Unsightly Mental Blemishes

Reuters notes an important ruling by SCOTUS:

The justices decided that federal immigration law requires authorities to include all relevant details for a notice to appear for a hearing in one document rather than sending the information across multiple documents. While a technical issue, the ruling could affect hundreds of thousands of immigration cases.

“In this case, the law’s terms ensure that, when the federal government seeks a procedural advantage against an individual, it will at least supply him with a single and reasonably comprehensive statement of the nature of the proceedings against him,” conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in the ruling.

Gorsuch was joined by the court’s three liberal justices as well as conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett.

And this is important because:

Under federal law, immigrants who are not lawful permanent residents may apply to have their deportation canceled if they have been in the United States for at least 10 years. The time counted to reach that threshold ends when the government initiates immigration proceedings with a notice to appear, a limit known as the “stop-time” rule.

In 2013, eight years after he entered the country, police stopped Niz-Chavez for a broken tail light on his vehicle. The federal government followed up with a notice to appear for a deportation hearing.

After the Supreme Court in 2018 found in another case that notices to appear that omitted the time and date of the hearing were deficient, Niz-Chavez cited his faulty notice to argue that the stop-time rule had not been triggered in his case.

And so Niz-Chavez gets past the decade mark. Seemingly trivial rules can have outsized impact in the judicial system.

Ow, this one hurts. By Jennifer Rubin, “Hey, whatever happened to the border crisis?”:

I admit to a certain amount of amusement about this software, new to me, made by Cellebrite, as analyzed and published on Signal:

Cellebrite makes software to automate physically extracting and indexing data from mobile devices. They exist within the grey – where enterprise branding joins together with the larcenous to be called “digital intelligence.” Their customer list has included authoritarian regimes in Belarus, Russia, Venezuela, and China; death squads in Bangladesh; military juntas in Myanmar; and those seeking to abuse and oppress in Turkey, UAE, and elsewhere. A few months ago, they announced that they added Signal support to their software.

Their products have often been linked to the persecution of imprisoned journalists and activists around the world, but less has been written about what their software actually does or how it works.

Wait for it …

Anyone familiar with software security will immediately recognize that the primary task of Cellebrite’s software is to parse “untrusted” data from a wide variety of formats as used by many different apps. That is to say, the data Cellebrite’s software needs to extract and display is ultimately generated and controlled by the apps on the device, not a “trusted” source, so Cellebrite can’t make any assumptions about the “correctness” of the formatted data it is receiving. This is the space in which virtually all security vulnerabilities originate.

Since almost all of Cellebrite’s code exists to parse untrusted input that could be formatted in an unexpected way to exploit memory corruption or other vulnerabilities in the parsing software, one might expect Cellebrite to have been extremely cautious. Looking at both UFED and Physical Analyzer, though, we were surprised to find that very little care seems to have been given to Cellebrite’s own software security. Industry-standard exploit mitigation defenses are missing, and many opportunities for exploitation are present.

As just one example (unrelated to what follows), their software bundles FFmpeg DLLs that were built in 2012 and have not been updated since then. There have been over a hundred security updates in that time, none of which have been applied.

Oh! That’s a burn. It’s beginning to taste like a company that concerns itself with nothing but making money, doesn’t it?

And that’s worth considering. At the highest ethical standard, a company marketing a software package should endeavour to deliver software with no security holes, now shouldn’t it? Oh, sure, given today’s primitive technology, security holes are a given – but the ethical marketers and developers should make the least little effort, right?

But, then, ethical developers shouldn’t be developing software for the “we’ll use it to torture our journalists” market either, wouldn’t you say? People signing on for that work … probably are not all that ethical.

So, in the end, it’s all not much of a surprise. Low class software because doing it properly requires a mindset that would refuse to do it in the first place.

Interesting how that all works out.

WaPo’s Margaret Sullivan profiles Harrisburg, PA’s WITF, a public radio station devoted to news:

The journalists at WITF, an all-news public radio station in Harrisburg, Pa., made a perfectly reasonable decision a few months ago.

They decided they wouldn’t shrug off the damaging lies of election denialism.

They wouldn’t do what too many in Big Journalism have done in recent months: shove into the memory hole the undemocratic efforts by some Republican elected officials to delegitimize or overturn the 2020 presidential election. …

But Harrisburg’s WITF has gone a different route: They want you to remember. …

The deadly culmination of that anti-democratic lie, the Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6, solidified their thinking. In late January, the station — whose newsroom includes six reporters and two editors — posted an explanatory story stating that they would be regularly reminding their audience that some state legislators signed a letter urging Congress to vote against certifying the Pennsylvania election results, and that some members of Congress had voted against certifying the state’s election results for President Biden, despite no evidence to support their election-fraud claims.

While some might argue that this constitutes a journalistically impermissible bias in WITF reporting, I find that position hard to credit: the deliberate actions of conspiring to obstruct the confirmation of President-elect Biden in the face of 60+ failed lawsuits, most of which were little more than obstruction, is not a rumor or opinion, but a fact that should be considered an important part of the next election, especially if the members involved run for reelection. In other words, it’s ongoing news that needs to be considered over the long term.

And this is a direct blow at one of the defects of a democracy, one that the Republicans are depending on, if Erick Erickson is any authority:

Continuing down the path [Democratic strategist James] Carville wants of tying the GOP to the January 6th insurrection may make Democrats feel good, but it won’t actually work because (1) the GOP will control redistricting in most states; (2) voters generally like their own congressman; (3) most of the GOP has plausible deniability on the issue; (4) memories are short; and (5) 2022 will be about Biden and Woke-O Haram, which Carville knows isn’t going away and is regularly now amplified by the media and corporate America to the seething resentment of the American public.

[My bold.]

The seething resentment of the America public should be that their Republic was endangered by the emotional five year olds who were manipulated into an attack on the US Congress on January 6th, and Erickson, I note without surprise but great sadness, acknowledges this happened and then proceeds to assert that the Democrats are still more evil than his own cohorts.

If the Republicans howl foul, tough shit. You talked the talk, now you walk the walk. The only part missing will be the heads down in shame. Kudos to WITF!

For the record, Minnesota Representatives voting not to accept the Presidential election results: Michelle Fischbach (R) and Jim Hagedorn (R). Current National Republican Congressional Committee chairman Tom Emmer (R-MN) did not join his Minnesota colleagues, so color me a little surprised that he’s now chairman of the NRCC. The list of Minnesota Representatives who signed on in support of the ludicrous Texas v Pennsylvania lawsuit is comprised of Hagedorn and Emmer.

In case you were thinking of changing careers to Christian prophet, you should be aware that someone out there thinks you should be meeting a set of standards in order to assume this prestigious role. Here’s their lead-in:

WE BELIEVE that the gifts of the Holy Spirit, including the gift of prophecy and the ministry of the prophet, are essential for the edification of the Body of Christ and the work of the ministry, which is why Scripture exhorts us to earnestly desire spiritual gifts, especially that we may prophesy (see 1 Cor. 14:1, 39). Prophetic ministry is of great importance to the Church and must be encouraged, welcomed, and nurtured.

Or, in other words, We want to be prophets because it’s easy work, so here’s why we’re essential workers.

But they do recognize that the greedy and undisciplined may endanger everyone’s livelihood:

WE RECOGNIZE the unique challenges posed by the internet and social media, as anyone claiming to be a prophet can release a word to the general public without any accountability or even responsibility. While it is not possible to stop the flood of such words online, we urge all believers to check the lives and fruit of those they follow online and also see if they are part of a local church body and have true accountability for their public ministries and personal lives. We also urge prophetic ministers posting unfiltered and untested words purportedly from the Lord to first submit those words to peer leaders for evaluation.

There’s more, but that’s enough. As an agnostic who’s quite dubious about any of the current religions being anywhere close to reality, I find it hard to take this seriously; still, I can see how someone writing this may be in earnest. I don’t want to be too unfair in mocking them, but it’s still important to realize that belief is not proof, and that prophecy, being fundamentally based on private knowledge rather than public knowledge, should be recognized as an unsound basis for communications with the Divine, should it exist. A Divine creature is unconstrained by definition, and thus prophecy is a form of communications completely uncalled for and ultimately damaging, even destructive, of a belief in the Divine.

Prophecy should simply be ignored as untrustworthy.

Drew McCoy, via Friendly Atheist, diagrams successful Protestant church services:

It’s worth noting that the development is not a priori, but rather an example of social evolution. Competing designs of church services have varying levels of success; those designs that are less successful are tweaked or discarded. It’s not surprising that a common sequence of segments is shared across churches.

Codicil:

1. a supplement to a will, containing an addition, explanation, modification, etc., of something in the will.
2. any supplement; appendix. [Dictionary.com]

Noted in “From former Soviet archives, chilling new details of the Cuban missile crisis,” Max Boot, WaPo:

Such close calls spurred Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev into intensive diplomacy to defuse the crisis. Their publicly announced deal was for the Soviets to withdraw their missiles in return for a U.S. pledge not to invade Cuba. But there was a secret codicil: Kennedy agreed to withdraw Jupiter missiles from Turkey that could reach Moscow as quickly as Soviet missiles in Cuba could reach Washington. Interestingly, Plokhy writes, Khrushchev got the idea of asking for the removal of the Jupiters from an article in The Washington Post by columnist Walter Lippmann, who was privy to White House discussions.

Because the Jupiter deal remained secret, Kennedy was widely seen to have ended the crisis with a display of strength. Khrushchev was humiliated and forced out of power two years later. In reality both men deserve credit for making concessions to save humanity.

Put anyone in 21 inch heels and they look tall. Too tall. To tell the truth, her distant cousin is Godzilla.

Angel-a (2005), a French film, follows the travails of Parisian André Moussah, in hock up to his eyeballs to Parisian gangsters of various flavors. We open with André pleading his case to officials of both legal and illegal nature, but all leave his fruit jar empty, and soon he is on one of the famous Parisian bridges over the Seine, crawling over the railing and onto one of the supports, taking the long stare down into the dangerous,  polluted –

But there’ll be a brief interruption of this suicide attempt, as there is a competitor on the next bridge support over, glaring at André for usurping her moment in the burst of a spotlight: Angela. After a brief and acrimonious exchange, she takes the plunge.

With André, one armed and all, directly following her. How he saves her with only one functioning arm, I’ll never know.

Having landed his monstrous fish, she now promises to help him with his fiscal problems, and she does so with gusto: first, advice, and then whoring herself out in such volume and prices as to excite envy – or, perhaps, disgust – from any true professional. But there’s an interesting undercurrent: this is a job, a duty to be performed. It may amuse Angela, and André’s bounty of character defects may add to her complex reaction to her entire situation, but this is a function for her, a reason to exist.

And, as André’s situation improves, Angela becomes less and less satisfied. No past, she claims; no future? How does André figure into Angela’s needs?

How can one love a man with André’s many and manifest faults?

The plot becomes more and more organic, but the dialogue never becomes natural, and that’s a real burden on a story in which the action is the dialogue. It gets worse if you don’t speak French and the print you’re seeing is not dubbed; captions made this a bit of a challenge to thoroughly understand. But it remains intriguing, from the Parisian criminals who become victims, if you will, to André, Angela, and the unseen puppet master orchestrating it all. It may leave you unsatisfied, but boredom is less likely.

A lovely yellow.

The attempted scandal of the week:

Republicans have seized on a recent claim that former Secretary of State John Kerry told Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif about Israeli strikes on Iranian interests in Syria. Zarif made the allegation in leaked audio, a claim which, if true, would undermine the US relationship with Israel.

Though Kerry has flatly denied that any such conversation took place, a group of Republican senators have asked the President to investigate the allegation. A handful of other congressional Republicans are calling for Kerry’s resignation from his current position on the National Security Council if the allegations are confirmed. [CNN/Politics]

This may be a compliment to President Biden by the Iranians, a recognition that the President, despite the recalcitrance of Republican leaders, has indeed proven an effective leader at this early date in his term. How so? By attempting to introduce doubt about the Democrats in the minds of the public.

It’s also an attack on Kerry, a known force in the American foreign policy world, whose expertise and long experience marks him as a target of anyone wishing to introduce confusion and impotence into the American sphere.

And, no doubt, the Iranians recognize the greedy grasping after power of the Republicans, having seen more than enough of that quality in their own political elites.

In the end, I expect this to quietly fade away, as so many supposed Democratic scandals have done of late, being tenuous creatures of their opponents. Time will tell.

The surges are big enough to capsize a continent:

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

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

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

Oh dear. Oh dear.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exaptation:

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

This little guy came out to show off last night.

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

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

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

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

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

No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is all boilerplate that disappears on study.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If they don’t, they deserve to lose.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’ll find out in the future.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chaparral:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So maybe someone will see a solution in this analogy.

John McWhorter on cop-on-black violence:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the disproportion … !

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

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

[Bold mine]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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