Sempiternal:

1. everlasting; eternal. [Dictionary.com]

Reader (and occasional contributor) Chris Johnson noted it in “The Last Hours of El Faro: An excerpt from RUN THE STORM,” George Michelson Foy, Soundings:

The ongoing pulse of engines deep below, the sempiternal tremble of deck and joinery that is the sign, tactile as much as auditory, that El Faro’s heart is beating, her engines driving her and all her people in the direction they’re supposed to go in, begins to falter.

Slows in rhythm.

Fades, at last, to nothing.

Perhaps not quite used properly, at least according to the definition I found.

2022 elections are already hoving – heaving? – into view:

Rep. Jody Hice, a Republican, announced last week that he is running for Georgia secretary of state, the state’s top elections job. His 2022 campaign was immediately endorsed by former President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly launched dishonest attacks against the Republican currently in the post, Brad Raffensperger.

And then Hice went on television and made a series of false claims about the 2020 election.

This was not new behavior. Since November, Hice has been a vocal and frequent purveyor of inaccurate election claims — baselessly saying or insinuating that the results were tainted by mass fraud and that Joe Biden did not legitimately beat Trump in Georgia. [CNN/Politics]

While Raffensperger is well-known as a very conservative Republican, his failure to be corrupted by Trump has marked him for cancellation by the Trump cult. The cult – and obviously Trump – is unforgiving in an arena where forgiveness is much more fruitful than the sword.

This can go two ways.

First, Raffensperger can give up and not run for reelection to the Secretary of State office. He may do that in order to preserve the integrity of the Republican Party. Or he’ll take a skip on the hassle of running against a cultist.

Or he runs. Based on Trump’s immature view of politics, I would expect the primary to become a war of no quarter. Winning, at least for Hice, won’t be sufficient; Raffensperger’s unforgivable failure to become corrupted must be punished by complete political destruction.

And Raffensperger won’t be able to restrain himself in his return attacks. This will turn into the worst sort of internecine war between cousins. And that will have consequences, both within the ranks of independent voters and in the Republican Party itself. As more and more Republicans become disaffected, and as the independents are reminded, time after time, of Hice’s idol’s feet of clay, more and more Republican voters may end up sitting out the general election.

And hand the Secretary of State office to a Democrat.

A friend sent me a link to a blog named z///tbd.org, the blog of an artist who has some interesting passions. Like this one:

Compositing Kowloon Walled City Cross Sections

…
I first saw an image of the cross section of Kowloon Walled City in 2014. It is a wonderful illustration of the infamously dense city within a city that once existed in Hong Kong. The attention to detail is extraordinary, with a dozen birds, hundreds of glowing orange human silhouettes, and the outlines of thousands of household objects filling up the canvas. Each room is unique, every shape is different from the others of its type. The messes of television antennae on the roofs initially appear to be trees, while the plants inside apartments are colored solid green, setting them apart from the other hollow, unfilled objects surrounding them.

The busy city shines in its full 4500×1636 resolution. Every silhouette tells a story. As waking arms stretch over a bottom bunk bed, someone else falls asleep outside on the roof. Behind a wall on which a man carrying a large bag leans, a pair of people sit facing each other across a folding table and a small child climbs up on a counter. It’s not clear whether the man with the bag is aware of the people on the other side or if they are strangers to him.

More here.

[H/T MP]

In case you have some free time on your hands and don’t mind playing with electricity, here’s Cameron Duke in NewScientist (20 March 2021, paywall) on the mystery of electric catfish:

By Stan Shebs, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

The electric catfish can emit up to 300 volts to stun its unsuspecting prey. However, the fish isn’t just immune to its own jolts – it seems to be unable to be shocked at all.

Georg Welzel and Stefan Schuster at University of Bayreuth in Germany explored the degree to which electric catfish (Malapterurus beniensis) are insulated from electric shocks, both their own and those from outside sources.

In one test, in which a goldfish and one of the two electric catfish used in these trials shared a tank, Welzel and Schuster coaxed the catfish into discharging its electricity by gently brushing its tail. In another, they used a commercial electrofishing device to give the entire tank a jolt. In both trials, the goldfish spasmed and contorted its body briefly before recovering, but the catfish was unaffected.

“It was absolutely amazing to see how unexpressed and relaxed electric catfish swam through their tank when being confronted with electric shocks that usually narcotise other fish,” says Welzel.

And as it’s thought that the fish hunts by sensing the electric field of prey, it’s not as if he’s super-calloused or something.

Reverse strike:

Nelson was the county executive of Wisconsin’s Outagamie County in 2017 when the Appleton Coated paper mill was forced into receivership by its creditor PNC Bank—one of several mill shutdowns in the Fox River Valley paper-manufacturing region. Appleton Coated was the economic mainstay of the town of Combined Locks, providing it with 620 high-paying jobs and tax revenue, and its managers insisted it would be profitable after it weathered a rough patch of high wood-pulp prices and depressed markets and introduced new product lines. Nelson recounts that PNC claimed otherwise and that it used provisions in a loan agreement to take control of the mill and auction it to another company that planned to shutter and scrap it. Appleton Coated’s community rallied to its cause: Workers staged a “reverse strike” and kept the mill operating; the United Steelworkers Union local representing them filed an objection to the receivership sale in court and set about finding another buyer that would keep the mill up and running; and Nelson filed his own objection in court, citing the economic damage to the county that would result if the mill closed. A heated legal battle ensued, and the mill won a reprieve thanks to concessions from the union and government aid that Nelson pitched in. As a result, Appleton Coated duly made its way back to profitability in 2018. Over the course of this book, Nelson sets the mill’s story against a panorama of Wisconsin politics and economic issues, examining a rash of similar mill shutdowns and accusing Republican Gov. Scott Walker, who served from 2011 to 2019, and the state legislature’s Republican majority of being indifferent to the plight of the paper industry even as it gave electronics manufacturer FoxConn billions in subsidies for a new factory. [“ONE DAY STRONGER: HOW ONE UNION LOCAL SAVED A MILL AND CHANGED AN INDUSTRY—AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR AMERICAN MANUFACTURING,” THOMAS M. NELSON, Kirkus Reviews]

In other words, continuing to work when instructed to not do so.

Mr. Nelson is an early contender for the Democratic nomination to the 2022 race for the Senate seat in Wisconsin, currently occupied by Senator Ron Johnson (R).

Freddie (not Frederik any longer?) deBoer remarks on the non-conservative media profession and how they appear to have taken a dislike to Substack, currently the home of deBoer, Andrew Sullivan, and a few other writers who appear to not have much patience with the woke:

Substack might fold tomorrow, but someone would else sell independent media; there’s a market. Substack might kick me and the rest of the unclean off of their platforms tomorrow, but other critics of social justice politics would pop up here; there’s a market. Establishment media’s takeover by this strange brand of academic identity politics might grow even more powerful, if that’s even possible, but dissenters will find a place to sell alternative opinion; there’s a market. What there might not be much of a market for anymore is, well, you – college educated, urban, upwardly striving if not economically improving, woke, ironic, and selling that wokeness and that irony as your only product. Because you flooded the market. Everyone in your entire industry is selling the exact same thing, tired sarcastic jokes and bleating righteousness about injustices they don’t suffer under themselves, and it’s not good in basic economic terms if you’re selling the same thing as everyone else. You add that on to structural problems within your business model and your utter subservience to a Silicon Valley that increasingly hates you, well…. I get why you’re mad. And I get that you don’t like me. But I’m not what you’re mad about. Not really.

In the span of a decade or so, essentially all professional media not explicitly branded as conservative has been taken over by a school of politics that emerged from humanities departments at elite universities and began colonizing the college educated through social media. Those politics are obscure, they are confusing, they are socially and culturally extreme, they are expressed in a bizarre vocabulary, they are deeply alienating to many, and they are very unpopular by any definition. The vast majority of the country is not woke, including the vast majority of women and people of color. How could it possibly be healthy for the entire media industry to be captured by any single niche political movement, let alone one that nobody likes? Why does no one in media seem willing to have an honest, uncomfortable conversation about the near-total takeover of their industry by a fringe ideology?

Having been a little frustrated at the lack of definition of being woke, it’s good to see deBoer, a former academician himself – I think – noting that it’s a confusing and obscure ideology.

I even find it comforting that I’m not stupid. Or at least more stupid than usual. Formulating criticisms of the confusing only really succeeds at the visceral level.

But I’m not referencing deBoer in order to try to say something clever, but to get the word out, especially here in the Midwest, that wokeness does appear to be confusing, obscure, and, if it remains that way, dangerous to those who adopt it.

And to note that, possibly, the conundrum for the woke is that if it does stand up and define itself, it may find that most of the country, even in its academic strongholds, withdraw support from it, especially if it shows gaps between itself and the principles of liberal democracy on which this country has been built, violated, repaired, etc – I feel it’s important to note that principles upon which we built have often been violated by the greedy, by theocrats, and narcissists, in order to make clear that a heterogenuous country, racially, philosophically, ideologically, will violate, with serious consequences, those principles.

And that does not condemn those principles. It only condemns the violators.

Violent crime may be up in Minnesota … but not in Baltimore?

Something happened in Baltimore last year. The coronavirus pandemic hit, and State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby announced that the city would no longer prosecute drug possession, prostitution, trespassing, and other minor charges, to keep people out of jail and limit the spread of the deadly virus.

And then crime went down in Baltimore. A lot.

While violent crime and homicides skyrocketed in most other big American cities last year, violent crime in Baltimore dropped 20 percent from last March to this month, property crime decreased 36 percent, and there were 13 fewer homicides compared with the previous year. This happened while 39 percent fewer people entered the city’s criminal justice system in the one-year period, and 20 percent fewer people landed in jail after Mosby’s office dismissed more than 1,400 pending cases and tossed out more than 1,400 warrants for nonviolent crimes.

So on Friday, Mosby made her temporary steps permanent. She announced that Baltimore City will continue to decline prosecution of all drug possession, prostitution, minor traffic and misdemeanor cases, and will partner with a local behavioral health service to aggressively reach out to drug users, sex workers, and people in psychiatric crisis to direct them into treatment rather than the back of a patrol car.

Would this be a universally good idea? I see no reason to think so, actually – but that doesn’t mean it’s a finding that shouldn’t be examined by academics and professionals alike. For example, I’d like to see those responsible for St. Paul and Minneapolis take this result under advisement.

And what did this allow Baltimore to do?

“The era of ‘tough on crime’ prosecutors is over in Baltimore,” Mosby said. “We have to rebuild the community’s trust in the criminal justice system and that’s what we will do, so we can focus on violent crime.” She said the policy shift will enable more prosecutors to be assigned to homicides and other major cases instead of working in misdemeanor court.

My original pointer to this result, TheCriticalMind on The Daily Kos, remarked:

Two benefits of Baltimore’s strategy that should make conservatives happy are one, the savings. And two, it allows the criminal justice system to focus on violent crimes — the crimes that actually hurt people. Americans should know, but it is a fact rarely publicized, that 40% of murders in the US go unsolved. And criminal psychologists know by study — as does any thoughtful person by instinct— that it is not the severity of the punishment that deters the criminal — but the likelihood they will be caught, convicted, and suffer the consequences of their action.

Skipping the gratuitously arrogant remark as does any thoughtful person by instinct, I followed up on this and ran across this National Institute of Justice report, based on an essay by Daniel S. Nagin, which I think can be summarized thusly:

1. The certainty of being caught is a vastly more powerful deterrent than the punishment.
2. Sending an individual convicted of a crime to prison isn’t a very effective way to deter crime.
3. Police deter crime by increasing the perception that criminals will be caught and punished.
4. Increasing the severity of punishment does little to deter crime.
5. There is no proof that the death penalty deters criminals.

I haven’t reviewed the research Nagin works off of, as I haven’t the time nor expertise, but it’s certain interesting, and not congruent with conservative cant on the issue. But given staffing issues in some localities, the Baltimore approach may be well worth investigating and adopting, in various forms, in other cities.

I look forward to hearing results.

Flatliners (1990) is an odd and, ultimately, ineffectual morality tale. Five medical students in New York City, having a fascination with after-death experiences, begin taking turns at dying and being brought back to life.

This doesn’t go well.

Wright finds himself in a sordid incident in which a boy, hiding in the branches of a tree, is stoned by other boys, falls out, and badly injures a dog – and himself. Pulled back from the beyond, Wright begins to be assaulted by parties unknown, and feels deeply troubled.

Hurley, who is engaged to be married, finds himself in a nightmare sequence in which the women he’s slept with, and videotaped while doing so, keep throwing his pickup lines in his face. Shortly after returning from the beyond, his fiancee becomes ex-, when she discovers his collection of tapes.

Labraccio returns to a past in which he may have participated in the humiliation of a young black girl. This leads him to track her down and apologize.

Manus relives the loss of her father to suicide, which she obscurely believes she triggered by intruding on him when he was about to take some illegal drugs. Pulled back, she now keeps seeing her father in shadows. A second flatline experience results in his explanation that his PTSD was the trigger, not herself.

The fifth, Steckle, refrains from flatlining. He says he doesn’t want to be chased by his childhood babysitter, waving a sandwich at him.

The theme is, mostly, be good or you’ll hate your afterlife. Given the dearth of evidence for an afterlife, though, the story lacks any staying power, which is to say that having a discussion of the lessons of the movie is far-fetched. A modern morality tale is a logical sequence of steps, “If you do that then this will happen to you!” But in the afterlife? While the religious zealot may decry this assertion, no one really knows if there is an afterlife – much less what occurs there.

Sure, acting in an honest, respectful manner is a good thing – but this story, at least of the three men, does nothing to honestly affirm that theme.

And Manus’ lesson, whatever it may be, is a discordant note in the chorus. She did nothing wrong, but she imagines she did, whether consciously or unconsciously. If you consider Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, or extended novel if you prefer (and not the Peter Jackson movies, and I’ll thank you not to remind me of them when it comes to fidelity and understanding), every major character is confronted with the question of temptation; their immediate and long-term fates are an exploration of how reactions to temptation ultimately conclude.

Not so here. This discordance lessens the impact of an already dubious premise.

It’s too bad. The film is a professional production otherwise, enjoyable – but ultimately a puff piece working off a dubious premise.

The change in shipping patterns caused by the blockage of the Suez Canal led me to VesselFinder:

Too bad I don’t have a before and after for the southern regions of Africa.

And here’s the Suez Canal closeup:

That isolated yellow blob in the middle is the Ever Given. Going in even closer shows the ship blocking the canal.

And I presume the rest of the ships in the Canal are tugboats or other vessels dedicated to getting the Ever Given out of this mess.

I’ve not known until now. Lyle Denniston, who has been covering SCOTUS for nearly 60 years, explains:

Among the circle of people outside the Supreme Court but closest to it – the lawyers who practice there and the professors who study it – there is much talk and a lot of criticism these days of the problem of what they call the “shadow docket.” That is the Court’s choice, increasing in frequency and in legal consequences, of deciding important controversies without deep study, and without full explanation and sometimes none at all.

Unlike regular rulings, the kind that emerge after thorough vetting and prolonged deliberations, the pronouncements the Court is making more often on that docket are the products of a quickie, once-over-lightly examination that leaves lower courts, attorneys and the American public guessing about what they mean.

Sometimes, of course, the Court is required to act quickly, perhaps in emergencies, but those occasions ought to be rare, and – even when they happen – ought to be clear as to how the Court acted and why. The opaque process of the “shadow docket,” however, is a phenomenon that the Court as a whole does not concede is a problem, even though individual Justices have at times joined in the criticism. There seems to be little prospect now of a change.

So is this a deliberate choice by Chief Justice Roberts as a way to escape scrutiny by Court watchers? Or just a case of being overwhelmed and trying to cover more ground with less effort?

This was particularly disturbing, as it implies who is filing affects the outcome of deliberations, such as they are:

When the Trump Administration came into office, taking bold new legal initiatives, many of which ran into roadblocks in lower courts, government lawyers discovered the value of the “shadow docket.” They soon found that an increasingly conservative majority on the Supreme Court was sympathetic to putting those lower court orders on hold. That meant, of course, that a contested policy could go into effect, with at least implied support from the highest tribunal. That administration far exceeded what any other administration had done with these maneuvers, making routine use of what previously had been unusual.

That Trump Administration lawyers took advantage of the conservative majority’s temperament to overcome lower court rulings, while Biden Administration lawyers probably cannot, and might not even try, smacks of favoritism deeply unworthy of the Court.

The grounding of the Ever Given in the Suez Canal may be an ongoing mess, but I did like this photo from Egypt Today Magazine. It’s nicely composed.

From Not Totally Rad, a medical imaging blog:

Waking Up is Hard to Do
If these 5 Minnesota nurse-anesthetists can pass gas as well as they can sing, I want my next surgery in their hospital.

Remember way back when, when Albert Einstein had predicted that light could be bent by sufficiently massive objects, and observed in conditions such as … a solar eclipse? And a solar eclipse was scheduled to occur a century ago?

Dr. Tony Phillips has the story on Spaceweather.com:

On May 29, 1919, the Moon slid in front of the sun and forever altered our understanding of spacetime. It was “Einstein’s Eclipse.” Using the newly-developed theory of relativity, the young German physicist predicted that the sun’s gravity should bend starlight–an effect which could be seen only during a total eclipse. Some of the greatest astronomers of the age rushed to check his prediction.

And the cherry on top:

More than 100 years later, Petr Horálek (ESO Photo Ambassador, Institute of Physics in Opava) and Miloslav Druckmüller (Brno University of Technology) have just released a stunning restoration of the photo that proved Einstein right:

The stars that were in the position predicted by relativity are down in the lower right, although frankly I have no idea which ones – I suppose any of them prove the point, assuming they have deviated from the position predicted by previous theories by the expected amount.

But I just like the pic. That prominence on the upper right is fantastic.

Or at least I hope that’s what lead to this:

A 10,000-kilometre-long fibre-optic cable owned by Google that is at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean can be used to detect deep-sea seismic activity and ocean waves.

Zhongwen Zhan at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, and his colleagues, including researchers at Google, used traffic data from one of the tech giant’s optical fibres to measure changes in pressure and strain in the cable. Using this data, they could detect earthquakes and ocean waves called swells generated by storms.

Over a nine-month period, the team recorded around 30 ocean storm swell events and around 20 earthquakes over magnitude 5 – strong enough to damage buildings – including the magnitude 7.4 earthquake event near Oaxaca, Mexico, in June 2020. The team had wanted to measure a tsunami, but none occurred during the monitoring. [“Google uses underwater fibre-optic cable to detect earthquakes,” Priti Parikh, NewScientist (6 March 2021)]

This is one of those unplanned science research efforts that I generally find delightful. I can imagine the phone call: Hey! We just realized something really cool …

But I seem to have an impediment named Mayhem.

I had to make do with lunch.

Bolero, but now not how I’ve ever heard it before….

For those of us not up on obscure Nazi-related insults, Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels was Nazi Germany’s #2 man, and in charge of the Propaganda Ministry, which is communications used in a deceitful manner.

Today, which I will cling to as I haven’t yet gone to bed, I learned of a recent tweet by Madison Cawthorn (R-NC), a first-term member of the House of Representatives. CNN/Politics delivers the text of it:

Rep. Madison Cawthorn, a North Carolina Republican who has a history of egregious false claims, posted another one Sunday on Twitter.

Cawthorn was criticizing a new $86.9 million federal contract to house some migrant families in hotel rooms as they await legal proceedings to remove them from the US. (Other migrant families are being swiftly expelled without a court process.)

“The Biden Admin just dropped $86 Million dollars to get hotel rooms for ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS yet we have zero dollars going to our homeless veterans who are at a high risk of suicide. UNACCEPTABLE. UNAMERICAN,” Cawthorn wrote.

The CNN report goes on to fact check Cawthorn’s claim (a resounding false), a counterclaim that the tweet was actually about the single contract and not about the overall Federal response (“huh?”), etc.

But I’m considering how this fits into the overall pattern of conservative governance – or lack thereof. Among many sources, a while back the Washington Examiner reported:

Cawthorn has received criticism among fellow conservatives and liberals alike, who feel he is more focused on media appearances than the business of legislating.

Cawthorn had emailed fellow Republicans on Jan. 19, “I have built my staff around comms rather than legislation,” Time reported Jan. 27.

Cawthorn felt the quote was not properly contextualized but acknowledged, “That is what we said.”

“The problem is, being in the minority, I see little use in devoting the overwhelming majority of my staff to the legislative side, whereas I think it is much more beneficial to be serving the constituents in my district and helping them with their casework,” he said. “I have more staff in the district than most people would have in D.C.”

It sounds reasonable, but I have to wonder. The GOP, to my eye, has been exhibiting a decay of skill in governance even as it has won – and lost – control over the elective branches of government since the turn of the century. Today, the Democrats’ lock on the legislative branch is paper-thin; the removal of a single Democratic Senator would give the Senate back to the Republicans, if that Senator came from a state with a Republican governor and lacked a law calling for a Senator to be replaced by a member of their own party.

But the incompetence exhibited by the Republicans 2001-2007 and 2017-2019 in exercising fiscal discipline during the first period, or even competently writing legislation during the second, is in keeping with a party that is continuing to lean authoritarian.

Cawthorn’s putative reasoning may seem logical, but when he or his staff issue a tweet which is, at best, highly deceptive and seeded with concepts intended to stir up emotions – and if favoring illegal aliens over homeless vets doesn’t stir your emotions, you’re not paying attention – followed by a ridiculous defense, it’s clear that he’s not allocating resources on the basis of honest legislating, even within the framework of getting control of the House back.

This really seems to be about keeping a base stirred up and emotional.

And that, in turn, is not unusual for most political parties – think of the fights over the Kavanaugh and Barrett nominations to SCOTUS and some of the inflammatory rhetoric from the Democrats and beyond them on the far-left. But I find it disturbing that the cited incompetence, in combination with Members of Congress who seem to be dedicated to keeping the base stirred up, such as Senator Johnson (R-WI), Senator Lee (R-UT), Rep Cawthorn, Rep Boebert (R-CO), and Rep Greene (R-GA), suggests that good governance is no longer a priority for the Republicans, even if a number of leading GOP officials expressed apprehension concerning the latter two prior to their election.

Instead of developing skills in governance, even while in the minority, by, say, learning to compromise and working across the aisle, these members seem to be little more than weapons, propaganda vehicles.

This would be congruent with, but not dispositive of, an authoritarian governmental form in which all policy and directive comes from a small coterie at the top of the hierarchy, and everyone else is to shut up and do what they’re told. Arguments can be made that both sides do this, but Democratic activity seems to be far more collaborative and utilizes the skills and ideas of many members.

In contrast, the failed replacement for the ACA was reported to have been written by a handful of Republican senators who even failed to ask their Republican colleagues for assistance, much less the opposition. Ditto the 2017 Tax Reform bill, which passed and did not accomplish its goals. Indeed, the relative inactivity of the Senate when it was run by Senator McConnell (R-KY), outside of the judiciary confirmation work, reportedly generated complaints from his fellow GOP Senators, and suggests someone who is genuinely afraid of trying to pass legislation.

But, in hindsight, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. The toxic team politics tenet that the Republicans have pursued for so long that it’s become part of a political aphorism – Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall into line – would, to my mind, lead to a hierarchical model of governance. Add in Goldwater’s warning concerning religious zealot pastors who see compromise and adversaries as evil, and far-right fringers who have gotten a taste of power and like it, and it turns towards being a deadly poison in a country in which power should be transferred violence-free, rights protected, and wealth fairly distributed – not concentrated disastrously at the top of the food chain.

But where will this lead? I don’t know. I’d like to believe that the American electorate is getting better and better at the entire Web communications thing, that they’ll look at the hijinks of those listed above and their allies and begin to see the sleight of hand.

But I don’t know. I just don’t know. This not-shooting warfare reminds me of Professor Turchin’s theory concerning agrarian demographics, and not in a good way. The January 6th Insurrection could be interpreted as a specimen of the elite internecine  warfare Turchin observes during the disintegrative phase of a secular cycle, as numerous members of Congress were reportedly in danger, regardless of what Senator Johnson has claimed.

Yeah, we’re no longer agrarian – but I don’t think human impulses towards power differ all that much between agrarian and non-agrarian societies.

If you find this believable …

After weeks of near-total diplomatic silence from North Korea following the inauguration of U.S. President Joe Biden, the Hermit Kingdom’s reclusive head of state unexpectedly appeared in this well-to-do Florida town in a whimsical, romantic flourish.

Surprised residents watched as Kim Jong-Un stood just outside former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, clad in a brown trench coat, holding a large boombox radio with a tape deck over his head, loudly blasting Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes.”

… then it’s time to get your sarcasm detector overhauled.

But if it made you laugh, then you may want to chuck a bit of change at Duffel Blog.

“I didn’t know what to make of it,” said longtime resident Monecia Taylor, who saw the ruthless tyrant while on her morning walk. “I wondered what could be making such a ruckus so early in the morning. I almost called the police, but then realized who it was. It was really sweet.”

When passersby asked the murderous family cult leader what he hoped to accomplish, he was silent at first. But after some prodding, he finally opened up.

“We had something special,” said the Butcher of Pyongyang. “I refuse to believe that when Trump said ‘We fell in love,’ that he didn’t mean it.”

Ooops!

In reference to the concerns of Andrew Sullivan regarding the ARP, a reader writes:

Where were these whiners when the GQP sucked the same trillions out of the economy by giving massive tax breaks to the rich, over and over? I lost all my respect of Sullivan long time ago. His 15 minutes are so over.

I must point out that, in the years of reading Sullivan, he’s never expressed any sympathy or kinship with the GOP – not of today, not of the GOP who took us into two wars twenty years ago. None. He has expressed dislike both intellectually and viscerally.

Did he support those wars? Yes – right up until the CIA torture sessions came up. Then he

1. Changed his opinion;
2. Expressed his shame, as he felt he shared responsibility for those shameful torture sessions;
3. Apologized;
4. Changed his advocacy;
5. And, most extraordinarily, self-analyzed in an effort to discover how he had come to a wrong decision in the first place.

That is not something you see often, if at all, in conservative or liberal circles.

In so far as financial matters go, he’s been less interested in those details, at least in what I’ve read. Sullivan is an independent, philosophical conservative who has embraced the ACA, who led the fight for gay marriage, and has been more interested in the philosophy and sociology of political matters on both the left and the right, than budgetary.

Will he be wrong on some matters and right on others? Sure. That’s the nature of the game. But I think I can count on him being honest about being wrong, I can count on him ignoring the rules of being liberal or conservative, much to the frustration of the woke and the far-right, and he has the added benefit of being a good writer.

I sorely wish he wasn’t migrating towards podcasting. Podcasts are far too ephemeral, and I hate digging through accents, since most accents elude me.

Labeled as such, at least:

“Michael Jackson … dances and sings for the Lord!”

Well, if you’re going to differentiate yourself in the prophetic movement, you have to stand out from the madding crowd, and that’s what Johnson is doing.

Just part of the prophetic eco-system, I guess.

[H/T Friendly Atheist]

My Arts Editor and I have noticed a jump in gun-related violence here in Minnesota, but it appears to be nation-wide:

Let’s be honest here: citing raw numbers in a country in which total population grows from year to year is just bad statistics on WaPo’s part. Even more egregriously, not providing this on a per-capita basis strips necessary context^[1]. If I do my math properly, it appears to be roughly 6 deaths per 100,000 people – which masks important details such as how much more impacted are minority and lower income communities than high income communities. How about comparisons with other countries?

And then they don’t actually give the 2019 number. Assholes.

But a jump of roughly 28% in gun deaths is at least worthy of concern. WaPo goes on to note:

Researchers say the pandemic probably fueled the increases in several ways. The spread of the coronavirus hampered anti-crime efforts, and the attendant shutdowns compounded unemployment and stress at a time when schools and other community programs were closed or online. They also note the apparent collapse of public confidence in law enforcement that followed the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Covid-19 and the protests over police brutality also led to a surge of firearm sales. In 2020, people purchased about 23 million guns, a 64 percent increase over 2019 sales, according to a Washington Post analysis of federal data on gun background checks.

And this at a time when, in Minneapolis, the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) appears to be struggling with morale in the wake of the George Floyd riots and a city council that tried, but failed, to “defund” it in the wake of the George Floyd homicide. Officers have retired or gone on disability in the wake of the riots, and they’re not being replaced at a comparable rate. Here’s MPR News:

There are far fewer police officers patrolling the streets of Minneapolis so far this year than city officials anticipated. Members of a City Council committee Thursday approved $6.4 million for the city’s Police Department to hire dozens more officers this year.

Chief Medaria Arradondo told the committee that 105 officers left the department last year, which is more than double the average attrition rate. And so far this year, 155 officers are on leave and are not available for duty.

Ominously:

“This presents operational challenges for me as chief,” said Arradondo, adding that the department is becoming one-dimensional, meaning officers mostly respond to 911 calls instead of doing what he calls proactive policing.

After all, you want to stop crimes before they start. Right now, they seem to be fighting a losing battle. All the while they are also attending to tasks for which they’re ill-suited such as mental illness calls, which would be better handled by trained responders in those areas, much like the CAHOOTS program in Eugene, Oregon.

I have to wonder how many other city police forces are struggling with the same problems.

MEANWHILE … Limbaugh-replacement Erick Erickson is off and running with a tidy little bit of relevant insanity:

Instead of trying to confiscate people’s guns and make it harder to buy them, we should make every one in this country own a gun and know how to use it. Give a federally allocated handgun to every single American. But in order to get the gun, you have to go learn gun safety and how to use it, and when not to use it. Arm every American citizen so that when the shooter goes to the grocery store they know that ten out of ten people in that grocery store are going to have a gun on them. At this point, the left gets hysterical as I bring this up.

I suspect the left begins laughing hysterically. To me, this is the sort of conclusion that comes from bad assumptions. The post is full of them, but I’ll just point out one:

… when the shooter goes to the grocery store they know that ten out of ten people in that grocery store are going to have a gun on them.

Yeah? The assumption here is that the shooter is rationally performing cost/benefit analyses, etc. Are they?

No. Most shooters are young males, and for those of us who follow neurological news, we know that young people’s brains don’t become fully functional until their early twenties at the very best; late twenties is more likely for males. Assuming rationality when most shootings are based impulse or irrational hatreds is insanity writ large.

So the shooting happens nonetheless … those ten armed citizens return fire … from different corners of the store … at whoever happens to be in the direction of the firing … if that can be ascertained …

And the town’s coffin-maker experiences yet another surge of economic activity, just weeks after the town’s gun maker does.

… and the fabric of the town goes to pieces as trust is replaced with guns …

The thing is, I went through a phase of working my way through logic much like Erickson’s (you’ll have to read his post for the full effect) when I was younger. I’m an independent centrist, not a leftist, who used to have a lot of sympathy with the libertarians, so I defended this sort of view myself.

Being a contrarian, though, I eventually dug around at the assumptions of the position and found them to be weak, even crumbling. So that’s why I don’t have a lot of sympathy for Erickson here. His assumptions – or perhaps his appetite for gun manufacturer money, although I assign that a low probability – lead him to awful conclusions.

And he ignores a history in which NRA-endorsed gun control laws didn’t result in horrible slaughters of citizens. He should incorporate that into his thinking.

¹ And then there’s this dude in the same WaPo story:

“More than 100 Americans are killed daily by gun violence,” Ronnie Dunn, a professor of urban studies at Cleveland State University, said, using a figure that includes suicides.

Most people have no idea of the population of the United States, so this guy can be credibly accused by anti-gun control advocates of fear-mongering – thus sabotaging what I presume would be his position in favor of gun control. And my math suggests that’s a result of 365,000 gun violence deaths a year – a number that does not correlate with the presented graph, not even near. Not even subtracting out the estimated suicides. It really wrecks confidence in the WaPo story.

A lovely video of the recent eruptions in Iceland:

Seems like my video went full throttle! More on my YouTube channel pic.twitter.com/RzrRniXxPu

— Bjorn Steinbekk (@BSteinbekk) March 22, 2021

This is the Suez Canal.

An aerial port bow view of the aircraft carrier USS AMERICA (CV 66) during its transit through the canal in 1981. (Wikipedia)

This is the Suez Canal after someone had a bad day.

More here.

(H/T SS)

On Above The Law Tyler Broker makes a suggestion or two that I’d like to believe, but can’t quite:

Not only is this demonization [of non-believers] by cabinet members [of the Trump Administration] sickening (imagine if an attorney general nominee said, at their confirmation hearing no less, that they couldn’t say if Catholics or Protestants could discern “truth” because their faith was wrong), it is demonstrably false. As the decline of religion has occurred, over this same period violence and crime have dropped dramatically, and even on a topic many Christians claim is of their upmost concern there is great news: abortion rates are now at record lows. Yet, there is a disturbing insistence by powerful government officials who claim that nonreligion is a national security threat and a threat to the religious way of life.

In fact, I can’t take either, crime levels or abortion rate, seriously. Why?

Long time readers will recall the studies cited by Kevin Drum in which environmental lead levels correlate with levels of crime, adjusting for lifespans of criminals. I continue to find that more convincing than different policing strategies, societal changes, or, in Broker’s case, the level of religious observance in society.

His abortion argument also suffers from a better correlation, that with education of the populace, particularly when it comes to reproductive matters.

And it’s too bad, because the intolerance of the Trump Administration, emblematic of the evangelical movement and, in particular, its arrogance, as Broker notes, is something any ‘none’ should be aware, and wary, of. That the Trump Administration is gone doesn’t mean SCOTUS has been neutered, nor that the theocratic forces in America have been shamed. Far from it.