Category Archives: Uncategorized

I was gonna say you could tell which way the wind was blowing yesterday …

And then the boss showed up and I had to get back to work!

Peeper was a little grumpy about me leaning on my shovel!

Greg Fallis was trained as a medic by the Army, and learned this:

The 9mm pistol rounds easily penetrated the first [pig] carcass, making a tidy little entry wound. The M1’s heavier .30 caliber rounds made a similar entry wound, but several of the rounds completely penetrated through the front carcass and entered the second [pig carcass]. Most of the M-16’s smaller and lighter .223 rounds failed to penetrated through the first carcass into the second, but they created really big, savage, gaping wounds in that first one. Those few rounds that did completely penetrate the carcass left massive, ragged exit wounds.

This is where ballistics comes into play. Remember, a bullet displaces air as it travels through it. Similarly, a bullet displaces flesh as it travels through it. When you fire a gun, you want a bullet that remains stable as it flies through the air towards the target — a bullet that will go where you aim it. The big difference between all these weapons is their terminal ballistics — what happens after the bullet hits its target.

Both the 9mm and .30 caliber rounds remained stable as they hit — and sometimes passed through — the carcass. They had tremendous penetrative power, displacing a relatively small amount of flesh. In other words, they poked holes in the carcass. The .223 rounds, on the other hand, were stable until they hit the carcass, at which point they became wildly unstable. That instability causes extensive cavitation — displacing a lot more flesh. That cavitation meant organs and blood vessels near the bullet’s path were also damaged. The energy of the bullet was expended IN the body instead of passing THROUGH the body. The result was a much nastier wound.

There’s more to a gun than shooting a bullet. You may survive being hit by a bullet from a pistol or a long rifle – but a hit in the same location by a weapon of war can kill you just because it’s designed to do so.

I was unaware of this facet of the credit card industry, but Andrew Sorkin of The New York Times proposes to take advantage of it in the wake of the Parkland massacre:

Here’s an idea.

What if the finance industry — credit card companies like Visa, Mastercard and American Express; credit card processors like First Data; and banks like JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo — were to effectively set new rules for the sales of guns in America?

Collectively, they have more leverage over the gun industry than any lawmaker. And it wouldn’t be hard for them to take a stand.

PayPal, Square, Stripe and Apple Pay announced years ago that they would not allow their services to be used for the sale of firearms.

“We do not believe permitting the sale of firearms on our platform is consistent with our values or in the best interests of our customers,” a spokesman for Square told me.

The big financial firms don’t even have to go that far.

For example, Visa, which published a 71-page paper in 2016 espousing its “corporate responsibility,” could easily change its terms of service to say that it won’t do business with retailers that sell assault weapons, high-capacity magazines and bump stocks, which make semiautomatic rifles fire faster.

The big credit card companies have already cut off purchases of Bitcoins, although to some extent that feels like simply refusing to have intercourse with the enemy. It’s an interesting approach – as a retailer, I’d be aghast at the thought that one of the primary methods of payments these days would put limits on what could be bought with credit, and yet there is some sense in the issuers of credit putting limits on what may be bought – seeing that some purchases may indicate an imminent failure to pay by the borrower. It’s a legitimate interest. WaPo’s Avi Selk remarks:

Some have also suggested that banks could throttle gun makers from the supply side, by cutting off credit. In the past, that proposal has been a nonstarter. In 2012, Snopes investigated a report that Bank of America was cutting off credit lines to gun manufacturers. A spokeswoman for the bank denied the report, saying it had no policies against doing business with the firearms industry and pointing to a $250 million deal with a gunmaker that month.

Six years later, amid the growing outrage over the Stoneman Douglas massacre, the bank’s rhetoric sounds a bit different.

Axios reported Saturday that Bank of America was “reexamining” its relationship with AR-15 rifle manufacturers that do business with it. “We are joining other companies in our industry to examine what we can do to help end the tragedy of mass shootings,” the bank said in a statement.

This world we’re living in is getting more and more interesting. Companies sporting a conscience? How long can that last?

On D-brief Nathaniel Scharping notes a report that some of the planets orbiting Trappist-1 may be water worlds:

A series of papers out today gives us further insights into the TRAPPIST-1 system discovered in 2016.

The seven planets that make up the system orbit a dim red dwarf star much smaller and cooler than our own Sun. The planets’ orbits are much tighter than in our solar system, and they’re all closer to their home star than Mercury is to the Sun. Three of them are thought to be in the “habitable zone” where liquid water could exist.

Credit: Trappist-1 website

What really sharpens my interest in this report is what goes unmentioned here: red dwarfs, which is the classification of Trappist-1, tend to be very long-lived stars. If these planets came into existence at the same time as their star, and the star is well along in its lifetime, well, that’s a lot of time to exist with one of life’s requirements – water – available in what’s considered the system’s habitable zone. I don’t know how old Trappist-1 might be, although I see Wikipedia’s page on Trappist-1 is estimating 3.8 billion years, while the website dedicated to Trappist-1 says 7.6 ± 2.2 Gyr, which is rather longer.

I thought of being an astronomer as a child, until Dad came home one day and said I’d have to earn a Ph.D. or wash test tubes all day. I didn’t have the math for this sort of thing anyways, but I remain fascinated.

Global Fishing Watch as mentioned in WaPo:

Humans are now fishing at least 55 percent of the world’s oceans — an area four times larger than the area occupied by humanity’s onshore agriculture.

That startling statistic is among the findings of a unique, high-tech collaboration that is providing a massive amount of new data about global fishing operations. The results, published Thursday in the journal Science, offer a powerful glimpse of the problem of overfishing on the hard-to-regulate high seas. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 31.4 percent of global fish stocks were overfished or fished unsustainably, as of 2013, while another 58.1 percent were “fully fished.”

Thursday’s findings relied on data from Global Fishing Watch, a collaboration encompassing Oceana, SkyTruth and Google. Researchers compiled billions of data points from tracking systems that the International Maritime Organization requires for about 70,000 fishing vessels.

Here’s a sample map. I have not deeply explored it.

And we can guess “fully fished” may be overfished, as such labels are often heavily lobbied for by political representatives who are looking at calorie supply problems. And as the population continues to increase, over-fishing will also increase.

Oh, yeah? Who’s your agent?

King Kong, intubated.

Yep. Never thought I’d be typing that sentence. But there he was, post-fall from the World Trade Center (yep, Jessica Lange shows up ever so briefly), hanging out with a tube in his mouth and a cardiologist in attendance in King Kong Lives (1986), as he somehow survives that 1300+ ft fall to the asphalt below – in reality, he should have been splashed by the impact.

And while he slowly wastes away in his storage facility, another Kong is discovered in Borneo, named Lady Kong, and they ship her back to the States so she can provide blood for a transfusion.

Big mistake. King Kong swiftly recovers, breaks out, locates Lady Kong, show his intrepid chivalry through a quick but gentle courtship. Meanwhile, the government is on the hunt and chases him into a river, where they believe he’s drowned – although they never find a corpse. Meanwhile, Lady Kong is captured and begins to pine away for the ape she went ape over.

Never fear, King Kong has been feasting on alligators too dumb to leave the river, and, with the help of the cardiologist and her lover, he fights his way through a regiment of troops to be with his mate and she, of course, gives birth.

I’ve skipped all the cheesiness, but I must admit my calcium levels are far higher than when I started this woofer of a movie. It all starts and ends with the plot, which is ridiculous, and features characters who have no existence outside of the needs of this story. Hackneyed and uninspired, it’s not even fun to poke fun at.

OK, I laughed when eating a human who had been torturing him seemed to give him heartburn. But that’s the only time.

Blech.

On Science Sushi, affiliated with Discover, Christie Wilcox pummels Slate’s Ethan Linck over a claim that backpackers do not need to purify water they find in streams:

While we like to think of ourselves as rational creatures, there’s no doubt that human beings are actually quite awful at assessing risk. So I can understand why Ethan Linck thought to contextualize the risk of drinking from backcountry streams with data. “Life is triage, a constant series of negotiations between risks of varying severity,” he wrote. “And how we talk about those risks matters.”

Yes, it does—which is exactly why his piece in Slate last week was so damaging. It was anything but a careful, scientific evaluation of the risks. Wes Siler over at Outside Magazine already pointed out a myriad of issues with the article, but I want to zero in on the actual data, because Linck claimed to be looking at the matter scientifically. Instead, he cherry-picked sources to argue against doing one of the simplest things you can do to protect yourself from some truly awful diseases when you’re backpacking: treating your water.

She goes on to thrash him over his data, his methods, and pretty much his entire outlook on life. At this point, I’m just glad I’m not into the whole Nature Is Good And Wholesome! movement, as this would jolt me right out of it.

Looks a bit deep out there. Good thing my neighbor likes to run his snowblower, or I’d be shoveling all day.

The abstract for A good life for all within planetary boundaries, O’Neill, Fanning, Lamb, Steinberger, Nature Sustainability:

Humanity faces the challenge of how to achieve a high quality of life for over 7 billion people without destabilizing critical planetary processes. Using indicators designed to measure a ‘safe and just’ development space, we quantify the resource use associated with meeting basic human needs, and compare this to downscaled planetary boundaries for over 150 nations. We find that no country meets basic needs for its citizens at a globally sustainable level of resource use. Physical needs such as nutrition, sanitation, access to electricity and the elimination of extreme poverty could likely be met for all people without transgressing planetary boundaries. However, the universal achievement of more qualitative goals (for example, high life satisfaction) would require a level of resource use that is 2–6 times the sustainable level, based on current relationships. Strategies to improve physical and social provisioning systems, with a focus on sufficiency and equity, have the potential to move nations towards sustainability, but the challenge remains substantial.

I suspect the part about 7 billion people (and still rising) makes this equation impossible to solve – although I hope they do figure it out.

What am I saying? I hope we figure it out. It’s the inclination to wait for other people to figure it out which is part of the problem. Although, honestly, only a small part. Mostly humans just don’t think on the scale of worlds, and we probably never will. Not enough of us.

As hysteria over the Parkland massacre heightens in right wing extremist circles, Kevin Kruse provides a little historical background in a Twitter comment:

When nine black teenagers integrated Central High School in Little Rock, many segregationists insisted they were paid protesters who had been imported from other states.

In a reply, Heather Richardson notes similar behavior during the American Reconstruction period (1865 to 1877).

Not only are they a little nuts, they have virtually no imagination. I suppose this is a reaction to the idea that members of the immediate community are not entirely happy in their roles, a thought repugnant to those who find their positions in society to be more than satisfactory. Rather than admit to imperfections in their creations, they create an imagined external enemy which wishes to crush them, thus saving themselves the hard work of actually reforming society into something more equitable – and the personal cost in wealth and prestige which would inevitably accompany such an endeavour.

That was then, this is now, and I’m not so sure such an analysis necessarily applies, although the meaning of immediate community has certainly changed. Paul Waldman supplies a somewhat different explanation in The Plum Line in connection with the Parkland survivors’ protests:

The idea of the paid actor criticism, like the charge that the students must be using PR agents to book their interviews, is that if you can find some reason that their words aren’t a pure expression of their feelings without any strategic intent behind it, then their testimony is no longer valid and need not be addressed substantively. So either they’re just emotional and naive and therefore need not be listened to, or they’re too savvy and strategic and therefore need not be listened to.

Sounds reasonable enough to me. Anything to avoid the substantive issues facing you, eh? And, you know, everyone is tempted by this sort of behavior. Reforming society – especially when you hold an advantageous position – is unappetizing work. And when your notion of justice supports your position, well, why do the hard work? Just condemn those pricking your conscience and move on.

Otherwise, it’s God Sneeze on me, and that’s disturbing.

And one without the flash, just for fun.

And not from tonight, either, but the previous storm.

According to Lizzie Wade in “How To Survive Climate Change,” an unfortunately offline article in Archaeology (March/April 2018), the Moche were a South American empire in which the leadership depended on their communications and propitiation of the gods

Then climate change came in the form of droughts.

The Moche began to falter. Cities turned away from traditional Moche rituals and architecture, and new ceramic styles sprang up, [archaeologist Michele Koons at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science] says. By the time El Purgatorio [a city located in what is now Peru] was built, around A.D. 700, after about 150 years of climate chaos, the Moche had definitively lost their grip within the southern part of their territory, which had once extended to just north of the Casma Valley. “If you have a government that is built on claiming to have control over what seem to be supernatural events, climate change can lead to real political instability, [Clemson University archaeologist Melissa] Vogel says. People start to say, ‘You’re  not doing your job. You told us you could take care of us.

Vogel thinks the people living in the Casma Valley saw the need to do things differently. “They’re taking their lives back,” she says.^[1]

They were succeeded by the Casma in Peru, who were less interested in the gods.

That really rings a bell for me. A substantial chunk of the United States, in denying that anthropogenic climate change is occurring, has effectively withdrawn from science. Where will they go? Religion, of course.

I wonder how long before a major American city is substantially affected by climate change. Will the deniers apologize? No. I foresee your big ol’ religious revival, instead, where they’ll try to pray away the problem.

And that’ll be a heckuva mess.

¹Typos almost certainly mine.

From WaPo:

The moment he saw the brilliant light captured by his camera, “it all clicked” for Victor Buso: All the times his parents woke him before sunrise to gaze at the stars, all the energy he had poured into constructing an observatory atop his home, all the hours he had spent trying to parse meaning from the dim glow of distant suns.

“In many moments you search and ask yourself, why do I do this?” Buso said via email. This was why: Buso, a self-taught astronomer, had just witnessed the surge of light at the birth of a supernova — something no other human, not even a professional scientist, had seen.

Alone on his rooftop, the star-strewn sky arced above him, the rest of the world sleeping below, Buso began to jump for joy.

His discovery, reported Wednesday in the journal Nature, is a landmark for astronomy. Buso’s images are the first to capture the brief “shock breakout” phase of a supernova, when a wave of energy rolls from a star’s core to its exterior just before the star explodes. Computer models had suggested the existence of this phase, but no one had witnessed it.

Great story, worth reading in full. And it serves as a reminder that science is not an occult occupation, only open to those who skilled in divine prognostications, but is a vocation open to all who study and work hard – and get a little bit lucky. Our protagonist here is not a scientist – he’s a locksmith who built himself an observatory! A devoted amateur, his name goes down in the history books.

I was fascinated to read that some folks who suffer from epilepsy can be trained to think themselves out of the seizures, as NewScientist (10 February 2018, paywall) reports:

SOME people with epilepsy can be trained to boost their mental alertness to avoid having a seizure. The technique may work by strengthening nerve pathways that can damp down overactive parts of the brain.

Epileptic seizures happen when brain cells become too excitable and start firing out of control. This sometimes starts in just a small region – most often one of the temporal lobes, at the side of the head – and then spreads.

Medicines can keep epilepsy under control, but they don’t work in around a third of cases. This has prompted interest in psychological approaches such as yoga or mindfulness training to control or alleviate the condition – not least because it can be exacerbated by stress.

Several studies have suggested that seizures can be reduced by a form of biofeedback training: techniques that give people information about their body, such as their blood pressure, to help them try to control it. But the use of such training in medicine is controversial, with some suspecting it works mainly through a placebo effect.

It’s fascinating, both from a functional perspective and from the placebo-effect perspective – and, for that matter, it deals another blow to the mind-brain dualism theory (is that dead yet?).

Because scans of the brain indicate it changes in response to the training, it suggests that the physical matter of the brain is influenced by how it is used, much as our muscles grow or become flabby depending on whether or not we exercise, and do it properly. This, in turn, suggests such an undeniable link between mind and body to render the entire theory that the two are distinct as so much rubbish.

And the ever mysterious placebo effect, how does it play into this? I’m not sure. One must assume the placebo effect is some change rendered by the brain to the rest of the body, whether palliative or curative, but I don’t think I, or anyone else, has ever really understood just how it works. And now we’re essentially discussing a treatment of the brain, which in turn may be using the attention it is receiving to modify the body, of which the brain is a part. It sounds like a feedback loop in some ways, but just how that might play into this entire scenario, physically and ethically, is not in the least clear to me.

And the right wing extremists are suddenly getting a vivid example of what happens when the arguments of the leaders become ludicrous:

Two major airlines. A cybersecurity firm. Six car rental brands. A home security company. An Omaha bank. Companies have scrambled to cut ties with the National Rifle Association over the past couple of days, and the list continued to grow into the weekend.

Delta Air Lines (DAL) announced Saturday morning that it’s ending discounted rates for NRA members. “We will be requesting that the NRA remove our information from their website,” the company said in a tweet.

United Airlines (UAL) followed a short time later, saying the company will no longer offer discounts on flights to the NRA annual meeting. [CNN]

I think we can predict the communications at the NRA‘s annual meeting – UAL has been taken over by the liberals. Or far, far worse from the NRA leadership. I mean, it’s a bit of an awkward mouthful to say that about a major corporation, but they’ll try.

And this will become a test for the membership of the NRA. It’s helpful to remember that, once upon a time, the NRA was not an extremist organization. It was instrumental in organizing gun classes. This Steven Rosenfeld article on AlterNet is congruent with my memories over my lifetime:

For nearly a century after, its founding in 1871, the National Rifle Association was among America’s foremost pro-gun control organizations. It was not until 1977 when the NRA that Americans know today emerged, after libertarians who equated owning a gun with the epitome of freedom and fomented widespread distrust against government—if not armed insurrection—emerged after staging a hostile leadership coup.

In the years since, an NRA that once encouraged better markmanship and reasonable gun control laws gave way to an advocacy organization and political force that saw more guns as the answer to society’s worst violence, whether arming commercial airline pilots after 9/11 or teachers after the Newtown [massacre], while opposing new restrictions on gun usage.

No doubt the NRA leadership will be gnashing its teeth at the NRA annual meeting. UAL has been taken over by the liberals! This from an NRA leadership that has been scrabbling for traction as its now-traditional bugaboos of a liberal take-away of firearms has gone by the wayside, and they’ve become even more unhinged as they try to … what?

Keep their membership from escaping the far-right echo chamber.

This is the problem for LaPierre, the NRA CEO, and his gang: they have no influence without the NRA membership and its money. Membership figures are not released, last I checked, so it’s unknown whether the membership continues, as a whole, to be shrinking or growing. But from here on the outside, it’s become clear that the NRA has been a speedboat running madly to the right wing, spewing out fear of the liberals and their gun-grabbing ways, as well as criminals.

And this is the test of the membership – are they still willing to stick with 2nd Amendment absolutists who really think their gun rights come from God? You don’t have to be an atheist to realize that LaPierre is desperately trying to remove the entire topic of gun rights and reasonable gun control from the venue of public discourse and into the venue of the Word Of God – and thus set them in stone.

In other words, he hasn’t a leg to stand on, but he doesn’t want to admit to it.

In the echo chamber, all communications with the outside world is carefully labeled as unreliable, and because only the word of the leaders of the echo chamber are to be trusted and funded, the wealth of the flock may be skimmed off from time to time with a predictability quite useful to the NRA leadership. But if the flock starts to leave the echo chamber?

If the flock begins to question the wisdom of absolutism? I’ve discussed this recently, but it bears repeating: The United States is the Land of Limited Rights. You can’t yell Fire! in a theater unless there’s really a fire. Similarly, rights that can impair other rights must also be limited. Go read it.

Since the NRA leadership has demonstrated a fanatical belief in the centrality of the 2nd Amendment to American life, the membership needs to start thinking about just how far they’re willing to stray from the American mainstream for a flawed ideology.

And the corporations cutting ties with the NRA? They’re not organizations tainted by the liberals. They are hard-headed pillars of the community who have come to realize that the NRA has gone off the rails, and they’re making financially-based decisions. Not just to preserve their customers’ loyalty, but to preserve the stability of the very society on which they depend for their very existence. If society becomes a warzone, these companies won’t see profits like they do today – they might not even exist.

The NRA membership shouldn’t be worrying about the Hand of God appearing in the sky, clutching a Glock. They should be looking at all those airliners up there, a reminder that a sane society is thataway.

Time to change the leadership. It’s a bit like changing a diaper. Has to happen or the baby dies in extremely bad ways.

Did your favorite mouse just suffer a stroke and now you think you have to put him down? Maybe not, reports NewScientist (10 February 2018, paywall) – maybe you can repair him with a pair of scissors:

RECOVERY from a stroke is unpredictable and can take months. But blocking off some functions of the brain can help it rewire itself to work around the damage, according to research in mice.

Jin-Moo Lee of Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, and his team have found that when they trim the whiskers of mice, these animals can recover from strokes more quickly, and show a greater improvement.

“It’s the first study to demonstrate that we can make certain parts of the brain more receptive to rewiring,” says Lee. “We have the ability to actually accelerate and improve recovery.”

In their experiment, Lee and his team triggered strokes in the mice in part of their brains responsible for processing sensations felt in their right forepaws. The team then cut the whiskers of half the mice, and kept them short for eight weeks.

They found that mice with trimmed whiskers recovered within five weeks: by this time, the animals were fully using their right forepaw again. The mice with untrimmed whiskers took seven weeks to reach their peak recovery level, and never regained full use of their forepaws.

Wow!

I had not realized that anti-NRA sentiment was rising so fast, as this mail from Color of Change demonstrates:

Chubb, the world’s largest publicly traded property and casualty insurance company has cut ties with the NRA! 

This decision comes one month after Color Of Change partnered with Sybrina Fulton, Mother of Trayvon Martin, and Guns Down to launch our #MurderInsurance campaign demanding Chubb and Lockton Inc. to stop doing business as usual with the NRA’s Carry Guard insurance program. Chubb executives announced their divorce from the NRA in the wake of the tragic high school shooting in Parkland, Florida where 17 children were killed and hundreds more were traumatized.

I suspect it was more than moral outrage, as turning the United States into a virtual war zone would have negative consequences for most insurance companies. Still, kudos to Chubb for sending a message to the NRA – and its own clients.

Michael Veltri discusses the physical fighting skills of President Vladimir Putin in the context of an offer of combat from Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare:

Wittes’s premise is that Putin’s martial arts prowess is largely a matter of propaganda and public relations imaging. As he writes,

Martial arts videos of Putin litter the Internet. So do shirtless images. He tangles with endangered species and supposedly wrestles bears. But for all his displays of the crudest forms of masculinity, Putin only fights people who are in his power, whom he can have arrested, whose lives he can ruin. And I think they’re all taking falls for him. In fact, they’re not really fighting him at all.

Though his Lawfare post is limited in its claims about Putin, Wittes has not always been careful in his descriptions. In at least one social medial post, he called Putin a “fraud”—an idea that then got picked up in the Washington Post in a story about the challenge.

I’ll leave to others the task of evaluating Wittes’s political point about Putin’s use of martial arts for propaganda purposes. For present purposes, let’s focus on gaming out the fight. How would Wittes fair in a fight with Vlad?

Some interesting videos are interspersed, making the point that Putin was once a full-blown KGB agent. Veltri finishes with this:

If I thought Wittes were actually serious, I would urge him—as I do anyone contemplating a fight—to avoid it. I would urge Wittes instead to continue wrestling bears at the National Zoo shirtless from time to time instead.

Does shirtless imply a certain extra dose of manliness?

I thought this was an innovative approach, if a trifle chancy, to identifying ancient animal populations. NewScientist (10 February 2018, paywall) reports:

Art carved into rock by prehistoric people can tell us a lot about the places they lived. Now rock engravings in north-west Saudi Arabia suggest that the region was once home to a host of unexpected animals. …

To find out, Maria Guagnin at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, and her colleagues studied rock art at Jubbah and Shuwaymis, a joint UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The team examined more than 1400 rock engraving panels, some dating back to 8000 BC. The pictures contain around 6600 depictions of wildlife. The team could identify the exact species shown.

Some of the art showed animals that have never been seen in the local archaeological record. For example, antelope called lesser kudu appeared in the engravings, given away by their distinctive spiral horns. Before now, there was little evidence that they ever left Africa.

Of course, this is, in a way, a secondary source – to be viewed with some skepticism by the wise scholar. But I like it! And it suggests that another current-desert was once quite a different landscape.

In case you’re wondering what you can do about the NRA, CNBC has a report that might interest you:

Car rental company Enterprise and First National Bank of Omaha have severed their relationship with the National Rifle Association.

First National Bank of Omaha said Thursdsay it will not renew a contract to issue its NRA-branded Visa credit card.

“Customer feedback has caused us to review our relationship with the NRA,” a bank spokesperson told CNBC. “As a result, First National Bank of Omaha will not renew its contract with the National Rifle Association to issue the NRA Visa Card.”

If you’re aware of an NRA promotional scheme with one of organizations you do business with, complaining about it can bring results. Pick up the phone and call!

Angie Schmitt on StreetsBlog USA laments the mistakes of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority:

Nobody gets thrown in jail for not paying a highway toll or a parking meter. But for some reason people who break transit fare rules are subject to criminal penalties.

In Washington, DC, jumping a turnstile is punishable by a fine of up to $300 and up to 10 days in jail. A bill in the City Council would make these penalties much less severe, treating fare evasion as a civil violation instead of a crime. It has majority support in the council, but WMATA is resisting.

Now the push for decriminalization in DC is gaining momentum, reports Eve Zhurbinskiy at Greater Greater Washington. The Save Our System Coalition — composed of transit unions, the local Black Lives Matter chapter, and other activists — is drawing attention to the use of excessive force and racial profiling by police enforcing transit fares. …

In the end, WMATA isn’t even helping its own bottom line, because obsessing over strict fare enforcement slows down service and repels would-be riders. Transit experts recommend implementing convenient, proof-of-payment fare collection methods that speed up service, with non-punitive inspection systems. Make the fare system work better for riders, and more people will ride — and pay fares.

Smashing your riders’ teeth when they forget their fare cards, on the other hand, isn’t a good way to encourage people to use your service.

Transit systems don’t exist to directly make money. They exist, at least in part^[1], to reduce traffic congestion throughout their service area by reducing the number of cars traversing those roads. While it makes sense to require some sort of payment in order to bring in some revenue, that revenue (and profits) is not the purpose, and to try to find a way to make people value their system enough to care for it and pay for it, coercion isn’t the answer.

My suggestion would be to decriminalize the anti-social behavior, as Angie suggests, and then post prominent signs that say:

Yeccch!

If you see someone cheating your transit system, don’t report them to us. Point at them and start chanting ‘Cheater, Cheater, Parasite, go stick it where the Lampreys bite!’

OK, so perhaps that’s a bit obscure. Public shaming, though, has a long history of efficacy (and fun!), and this would be the gentle way of doing it.

¹Other goals would include reducing highway construction, which brings with it increased ecological benefits.

In the wake of the Parkland massacre the usual arguments from the left, and the usual arguments from the right, but magnified, have continued, with President Trump leading with the suggestion of adding more guns to the fray. I addressed some of this following the heart-breaking Las Vegas massacre in which a man in a tower began shooting into a crowd attending a concert.

But it’s worth exploring Trump’s assertions, because while they might seem somewhat reasonable on first glance, upon reflection they’re really full of holes. Basically, he wants to give guns to some 20% of teachers in each school, and he’s focused our attention on his strawman, some “sicko” “cowardly”. And then they’ll be scared away.

But what about escalation? I’m actually thinking of two kinds here.

First, there’s our gunman. He’s gone out and bought himself body armor. This is going to be a problem for our heroic teachers, because body armor commonly covers the torso, and in gun training your best target area is the torso. Head and hand shots are discouraged.

So do we expect the teachers to also wear body armor while teaching? Really?

But that’s not even a salient question! (It’s an example of grasping the conversation and turning it where I wanted it to go, if only briefly.) Because the typical pistol a teacher will carry cannot breach the body armor.

They’ll need something heavier (this is my second escalation). And so the clamor begins for heavier weapons. Because that’s all the 2nd Amendment absolutists know. Soon we’ll be talking about personal possession of heavier weapons, no matter how SCOTUS has ruled on such mischief before. Schools could become sights of true warfare, small personal tanks waiting for assaults from troubled people who just happen to have the right to buy their own personal tanks.

Or heavily armed drones, for that matter. Is all this acceptable to American parents?

But let’s go back to that phrase I used, “2nd Amendment absolutists.” The key word is absolutist, someone who thinks they have an absolute and unlimited right to own guns. But we’re not a country of absolute rights, because such a country cannot exist. An absolute right of one person must necessarily impair the rights of another, as I’ve discussed before, and in a country where we’re all equal before the law, this cannot exist.

The argument used by the absolutists is that through the presence of more guns, the violence, otherwise known as impairment of rights, will actually lessen. But their arguments are weak and being disproven by reality. While I think Steve Benen’s argument that some people will freeze in a combat situation is not as convincing as other arguments, it’s still worth a look. As I noted after the Las Vegas shooting, the real problem comes in thinking that a gun balances a gun. Well, no. As any trained military tactician will tell you, the element of surprise is far more important. Catch a defender taking a whiz in the loo with his gun leaning against the wall, and all he’s capable of doing is crapping his pants, while your sicko, cowardly gunman shoots him in the nuts.

That’s why the pro-gunners’ arguments are shallow. They don’t understand the nature of the combat they’re going to engender.

Look, no one needs an AR-15 to protect their home. It endangers anyone in the house, along with the neighbors, when you start plugging away at some home invader. If you feel endangered, get a handgun. Or, better yet, start working to improve conditions for the local kids. Figure out how to create jobs so folks who can’t find jobs can have some. Or improve their education.

We don’t need the Land of the Free to become the Land of Continuous Warfare.

Kevin Drum remarks on President Trump’s big skill:

Hossam Dirar of Egypt is considered to be a significant artist, and I thought it interesting that his latest project seems to be, well, going back in time:

“I took European Orientalist artists’ paintings, which I duplicated as black and white photos, and then I painted over them using acrylic paints and inks,” Dirar told Al-Monitor. “I used collage techniques on some of the works.” [AL Monitor]

On his website he has a page dedicated to Le Cairo 1801. Here’s a sample.

A desire to take ownership over the images of the French? Yearning for the Cairo of yestercentury? Just having fun? Check out his other work at the link above. For an overview, see the AL Monitor article, also above.