Sacramento area community musical theater (esp. DMTC in Davis, 2000-2020); Liberal politics; Meteorology; "Breaking Bad," "Better Call Saul," and Albuquerque movie filming locations; New Mexico and California arcana, and general weirdness.
We return to Davis’ Community Park every year for Fourth of July, like salmon. Davis Musical Theatre Company sold cotton candy, popcorn, water and sodas. Last year, it was nuts here, like cotton candy was caviar, or something. It’s breezy (maybe too breezy given the County Fire), but temperatures were as pleasant as they have ever been.
There was just one disturbing element in yesterday's cotton candy adventure at Davis' Community Park: a wisp of a girl, age about eight, who approached and explained that she had no money, and her parents had no money, and could I just give her some cotton candy? We said no, but told her maybe come back later. I saved waste pieces of cotton candy for her, but she never returned. I just hope she's OK.
Afterwards, I was covered in cotton candy. Sticky and gooey!
A couple of months ago, I dawdled on a news story featuring Victoria's Secret advertising, and accidentally clicked on the ad. The algorithms caught wind of my apparent interest in negligees, so for weeks afterwards, whatever web page I went to, there were beautiful models everywhere. Several days ago, I went shopping for security lights, which alerted the algorithms once again, so now all my web pages are a utilitarian gallery of lighting technology, often featuring just the same, single light. I want my models back.
Driving across the Yolo Causeway, looking west through the forest fire smoke at what looks like an immense volcano in the hills (at Yolo Bypass Wildlife Area).
I like this term, schizo-fascism, to describe the challenge of our times:
In a recent talk in Washington, the historian Timothy Snyder observed that Russia’s annual budget for cyberwarfare is less than the price of a single American F-35 jet. Snyder challenged his audience to consider: Which weapon has done more to shape world events?
Snyder is an unusual historian-activist, both a great scholar of the terrible cost of 20th-century totalitarianism and also a passionate champion of endangered democracy in Ukraine and Eastern Europe—and now, the United States. Increasingly, he sees his concerns fusing into one great narrative, as methods of manipulation and deception pioneered inside Russia are deployed against Russia’s chosen targets.
After my friends and I got ill watching Wes Craven's first film "Last House on the Left" at the drive-in theater in 1972, and stormed out - it was the chisel on the front teeth scene - I pledged never to watch another Wes Craven film. And I've kept that pledge. Nevertheless, I decided to watch Wes Craven's 1977 film "The Hills Have Eyes," because it's apparently part of the oral background of "Breaking Bad." The inspiration for the battle between the biker-gang family and the White nuclear family may have come from “The Hills Have Eyes,” which features a pitched battle between the white-bread family from Ohio and the feral family in the desert. Jimmy McGill even mentions “The Hills Have Eyes” in his Bingo rant (“Better Call Saul,” Season 1, episode 10, ‘Marco’).
The film is pretty good - better than expected for what I thought might be just a low-cost Seventies slasher flick.
The making of the film is good too. Ideas for the film came from classical mythology. Better than expected for what I thought might be just a low-cost Seventies slasher flick.
Friday night, I saw the 50th anniversary, 70 mm roadshow film version of Stanley Kubrick's “2001: A Space Odyssey,” and I wondered if there might be any 2001 references buried in "Breaking Bad." Possibly. The monolith in 2001 had physical dimensions of 1:4:9 (representing the squares of the first three prime numbers). The tall sign for Albuquerque's Crossroads Motel in "Breaking Bad" also has a 9:4 aspect ratio. The sign lies on its side, like the Star Gate orbiting Jupiter in 2001.
The critic Rob Ager has noted the monolith represents the film screen itself, "a transitionary doorway in and out of the film narrative." At the Crossroads Motel the doorway might be to the past, to its namesake, London's Crystal Palace of 1851.
The doorway motif reappears several times in "Breaking Bad" - for example, in Georgia O'Keeffe's Doorway painting. Several story lines in "Breaking Bad" may be based on Stephen King's "Night Shift," a collection of horror stories, including 'I Am The Doorway.'
It looks cold, dark and empty, but astronomers have revealed that interstellar space is permeated with a fine mist of grease-like molecules.
The study provides the most precise estimate yet of the amount of “space grease” in the Milky Way, by recreating the carbon-based compounds in the laboratory. The Australian-Turkish team discovered more than expected: 10 billion trillion trillion tonnes of gloop, or enough for 40 trillion trillion trillion packs of butter.
...To tackle the question, Schmidt and colleagues recreated in the laboratory the process by which greasy carbon forms in the outflows of carbon stars. The material was collected and analysed using spectroscopy to work out how strongly it absorbed light of certain wavelengths.
“This allowed us to figure out how much greasy carbon is in the line of sight of various stars,” said Schmidt.
They found that there are about 100 greasy carbon atoms for every million hydrogen atoms, accounting for between a quarter and a half of the available carbon in the Milky Way.
“This space grease is not the kind of thing you’d want to spread on a slice of toast,” said Schmidt. “It’s dirty, likely toxic and only forms in the environment of interstellar space – and our laboratory.”
I went to the Tower Theater Friday night to see the 50th anniversary, 70 mm roadshow film version of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” to a surprisingly large audience of about a hundred people. Matias Bombal (a well-known Sacramento cinephile and Gabriel McAuliffe’s childhood friend), gave introductory, purplish remarks, and recalled those golden years before video conquered all.
Bombal was beyond enthusiastic about the color reproduction (“note the blues!!!!”) Since the projectionist would have to adjust the focus several times during the film, Bombal noted that he wasn’t just playing the film, but “rendering” it before our eyes. Bombal went so far overboard with his remarks it would have required the Coast Guard to reel him back in.
And it brought back memories of the first time I saw a porn movie. About 1973. The projector overheated and the sound sporadically cut in and out. The projectionist cursed and banged repeatedly on the projector, making the sound pop - his own way of ‘rendering’ the film. Ah, the majesty of film!
Nevertheless, Bombal was absolutely right. The blues were spectacular. The film was amazing. Touchstones like advertising logos in space, used originally to make the future seem more-familiar, now work for nostalgic purposes.
Bombal also made me laugh. I hesitated to enter the proper theater. I asked him, “Is 2001 being shown here?” and told him the sign above the door (for Misterrogers ‘Won’t You Be My Neighbor?’) was ambiguous. Referring to 2001, he replied “Was it as ambiguous as the show’s conclusion?”
My dad didn’t understand 2001 when we saw it at the drive-in theater, circa 1971 (I think it was a Stanley Kubrick double bill with “A Clockwork Orange”, the first time I saw fluorescent-colored hair portrayed on film and knew instantly that that was the future of youth). I belonged to the Science Fiction Book Club, and I had already read 2001, so I overexplained it to my dad, and made him hate the film even more.
There are still a couple more screenings left at the Tower. See “2001: A Space Odyssey” rendered as it was meant to be seen! All those blues!
Just realized I had taken a photograph of a hillside used in David Bowie's 1976 film, "The Man Who Fell To Earth." Taken just south of Madrid, New Mexico in October, 2012.
Whiling away under the Yolo Causeway and the adjacent causeway for the Capitol Corridor. Forest fire smoke from Northern California loomed above:
What is it like when the bats under the Yolo Causeway emerge at sunset? I wanted to find out.
I saw very few bats actually emerge, and the ones that did seemed to drop like stones from their cracks. They came in waves, and circled about under the bed of the freeway, their wings making a crackling sound. A wind tunnel of thousands of bats.
The Red Cross is denied access to Trump's Baby Jails. Remember, due to the Geneva Conventions, which the Nazis honored, the Red Cross was able to visit Nazi camps for American POWs in World War II, and that was the only way some Americans were able to make it out alive:
This is eerily reminiscent of Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust. The Red Cross was repeatedly forbidden from touring concentration camps during World War II. Finally, in 1944, they were allowed to inspect the hoax camp, Theresienstadt.
I saw "American Animals" last Friday evening, a true story about four average college students who decided to make a daring art heist. The actual thieves weave in and out of the story too, generally watching sadly from the sidelines as their younger selves pass by on their mission.
The film made me wonder if I could have conspired to steal rare art in college and still maintained my studies. I think the distraction would have been just terrible. How can you focus on calculus when you urgently need to obtain disguises?
In the blizzard of spam I get, I'm tempted by one academic come-on: "3 papers mention Marc Valdez, including one by a highly followed author with 377 followers." Of course, you have to sign up for the premium service to discover who this ethereal person might happen to be.
One of their testimonials announced that their service "was better than Google Scholar." I had never heard of Google Scholar. I haven't looked at a citation index in thirty years. At least Google Scholar is free.
I was amazed when I looked. My Atmospheric Sciences Master's Degree paper has 89 citations, and my three Ph.D. papers have 59, 58, and 45 citations, respectively. I've apparently had more impact than I realized. I'll have to read some of these papers.
Now, if I can get some traction with my "Breaking Bad" books.
The President says he’s signing an executive order to end family separations. ... the President will sign an executive order allowing children to be detained indefinitely with their parents. The problem is that that violates a 1997 consent decree saying that you can’t detain/imprison children for more than 20 days ... It straight up violates that order. ... a court will step in, say you can’t do that and then Trump will announce that the judge is forcing him to keep separating families.
Donald Trump didn’t bring about the end of “family values” conservatism. It was already on the way out. But now that overdramatic political metaphor exists as a very real policy. And it’s hard to imagine that “family values” talking points can survive much longer while those who long ranted that the federal government was seeking to “destroy the family” sit silently as it literally rips families apart.
For Melania to emerge from her customary position on the sidelines to play a critical role in reversing a major policy initiative might seem a perplexing event. But for a historian of the Middle Ages, it is part of an instantly recognizable pattern.
A near-constant in late medieval kingship was the use of the queen as intercessor. Women were conventionally ascribed softer hearts, and subjects were encouraged to appeal to the queen for mercy. The template for this role was the Virgin Mary—the paragon of intercession among medieval Christians—who was believed to sit, enthroned in heaven, at the side of her son Christ, able and willing to make appeals to him on behalf of suffering or desperate devotees. Medieval art and medieval texts customarily liken queens to the Virgin Mary, especially in the role of intercessor.
Immigrant Children Terrified At Ghastly Visage Of La Llorona In Detention Center (link)
Rupert Murdoch, the executive chairman of Fox News, said in a statement at the time, "Charles has been a profound source of personal and intellectual inspiration for all of us at Fox News. His always principled stand on the most important issues of our time has been a guiding star in an often turbulent world, a world that has too many superficial thinkers vulnerable to the ebb and flow of fashion, and a world that, unfortunately, has only one Charles Krauthammer. His words, his ideas, his dignity and his integrity will resonate within our society and within me for many, many years to come."
Trying to dispose of broken plate glass, I learned that no one recycles it: too cheap to make. So, I tried to break the plate glass into smaller, more-manageable pieces by gently tapping it. That went about as well as expected: 10 trillion pieces of glass everywhere. Into the garbage can and off to the landfill tomorrow, provided the scavenging homeless don’t slice themselves into ribbons tonight.
You have to keep the channels separate, and when you run the government, you can't do that:
This is not just sloppiness or indiscipline. The essence of Trumpism is dominance and punishment of those outside the tribal fold. It is probably even wrong to call this a policy of deterrence. It’s a policy of punishment. At the most basic level folks like Miller, Sessions, Trump want to show they are kicking ass at the border, against lawless non-white people. They want to do it and they want to show they are doing it. For them doing it doesn’t matter unless you show it. It’s what a TPM Reader identified as the essence of Trumpism: ‘performative cruelty‘.
...There’s also the matter of channel conflict. Channel separation is a bedrock principle of marketing. You sell the same product to different people at different prices – price discrimination. You sell the same product to different people using different pitches. It all works so long as the channels remain largely separate. Since Trump is more than anything a marketing man the framework of channel conflict is an appropriate way to explain what is happening.
For base Trumpists: family separation for the bad people is simply awesome.
For other pro-Trump Republicans: evil against children may not be okay, but abusing Democrats works. So for them, no defense of family separation as such, but stick it on the Democrats. Blaming the opponents of your policy for policy is perverse, nasty and thus awesome.
For more Middle of the Road Voters: It’s simply not happening. There is no family separation policy. It’s literally not happening at all or if it is happening it’s being forced on us and families were separated under Obama too.
What we’ve seen this weekend is that evil practiced on children, by design, with quotes from senior administration officials floating around saying it’s great was just too much. This created a sort of 10 car pile of contradictory BS answers. It’s awesome. The Democrats made us do it. It’s not happening. And here we are. It is difficult to imagine this policy will survive the week in its current form, given this firestorm. But we should recognize how deeply embedded the need for these actions is in Trumpism. This isn’t a byproduct. Child separation as punishment, on display, was always a feature not a bug.
But there’s no real negotiation going on. Democrats, particularly those from border states, will not support a border wall, and even if they caved, the GOP won’t release the children. The appropriate response is to identify and seize Republican hostages, whether literal or figurative. There are plenty of targets:
President Trump has calculated that he will gain political leverage in congressional negotiations by continuing to enforce a policy he claims to hate — separating immigrant parents from their young children at the southern border, according to White House officials.
On Friday, Trump suggested he would not change the policy unless Democrats agreed to his other immigration demands, which include funding a border wall, tightening the rules for border enforcement and curbing legal entry. He also is intent on pushing members of his party to vote for a compromise measure that would achieve those long-standing priorities.
Trump’s public acknowledgment that he was willing to let the policy continue as he pursued his political goals came as the president once again blamed Democrats for a policy enacted and touted by his own administration.
Going through my books, I came across "The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction."
In September 1904, New York City nuns brought forty Irish orphans to Clifton-Morenci Arizona, to be placed with Catholic families, who were overwhelmingly of Mexican extraction. To the town's Anglos, placing a white child with a Mexican family was tantamount to child abuse. Furious at this "interracial" transgression, they formed a vigilante squad that kidnapped the children and nearly lynched the nuns and the local priest. The Catholic Church sued to get its wards back, but all the courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, ruled in favor of the vigilantes.
Kidnapping children is what racist Anglos do. Circumstances might change, but the basic patterns of history repeat themselves.
I was a little old for Mister Rogers, more my sisters' watching material, so I watched the movie in a spirit of curiosity. There a was a round of applause from the audience at the end.
Preparing to exit the theater, a man asked, "Are you from Pittsburgh?" I said no, and asked why he asked. "Oh, it's because I'm from there, and Fred Rogers is one of the icons of the city, right up there with the Pittsburgh Steelers. See my T-Shirt?" I looked at his T-Shirt of a roller coaster. "See? It features an amusement park that anyone from Pittsburgh will recognize." I grinned and thought his hometown enthusiasm was marvelous!
I have accepted Lisa Masters' challenge to post the covers of seven books I love. I'm tweaking the rules she passed on to me, though. Instead of asking a friend to take up the challenge every time I post a cover, I'll just ask one friend on Day Seven. Or you can just accept the challenge on your own without my prompting. In addition, I'll post a brief explanation of why I like this book.
Day One
"Son of the Morning Star" is a poetic attempt to penetrate the mystery of why Custer failed at the Little Bighorn. In order to do so, Evan Connell runs far afield, delving into many other mysteries of life on the Great Plains in the 19th Century, such as the practice of "counting coup," the inexperience of his troops (a number had barely ever seen a Native American before), and their surprise when they discovered a dying longtime laundress was a man. Just a great work!
Day Two
Of all my professors in college, UNM's Ferenc Szasz was my favorite. He taught American cultural, religious, and intellectual history. It was from him I learned delightful things like: the mindset of the Puritans; Francis Schlatter, the second coming of the Messiah in New Mexico; and the Littlefield allegorical interpretation of the Wizard of Oz.
Szasz was an authority on 19th Century American Protestantism, and nothing made him happier than learning about the teachings of obscure preachers trying to make a go of it in overwhelmingly-Catholic New Mexico.
"The Day the Sun Rose Twice: The Story of the Trinity Site Nuclear Explosion" is based on large amounts of Manhattan Project material declassified in the 1980s, particularly the meteorology (the same batch of material that formed the basis of Peter Sellars opera, "Dr. Atomic"). In Szasz's characteristic way, he focuses on what people in the Manhattan Project believed.
Szasz's wife, Margaret Connell-Szasz, wrote about her husband: "His training was in social and intellectual history, which is almost a nonexistent field now. Because of that, it meant that he was interested in everything in American history - in society, culture, the intellectual world; just common, ordinary, everyday things that included folk history, philosophy, religion, science - you name it." Szasz was about the History of Everything, and I am proud to have studied under him.
Ferenc Szasz gave this lecture in 2009 at Los Alamos. Here is Part 4 of 7, where he introduces some of the geniuses of the Manhattan Project (with a brief sound glitch):
Day Three
Strangely enough, I don't believe I've fully read this book, a memoir by my first ballet instructor and Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo veteran, George Zoritch. That's OK: ballet is about doing anyway. Zoritch came from a generation of expatriate Russian nobility that transformed the world of dance in the 1930s an 40s. What an (opinionated) man! Ballet is the best art, ever!
George Zoritch, in Hollywood:
Day Four
Pekka Hämäläinen's "The Comanche Empire" follows the story of a band of Shoshone who decided not to follow the buffalo north with their compatriots on their newly-obtained horses, but instead to cross into the Colorado Plateau, forge an alliance with the Utes about 1710, and begin raiding the Spaniards of northern New Mexico, who had just returned after the Pueblo Revolt. The Comanches soon became the terror of the Southwest, sweeping aside Spaniards and Apache alike, far into Texas and Mexico. At their height, the Comanches controlled a territory roughly the size of Mexico, but never numbered more than about 50,000. A very odd, nearly-empty horseback empire.
The Comanches could have eliminated the Spaniards, but chose instead to abuse and control them, because they had useful armaments. The Spaniards tried various defenses, which proved weak against the Comanche (but later bore fruit against the Navajo). Certain Governors of New Mexico stood out for their statesmanship under difficult circumstances (CachupÃn & de Anza).
This book is a reminder that politics in the past was even more-miserable and complicated than it is today.
Day Five
Back in the early Seventies, California's schools were the envy of the nation, but as real estate inflation accelerated, so too did property taxes, igniting a rebellion among home owners, particularly those on fixed incomes. Proposition 13's passage heralded the conservative dominance in America we've seen since 1978. Needless to say, the collapse of high-quality California public education followed almost instantaneously. Even though homeowners led the charge, Corporate America profited most from the sharp reduction in property taxes.
When the California Gubernatorial Recall campaign accelerated in the summer of 2003, and 135 people declared their candidacies for Governor (including myself), we all had to quickly assemble platforms on which to run. I ran on Proposition 13 repeal, and based my campaign entirely on this book.
Day Six
I love puzzles. Over the last thirty years, there has been a great deal of progress in puzzling out how the Maya understood the cosmos, what their constellations were, and what they meant to them. "Maya Cosmos," written in 1994, is right on the cusp of understanding, where the authors piece together what they know, accounting for precession over the last two millennia. It's all exceedingly complex. Inscriptions of Mayan cosmic symbols represent sky maps.
The sky was a rich pageant of Creation. For example, on August 13, 690 AD (the inauguration of an important holiday), the Milky Way begins as the Crocodile Tree at sunset, and then transforms into a great canoe, which then sinks underwater as the hours pass by. The Turtle and the Stones of Creation (what we call the belt of Orion) reach the zenith by sunrise.
A number of important stories and legends play out as the sky rotates. By understanding these stories, the reasons why certain days are Mayan holidays can finally be understood and referenced against the sky.
Day Seven
This is day seven; the final day.
Ernest Dimnet (1866-1954) was a French priest, writer and lecturer. In his 1928 book "The Art of Thinking," Dimnet discusses "Preserving One's Thoughts":
"To keep no track of what one learns or thinks is as foolish as to till and seed one's lands with great pains, and when the harvest is ripe turn one's back upon it and think of it no more.
Some people have extraordinarily retentive memories and can do with a minimum of notes, but phenomenal exceptions do not count. Most men who have made a name in literature, politics, or business have found it necessary to have a paper memory and those who have thought it possible to dispense with the drudgery of forming such a one have inevitably someday rued it. For humorists who define memory as the faculty enabling us to forget only emphasize an unfortunate truth. Striking or vivid impressions which we imagine can never be effaced from our consciousness do not survive in it more than a few weeks, sometimes a few days, unless something is done to give them permanence. A busy life teaches even congenital idleness to do that. Anybody whom his fate compels to use his brain actively soon realizes that he cannot afford to lose any of his resources, and he devises some plan for stopping waste. If he is rich enough he buys the assistance of a trained secretary. If not, he reads the books in which the methods of erudition or those of business (they are almost alike) are expounded, or he invents devices of his own. We marvel at the immense knowledge which some writers possess of what used to be called foreign politics but should be called at present the politics of us all. We wonder at the enormousness of the archives they must keep and the difficulty for even them to find their way through that mass of papers. As a matter of fact, folio volumes of coarse paper on which clippings from the newspapers can be glued according to some happy combination of the vertical and the horizontal are all that is necessary. Red ink annotations will provide indication of richer dossiers. The secret is to clip all that seems important at once. Newspapers are historical documents prepared by men and women generally ignorant of, and indifferent to, history. An occurrence of far-reaching consequence may be mentioned in an inconspicuous column and in unemphatic type by so-called specialists who do not realize its importance and will never allude to it again. If the passage is not filed at once its absence may mean the loss of a capital link in the chain of events.
Facts are only the material for thought. Thoughts themselves, that is to say, the illumination produced in our mind by the presence of rich facts, should be preserved even more carefully."
What Dimnet describes above is, in essence, pre-Internet blogging. The habit of blogging preserves information and the annotations one makes generates thought. It is a very good habit to have.
What a disgrace. Despicable, and a grave dishonor to the 50,000 American soldiers who lost their lives in Korea, as well as their families.
North Korean state television aired a 42-minute documentary on Thursday that offered a different view of Kim Jong Un's meeting with President Trump in Singapore.
Notably, the documentary appears to have captured several scenes that international news organizations missed — including one awkward moment when Trump was saluted by a North Korean military leader. The U.S. president then salutes in return.
Though only a brief interaction, it was telling that the salute was included in the documentary, according to Jean H. Lee, a North Korea scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington.
“This is a moment that will be used over and over in North Korea’s propaganda as 'proof' that the American president defers to the North Korean military,” Lee said. “It will be treated as a military victory by the North Koreans.”
BILLUND, DENMARK—Lego has just introduced new and improved interlocking plastic bricks that will instantly kill you when you step on them, sources at the company’s headquarters confirmed Thursday.
The sharper edges in the new design will just immediately put you out of your misery, so you don’t have to roll around on the ground in excruciating pain for minutes on end. Utilizing advanced laser-driven techniques, Lego factories can now hone the edges of the famously sharp and painful bricks to such a fine point that the human nervous system instantly shuts down upon coming into contact with them.
“Everyone with a Facebook these days is an influencer,” she said. “People say, I want to come to the Maldives for 10 days and will do two posts on Instagram to like 2,000 followers. It's people with 600 Facebook friends saying, ‘Hi, I'm an influencer, I want to stay in your hotel for 7 days,’” she said. Others send vague one-line emails, like “I want to collaborate with you,”with no further explanation. “These people are expecting five to seven nights on average, all inclusive. Maldives is not a cheap destination.” She said that only about 10 percent of the requests she receives are worth investigating.
A steam plume first appeared around 10 a.m. Saturday as lava poured into Green Lake in Kapoho, but by 3 p.m. a Hawaii County Fire Department overflight confirmed to the US Geological Survey that the lake had filled with lava and the body of water was no more.
Forecasts are looking good for Hurricane Bud's remnants to hit the Southwest with some welcome rains. Unclear if the rains will move up the Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico, or a little farther west, but either way, there's lots of parched ground ready and waiting.
Most are a little too dubsteppy for me, but Tiesto seems about right. Long track record. A few years ago, I passed by a retirement home, and I was surprised to hear Tiesto booming out from the windows.
When Apodaca first came to the attention of the FBI, he was living in a trailer in Davie, Fla., north of Miami, behind the clubhouse of the”Dirty White Boys Motorcycle Club,” which prosecutors say supports more notorious motorcycle gangs such as the Outlaws.
...The South Florida Sun Sentinel reported that a fellow white supremacist-turned-FBI-informant testified at trial that at the Davie clubhouse, Apodaca had told him “tales of violence,” including about his role in McGuire’s slaying. In response, Apodaca testified that the stories of violence were just bravado, referring to them as “tall tales and legends.”
Regardless, the FBI in Miami was intrigued enough to open up an investigation into Apodaca in May 2016, supposedly to “mitigate any potential threats posed by Apodaca and to determine whether he was engaging in criminal activities.”
The agents didn’t find any evidence that he was.
So in September 2016 they introduced themselves, posing as “affluent violent members of a criminal organization with white supremacy extremist beliefs” in a covert undercover warehouse in Broward County, according to a criminal complaint filed in federal court.
Forecasts of lots of Hurricane Bud moisture entering NM/Arizona this weekend. It'll be interesting to see how much rain might fall, and where. Here's the current idea.
Kolodny’s arguments build off the groundbreaking experiments of Dietrich Stout, an anthropologist at Emory University. A flintknapper himself, Stout has taught hundreds of students how to make Acheulean-era tools, and he’s tracked their brain activity during the learning process. Stout found that his students’ white matter—or the neural connectivity in their brains—increased as they gained competence in flintknapping. His research suggests that producing complex tools spurred an increase in brain size and other aspects of hominin evolution, including—perhaps—the emergence of language.
But language couldn’t just pop out fully formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus. “Every evolutionary process, including the evolution of language, has to be incremental and composed of small steps, each of which independently needs to be beneficial,” Kolodny explains. Teaching, he says, was a crucial part of the process. When hominins like Homo ergaster and Homo erectus taught their close relatives how to make complex tools, they worked their way into an ever more specialized cultural niche, with evolutionary advantage going to those individuals who were not only adept at making and using complex tools, but who were also able—at the same time—to communicate in more and more sophisticated ways.
Depressing, but not surprising statistic: "85 percent of gun-owning parents did not practice safe gun storage and 72 percent believed their young children could differentiate a toy gun from a real gun.":
Children who participate in gun safety programs often ignore what they learned when encountering a real firearm, according to a Rutgers School of Nursing study.
The report, published recently in Health Promotion Practice, reviewed 10 studies on the effectiveness of strategies for teaching gun safety to children ages 4 to 9. The researchers found such programs do not reduce the likelihood that children will handle guns when they are unsupervised, that boys are more likely than girls to ignore gun-safety rules and that few studies exist of gun-safety programs for children beyond the fourth grade.
An Air Force officer who deserted in 1983 and was just rediscovered in California. Strange. Was at Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque, and is now imprisoned not far away, at Travis AFB in Fairfield. Still, I sometimes wonder what it would be like to have an alternate identity. A chance to start over:
Hughes was assigned to temporary duty in the Netherlands, working with NATO to test its new Airborne Warning and Control System, designed to be used for surveillance, command and control, battle space management and communications. He was expected to return to duty at Kirtland on Aug. 1, 1983.
He never showed up.
His car was found at the Albuquerque airport and a search of his home in the 1900 block of Chandelle Loop NE revealed notes of planned activities and books to read upon his return, according to reports.
Hughes was seen in the Albuquerque area withdrawing more than $28,000 from bank accounts, according to the AFOSI news release.
After the Air Force formally declared Hughes a deserter in December 1983, his family said in an Associated Press article printed in the Journal on Jan. 20, 1984, they believed he had been abducted.
A State Department spokeswoman has been ridiculed for citing the D-Day invasion as an example of America’s “very strong relationship” with Germany.
“We have a very strong relationship with the government of Germany,” Heather Nauert said.
“Looking back in the history books, today is the 71st anniversary of the speech that announced the Marshall Plan. Tomorrow is the anniversary of the D-Day invasion. We obviously have a very long history with the government of Germany, and we have a strong relationship with the government of Germany.”
What Happens When a Bad-Tempered, Distractible Doofus Runs an Empire?
One of the many things that Wilhelm was convinced he was brilliant at, despite all evidence to the contrary, was “personal diplomacy,” fixing foreign policy through one-on-one meetings with other European monarchs and statesmen. In fact, Wilhelm could do neither the personal nor the diplomacy, and these meetings rarely went well. The Kaiser viewed other people in instrumental terms, was a compulsive liar, and seemed to have a limited understanding of cause and effect. In 1890, he let lapse a long-standing defensive agreement with Russia—the German Empire’s vast and sometimes threatening eastern neighbor. He judged, wrongly, that Russia was so desperate for German good will that he could keep it dangling. Instead, Russia immediately made an alliance with Germany’s western neighbor and enemy, France. Wilhelm decided he would charm and manipulate Tsar Nicholas II (a “ninny” and a “whimperer,” according to Wilhelm, fit only “to grow turnips”) into abandoning the alliance. In 1897, Nicholas told Wilhelm to get lost; the German-Russian alliance withered.
That’s where Solomon Lartey comes in. The records management analyst has spent hours tediously attempting to piece together pages ripped apart by the commander in chief. Spending his days piecing together the world’s most important government transparency “jigsaw puzzle,” scores the staffer just a little over $65,000 annually.
Sometimes his job is easy. Papers torn in half or quarters make for a simple day in the office. Others, however, “would be torn into pieces so small they looked like confetti.”
While the Republican leader campaigned on the importance of transparency, his administration and cabinet appointees have taken a different approach. For president himself, old habits die hard. His “process” is an “unofficial filing system” in which he rips papers to pieces when he’s finished with them. Sometimes they make it into the trash, others they are strewn about in the Oval Office.
Rather than trying to teach an old dog new tricks, the staff decided simply to clean up after him.
“We got Scotch tape, the clear kind,” Lartey told Politico in an interview. “You found pieces and taped them back together and then you gave it back to the supervisor.”
Papers would then be sent to the National Archives where they would be filed.
“I had a letter from Schumer — he tore it up,” he said. “It was the craziest thing ever. He ripped papers into tiny pieces.”
I don't pay much attention to genetics, but I was really struck by this article. I had learned that the discovery of DNA had proven Darwinian evolution - evolution by natural selection - as correct, and pushed Lamarckian evolution - evolution by inheritance of acquired characteristics - into the realm of fiction.
The role of methylation in affecting gene expression, however, may make evolution more Lamarckian in nature.
It reminds me of back when I was a kid. I took a population of tadpoles and put them in a tub. The remaining mud-puddle population quickly grew legs and hopped away as tiny toads as the mud puddle dried out. The tub population, however, just became fatter tadpoles, developing legs only very late. Somehow their growth was being affected by the availability of water. Pretty amazing stuff!:
As scientists came to better understand the function of methylation in altering gene expression, they realized that extreme environmental stress—the results of which had earlier seemed self-explanatory—could have additional biological effects on the organisms that suffered it. Experiments with laboratory animals have now shown that these outcomes are based on the transmission of acquired changes in genetic function. Childhood abuse, trauma, famine, and ethnic prejudice may, it turns out, have long-term consequences for the functioning of our genes.
These effects arise from a newly recognized genetic mechanism called epigenesis, which enables the environment to make long-lasting changes in the way genes are expressed. Epigenesis does not change the information coded in the genes or a person’s genetic makeup—the genes themselves are not affected—but instead alters the manner in which they are “read” by blocking access to certain genes and preventing their expression. This mechanism can be the hidden cause of our feelings of depression, anxiety, or paranoia. What is perhaps most surprising of all, this alteration could, in some cases, be passed on to future generations who have never directly experienced the stresses that caused their forebears’ depression or ill health.
We return to Davis’ Community Park every year for Fourth of July, like salmon. Davis Musical Theatre Company sold cotton candy, popcorn, water and sodas. Last year, it was nuts here, like cotton candy was caviar, or something. It’s breezy (maybe too breezy given the County Fire), but temperatures were as pleasant as they have ever been.
There was just one disturbing element in yesterday's cotton candy adventure at Davis' Community Park: a wisp of a girl, age about eight, who approached and explained that she had no money, and her parents had no money, and could I just give her some cotton candy? We said no, but told her maybe come back later. I saved waste pieces of cotton candy for her, but she never returned. I just hope she's OK.
Afterwards, I was covered in cotton candy. Sticky and gooey!
