Trampsta - Chunky (Old Dancing Movies Video)

I always like dancing-movie videos:

 

Title 42 Is All About Creating An Artificial Crisis

I was up to my favorite pasttime, tweaking rightwingers on Facebook, when I noticed how government statistics are now jacked to make the border with Mexico look like an absolute disaster. The particular rightwing claim was: "In January 2020 there were a total of 16,182 illegal crossings compared to 206,239 in January 2022." That sounds really terrible - a huge increase. Bad Joe Biden! 

But wait! The Jan. 2020 number is apprehensions only. The Jan. 2022 number is apprehensions plus expulsions. Starting with the pandemic in Mar. 2020, the numbers exploded with Title 8 and Title 42 expulsions - people who otherwise would have been allowed to cross legally into the U.S. to apply for asylum. The number of "illegal crossings" may not have gone up at all. Maybe the number of "illegal crossings" actually went down. Who knows? You'd have to really get into the statistical weeds to tell if things were getting worse, or not. 

So, apples and oranges. It only looks like a crisis if you first deliberately jack the statistics to manufacture a crisis out of it. Still, things probably aren't as bad today as they were under G.W. Bush. 

With statistics like these, you can hide anything. The border with Mexico might actually be a land of theme parks, candy canes, and unicorns, but with all the Title 42 expulsions, the border looks like a disaster. 

Maybe the Border Patrol wants to manufacture a crisis, and manage it, in perpetuity. Maybe that's what Title 42 is all about; feathering nests.

RIP, Burt Bacharach

Pronouncing The Names of the Four Sacred Navajo Mountains (+2)

I have a terrible Navajo accent.  Mount Taylor kills me.  Heck, they all kill me.

 

Betty Booom & J Fitz - Puttin' on the Ritz

Biden Plays the Republicans for Fools

Best State of the Union speech in American history!

 

Making Nuclear Power Smaller, Safer, and Agile

Here's an interesting article about rethinking nuclear power by making it smaller, safer, and agile. Kairos Power in Albuquerque is based in the same building used in "Better Call Saul" for housing German workers building the Superlab:

kairos power’s new test facility is on a parched site a few miles south of the Albuquerque, New Mexico, airport. Around it, desert stretches toward hazy mountains on the horizon. The building looks like a factory or a warehouse; nothing about it betrays the moonshot exercise happening within. There, digital readouts count down the minutes, T-minus style, until power begins flowing to a test unit simulating the blistering heat of a new kind of nuclear reactor. In this test run, electricity, not uranium, will furnish the energy; graphite-encased fuel pebbles, each about the size of a golf ball, will be dummies containing no radioactive material. But everything else will be true to life, including the molten fluoride salt that will flow through the device to cool it. If all goes according to plan, the system—never tried before—will control and regulate a simulated chain reaction.

RIP, Carolyn Gregory

Shocked to hear, and sorry, because I didn't know she was sick. She was a kind soul, and a great fan of theater.

Another Shot at the Skates

Can't Fill Lakes Powell and Mead Again, Ever

This is a most-interesting chart, which shows water storage in Lakes Powell and Mead, by decade, since 1970. The point of the chart is to illustrate just how far gone the Colorado River system is now. Water demand is so high now (particularly after the Central AZ Project and the Southern NV Water Authority were completed), and inflow so low, that no expert anticipates being able to see both reservoirs full again in their lifetime. Look at that big drop from 2000 to 2005! Filling the reservoirs now would require six extremely-wet years in a row. Not likely to happen:

Demand for Colorado River water picked up in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The Central Arizona Project, a 336-mile-long water delivery system, brings water from the Colorado River to Arizona’s most populous counties and wasn’t completed until the 1990s. The Southern Nevada Water Authority was created in 1991.

Arizona began starting to take its full apportionment of river water in the late 1990s, and Nevada in the early 2000s. California continues using the single largest share of the river. 

“Now the water use is maxed out. Every state is taking too much, and we have to cut back. And so there’s just not enough. You would need wet year after wet year, after wet year after wet year, after wet year. Even then, because the demand is so high, it still wouldn’t fill,” Hasencamp said in an interview.

Parov Stelar - Candy Girl (Late Night Mix)

Ballet on the brain.

 

The Chinese Balloon Hullabaloo