Category Archives: Uncategorized

We stumbled across these blooming cacti during a walk and were utterly charmed.

Former Republican Max Boot’s prose brings the title of this post into vivid clarity:

Despite having read about archaeology for close to forty years – or maybe more if I count National Geographic to which my parents subscribed – I’ve never really formed a picture in my head of Mayan society. Those murals and vases present scenes which are really alien to modern eyes: Monarchical rulers, cities hidden in jungles, slaves, victims having their hearts ripped out (or so the rumors went), the exotic ball game, deeply held arrogance, deliberately misshapen heads. Add to that a complete lack of systematic study, and I suppose it was inevitable.

But this picture from a Mayan vase just made me laugh. It’s contained in “From Head to Toe in the Ancient Maya World,” by Lydia Pyne, Archaeology (July/August 2020), and these folks are so … human.

What do you see? I, vastly improbably, see a Yorick reference; an unamused older lady, keeping things rolling along; a dude who just got goosed by his rump painter and isn’t sure he liked it; and a couple more folks, bored by the routine, no doubt fantasizing about something Mayan.

Oh, sure, go yell at me. Tell me you’re not giggling at this picture. I know the caption, not reproduced here, claims it’s a King and Queen preparing for a ceremonial dance. I think it’s graffiti, perhaps at the King’s expense.

If you have any interest in Mayans, you should click the link. The artifact pictured with the Capes and Cloaks section is really quite extraordinary.

And, hey, they could use your subscription money, too. I’ve subscribed probably since my mid-twenties.

Endorheic basin:

An endorheic basin is a closed drainage that retains water and does not allow for overflow to other external bodies such as the rivers and or oceans. The endorheic basin may form either permanent or seasonal lakes or swamps that equilibrate only through evaporation. The basin is also commonly referred to as internal drainage system or a closed basin. However, under normal circumstances, the water that accumulates in the drainage basin flows out through rivers or streams or by underground diffusion through permeable rocks and finally ends up in the ocean. This scenario is not common in the endorheic Basin since water that flows into the basin cannot flow out and may only leave the drainage through evaporation or seep into the ground. [WorldAtlas]

Noted in XKCD:

It appears the Republican Party is laying rubber in its flight to the extreme right wing as a Republican incumbent in Colorado is upended in the primary – by another QAnon believer:

Colorado Republican Rep. Scott Tipton lost his primary Tuesday to Lauren Boebert, a gun rights activist who has also been associated with the far-right conspiracy theory known as QAnon. …

When I say Go!, you throw the dog at them and run like hell. I’ve packed him full of explosives and I never liked him anyways.

The Adventures of Tintin (2011) is an interesting little bit of fluff that quickly fades away. It’s an animated film in the style of Gollum from Peter Jackson’s Lord Of The Rings series, with the characters’ movements based on motion capture technology, and so it lends a certain, almost creepy verisimilitude to the action.

And this is an action film. Set in the 1930s, Tintin is a young French journalist who, in the midst of decorating his office, decides a model of a sailing ship might be just the thing. He procures just such a model in a flea market in a nearby street of Paris, barely ahead of another determined buyer, and refuses a superior offer. That night, his home is invaded by a man shot in the back, his model ship disappears, and soon enough Tintin is taken prisoner himself, finding himself on a tramp steamer heading … somewhere.

But taking prisoner is not the same as keeping prisoner, for Tintin and his little dog, Snowy, are resourceful protagonists – and the ship’s captain is a drunkard, a chore for the crew to manage, yet required by Tintin’s captor. Soon enough, Tintin and Snowy escape and make their way to the shores of Africa, all the while wondering what their little model ship has to do with their captivity.

And on it goes. There’s no doubt that Tintin is an entertainingly resourceful young man, escaping and frustrating the antagonists, and the movie is a colorful, exciting fantasy, but the problem lies with the story. Let’s compare this to the acknowledged masterpiece of the genre: Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). In both films, the antagonists have few, if any, redeeming characteristics. The difference, though, is in the situations in which Professor Jones finds himself.

No. Fans of the film will know I just misstated Jones’ characteristic contretemps. Indiana Jones doesn’t have situations happen to him, he seeks them out. And while Tintin’s more reactive role is mitigated by his aggressive, intelligent responses, the situations themselves differ in one key aspect:

Morality. Or ethics, if you prefer.

Remember how we meet Indiana Jones? He’s taking an ancient artifact from a temple. Is this research or theft? It turns out that Professor Jones has quite the checkered past and, more importantly, present: a former and resentful lover, Marion, many years his junior, who he now meets in diminished circumstances, but full of her own brand of cleverness; his desperate search for Marion after her kidnapping, ending in her death by the explosion of the car Jones shoots; his search for the Ark, undertaken through subterfuge; the question of whether he should use the bazooka on the Ark; & etc. All of these situations, along with being fun and exciting, have a serious moral dimension to them, a dimension that includes consequences. That mad, frantic dash, sans artifact, through the jungle, pursued by a tribe spitting poison darts at him?

That’s consequences.

Tintin’s adventures may be equally exciting, but there’s no moral cloudiness concerning his actions; he makes the Right Choice, easily, every time. And that takes the tension and memorability plumb out of this movie, because those questions of morality, of predicting which decision a character will make, and how the consequences will affect their future, is the reason most audience members watch and talk about a movie.

It’s too bad that Tintin never faces tough moral situations, even making bad decisions, because many of the other elements of a really good film are present: colorful characters, good effects, conflict. The only other lack is that I don’t particularly care for is a goal that is purely wealth, even if it’s not Tintin’s goal, as he’s just along for the ride. Jones drew the audience in by presenting the dream of an archaeologist: the finding of an ancient artifact, of even the ancient artifact. The relentless search for wealth is often an end in itself, both in stories and in real life; Jones’ search, and the psychological implications, was far more interesting. Now, if the storytellers had emphasized Tintin’s journalistic profession more, they could have made that quite engaging, but, sadly, that was nothing more than a tag they hung off his shirt: I’m a journalist, see the tag?! So far as I could tell, he did precious little journalism, and certainly didn’t put himself out to do so.

And so this is another movie that reaches its potential, that potential sadly defined by a script with superficial attraction, but, in the end, fairly hollow.

From WaPo today:

I’m not sure why I seem to have dwarf lilies, but there you go.

Here’s a hollyhock with a very pale yellow bloom.

And here I think the ambition got the better of the camera.

National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien is outraged at the leak that brought the news – or at least rumors – that Russia’s intelligence service had placed bounties on allied troops in Afghanistan:

“To those government officials who betray the trust of the people of the United States by leaking classified information, your actions endanger our national security. No matter the motivation, there is never a justification for such conduct.” [The Hill – I’ve not been able to actually find a written statement from whitehouse.gov, but a number of reputable sources are reporting it.]

Of course there are valid excuses, Mr. O’Brien, and they fall into two categories:

1. Normal lines of communications have been corrupted. If communications are blocked or subverted, any good spy operative (nudge nudge) knows that extraordinary means must then be taken to communicate with those who need to know the information the operative has ferreted out.
2. The people responsible have been corrupted or are fatally incompetent. In the case of corruption at the highest levels, extraordinary means must be sought and found by the personnel in order to replace those who are damaging the country’s future prospects.

I suspect that Mr. O’Brien is sweating as former federal prosecutor Daniel Goldman’s return volley puts President Trump, and perhaps the National Security Advisor himself, squarely in, well, both categories:

The consequences of attacking the Ukraine whistleblower: concerned officials go to the media instead of proper channels. When you take away the proper route through vindictive retribution, you cannot then complain about leaks. https://t.co/gIj5sWTfPq

— Daniel Goldman (@danielsgoldman) June 30, 2020

I know that I can be a little obsessive about precision, but often precision matters. Just ask anyone associated with detonating a nuclear bomb. In this case, O’Brien, by glossing over key details, is attempting to obscure the fact that the government has become increasingly dysfunctional. He’s attempting to cast those doing the leaking as irresponsibly putting the nation’s future at risk, when it’s rather clear that without those leaks, the future is deeply at risk. Indeed, it appears the future of several of our troops, our fellow citizens, has been snuffed out.

I wouldn’t pay any attention to this dude, if I had only this behavior to go on. However, he does have a career in the government in the Bush and Obama Administrations, although not in an intelligence capacity, as well as working on the Romney campaign.

At least, right now it is. Trey Herr, Nathaniel Kim, and Bruce Schneier are concerned about the lack of security standards when it comes to routers and the Internet of Things (IoT), the idea that damn well everything really ought to be on the Internet because, well, just because.

The “internet of things” (IoT) has been insecure since the first connected refrigerator woke up and asked for more milk. But while having your fridge hacked seems at best amusing and at worst inconvenient, the nightmare scenario is a matter of national security. Imagine hundreds of thousands of smart refrigerators, all with the same default password, hacked to direct a flood of web traffic against key internet servers, paralyzing them. Swap smart fridges for security cameras and DVD players, and you have the Dyn cyberattack of 2016. [Lawfare]

I personally prefer the story of the data breach at a Las Vegas hotel where the hackers used an insecure thermostat to get at the data. But to each their own.

At the heart of most home networks, and many industrial ones, is the humble wireless router. The security of these popular hubs is a prominent concern because they form the core of IoT networks. Against the steady drumbeat of major security flaws disclosed in the code running these devices—including several in just the past month—researchers have seen little progress in router security over the past 15 years. Serious vulnerabilities in home Wi-Fi routers can open the door for attackers to gain access to local networks and other connected systems. As the U.S. faces a surge of attacks exploiting the widespread uncertainty and confusion wrought by the coronavirus pandemic, these concerns have become all the more urgent.

In fact, the problem is so bad that I would give serious consideration to somehow not permitting insecure routers to connect to the Internet, although I’m at a loss as to how to accomplish that. In a sense, we need a complete reset or replacement of all the hardware that is typically vulnerable at the network level.

But Herr, et al, are thinking institutionally:

In a new paper, we propose to leverage these supply chains as part of the solution. Selling to U.S. consumers generally requires that IoT manufacturers sell through a U.S. subsidiary or, more commonly, a domestic distributor like Best Buy or Amazon. The Federal Trade Commission can apply regulatory pressure to this distributor to sell only products that meet the requirements of a security framework developed by U.S. cybersecurity agencies. That would put pressure on manufacturers to make sure their products are compliant with the standards set out in this security framework, including pressuring their component vendors and original device manufacturers to make sure they supply parts that meet the recognized security framework.

I’ll decline to criticize their proposal, although it sounds likely to succeed.

But what piques me is that we have to worry about these things at all. A generation ago these were not the concerns of your average citizen; hell, I’m old enough to remember when computer viruses were the new, theoretical thing on the horizon – and the shock of the night, sitting in a Perkin’s, and hearing a family two tables over discussing the potential problems of a virus impacting their little IBM PC.

For today, one of the things we do when evaluating a potential new purchase is to ask whether there are potential security holes in the product, and whether or not that risk is justified by the positives the product brings to our house. For example, we’ve given thought to replacing our TV with an LG OLED TV, but because it appears to only come with one of the commercial digital assistants built in, which means a microphone that is not under our physical control, we’ve delayed that purchase.

Or, for a hypothetical, why the hell does your refrigerator need to be on the Internet, folks?

Transduction:

Transduction is the process by which foreign DNA is introduced into a cell by a virus or viral vector. An example is the viral transfer of DNA from one bacterium to another and hence an example of horizontal gene transfer. Transduction does not require physical contact between the cell donating the DNA and the cell receiving the DNA (which occurs in conjugation), and it is DNase resistant (transformation is susceptible to DNase). Transduction is a common tool used by molecular biologists to stably introduce a foreign gene into a host cell’s genome (both bacterial and mammalian cells). [Wikipedia]

Noted in “This coronavirus mutation has taken over the world. Scientists are trying to understand why,” Sarah Kaplan and Joel Achenbach, WaPo:

Neville Sanjana, a geneticist at the New York Genome Center and New York University, was trying to figure out which genes enable SARS-CoV-2 to infiltrate human cells. But in experiments based on a gene sequence taken from an early case of the virus in Wuhan, he struggled to get that form of the virus to infect cells. Then the team switched to a model virus based on the G variant.

“We were shocked,” Sanjana said. “Voilà! It was just this huge increase in viral transduction.” They repeated the experiment in many types of cells, and every time the variant was many times more infectious.

A few more pictures of portulaca, just to be annoying.

Guess what pops up in search engine searches. Just guess.

They do make me a bit vertiginous, though.

Paul Fidalgo of the Center For Inquiry, a free-thinkers organization, has begun to document and, er, ridicule the coming anti-vaxxer hysteria:

Anthony Fauci says we’re probably not going to achieve herd immunity in the U.S. even if we get a vaccine because too many people will refuse to take it. CNN reports:

“The best we’ve ever done is measles, which is 97 to 98 percent effective,” said Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “That would be wonderful if we get there. I don’t think we will. I would settle for [a] 70, 75% effective vaccine.” …

… In an interview Friday, CNN asked Fauci whether a vaccine with 70% to 75% efficacy taken by only two-thirds of the population would provide herd immunity to the coronavirus.

“No — unlikely,” he answered.

Case in point, anti-vaxxers in California who are, of course, anti-mask, as reported by Hannah Wiley at the Sacramento Bee:

At every stage of the pandemic, California’s anti-vaccine activists have foreshadowed what their fight against a future vaccine to prevent COVID-19 could look like.

“If we can’t win the mandatory mask argument, we won’t win the mandatory COVID-19 vaccination argument,” Larry Cook, founder of the Los Angeles-based group Stop Mandatory Vaccination, wrote in a June 21 tweet. “They are 100% connected.”

At this juncture, I must stop and say that this Mr. Cook, whoever he may be, reminds me of a character in Inferno. No, not Dante Aligheri‘s, but the Niven & Pournelle rendition. At some point, the characters making their way through the rings of Hell run across a dude riding a stationary bike; when he slowed, he was enveloped in thick clouds of smoke, so he was forced to ride, and ride hard, in order to breath. After a bit of conversation in which he explains he was an environmentalist, one of the members of the party spies a briefcase on the bike, opens it up, and reads a letter inside, which is the plaint of the rider’s former organization’s scientific advisor, informing him that, yes, nuclear power is safe, and what does he think he’s doing, anyways?

At this point, the guy yells, But I was in charge! Or something like. I’m too lazy to go look it up. One has to wonder if these anti-vaxxer leaders are sincere, or just on ego-trips.

Speaking of the anti-vaxxers, Derek Lowe at American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has his own thoughts on the matter:

As the prospect of these become more real in the public mind, I’m noticing more and more anti-vaccine takes, from a variety of directions. First, there are the more traditional anti-vaccine activists, who most certainly haven’t gone away. This is the vaccines-harm-our-children faction, the group that’s been associated with (unfounded, unfounded, unfounded) concerns about autism. But it’s worth remembering that they were around long before the Wakefield autism scare, and that even though many of these people are still pushing that (unfounded!) connection, they could drop it tomorrow and still be anti-vaccination. I well recall being ranted at on USENET in 1993 about how vaccines were destroying our children’s immune systems, and this point of view is a lot older still than that – there’s a C. M. Kornbluth science fiction story from the 1950s that has an argumentative crank in a bar going on about how modern medicine is ruining the children, not one of them is healthy like they used to be, etc. At any rate, I certainly did not expect this bunch to be in favor of a coronavirus vaccine, and they are not letting me down.

We have a newer group, though, who combine dislike and fear of vaccines with a dislike and fear of Bill Gates (and the WHO, and the Powers That Be in general). As I mentioned the other day, there’s a strong overlap here with anti-mask sentiments, often phrased in the form of loud statements about personal liberty and pledges never to take the “Gates vaccine”. From there, it branches out into various crazy tributaries: some of these folks are sticking with the good ol’ poisons-in-the-vaccines line, but others seem to be convinced that the coronavirus vaccine will feature “nanochips” of some sort (“I refuse to be ‘chipped’ like someone’s pet!“) which will. . .well, depending which lunatic you listen to, they will track everyone (need I add that the 5G tower conspiracy people are well represented in this bunch), or somehow control their behavior, or (5G towers again) be used to target and kill them if they “get out of line”. There is a long, long history of pathological paranoid ideation about radio waves, TV broadcasts, and wireless transmission in general, and the 5G people are just the latest version. It was too much to expect this not to end up in the blender with the vaccines and the coronavirus. The list of ways in which all of this is nonsense is a long one, but the sorts of people who really believe this stuff are impervious to any such attempts at persuasion.

They remind me of trolls, or, more distantly, the ruggies (rugrats, people of no ethical or moral persuasion) of the BBS (an early form of social media) days. They’re looking for attention as well as for control in their lives.

It’s painful knowing they exist, and they often hide in religious exceptions in order to avoid doing their part of the social good. Will this continue to be permitted if & when a coronavirus vaccine is invented? I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

Chief Justice Roberts threatens to become the social right’s boogeyman as he continues to quash conservative hopes this morning, being the swing vote to the pro-choice wing of SCOTUS in June Medical Service LLC v. Russo, aka the Louisiana abortion case. Why? From his concurring opinion:

The legal doctrine of stare decisis requires us, absent special circumstances, to treat like cases [such as Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt] alike. The Louisiana law imposes a burden on access to abortion just as severe as that imposed by the Texas law, for the same reasons. Therefore Louisiana’s law cannot stand under our precedents.

He is at pains to remind readers that, in his opinion, Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt was improperly decided, but by embracing stare decisis, the principle that previous decisions should not be overturned willy nilly, he is defending the Federal Judiciary from charges of politicization. He also manages to make the balance of the conservative wing of the Court look, well, frivolous.

It’s an exaggeration, perhaps, but it seems that Roberts is becoming the Biden of the judiciary: a reminder and an invitation of a more sane time, when tradition mattered and the United States was the admired leader of the free world, and not the pitied, failing example of democratic foolishness. This isn’t to say I agree with Roberts on everything: I am pro-choice while Roberts is not, and Roberts led the way, prior to his joining the Court, on the execrable matter of private justice.  But there is something to be said for someone who believes prior decisions really do matter – and that politicizing the Court, as apparently newcomers Kavanaugh and Gorsuch, as well as the more elderly Alito and Thomas, are indulging, is simply not acceptable.

Ever since I read of Christopher Columbus’ barbaric practices with respect to the native peoples he encountered after “discovering” North America, I’ve been repulsed by him. My Arts Editor and I once wrote a novel in which an American Indian has subtly incorporated the word SUBMULOC, “Columbus” spell backwards, into his garage as a way to call on his Gods to expel the European invaders.

But is there anyone whose countenance might be worth putting up on all those empty plinths, maybe even replace the name of that town in Ohio? My cousin Scott Chamberlain, a former Latin American historian, makes the case for another European. All the links below are mine, not Scott’s:

From Wikipedia:
Fray Bartolomé de las Casas depicted as Savior of the Indians in a later painting by Felix Parra

Given the problematic nature of Columbus’s legacy, let me suggest that we remove him from the pantheon of cultural heroes, and replace  him with a different figure from the Age of Exploration… a man who moved in the same circles as Columbus and experienced many of the same things as his contemporary did, and yet took a very different path. Let us consider life and times of Bartolomé de las Casas. …

A former encomendero (holder of an ENCOMIENDA) who after experiencing the plight of the native peoples under Spanish rule in the early sixteenth century, took the vows of a DOMINICAN friar and became an energetic champion of native rights on both sides of the Atlantic.

Las Casas remains one of the most controversial figures in Latin American history. His attempts to convert and protect the indigenous people of the Americas earned him the adulation of missionaries and several key figures in the Catholic Church. Religious and secular leaders in England, France, and the Netherlands argued that he was a courageous figure for standing up to the corrupt, destructive actions of his fellow Spaniards, and his works were widely read in these countries.

In Spain itself, however, he faced a more mixed reaction—many Spaniards felt that he was unpatriotic, soiling the reputation of national heroes. His later writings seemed to undermine the legitimacy of the conquest, causing Las Casas to lose favor with the royal government. Many of the conquistadors and their families felt personally attacked by his writings and moved to have them denounced at court. One sixteenth-century polemic against Las Casas bore the revealing title: Against the Premature, Scandalous, and Heretical Assertions which Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas Has Made in His Book About the Conquest of the Indies, Which He Has Had Printed Without the Permission of the Authorities. The controversy over his life and writings has continued through the twentieth century, where Spanish historians called him “mentally ill” (1927), “a pigheaded anarchist” (1930), a “leveler possessed by the Devil” (1946), and “a pathological liar” (1963). Those who doubt the veracity of his works have argued that he was creating a “BLACK LEGEND” about Spain’s actions in the New World, while his supporters have claimed that he is perhaps the only reliable figure of the conquest era.

When angry epithets are flung at someone by nationalists in that quantity, he’s definitely off to a good start. He had some disastrous misfires, but after becoming a Dominican monk, he managed to secure some land and convince local tribes to convert.

Scott tells the story far better than I, though. Go read it. I’m not sure any European of the era should be honored with monuments, but perhaps Bartolomé de las Casas would be the best candidate, if we need any.

Now if they were just a bit taller. 6 inches isn’t really enough.

A dread flying eye, complete with nerves hanging below, is on the loose! Only the giant, dancing robot can defeat it!

Voyage Into Space (1970), a collage of four episodes from the Japanese TV series Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot, in which a little boy joins a secret organization defending Earth from invaders by turning their own gigantic robot against them, is awful. Awful awful awful. Name a facet, such as special effects or dialog, and it was wretched.

And bad. Even the opposing monsters were bad.

It took a couple of months to get through it.

Don’t you do that, too.

In response to calls to ‘defund’ the MPD (Minneapolis Police Department) there’s been all sorts of reactions, from Are you nuts! to It’s about time!

But it might help if we knew what police generally do and how they spend their time. Jerry Ratcliffe has illustrated this for the Philadelphia Police:

1. Policing is overwhelmingly a social service

Graph no. 1. This is from the second edition of my book “Intelligence-Led Policing“. The area of each box represents the volume of incidents in 2015 in the City of Philadelphia (about 1.5m in total). These incidents can come from verified calls for service from the public (something really took place as confirmed by a police officer), or from officer-initiated events (such as drug incidents).

What is clear from the graphic is that violent crime plays such a small part in the day-to-day demands on police departments, even in Philadelphia, one of the more troubled cities in the U.S. While the media frets over homicide, it can be seen in the lower right as one of the least noticeable boxes in the graph. The majority of the police department’s workload is the day-to-day minutiae of life in a big city.

WaPo’s Philip Bump remarks:

Relatively little of what’s shown necessarily demands the presence of an armed individual.

But can this be known prior to sending someone to check the call?

Bump also make available a similar chart for New Orleans, 2019:

It’s interesting to see how police are called to many incidents that don’t warrant an armed person. And even more interesting, contra-Trump and his claims about crime going up and up and up, is this chart, again from Bump’s article:

Of course, it’d be an error to interpret this chart as showing independent variables, because it’s not hard to make the assertion that more spent on police results in less crime. I’m not a crime researcher, so I don’t know how much evidence there is for this assertion, vs how much for the alternate interpretation, which is that we’re wasting money on funding the police when crime is going down.

I’ll take just a moment to remind my reader of my personal interpretive mechanism of applying bell curves where it appears appropriate. That is, many or even most situations involving the health of humans and/or human society will, I believe, reflect a bell curve. For example, plot the intake of H₂O (water) against the health of an individual. None leads to death, which we’ll arbitrarily label a poor outcome, but water intoxication, brought on by the intake of too much water, also leads to death. Between these two paths, though, the individual’s health may be measured as more or less good – thus, a bell curve.

So how do we determine the end points of the bell curve that applies, I believe, to the question of the funding of police? That’s in the domain of elected officials, and I’d hope that they’d see a graph such as the above and cogitate on whether or not the police truly need more resources, like, say MPD’s request for more officers, three years prior to the George Floyd homicide:

The Minneapolis police chief wants to add some 400 new patrol officers to the force by the year 2025.

Chief Medaria Arradondo told the City Council’s Public Safety and Emergency Management Committee Wednesday that the current number of about 600 patrol officers cannot keep up with demands for service.

“And because our staffing needs have not been properly addressed for many years, it has resulted in our current MPD resources being strained to capacity, and quite frankly we are hemorrhaging,” he said. “I am not blaming this Council or even previous police administrations. The MPD funding model has been broken, quite frankly, for decades.”

Arradondo will ask for 30 new positions in the upcoming budget cycle. A department spokesperson said although the chief has set the target for 400 more patrol officers, it’s a long-term goal and may change. [Minnesota Public Radio]

I believe I remember a year or two ago Mayor Frey suggesting that four new positions might be added.

Minneapolis has apparently been working on the problem of overly burdened police since at least last year:

The city of Minneapolis should consider expanding the roles of counselors, traffic officers and community service patrols in certain low-risk 911 calls, according to a group tasked with finding alternatives to police involvement in some emergency responses.

The city’s 911/Police Department Workgroup, made up of city officials and community members, presented its findings at this week’s meeting of the Public Safety and Emergency Management Committee, which accepted the recommendations without saying how it planned to proceed. Some in the coalition asked for more time to study other options.

The group made several recommendations this week. One was to explore a crisis intervention team developed in Eugene, Ore., that pairs paramedics with counselors on certain mental health calls.

Other recommendations included having community service officers, who are unarmed, respond to low-risk traffic calls and other urgent, but nonemergency situations; directing theft reports to 311 or the department’s website; and developing a nonemergency mental health help line. [StarTribune]

So it appears the City has been investigating how to focus the police on dangerous situations and put different experts on other problems. I wish I could have found similar reports for Minneapolis as those cited above for Philadelphia and New Orleans, but I’m inclined to believe they’d be similar.

I present this data not in support of any particular conclusion, but simply as information my reader might not have run across prior to this. Do with it what you will.

Andrew Sullivan dares to voice public optimism in the second entry of his weekly tripartite diary:

The dream is that a clear and decisive defeat for the GOP in November can help shift the narrative set in 2016 so that history records Trump and his enablers as an outlier in corruption, incompetence, and insanity and we are able to cauterize this hideously illiberal period in American history. That was my hope in the first six months of this nightmare, until I began to despair at the resilience of Trump’s support. Now, suddenly, we have a chance to bring it to fruition.

For America’s sake and the world’s, we need to draw a hard line under this presidency — and we now have an unexpected chance to do exactly that. You can almost taste the prospect of a post-Trump America in the air these days. Let’s keep our focus on this simple task and vote in such numbers that even he cannot dispute his utter rejection by the American people. Know hope.

The trick will be to recognize a President as dangerous as this one had to have supporters and enablers, and they need to be recognized and removed from office as well. I don’t mean the early ones who have since repented, because one of America’s great themes is redemption, and repentance is the first step down that rocky path. But just a few months ago, the Senate had its chance to eject the President from the Oval Office, and slept its way, sometimes literally, through the case presented by the House of Representatives’ case managers. Those Republican Senators, with the notable exception of Senator Romney (R-UT), who voted for conviction, should be ejected from their seats. As an independent, I don’t necessarily think their replacement with what I will call a Reformation Republican is a bad thing, but such persons should be closely examined by voters for their positions, with such thoughts as leaving the United Nations or other honored international organizations considered disqualifying.

Even more importantly, this experiment in amateur-hour, in letting barroom blowhards and adherents of bizarre right-fringe policies take respected positions in government, should be discussed at length in public forums, and questions raised about how to better ensure the suitability of future candidates. I will beat my traditional drums:

• I want to see competency as well as ideology discussed and taken into account.
• I desperately want the public to realize that expertise in one sector of society, such as the CEO of a company, has little relevance to government. Remember Governor Ventura (I-MN)? For all that he displayed the outsized personality he’d created for his pro wrestling career, he took his position seriously, not only during his one term tenure (he did not run for reelection), but prior to the election: he was mayor of Brooklyn Park, MN. Donald Trump? He did nothing more than express opinions and make predictions, almost all of them wrong.
• Any calls for party-line voting for the sake of the party should be dismissed as damaging to the party and the country, for reasons I’ve discussed here.
• Micro-targeting should be disowned by all candidates. It may be un-Constitutional to pass a law against it on First Amendment grounds, but there’s nothing wrong with a voter making it a personal requirement that candidates disown that particular communications strategy. Public political messaging only, please. And we use please merely to be polite.
• Speaking of communications strategies, I desire voters to learn about communications strategies used to manipulate them. From abortion to subtly racist email that use the words socialism and communism and gun control on the right, and a few more on the left^[0], I hope voters will learn that, if you’re breathing heavily by the time you’ve heard or read the message, if you’re roiling with emotion, maybe you should sit back and consider exactly what has been said.
• 

  A -15+ gap in Trump’s approval numbers is hard to ignore.

  Respect each other. Too often, we hear of libtards and woketards and snowflakes and wingnuts. It’s a tradition in American politics to hate on your political opponents, but we also have a tradition of discarding that hate and coming together to realize that no one has a monopoly on good ideas – or just what defines an American, either. This often happens in moments of national distress, and as the Republicans refuse to do more than wheeze about fake pandemics and hail Trump ego-rallies, our distress only deepens. I don’t expect the current Republican leadership to be part of a rapprochement, but I do expect that some of the Republican base, especially the moderates, to take part. We’ve seen the moderate Republicans in Kansas kick out some of the extremists when it came to Kansas getting into trouble over the Laffer Curve religious tenet of Governor Brownback; I think we may be seeing the start of this as a national trend.

• Speaking of that Laffer Curve, get rid of any allegiance to it; it has proven to be a failure, both at the state and national levels. Learn the lesson: taxes can be good when used, competently, for good ends. Incompetence makes taxes bad.

I could go on for a while, but I’ll spare the prescriptions. Sullivan has been fairly dark ever since before Trump was elected, a veritable bellwether. That he’s turning positive on this front, even if he’s dour concerning wokeness (the first part of that same diary), suggests that maybe we’re moving away from the magnetism of far right politics (lower taxes, we don’t need to change, God loves us) and charisma^[1] to a more rational approach, where expertise is appreciated. There’ll always be a few folks who worship the “strong leader” who just talks tough; real strong leaders in democracies know how to engage with their colleagues to craft strong legislation, address injustice, and improve the lot of those who need improving the most.

And that’s what we need now, more than ever.

⁰ For all that I get swamped in Democratic mailings, I read virtually none of it. They seem less willing to use trigger words, but they will evoke certain images: destroying the Post Office, or relatively safe electoral seats being in danger.

¹ Yeah, I’m told Trump is charismatic. I don’t get it. Then again, I’m told Bill Clinton was charismatic and even sexy, back in the day. He made my skin crawl even as I voted for him.

A few days ago we went out and bought some portulaca, and it seems to be surviving so far:

I must admit their resemblance to other succulents that are weeds is a little jarring.

If you put a hole in Mom’s couch reality, it’ll really piss off Mom:

A petawatt laser is a little more complex than the laser pointer with which you torture your kitty.
Osaka University’s Petawatt Lab.
Credit: Phys.org

Under good experimental conditions, the very fabric of space and time are torn asunder, testing quantum electrodynamics to destruction. And a new mirror may be all we need to get there. …

Plasma mirrors were all the rage a few years ago when petawatt lasers were all fresh and new. The idea is actually very simple. A plasma is a gas of conducting particles, with its electrons being very light and easy to move around. When light hits the plasma, the electrons are accelerated back and forth, following the light’s electric field. In doing so, the electrons absorb and re-emit the light in the opposite direction. In other words, the light reflects from the plasma, just like it does from a chrome bumper.

A plasma is basically already as destroyed as a material can be, so the laser beam cannot damage the plasma.

It was initially thought that plasma mirrors could not act as a good focusing element, though. Essentially, it is impossible to get the shape right. But 24 hours of supercomputer time has shown that a plasma mirror might be the right way to go. New developments in model code allowed researchers to simulate a full 3D laser pulse impacting on a surface. Researcher Henri Vincenti from France has taken advantage of these computational developments to adapt this code to open up new ways to increase the intensity of some very bright lasers.

Ripping holes in reality. Don’t politicians do this already?

Yeah, this is from last year. I’ve been holding onto it, hoping for more news – or for part of the Earth to disappear. But neither has happened, so maybe the evil geniuses are behind schedule.

But it’s still a bit mind blow –

The announcement, a few weeks ago, that SCOTUS was up and running remotely no doubt reassured people that all was normal in the highest Court of the land. However, this isn’t quite true, reports Mark Walsh in the ABA Journal. There’s something missing when dissents read from the bench can no longer occur because there’s no shared bench to read from:

It’s true that only a few hundred people in the courtroom get to hear opinion announcements or dissents live. The announcements are recorded, but the court does not post them later the same week the way it does with recordings of oral arguments. Court buffs must wait for months after the end of a particular term, when Oyez.org puts the recordings up on its website and provides unofficial transcripts.

But some journalists and legal analysts listen carefully to the summaries and oral dissents, which can crystallize key points.

“We’re missing out by not being able to hear from the justices,” says Timothy R. Johnson, a professor of political science and law at the University of Minnesota who has studied oral dissents. Bench announcements—whether it’s the majority opinion, an oral dissent or the occasional concurrence summarized from the bench—“are signals to the elected branches and to the larger public,” he says.

A classic example is Justice Ginsburg’s 2007 dissent in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., in which she read from the bench to call on Congress to reverse the majority’s narrow interpretation of the timeliness of claims under federal employment discrimination law. Congress passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act less than two years later.

“A dissent presented orally … garners immediate attention,” Ginsburg said in a 2007 lecture. “It signals that, in the dissenters’ view, the court’s opinion is not just wrong, but grievously misguided.”

Our natural urge to interact, to use drama to emphasize a point, can be lost when the remote version of our institutions discards, accidentally or because it has to, some feature of institutions’ work. It’s something to consider and work hard to retain, even if the current Senate is disinclined to pay attention to the country’s business.

Panpsychism:

Ask “is the universe conscious?”, as we do on this week’s cover, and the brain-jerk answer is “no”. Consciousness is a case of the haves and have nots. Humans clearly have it; a rock, a star or other agglomeration of physical matter, such as the wider cosmos, doesn’t. The venerable philosophical idea of universal sentience, or “panpsychism”, says otherwise when it comes to inanimate things, but it seems to have no more place in modern science than a belief in fairies at the end of the garden.

However, an enquiring mind does well to leave its intuitions at the door. How certain arrangements of matter such as the neuronal circuits in our brains give rise to felt experience, while others don’t, is a “hard problem”. It is difficult to set boundaries on consciousness when we don’t really know what it is. Does an octopus have it? A tree? A bacterium? A sentient robot? [“Pondering the big question of consciousness is a welcome distraction,” Leader, NewScientist (2 May 2020)]

And, yes, I just discovered this is the second time Panpsychism is the Word Of The Day.

I like it. I’m keeping it.

Perhaps not the largest hit to the mall scene, but it’s a bit woeful when one of the world’s largest corporations is pulling out of your mall:

Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) (“Microsoft”) today announced a strategic change in its retail operations, including closing Microsoft Store physical locations. The company’s retail team members will continue to serve customers from Microsoft corporate facilities and remotely providing sales, training, and support. Microsoft will continue to invest in its digital storefronts on Microsoft.com, and stores in Xbox and Windows, reaching more than 1.2 billion people every month in 190 markets. The company will also reimagine spaces that serve all customers, including operating Microsoft Experience Centers in London, NYC, Sydney, and Redmond campus locations.

The concept and team are not gone, just the storefronts.

So that means a hole at the local Mall of America (MoA); I don’t recall if there’s a Microsoft Store at Rosedale, which is a lot smaller than MoA., but I do believe there’s an Apple Store at both locations.

This will put yet more stress on the bricks & mortar sector. Not that it means much in the overall scheme of things, but it does contribute to making real life retail, where people meet, buy, sell, even court and marry, slowly fade from the American scene.

Or will it? While hard core introverts celebrate using Amazon and other online retail services, and others are attracted by the discounts online services can provide, if the squeeze a penny tradition begins to fade, we could see the bricks and mortar comeback.

I have to wonder how much online retail once again serves to drive us apart.