that the opposition is the enemy.

This is appalling:

A brother and sister working at a different plant both got sick in early April. The brother wound up on a ventilator, spending six weeks in the hospital, nearly all of it unpaid, his sibling said. He was still in a medically induced coma when the chicken plant began urging her to come back.

Though he survived, they recently received documents from the hospital in English, which they don’t speak. The only thing they understood was the number at the bottom for the cost of his hospital stay: $61,000. [WaPo]

It seems to me that if you’re deemed essential to the well-being of the nation, and are asked to put your life on the line, your medical bills connected to the risk become the responsibility of the Federal Government. Just like military personnel.

The “party of morality,” aka the Republican Party, should know this, they shouldn’t have to be told it. Why isn’t Majority Leader Senator McConnell (R-KY) not up at a lectern, pounding on it while demanding the Democrats in the House deliver legislation to cover the costs of these workers?

Quite lovely, but perhaps a little common.

In Slate, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Kende point at the next legal reformation that we should soon see popping up as a wart on America’s hide – it’s called Washington v. Davis:

In Washington v. Davis, decided in 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that laws or government policies that disproportionately harm Black people do not violate the Constitution’s equal protection clause. The case was brought by aspiring Black police officers challenging the statistical disparity in test scores between Black and white test takers as a reflection that the D.C. police department’s hiring policy was unconstitutional. The test, known as Test 21, was chock full of white cultural and idiomatic references that may well have contributed to the fact that from 1968 to 1971, 57 percent of Black applicants failed the test as compared with 13 percent of whites.

In a 7–2 decision penned by Justice Byron White, the Supreme Court decided that courts can only find that a law or governmental action violates the equal protection clause when a plaintiff can show that a state actor intended to discriminate, and that this intention, in turn, caused a discriminatory result. But discriminatory intent is virtually impossible to prove. Who openly admits they are racist? This nearly insurmountable bar means that laws that treat Black people worse than white people (for example, laws requiring exponentially harsher sentences for crack possession than for cocaine use) remain tolerated throughout society.

It’s not exactly mind-reading, since intent is often written down, but when it’s racism it’s often concealed, and paper trails are either never permitted to exist, or erased when possible, as Lithwick and Kende point out.

As Osagie K. Obasogie noted in the New York Times, the result of this decision was the perpetuation of systemic racial discrimination and the ascendance of “what is now known as the ‘intent doctrine,’ which emerged in later cases as a simplistic search for a smoking gun—individual bad actors intentionally doing bad things with nothing but racial animus on their minds.”

Which is little more than denial of a systemic problem. But as was shown, contingent on confirmation, in this study, systemic racism is not necessarily even a conscious act; it may be the result of something as innocent as incomplete knowledge of a chronic situation.

Statistical analysis is necessarily a fuzzy understanding of a situation, and thus it takes specialist skills to decide if situations such as that motivating Washington v. Davis are coincidental or, as the authors suggest, causative. I think Washington v. Davis needs to be replaced by some sort of law that says if a respectable statistical analysis suggests structural racism is occurring, then call in a specialist (I believe legal jargon calls them special masters) to examine the matter. Not to assign blame or punishment, but to point out the causes of the structural racism and to supervise their correction.

Two more NBA teams are now offering their arenas for voting use, as have the Atlanta Hawks:

The three teams that have so far offered their spaces — the Atlanta Hawks, the Detroit Pistons and the Milwaukee Bucks — are located in presidential battleground states. More than a third of the league’s teams are in states that could help determine the presidential contest this fall. [NPR]

And now we see the source of pressure under which the NBA may be laboring:

And the offers come as many of the NBA’s mostly African-American players have upped their involvement in social causes following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody. Last month, for instance, superstar LeBron James announced a new organization aimed at protecting Black citizens’ voting rights.

The group, More Than A Vote, has praised the NBA franchises volunteering their spaces, while also egging on others with a hoops-like challenge: “Who’s got next?”

There’s no doubt at all that the NBA exists on the backs of its superstars, From Mikan to Kareem to Jordan and James. Fans come to see them perform – and for the underdog roles of the lesser known players who play against them. It’s a fabulous story.

So the implicit threat in the More Than A Vote organization of the superstars choosing to sit out a season – or three – exerts a great deal of pressure on the money hungry NBA, which has to pay superstar salaries.

But I think the NBA teams are more likely very tired of the GOP, which is mostly responsible for the management, if not genesis, of the two events which are costing the NBA its business – the pandemic and the systemic racism-unrest.

So even if it’s not true that there have been deliberate efforts to suppress voting by communities thought to be inclined to vote Democratic, these offers, and those that follow, are symbolic of an industry that is entirely fed up with a Party that has become increasingly isolated from mainstream America, built an epistemic bubble in order to limit apostasy and keep the faithful, well, faithful, and continues to try to reassure itself that it represents normal America by labeling everyone else ‘Marxists’ and ‘terrorists.’

All the while, their ‘normal America’ was the one that repressed the black community and put absolute rights above public health and safety. So long as the Democrats continue to push this message, they should have a good chance of success in November.

From NewScientist (13 June 2020):

The oldest and largest known monument built by the Mayan civilisation has been found in Mexico. Called Aguada Fénix, it is a huge raised platform 1.4 kilometres long.

Aguada Fénix was built around 1000 BC, centuries before the Maya began constructing their famous stepped pyramids. Its design suggests that early Mayan societies were fairly egalitarian and didn’t have a powerful ruling class.

There’s a lovely accompanying remote sensing picture of the area, but I was curious what it looks like au naturel, so I dug a picture up:

Source: Pagina66

It makes me wonder what’s under my feet. I’ve found several toys from previous owners of this property, but somehow they don’t have the magic of a Mayan ruin. But this picture explains why we keep finding ancient civilization artifacts, even huge ones – they’re very well hidden.

The other day I happened to look at the running kitchen sink tap when sun was coming in the window, and I could see a fine mist that I decided to try to photograph. Did I get the spray?

Well, yes. But that didn’t turn out to be the star of the show:

They’re like bubbly icicles.

For World War II buffs, the D-Day invasion of Normandy, followed by the battle for Europe and the final suffocation of Nazi Germany is a signal and gallant part of the war. It’s depressing, therefore, to read this:

Bomb-cratered landscapes can also tell the heartrending tale of the civilian cost of Allied air operations over Normandy. In the daily operational records of air squadrons, it is rare to find any acknowledgment that attacks on targets in towns, villages, and the surrounding countryside may have incurred civilian casualties, Passmore says. But it is becoming clear as research continues that as many as 60,000 to 70,000 French civilians died as a result of air attacks in support of the Normandy campaign and later operations across France. “This narrative warrants more attention,” says Passmore, “and archaeology can make a significant contribution by carefully documenting the survival of landscapes that testify to the extent, range, and intensity of the attacks that brought civilians in harm’s way tens, or even hundreds, of miles behind the front.” [“Letter from Normandy,” Archaeology (July/August 2020), page 5]

70,000 civilians dead as two ideologies struggled for supremacy, or even three, if we count the Soviets – although they were busy recovering Soviet territory and, if I remember my history properly, retaking Poland.

I’ve remarked that the roots of the Nazi Party were nourished by the soil of the Treaty of Versailles, a punitive treaty the French employed to exact their end; it’s my belief that without that treaty, the Weimar Republic, which succeeded the discredited German monarchy would have had a far better chance of success, and Hitler would have been dismissed as an impotent goof.

But it did exist, it discredited democracy in Germany, along with conventional morality, and in the end the Allies had to fight their way through every hedge in order to extirpate the Nazi Party – and, even then, Nazi ideology is still employed by some dead-enders.

This is what happens when ideology is clung to beyond reason and sanity, and it discourages me now. All of this is known, but sometimes it’s worth reiterating such points when we’re observing such obstinacy as with the Republican Party.

… this is what it looks like:

“The Republican Party under Donald Trump has become a party wandering aimlessly in the street talking to itself and responding to itself, and all the rest of us have become the pedestrians trying to avoid that guy.” – Patrick Gaspard

In other words, the epistemic bubble that so many pundits identified and worried about so many years before I started writing a blog (but I’ve been reading blogs since 2000 or earlier, when the BBSes dried up) are now getting to see the endpoint of those worries – a sclerotic Party in which the members are terrified of grabbing the wheel and not grabbing the wheel. (For those with a historical bent, here’s a reference to concerns about epistemic closure, an equivalent term, from 2007.)

I am so glad I’m not a Republican, because the Party sounds like just another chamber in the insane asylum in Hell. A President who can only divide, not lead; he may be, medically speaking, demented; madcap messages and actions such as The Confederacy deserves to be honored! (oh, maybe that very first one back in the late 1700s), foolish religious tenets (the Laffer Curve); demands for 100% support of the leader; zombie elected officials who cannot envision being rid of their leader; & etc.

This is toxic team politics at its worst, folks. Study, distill, and put the results in a textbook about how not to run an American political party.

Shambolic:

confused and badly organized:

• Things are often a bit shambolic at the beginning of the school year.
• Anna is far too shambolic to be able to run a business. [Cambridge Dictionary]

Noted in “Obama at Biden fundraiser: ‘Whatever you’ve done so far is not enough’,” Tal Axelrod, The Hill:

“The good news, what makes me optimistic, is the fact that there is a great awakening going on around the country, particularly among younger people, who are saying not only are they fed up with the shambolic, disorganized, mean-spirited approach to governance that we’ve seen over the last couple of years but, more than that, are eager to take on some of the core challenges that have been facing this country for centuries,” he said.

I never knew what it meant.

In response to my latest update on climate change, a reader remarks:

I hate to be a downer, but civilization will be toast by the end of this century — and it’ll be an ugly trip to that destination.

Maybe. But humanity sometimes finds a way to wriggle its way out of dubious situations. I think the Covid-19 pandemic, along with the chronic incompetency of Trump, has slapped a whole lot of people in the face about the realities of wishful thinking.

In fact, yesterday I was wondering what I would do if I was confronted with a pack of MAGA-hat wearing oldsters, as we happen to have a retirement community just across the street, and another one a-building down the road. In my fevered imagination, it’d go something like this, keeping in mind my hair went prematurely white years ago:

ME: Hey, folks.

CRANKY OLD GUY (COG): Hey, are you with us? (Shakes his cane at ME.)

ME: What are you?

(All together): Trump supporters!

(COG): See our hats? (Waves hat, exposing a pale pate.)

ME: I certainly am not.

(Discontented yelling and muttering. More cane swinging.)

COG: Why not? Are you a fucking Democrat?

ME: (smile) I’m an independent!

COG: Yeah? Hit by cars going both ways, then – hah!

ME: Not in the least, I’m far too fast on my feet. No, friends, it just means I get to think for myself.

(More muttering)

ME: Look, everyone settle down and I’ll tell you a story.

COG: Why?

ME: Because … I feel like it. OK, everyone settled? (COG mumbles but shuts up.) Back in the 1930s – anyone here grow up then? No? – the United States was mostly isolationist. Folks believed getting involved in the events in Europe that were leading to World War II was wrong; they were not our affair. So we didn’t officially get involved in the Spanish Civil War, and when Hitler’s Germany became more and more menacing, again Americans didn’t wish to become involved.

COG: We did nothing?

ME: Not precisely. President Roosevelt was not an Isolationist, and in fact arranged the Lend-Lease Program, wherein we sent obsolete naval vessels to the British, virtually for free.

But the shared view of Americans definitely tied his hands and restrained him from preparing properly for the storm clouds on the horizon.

And then came December 7, 1941. The day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor – remember? The day before, we were a nation of determined isolationist sentiment. The day after, we were in shock. And the day after that, America had discarded its shared delusion and began preparing for war, whether it was joining the service, beginning rationing, or transitioning businesses to a war-time footing.

COG: So what?

ME: Friends, I see a definite similarity between December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attack was the great slap of reality to our face, and the two defining incidents of today.

COG: Yeah? I don’t think so.

ME: Sure. Here are the great face slaps that reality has administered to us recently. First, the Covid-19 pandemic, our vastly incompetent response, the lives we’ve lost – surely you all have lost friends to it – and how badly we compare to many other countries has, has exposed our leadership – President Trump – as a monumental fraud.

COG: (Enraged) Bah!

ME: You can scoff if you wish, but then there’s the second incident. President Trump has campaigned on promises of No Change, Everything Will Be OK and You’re Fine How You Are! Isn’t that what attracts you? He told coal miners that their jobs would return, factory workers that factories would reopen, investors that the economy would come roaring back, that he’d rebuild the military, and all would be just as fabulous as it was before?

COG: So?

ME: And then came the George Floyd incident, and the black community said, once again, It’s Never Been Great, It’s Never Been OK, It’s Not Even Tolerable. They reminded us of slavery, the Tulsa White Supremacy riot which killed so many, the Tuskegee Experiment, the Democratic Convention riots, sharecroppers, segregation, separate but equal, police harassment of the black community, lynchings, and systemic racism.

COG: S-s-so?

ME: And they forced it upon our attention: maybe it was great for you folks, but not for them. Floyd was, from all appearances, deliberately murdered by a policeman, as have been a number of other blacks over the years. That’s the other great slap of reality that should eliminate the magical thinking that has infected American thinking for the last thirty years.

COG: Fuck you! (Turns and wave his cane at the crowd.) Come on! Fuck you!

(The crowd is angry but uneasy)

ME: I don’t expect anyone here to change their minds. Not right now. All I want to think is that you’ll go home and think about your support of a man who continually claims that all we have to do is go back to how things were. When racists could lynch blacks, for example. And how you can approve that.

COG: Fuck you! (Turns to leave, beckoning the crowd!) Fucking liberal! Come on, folks.

(As the crowd leaves, several are holding their red hats in their hands, and as they file away, one sails through the air and lands in a garbage can.)

I do have lurid fantasies.

From NewScientist:

Image: Wikipedia

Welwitschia is one of the world’s strangest and most resilient plants, living in the exceptionally dry Namib desert, which stretches along the coasts of Angola, Namibia and South Africa. But climate change may push these hardy plants past their limits, suggesting that they should be placed on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.

Vaguely reminiscent of a pile of kelp nowhere near the ocean, welwitschia (Welwitschia mirabilis) is unlike anything else on Earth. The plant consists of just two ever-growing leaves. These can grow to more than 4 metres long erupting out of a subterranean stem. These tough leaves split and coil, turning into a dishevelled, sun-baked heap over the plant’s roughly 1000-year-long lifespan.

Although we’re not nearly that dry. How do they estimate a thousand year lifetime, I wonder…

On the anniversary (well, off by one day) of the first day of service of CAHOOTS, the Eugene, OR, emergency mental health service often invoked rather than police, CNN, rather tardily, publishes an article on them. Readers may recall that I lamented that I couldn’t find an assessment of CAHOOTS performance, and while there’s nothing like a formal assessment in this article, they do have a few numbers:

Per self-reported data, CAHOOTS workers responded to 24,000 calls in 2019 — about 20% of total dispatches. About 150 of those required police backup.

CAHOOTS says the program saves the city about $8.5 million in public safety costs every year, plus another $14 million in ambulance trips and ER costs.

Although Eugene may be somewhat atypical in the United States:

Lane County, which encompasses Eugene and neighbor city Springfield, has staggering rates of homelessness.

The county’s per-capita homeless rate is among the nation’s highest. Recent data from the county also suggests mental health crises are widespread, too — the suicide rate, at around 17 deaths per 100,000, is about 40% higher than the national average.

Police encounters with the homeless often end in citations or arrests. Of homeless people with mental health conditions, anywhere from 62.0% to 90% of them will be arrested, per one journal review of homelessness studies. They may end up in jail, not in treatment or housing, and thus begins the cycle of incarceration that doesn’t benefit either party.

CAHOOTS was created in part because of another disturbing statistic — around 25% of people killed by police show signs of mental illness, according to a journal review of the Washington Post’s extensive officer-involved shootings database.

It’s an interesting article. Retired CAHOOTS co-founder David Zeiss notes that every city is different, and every solution must be local and organic. As a member of the Instant Gratification Generation, I found this a little disheartening, to be honest:

[CAHOOTS is] not an immediate fix. Zeiss said it took a lot of “patient plotting” for CAHOOTS to really have an impact.

“At this point, we’ve patiently waited out an entire generation of police officers,” he said. “There’s nobody on the Eugene police force today who can remember being a Eugene police officer without CAHOOTS. It’s been that slow of a process.”

Which suggests distrust and even resentment, which I suppose should not be surprising. But it’s important to understand that Zeiss himself does not agree with the Get rid of the police! movement:

But a growing group of dissenters feel there’s little room for police in the movement to fundamentally change the American criminal justice system. Services like CAHOOTS, they say, may function better and more broadly without the assistance of police.

Zeiss isn’t sure he agrees.

“Partnership with police has always been essential to our model,” he said. “A CAHOOTS-like program without a close relationship with police would be very different from anything we’ve done. I don’t have a coherent vision of a society that has no police force.”

He said the current movement has seemingly pitted service providers like CAHOOTS against police, which may stoke suspicion among police over “whether we’re really their allies or their competitors,” he said.

“In some sense, that may be true. But I think we still need to focus on being part of a system, and a system that includes police for some functions,” Zeiss said.

I think I’m with Zeiss. I, personally, view the police, in some form, as essential. That form does not look a lot like today’s form, though. I think leaders must ask themselves why we need a heavily armed organization that sometimes seems to be on a hair-trigger, and, from the behavior and statements of the current Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) police union president, Bob Kruller, views its duties as inherently violent and right-wing. Other problems include an atmosphere of extreme mutual protection, even in the face of illegal behavior by members, and the use of a funding source, civil forfeiture, that is prone to corruption. The militarization of the police has been a national topic of debate, and I’d like to see most or all of the heavy weapons removed from police armories.

Leaders need to very carefully select metrics for measuring police performance. Those metrics must not measure quantities that do not advance community interests, or are easily inflated quantities. Funding sources must be completely outside of the control and influence of the police as well. The idea that taxation is always bad needs to be jettisoned as the community wrecker that it is. Improper funding of anything will lead to corruption, so we need to come to an agreement on proper funding levels, adjust as needed, and implement the funding through taxation. Enough with hiding behind dubious sources and proclaiming how you’ve kept taxes low.

And, since it’s a related topic, we should also ban private prisons, as they can lead to behaviors by the corporations providing the service that are deleterious to the community, while only benefiting the coffers of the company.

Off the soap box. I’m getting dizzy from the altitude.

Or, at least, so it feels. BuzzFeed requested a new version of the Mueller Report, now that Roger Stone’s trial has concluded, and the courts obliged. Lawfare’s Quinta Jurecic has combed through the newly revealed information, which I won’t be doing, and came up with this:

But there are a few shreds of information that are really, genuinely new, and they’re damning of the president. Namely: Trump had direct knowledge of Roger Stone’s outreach to WikiLeaks, according to multiple witnesses interviewed by Mueller. He encouraged that outreach and asked his campaign chairman to pursue it further, those witnesses said. And Mueller’s office appears to have strongly suspected, without putting it in so many words, that Trump lied to the special counsel in his written answers to Mueller’s questions about the Stone affair.

The redacted report hinted at this. But it’s another thing to see it spelled out unmistakably by the special counsel.

I suspect that, at this juncture, Lawfare really isn’t a non-partisan third party in many observers minds, but partisan is a slippery term: it usually refers to adherents to one side or another for a cause for which neither side can be considered malicious.

This is no longer true for President Trump. His list of incompetencies and malevolencies are too long to bear repeating here; it’s safe to say, though, that most or even all of Lawfare’s contributors are more or less scornful of President Trump and his enablers.

So I can say that it’s unsurprising that Mueller’s report is more incriminating of Trump than the previously heavily redacted report. Trump’s performance in just the last year has been appalling, and I don’t intend to say that in the appallingly partisan, grating manner that I might have read of Obama’s performance on National Review back in the day; as an independent voter who desperately wishes there was a reasonable conservative party that could be considered competent to be a governing party, I have to report that, objectively speaking, Trump’s not worthy of anyone’s support.

Here’s just one example Jurecic provides of many:

“…beginning in June 2016 and continuing through October 2016, Stone spoke about WikiLeaks with senior Campaign officials, including candidate Trump.” (Vol. I, p. 51)

While the redacted report hints at involvement by Trump, the hidden material makes this frustratingly unclear. The unredacted copy directly states that Trump spoke multiple times with Stone about WikiLeaks’s release of material damaging to Clinton. Specifically, according to the report, Stone told the Trump campaign “as early as June 2016”—that is, at least a month before WikiLeaks began its releases on July 22—that Assange would release damaging documents.

It’s all old, unimportant news in one sense, yet it functions as a confirmation of many suspicions of Trump’s mendacity, as well as his enablers’, and should guide future judgments.

I seem to be afflicted with short lilies, I’m not sure if that’s just their genetics or their treatment.

Siberia continues to be that fabled canary:

Neither Dallas nor Houston has hit 100 degrees yet this year, but in one of the coldest regions of the world, Siberia’s “Pole of Cold,” the mercury climbed to 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit (38 Celsius) on June 20.

If confirmed, the record-breaker in the remote Siberian town of Verkhoyansk, about 3,000 miles east of Moscow, would stand as the highest temperature in the Arctic since record-keeping began in 1885.

The triple-digit record was not a freak event, either, but instead part of a searing heat wave. Verkhoyansk saw 11 straight days with a high temperature of 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30 Celsius) or above, according to Rick Thoman, a climate scientist at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. The average June high at that location is just 68 degrees Fahrenheit (20 Celsius).

This week, Ust’-Olenek, Russia, about 450 miles north of the Arctic Circle, recorded a temperature of 93.7 degrees (34.3 Celsius), about 40 degrees above average for the date. On May 22, the Siberian town of Khatanga, located well north of the Arctic Circle, recorded a temperature of 78 degrees Fahrenheit — about 46 degrees above normal. [WaPo]

Disquieting, to say the least. Any change on the CO₂ measurement front?

No improvement there. Oh, wait, maybe a graphic representation will calm my nerves:

Siberia doesn’t look too awful, but world-wide that’s an awful lot of red.

Maybe this will turn out to be good news:

What is the aim of this project?

The SUN-to-LIQUID project is developing a technology that produces aviation fuels from water, carbon dioxide (CO₂) and the power of the sun.

How could this technology be explained to a high school student?

Concentrated solar radiation is absorbed in a solar reactor that converts water and CO₂ into synthesis gas – a gas mixture comprising hydrogen and carbon monoxide. The synthesis gas is then delivered to a gas-to-liquid plant where it is converted into jet fuel. [International Energy Agency]

I wonder about its long term stability. My thought is, rather than deliver it to the airports to be burned, just store the stuff in caverns. I suppose it’s too slow to actually be effective, though.

Republican internal polling signals a Democratic rout

[CNN/Politics]

From the article:

Democratic and liberal aligned groups have put out 17 House polls taken in April or later. Republican aligned groups have put out 0. That’s a very bad ratio for Republicans.

Interestingly, Republicans were the ones dominating the polling landscape in the first quarter of the year. From January through March, Republican and conservative groups released 10 polls compared with the Democrats’ 2.

The April turning point lines up well with when the coronavirus pandemic became the headline story of the year. It’s when President Donald Trump’s approval rating started an almost continuous decline that remains unabated.

In other words, it makes a lot of sense that Democrats started to dominate the House polling landscape in the past few months. They had a lot of good news for their side that they wanted out in the public. Republicans, meanwhile, were likely seeing numbers that wouldn’t make them look good.

Under the hypothesis that parties only release good news for themselves, the avalanche of poll releases from the Democrats point towards a rout of Republican candidates in November.

I went into the article hoping for more Republicans expressing confidence about November; the cognitive dissonance behind such pronouncements can be quite entertaining. But that’s not the message of this article. They just screwed up their article title.

Ah well.

Watercourt:

About 700 years ago the Calusa people of Southern Florida created large watercourts for capturing and storing live fish, according to a new archaeological study published in March by the Proceedings of the National Acadamy of Sciences. Although researchers have thought for years that these watercourts existed, this is the first archaeological study that documents when and how they were constructed, said archaeologist Victor Thompson of the University of Georgia, the lead author of the study. [“Ancient People Built Pens To Store Live Fish,” Paul Neely, American Archaeology (summer • 2020, print only).]

I did not find a congruent definition online; watercourt leads to articles concerning legal courts with jurisdiction over water rights.

The NBA’s Atlanta Hawks, seeing the recent mess of Georgia primary elections, have a donation to make:

On July 20, voters will be able to follow Centers for Disease Control and Prevention social distancing guidelines as they cast early ballots for the Georgia general primary runoff election, which takes place on Aug. 11. Voters also will be able to access the 21-year-old venue in October for early voting in November’s general election.

Hundreds of Hawks employees and arena staff will be trained as election workers at the 700,000-square-foot venue, which hosts more than 16,000 spectators for basketball games and 21,000 for concerts. The team says parking will be free for voters and more than 1,500 spaces will be made available. The recently renovated arena has been home to the Hawks since 1999. [WaPo]

Given the dubious strategies employed by GOP state parties and GOP-controlled governments to discourage voting by groups considered anti-GOP, this may constitute one of the most substantial pushbacks available to this particular commercial entity.

March of 2015.

And this is another clue that corporate America has become dissatisfied with the Republican Party as their representation in local, state, and federal governments. This is not entirely new, of course; Indiana experienced a lot of pushback in 2015 after then-Governor Mike Pence (R-IN) signed the Indiana Religious Freedom Restoration Act, passed by the GOP-dominated Indiana legislature, widely recognized, especially by corporate America, as an authorization to discriminate against the LGBTQ community by hiding behind religious institutions. It was part of an effort to give birth to paranoia among conservative religious practicioners by suggesting that shameful social practices were justified by religious beliefs. Such are the methods of constructing epistemic bubbles.

There was also the abandonment of ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council), best described as the link between the GOP and businesses, by Google (now Alphabet) and several other businesses over claims that ALEC was issuing misleading information concerning climate change back in 2015. As I said at the time,

From a wider viewpoint, one must wonder if the last couple of years are starting to signal a rift between a GOP increasingly controlled by a deeply religious conservative faction, and businesses who find the assumptions of this new GOP are no longer compatible with good business practices.  We saw signs of a rift earlier this year when Indiana passed a law widely interpreted as giving small businesses the right to discriminate against virtually anyone they wished on religious grounds, resulting in various businesses and other organizations vowing to leave, or avoid, the state.  Indiana eventually replaced the law; other states with similar laws in the pipeline then did not pass their versions.

The Atlanta Hawks donation of the stadium would be the next step, as it’s plausible to suggest this would imperil GOP control of the Atlanta legislature, as well as GOP success in national-level elections, including not only the Oval Office, but both Senate seats (one is up for a special election after the retirement, due to ill health, by Senator Isakson  (R-GA)).

And the recent move of corporations, ever loving of a stable environment and happy consumers, to dictate to social media platforms to stop fucking around and fix the propaganda problem is another cobblestone on the path towards disjointing the GOP from the business world.

So when the Republicans have been reduced to the a group of morality-free power-lovers, the religious groups who are desperately against change of any kind, a band of uneasy libertarians, a gross of racists and liberal-haters, a few class-B Hollywood actors, and some rogue billionaires, will they still truly qualify as a political party?

Only the voters can decide that.

Recent research on the Chicxulub impact crater, generally considered the remains of the impact that wiped out the dinosaurs, yielded the following fascinating diagram of the impact:

New simulations have revealed the asteroid that doomed the dinosaurs struck Earth at the 'deadliest possible' angle. The simulations show that the asteroid hit Earth at an angle of about 60°, which maximised the amount of climate-changing gases https://t.co/xqv3AmE4oH pic.twitter.com/faKoIAR25E

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) May 27, 2020

It’s fascinating to think of granite as acting like a very low-grade rubber, isn’t it? It clearly compresses and then decompresses, leaving a peak, as shown at the end of the simulation. Compare to the lunar crater Moretus:

Information courtesy of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera concerning central peak formation in lunar impact craters is here.

In the last week or so, we (my Arts Editor and I) exited our position, as professional investors and advisors like to say, in the Elon Musk-controlled company Tesla (TSLA). Some of that position was the result of buying Tesla stock, and some of it was the result of the Tesla acquisition of SolarCity, another company controlled by Musk.

Regardless, we had become uncomfortable with Tesla. It didn’t hurt that we had made a tidy profit on Tesla stock over the years, nor that it seemed to be perhaps a trifle overvalued by the market, especially in the context of a pandemic that may force many businesses to become dormant and risk bankruptcy, in many cases again.

But we had recently become increasingly uncomfortable with the holding for reasons having nothing to do with its context, but with the company itself.

First, we didn’t like their strategies surrounding their cars. We had been in line to buy the Model 3, but when our names came up, we didn’t like how the car was sold: We were told that to avoid slewing off the road while the auto-pilot was engaged, we must keep our hands on the wheel during ‘S’ curves, since the feature as installed was not yet fully developed and we’d be likely to end up in the ditch if not paying attention.  As my Arts Editor is a former QA Engineer, she didn’t wish to be Tesla’s beta-tester when it came to the self-driving feature. We also didn’t feel that it was asking too much that a major feature installed in the car actually work.  Especially one which was being advertised as one of the car’s main selling points, which added a considerable percentage to the price of the car, and which, were it to fail, would certainly be a major liability and safety issue. We would have been happier to not have the feature, truth be told.

Their pricing strategy was annoying as well. Advertised as starting around $35,000, it turned out that, at least when we were considering it, it couldn’t be acquired for less than $52,000, as it was required that you also buy a package that significantly increased the price. I don’t recall how many packages we had to choose from, but we were unimpressed by this unethical bait & switch strategy.

But the discomfort truly started with Musk’s antics. They consisted of two incidents.

First, there was the incident in which a number of children from a Thai soccer team were trapped in a sea cave. After offering to help and being rebuffed:

In other replies to critics on Twitter Sunday morning, Musk said, “Stay tuned jack— …” and “Bet ya a signed dollar it’s true” to someone expressing skepticism that Unsworth could be a pedophile.

Musk deleted the Twitter thread hours later on Sunday, but not before they had been captured in screenshots. [Business Insider]

Spreading rumors of pedophilia is certainly beyond the pale, and the fact that he deleted the Twitter thread doesn’t mean he necessarily regretted the remark, as he should have, but may have been advised that it would be damaging. It brings up questions of his suitability and judgment for positions of responsibility.

But it’s been the second, recent incidents that have really left us with serious questions about his ethics and judgment: his refusal to take the coronavirus-caused pandemic seriously.

The coronavirus panic is dumb

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 6, 2020

If somebody wants to stay in their house, that’s great. They should be allowed to stay in their house and should not be compelled to leave, but to say that they cannot leave their house, and they will be arrested if they do, this is fascist, this is not democratic, this is not freedom. Give people back their goddamn freedom. [Transcript from Wikipedia, recording of Tesla conference in which it occurred]

Tesla is restarting production today against Alameda County rules. I will be on the line with everyone else. If anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 11, 2020

If he thought that might make him a folk hero, he failed with us. And then followed by this deal-breaker:

As Tesla’s Fremont, California, factory reopened in mid-May, CEO Elon Musk reassured nervous workers that they wouldn’t have to report to work if they “feel uncomfortable” about showing up to the factory during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since then, Tesla has fired at least five workers for staying home due to COVID-19 fears, according to The Washington Post. Three of those employees told The Post they were fired in the past week. [Business Insider]

I’m not going to hold forth on how dishonest or unethical leadership leads to inevitable failure in business, because the tobacco industry behaviors and results would invalidate that claim.  But profit, regardless of societal cost, is not part of our philosophy of life.  Such behavior damages society, and why should we be associated with such behaviors? Are we so important that the very society in which we are embedded should be damaged just so we can have a few more dollars?

So we’re out of Tesla stock. Perhaps we’re going to miss the next big jump in value for Tesla. Maybe it’ll go over the cliff with the rest of the market as investors begin to realize that Covid-19 isn’t disappearing in the summer heat and loves to ravage the patrons of bars and beaches as much as it does rest homes for the elderly, and comes with life long damage for those who end up surviving the infection.

I don’t predict any of those things happening, because we don’t need to. Our discomfort with Musk’s antics was really enough. It betrays a dubious ethical framework, and quite possibly an arrogance, known to be associated with the bright and successful, that may lead Musk and Tesla down the wrong path.

Our advice to you: If you’re uncomfortable with an investment for non-financial reasons, get out. There are plenty of other fish in the sea, so why make yourself uncomfortable, perhaps for the rest of your life, just because some dollars have been dangled in front of you?

Sometimes, even when you’re just a little fish in a medium-sized pond, you still get to let your money speak for you.

Another lily, brazenly showing off its sex organs.

It almost looks like a painting.

Former Senator Timothy Wirth (D-CO) and Tom Rogers suggest in Newsweek that President Trump may continue to fight the battle after the November elections finish with a narrow loss for him:

The second pathway to subverting the election is even more ominous—but we must be cognizant of it because Trump is already laying the groundwork for how he can lose the popular vote, and even lose in the key swing states necessary for an Electoral College victory, but still remain president. …

Recent press reports have revealed the compilation by the Brennan Center at New York University of an extensive list of presidential emergency powers that might be inappropriately invoked in a national security crisis. Attorney General William Barr, known for his extremist view of the expanse of presidential power, is widely believed to be developing a Justice Department opinion arguing that the president can exercise emergency powers in certain national security situations, while stating that the courts, being extremely reluctant to intervene in the sphere of a national security emergency, would allow the president to proceed unchecked.

Something like the following scenario is not just possible but increasingly probable because it is clear Trump will do anything to avoid the moniker he hates more than any other: “loser.”

Trump actually tweeted on June 22: “Rigged 2020 election: millions of mail-in ballots will be printed by foreign countries, and others. It will be the scandal of our times!” With this, Trump has begun to lay the groundwork for the step-by-step process by which he holds on to the presidency after he has clearly lost the election:

1. Biden wins the popular vote, and carries the key swing states of Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania by decent but not overwhelming margins.
2. Trump immediately declares that the voting was rigged, that there was mail-in ballot fraud and that the Chinese were behind a plan to provide fraudulent mail-in ballots and other “election hacking” throughout the four key swing states that gave Biden his victory.
3. Having railed against the Chinese throughout the campaign, calling Biden “soft on China,” Trump delivers his narrative claiming the Chinese have interfered in the U.S. election.
4. Trump indicates this is a major national security issue, and he invokes emergency powers, directing the Justice Department to investigate the alleged activity in the swing states. The legal justification for the presidential powers he invokes has already been developed and issued by Barr.
5. The investigation is intended to tick down the clock toward December 14, the deadline when each state’s Electoral College electors must be appointed. This is the very issue that the Supreme Court harped on in Bush v. Gore in ruling that the election process had to be brought to a close, thus forbidding the further counting of Florida ballots.
6. All four swing states have Republican control of both their upper and lower houses of their state legislatures. Those state legislatures refuse to allow any Electoral College slate to be certified until the “national security” investigation is complete.
7. The Democrats will have begun a legal action to certify the results in those four states, and the appointment of the Biden slate of electors, arguing that Trump has manufactured a national security emergency in order to create the ensuing chaos.
8. The issue goes up to the Supreme Court, which unlike the 2000 election does not decide the election in favor of the Republicans. However, it indicates again that the December 14 Electoral College deadline must be met; that the president’s national security powers legally authorize him to investigate potential foreign country intrusion into the national election; and if no Electoral College slate can be certified by any state by December 14, the Electoral College must meet anyway and cast its votes.
9. The Electoral College meets, and without the electors from those four states being represented, neither Biden nor Trump has sufficient votes to get an Electoral College majority.
10. The election is thrown into the House of Representatives, pursuant to the Constitution. Under the relevant constitutional process, the vote in the House is by state delegation, where each delegation casts one vote, which is determined by the majority of the representatives in that state.

And Trump wins, 26-24.

It’s not outside the realm of possibility that Trump would pursue this strategy. He is reportedly being considered for indictment the moment this ridiculous cloak of Presidential immunity is removed, so if he wants to push off those contretemps for another four years, and perhaps bring the statute of limitations into play for at least some of those indictments, this may seem to be an attractive route.

This, of course, would be a Pyrrhic victory par excellence for the Republican Party, which is to say that if the Republican politicians responsible for these votes were to close their eyes and mutter that, Yes, maybe there was corruption in the voting! and hand Trump the Oval Office again, their family names would go down forever after as dishonorable toadies, unworthy of even contempt, much less responsibility, and the Republican Party would have reached the absolutely lowest nadir possible in their mad chase for power. All they would have to hide behind are the grasping clerics who keep telling the Republican base that Trump, with 18,000+ lies, betrayals obvious to everyone, caging children, etc etc, is still somehow more Godly than the Democrats.

As if it even matters.

If Trump were to even consider trying it, though, it would mark him forever after as a loser, and all Americans, even his base, would know it. Just the attempt would brand it into his forehead. We’d know the emergency powers thing was nothing more than a fraud.

Now, despite the evident entertainment value of this maneuver, it would not be healthy for the nation to take this detour before returning sanity to the White House. This is why – not that it need be said – the Democrats must continue to work hard to win every contest in every State, even those that seem impossible. An overwhelming rejection of Trumpian corruption is necessary to signal to Americans everywhere that renewal is underway, and that corruption in both Parties is in the process of being oustered and neutered.

Without anesthesia.