Saturday, June 21, 2025
Regarding The Iran Bombing Campaign
What worries me is that no one holds a grudge like the Shiites. They will remember long after you’ve moved on.
Uptick in Enthusiasm at This Week's Tesla Protest
More protesters at Tesla this weekend; more flags; more support. I think it's the beating of the war drum that's responsible for the uptick.
Friday, June 20, 2025
Whither America?
It will be interesting to see whether Trumpian America's approach to immigrants will be more like Nazi Germany's genocides or more like pre-Civil-War America's abuse of Fugitive Slaves, or some creative blend of the two models:
"Can a nation committed to human equality treat human beings like chattel? “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” Abraham Lincoln famously said in 1858, “I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I expect it to cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.”
The federal government is now committed to treating immigrants almost precisely as the antebellum South treated slaves. They are to have fewer rights than others; to their jailers, they are not even truly “persons”; they need not receive due process, or indeed any process, before being detained indefinitely or even deported to countries they have never seen. And under the Trump executive order on birthright citizenship, this subordinate status is to be permanent and hereditary—passed down, the way slave status was, from parent to child.
Truly, this house cannot stand. These conflicts will recur. They will grow more, not less, corrosive to a free, democratic republic. Americans—red or blue—are not accustomed to heel-clicking compliance to the orders of some jack-in-office with a Sharpie."
I Like This Rant About The Inept Democratic Party Establishment
It's a "distraction":
Scan the footage of the largest protests in United States history. Read the signs. How many of the unprecedented crises alluded to by those signs have been called distractions by the political figures most charged with responding to them? What percentage of those crowds is, according to Democratic strategists, foolish for caring about their issue more than the party-authorized real issues?
It is cowardice. Party strategists are so obsessed with maintaining control over what party voters are allowed to challenge or not allowed to challenge that they have fossilized at their desks, unable to respond to anything that was not already on the spreadsheets. And it is certain, absolutely certain, that if this authoritarian moment is beaten back down it will be those elected officials willing to channel the true, visceral outrage of the public who will do it.
The Southwestern Monsoon Is About To Start
The GFS model weather predictions for the next two weeks show that the Southwestern Monsoon is primed for an early, vigorous start on June 22nd (at least over New Mexico; it'll generally be later, in July, for Arizona).
The high pressure system that will make life miserable next week in the Ohio River Valley strengthens at the same time, and indeed, appears integral to the initiation of the monsoon. (I wonder if something like this is true for all southwestern monsoons?)
I'm hoping the best for abundant southwestern rainfall, but you can never be certain how it will all play out. I remember the 1984 southwestern monsoon had a similarly-vigorous start, but the cloud cover that accompanied it depressed the orographic uplift of thunderstorms. It didn't rain much at all in the southwest in June, 1984. Instead, high pressure hurled all that the moisture far, far into Canada before much rain managed to fall. I know the Canadians need rainfall, but can't we get some too?
And there may be a Global Climate Change aspect too. Michael Mann is out with a brand-new paper entitled "Increased frequency of planetary wave resonance events over the past half-century." Mann asserts that resonance events (like next week's heat wave in the Midwest) have increased three-fold over the last half-century, especially in the summer, due to global warming. I'm sure the report will make good reading on a miserably-muggy Cincinnati evening next week.
Southwestern rainfall is exceedingly erratic, and always has been, at least as far as post-Ice-Age records reveal. Still, I'm thinking there is a slow, decades-long increase of rainfall underway. You look at century-old photos of the southwest and things just seemed less lush in the bad old days. We are getting hotter temperatures these days, but we are getting a bit more rain too.
Change can seem slow. I hope we like the new world we are creating.
Tuesday, June 17, 2025
I Like Visiting the DMV
And in the typical manner, I apparently already have a Real ID, and so there’s no reason for me to be here at all. Learn something new every day! All I'm doing here is gumming up the works and slowing things down.
Brute Force 0; Lucky Escape 1
This morning, Jasper and I started our morning walk down the alley. Two sparrows sat on a wooden fence as we approached.
Suddenly, * THWACK! * A big bird’s wing hit the fence and its owner tumbled into the yard behind. The sparrows tumbled too. Was the big bird a chaotic pigeon? Perhaps a not-so-intelligent crow? No, it was a HAWK, trying to catch the dazed sparrows. Fly away!
One sparrow immediately fled from the yard and the other sparrow squeezed through a tiny crack in the fence before using our presence to shield its escape down the alley. The hawk gathered itself, summoned its dignity, and flew up to a utility line. The hawk then gazed down in disdain on us. Brute Force 0; Lucky Escape 1.
This event doesn’t provide an answer as to why pigeons are challenged in my neighborhood, but it is a data point. Life is cheap out here on the bird seed frontier!
Green Valley Theater’s "Summer Camp"
A few minutes before show time at St. John Lutheran's meeting space.
Initial Speculation on the Air India Crash
What pops out immediately looking at the video of the Ahmedabad Air India crash is that the plane's flaps aren't extended. Speculation starts immediately from there. Two quotes from BBC:
"When I'm looking at this," aviation analyst Geoffrey Thomas said, "the undercarriage is still down but the flaps have been retracted."
Another expert, Terry Tozer, said: "It's very hard to say from the video for sure, it doesn't look as if the flaps are extended and that would be a perfectly obvious explanation for an aircraft not completing its take-off correctly."
Airliner crashes have been caused before by the simple failure to have flaps extended on takeoff. In the old days it was usually caused by distraction or forgetfulness. I have trouble imagining that with modern computerized aircraft that such an obvious failure wasn't accompanied by blaring alarms. But who knows? Stranger things have happened.
Where is Jill Stein?
@pearlmania500 🚨 Missing Person Alert 🚨 JILL STEIN
♬ Dvorak-Slavonic Dances OP.72-2 - 中央芭蕾舞团交响乐团
Pigeons Under Stress
A pigeon is down near my feeding spot this evening; the sixth pigeon in about a month. Similar to the others, this pigeon has an intact body, a partly-severed head, and is lightly-scavenged. I don’t know why this is happening: whether it’s disease or an attack. If a pigeon goes down every five days, or so, and nothing else changes, given that the local flock is composed of about forty pigeons, by the end of the year I’ll be out of pigeons. And then where will I be?
Strawberry Moon
An iPhone pic of June 11th's “Strawberry Moon” (apparently an Algonquin term, not a color reference).
The Moon looks pretty white tonight; not pink.
We’ve been at Major Lunar Standstill for the past year, meaning the Moon is swinging as far north to south as it possibly can: north at New Moon and south at Full Moon. Even though the extremities of the swings were reached earlier this year, the Moon is still swinging pretty wide: -29 degrees on June 11th, which is almost as far south as it can possibly get.
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