Monthly Archives: August 2020

Judge Emmet Sullivan’s extraordinary suit seeking to permit him to examine the reasons the prosecutors have decided to drop charges against former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn for lying to the FBI – after he had plead guilty twice – has been granted on appeal to the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, much to my relief. Here’s WaPo:

The campaign to get Kanye West on the November election ballot has attained a cartoon-like quality:

West’s lawsuit on Friday requested that the local court rule that his nominating papers met the submission deadline to ensure that he appears on the swing state’s ballot in November after he narrowly appeared to miss the state’s filing deadline.

While the WEC voted to dismiss the rapper’s petition on the basis of its lateness, West’s attorneys contend in the complaint that Wisconsin’s deadline expires one minute after 5 p.m., making West’s submission which reportedly arrived seconds after 5 p.m. valid.

The news of West’s address on the lawsuit being tied to the RNC, is the latest evidence that the hiphop icon is being boosted by GOP strategists to drive votes away from the Democratic presidential ticket. [Talking Points Memo]

Extend the deadline for us by one minute. Because, what, they’re special? Amazing.

And I remain fascinated by the possibility that this maneuver will unwittingly serve as a repository for a protest vote for Republicans, and not the apparent goal of giving Democrats or members of the black community who may be uncomfortable with Biden, or have no faith that the Democrats will work to eliminate racism in America, an alternative voting option. This is illustrated by the last quoted paragraph, above.

West has made it on the ballot here in Minnesota. It would be the highlight of the year for a local poll to appear showing West outpolling Trump.

Oh, hell. I’m going on vacation. Enough with the lightning strikes showing where I am all the time.

Reigo: The Deep-Sea Monster vs. the Battleship Yamato (2005) is the painful story of the Imperial Japanese Navy Yamato’s encounter with a magical monster while escorting troop transports. Nothing works here: a bad plot, a useless romantic subplot, an American prisoner who is clearly Japanese, poor special effects, and, at times, a farcical broad humor which doesn’t sit well with the overall noir feel of the movie. The most that can be said is that a few night scenes have a Minnesota Fringe Festival feel to them.

Take a skip on this one.

My weekly pop-sci NewScientist issues have been showing up at erratic intervals; this week, after what seemed like weeks of no issues, two showed up on the ame day, although of a non-contiguous nature. No doubt just more evidence of the, shall we say, demonic incompetence of Postmaster General DeJoy in combination with the more comprehensible delays inherent in publishing during a pandemic.

Paging through the 8 August 2020 issue, I was struck by the surrealistic features of two articles. The first, concerning a variety of termite which always lives with another specific species in their nests, contains this little gem:

“Many times,” says [Helder Hugo of the University of Konstanz in Germany], “when two unrelated colonies are put together in a single confined space – such as an experimental arena – the outcome is warfare with losses from both sides.”

But that didn’t happen here. Despite attacks from host termites, the tenant termites were acquiescent. Hosts would bite or spray the inquilines [foreign termites] with acrid chemicals, but their targets never responded in kind, opting to flee. Some ignored the hosts completely.

At most, the lodger termites would squirt faeces towards a threatening host termite, surprising their assailant long enough to retreat. “By preventing conflict escalation, inquiline termites may considerably improve their chances of establishing a stable cohabitation with their host termites,” says Hugo.

Yep, that’s right – they pooped on their hosts. Or in their hosts’ living room.

From Wikipedia.
This is the sauropod, not the mammal.

However, the ribaldry comes right out in the open in this article on finding mammalian toothmarks on the bones of a sauropod – and small mammals at that. While interesting in itself, I fear I woke my Arts Editor when I started laughing at the penultimate paragraph:

The mammals must have been scavenging, says [Felix Augustin at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen in Germany], as it isn’t possible that such tiny mammals could have taken down a huge sauropod dinosaur.

Beyond the obvious, I can also remark that this reminds me of my aborted project to construct an animated film involving a T-Rex finding himself in similar contretemps. If some young Blender artist, looking to showcase their skills, needs a project, I might be persuaded to share the story with you. My Arts Editor thought it was fairly cool, but my time constraints and relative clumsiness with Blender has made it unlikely that I’ll ever get beyond the picnic basket.

Regarding Andrew Sullivan’s dark view of the American future, a reader writes:

The same Andrew Sullivan who declared his unabashed support for fascism? Here:

If I'm reading this right, Andrew Sullivan more or less declares himself to be a fascist here https://t.co/bzRhNq6WRY pic.twitter.com/s5SYanO5go

— David Klion (@DavidKlion) August 28, 2020

Of course, it’s useful to review the tweet and the replies, of which the first is from Sullivan, refuting the attack. Although a refutation on Twitter, one of the saddest and ineffectual social media platforms, is a twisted or fragmentary thing^[1].

But I think Sullivan’s first mistake was not clearly delineating the abstract nature of the discussion, because he’s centered on how the Democrats screwed up. The abstract nature is that this is a discussion of societal governance competition.

Which is to say, if democracy does not provide for the safety and prosperity of the citizenry, out it goes. There is nothing sacred about democracy, just as there’s nothing sacred about a theocracy or a monarchy^[2]. Democracy is one way to run a society; there are several competitors, a word which I stress, such as the aforementioned divinity-based forms, along with straight autocracies, whatever it is we call what Russia is currently using, the conservative Swiss model, radical anarchy, and including the Amish approach of requiring each modification to how things are done be reviewed by the community’s families for its potential effects on the community as a whole – and if they decide it’ll damage the community, it’s not permitted. Call it an implementation of the precautionary principle.

Briefly, Sullivan is demonstrating a linked prioritization ladder – first safety & prosperity, then the form of social governance. If democracy can provide safety & prosperity, great – any long-time reader of Sullivan knows he’s for democracy, due to its support for individual rights, and its ability to swiftly evolve when injustices are discovered, such as gay rights in general, and gay marriage in particular. Klion appears to be quite the douchebag.

But if democracy is going to put Sullivan in perpetual danger because of the policies of its main proponent – and, yes, I don’t view the GOP^[3] as a proponent of democracy these days – while the GOP, the only other likely choice, under the ugly flag of fascism, claims it guarantees safety, well, what to do?

Of course, fans of democracy can argue about the fate of all fascist regimes, which is a rapid decline into bigotry, barbarity, and disaster. But there is a problem with this approach: Most Americans are historically illiterate. Their view of history extends back to the last car they bought. It becomes a yelling contest, and such smoothly-coiffed villains such as Matt Gaetz are likely to out-charm the Democrats, who tend to be technocrats, geeks crossed with schmoozers.

And it doesn’t help that the proponents of democracy do not, at least in Sullivan’s view, talk about safety.

In my view, the work to guarantee that safety, insomuch as that’s possible, has already begun because of the awareness of the systemic, as well as explicit, racism present in society precipitated into national debate by the brutal Floyd murder, and how it damages democracy. Asheville, NC, is already exploring reparations, a subject which should be picked up at the state and national levels over the next year or two. But the Democrats had better link these nascent efforts to the safety they will bring as the black community finally begins to share, en masse, in the prosperity of the American dream.

And that’s what I think Sullivan should have emphasized – that if the Democrats promise to bring permanent chaos, then it’s not an attractive choice, and it’s an evolutionary failure. The GOP is also not an attractive choice, as Sullivan has made obvious in multiple New York Intelligencer articles, as well as the 15 years of his previous Daily Dish blog. It’s why I can’t possibly take Klion seriously – he’s either malicious or he’s intellectually shallow.

But it’s worth contemplating that democracy is not a replacement for a religion, an eternal institution, it’s just an approach to societal governance that seems attractive – until this sort of thing happens. As my long-time readers may remember, I’ve worried a time or two that the Trump election may be damaging not just the United States, but the entire concept of liberal democracy as a viable governing form. I think, in essence, that’s all Sullivan is doing.

¹ “Twitter storms,” indeed. That’s simply a way to say, “This platform isn’t useful for anything more than sharing cool maps.”

² I apologize. I’m sure my reader saw it coming.

³ Aka the “Party of Trump,” which I presume will, someday, become its legal name.

Cryptochrome:

A dose of radio waves seems to encourage plant seedlings to grow slightly faster, a find that, if confirmed, could have applications from farming to medicine.

Margaret Ahmad at Sorbonne University in Paris, France, and her colleagues exposed thale cress seedlings (Arabidopsis thaliana) to weak pulses of radio frequency (RF) radiation at 7 megahertz, a frequency normally used by amateur radio operators.

The team found that this altered the activity of a type of light sensor in the plants called a cryptochrome. The expression of several genes regulated by the cryptochrome also changed, and the seedlings grew slightly faster.

This is the first time anyone has found a biological receptor sensitive to radio waves, says Ahmad. “What we showed is that we can manipulate the ‘chemistry’ of the cryptochrome receptor in living plants by a remote radio frequency signal.”

Cryptochromes are proteins found across biology in insects, birds and mammals, including humans. They have a wide range of functions, from regulating plant growth rates and biological clocks to helping birds navigate. They are thought to sense weak magnetic fields in many species, through a quantum mechanism in which the field alters the rate at which the protein is activated by light.

From “Plant protein responds to radio waves by making seedlings grow faster,” Jo Marchant, NewScientist (22 August 2020, paywall).

The conservative conundrum?

A few hours before President Trump accepted the Republican nomination on the White House South Lawn, Mike Baker and his wife went on a meandering, three-hour drive near their Bloomington, Ind., home.

On the ride, they mulled the upcoming election, debating whether they could separate the president’s policy from his personality, and if it mattered.

Baker, still undecided, had watched some of both political conventions over the past two weeks, supplementing his observations with newspaper articles and socially distanced conversations with friends.

On Thursday night he tuned in, hoping for an answer.

It didn’t come. [WaPo]

I dunno, Mr. Baker.

Would you trust an employee who lies whenever it makes him look better than the truth might? Before you take that as hyperbole, look at the 20,000+ lies in the WaPo Fact Checker database. Take a few out for some investigation and validation. Do the math – it’s not how many days between lies, but how many lies per day.

And remember – Mr Trump is an employee of the American people, not the king. That makes this question crucially important to every American to bring to the forefront of their analysis. If you decide to vote for Mr. Trump, then you must own all of those lies, and all the lies he’ll tell in the future. You must realize that you’re putting your own business at risk because you cannot predict future actions by Mr. Trump if he’s reelected.

As a business owner, how can you possibly do that?

I can understand, sir, if you, your wife, and all your colleagues choose to sit this election out, although Republican cries that Joe Biden, a quintessential centrist who still believes in working across the aisle in order to accomplish good governance, are not credible. Whether this makes him a beacon of goodness in our current fierce fog of partisanship, or a fool with a torch, I don’t know. But it doesn’t make him a far-left radical. He’s the thing that Trump is not – they’ve both made mistakes, but Biden admits to them, apologizes, analyzes, and adjusts. Trump makes mistakes, and there is no more comparison. Full stop.

But I cannot understand you putting your business at risk for an employee who veritably thinks an adherence to truth is for suckers. If your vote leans to Trump, then I perceive there’s little point in noting the vast corruption that associates with names such as Pruitt, Zenanke, Flynn, Cohen, Stone, and so many others in Trump’s orbit; the sucking up to known, dangerous national adversaries; and the vast hubris associated with this amateur who has not improved a single whit since day one. Do you prefer employees who do not improve over time?

I should only remind you that, without a happy & prosperous United States, which, under Trump, we certainly are not, your business can not exist for long.

“There’s so many of these issues that on the surface seem like this administration has somewhat delivered,” Baker said Friday morning. “I don’t think having a proper immigration policy is a bad thing. Total lawlessness is not a good thing. There’s a lot of these things that I think have happened that I think are good long term.”

But for this, those who consider Trump a disaster owe you a debt. It brings to the fore and authenticates issues that Trump’s official rivals must properly advance as answers. Yes, as President Obama pointed out, this lawlessness cannot go on, for it’ll wreck the cities. This does not mean simple repression, but an investigation into the suppression of the communities of color, the elimination of opportunities for them, and how to excise those foul elements propagating these injustices from our society. Efforts have already begun in this area, but it remains a fragile effort, and will be until people such as you contribute ideas to it, much as have employees, such as those of the various sports leagues.

I leave it to those who speak officially for Biden and the Democrats to delineate their policies more cleanly on those issues and others that may concern confused conservatives. But you are to be thanked for making some of your concerns clear.

So. Thank you.

A reader writes concerning testing blunders discovered regarding a pesticide:

There are about ~80,000 industrial chemicals in common use in the US. OSHA regulates about about 600 of them by establishing enforceable exposure limits. Most of the “science” behind these limits is more than 40 years old. EPA regulates another 400. The simple fact is nobody knows what exposure is safe for the overwhelming majority of chemicals we come into contact with every day.

Not to mention what they’ll do to the wildlife if they’re permitted to dump right into the environment.

Just a quick note for local readers about Stillwater Zephyr Theatre’s production of Much Ado About Nothing, done as a Shakespeare in the Park … ing Lot:

It’s fun!

It’s free, except for the front row.

Groups of 2-4 are seated together, separate from all other groups by six or more feet. In fact, I think they prefer only groups.

And the staging is fun. I particularly liked the constabulary’s horses; the other actors were even better.

If you’re looking for something to do tomorrow, they’ve added a second show, so they’re doing 1 and 6:30 shows.

Go have some fun!

Inquiline:

Animals that live in the dwellings of another species without affecting them are known as inquilines. Inquiline termites (Inquilinitermes microcerus) are unique among termites in being unable to make their own nests. Instead, they inhabit the labyrinthine hallways built by another termite, Constrictotermes cyphergaster. Until now, it has been unclear how the two parties kept peaceful in such tight quarters, because termites are typically very aggressive towards outsiders.

From “Termite intruders evolved cowardice to squat in another species’ nest,” Jake Buehler, NewScientist (8 August 2020).

This is one fancy hurdy-gurdy:

But still attractive, now that the burned out ferns have been replaced – temporarily – with some other items:

From Weekly Dish proprietor Andrew Sullivan:

All this reassurance played out against a backdrop of Kenosha, which was burning, and Minneapolis, where a suicide led to a bout of opportunistic looting, and Washington DC, where mobs of wokesters went through the city chanting obscenities, invading others’ spaces, demanding bystanders raise fists in solidarity, with occasional spasms of violence. These despicable fanatics, like it or not, are now in part the face of the Democrats: a snarling bunch of self-righteous, entitled bigots, chanting slogans rooted in pseudo-Marxist claptrap, erecting guillotines — guillotines! — in the streets as emblems of their agenda. They are not arguing; they are attempting to coerce. And liberals, from the Biden campaign to the New York Times, are too cowardly and intimidated to call out these bullies and expel them from the ranks.

Remember the pivotal moment earlier this summer when the New York Times caved to its activist staff and fired James Bennet? It’s no accident this was over an op-ed that argued that if New York City would not stop the rioting in the streets, the feds should step in to restore order. For the far left activists who now control that paper, the imposition of order was seen not as an indispensable baseline for restoring democratic debate, but as a potential physical attack on black staffers. They saw restoring order within the prism of their own critical race ideology, which stipulates that the police are enforcers of white supremacy, and not enforcers of the rule of law in a liberal society. It was a sign that the establishment left were willing to tolerate disorder and chaos if they were directed toward the ideologically correct ends — which is how Democratic establishments in Minneapolis and Seattle and Portland responded. The NYT, CNN and the rest tried to ignore the inexcusable, and find increasingly pathetic ways to dismiss it. This week, their staggering bias was exposed as absurd.

And

A long time ago, I was mocked for saying that I believed that the election of Donald Trump was an extinction-level event for liberal democracy. But this is where we are. There is no place for liberal debate or dissent, just competing mobs deploying propaganda, intimidation and mutual racial hatred. Norms are trashed, from the shameful cooptation of national monuments for partisan purposes, to violating the privacy and peace of ordinary citizens because they are not in the ranks of agitators. Liberals are now illiberal; conservatives are revolutionaries. The Republican convention we are witnessing makes no pretense of even publishing a platform — all to demonstrate total and unfailing fealty to the leader whose own family is now assumed to succeed him. What about this pattern of events do we not already understand?

Yes, we still have an election. But barring a landslide victory for either party, it will be the beginning and not the end of the raw struggle for power in a fast-collapsing republic. In a close race, Trump will never concede, and if he is somehow forced to, he will mount a campaign from the outside to delegitimize the incoming president, backed by street-gangs and propaganda outfits. If Biden wins, we may have one last chance for the center to hold — and what few hopes I have rest on this.

I have neither the academic training to evaluate, nor exposure to the far left for first hand experience, but it occurs to me that I should find some time to refresh myself on the basic principles of the liberal American Experiment, so if I’m accosted by woke extremists, they might be rebuked as politely, but as effectively, as possible – but reminded that their tactics may bear bitter fruit.

And, further in his column, he suggests that Biden is weak. I hope he’s wrong. While I don’t want a strong-man President – the lead-in to disaster – but I want a President who’s strong enough to know their mind and not topple in a wind.

And, yeah, to say, It’s inappropriate to have this delegated power from Congress – take it back.

Part of the Democratic National Convention, it’s Billy Porter and Steven Stills:

Kvell:

to be extraordinarily proud : REJOICE [Merriam-Webster]

Noted in “Trump will endanger American lives if it helps him get reelected,” Jennifer Rubin, WaPo:

The media too often feel compelled to underplay the abnormality and the utter unacceptability of this president so as to preserve the patina of “balance,” as if this is simply the counterpoint to last week’s Democratic convention. They will score his speech, kvell when he sounds less unhinged than normal and pretend this is a functioning administration. In that, they give him the greater advantage — the ability to delude Americans into thinking he is temperamentally up to the job.

Long time readers who’ve read my dissections of relayed mail from conservative friends are aware that I object to mail that engenders a distrust of our government.

I use the phrase “our government” with great particularity. All too often, in those emails, it’s the government. It seems so innocuous, doesn’t it, interchanging the two? Yet, in my opinion, there’s a major, if subtle, difference. One suggests the government is an alien, imposed force upon us; the other, it’s our government and we can change it if we can muster the arguments to do so.

When someone uses the convenient excuse that they have to have a gun to defend themselves from the government, someone should stand up and say,

Buster, you’ve got it wrong. It’s OUR GOVERNMENT, and if you feel like you need a gun to enforce your political opinion, then you don’t understand how the United States works.

So I was really pleased to see singer and artist Billy Porter express something similar in this interview:

Q: How do you think the country ended up here?

A: We, the people, have to be engaged. You know, it’s a really complicated landscape to take in. And so the more complicated you make it, the more people turn off. Voter suppression is not just slowing down the mail system. When you don’t think your vote matters that’s voter suppression. That’s the whole point — to create distrust of your government. And if you distrust and it’s just chaos then nobody knows what to do and then nobody does anything. This is a playbook, y’all. And this is coming from a singer and an actor who’s educated enough to know what y’all are doing. So my opinion actually does matter, and I won’t shut up. [WaPo]

Porter is someone who definitely has their head screwed on right.

Last night, players in the NBA called a wildcat strike to protest the Kenosha incident; today, they’re returning to the floor, while MLB players have chosen to strike. I know the WNBA also struck yesterday, but I’m not sure about today.

I, and my Arts Editor, wish the NBA players had remained off the floor. In fact, I think the players in the various sports league should walk off for some designated amount of time in protest.

It makes a couple of points. First, the obvious one, is directing attention to problems desperately in need of resolution: systemic racism, harassment of the black community, profiling, the use of guns to resolve problems.

There’s no pretending that these are easy problems to solve. At least some of the players understand this:

On Wednesday’s nightly whip-around show on MLB TV, host Matt Vasgersian read an Instagram post from Colorado Rockies DH Matt Kemp, which said in part, “Tonight I stand with my fellow professional athletes in protest of the injustices my people continue to suffer.”

Vasgersian then chimed in: “I think there needs to be an important distinction made here, however,” he said. “The law enforcement community is under attack right now. And Matt Kemp’s statement was well-written and I think everybody empathizes with the point of view, but not every member of the law enforcement community is guilty of some of the atrocities that have been committed in the last few months. I feel like it’s important to make that statement, as well, along with supporting those who are not playing, along with the cries for social reform, which are so needed right now.”

Analyst and former player Harold Reynolds responded: “I agree with that, but also it comes down to one bad apple leads to a bunch, right? It spoils a whole bunch. That’s what’s been happening here. There are great police officers. I have great police officers who are friends of mine. But there’s been far too many things like this happening. That’s the point guys are saying.” [WaPo]

This lends an air of practicality and brings home to the fans the importance of these issues.

Perhaps more importantly, though, is the implicit message which may still need to be hammered into some Americans: this is your problem, too.

Sports players are, outside of a few exceptions, well known for being focused on their game to the exclusion of most of social questions. By imposing a work stoppage and talking vociferously about these issues, they model the behavior that we all need to look at these problems and try to find the right steps to take to resolve them. We all have input on such issues as police reformation, whether it’s disbandment and reassembly, or reformation and removal of certain responsibilities. Questions that bother me include

• how to effectively implement reparations so long ago offered and then shamefully retracted
• how do we quickly move to a model of divesting the police of certain responsibilities
• how do we ensure the police value the neighborhoods they patrol
• how do we identify counterproductive carrots in the law enforcement system
• how do we adjust for systemic racism, by which I mean unequal treatment built into the system, such as property taxation

Such issues should be put on the table by the players, as well as their retired colleagues.

And then there’s the entire question of paying for it. Look for the right-wing fringe to run around with their hair on fire when tax increase proposals come around. Many who take great pride in their ancestors coming over the Mayflower may suddenly be claiming their family just arrived twenty years ago – as if that’s a flower to hide behind.

Scott Adams – allegedly – analyzing Joe Biden – literally:

"Dilbert" creator Scott Adams uncover the hidden satanic symbolism in Joe Biden's name. https://t.co/gjyHQasTL6 pic.twitter.com/3JJt0aybSt

— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) August 26, 2020

I don’t know anything about Scott Adams beyond his comic, Dilbert, which I haven’t read in a decade or more – I just became bored with it. Heck, maybe that’s not even him up there. In any case, The Friendly Atheist has a rejoinder here, where they prove another Presidential candidate is even more, ah, 666er.

But I can’t help but wonder if that was an epic trolling of the right wing. It’s so ridiculous.

This is upsetting:

For nearly 50 years, a statistical omission tantamount to data falsification sat undiscovered in a critical study at the heart of regulating one of the most controversial and widely used pesticides in America.

Chlorpyrifos, an insecticide created in the late 1960s by the Dow Chemical Co., has been linked to serious health problems, especially in children. It has been the subject of many lawsuits and banned in Europe and California. The EPA itself nearly banned the chemical, but in 2017 the Trump administration backtracked and rejected EPA’s own recommendation to take chlorpyrifos off the market. The EPA plans to reconsider the chemical’s use by 2022. [University of Washington]

What happened?

Lianne Sheppard, a professor of biostatistics and environmental health in the UW School of Public Health and the study’s lead author, explained that the 1972 “Coulston study” established erroneously how much of the chemical a human could be exposed to before adverse effects showed up in a body’s chemistry.

When Sheppard re-ran the study data using the same longhand statistical analysis as the original, she discovered that key data used in two other level-of-exposure tests in the same study had been left out of the central exposure question — inexplicably. Consequently, the safe exposure limit, called the “no observed adverse effect level,” that the EPA used was wrong.

But – inexplicably – no why. Worse yet:

Why the 1972 Coulston study was not thoroughly examined even as the maturing EPA began reviewing these kinds of studies more rigorously through its inaugural 2006 Human Studies Review Board is a mystery, said co-author Richard Fenske, emeritus professor in the UW School of Public Health’s Department of Environmental & Occupational Health Sciences.

But when the EPA formally set out to review human-subject studies like the Coulston study, the maker of chlorpyrifos (Dow) specifically removed the study from that process, said Fenske, who was a member of that initial review board.

Which appears to be appalling, at least to me. While the initial error can be understood as a blunder – even if it’s inexplicable – the second incident appears to be a deliberate attempt to shield profits from damage by scientific scrutiny. This is – or should be – considered a severe ethical lapse.

If in fact the removal from the human-subject review process was deliberately to shield those profits, someone should end up in the pokey.

I know that in the local area last night’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert was overrun by the coverage of the riots in Minneapolis, but it’s worth catching his monologue. It’s basically a call to the barricades.

I saw an early report on the background of the shooter this morning and decided to wait for confirmation – and here it is:

A 17-year-old has been arrested in connection with a fatal shooting in Kenosha, Wisconsin, at a protest sparked by the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man.

The suspect, Kyle Rittenhouse, of Antioch, Illinois, was taken into custody Wednesday and is being held in the Lake County Judicial System pending an extradition hearing to transfer custody to Wisconsin, the Village of Antioch Police Department said in a Facebook post.

Authorities in Kenosha County had issued an arrest warrant for him earlier Wednesday on a charge of first-degree intentional homicide, the department said. The Kenosha Police Department has not commented on the arrest. [NBC News]

The Guardian critically notes:

Before the shooting, the presence of white armed men at the Black Lives Matter protests in Kenosha on Tuesday night prompted criticism from protesters – and some support from law enforcement.

In a widely circulating video from Tuesday night, Kenosha police can be heard thanking and tossing bottled water from an armored vehicle to what appear to be armed civilians walking the streets.

“We appreciate you being here,” an officer is heard saying over a loudspeaker.

But David Best, the county sheriff, told media outlets after the shooting that people patrolling the streets in Kenosha were a “like a vigilante group”, and said that the shooting was evidence of why suggestions to deputize citizens to help law enforcement contain the unrest in the city had been a bad idea.

Not “like”. They are a vigilante group. I don’t know if Sheriff Best is responsible for Kenosha, but this is the fault of a law enforcement agency that collectively doesn’t understand that it is responsible, along with any governmental group deputized by an authorized leader, for the proper management of the situation.

Civilians are untrained and, worse, unscreened. While a slightly older version of Rittenhouse might have been able to worm his way into law enforcement, there would be a better chance of being caught out as a rabid racist, of even being caught in some minor crime first.

There’s 0% chance of catching an unscreened civilian with evil intentions.

A properly law enforcement agency would have taken one look at that war weapon and taken it away Rittenhouse, along with all the rest, and justified it as a threat to the public safety.

The police just had their fingers burned, and BLM has suffered a tragic loss – people protesting for justice, gunned down by some damn kid who ingested inferior, discredited ideas.

I’d never heard of a rattleback.

Oscitancy:

1. the state of being drowsy, lazy, or inattentive
2. the act of yawning [Collins Dictionary]

From reader CJ, who remarks, of course:

I’m experiencing a lot of that this morning. 🥱

Another Trump orbiter breaks away and speaks to the dangers.

The people who know Donald Trump best are sounding the alarm: our country cannot survive four more years of a Trump presidency.

In our latest ad, a former member of his inner circle & "fixer" — @MichaelCohen212 — has a dire warning for us all. #RNC2020 pic.twitter.com/suPUODOdwz

— American Bridge 21st Century (@American_Bridge) August 24, 2020

It’s one thing when a Democrat warns of the Trump dangers, or even a former Administration employee. But when a Trump Organization employee speaks against him, well, it’s important that any undecided independent see this video. Spread the word!