9-11

     I deliberately didn't post about it this morning.  A lot of good people -- heck, a lot of people who were, on average, average, and what's wrong with that? -- died as the result of a small group of violent bastards; more have died since, from the same root cause.  I mourn those people, most of whom died not as heroes but unsuspecting.  There were heroes, and plenty of them: first responders, the passengers who kept the hijackers on Flight 93 from completing their plans, and others.  It is right to remember all of the fallen.

     What's not right is to wallow in the end of an illusion, the illusion that nothing bad could happen in the continental U.S.; that's simply crazy, and anyone who remembers learning about 1812 and 1861-65 should darned well know better.  This country is a special place, but it's not charmed.  Our specialness is not inherent but an act of will, an ongoing effort to live up to the promise of the U.S. Constitution.

     And nobody can take it away by wrecking buildings and murdering people.

It's Monday

     A lot of Florida is messed up and Texas is still wringing out.  Give 'em hand, if you can.

Torn Apart By She-Bears

     I'm not going to explain the post title, other than to remind readers, "Really don't make fun of bald guys," and to explain that today's screed is about--

     Well, it's about faith, I suppose, and True Believers and confirmation bias and if it's right to leave someone up to their neck in alligators because you think they have been rubbing the wrong shade of blue mud in their navels.

     The continental United States (and Mexico and countless Caribbean islands) is being hit by dreadful weather, wildfires, earthquakes and tsunamis.  These are facts.  You can watch some of it happening right now, in real time, via your computer or television.


     Let's start with confirmation bias, or perhaps Idiotic Smugness: I have seen a couple of instances on social media of people pointing out, "See, all this is happening right after the U.S. withdrew from the Paris Climate Agreement!"
     Sure, but even if you believe the Agreement is funding some sort of Captain Planet-type corps of superheroes pushing back against the cruel thermometer of Wicked Industrial Mankind (it isn't), there's one tiny problem: "The Paris Agreement (French: Accord de Paris), Paris climate accord or Paris climate agreement, is an agreement within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) dealing with greenhouse gas emissions mitigation, adaptation and finance starting in the year 2020."
     Catch that last?  Twenty-twenty.  So far, Paris hasn't produced anything but fancy talk and high-falutin' plans.
     In fact, though President Trump most certainly has announced the U. S. would withdraw from the Agreement, it works out that the very earliest date by which this country could be out would be 4 November 2020, which just happens to be the day after the next Presidential elections, making this one of those safest of Presidential promises, slated to occur after the promiser's term of office has ended.*


     A little sneakier and more smug are those who say, "With all this horrible weather, now you/politician/whoever have to admit Global Warming is real!"
     Yeah, no.  For the sake of argument, stipulate Anthropogenic Global Warming is real -- and then explain to me how a people in general and the political class -- overlapping groups that includes flat-earthers, far-out conspiracy theorists and hardcore young-Earth creations -- will be persuaded by by yet more evidence.  And the cited evidence (recent weather), while suggestive, is far from incontrovertible: weather isn't climate.  Climate isn't weather. Looking back, the short-term "noise" of weather is huge compared to the long-term trendlines of climate: there's a lot of jitter.  On the scale of geologic time, the climate shows lovely rising and falling curves, Ice Age to Warm Period and back again, a bit sawtooth-y; zoom in to the span of a single human lifetime and the big curve vanishes under warm spells and cold snaps, floods and droughts.  At no time has the planet been entirely Edenic: it's a tough place for individual naked apes and it's not all that great for the other critters, either: mortality is 100%.


     I'm also unimpressed with the people who claimed Houston's lack of "proper zoning" and Texas's GOP-dominated, business-friendly state government made the hurricane damage there worse than it could have been.  The city got as much rain in four days as it normally receives in the course of a year.  When that happens anywhere that gets rained on regularly, terrible things follow.  People drown in their own attics. Industrial facilities are washed out...and into people's back yards.  You can't zone for it and the political climate and party in power are insignificant against the power of a storm -- as Hurricane Sandy showed, when plenty of code-compliant seaside homes were destroyed as far north as New Jersey and New York.

    
     The lesson here is not that "The thing I want to believe about climactic trends and our ability as a species to affect them is the Absolute Truth," no matter which way you lean.  The lesson is Bad Things Happen.

     Are you gonna pitch in to help the victims or not?
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* Which is not to say Mr. Trump won't run again, or that it is outside the bounds of possibility that he might win, at which point that chicken is going to need roosting space.  Nevertheless, it hasn't even hatched yet.

Tamara's Back!

     After nearly a week away, Tam is back!  This is good.  The cats get irked when they are fed late and me--  Well, I'm a worrier.  It's a lot better for me when there's someone around to keep an eye on things.

Okay, Let's See...

     There's a massive hurricane barreling towards Florida, as people in Texas continue to recover from their own hurricane; hackers grabbed the personal data of over 700 140 million people from Equifax, one of the three companies that keeps track of our credit ratings; North Korea is making saber-rattling noises about whacking North America with a thermonuclear-airburst EMP that would wipe out most computers (including, one supposes, the compromised computers at Equifax), and we just had the biggest solar flare since 2006 and the geomagnetic storm it will trigger is going to hit some time today--

     Yeah, it's Friday.

     P.S.: I have been reminded that much of the West is presently on fire, too. 

DACA: At Least It's A Normal Mess

     Say what you will of the Trump administration's announced end to DACA -- actually a phase-out, since the system will ramp down over several years and not just "end" in six months as headlines claim* -- it is, at least, a normal kind of posturing between the White House and Congress.

     A little history: Federal attempts to resolve the issue of the children of non-citizens raised in this country date back to at least 2001, when the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act was introduced in the Senate.  There was a lot of back-and-forth in Congress and it has been revised, rewritten, argued over and voted on, but by 2012, was still stalled.  The Obama Administration, feeling that urge to Do Something that mars most Presidencies, decided they had some precedent in the occasional Executive use of "prosecutorial discretion"† in allowing refugees from bad weather or worse governments to enter the U.S. without the usual constraints, and established the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, essentially doing what the DREAM Act intended without waiting for Congress to pass it.  The apparent intent was to buy time and try to chivvy Congress into acting.  The latter effort failed.

     And there's the rub or at least a point of friction -- temporary humanitarian relief is one thing,  permanent programs of this nature are the business of the Legislative branch, not the Executive.  This conflict gives both sides wiggle room to argue legality and I have heard a lot of it.  Which side is correct?  Probably both, or neither: a fairly clear distinction has been made fuzzy.

     Pulling the plug on DACA is now being cast as an effort to -- wait for it, wait for it -- chivvy Congress into acting.  Possibly the White House needs to keep a mule around as a reminder.

     Meanwhile, the DACA protectees are about as demographically assorted as any group of people in their age range living in the U.S. -- a little poorer, a little more likely to be speaking Spanish at home, but you can sort through them and find med-school students from sub-Saharan Africa and hairdressers born in Russia, heroes and nobodies and people you wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley in roughly the same proportion as in a group of citizens.  They're not, aside from their legal status, all that special.  Singling them out for deportation as their protection expires is about the same thing as a state changing its firearms laws and seizing the rifles owned by those dutiful gun-owners who registered their "assault weapons" before they were outlawed: the people who followed the rules are the least likely to problematic. On the other hand, if The Law Is The Law in one case, it certainly is in the other and if we're picking and choosing, that'll take some serious explaining.

     Congress has at least four bills floating around that would Do Something, if they are so minded.  They might.  They might not; this entire thing is exactly the sort of can of worms they like to pass around, make impassioned speeches about and hope it goes away.  If it does go away, a lot of pretty average folks will be facing serious consequences.

     But the Executive and the Legislative branches playing "I dare you" is, at least, the normal sort of thing that goes on in the Federal government, and that aspect of it comes as almost a relief after months of tabloid-worthy drama.
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* Vox, of all places, has an article that includes some factual charts and graphs along with tear-jerking photographs.  If Congress does nothing, the final group of DACA protections will expire in the Spring of 2021.

† This is more usually invoked when J. Random Badguy kicks down Grandpa's door in the middle of the night, Grandpa beats him half to death with a baseball bat as he is digging through Grandma's jewelry drawer and the prosecutor declines to bring charges against Grandpa.  You can't rely on it happening.

This Is Why They Sell Pepper Spray

     It's one reason why they sell the stuff: Bloomington's got a serial flasher and he's chasing after young women. The prime suspect was already out on bail for a similar crime here in Indianapolis in February.

     A little behavior modification would go a long way in reducing such crimes.  Averse conditioning in the form of pepper spray, for example; if there was a one-in-four chance of being pepper-sprayed, and if we let flashers learn that via experience, it'd do a whole lot to reduce the number of such incidents.

     College students, young women in particular, consider carrying pepper spray: small, portable, non-lethal -- and used judiciously, it contributes to the betterment of society.  Flashing is a crime of intimidation, usually committed against women, and it is best stopped early, before the flasher goes after bigger thrills.  A reminder that such behavior is intolerable would go a long way towards correcting it.  It is unlikely to do them lasting harm and may prevent injury to others and a long jail sentence for the perp.

     Won't you please do your part to help?

The Tick: A Little More

     Finished watching the first half of the current TV series of The Tick.  It is pleasantly nuanced, especially for a superhero satire, and delivers more in the way of cliffhangers and thrilling fight sequences than the television versions of Superman or Batman ever did.

     While The Tick has always had a little more depth (or at least inner turmoil) than most superheroes and Arthur is memorably human, frail and worried, the humanity and depth of the characters in this version may well be traceable to character creator (and main writer) Ben Edlund having written for Joss Whedon's* series Firefly, Angel and Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on the time between the last two incarnatioins of The Tick and this one.  I see another another writer from Whedon's Firefly stable in the credits, too: Jose Molina.  It shows.

     The first half of the season ends with a biggest cliffhanger so far.  I'm looking forward to the next group of episodes.
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* I'm not a big fan of his politics but he's an extraordinarily talented storyteller.

I Pretty Much Took Labor Day Off

     Tam and I had big plans.  They never happened.  I napped, then grilled a couple of steaks, did some laundry and ran the dishwasher. 

Pye Wacket/The Hidden Frontier

     Lenticular spacecraft are nothing new in the nearly-real world of defense studies.  Nevertheless, the notion of a lenticular missile came as something of a surprise to me.

     ...And then I scrolled down to the chart labeled "UFO Reports Per Month," covering 1935 - 2005.

     It fits extremely well with the timeline of the Hidden Frontier, especially the not-quite-a-war fought from the late 1940s through 1987 between the U.S. (with selected NATO allies) and the "Far Edge" refuseniks of the Federation of Concerned Spacemen.

     Interesting.

Secret Submarine NR-1

     I've been reading about the smallest nuclear submarine in the U. S. Navy, the NR-1, which was, in some ways,  more like a spacecraft than a submarine.  Fascinating stuff, or at least the parts the people involved can talk about are.  The little sub (probably) did a lot of of interesting Cold War-ish things and plenty of it is still a deep, dark secret.

Friday At Last!

     And yet, it's not quite my Friday -- I have to fill in a few hours for a vacationing co-worker tomorrow.  The rest of you, celebrate!