Most frightening and/or depressing story: Mass shootings are often motivated by suicidally depressed people who decide to take others with them to the grave.
Most hopeful story: For us 80s children, Top Gun has not lost that loving feeling.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Taser drones? Seriously, this might have been my most interestingly random post last month. I’ll try to do better.
This is the time on the show where I say I am not going to comment on divisive social issues on this blog, and then I do anyway. I have just a few things to say: (1) I support the right to choose. (2) I can empathize with the point of view of people who have strong moral or religious objections to abortion. There can never be a true consensus on this issue. (3) Abortion is much less common than it used to be because we have effective birth control technology and by and large people have access to it and use it. We need even more technology, especially for men. It’s one of those research areas that has been neglected by the private sector, and governments need to step in. We need much better access and information and much less stigma to access the birth control technology we have, starting with teenagers whether we like it or not. (4) We should be able to reach a consensus that the goal is for all children who are brought into the world to be wanted and loved. Abortion is a small part of this answer, for now, but family planning and birth control are most of the answer. (5) If the Supreme Court takes family planning and birth control away from us, I want to say I will be out in the streets protesting, but I may also look into Canadian naturalization options. I like to hedge my bets when things are going downhill that are outside my direct control. (6) Clarence Thomas, you are corrupt, you stink and you should be impeached. (7) Read The Handmaid’s Tale if you haven’t. I didn’t believe this work of fiction could become a reality but we have started down the slippery slope.
Is this hypocrisy or ignorance?
Bettina Jarasch, a Green party politician who also serves as the city’s deputy mayor, suggested the implementation of the measure after the apparent success of a recent summer scheme that saw Germans charged only €9 per month for public transport in order to help curb the impact of inflation during the summer months.
According to a report by Bild, Jarasch believes that a mandatory charge of between €15 and €20 ($16-$21) for public transport will further to bump revenue for public transport services while keeping prices low for individual users.
“I’m increasingly thinking about a solidarity levy of 15 to 20 euros a month for all Berliners,” the politician remarked, while also noting that the reduction in the price of public transport has seen a significant uptick in usage across the country.
Breitbart
Meanwhile, here in the USA, we are all forced to pay a fortune for driving and parking infrastructure, whether we use it or not. We accept this partly because it has been the status quo for so long we don’t remember anything different, and partly because of the endless propaganda hurled at us by the auto-highway-oil industrial complex.
Meanwhile, we have a double standard for transit for some reason where we expect it to be paid for 100% by user fees. Then we disincentivize people from actually using it by providing heavily subsidized car infrastructure.
There may be a few corporate executives and marketing types that understand the hypocrisy of this arrangement, but overall I’m going to go with ignorance.
So I saw Top Gun: Maverick. MINOR SPOILERS FOLLOW. I’ve read a few snarky reviews of it – it’s a recruiting poster for the military, an indication of the dying gasp of an empire, a throwback to the glory days that will never return, maybe even anti-Chinese. I thought it was a fun movie, though. Could we just not overthink it and let it be a fun movie? As a boy of the 1980s (when Top Gun came out) and 1990s (when it was on TV a lot), I do consider it a cultural icon that should not be messed with. So I was worried, but I heard the movie was good and decided to see it. And I thought it succeeded in not ruining the original for a couple reasons – first, Tom Cruise just doing his Tom Cruise thing in his Tom Cruise way. It wouldn’t have worked without him. Second, the eye-popping airplane action and the soundtrack, which were both in the spirit of the original. It just all worked.
Sure, it is a recruiting poster for the U.S. Navy. But this is a movie that is very clear and honest that it is a movie made by the U.S. Navy and glorifying the U.S. Navy. I am much more bothered by movies like the Transformers and Godzilla series that subtly target a younger audience with a pro-military message.
Sure, the plot makes no sense. The enemy is a “rogue regime” building a uranium enrichment plant in a coastal, cold, and mountainous location. So in the real world, it can’t be China, North Korea, or Pakistan because they have had nuclear weapons for decades. And yet they have cutting edge advanced aircraft and air defenses. So maybe a mountainous area of Iran with military hardware supplied by China? Or some fictional island dictator or sultan, except that these tend to be in warm locations. Maybe Iceland – I’m going to go with a mad Bond villain taking over Iceland and seizing some kind of secret NATO R&D facility. There apparently is a purely military solution to the problem, and there apparently are no geopolitical implications of any kind that the moviegoer has to worry about. (In the original, the suggestion is that it was sort of an accidental United States and Soviet Union confrontation that both decide it is in their best interests to cover up. If the U.S. actually launched an unprovoked attack on China, I’m pretty sure China would publicize it.
But Hollywood doesn’t even try to develop characters or make plots that make sense any more. That seems to be a job for TV series these days. So let’s just let it be fun.
Two things did bother me though. One was the absence of Kelly McGillis’s character Charlie. As a boy of the 1980s and 1990s, 1986 Kelly McGillis is important to me. I looked her up – she is a handsome 64-year-old woman. I guess she just wouldn’t have worked as Tom Cruise’s love interest – Cruise is 59 but whatever they do to him through surgery, makeup, and/or computer graphics he looks about 35 in the movie. They should have at least given Kelly McGillis a cameo though – well, maybe they offered and she said no thanks. I was mildly disturbed by the actual love interest in the movie – they never explain anything about her and pretend we are supposed to know her from the first movie. I had to look this up – apparently her character is mentioned in passing in the original movie. They should have at least mentioned Charlie in this new movie or explained what happened to her. I will always love you, Charlie! (Oops, wrong song – I was supposed to say you take my breath away. Well, at least they had the good sense not to mess with that song in the new movie because that song was all about Charlie. And I’m not much of a romantic by the way, but like I say it’s a culture icon. By the way, they avoid having to pay Meg Ryan for a cameo by just telling us her character is dead, which is kind of cheap.)
And finally, I just want to make a pitch for motorcycle helmets. I get that the brash young balls-forward Maverick didn’t wear a helmet. The grownup, more responsible Maverick should have put one on. I suppose his character is marginally suicidal so maybe he gets a pass. He certainly should have put one on his love interest if he actually cared about her life and safety. So shame on Hollywood for this and I hope nobody imitates the movie and gets hurt. Incidentally, I looked up one other thing: you can go online and find a motorcycle helmet in the style of Maverick’s flight helmet. And that is pretty cool. Although remember motorcycles are not safe to begin with. I see some Top Gun-inspired bike helmets for children.
And finally, there are just certain iconic songs associated with certain iconic movies. Top Gun: Maverick goes to the danger zone (a lot), but it has lost that loving feeling.
This book review in the Guardian tries to link climate change to inflation. It talks about the costs of storms, fires, and insurance, and impacts of heat on worker productivity. I’m not convinced it is exactly on the mark. Cleaning up from storms can actually stimulate the economy, if they have only local impacts and don’t happen too often. One area’s cost of cleanup creates business and jobs for another area of the economy. The larger economy should be able to absorb these costs if it is healthy. Maybe this is the issue – are the impacts of storms, fires, and floods become geographically widespread and frequent enough that they are taking up a significant amount of our economy’s productive capacity that could be better spent elsewhere? Maybe that is the case, but this article doesn’t address it. I can certainly imagine this being the case if and when major population centers (and economic drivers of our economy) start to be impacted on a regular basis by a combination of severe storms and sea level rise. A major earthquake or volcano could have similar impacts, and while it would have nothing to do with climate change directly, it would happen on top of climate change and we need to be ready for the known risks let alone the unknown ones.
The article doesn’t talk much about food, but along with impacts on coastal cities, a tightening of the food supply relative to population seems like the most obvious and immediate impact of climate change on people. While climate change didn’t cause the Russia-Ukraine war, removing food exports from those two countries from the system has taught us something about how tight the food supply is. Climate change could add up to a similar tightening over a period of time, and remove that slack that we currently have in the system. And then shocks can and will happen on top of the long term trend. It really does not seem like the world is ready.
All the information is really in the name. Taser drone. They’re supposedly halting development of it for the time being, but some company somewhere will undoubtedly bring this to the market. Then all we have to do is give them facial recognition and autonomy, and we can just set and forget!
This article in France24 draws a link between habitat loss, climate change, and zoonotic diseases.
“Deforestation reduces biodiversity: we lose animals that naturally regulate viruses, which allows them to spread more easily,” he told AFP…
As animals flee their warming natural habitats they will meet other species for the first time — potentially infecting them with some of the 10,000 zoonotic viruses believed to be “circulating silently” among wild mammals, mostly in tropical forests, the study said.
Greg Albery, a disease ecologist at Georgetown University who co-authored the study, told AFP that “the host-pathogen network is about to change substantially”.
France24
I don’t quite get the logic of the first sentence – how do animals “naturally regulate viruses”? I can see the logic that some animals would limit the spread of viruses they are infected with based on their behavior. If they start moving around more, whether because their habitats are becoming smaller and more fragmented, because their ranges are shifting as the climate changes (although this seems like a much slower process to me), they will potentially interact more with other wild animals, with domestic animals, and with humans.
So solutions could be to protect natural habitats and keep cities from sprawling into them, shift more to vegetarian diets for people and/or keep livestock indoors (maybe not so great for the livestock).
Yes, I know that was quite possibly the worst pun ever. But they really are disgusting, even for those of us who basically like bugs.
Particularly disgusting are types that can form such large clusters that they can bleed a large mammal to death, like a cow or even a moose. They cause many more cases of disease in the U.S. than mosquitoes. The lone star tick can cause a person to develop an allergy to red meat, which is just bizarre. We’ve become kind of desensitized to Lyme disease, but it can be quite dangerous – on a personal note, a cousin of mine who lives in western Pennsylvania was hospitalized with a serious heart condition in the summer of 2020, and it turned out to be Lyme disease – quickly and correctly diagnosed and treated by the way, and he is now fine. I guess that is one up side of it being so common and widespread – even during the height of Covid-19 in 2020 when someone came into an emergency room with Covid-like symptoms, it was correctly tested for, diagnosed, and treated.
My cousin thinks he acquired Lyme disease in his yard, and according to Vox, this is a more common way to acquire it than hiking in the woods. So you can’t avoid it by just staying out of the woods.
The Vox article says scientists are pretty sure habitat fragmentation plays a role – deer and mice love lots of fragments and edge habitat, and meanwhile their predators do not, and people generally do not want the predators among them.
And finally, the article says the jury is out on how climate change is affecting ticks, but their ranges are generally expanding and milder winters are probably playing a role.
Ticks have made nature less fun, and that is what sucks most of all, if you ask me.
Mass shooters are often motivated by essentially suicidal fantasies. They just sometimes decide to take an elementary school class with them. It’s hard to be sympathetic, but then again it highlights how the lack of access to quality health care and mental health care in particular is part of what is rotting our society from the inside out. t seems to me we are lumping unrelated phenomena from a few categories:
The latter two you could maybe lump together, although ironically these groups would consider each other enemies. The first two are completely different though. There are several different problems here with several different solutions.
Don’t get me wrong, there are still too many guns in too many hands and too many people who think more violence is the answer to our violence problem.
Most frightening and/or depressing story: The lab leak hypothesis is back, baby! Whether Covid-19 was or was not a lab accident, the technology for accidental or intentional release of engineered plagues has clearly arrived. And also, the world is waking up to a serious food crisis.
Most hopeful story: I came up with (but I am sure I didn’t think of it first) the idea of a 21st century bill of rights. This seems to me like a political big idea somebody could run with. I’ll expand on it at some point, but quick ideas would be to clarify that the right to completely free political speech applies to human beings only and put some bounds on what it means for corporations and other legal entities, and update the 18th century idea of “unlawful search and seizure” to address the privacy/security tradeoffs of our modern world. And there’s that weird “right to bear arms” thing. Instead of arguing about what those words meant in the 18th century, we could figure out what we want them to mean now and then say it clearly. For example, we might decide that people have a right to be free of violence and protected from violence, in return for giving up any right to perpetrate violence. We could figure out if we think people have a right to a minimum standard of living, or housing, or health care, or education. And maybe clean up the voting mess?
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: I found one easily accessible and understandable source of Covid-19 wastewater surveillance data.