Catsitting At Gabe and Eleanor's

It's been a while since I've been to Gabe and Eleanor's house, and I was worried about whether the keys I had in my possession worked anymore. Voila! No problem entering the house! Only trouble was, Gabe had replaced the old alarm system, and my code was not entered into the new alarm system. Teeth shattered with the high-pitched wailing of the alarm....

Gabe said let the cats stay in the gated area of the house, where they had few places to hide, but allow them to explore his office, where there also weren't many places to hide. Great! Only trouble was, I opened the door to Eleanor's office instead of Gabe's, and Danny promptly vanished. About an hour later, I had to pry him out from under a piece of furniture.

Cats are so honest.  When I open the door, I can see Danny look up in anticipation, then look down again, as if to say, "Oh, YOU again!"

Harry needs a laser pointer, real bad.  I could hypnotize him just with my flashlight.

Roomba's Dumb Ass

Antifa Hoedown

Completely down with all this:

 

Midnight Oil - The Dead Heart

In an 80s Aussie frame of mind:

 

Things Native English Speakers Know

One Thousand Fin Whales

Cool!:

This vast assembly was spread over a five-mile-wide area between the South Orkney islands and the Antarctic Peninsula. A single whale is stupendous; imagine 1,000 of them, their misty forest of spouts, as tall as pine trees, the plosive sound of their blows, their hot breath condensing in the icy air. Their sharp dorsal fins and steel-grey bodies slide through the waves like a whale ballet, choreographed at the extreme south of our planet. 

Scientists have recently discovered that sperm whales, which do tend to gather in groups, learned to spread out in the presence of whalers, as a means of self-preservation. Perhaps, Hoare wonders, we only think krill-eaters like the fin whale were solitary because they too learned that gathering in groups was a death sentence when faced with hunters armed with harpoons. Perhaps this amassing was once normal.

Arrowhead Bottled Water in SoCal

What I buy! Still, a curse on the San Bernardino forest:

RIMFOREST, Calif. — High in the San Bernardino Mountains, water seeps from the ground and trickles down the mountainside among granite boulders and bay laurel trees. 

Near this dribbling spring, water gushes through a system of tunnels and boreholes, and flows into a network of stainless steel pipes that join together in a single line. The water then courses downhill across 4.5 miles of rugged terrain in the San Bernardino National Forest to a tank, where some is hauled away in trucks to be bottled and sold as Arrowhead 100% Mountain Spring Water. 

 Local environmentalists say the bottled water pipeline doesn’t belong in the national forest and is removing precious water that would otherwise flow in Strawberry Creek and nourish the ecosystem. After nearly seven years of fighting against the extraction of water, activists say they hope California regulators will finally order BlueTriton Brands — the company that took over bottling from Nestlé last year — to drastically reduce its operation in the national forest.

An Interactive map of California Fire Footprints

It doesn't have everything - 2021 is still missing - but it's close!

What About That Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Ha'apai?

Wow!:

It takes roughly 900-1000 years for the Hunga volcano to fill up with magma, which cools and starts to crystallize, producing large amounts of gas pressure inside the magma. As gases start to build up pressure, the magma becomes unstable. Think of it like putting too many bubbles into a champagne bottle -- eventually, the bottle will break. 

As the magma pressure rises, the cold and wet rock above the magma fails and suddenly releases the pent-up pressure. The eruption we saw on Saturday blasted rock, water, and magma 30 km high into the atmosphere, and was profound in terms of its energy. Within 30 minutes, the resulting cloud seen from space was over 350 km (or 218 miles) in diameter, with ash falling out onto several Tongan islands.

The sound wave is so impressive!:

pic.twitter.com/bYTm3p78lz

— Dr. Mathew Barlow (@MathewABarlow) January 16, 2022

Corwin Wright was on NPR explaining some of this stuff:

In theory, the rapid updraft of hot air and ash from an erupting volcano into the upper atmosphere could trigger gravity waves on a much larger scale. But nothing like this has been observed with previous eruptions analysed since the AIRS instrument was launched in May 2002.

“That’s what’s really puzzling us,” says Corwin Wright, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Bath, UK. “It must have something to do with the physics of what’s going on, but we don’t know what yet.” 

He and his co-workers suspect that a “great big, messy pile of hot gases” in the upper atmosphere might be what kicks the waves off. The hot gas is “going up high into the stratosphere and knocking the air around”, he says.

And the sounds of the explosion, as heard in ALASKA! Sound waves can travel far, and can be refracted back to the ground when the atmosphere is stable. It is likely that the early hour favored the Alaskans hearing the explosions.

@andreal.corbin The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano eruption heard 6,000 miles away in Alaska. #Alaska #tongavolcano #weathertok ♬ original sound - andrea.corbin

Annoying Conservatives of the Day

Kari Lake:

If there's one thing Lake loves to amplify, it's a poorly vetted conspiracy theory. There was the time in 2018 she tweeted that teachers' efforts for better pay were secretly a ploy to legalize marijuana — based solely on a joke T-shirt. In recent months, she's retweeted news about power outages at the Vatican and in Pakistan, which conspiracy theorists have claimed were signs that the Pope was being arrested for child sex trafficking. 

She's also helped push unverified claims about voter fraud, further spreading a myth that Trump supporters have used to try and overturn the presidential election. In 2018, she boosted a random Twitter user's unverified claim that the person had received a pre-filled-out ballot. In November, Lake posted a Twitter thread quoting what she called a "sobering interview" by election-conspiracy-theory-pusher Sidney Powell, who is now facing a huge defamation suit related to her claims that the election had been stolen in a scheme connected to Venezuela, Cuba, and China.

Star Parker:

I listened to her on C-SPAN on MLK Day. What an idiot! Conservatives are working overtime to appropriate King.

Djokovic Gets The Boot

Good:

Djokovic has been a vaccine skeptic from the outset of the coronavirus pandemic, and has never hidden his staunch opposition to vaccine mandates. That an athlete of his fame is using his platform in such a destructive fashion is bad enough; even more despicable is that Djokovic seems so comfortable exploiting his immense privilege to endanger the health and safety of others. It is especially insulting to the Australian people, who have adhered to some of the strictest restrictions during the pandemic in an effort to keep their hospitalizations and death rates low. 

Sacrificing is what caring communities do—and it’s something Djokovic knows nothing about. As the top player in men’s tennis, Djokovic has a responsibility to be a good ambassador for his sport. But that, like Australia’s COVID rules, is just another requirement that he’s failed to meet.

Idle Thoughts on Ukraine

John writes:

I have been thinking the same thing articulated in this link. To me the parallels are uncanny. What do you think?

What does the link say?:

Operation Canned Meat II 

U.S. intelligence officials have determined a Russian effort is underway to create a pretext for its troops to further invade Ukraine, and Moscow has already prepositioned operatives to conduct “a false-flag operation” in eastern Ukraine, according to the White House.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said on Friday the intelligence findings show Russia is also laying the groundwork through a social media disinformation campaign that frames Ukraine as an aggressor that has been preparing an imminent attack against Russian-backed forces in eastern Ukraine.

Psaki charged that Russia has already dispatched operatives trained in urban warfare who could use explosives to carry out acts of sabotage against Russia’s own proxy forces — blaming the acts on Ukraine — if Russian President Vladimir Putin decides he wants to move forward with an invasion.

...Mass overwhelming forces on the border of a far less-powerful neighbor -- check. Stage a pretext for an invasion -- check. Claim that they are only acting in self-defense -- check. Claim that they are only protecting the rights of their own ethnic people -- check. Right wing groups in the United States parroting the lies of the invaders -- check. An Asian dictatorship using the distraction of a war in Europe to carry out their own war -- check.

Other nations are paying attention and taking their own steps. Russia's aggressive posturing has made it clear to the Nordic neutrals that they will have to choose a side. And they seem to be.

My take:

Maybe so! By putting the word out in advance about a false flag operation, The U.S. takes a lot of wind out of the sails of Russia. Still...

Russia has the luxury of the initiative and a long porous border with Ukraine to work with. It will be difficult to defend Ukraine.

Ukrainian public opinion is increasingly solidified against Russia.

It is interesting that FDR did not make security guarantees for Ukraine at Yalta (a point the Republicans used to hammer Democrats for the next 50 years). FDR didn't do it because the U.S. didn't have a large enough presence in the area to make any guarantees against Stalin. Times are iffy these days with Putin in the Kremlin.

The U.S. was very careful not to intrude on Russia's informal security zone in eastern Europe until very recently. Even in 2008, when Georgia invaded a portion of Russian territory and pleaded for U.S. intervention, and despite John McCain's efforts to do exactly that, the U.S. didn't protect Georgia, as the Russians invaded and whupped their asses.

But times have changed. Putin wants what the USSR had, its respected cordon sanitaire in eastern Europe, but doesn't have the strength to maintain it. Ukraine and others don't fear them so much anymore. The U.S. wants to bring Ukraine into NATO, and Ukraine wants to join. Sweden and Finland are threatening to join NATO if Russia invades Ukraine.

Putin thinks he can get what he wants, and the U.S. thinks it can enter the Ukrainian cordon sanitaire and outlast Putin. A recipe for war, when both sides see opportunities and few downsides. And there are still nukes to worry about too. 9We'll see!

I'm curious about Zelensky's action at this time regarding Poroshenko. Seems risky!:

KYIV (Reuters) -Ukraine's former president, Petro Poroshenko, landed in Kyiv on Monday to face treason charges in a case he says was trumped up by allies of his successor, Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

In a brief stand-off at border control after arriving on a flight from Warsaw, Poroshenko accused border guards of taking away his passport. He later greeted a crowd of thousands of cheering and flag-waving supporters outside the airport.

Poroshenko's return sets up a showdown with President Zelenskiy's government in what critics say is an ill-judged distraction as Ukraine braces for a possible Russian military offensive and seeks the support of its Western allies.