Should We Add "Inability to Post In a Timely Manner"?

 

The path of Hurricane Idalia may look line it's tracking across north Florida and then along the Georgia coast, but the familiar cone projections only show the center of the storm and Idalia actually traveled a little further inland than forecast.  In fact, the storm is huge, several hundred miles across, and the outer edge grazed the southeast edge of the metro Atlanta region.

It's rained on and off all day here, but wind hasn't been a factor and even the rain hasn't been as heavy as the thunderstorms that rolled through here this week.  Just last night, the t-storms knocked limbs off several trees across my neighborhood, although none fell on my property and no power lives were hit.

No credible source has claimed that Idalia was caused by climate change, but climate change and the associated warmer ocean temperatures are responsible for the increase in the frequency of hurricanes and the increased intensity of the hurricanes.  

Just as no single weather event can be blamed on climate change, no single death can be attributed to climate change either. Yet a Republican presidential candidate is going around stating that more deaths have occurred because of bad climate change policy than due to climate change itself, which he further still claims is a "hoax."

No one single death can be attributed to climate change, but the increasing number of excess hurricane-related deaths has been increasing over the years.  A recent study of excess hurricane-related deaths between 1988 and 2019 found that about 70% of the deaths occurred more recently, from 2004 to 2019. Hurricane Katrina in 2004 and Hurricanes Harvey and Irma in 2017 contributed significantly to the total number of excess deaths.  The ongoing effect of climate change, which has increased the severity of hurricanes, most likely played a role in the upward number of hurricane-related deaths, although increasing coastal populations in the U.S. are another contributing factor. 

Meanwhile, there sadly aren't that many climate-change policies in the U.S. or elsewhere other than a few lofty goals that haven't yet been achieved.  No one is dying from "bad climate-change policy."

But the claim resonates with conservative voters because it sounds like the other spurious charge that the international response to COVID-19 has done more harm than the virus itself.  While there is some room for agreement that there have been unintended consequences to the covid lockdown (missed education, postponement of other medical procedures, etc.), there have been nearly seven million confirmed deaths worldwide from the virus.  

The response to the pandemic was not worse than the pandemic itself, although many conservatives believe otherwise. From there, it's an easy association that any policy response to any problem is worse than the cause itself.  Therefore, claims like more people dying from climate change policy than from climate change itself feels right to them and are accepted with questioning.  It's consistent with their world view; it fits their mental map, their schema. 

But back here in the so-called consensus reality, let's wish the best for the Floridians and Georgians in the path of Idalia and hope for the best possible outcome.       

Hydrology 101

In 1979, Miller Beer opened a new brewery on the grounds of the former Turner Air Field near Albany, Georgia. A year later, Albany's Radium Springs went dry.  That's why I live in Atlanta today.

Allow me to connect the dots for you.

Back in the 1970s, I was a geology undergrad at Boston University.  This was after the energy crisis and the OPEC embargo of the early '70s. Petroleum companies ruled the geology world and I fully expected that my post-graduation career would involve employment at one oil company or the other, out sitting by a West Texas oil rig logging the cuttings before being moved to some cubicle in Houston or Denver to analyze maps. Corporate recruiters from Exxon and Mobil had already visited campus and some of the best and brightest of the grad students already had contracts to join the companies after graduation.

But the one problem was that I didn't much care for the petroleum geology professor.  It was nothing major - he wasn't a creep or anything and hadn't abused me or any of my fellow students (as far as I knew) but he just seemed to me kind of stuffy and off-putting.  I still took a couple of courses under him, but I much more enjoyed the teaching style and the presence of the professor who taught glacial geology.  

Dr. Caldwell's first name was Dabney but he hated that name - he went by Dee and even his students called him that.  His father was the Georgia writer Erskine Caldwell, author of Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre.  Graduate students advised us undergrads to never talk to him about that. Apparently, after movies were made of Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre, Erskine Caldwell moved to L.A., went Hollywood, divorced Dee's mother, and lost interest in his children.  Dee hated his Dad for that and didn't want to talk about him.  I never brought the subject up with him.

One of the best parts of geological pedagogy is field trips.  Geology is a field science and it's one thing to talk about rocks and formations in the classroom, but one ultimately has to go out and see, touch, and experience them for oneself.  In practical terms, this meant that many weekends in the early autumn and late spring, before and after the cold New England winters covered everything with snow, one prof or the other would pile a bunch of students into one or more of the University's passenger vans and we'd drive off to look at the limestones of upstate New York, granites and other plutonic rocks of New Hampshire, or dinosaur footprints in the Connecticut River Valley.  

In my experience, Dee led the best field trips, usually up to Maine to examine the glacial deposits he had studied for his own doctorate and for his continuing academic research. I learned a lot, but we were also young, 20-something college students, and those academic field trips also involved a lot of exuberant late-night partying, beer drinking, and romantic intrigue. We went to great lengths to hide these extracurricular activities from most of the other professors, and most of the other professors went to great lengths to maintain plausible deniability of the extracurriculars they of course knew were occurring. They'd stay in hotel rooms while we were out camping around roaring bonfires.

But Dee maintained less of a wall separating us from him than did the other profs. Thankfully, he didn't get involved in the romantic intrigue, although his partner was an ex-grad student just a few years out of school herself. But more than a few times, he'd join us for beers around the campfire and knock back swigs of Jack Daniels from the bottle being passed around.  On one particularly raucous night, we all started singing Onward Christian Soldiers, of all things, as Dee led us by a Coleman lantern raised high on a march through the woods.  When we came to a pond, we kept on marching as Dee led us first into knee-deep water, then up to our waist, then up to our shoulders.  We kept on singing until Dee was literally in over his head and all we could see was the light of his lantern still held aloft.

The petroleum geology professor would never have done that.                       

In addition to glacial geology, Dee also taught hydrogeology - the study of surface- and groundwater. In New England, the plentiful glacial deposits are the principal groundwater aquifers, so the association of the two disciplines is logical. In 1979, the same year Miller was opening its Albany brewery, I signed up for Hydrogeology 101.  

During the first lecture on the first day of the first course in the sequence, Dee told us how lucky we all were to be there. Hydrogeology, while not exactly an exotic study, was still not widely taught at most geology programs but, Dee advised us, water resources will become increasingly scarce and experienced groundwater hydrogeologists will become increasingly in demand.  The Golden Age of Oil Exploration was already coming to a close, he advised, but hydrogeology will be the Next Big Thing.  "In a few years, you may well find yourselves as experienced hydrogeologists at a time when demand for the science is at an all-time peak."

It sounded like a boast and needless self-promotion as we were already there, signed up for the course, but it turns out Dee was right.  

When Radium Springs went dry, many god-fearing residents of Albany, Georgia blamed it on the good Lord's vengence for opening a brewery in the Bible Belt.  They demanded that the brewery be shut down before god's wrath manifested itself in yet more painful ways.  

Politicians were caught in a bind - they didn't want to go up against the big-money interests of the Miller Brewing Company on the one hand but didn't want to appear to be ignoring the will of the more religious of their constituents on the other. So they did what any good politician would do - they commissioned a study of the problem.

The Governor's Accelerated Groundwater Program was initiated in 1980 as a comprehensive study of the state's hydrologic resources and to develop recommendations for proper management thereof.  But it turns out that there weren't a lot of experienced groundwater hydrogeologists in Georgia to study the problem, so a call went out to recruit qualified experts to the Georgia Geological Survey. 

You've already connected the dots, I'm sure, but one day my telephone rang (this was long before the internet and email) and the secretary of BU's Geology Department told me that an alumnus working down in Georgia had called Dee, his old professor, asking about recent graduates he could hire for the Accelerated Groundwater Program. I was teaching high-school Earth Science at the time, not my dream career, and Dee recommended me.  I took the job and moved to Atlanta, and fast forward, here I am, 43 years later, still living in Georgia.    

I worked at the Geological Survey for only three years, but with that experience under my belt, I took a job at an Atlanta-based national engineering and environmental consulting company for whom I worked at sites all across the country for the next 20-odd years.  The last 10 years of my career before retirement were at various smaller firms.  

Dee was correct - groundwater became the dominant field of employment for geologists. Since the late 1980s, the majority of geology graduates were suddenly all hydrology majors, but I was fortunate enough to always have had a few more years of experience in that field than 95% of my colleagues. Those best and brightest grad students who were recruited from grad school by the oil companies found themselves laid off in the1980s. I found myself interviewing them for employment - not the actual BU grads I knew, but similar graduates from other programs who couldn't believe that they were on the applicant side of the desk despite all their petroleum experience and I, a mere hydrogeologist, was on the other.  

"Look, I'll just come out and say it," one once told me in an interview, "the work I did in the oil industry was far more scientific and complicated than anything you do in the environmental field, and any lack of experience on my part in your business won't be a problem for me at all." I didn't hire him, not because of his arrogance or because I was offended by what he said, but because his statement told me that it would be difficult if not impossible to train him in new things.

Anyway, it turns out Radium Springs didn't go dry because of god's wrath or even over-pumping by Miller Brewing.  The Miller Brewery tapped a deeper source, the Clayton-Claibourne Aquifer, than the Principal Artesian Aquifer that fed Radium Springs.  Hydrologic studies showed that the prolonged drought of 1979 and 1980 led to lower water levels in the Principal Artesian Aquifer, and sure enough, once the drought ended, the flow of water returned to the spring.  Ironically, the historic Radium Springs Casino (not a gambling casino, but more of a resort) shut down in 1994 after prolonged rainfall flooded the facility.   

Dee Caldwell passed away in 2006.

A headline article in the New York Times today talked about how groundwater resources are being depleted at alarming levels across the U.S., and how little is being down to manage or preserve our remaining reserves.  The graph up above is from that article. I sat down to write about that, but an old man gets lost in memory and nostalgia and instead I wound up writing this memoir.

The Universal Solar Calendar calls today "Listening," and as I wrote this, I listened to new (2023) releases by the bands Horse Lords, Ratboys, and bar italia, and, of course, the posthumous release by the late jaimie branch. 

The Mountain

Last Friday, August 25, 2023, the third and final album by the late jaimie branch's Fly or Die ensemble was posthumously released.

It's the best record I've heard this year. AOTY.  A masterpiece.  

It's such a goddamn shame that we've lost the jazz voice of a generation with jaimie's passing last year. Listening to the album, titled Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((world war)), I alternate between laughing with joy and crying with grief.

To be clear, the sound of the mountain is not typical of the album or of jaimie's oeuvre, but it's the very uniqueness of the track and the way that it stands out from everything else she's recorded that's emblematic of her music and her career. There's no such thing as a "typical" Fly or Die track.  

RIP, jaimie.  You are missed.   

Idalia

It appears we're going to see a hurricane make landfall on the Gulf Coast this week.

All eyes were on tropical depression Nine dumping rain on East Texas and on Hurricane Franklin out in the Atlantic. It appears now that Franklin will stay offshore and the Gulf Stream will carry it off toward the cooler waters of the North Atlantic.

But suddenly tropical depression Ten popped up out of nowhere in the Carribean, and quickly organized itself into a Tropical Storm, named Idalia.  Current forecasts have it becoming a hurricane by Tuesday night, and making landfall near the Big Bend area of the Florida coast Wednesday morning. It's expected to cross into Georgia later on Wednesday and cross the state to the southeast of Atlanta.

Too close for comfort, as these predicted paths can change on a daily or even hourly basis. 

Meanwhile, it's hot here in Atlanta.  The intense heat waves that have plagued so much of the U.S. have made a second appearance here this summer.  The forecast high is 97°F, but with the humidity it will feel like 102°.

Ninety-five more days left to the 2023 hurricane season.

From the Sports Desk

For their college football preview, most blogs choose a picture of their favorite team or maybe that team's logo. Here at WDW, the Sports Desk does things a little differently. Instead of a photograph of a quarterback throwing a pass or some hype meme, we present a nearly indecipherable chart showing the status of college football's imaginary Championship Belts.

For the uninformed, the belts don't actually exist and nearly no one else seems to track them, but the Sports Desk likes to imagine that each year, a Championship Belt is minted for that year's national champ.  Like in boxing, the champion holds the belt until the team is beaten by someone else, and then the winner takes the belt.

For example, on January 13, 2015, Ohio State beat Oregon, 42-20, to win the National Championship for the 2014 season. By Belt Theory, Ohio State thereby came to own the 2014 National Championship Belt. The Buckeyes defended the belt for the first 10 games of the 2015 season, but then lost to Michigan State, 17-14, on November 21, 2015. As a result, the Spartans took their belt away, and held it for the next two games, until losing to Alabama, 38-0, in the Cotton Bowl.         

Not quite two weeks later, Alabama won the 2015 National Championship Game, beating Clemson, 45-40, on January 11, 2016. Therefore, a new Championship Belt was crafted for Alabama, and they unified their new belt with the 2014 National Championship Belt, formerly owned by Ohio State.

Alabama kept the unified belts by going undefeated through the 2016 season until losing to Clemson in the 2016 National Championship Game. As a result, Clemson took the unified 2014 and 2015 belts away from Alabama and unified them with their newly crafted 2016 National Championship Belt.

There's two ways of looking at the Championship Belts. One is the way we've been discussing, with a new belt crafted each year for that year's National Champion. But another way of looking at it is to imagine that there's only one true belt, which was awarded to the winner of the very first college football game ever played, and it's that belt that gets taken away and passed around by successive winners. 

Folks with more patience and research skills than I have traced the One True Belt back to the winner of the November 6, 1869 Rutgers-Princeton game.  Rutgers won, 6-4, and the game probably more resembled what we would call "soccer" today than American football (hence the unusual score). For example, the game was played with a round ball and players weren't allowed to use their hands. Nevertheless, it's still considered the first college football game, but Rutgers didn't hold onto the Championship Belt for long, losing to Princeton, 8-0, the next weekend.

In any event, the One True Belt was won and lost by a number of successive teams over the next century-and-a-half, and on October 22, 2016, Albama won it away from Texas A&M.  Since at that time, Alabama was holding Ohio State's former 2014 Championship Belt and their own 2015 belt, the Crimson Tide unified the One True Belt with the two Championship Belts.

So the belt that Clemson won away from Alabama in the 2016 National Championship Game was not only the unified 2014 and 2015 Championship Belts, but also the Holy, Moley Guacamole One True Belt (blessed be its name).

The chart above tracks the National Championship belts each year of the College Football Playoff system.  Unification events, when one team combines their newly crafted Championship Belt with the other belts, are indicated by the blue arrows. The track of the Holy Moley, Guacamole One True Belt (blessed be its name) is shown in yellow.  

At present, the Washington Huskies hold the unified Championship Belts and the HMGOTB, and the Georgia Bulldogs hold their own 2021 and 2022 Championship Belts. Being a Georgia fan, I would love to see the Bulldogs unify their belts with the other Championship Belts and the HMGOTB. But the teams aren't currently scheduled to play each other, although there's an outside chance that may happen in the 2023 Playoffs.  More likely, Washington will lose the game to some other team, and then a third team will take the belts away from them, and so on and so forth until the belt holder faces Georgia.

So the 2023 season starts today (Day of the North Sea according to the Universal Solar Calendar), oddly enough in Dublin, Ireland, where the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame will play the Midshipmen of the U.S. Naval Academy. Notre Dame is favored to win by over 20 points, but I'll be cheering for Navy because I like underdogs and I hate fucking Notre Dame. Don't get me started on the many reasons why.

The Georgia Bulldogs don't begin their season until next weekend.  We Georgia fans are hoping for a three-peat championship - a third belt to unify with the previous two, and hopefully with all the other belts, including the Holy, Moley etc.

What Else Is There To Talk About?

I forced myself to watch the Republican Presidential debate last night. Rather than watch clips and other peoples' comments on the event, I figured I'd see it for myself and form my own conclusions.

The worst persons at the debate last night?  It was clear to me after two hours (two hours of my life I'll never get back) that the worst people at the debate were the Fox audience.

They cheered at the worst lines from the debaters and booed whenever somebody tried to express a near-reasonable opinion.  The crowd reaction was almost an inverse mirror image of my own feelings.  Even Fox News moderator Bret Baier had to turn around at one point and tell the audience to shut the fuck up (not exactly the words he used, but in essence what he said). 

I was appalled by the knee-jerk reactionary audience and I'm depressed by what they indicate for the future of the United States. 

Imagine still claiming in 2023 that climate change is a hoax. Imagine promising to invade Mexico on your very first day as President to thwart the flow of illegal fentanyl coming in from China through other, mostly legal ports of entry.  Imagine vowing to pardon twice-impeached, four-times-indicted ex-president Trump before a trial has even found him guilty, much less presented the evidence against him.

Now imagine the people who would give those statements a standing ovation.     

     

 

Picture Post

 

In Search of Lost Beauty

In Search of Lost Beauty is a 2019 composition by NY-based, Lithuanian-born composer Žibuoklė Martinaitytė. The piece is composed for piano, violin, cello, electronics, and synchronized video projections. 

Martinaitytė is probably my favorite contemporary composer.  Her Hadal Zone came out right around the time that a submersible went missing near the wreck of the Titanic, and her composition captures the intense pressure, darkness, and cold of the extreme depths that the doomed explorers must have encountered (although to be clear the piece was not written about them). Her previous Ex Tenebris Lux was a collection of various compositions written primarily for strings and included a suite, Sielunmaisema, revolving around the four seasons. But it was only today that I discovered In Search of Lost Beauty.

The piece was described by Martinaitytė as "a sequence of audiovisual novellas" on the elusive subject of beauty. The experience of time is slowed down to transport the listener into an alternate dimension where commonly apprehended reality is inverted into an otherworldly mystique of reflections and shadows. The full composition consists of 10 sections, which are woven into one structural entity:

I. Prelude (Subliminal)

II. Blue

III. Ephemeral

IV. Longings in Perpetual Motion

V. Interlude (Transient)

VI. Serenity Diptychs

VII. Shadows of Memories

VIII. Interlude (Fleeting)

IX. Inhabited Silences

X. Postlude (Evanescent)

You can watch a performance of IX. Inhabited Silences from October 26, 2019 at the Dresher Ensemble Studio in San Francisco on YouTube (Karen Bentley Pollick, violin, Monica Scott, cello, and Marja Mutru, piano). I highly recommend checking it out. 

The full In Search of Lost Beauty is available at Bandcamp and can be streamed on Spotify.

Annals of Climate Change

Hurricane Hilary was downgraded to a tropical storm before making landfall in Southern California yesterday, but it still dropped a shitload of rain all over the southwest.  To make things more interesting, God, that sadistic bastard, also hit Cali with a Magnitude 5.5 earthquake even while Hilary was making life miserable.  Nice going, guy.

The Canary Islands have been in drought for most of the past few years, like most of mainland Spain, because of changing weather patterns impacted by climate change. Wildfires on the island of Tenerife have forced the evacuation of 26,000 people. Wildfires are also still burning on Greece and in Italy, too.   

Meanwhile, though, things are getting busy in the Atlantic basin, although no real or imminent dangers are currently present. 

Nine is expected to become at least a tropical storm, but is expected to make landfall in Texas so who cares?

Tropical Storm Franklin is forecast to become a full-blown hurricane by this weekend, but after crossing Hispaniola is expected to turn east toward the central Atlantic.  Franklins are sneaky bastards, though, so we need to keep an eye on this one.

Tropical Storm Gert isn't expected to develop into anything much and in fact could dissipate at any time. 

Similarly, Tropical Storm Emily is now but a remnant, and the National Hurricane Center has announced it won't issue any more advisories on it, because fuck Emily, that's why. 

Showers and thunderstorms over the portion of the eastern Atlantic denoted by the orange X above are associated with a tropical wave. Environmental conditions appear generally conducive for gradual development of this system, and a tropical depression is likely to form later this week while it moves west-northwestward across the eastern Atlantic and towards my house in Atlanta, Georgia.  

This video is for those of us who have trouble getting up on Sunday morning and going to church. Instead, we can just listen to this 12-bar blues from Howlin' Wolf and when the song's over, just get up and go on with our week.

Life is the place where we can fully realize our potential. Being completely and vividly present in living and dying, in caring and being cared for, and in loving and receiving love, the rich details of our lives and the lives of others manifest who we actually are. 

Love and death, then, are experiences of discovery.

Hurricanes

I have lived on this blue planet for 69 years now, and I've never seen a hurricane make landfall in California. You'd have to be 84 years old to have seen a Cali landfall - the last time it happened was in 1939. But this year of extreme, record-setting heat has already seen more than its fair share of oddities, including a hurricane off the coast of Maui that fanned wildfires there and tragically led to the death of over 100 people.  

Hurricane Hilary will dump up to six inches of rain, with isolated amounts up to 10 inches, across portions of Baja California, SoCal, and Southern Nevada, which could lead to “significant and rare impacts,” according to forecasters. A flood watch has been issued for Los Angeles and Ventura Counties, including Catalina Island. In Nevada, it's going to rain in Winnemucca. It never rains in Winnemucca. Lake Winnemucca dried up in 1939, coincidentally the same year a hurricane last made landfall in California.

Meanwhile, southern New England was under flash flood and tornado warnings as severe storms swept through the region today.

The trend of increasing large, unusual, and dangerous weather events is a direct result of human-induced climate change, and if you still don't understand that at this point, you're fucking stupid and there's nothing I can do to help you. 

Over in the Atlantic, though, this year's Hurricane Season has been surprisingly calm, especially considering the record-setting sea and air temperatures measured this summer. This is a good thing - I don't want or need more hurricanes blowing over my Atlanta home. But things are heating up, so to speak, and suddenly the National Hurricane Center is tracking no less than four tropical disturbances at various stages of progress in their journey across the ocean.  

The storm closest to the North American shore, that one just north of Haiti, is expected to move westward and approach the western Gulf of Mexico coastline by the middle of next week, but the storm is expected to have a low chance of becoming a hurricane. 

It's still unlikely, but the next storm further east has a slightly better chance of forming into a tropical storm or a hurricane.  That system is forecast to move generally west-northwestward into the northeastern Caribbean.

It's the two storms in the middle/eastern Atlantic that have me the most concerned.  The one furthest east, a few hundred miles west of the Cabo Verde Islands, has the best chance for additional development.  It's likely to turn into a tropical depression over the weekend while it continues to move toward the northwest across the eastern Atlantic. By early next week, upper-level winds over the system are forecast to increase.

No single one of these storms currently pose a significant threat, but the sheer number of them suggests that something's brewing - the high temperatures Earth is experiencing this year is likely to produce something nasty in the Atlantic before the 2023 Hurricane Season is over.

What's Going On?

Hats off and a pat on the back if you understand why this 2023 blog post features a 1992 song used in the soundtrack of a 2015 Netflix science-fiction series. 

If you understand why this 2023 blog post features a 1992 song used in the soundtrack of a 2015 Netflix science-fiction series, would you please be so kind as to explain it to me?

Georgia v. Trump

Yesterday, August 14, 2023, "The Three Faces" according to the Universal Solar Calendar, the great and sovereign state of Georgia indicted former "president" Donald J. Trump, Agent Orange himself, and 18 others for multiple crimes committed while trying to steal the 2020 presidential election. A special-purpose grand jury made up of my fellow Fulton County citizens examined evidence and heard from 75 witnesses in the case and issued a Final Report in January. A regular grand jury considered the Final Report of the special grand jury and brought the indictments as recommended.  The defendants have until noon on August 25 to surrender to authorities.

“Trump and the other Defendants charged in the Indictment refused to accept that Trump lost,” the indictment reads, "and they knowingly and willfully joined a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump. That conspiracy contained a common plan and purpose to commit two or more acts of racketeering activity in Fulton County, Georgia, elsewhere in the State of Georgia, and in other states.” 

The indictment alleges that those involved in the “criminal enterprise” 

“constituted a criminal organization whose members and associates engaged in various related criminal activities including, but not limited to, false statements and writings, impersonating a public officer, forgery, filing false documents, influencing witnesses, computer theft, computer trespass, computer invasion of privacy, conspiracy to defraud the state, acts involving theft, and perjury.” 

While claiming to investigate voter fraud, they allegedly committed election fraud. 

That effort has run them afoul of a number of laws, including the Georgia Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, which is broader than federal anti-racketeering laws and carries a mandatory five-year prison term. There is no probation for Georgia RICO convictions.

I voted in Georgia back in 2020 and not for Trump, but then he and his co-conspirators tried to get Georgia to agree to manufacture fake votes to overturn the vote that I cast. When that failed, they next tried to convince Georgia legislators to just ignore the will of the people and send fake Electors to Washington to misrepresent my vote. I took that personally. Try to deny me my civil rights and try to discount my vote and I will do everything legally in my power to fuck you up, make sure you never take the oath of office again, and serve time and hopefully die in a jail cell somewhere, lonely and unloved. 

Trump allies who operated out of the White House include lawyers Rudy Giuliani (who recently conceded in a lawsuit that he lied about Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss having stuffed ballot boxes), John Eastman, Kenneth Chesebro, Jeffrey Clark, Jenna Ellis, and Trump’s White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. 

Those operating in Georgia to push the scheme to manufacture a false slate of Trump electors to challenge the real Electors include lawyer Ray Stallings Smith III, who tried to sell the idea to legislators; Philadelphia political operative Michael Roman; former Georgia Republican chair David James Shafer, who led the fake elector meeting; and Shawn Micah Tresher Still, currently a state senator, who was the secretary of the fake elector meeting. 

Those trying to intimidate election worker and witness Ruby Freeman include Stephen Cliffgard Lee, a police chaplain from Illinois, Harrison William Prescott Floyd, executive director of Black Voices for Trump, and Trevian C. Kutti, a publicist for Kanye West. 

Those who allegedly stole data from the voting systems in Coffee County down in South Georgia and spread it across the country in an attempt to somehow prove fraud include Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, former Coffee County Republican Committee chair Cathleen Alston Latham, businessman Scott Graham Hall, and Coffee County election director Misty Hampton (also known as Emily Misty Hayes).  

Predictably, Trump has called the case against him "partisan" and launched a series of attacks against Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. In response, Willis told a reporter, “I make decisions in this office based on the facts and the law. The law is completely nonpartisan. That's how decisions are made in every case. To date, this office has indicted, since I’ve been sitting as the district attorney, over 12,000 cases. This is the eleventh RICO indictment. We follow the same process. We look at the facts. We look at the law. And we bring charges."

Georgia was instrumental in assuring that Joe Biden got the Electoral votes needed to win the Presidency.  Georgia assured Democratic control of the Senate by sending two fine Senators, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, to Washington.  Despite jackasses like Mary Tyler Greene and Andrew Clyde, Georgia has sent also progressive Congressmen like the late, great John Lewis to D.C. And now Georgia has issued no-nonsense, hang-them-all-and-let-God sort-them-out-later indictments against the entire Trump enterprise. I couldn't be prouder of my home state.

You're welcome.

Meanwhile, In Kyrat

We turned this forum over to the Gaming Desk one day last week and gave it full reign to rant and rave for as long as it took to get it all out of its system, and then thought that we had heard the last from them for a while.  Imagine our surprise when they turned back up today wanting to talk about their latest accomplishment.

Apparently, I finally completed the game Far Cry 4 last night. Why is thar a big deal?, you might ask. It's because I started the game in 2017.

Back then, I was still something of a novice at video games.  Sure, I had spent a lot of hours playing Minecraft, and had completed Fallout 4 and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, but that was it. I had found Far Cry 4 much more challenging than those other games.

The challenge, as I later found out, was not only my own inexperience with First-Person Shooter games, but also my laptop computer.  I had bought the laptop the year before as a powerful home computer, but not necessarily as a gaming computer. But I later learned that it was robust enough to play some video games, although not, as it turned out, very well.  I couldn't play some modern games due to low frame rates or frequent crashes, but I also had performance issues with some other games that otherwise appeared to play well.  

My underpowered laptop tried valiantly to keep up with those games and made up for the low frame rate by having my protagonist move at a slightly slower rate.  It wasn't always noticeable, but I found that when I needed to move quickly to avoid some danger, my sluggish movement would result in my character's untimely death. On most occasions, however, I could compensate for this on the second or third try by anticipating the danger and moving out of the way much earlier.

In Far Cry 4, vehicles (cars, trucks, ATVs, jet skis, choppers, etc.) wouldn't respond to the controls properly, and would run off the road or spin out of control.  I would lose control of their speed and steering and be unable to get them back under control again.  

Two particular missions frustrated me in Far Cry 4.  In the Willis mission at the Kyrat Airport, I couldn't catch up to a departing airplane in time to advance to the next scene.  The ATV I was supposed to ride down the runway would veer wildly off course, or if I managed to control that vehicle, once midair I couldn't use the wingsuit to reach the departing plane.  It was so frustrating, and I'd play the mission over and over again without success. I looked for hints and clues on line and watched YouTube videos of people successfully completing the mission, but no one even hinted at that task being a particularly difficult one. By sheer dumb luck, I somehow succeeded to finally catch the plane, but not before first almost rage quitting the game in frustration.  

I did wind up rage quitting the game, though, during the Yuma boss fight, relatively near the end of the game (Yuma is the third of four bosses the game requires you to beat). The fight is in some sort of supernatural arena, and equipped with only a bow and arrow, you're supposed to fight off spectral archers who can disappear as you aim at them and tigers that can similarly vanish in a puff of smoke. Your target, though, is Kalinag, a mythological hero who's also shooting arrows back at you and whom you not only have to hit with an arrow, despite the archers and tigers and all, but then finish off with a knife.  Because my atavar moved just a little slower due to my underpowered laptop, this was all very difficult but after countless attempts I finally succeeded, only to find I was still in the arena fighting the same foes.  

It turns out you have to finish off Kalinag with the knife three times to complete the mission, and if you die during the second or third attempt, you have to start all over again. So I did, but the task didn't get any easier and I'd usually die before even the first of the three victories. I was screaming at the computer screen ("Oh for Christ's sakes!" and "Goddamnit!") before finally abandoning the mission. But since you can't advance the game without beating that boss, abandoning the mission meant quitting the game and after several days and nights stuck in that godforsaken arena, I finally rage quit the mission and moved on to the next game without completing Far Cry 4.  

Hey, games are supposed to be fun and if you're not having fun, I reasoned, move on to another.

Since then, I've completed numerous other video games, including Far Cry 3, 5, and 6, Far Cry: New Dawn, and Far Cry: Primal. Not incidentally, I also finally got a proper gaming PC.

Last month, with no new games sitting in my queue, I started a replay of the Far Cry series, starting with 3 and moving my way up in numerical order. I admit, though, to being intimidated by 4 because of my prior experience, despite my success with the other Far Cry titles.  But with my new gaming PC, the game was much more manageable than on my old laptop and vehicles performed properly without wildly spinning out of control. I even got through the Kyrat Airport mission just fine,catching the plane on my very first try.            

The Yuma boss fight was still a challenge, but it's supposed to be - boss fights by definition are challenging.  I died a couple of times trying to take down the hero the first time, not to mention the second or third tries.  But I was able to complete the mission within about 15 minutes, not hours and hours over several days and nights like before. 

After the Yuma fight, the rest of the game seemed like a breeze, even the ultimate boss fight against the game's main antagonist. I would say that maybe 5% of my improvement of the second playthrough of Far Cry 4 was due to my familiarity with the game from my first attempt (fewer surprises), and 25%  was due to practice and experience with other FPS games, including the other Far Cry titles.  But the remaining 70% of my improvement was due to finally having the proper hardware on which to run the game, and not being stuck in some slowed-down timeframe in which I physically couldn't react in time.

So with 4 finally under my belt, it's time to move on to Far Cry 5 again, possibly my favorite game of the series.     

Rocks

Caetano Veloso is a legend of Brazilian music and a major figure in 60s and 70s samba and tropicalia. Ever the innovator, after recording numerous MPB ("popular music of Brazil") albums through the 70s, 80s, and 90s, he ditched the traditional samba band and started recording with a bona fide rock band in the 2000s. Here he is at age 65 in 2007 performing the appropriately named Rocks from his LP, Cê, like he was hanging out with Os Mutantes again back in 1969.

Fire!

Today is supposedly Saturday, August 12, 2023.  Rustle of the Prey, according to the Universal Solar Calendar. It is only my second day on an ACE inhibitor, and already my blood pressure has fallen from Stage 2 hypertension to merely "elevated."

As you know, the Hawai'ian Island of Maui suffered from devastating wildfires this week. How is the far right dealing with the wildfires, the 110° heat waves, flooding, and other climate catastrophes?  Glad you asked. By releasing a 950-page plan for the next Republican president to gut the EPA, halt the conversion to clean energy and electric cars, and burn more fossil fuels, that's how.  Great. What could go wrong with that plan?

Regarding Maui, some are arguing that it's not climate change but weather or arson that's to blame - climate change doesn't start wildfires. It's been proposed that the fires were caused by climate activists trying to fake the risks it poses to us.  Or by over-zealous environmentalists trying to clear land for wind turbines or lithium mining.

They are right on one point - climate change doesn't start wildfires. Rather, it intensifies them, increasing the area they burn and making them much more dangerous.

Imagine someone tosses a match into a pile of relatively green, wet wood. What happens? Not much. Now, imagine they toss that same match into a pile of bone-dry kindling. What happens? It sets off an inferno.

What determines the condition of the wood pile? Increasingly, it's climate change. But not to get lost in the metaphor, we're talking about grasslands, forests, and other ecosystems here, not literal piles of wood.

A 2016 study found climate change enhanced the drying of organic matter and doubled the number of large fires between 1984 and 2015offsite link in the western United States. A 2021 study supported by NOAA concluded that climate change has been the main driver of the increase in fires in the western United States.

Research also shows that changes in climate create warmer, drier conditions, leading to longer and more active fire seasons. Increases in temperatures and the thirst of the atmosphere due to human--caused climate change have increased aridity of forest fuels during the fire season. These drivers were found to be responsible for over half the observed decrease in the moisture content of fuels in western U.S. forests from 1979 to 2015, and the doubling of forest fire burned area over the period 1984–2015. 

For much of the Western U.S., projections show that an average annual 1° C temperature increase would increase the median burned area per year by as much as 600 % in some types of forests. Modeling suggests increased fire risk and longer fire seasons in the Southeastern U.S., with at least a 30 percent increase from 2011 in the area burned by lightning-ignited wildfire by 2060.

Today, the National Weather Service issued an Excessive Heat Advisory of moderate severity ("possible threat to life or property") for portions of northern and western Georgia, including the Atlanta metro area. The advisory warns of heat index values up to 110° through the weekend and early next week. So far this summer, Georgia has managed to avoid the extreme heat that's gripped much of the rest of the continent, if not the world.  It's been hot, but seasonably so - August in Georgia hot, but now walking-on-the-Sun hot. But those days of relatively seasonal temperatures seem to be at an end with this Excessive Heat Advisory.  

Picture Post

Annals of Medicine, Part II: Here Come the Pharmaceuticals

Last month, I wound up in the Emergency Room for what the doctors claim was a UTI.

Now, as a general rule, I don't think it's a good idea to share one's medical information on line.  But for the record, I don't think it was a UTI that sent me to the ER. I don't disagree with the lab results and the elevated levels of white-blood cells detected, but I don't think it was a UTI that caused the intense cramping, the bone and muscle aches, and the dry heaving (intense nausea without actual vomiting) that I experienced before going to the hospital. I may also have had a UTI, but I suspect it was something else that was causing my symptoms.

If I die a month from now from, say, stomach cancer, look back at this post and say, yep, he knew there was something wrong.  

But I don't know what.

During my follow-up visit to the doctor after my ER adventures, he expressed concern about my high blood pressure and told me to buy a home monitor and record my blood pressure every morning for two weeks. 

Surprisingly, I complied with his request. Stage II hypertension. After I sent him the monitoring results, he responded with a 90-day prescription to an ACE inhibitor. 

I managed to live for 69 years and a couple of weeks without needing any long-term prescription drugs.  When doctors and health insurers asked me to list the medications to which I prescribed, they seemed not be believe me when I told them "none." 

But those days are gone.  Now I'm old and need an ACE inhibitor. 

I may need more than that.  I don't think it was high-blood pressure that caused the pain and nausea that sent me to the ER any more than I think it was a UTI, so we'll see where all this goes. 

Impermanence is swift.

    

The Gaming Desk Again

The other desks are getting impatient with the Gaming Desk for taking so long to catch us up on all the video games completed this year.  So far, it's taken three posts over two months to tell us that we've completed A Plague Tale: Innocence and A Plague Tale: Requiem, Tomb Raider (2013) and Rise of the Tomb Raider, and God of War. 

So let's wrap this up.  We've also completed Borderlands 3, Dying Light, and Watch Dogs.   

Borderlands 3 was an okay experience, not as good as Borderlands 2 but far better than Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel. The gameplay and action of 3 were very similar to that of 2, which is a good thing, and many characters from 2 reappeared in 3. But those reappearances were more like cameos to remind you of the earlier game, and their quests were generally not related to the main story. I've played better sequels to other games and I've also played worse.  If you liked Borderlands 2 you won't dislike Borderlands 3, but there's nothing in 3 to change your mind if you didn't like 2, and there's nothing in 3 to make you like the franchise more.

Dying Light is a zombie game set in a fictional Middle East city (I got strong Beirut vibes).  The game was more than adequate, and the story line and the gameplay were both okay.  But what I really liked about the game was the map.  The detail in the city was outstanding, and the city was complex and busy enough that it never felt familiar - you were never quite sure of exactly where you were and the city never seemed overly familiar, even after hours and hours of gameplay.  Plus, unlike most other games in urban settings, most of the buildings weren't simply empty facades that you couldn't enter, but almost every building, house, store and business had an explorable interior. Maybe the entrance wasn't a ground-level door - in the zombie apocalypse, many owners boarded up street-level windows and doors - but you could find terraces, rooftop doors, and upper-level windows which allowed access to almost every building. And once inside, you could find tools, supplies, and weapons, as well as hungry zombies ready to kill you.  What's more, well into the game, well past the half-way mark and after a quest that has you battling through the maze of a subterranean sewer, a whole new area of the city opens to you, the New City, much more affluent (and challenging) than the slums of the first half of the game. I liked the game, not because of the story or characters, but because of the parkour-style rooftop travel and the exploration of a richly detailed city. I haven't played the sequel (Dying Light 2: Stay Human) yet, but it's just a matter of time.   

Watch Dogs can be summarized as a cyberpunk version of Grand Theft Auto.  Like Dying Light, the best aspect of the game was the setting - an expansive and detailed simulation of the City of Chicago. Exploration of the city and detailed info about Chicago landmarks and history made the game interesting, much more so than the mostly unlikable characters and pedestrian storyline. The side quests - which are scattered all over the city - are completely ignorable mini-games that look and feel like 1990s arcade games, totally out of sync visually and ludically with the rest of the game.  Unfortunately, it must be mentioned that the worst aspect of the game, a major deterrent to enjoyment of the game, was the car-driving mechanics.  Cars were simply unmanageable - the simplest turn would cause a car to spin wildly out of control, to crash into buildings or other cars, or fall apart in a wreck to the point where they couldn't be used. Worse yet, police cars and enemies would work just fine, cutting you off with hairpin turns at high speeds, appearing out of nowhere, and pinning your car to a complete stop with PIT maneuvers. And in a Grand Theft Auto-style game, car chases and escapes were unavoidable and integral parts of a lot of the main quests. There was no avoiding them, and they simply ruined the game for me. I managed to complete the game, including the near-impossible chases and escapes, but I wouldn't have even bothered if it weren't for the great Chicago setting and my love of in-game exploration.

So that's it - I'm all caught up now.  Currently, I'm replaying the Far Cry series, from Far Cry 3 to Far Cry 6.  I've completed 3 (my favorite in the series) and am about three-quarters through 4. If I stick with my plans, I will also play Far Cry Primal and Far Cry New Dawn, two off-shoots of the main series of games.    

After that - who knows? The completionist in me makes me think I may play Dying Light 2 and even Watch Dogs 2 next, but it remains to be seen.                   

Portrait of a Typical Georgia Resident According to AI (aka "Cheap Prediction")

If things feel a bit unsettled these days, it may be due to the unprecedented treachery and perfidy of former president Trump, because of changes in the U.S. economy, because of turmoil brought on by climate change, because of recent outbreaks of malaria and leprosy in Florida, because of the breakup and reorganization of the traditional college football conferences (Stanford to the Atlantic Coast Conference?), and because of the global power realignment initiated by Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Anytime You’re Reading Something About AI, Replace the Term “Artificial Intelligence” In Your Mind With “Cheap Prediction.”

I saw a performance of visual artist Sue C's work during guitarist Ava Mendoza's set at Big Ears earlier this year.

I've seen Negativland in Albany, NY back in the early 90s and at Bumbershoot in 2012 (or maybe 2013).

Im sad to admit that I missed their tour together in 2021.

Giraffes are the only mammal that can't jump.

This Is Not Normal

A U.S. President has been federally indicted for treason.

Global average daily sea-surface temperatures (SST) hit 69.72° F this week, breaking the record reached in 2016.

A buoy at Manatee Bay in Florida hit 101.1° F last week. The night before, that buoy showed an online reading of 100.2° F. For comparison, most hot tubs operate at temperatures between 100-102° F. 

Due to climate change, the Earth’s oceans are changing color and the deep blue sea is becoming steadily greener over time.

Mass coral bleaching currently happening throughout the Florida Keys is the most severe in the state’s history. Divers are trying to rescue coral by moving it into tanks on land. 

Scorching heat, fires, floods, tornadoes, and hailstorms driven by climate change have disrupted plans of travelers around the world, and summer vacations may become a thing of the past.

It took 15 votes to pick a speaker of the House this year, and a physical fight broke out on the floor of Congress during the protracted process.

A 6-year-old in Virginia shot his teacher with his mom's gun.

The Mega Millions jackpot reached over $1 billion.

Since May 2, the film and television industries have reached a virtual standstill due to a series of strikes by the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild.

Gov. Ron DeSantis od Florida used the word "woke" five times in 19 seconds last year. Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, speaks of a “woke self-loathing” that has swept the nation. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina found himself backpedaling furiously after declaring that “‘woke supremacy’ is as bad as white supremacy.”

Due to the allure of television revenues, there are only four football teams left in the PAC-12.

This is not normal.

Now in the 70th year of my existence, I'm old. I've seen a lot of things (I've seen some shit, man!). I've lived through Nixon and Watergate, Reagan and Contragate. I've seen Secretary of State Colin Powell whip out what he claimed was a vial full of anthrax at a UN Security Council meeting. I've seen space shuttles explode and I've seen Team USA beat the USSR in Olympic ice hockey. I've survived a global pandemic.

But I never thought I'd see a U.S. President federally indicted for treason.

These are historic times.  This is not normal.  I haven't commented on this too much because the news is already so saturated with coverage and there's far better commentary available, well, everywhere, but all of this shouldn't go with acknowledgement. 

Remember 1973, when newspapers across the country banned the comic strip Doonesbury because a character in one strip declared former Attorney General John Mitchel "guilty" of Watergate crimes before the trial was complete? Okay, he declared "guilty" with a little, um, exuberance, but still, so-called "cancel culture" was already alive and well way back then.  

Trump's trial hasn't even started yet, but I'm ready to declare him "Guilty! Guilty, guilty, guilty!" now. Hang the treacherous motherfucker.   

  

 

Pascagoula

According to bombshell reporting by The Guardian and ProPublica, the US EPA recently approved production of new alternative fuels that are so carcenogenic they could cause cancer to nearly everyone exposed to their exhaust.

A headline like that is so incredible that it invites disbelief.  Why would EPA approve something so deadly? Even in its darkest, Reagan and Trump years, the EPA wouldn't allow almost certain additional cancer deaths. So why now in the theoretically reinvigorated EPA of the Biden Administration?

Development of the new fuels, designated for boats and planes, is part of a program to develop new “climate-friendly” alternatives to petroleum-based fuels. The new fuels, to be produced at a Chevron refinery in Pascagoula, Mississippi, will be made from recycled plastics.  Could the EPA have ignored the cancer risk just so they could say they approved a new alternative fuel made from recycled plastic?

Full disclosure: alert readers may recall that I've consulted with Chevon at their Pascagula refinery back in 2005. My work there was not related to development or production of the new alternative fuels, but with management and long-term care of their on-site waste-management and -disposal units. I spent most of the summer of 2005 at the refinery until my work was cut short by Hurricane Katrina, and in the course of that summer, developed personal friendships with many of the refinery workers and managers. But after the project finally ended, those friendships and relationships came to amicable ends as we all went about our separate lives. 

But back to the question at hand - why would EPA approve production of such carcenogenic fuels?  The cancer risk was based on EPA's own assessment and calculations, and in a statement, the Agency claimed they "considered the full range of values described in the risk assessment to develop its risk management approach for these” fuels. However, the statement also claimed that the cancer-risk estimates were “extremely unlikely and reported with high uncertainty.” 

Because it used conservative assumptions when modeling, EPA claimed it had significantly overestimated the cancer risks posed by both the jet and marine fuels. The agency assumed, for instance, that every plane at an airport would be idling on a runway burning an entire tank of fuel, that the cancer-causing components would be present in the exhaust, and that residents nearby would breathe that exhaust every day over their lifetime.

The latter assumption of life-long exposure is standard for chemical risk assessments.  In fact, the cancer calculations are generally expressed in terms of "additional lifetime cancer risks."  The goal is to limit that lifetime risk to one in a million (1:1,000,000).  The calculated lifetime cancer risk of the new fuel products is 1.3:1, meaning every person exposed to it over the course of a full lifetime would be expected to get cancer.

If one were to ignore the conservative assumptions common in risk assessments, such as a complete exposure pathway and lifetime duration of that exposure, almost any chemical could be deemed non-carcenogenic, if not non-harmful. For example, when performing risk assessments to calculate acceptable concentrations of pollutants in groundwater, I was forced by EPA and the states to make the unrealistic assumption that residents drank two liters of impacted groundwater each day over 70 years, as if they didn't supplement their drinking-water requirements with bottled water or other drinks. I had to further assume they didn't move to a different residence with a different source of water from the day they were born until their 70th birthday, and that the concentration of the pollutants in that drinking water didn't change over the course of those 70 years.  

If I were allowed to assume that people drank only half of their 2 liters of water each day from their own wells (which also assumes that their tap water isn't from a municipal source), that they only resided at their homes for, say, 25 years, and that concentrations of the contaminants would naturally dissipate over time due to dilution, almost any concentration of most chemicals would be well within the 1:1,000,000 threshold.  There wouldn't be a need to clean up most of the groundwater contamination in the U.S. 

But that would neither be "safe" nor within regulatory thresholds of acceptable risks.  The conservative assumptions are added to the risk assessment to account for the uncertainties inherent in estimating carcenogenic risk.

So the real question is why the EPA is willing to ignore the conservative assumptions in the risk assessment for these "climate-friendly" alternative fuels but not in other cases. Are the climate benefits of the alternative fuels great enough to outweigh the risks of those exposed to the fuels themselves? Is it acceptable to allow some people to develop additional cancers so that the greater population can enjoy a better climate? Or is it a policy issue - are the political pressures to develop alternative fuels so great that the EPA is willing to ignore health concerns?

These are the real questions that aren't being discussed.