Author Archives: Hue White

While reading Noah Smith’s summary of disasters that didn’t happen during the pandemic, it occurred to me that Senator McConnell (R-KY) might be a trifle disappointed in this one:

4) State budgets are healthy

The Great Recession clobbered state budgets, and they never really recovered. It was natural to expect that the COVID-19 recession would have the same effect. Most people predicted giant budget gaps and called urgently for a federal bailout of the states. Here’s Brookings, from April 2020:

[I]n the coming months, states will experience large declines in tax revenues and increased enrollment in safety-net programs as disruptions caused by COVID-19 drive incomes and consumption lower. Without assistance from the federal government, states will likely be forced to make deep program cuts, enact substantial tax increases, or both.

But fortunately, the crisis never happened. The relief bills raised income, and that income got taxed, filling states’ coffers. Capital gains taxes resulting from the big stock market boom helped too. This May it was reported that California has a $75.5 billion budget surplus. New York has a more modest surplus, as does Texas.

In fact, by the time Biden gave states a big dollop of federal cash, most probably no longer needed it.

It’s a known rumor that Senator McConnell would love to see state budgets, plural, get into trouble, because then the judiciary might assign a judge to supervise a state’s budget – and that might result in the big slashes in those budgets that he’d like to see.

No such luck this time, Moscow Mitch.

Stephen J. K. Walters, chief economist at the Maryland Public Policy Institute, etc, has a countering view on the Baltimore phenomenon of lowered violent crime during the pandemic. Briefly, he’s not a fan and thinks we’re seeing rank amateurism from prosecutor Marilyn Mosby:

And now Baltimore is among the national vanguard in a new trend: de-prosecution. While it was widely perceived that early in her tenure Mosby put the brakes on prosecution of many “low-level” crimes, once the pandemic began she made that policy explicit (nominally to ensure that overcrowded prisons not become Covid spreaders). She dismissed over 1,400 pending criminal cases and quashed as many warrants for possession or “attempted distribution” of controlled dangerous substances, prostitution, trespassing, public urination or defecation, minor traffic offenses, and more.

A year later, she revealed that this policy was not just a Covid palliative but an experiment with human subjects; declaring it a big success, she proclaimed that “the era of ‘tough on crime’ prosecutors is over in Baltimore.” She pointed to a 20 percent reduction in violent crime and a 35 percent decline in property crime in the first quarter of 2021 compared with the same period last year. With all the confounding variables at work during the pandemic, of course, no social scientist worth her salt would proclaim such a complex experiment complete—much less successful—with just a year’s worth of data (or a subsample thereof).

When you’ve got data you like, however, “the science” or logic can be overlooked. So Mosby claimed that a 33 percent decline in 911 calls mentioning drugs and a 50 percent decline in calls mentioning sex work during her experiment proves that “there is no public safety value in prosecuting these offenses.” To the contrary: with drug use and prostitution de facto legal in Baltimore, many residents still wasted their time calling the cops about the dealers, junkies, hookers, or johns on their block. [City Journal]

He thinks … well …

A simpler explanation is that Mosby is just not very good at her job. Pre-pandemic, violent crime surged on her watch; homicides (averaging 55 per 100,000 residents) have run one-fifth higher than in any prior administration. Conviction rates fell as soon as she took office. According to Sean Kennedy of the Maryland Public Policy Institute, in 2017 only 12 percent of murder, attempted murder, or conspiracy-to-commit-murder cases resulted in a guilty plea or verdict for the murder charge. In 2018, only 18 percent of gun-crime defendants were found guilty.

It’s not the kind of statement designed to elicit agreement and analysis from the inside, but it may be accurate. It’s worth noting, though, that Walters is a fan of the Broken Windows philosophy of policing, which raises a red flag for me. If he had considered and rejected the lead poisoning theory of crime waves, then I’d be contingently happier, but he betrays no consciousness of it – which leaves me wondering if he’s well versed in the subject, or simply doesn’t like the work of Mosby.

But Walters provides a lot of context to the crime drama in Baltimore, so it’s worth a read.

[h/t Andrew Sullivan]

Moral risk:

In economics, moral hazard occurs when an entity has an incentive to increase its exposure to risk because it does not bear the full costs of that risk. For example, when a corporation is insured, it may take on higher risk knowing that its insurance will pay the associated costs. A moral hazard may occur where the actions of the risk-taking party change to the detriment of the cost-bearing party after a financial transaction has taken place.

Moral hazard can occur under a type of information asymmetry where the risk-taking party to a transaction knows more about its intentions than the party paying the consequences of the risk and has a tendency or incentive to take on too much risk from the perspective of the party with less information. One example is a principal–agent problem, where one party, called an agent, acts on behalf of another party, called the principal. If the agent has more information about his or her actions or intentions than the principal then the agent may have an incentive to act too riskily (from the viewpoint of the principal) if the interests of the agent and the principal are not aligned. [Wikipedia]

I assume Moral Risk and Moral Hazard are more or less synonyms. Noted in “Not That Innocent,” Elizabeth Bruenig, The Atlantic:

He shouldn’t have done what he did, none of it; nor should we have given him the opportunity to do what he did from death row, which we did when we created the machinery of capital punishment. Killing never reduces moral risk; there’s no cosmic ledger it can, by subtraction, set right, and no slate it can wash clean with the right amount of blood. In this way the lives of the innocent are no different from the lives of the guilty. The abolition of the death penalty will likely rest on whether we are willing to make that case.

I’m not quite sure why, but I found this particularly repellent:

According to [Marissa Bluestine, the assistant director of the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School], unsavory actors have taken advantage of the profusion of innocence organizations to exploit anxious inmates marked for death. “There is this weird cottage industry of folks who are under the radar—and I think they are completely predatory and disgusting,” she said. “They will reach out to folks who are incarcerated, [and] offer to review their case and present it to a conviction-integrity unit, saying it’ll only cost you $2,500. And they have no intention of doing any work.” Bluestine said she has worked with clients who have lost money and resources, such as transcripts with only one extant copy, to scams masquerading as innocence efforts. None of which is to say that genuine innocence programs are responsible for their malicious imposters—only that the proliferation of scattered innocence groups across the judicial landscape has given the fakes room to grow. [Elizabeth Bruenig, The Atlantic]

I suppose an innocence program, which advocates for convicts for whom there is some credible doubt as to their guilt, is simply trading in a product, and as such grifters/scammers are attracted due to the desperate circumstances of the customers.

Some years the poppies hardly even show up for summer. This year?

Good, clean fun.

I hope that I’ve restored the navigation links at the top of the post for individual post display.

For independent political observers, this WaPo article on Biden Administration hiring practices has potential significance:

Barely a week into office, President Biden made a promise that signaled a sharp break from his predecessor: No member of his family would be involved in government.

But that vow did not extend to his senior staff and their relatives. In the first few months of Biden’s presidency, at least five children of his top aides have secured coveted jobs in the new administration. They include two sons and a daughter of the White House counselor, the daughter of a deputy White House chief of staff and the daughter of the director of presidential personnel.

The pattern — which continued this week with the Treasury Department’s announcement that it was hiring J.J. Ricchetti, son of Biden counselor Steve Ricchetti — has drawn concerns from ethics experts, diversity advocates and others. They say it is disappointing that Biden didn’t shift even further from the practices of Donald Trump’s presidency, which they felt reeked of nepotism and cronyism.

I think the ethics experts have every right to be concerned. Good government is about hiring the best qualified, a positive statement, while avoiding hiring those with political connections where possible, which is a negative statement. Both are important, because the latter is a message that the corruption that comes with hiring family and friends with little to no regard for relevant expertise is not acceptable.

And Biden needs to send the message that we are committed to good government, rather than sliding into bad government, after the ethical disaster that was the Trump Administration. So this qualifies as a disappointment for me. This is only somewhat ameliorated by the highly qualified nature of some of those hires:

Stephanie Psaki has a Ph.D. in public health from Johns Hopkins University and her work has been published in leading journals such as The Lancet, according to her HHS biography. Medina is a former deputy undersecretary of Commerce for oceans and atmosphere and former special assistant to the secretary of Defense.

Others also come with a long list of credentials, such as White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan’s wife, Maggie Goodlander, who works as counsel to Attorney General Merrick Garland, for whom she clerked when he was an appellate judge. Sullivan’s brother, Tom Sullivan, is a State Department official and Tom’s wife, Rose Sullivan, is an official at the Department of Health and Human Services.

Something to keep an eye on.

The Minnesota State Fair is hosting the Back to the ’50s gang again, and my Arts Editor snapped some pics.

Positively glowing.

Some nice trucks.

Here’s our favorite, too cute for words.

And here’s a mystery car.

My Arts Editor thinks it’s an elderly T-bird.

De fide:

De fide (of the faith) is a “theological note” “theological qualification” that indicates that some religious doctrine is an essential part of Catholic faith and that denial of it is heresy.^[1] The doctrine is de fide divina et ecclesiastica (of divine and ecclesiastical faith), if contained in the sources of revelation and therefore believed to have been revealed by God (de fide divina) and if taught by the Church (de fide ecclesiastica). If a doctrine has been solemnly defined by a pope or an ecumenical council as a dogma, the doctrine is de fide definita. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “US Catholic bishops advance communion document, setting up potential rebuke of Biden,” Tom Foreman, CNN/Politics:

“I accept my church’s position on abortion as a what we call de fide doctrine. Life begins at conception. That’s the church’s judgment. I accept it in my personal life,” [then Vice President Joe Biden] said during the 2012 vice presidential debate. “But I refuse to impose it on equally devout Christians and Muslims and Jews. I just refuse to impose that on others,” he said.

There’s been a bit of an uproar over far-right Rep Clyde’s (R-GA) behavior yesterday towards law enforcement:

That dynamic was on full display in the Capitol Wednesday as D.C. police officer Michael Fanone, who suffered a concussion and heart attack while fending off the Jan. 6 mob, visited the Hill seeking meetings with the 21 House Republicans who voted against a bill to award a Congressional Gold Medal to police officers for their service during the attack. Fanone says freshman Rep. Andrew Clyde — the Georgia Republican who recently downplayed the insurrection by comparing it to a ”normal tourist visit” — refused to shake his hand after the officer introduced himself in an elevator. [Politico]

This has led prominent Democratic Rep Swalwell (D-CA) to ask a question:

Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), one of the House’s impeachment managers during Trump’s second trial, was quick to seize on the interaction, tweeting “that to honor Trump, @housegop will dishonor the police.”

“It’s hard to accuse Democrats of defunding the police when you are dishonoring the police,” Swalwell said in an interview. “It makes me wonder: Was there prior support [in the GOP] for law enforcement? Or just phony political pandering? Because when the rubber meets the road, they’re choosing Trump over the cops.”

Beyond this and GOP refusal to recognize white supremacy as a real threat to the United States over the last couple of decades, there’s not really much evidence in support of an affirmative response. Why?

Because the Republican Party has been madly careening to the right over those years. There’s no doubt as to this contention; FiveThirtyEight even measured it a few years ago. If anything, we’re entering the terminal stage now with the rise to prominence of Representatives Gohmert, Gosar, Clyde, Greene, Boebert, Gaetz, and several others, just in the House.

Those they replaced, and their staffs, have often left the Party or do not participate in Party processes and policy formation as the abyss separating the one group from the other has yawned larger and larger.

The rightward inclination of the younger, newer members also means an inclination towards violence and away from democracy; this puts them at odds with the police, at least those members who are not already of their temperament. Add in the spice of contempt that so many of these “new Republicans” have, and it’s no surprise they do not support law enforcement.

But those Republicans they replaced? I tend to think they did support law enforcement, perhaps strongly in many cases. But not today’s Republicans. The police are now on the front lines, opposing their ambitions. They may try to charm the police, as they did in the previous election, but I think it’s becoming clear that the police must find support elsewhere.

Hey, boys! Some Grecian mariners in, errr, blue!

And that, of course, is a problem. This may be another iteration of the two monsters of old Greek myth, Scylla and Charybdis, a deeply suspicious Democratic Party on one side and a hostile Republican Party on the other, that will come together to grind and reform or destroy the police. We’ve been seeing this in the reports of broken morale, early retirements, and extended medical leaves at various police departments in the wake of the George Floyd murder-inspired protests, and the concurrent riots; I phrase it that way because, while the protests are more or less peaceful, outside of Portland, OR, and the ideology homogenuous among the protesters, again with an exception in Portland, the rioters have been a mixed bag, with the FBI seeking at least one far-right instigator who encouraged the rioting by the black community.

The results of the this Grecian crushing of law enforcement is in the hands of law enforcement, really: will they assent to reformation in hopes of retaining a position of prestige in the community, or will they stubbornly cling to old ways and loyalties? The recent sudden resignation of the local police union president here in the Twin Cities might suggest they’re taking the constructive former option, as President Krull (I kid you not) was definitely of the old order.

Rep Swalwell’s question may have been more significant than he realizes.

Athleisure:

a style of clothing that is comfortable and suitable for doing sports, but also fashionable and attractive enough to wear for other activities:
The singer has her own athleisure brand of clothing. [Cambridge Dictionary]

Totally new to me. Noted in “Why Does Everyone Talk Like They’re In A Cult?,” Amanda Montell, Refinery29:

But New Age–speak can also be a red flag. In some contexts, nebulous terms like “alignment” and “awakening” serve as scammy marketing buzzwords that have no clear or specific meaning, but simply paint a portrait of the speaker as transcendently wise, like some kind of all-knowing wiseman or prophet (even if they themselves don’t quite know what they’re saying). In competitive workplace environments, for example, excessive New Age lingo — constant talk of “missional synergy” and “holistic idea-sharing” — can promote a culture of conformity, discouraging individualism and questioning, while obscuring the fact that behind all the gobbledygook, the company’s higher-ups might not have the most “holistic” intentions (a recent Bond University study found that one in five CEOs is a clinical psychopath). And on social media, where influencers are no longer selling just athleisure and eye cream, but also their very souls, dime-a-dozen Insta-gurus like @activationvibration offer free nuggets of spiritual-ese, hoping followers will get suckered into paying for their self-actualization courses or retreats in order to learn what the hell they’re actually talking about.

Perhaps a trifle Germanic?

The ACA, aka Obamacare, has survived the latest challenge at SCOTUS:

The Supreme Court dismissed a challenge to the Affordable Care Act on Thursday in a decision that will leave the law intact and save health care coverage for millions of Americans. The justices turned away a challenge from Republican-led states and the former Trump administration, which urged the justices to block the entire law.[CNN/Politics]

I thought this was interesting …

The justices said that the challengers of the 2010 law did not have the legal right to bring the case. …

The justices noted that there is no harm to opponents from the provisions that they are challenging because Congress has reduced the penalty for failing to buy health insurance to zero.

… because later CNN’s expert commented:

“Today’s ruling is, indeed, another reprieve for the Affordable Care Act — one that rests on the extent to which the provisions its critics say are objectionable are no longer enforceable against them,” said Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at the University of Texas Law.

The ruling means that the justices won’t rule on the merits of the lawsuit, but allows the law to stand.

“By holding that these individual plaintiffs and states lacked ‘standing’ to sue, the justices avoided deciding whether the ACA as revised is constitutional — but also made it much harder for anyone to get that issue into the courts going forward,” Vladeck said. “In essence, they sucked the oxygen out of the ACA’s continuing constitutional fire.”

So if Congress reinstates the penalty, doesn’t that give the complainants standing?

A 7-2 victory does tend to put the stamp of approval on the ACA, even if Justice Alito is feeling bitter:

In his dissent, Alito called out the various times the Supreme Court has now ruled on the law and found ways to keep it in place.

“Today’s decision is the third installment in our epic Affordable Care Act trilogy, and it follows the same pattern as installments one and two. In all three episodes, with the Affordable Care Act facing a serious threat, the Court has pulled off an improbable rescue,” Alito wrote.

“No one can fail to be impressed by the lengths to which this Court has been willing to go to defend the ACA against all threats. A penalty is a tax. The United States is a State. And 18 States who bear costly burdens under the ACA cannot even get a foot in the door to raise a constitutional challenge,” the veteran conservative justice added.

“So a tax that does not tax is allowed to stand and support one of the biggest Government programs in our Nation’s history. Fans of judicial inventiveness will applaud once again, he added. “But I must respectfully dissent.”

And I remain interested in the apparent fact that Adam Smith, the father of the free market, remains uncited by the opposition. I must find time to read his The Wealth of Nations someday.

Max Boot’s link leads nowhere, so I’ll quote him quoting the late Senator John McCain (R-AZ):

Russia benefits from a cold war if that means it gets treated as the equal of the world’s sole superpower rather than, as John McCain put it, “a gas station masquerading as a country.”

The upcoming transition away from fossil fuels may end up being a devastating blow to Russia.

A month and more ago, law professors Jonathan Gould, Kenneth Shepsle and Matthew Stephenson presented an idea for a way around filibustering by Senators representing a minority of the population of the United States – they call it democratizing the filibuster:

The filibuster exists only because a Senate rule requires the support of a three-fifths majority to cut off debate and hold a final vote. The Senate could change this rule so that ending debate would instead require the support of a majority of senators who collectively represent a majority of the U.S. population, with each senator considered to represent half of his or her state’s residents. This rule, which should be extended to all legislation as well as confirmation of judicial appointments, would allow a bare majority of senators to overcome a filibuster — if those senators together represented a majority of the American people. [WaPo]

It’s one of those ideas with a certain appeal to those who like complexity, but I think it ignores one big problem: The Senate was explicitly designed to provide equal representation to each State.

The problem may appear to be population representation, but it’s really the fact that filibustering exists.

It’s a carnivore dressed like an herbivore. Or maybe just an herb. Kill! Kill! Kill!

The Men Who Stare At Goats (2009) is the tale of US Army research into psychic warfare. Told through the eyes of reporter Bob Wilton, reports that the Soviets are working hard in the same sphere, true or not, inspires the Army, or more accurately a few senior officers, to open a research base dedicated to the topic in the 1970s.

Thirty years later, Lyn Cassady, an alumni of the original Army program, is rumbling through the Iraqi desert, looking for something, when Wilton, who learned Cassady’s name earlier, stumbles across him. Between IEDs and firefights in Iraqi towns, they finally find their way to a forward base run by another colleague from the psychic warfare days, Larry Hooper. He’s the man who takes the Army entirely too seriously, ready to use the psychic abilities – if they exist – of those trained for advanced warfare against any enemy who might pop up.

And they’ve proved psychic warfare’s utility with goats, a precursor to … goat stew.

The plot is much like Wilton and Cassady’s exploration of the desert, as it’s never quite clear where we’re going next, nor whether this is really a drama with comedic undertones, or a comedy with a twisted sense to it. It’s interesting, but exactly what it’s trying to say is more in the mind of the audience than the moviemakers.

They’re just hoping to read your’s.

Antipode:

1. places diametrically opposite each other on the globe.
2. those who dwell there. [Dictionary.com]

Noted in “Eyeing comeback, Maine’s former governor pitches ‘LePage 2.0’,” Michael Shepherd, Bangor Daily News:

[Former Governor LePage] is promising a “LePage 2.0.” Those who have heard him use the phrase take it to mean a calmer and issue-focused iteration of the former two-term governor. Democrats may scoff at such a rebranding after his chaotic eight-year tenure. His era ended with their party taking and keeping control of Augusta under Gov. Janet Mills, LePage’s stylistic antipode.

While America continues down its dramatic political path towards what we hope is recovery from the Trump years, Israel has, with greater reluctance, finally taken steps away from its right wing leader, former Prime Minister, but still Member of the Knesset, Benjamin Netanyahu. Much like former President Trump, Netanyahu’s not going quietly into the political night:

BILATERAL MEETING WITH THE PRIME MINISTER OF ISRAEL..Photo credit: Matty STERN/U.S. Embassy Jerusalem

Netanyahu, on the government’s first day, predicted a fast end to the new coalition.

“The fraudulent government will fall quickly,” Netanyahu said Monday. “Three things unite it: hatred, exclusion and domination. With such hatred it is impossible to hold a government for long.”

His allies, including far-right religious nationalists and ultra-Orthodox parties, are also pledging a comeback. [WaPo]

In fact, he’s not going at all if he can help it. That is one nasty breach of democratic norms; hoping they fail means endangering the country. But I’m also struck, if not surprised, by how his allies are so much like Trump’s religious allies:

Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, a member of the Chief Rabbinate Council, which enjoyed elevated status during Netanyahu’s tenure, led a prayer alongside other influential rabbis at the Western Wall in Jerusalem on Sunday. They prayed for the failure of a government that they said “wants to erase the Jewish identity in the state of Israel” . . . and “harm the holiness” of Jewish laws and customs.

The selfish nature of religious leaders apparently extends to Israel. Mazal Mualem has a bit more, although I wonder if it’s colored by her own feelings on the matter:

The alliance between Netanyahu and the ultra-Orthodox was one of the strongest, most impenetrable coalitions in Israeli politics. For many years Netanyahu gave them rulership, important portfolios and budgets, and in turn they were the prime minister’s safety net. Even when Netanyahu got into legal trouble and became a lame duck, the ultra-Orthodox did not abandon him and firmly rejected offers from the opposition. His ultra-Orthodox partners marched with him into the opposition.

The heads of the ultra-Orthodox parties seem to be in shock and are still working to grasp the situation. So long as Netanyahu can convince others that the change coalition will fall apart, they will cling to him as they know that they need one another. [AL-Monitor]

What is politely known as loyalty is better described as an addiction to power, even a reliance on a privileged position in society where, due to their religious professions, they do not have to serve in the military, unlike their fellow citizens. Mualem has a back-handed slap for them:

Liberman spoke yesterday about his intentions regarding the ultra-Orthodox: “We will try with all our might to promote core studies for all students, so that the sons and daughters of the ultra-Orthodox sector will be able to pass matriculation examinations like everyone else. This will enable them to acquire a profession and stand on their own feet economically, and not to rely on government allowances.” He was describing the nightmare of the ultra-Orthodox, a possibility they had fended off with Netanyahu’s help.

Hopefully, this is all side show. Israeli relations with their neighbors and the world remain the number one priority for the Israelis, and how a coalition government featuring parties from across the political spectrum performs should be fascinating.

From Erick Erickson:

Satan is running through churches. The spiritual fight is here. Those of you who do not believe, you will one day — every knee will bow one day. For today, however, I can only tell those of you in the church that your commitment to the truth of Christ is now more important than ever. You cannot hide from the world. You must engage the world — the Great Commission demands it.

He’s finally figured out the wholesale corruption of the evangelicals?

The Southern Baptist Convention is meeting this week. The participants overwhelmingly agree on everything. But they disagree on how to engage. Those who have spoken out on critical race theory, but have not beat their chests on it, are perceived as being suspect. Others have made denouncing the second-order things way more important than advancing the first-order things. Men who have spent their lives dedicated to biblical fidelity, biblical inerrancy, and God’s truth are being attacked as weak, spineless, or closet liberals because they are not angry, screaming, and railing against hot button issues. Performance now outweighs commitment because a commitment to truth without theater is suspect.

No, not really. The status quo, which for so long had hidden injustice behind the wall of tradition, is challenged, and to him that’s madness. The uproar within the evangelical world, which reportedly is shrinking, doesn’t signify to him of corruption, merely a lack of discipline.

There will be struggle in the days ahead, as there will – and perhaps already is – a rush of grifters of both religious and secular vectors towards the hole in the wall, ready to take advantage of all sorts of the vulnerable, as well as simply separating truth from ideological fiction.

But, if civil rights history is anything to go by, we should come out of it in better shape. We just have to remember that not all change is good change, just as not all status quo is good status quo.

For those long time readers recalling the post concerning the ‘slaughterbots,’ a counter-measure has been devised as NewScientist (24 April 2021, paywall) reports:

A mobile, high-power microwave weapon can knock down a swarm of drones at once or pick a single drone out of a group with sniper-like precision.

Anti-drone weapons, such as radio-frequency jammers, already exist, but are only effective against consumer drones – they were used at London’s Gatwick airport in 2018 to defend against a suspected drone intrusion that left flights grounded.

More advanced military models are protected against these kinds of jammers – either being equipped with jam-resistant radios or having the ability to operate autonomously without a radio link to an operator – so the Leonidas system developed by Epirus, a Los Angeles start-up, takes a different approach. The device fires a high-power microwave beam that overloads a drone’s electronics, causing it to drop out of the sky.

While existing microwave weapons are about the size of a shipping container, Leonidas fits in the back of a pickup truck. It can be controlled with great precision. “Our systems allow us the capability to widen or narrow the beam and put a null in any direction to disable enemy targets and nothing else,” says Epirus CEO Leigh Madden. The company is also working on a smaller version of the weapon that could be carried by operators on foot.

And, honestly, this seems like an irrelevant problem if you’re running from slaughterbots:

Justin Bronk at defence think tank RUSI in London notes that while microwaves may be more acceptable than guns or missiles for defending populated areas, high accuracy is needed. “In urban areas, there’s a danger of damaging the electrical power infrastructure or frying people’s electronic devices,” he says.

Your results may vary.

Or rosebush. Or I’m not sure. It’s red. It resides next to the air conditioner.

The desperation of the Republicans to draw a moral equivalency between themselves and the Democrats is becoming marked. Over the weekend, news broke of the latest Trump Administration scandal, as summarized by Steve Benen:

Even among those who’ve come to expect the worst from the Trump administration were taken aback last week with new revelations about the Republican-led Justice Department. The New York Times was first to report that federal investigators secretly seize communications records from at least two Democratic members of Congress, some of their staffers, and even some their family members.

Ranking GOP member of the Senate Judiciary Committee Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) had a response to the suggestion that perhaps Congress should be investigating this latest embarrassment to the American democracy:

“Both classified leaks and abuses of power are serious offenses that must be met with strict consequences. We know that the Justice Department is capable of abusing its power, as it did when it secretly spied on and ran intelligence operations against the Trump campaign. We also know that classified information in congress’ possession can leak to the press, as was the case with the classified Carter Page FISA – the product of that abuse. We do not know whether the effort to investigate such leaks was another example of an abuse of power by the Justice Department.

[Bold mine.]

Here’s the problem: despite numerous allegations and investigations, no evidence supporting said allegations ever emerged.

But Republicans can’t have that. They have a repellent character in the White House who abused his position unlike any other President, and if they admit that he’s far worse than the Democrats’ worst, then they risk losing votes.

And so they cling to what are most kindly described as unproven allegations; for realists, they’re better described as brazen Trumpian lies. And Senator Grassley is capping off a long career in the Senate by participating in those lies.

It’s such a fucking embarrassment. He used to be respectable. Now he babbles on about his physical condition and indulges in lies after rubber-stamping nearly all of the Trump-nominated judiciary – while doing nothing else.

From Newsweek:

In a way only they can, supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory are bizarrely suggesting there was huge significance in the moment a cicada flew around the neck of President Joe Biden before he boarded Air Force One. …

We The Media, a collection of QAnon advocates with more than 225,000 subscribers on its Telegram account, believes Biden swatting at the cicadas is actually “comms,” a secret message that can be decoded by QAnon supporters.

“JOE BIDEN BITTEN BY A CICADA – COMMS? Just so happens that Cicada nymphs emerge after a 17-year childhood underground!!!” We The Media wrote.

For QAnon supporters, anything that can be linked to the number 17, no matter how tenuous, can be interpreted as “comms” for them as Q is the 17th letter of the alphabet.

And that’s why I’m neither religious nor properly respectful of symbolism.

I must admit I found Erick Erickson’s post from a couple of days ago to be interesting, at least in part. It begin with a quote from the Wall Street Journal, which I don’t read, and extrapolates from there.

From individuals with smartphones and a few thousand dollars to pensions and private-equity firms with billions, yield-chasing investors are snapping up single-family houses to rent out or flip. They are competing for houses with ordinary Americans,

Here’s the problem, corporate America and particularly private equity America has decided that Americans no longer want the American dream. American middle-class homeowners no longer need homes to buy. So instead, they’re buying up every available property on the market and then forcing you to rent because the home is too expensive for you to buy, the land is too expensive for you to build, and lumber prices have gone up so much, you’re forced into a rental market even though you want to be a homeowner. These corporations were so focused on if they could do it, they haven’t asked if they should do it and they’re driving up home prices. They’re gentrifying neighborhoods against the neighbors’ will. They’re driving up property prices and they’re forcing you to pay more and more. If you want to own land or buy a house, you are forced to move further and further away from even the suburbs out into rural America.

It’s fascinating how Erickson’s prediction parallels Professor Turchin’s observations of secular cycles, isn’t it? As Turchin’s agrarian societies enter the disintegrative phase, the prices of land skyrocket and land accumulates to holders who rent it out for profit to the farmers. This is often caused by the farmers having children and dividing their land into less and less sufficient plots for the kids – usually the males. Perhaps we’re headed for a Turchin crash.

But also notice Erickson’s clinging to the status quo. I half expected him to decry the advent of the electric vehicle as well, wailing that the extinction of the fossil-fueled vehicle (hah! I kill myself!). Why is home ownership the dream of all Americans still? Perhaps it’s not. After all, an iconic emblem of the Millenials is the story of the job seeker who turned down a cushy job because it wasn’t on a bus route, much to the bewilderment of their would-be boss.

And finally, if prices are being driven up, perhaps this is a good thing. This may motivate people to increase their valuable skill sets, rather than sitting around drinking beer, gossiping, or praising their divinity. Don’t get me wrong, religion is a carrier of morality, but at some point you should admit that you have learned that morality and really don’t need to go to church. Increasing the skill set makes it more likely you can buy a house, at least in Erickson’s future.

This is all going to come crashing down. At some point, people are going to decide they are sick of renting and want to buy. They’re going to be priced out of markets and people are going to leave. They’re going to move further out into rural areas. They’re going to buy houses there where these corporations aren’t and the property prices are going to crash. You’re going to have whole empty suburban corridors with collapsing homes because corporate America never asked if they should do this. They never asked if they should wipe out the American dream. Congress will likely act on this and I’m in favor of it. Private equity companies are putting rental markets into pension funds.

These pension funds run by private entities for the government now demanding that you yourself rent your house instead of buying your house. It takes away the dream of homeownership and an available pool of equity from American consumers. This forces them to be renters for life and drives up rental prices. This is not sustainable long term. I can see it coming. After the collapse, the major hedge funds and private equity groups will go to the government for a bailout and can do it because they have access to subsidized guarantees and access to the FDIC that you, the individual home buyer do not have. They can get away with it. It’s not a free market. It’s not really even capitalism. It’s cronyism and they’re calling it capitalism.

A capitalist society without morality is no better than a communist society. Sure, more people are elevated out of poverty, but a whole lot of rich people take advantage of everyone else just like in communism. You’ve got to have a real free market. This isn’t one. Not only that, you’ve got to have some grounding in morality and be able to question whether or not you should do something instead of can you do something. This has been going on now for a number of years and it is escalating. The government is going to step in. When they do, it’s going to be a burden on all of us, unless we stop it now instead of waiting until it festers out of control.

The application of capitalism to the private sector seems like such a stretch, doesn’t it? Especially for such a speculative prediction on his part.

But it’s worth taking a thought about it.

It’s unsung efforts like these that I find intriguing:

Flat-pack furniture is commonplace, and flat-pack pasta might be one day too.

Wen Wang of Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania and her colleagues have developed edible 2D pasta that swells into 3D shapes when cooked, such as long spirals resembling fusilli and saddle shapes similar to conchiglie.

The researchers believe that flat-pack dry pasta could drastically reduce the amount of packaging required for the foodstuff, as well as saving on storage and transportation space.

For example, when macaroni is packaged, around 60 per cent of the space in the box or bag is air, estimates Wang.

The 2D pasta morphs into 3D shapes when boiled because each piece is lined with tiny grooves, less than 1 millimetre wide, in particular patterns. The grooves increase the surface area of some parts of a piece of pasta. Areas with a higher surface area absorb water and swell faster, says Wang, who now works at food and drink company Nestlé. [“Flat pasta that morphs into 3D shapes when cooked saves on packaging,” Donna Lu, NewScientist (15 May 2021)]

That’s the sort of cool stuff that tickles me.