Monthly Archives: April 2021

The surges are big enough to capsize a continent:

Australia, right now, feels a little biblical. There was a terrible drought, then the worst bush fires ever recorded. A flood came next. Now it’s the turn of the mice.

The scale of the mouse plague is hard to comprehend. In the western districts of New South Wales (NSW), the country’s most populous state, millions of mice are now on the march. There are also serious infestations in southern Queensland, Victoria and South Australia.

On social media, farmers post videos showing the swarm in action, while farming organizations say the cost is already in the millions. [Richard Glover, WaPo]

Oh dear. Oh dear.

Steve Benen notes that Montana, in the wake of the Census results, is picking up a second seat in the House of Representatives – and former Secretary of the Interior Ryan ZInke (R-MT) is already gearing up for a run. Benen summarizes Zinke’s tour under former President Trump:

Arguably no cabinet secretary from the Trump era was more controversial than the Republican secretary of the Interior. Roll Call‘s report noted that Zinke “came under at least 15 different investigations” before resigning, and that is not an exaggeration.

In Dec. 2018, the New York Times published a round-up of pending investigations into the Montana Republican, and it was a strikingly long list. Media Matters also put together a timeline of “the Interior secretary’s questionable actions and controversies,” and that list was even longer.

And, if he does, I’ll really wish I was a journalist, if only to ask a series of snarky questions, such as:

1. How many scandals does the typical Representative become involved in, sir? Do you think you can double or triple that number, sir?
2. Do you believe that you can do better than former Representative Weiner (D-NY)? He had quite the number, you know.
3. Or will you be competing in terms of exotic?
4. Is your motivation money or prestige, sir?

Because we know that neither shame nor notoriety will stop a member of the current crop of Republicans from running.

Exaptation:

Also unmentioned by [Professor Michael] Behe is exaptation, the co-opting of a structure, be it a molecule or anatomy, for a new function. For example, two of the three bones of the mammalian middle ear were co-opted from jaw bones in our reptilian ancestors. Wings, feathers, and swim bladders are other well-worn anatomical examples, but exaptation is even more prolific at the molecular scale. With the subtlest of tweaks, enzymes can catalyze different reactions, genes can be expressed in different tissues, and proteins can find new binding partners. Though Behe does not bother to address this, the molecular possibilities of exaptation are endless, particularly when gene duplication is involved. In the age of genomics, the evidence for molecular exaptation is abundant. [“Behe, Bias, and Bears (Oh My!),” Nathan H. Lents, Skeptical Inquirer (March / April 2021)]

This little guy came out to show off last night.

Erick Erickson is not as much fun as he used to be, no doubt because he’s inherited the seat of one of the great propagandaists of the era, and as propaganda has hardly any connection to truth, truth which is required for having said fun, he’s no fun.

In other words, the fun that occurs when Erickson critiques his own side.

One of his most recent missives, after a pro forma acknowledgment of the January 6th insurrection, simply ignores the entire matter while predicting victory in the midterms:

Yesterday, Joe Biden posited that January 6th, a day when the only person killed was a Trump supporter, was the greatest attack on our democracy since the Civil War. Lee Harvey Oswald and a group of terrorists aboard Flight 93 might laugh at that from the depths of Hell.

Ah, math applied to human beings. Let me ask: are human beings fungible? Could we exchange Stephen Hawking, when alive, for, say, Erick Erickson, and get the same results in their respective roles?

No.

And why? Because contexts differ. One is trained as a physicist, the other as an election lawyer. Put them in the wrong roles and they are unproductive.

And these contexts, which he so nonchalantly strips off, matter as well. The 9/11 attack and the assassination of JFK were not threats to our very system of government. They were, respectively, an attack involving a foreign adversary, and as assassination. In the latter incident, the motivation remains obscure, so we can’t say if it was Oswald acting independently, or if he was paid by a foreign adversary, but killing a government official, even a President, isn’t an existential threat.

The January 6th insurrection constitutes an existential threat. Symbolizing the deliberate claims that the election was rigged, despite all lack of evidence, it’s a play to destroy the very foundation of American society: rationality. As a secular nation – and that’s what we are, despite the frantic shouts of No! No! from a peanut gallery motivated to disagree by religious zeal rather than that rationality of which I speak – the danger is not of violence from outside or even inside, but of a cultural disaster, the turning of a substantial part of society to mass irrationality as a way of life, people convinced by nothing more than their desires and the words of a mendacious half-wit, rather than loyalty to the ways of our country.

This is why I occasionally call the January 6th Insurrection The Revolt of the Five Year Olds.

On top of that, while the Democrats insist otherwise, we continue to have ongoing mobs burning down cities across America who are of the left. Portland, OR gets little attention, but is still under assault by the left. On a weekly basis, leftwing mobs threaten and shakedown American businesses, burn cities, and obstruct daily life.

While Portland may indeed be having continuing problems, I’d guess this is the woke mob, burning itself out, or possibly anarchists, friends to no one, even themselves. My suspicion is they’re discrediting themselves rapidly with everyone. Nor would I be surprised if there are right-wing agitators involved, but I have seen little on the matter. Here in the Twin Cities? There’s been little worry about it, especially now that the Chauvin trial is over and there was only somber celebration in its wake. We don’t go about worrying about riots.

As an aside, there is worry about crime. It’s noteworthy that the fringe “defund” movement, which differs from the police reform movement, has begun to disappear. There are certainly people who really believe in replacing the police with some other form of law enforcement, but my impression is that most of the population of the Twin Cities do not see that as a viable approach to the problem. They want to see some reforms, and some partitioning of duties. But the “defund” movement has, at least at the moment, disappeared.

During Biden’s speech last night, he made the case for ever more expansive government, tax hikes that will punish small businesses in the name of taxing “the rich,” and massive growth of a welfare state that will further disincentivize work.

Standard conservative cant. Taxes are bad (no, they’re not, and given our Republican Party-generated debt, they’re not nearly high enough). People hate work, especially if they’re not from a particular religious background. However, experiments with Universal Basic Income suggest otherwise. People hate unpleasant, low paying work, sure. I approve. But working on something personally interesting? They love that.

This is all boilerplate that disappears on study.

But this here is what I suspect is the beginning of the creation of a cultural fact:

Part of this rush to more government is a recognition by the Democrats that the Republicans will take back the House next year.

I don’t have any special connections to the Democrats, so maybe that’s the rumble in Democratic circles, but it’s worth noting that I haven’t heard a single statement to that effect. Moreover, this is an echo of a comment Erickson made yesterday here. I think we may be seeing the creation, on the right, of momentum for the next election, by making it seem like an inevitable historical fact.

But here’s the strategy I expect will be used on every GOP member of Congress running for reelection who voted against accepting the Presidential Election results on January 6th, 2021, a simple statement:

XYZ voted against accepting the 2020 Presidential Election results despite multiple recounts, and a failure to win a single court case by local GOP officials as well as President Trump. Furthermore, they did so during an attempted coup by far right militia members. If you think they were liberals, go talk to the FBI.

Given all that, who, in their right minds, could even consider voting for XYZ? They are a traitor, in spirit, to the great pillars of our Republic, and I won’t even bother to debate him, because that would bring a blot upon my honor.

I think the Democrats will have a clear opportunity to pick up more seats, and the Republicans will be shell-shocked to discover their third- and fourth-rate candidates are not going to win just “because it’s midterms.” The right-wing mob handed the Democrats a huge club on January 6th, and I expect the Democrats to wield it with great enthusiasm in 2022.

If they don’t, they deserve to lose.

Former Press Secretary for former President Trump Sarah Huckabee Sanders is running for the governor of Arkansas, and is off to a flying start:

Republican gubernatorial candidate Sarah Huckabee Sanders raised more than $4.8 million during the first quarter of the year, her campaign announced Thursday.

Despite not entering the race until late January, Sanders outraised her Republican primary opponent, Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge, nearly 25-to-1 during that 90-day period.

Nationwide, Sanders received money from 34,700 donors. The campaign said it had cash on hand of about $3.9 million as of March 31.

More than two-thirds of Sanders’ first-quarter money came from out of state. Roughly four out of every five contributors live outside Arkansas. [Arkansas Democrat-Gazette]

Which suggests that Sanders is getting paid off for her soul here.

But will Arkansas voters also reward her? The fact that most of that money is from outside the state does suggest she may not be as popular as she might wish.

A problem with politics is information friction: most voters only have limited vision on their candidates. How many will remember Sanders and her abuse of her position?

We’ll find out in the future.

The director’s walk-on part. Not as good as Hitchcock’s.

Scared To Death (1947) is a throw it all at the wall and hope it sticks kind of movie. Comedic elements? Sure! Doctor and his sanatorium, into which a victim is supposedly locked? OK. Mysterious stranger at the door? Yeah. Floating mask at the window? Oh boy. Dead woman still moving around. Uh huh. Hidden doors and secret passageways? Yawn. Journalist and side-kick/fiancee? Wait, stop! Dead victim serves as the narrator? Oh, please, release the hounds!

Then turn on the ol’ plot mixer and see what comes plopping out!

Yet, for all that, it did keep my interest. Just where was this Bela Lugosi vehicle, in its original color, really going to end up? Could they make that dumb cop thing work, and why do film makers of the era keep using that damn trope, anyways?

Too static and random, this film ultimately fails. At one point, it sounds like the actors can’t even believe the dialog they’re delivering. All I can think is that the budget was really too thin.

But if you’re a Bela Lugosi completist, he chews the scenery nicely.

While those of us in the United States busy ourselves with either ignoring politics or indulging in it, the outside world is having its own frightfulness – and I’m not talking about Covid-19. No, this is all about people slinging old fashioned weapons at each other. From April 22:

A loud explosion caused by a missile strike was heard in Israel early Thursday morning, followed by reports of Israeli airstrikes in Syria.

People in Jerusalem reported hearing a loud explosion on social media at around 2:00 am local time. Israeli media outlets said rocket sirens went off near Dimona in central Israel, where Israel’s nuclear reactor is. A missile landed near the nuclear site, which is located in the Negev desert, The Associated Press reported.

A video from the Hamas-affiliated Shehab Agency showed an explosion and a large flash of light in the sky. [AL-Monitor]

Lovely. I’m not sure what a Syrian missile hit on a nuclear plant might do, but it wouldn’t do it any good, I feel sure. And if the plant was put out of commission, the retaliation would be major.

The Brexit process, last time I wrote about it, seemed to be having positive vibrations for the Brits, but it appears that the Irish may not be doing so well, as Professor Carolyn Gallaher and Professor Kimberly Cowell-Meyers note on Lawfare:

On April 7, young people in the Protestant community in the Shankill Road area of Belfast commandeered a bus and set it on fire. Later that night, Protestant and Catholic youth hurled incendiary devices at one another across so-called peace lines—formal and informal barriers that separate places where the two communities border one another. This capped a week of unrest across Northern Ireland. Since the violence started, 88 police officers have been injured. …

Commentators warned that Brexit would destabilize the peace process, and it did. It is difficult to know if unionists, who overwhelmingly supported leaving the European Union, were engaged in magical thinking when they insisted Brexit wouldn’t undermine the GFA, or if they were calculating that Brexit would strengthen their hand against nationalists. In the end, the Northern Ireland Protocol, which lays out the post-Brexit ground rules governing trade between the U.K. and the Republic of Ireland, did not favor unionist interests.

During negotiations, a key sticking point was where to place the border for customs checks. The EU vigorously opposed reestablishing a land border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. During the Troubles, the border had been heavily militarized, and guard posts were often subjected to attacks from the IRA. After the GFA, border infrastructure was dismantled and the border virtually disappeared. Because both countries were part of the EU, people and goods could cross the border without passport or customs checks. This contributed to peace-building by encouraging economic development throughout the island and neutralizing the border issue as a source of conflict between the competing identities of nationalists and unionists.

Unfortunately, there’s almost certainly no easy solution: each side is aggrieved. Look for this to continue to heat up. And, of course, the old stories continue:

Newer leaders—many born in the 1990s—have taken the reins of burgeoning criminal enterprises, selling drugs and extorting local businesses.

And they certainly have no motivation to calm the waters, do they? Sounds like a rough ride is in store for Belfast.

So for those of us with fossil fuel cars, this could be a surprise problem:

Millions of people stuck at home for more than a year are expected hit the road for much-needed post-pandemic vacations this summer. Good luck finding gas.

Not that there’s a looming shortage of crude oil or gasoline. Rather, it’s the tanker truck drivers needed to deliver the gas to stations who are in short supply.

According to the National Tank Truck Carriers, the industry’s trade group, somewhere between 20% to 25% of tank trucks in the fleet are parked heading into this summer due to a paucity of qualified drivers. At this point in 2019, only 10% of trucks were sitting idle for that reason. [CNN/Business]

And for those of with electric cars? Well, frankly, my electric MiniCooper still only has a 110 mile range – tops. Recharge speed remains of concern. And the lack of recharge stations outside of the metro is also of concern.

But, long-term, the use of the electrical system to deliver energy, even with its inherent limitations and inefficiencies, is certainly more attractive than tanker trucks that are subject to problems ranging from weather to problems at refining plants to drivers, whether they don’t exist or are not competent. While no miracle, at least I needn’t worry about the local gas station not having gas for me.

Chaparral:

1. : a thicket of dwarf evergreen oaks
   broadly : a dense impenetrable thicket of shrubs or dwarf trees
2. : an ecological community composed of shrubby plants adapted to dry summers and moist winters that occurs especially in southern California [Merriam-Webster]

Noted in “Study finds Lyme-carrying ticks next to beaches and ‘pretty much wherever we looked,” Paulina Firozi, WaPo:

“In classic oak woodlands, there’s a fair number of studies. But nobody had looked at the chaparral, which is that scrubby stuff in the hills before it hits the ocean,” [John Aucott, director of the Johns Hopkins Lyme Disease Clinical Research Center] said. He said the dearth of research in such areas may be because the known reservoir animals don’t really live there.

In computer science we occasionally – and not often enough in the past – refer to how well an algorithm scales, which means asking how does the algorithm react across the range of data, as measured by size, it encounters? Does it crash? Does it grind to a halt? Does it limp along with performance in the toilet (sometimes known as the N^x problem, meaning the algorithm’s performance, as related to N, the amount of data, is roughly N^x, where x > 1), or is it good (x == 1), or even very good (x < 1)? One of the difficulties in calculating the potential scaling is communications. Are you talking to another server or a database that’s not next door, but in Paris/Shanghai/Seattle/all three? How does that affect scaling?

The reason I bring this up is an observation by Richard Hanania:

People go into academia and journalism for generally idealistic reasons. Some conservatives might be turned away from these professions for political reasons, which poses a “chicken or egg” problem. In my experience though, a smart young person going into journalism is probably better off going into conservative media than they are liberal media, which is already saturated with people with elite degrees who cannot find stable employment. There’s a great deal of demand for conservative journalism among the general public, but few competent conservatives who want to be journalists given what the profession pays relative to what else smart people can be doing. Thus conservative media tends to see the rise of completely incompetent outlets like OANN, which posts fake COVID cures when it’s not arguing the whole thing is fake.

While he doesn’t cite any studies, intuitively it seems correct. To my eye, this is an example of scaling gone mad. The data, in this case, is the audience size; the algorithm is the journalists.

And the Internet is the communications channel that replaced broadcast TV and local newspapers.

If the algorithm is efficient then fewer resources – fewer journalists – need to be dedicated to it.

But the result is not better journalism to more people. While, yes, you can get WaPo or The New York Times – both of which some argue are falling on hard times, quality-wise – even better than before, and these were quality national newspapers prior to the Internet, you can also get sucked into such propaganda outlets as RT, Fox News, OANN, and an absolute myriad of scam sites that deliver false news or malicious analysis of news.

In a sense, nothing new here. I was simply struck by the parallels between my world and the journalism world as observed by Hanania. But analogies occasionally end up being more than illustrative: they can produce solutions that are not obvious, which is known, as I understand the terms, as isomorphic.

So maybe someone will see a solution in this analogy.

John McWhorter on cop-on-black violence:

Funny thing – nothing makes this clearer than the Washington Post database of cop murders. Just pour a cup of coffee and look at what it shows, month after month, year after year. As South Park’s Cartman would put it, “Just, like, just, just look at it. Just look at it.”

Yet, the enlightened take on the issue serenely sails along as if that database proves that cops ice black men regularly while white men only end up in their line of fire now and then by accident. The database reveals a serious problem with cops and murder, period, quite race-neutrally. [It Bears Mentioning]

If I’m to judge from the picture that accompanies his post, McWhorter is black. Let’s switch to Andrew Sullivan for a moment, who provided the link to McWhorter’s piece:

Whenever I find myself embroiled in an argument about police shootings, I ask my friends a simple question to get a handle on where they’re coming from. I ask them quite simply how many unarmed black men were killed by the cops last year. Don’t read on, and test yourself: what’s your rough guess?

Done? Good. The answers from my friends range, but I’d say the most common is somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000. We have, after all, been made much more aware of stories of these horrible killings, and the vividness of some of the videos have tapped into our psyches, as well they might. The correct answer, which usually results in a round of shame-faced jaw drops, is 17. Check it out yourself, under “Search the database”. There’s lots to explore there.

Almost all of these friends are educated, often beyond grad school, are interested in public affairs, and many marched last summer. Yet their understanding of the scale of the problem — and it is a problem — is off by hundreds and thousands. There have been some polls on this distorted perspective. In one, around 20 percent of those who described themselves as “very liberal” estimated 10,000 or more police killings of unarmed black men a year. Politics skews perspective on this, but even those who count themselves as conservative or very conservative vastly over-estimate the number. Around 20 percent of those self-identifying as “very conservative” said police killed 1,000 or more in 2019, with 4 percent saying the number was more than 10,000.

While 17 is greater than 0, it’s a lot less than I would have guessed – so color me red, too. But what about the documented misproportions of black deaths by cop? Back to McWhorter:

But the disproportion … !

Yes, yes – but please see my post on Derek Chauvin on that issue, which in no way disproves anything I have written. Black people are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by cops, and exactly 2.5 times more likely to be poor, and data shows that poverty makes you more likely to encounter the cops, as even intuition confirms. This is why somewhat more black people are killed by cops than what our proportion in the population would predict.

Accounts of this issue that pretend people like me have not presented figures like this – i.e. most mainstream media discussions — are out of court, even if their authors feel it’s their duty to pull people’s eyes away from “irreligious” ideas. Ignore the numbers and, even if you are writing about descendants of African slaves, you are simply plain wrong.

[Bold mine]

And it’s worth noting that the tradition-without-honor of the poverty-stricken taking it in the shorts from whatever passes for the law is far older than the trope that the black community is being targeted for being black.

That is, if you’re poor and disrespected, and thus lacking political power and defensive weaponry, your interactions with cops who may be upholding unjust laws that hurt the poor will be prone to violence; the eagerness of activists to attribute black deaths by cops to racism, rather than the far more complex problem of poverty and its interactions with racism, mental health, physical health, and many other factors, may in effect abuse those in poverty yet again. It’s a difficult situation to assess, and I, not being a social worker professional, refuse to go any further at the moment, but to express my unease with what appears to be the mischaracterization of the situation, unintentional as it may be, by activists and, according to McWhorter, journalists alike.

Nor is this to deny the existence of racism in the police force. I’m sure they’re there. The cops fired in Minneapolis a couple of years ago for decorating their precinct Christmas tree in an inappropriate manner probably qualify. We can easily go back through history to the American Civil War and attribute black community problems to white behaviors: the Tulsa riots, segregation, redlining, profiling.

But McWhorter’s insistence on data rather than emotion as an explanatory force is highly important. Assuming his analysis is correct, it suggests that alleviating poverty may be more effective than protesting police brutality – although both may be necessary. It may be an argument in favor of Universal Basic Income.

And it suggests that each case of police killing needs to be assessed on its own merits. Attempting to claim all cases of black death at the hands of cops under the rubric of law enforcement racism when each case is different may discourage all the good cops, result in the protection of criminals, and misguide our efforts at improvement.

I hope McWhorter’s analysis can be repeated and verified.

Just for completeness’ sake when it comes to the Ever Given, there’s … this:

Why should the Suez Canal have all the fun? From the comfort of home you can get the Ever Given stuck wherever you want it. Drag and zoom the map to move this big old boat somewhere else. Click the rotate button to get it wedged perfectly.

Want to play? Or at least see who has too much time on their hands? Click here.

This Politico report from three weeks ago keeps nudging me to mention it, because it indicates political feelings on the other side of the Atlantic can run almost as high as they do here in the United States:

French left-wing parties have spiraled into a bitter fight over whether white people should be asked to shut up – or be banned outright – during meetings about minority issues.

The controversy erupted after revelations that a left-wing student union, called UNEF, organizes meetings that are off-limits to white members.

Anne Hidalgo, Paris mayor and Socialist presidential hopeful, stepped in Wednesday after a candidate from the same party, Audrey Pulvar, failed to condemn such meetings.

“The field of politics is not a therapy session, it’s the domain of the universal, where we seek unity, and defend our secularist values,” Hidalgo said on BFMTV.

Pulvar, a Black former news anchor running under the Socialist banner in the upcoming regional elections, said on Sunday that white people should not be banned from discussion groups on minority issues, but that “they can however be asked to keep quiet and be silent spectators.”

Asked whether she would have said the same thing, Hidalgo said “obviously not.”

The clash over non-white discussion groups has reignited a debate in France about the growing influence of U.S.-style identity politics, and how it challenges the country’s existing political traditions.

Much like societies which suppress an entire gender’s voices, I think the left will find that suppressing white voices on minority issues, while no doubt giving non-whites a sense of control and authority, also loses them the diversity of views the white community brings to whichever issues matter to them.

Moreover, the suppression of a large portion of the potential participants means those voices of a more radical persuasion now have a more pronounced platform from which to make their case. It’s one thing to be a single radical voice against a million far more reasonable voices, but when it’s one voice against one hundred other such voices, then the advocacy has a better chance of succeeding – regardless of its worth or lack thereof.

And if there is a community of voices that is being silenced or ignored, and it earned it through the natural errors of humanity, historical or contemporary, then if those one hundred opposition voices that are not being silenced happen to be singing in harmony with the silenced & ignored, well, now they, too, are ripe to be ignored as well. Distrust is a fume of the devil, alluring with a false logic that drives people mad.

Leaving only the radical voice to be believed. And people often greatly hunger to believe; not to intellectually evaluate and analyze, but to believe. To believe in something different from a distrusted group, right or wrong.

Something around which the historically wronged community can rally.

This is a fundamentally illiberal position. Liberalism philosophically values debate. Not positions, but their clash. Silencing voices for reasons of anger and hatred is not acceptable in the search for progress, improvement, and justice. It leads to second-rate solutions – or worse.

I don’t know a thing about the European Left, but it sounds like they are discovering the foolishness of illiberalism.

They’re very tough:

But a little hard to find. Like, oh, Sasquatch. I’ll always have a place in my heart for MIB, though.

[Image shamelessly stolen from the American Jewish History Museum Store.]

When it comes to political discourse, I fear the idea of mature, thoughtful discourse has been replaced with stir-up-the-base statements, regardless of the speaker’s political loyalties. Consider this statement from the acting chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in response to a recent SCOTUS decision that didn’t go their way:

Our front yard apples are beginning to bud!

A bit of a dark day, but a lovely promise.

Too bad those front yard apples tend to be too wormy to eat.

The novel … Nominative Determinism. The opening:

“Here,” said the doctor as he handed me the black brew, “this is from Nicaragua and should cure what ails you.”

I glared at Dr. Rich darkly, bleakly wondering if I could possibly finish the proffered drink – and how much it would cost me.

In so many ways.

When it comes to police officers having to carry insurance, Dr. Rashawn Ray notes that settlements paid by civil authorities often hurt historically disadvantaged communities:

Because Chicago budgeted only about $20 million for police misconduct settlements, it used what are informally called “police brutality bonds” to cover its $225 million in settlements. Unlike other bonds, police brutality bonds often do not affect a city’s credit rating. And again, this money does not include the lawyer fees, which cost the city $13 million in 2015 alone. In addition to aiming to implement changes related to police training, deescalation, and the use of force, then-Mayor Rahm Emmanuel proposed increasing appropriation funds to cover police misconduct settlements.

Even more egregious are the financial implications of the funding for bond fees, appropriated funding, and civilian payouts for police misconduct more broadly. In a 2018 report, the Action Center on Race & the Economy described police brutality bonds as “financial instruments that transfer resources and extract wealth from Black and poor communities to Wall St., through the fees banks charge cities for the bonds.” Moreover, funding that should go toward education, work infrastructure, and health care is fueling police brutality of those same disenfranchised people in underserved neighborhoods, as is the case from Inkster, Michigan, to Gage County, Nebraska. [Lawfare]

A requirement that police officers carry brutality insurance would reverse the flow of money, resulting in Wall St. paying the families of those abused by the police. Wall St. won’t like that, and so we might see reformation come not from riots – but from people with a lot of money to lose or win.

There is also a second model:

Under the police department insurance model, the premium is paid by the municipality. To increase accountability, the premium should come from the police department budget. Departments with more misconduct settlements should not simply be given higher yearly budgets to cover higher premiums. Instead, the premium costs should be taken into account when departments ask for budget increases.

I do not think this is as potentially effective.

It seems the realm of cryptocurrencies is mutating. I’ve been basing some of my thoughts on the widespread observation that “mining” the basic tokens is becoming more and more costly in terms of power consumption. This, evidently, is beginning to upset some of the cryptocurrency users, who are advocating for a new paradigm for producing said tokens:

William Entriken, one of the authors of the NFT protocol for Ethereum, a popular alternative to bitcoin, says NFTs aren’t inherently bad, but that rapacious speculation is pushing them and cryptocurrencies down a destructive path as their carbon footprints rise.

Most cryptocurrencies rely on “proof of work” to secure their networks, meaning that computers must perform huge numbers of calculations to “mine” new currency and verify transactions on the blockchain. This uses large amounts of electricity – bitcoin’s annual power consumption is comparable to that of Finland.

Investing money into cryptocurrencies – either through simple speculation or by purchasing expensive artwork – boosts demand and therefore prices, says Entriken. That makes mining that cryptocurrency more profitable, but also more difficult, increasing carbon emissions.

Entriken contrasts cryptocurrencies with carbon offsetting, in which people pay to have carbon emissions removed from the atmosphere. “Bitcoin is the opposite of that. When you purchase bitcoin you’re purchasing carbon creation credits,” says Entriken. “When you purchase the $50,000 [of bitcoin] somebody else is directly putting that much carbon into the atmosphere. Ethereum is the same.”

He has called for Ethereum to switch from a proof of work (PoW) approach to a proof of stake (PoS) approach, which would remove the need for intense calculations by allowing the owners of existing coins to control the network, rather than the owners of the computing power. It is estimated this could cut the total energy demands of Ethereum by 99 per cent. “You have to switch to proof of stake. Proof of work should be illegal,” says Entriken. [NewScientist (3 April 2021)]

So what is “proof of stake”? Investopedia:

The Proof of Stake (PoS) concept states that a person can mine or validate block transactions according to how many coins they hold. This means that the more coins owned by a miner, the more mining power they have.

If this sounds puzzling, keep in mind that miners compete with each other – and all the losers in each competition are wasted energy. By limiting the field for each miner, there’s less competition and less waste.

On the other hand, there’s also less pressure to find new optimizations for mining.

But in a field that is coming under increasing pressure because of energy consumption, I suspect that concern is secondary.

Sans-culottes:

The sans-culottes (French: [sɑ̃kylɔt], literally “without breeches“) were the common people of the lower classes in late 18th-century France, a great many of whom became radical and militant partisans of the French Revolution in response to their poor quality of life under the Ancien Régime. The word sans-culotte, which is opposed to that of the aristocrat, seems to have been used for the first time on 28 February 1791 by officer Gauthier in a derogatory sense, speaking about a “sans-culottes army”. The word came into vogue during the demonstration of 20 June 1792. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “Federal judge keeps Capitol rioter in jail because Trump keeps peddling the Big Lie“, Darrell Lucus, The Daily Kos:

We’ve seen Donald Trump talk himself into trouble too many times to count over the years. Well, if we’re to believe a federal judge, he may have talked one of the sansculottes who stormed the Capitol in his name into an all-expenses-paid stay in jail pending trial.

I had no clue at all.

There are many ways to reject science, of course, and quite often there’s a cost to that rejection. In this case, it’s the fear of gene engineered food crops, as noted in NewScientist (3 April 2021):

[Emma Kovak at the Breakthrough Institute in California] and her colleagues have now worked out what the change in carbon emission would have been if the adoption rates of five key GM crops – soya bean, maize, cotton, rapeseed and sugar beet – had been as high in Europe as they were in the US in 2017, which has a much more favourable view of genetic engineering.

The team used data from a global metastudy of GM crops and previous studies of land-use change to calculate the 33 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent figure. This is a substantial amount, equivalent to 8 per cent of all the EU’s agricultural greenhouse gas emissions in 2017. For comparison, total global emissions from all human activities are around 100 million tonnes of CO2 per day.

And does this cost get advertised? Probably not. The emphasis with be on Frankenfoods and the terrible dangers associated with gene-engineered foods – whatever those might be.

And I’m sure they hope it’s lucrative. Jann Bellamy on Science-Based Medicine provides the relevant criticism and this pointed quote from a proponent’s paper:

But how does it “work”? From 5,000 papers collected in a literature search of the China Academic Journal Network Publishing Database, the authors of this article

summarized that TCM effect mechanism of catgut-point embedding therapy includes the effects of needle retaining and embedding, harmonizing yin and yang, balancing zangfu organs, promoting meridian qi, regulating qi and blood, tonifying for the deficiency and reducing for the excess, strengthening the antipathogenic qi and eliminating pathogens. From the point of view of western medicine, the effect mechanism of catgut-embedding therapy refers to recovering nerve function, regulating neural reflex, increasing human immunity, improving local circulation, inhibiting the release of inflammatory factors, reducing apoptosis, regulating cellular factor and improving body metabolism. It was found that the effects of catgut-embedding therapy were not only related to the effects induced by common acupuncture, but also to the persistent treatment through prolonged stimulation duration, especially in the treatment of chronic diseases with many systems involved.

In case you hadn’t taken your daily quota of sheer gibberish yet today.

Catgut acupuncture. How do these people waste their time so?