Erin

Severe Weather and Other Disasters

It has been a minute.

We are all the way up to the letter “E” without much of interest happening in the Atlantic Hurricane Basin, but we now have Erin.

Erin is a tropical storm but is expected to become a hurricane, and possibly a major hurricane.

It is way to early to say with much certainty, but mot models have Erin trending north of the leeward and windward islands, then curving north. Some of the northward tracks have the storm dissipating in the north atlantic, but most have it running into something, but probably as a degrades storm. New England and Eastern Canada are the most common target if it goes anywhere near land.

But there are some models that leave us hanging, and the chance of the storm entering the Caribbean or grazing the Carolina are not zero. Like this:

It’s the philosophy, stupid!

Uncategorized

It is the philosophy, not the method.

Consider this simple relationship:

Philosophy —> Strategy —> Tactics

Before the philosophers in the forum go all Socretean, let me define what I mean here when I say “philosophy.” I mean it in the vernacular sense, as a world view. Strategy and tactics are how you do things, with strategy being long term planning and tactics being the tools of the moment, the specific moves you make today or this week. Thinkin’ leads to plan which sets the moves. That should be clear.

CONTINUE READING HERE

Now is my chance to tell you I went to Harvard

Uncategorized

The basic fact: I have a PhD from Harvard. Also, a Masters Degree. Oh, and by the way, it is sort of a double PhD because the program I was in combined two different fields, removing only one of several requirements from each (of my choice), but I actually pretty much met all the requirements anyway plus I studied a third field for the equivalent of about a year. I was then on the teaching staff there for a few years, including creating and teaching a class that was the required intro class for all students coming into the highly prestigious and difficult to get into “Mind Brain Behavior” program. And so on and so forth. Oh, and I and colleagues recreated a novel undergraduate program that others copied. Then we created a novel way to run a PhD program, and the lead of that effort later became the Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and deployed our program across Harvard, which then of course caused many other graduate programs around the world to follow since that is what Harvard does — it leads. Etc. Etc. and you are welcome.

CONTINUE READING HERE

On those murdered South African farmers …

Uncategorized

One of the first things anyone in South Africa ever told me was a story involving five or six “guys” (euphemism for a black South African man), a pile of leaves under which several people could hide, a broken down car, and a family of white farmers driving down the road. The story develops with an attempt at killing the white farmers in a surprise ambush, but the farmer, being smarter than the “guys,” manages to run over and kill the black South Africans. This was not told as a story about whites killing black, but rather, a story about an bungled attempt of blacks killing whites. Also, and importantly, the story had happened to the story teller’s close relative, just recently, very nearby where I was told it, and it was told as evidence of the dangers of a post-apartheid uprising among blacks and the overall threat to whites.

CONTINUE READING HERE.

The most beautiful place on the Earth

Uncategorized

There is a place in South Africa where a major river splits into numerous channels, one large, and several small. It does this because there is almost no sediment in the river valley, just rock, as is the case of much of South Africa, so when the river floods, the water just spreads out everywhere and can’t really change the channels around like rivers with soft mushy floodplains do. So, over the course of about 800 million years, the flooding river spread and found ancient “joints” — linear weak spots in the granite — and turned them into channels, and some of those channels have grown quite large.

CONTINUE READING HERE

Bass Fishing In Ameria

Uncategorized

People are perplexed. At times, Trump seems to be an idiot. At other times, people notice that he has pulled off a messaging coup indicating that he must be a genius. Sometimes we hear commentators caught in such a conundrum give up to say “or maybe people around him are really smart,” and this is why his messaging can be really good.

I have an entirely different take on the Donald Trump secret sauce to success.

Trump is a bass fisherman. Allow me to ‘splain.

CLICK HERE

Two Things … about the election and our strategies.

Uncategorized

Eschew the binary thinking
We all know that we are better off not falling into the trap of worshiping the binary. That is of course not always true, there are perfectly good binaries out there. But there is a kind of binary thinking that many fall into that isn’t recognized as binary thinking but is, and it can be damaging to our collective understanding of politics.

Here are two competing alternative statements. One is true, the other is not true (hey, there’s one of those binaries!):

The polling sucked in 2016, but the polling in 2020 was OK.

The polling in 2016 was OK, but the polling in 2020 sucked.

Most people remember the shock and horror of a Trump victory in 2016, and it is very common for people to claim that the polling was bad that year. Meanwhile, the polling in 2020 seemed to suggest a Biden win, and there was a Biden win, so therefore the polling in 2020 was fine.

This is a pernicious falsehood and this kind of falsehood is based on incorrect binary thinking. The binary in this case is who wins and who loses an election (our candidate won vs our candidate lost). This binary ignores very important numbers and changes in numbers underlying a victory or loss.

Here’s some data:

Read the rest here.

What just happened and why?

Uncategorized

From the newsletter of my local Indivisible group:

Our first response to this loss must be humility. We fought, we lost, that is on us regardless of any explanatory framework that might eventually emerge.

Our other first response to this loss must be skepticism wrapped in patience. Nothing in politics is simple. Occam’s razor is a pernicious fallacy and a very poor guide to thinking about complex things. When your favorite football team loses a 34-33 game because the kicker missed the final field goal, that was not a problem with the kicker (exclusively). Single cause and simplistic explanations we hear people tout are more likely to be part of, rather than an explanation for, the problem. Did you know that there is a thing called “the voter files” assembled over weeks following an election and subsequently analyzed by groups like Pew Research? This is the corpus of data from which all experts draw verifiable conclusions about what actually happened during an election. This is a better resource than gut feeling or anecdotal data, and will produce a better analysis than that produced by the usual immediate lamentation and rending of cloth. Have patience.

Having said that, here are some preliminary thoughts on some of the things.

… CONTINUE READING HERE

Trump Is Expected To Be The Next President

Uncategorized

… according the the most respected and usually accurate polling, out today.

The most current, just released, and final New York Times-Sienna poll has just come out and, alarmingly, Harris and Trump are tied at the national level. Normally, if a Democrat is tied at the national level, they will lose the electoral college. That basic math has been true for many cycles, and is almost certainly true today. Polls are not predictions of the future, but rather, samples of very recent thinking and behavior of a sample of voters. But we use them to predict the near term future, and based on this, we will be electing Donald Trump for a second term as President, and we as a nation will choose to end our democracy. Good people will be imprisoned or killed, bad people will rise to global domination, we will all suffer, and we will all ask ourselves, “why did we bring children in to this world.”

Read the rest on my Substack (and subscribe!)

Storm World

Uncategorized

Recent Political Threats and Violence in America: a partial listing

2024 Election

This list is more comprehensive (but still very incomplete) for the last 10 years, but goes back to 2016 in order to capture the spate of threats and violence related to the Trump for President campaign in 2017.

Year Month (may be approximate) Target Perpetrator Nature of threat
2015 1 Barack Obama ISIL linked terrorists Complex Plot to kill President Obama, hijack an airplane, and bomb Coney Island
2016 3 Journalists Donald Trump Trump calls for violent attacks against journalists who do not agree with him, and promises to pay the legal bills of supporters who do so.
2016 11 Sasha Obama South Korean Lee Threat of rape against Sasha Obama, and threats against the US ambassador to South Korea and others.
2017 7 Suspected arrested by the police Donald Trump Trump called for police to physically beat suspects.
2017 7 Journalists Donald Trump Trump tweets produced video in which he violently attacks and beats a CNN reporter.
2017 8 All people in America who are not white males. Donald Trump Trump supported white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, during which white supremacists called for an all white controlled society and killed one counter protester.
2018 9 Barack Obama Cesar Sayoc Mail bomb attempt. Perpetrator sentenced to 20 years in prison.
2018 9 Hillary Clinton Cesar Sayoc Mail bomb attempt. Perpetrator sentenced to 20 years in prison.
2018 9 Robert De Niro Cesar Sayoc Mail bomb attempt. Perpetrator sentenced to 20 years in prison.
2018 11 Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Robert DeNiro, among over 1 dozen prominent Democrats and media outlets Trump Supporters Mailed pipe bombs.
2019 2 Cameraman Ron Skeans Donald Trump supporter BBC cameraman attacked by trump supporter in El Paso.
2019 3 Barack Obama and Maxine Waters Stephen Taubert Convicted of threatening to kill former President Obama and US Representative Maxine Waters
2019 4 Barack Obama Larry Mitchell Hopkins, militia member Led a militia band in training to assassinate President Obama. Sentenced to 21 months.
2019 4 Barack Obama Stephen Taubert Threatened to hang the president. Convicted and sentenced.
2019 6 Migrants Donald Trump Trump calls for the shooting of asylum seekers on the border to “slow them down.”
2020 5 The People, mostly people of color, of Minnesota Donald Trump President Trump threatens to send his military into Minnesota to end protests against police violence against black men.
2023 4 Joe Biden Cody McCormick Pleaded guilty for making death threats against the President.
2023 6 Barack Obama Taylor Taranto, January 6th participant Stalked the Obama home with bomb making materials and weapons
2023 8 Joe Biden and Jon Tester Anthony James Cross Charged with threats to kill the President and the Senator from Montana. Under indictment.
2023 8 Joe Biden Craig Deleeuw Robertson Threatened to kill President Biden. Killed by FBI agents.
2023 8 The Press Steve Bannon and Kash Patgel Former trump advisers openly discuss plans to target, arrest, or assault members of the press, in revenge.
2023 11 Unspecified members of the Biden Administration and Justice Department Monica Crowley and Donald trump Crowley threatened (“they will pay”) these victims and Donald Trump followed up by repeating the threats.
2024 1 Joe Biden and Kamala Harris Russell Wren Threatened violence against the President and Vice President and others
2024 5 Joe Biden Jordan Gee Charged with threatening the life of the President and his Cabinet.
2024 5 Juries, Judges, others Trump Supporters Following comments on his legal troubles by Donald trump, numerous supporters call for hanging or executing judges, juries, etc.
2024 7 Joe Biden Jason Alday Florida man charged with making threats against the President.
2024 7 Joe Biden Jason Patrick Alday Florida man accused of making threats against the President and other federal officials.
2024 7 Donald Trump Thomas Crooks Candidate Trump shot in the ear, would-be assassin Crooks killed by Secret Service CAT team.
2024 8 The Press Donald Trump and unnamed Trump supporter Candidate Trump called the press the “enemy of the people” inciting a supporter in his rally to attempt to physically attack or kill members of the press at the rally.
2024 8 Employee of National Cemetery Employee of Trump Campaign Physical assault
2024 8 Donald Trump Ryan Routh Florida Man Routh found near golf course with an automatic rifle, arrested.
2024 9 Children, families, private citizens at large Trump Campaign and their supporters More than 30 bomb threats and other threats made by likely Trump supporters incited by Trump/Vance comments about Haitian migrants in Springfield Ohio

Litani, a novel by Jess Lourey

Uncategorized

My childhood home had a double-barrel certified scary basement.

The wooden stairs leading down varied in size and smoothness, as they had all been replaced at different times over the century since the house was built. A large area of the concrete floor had been dug up as though something was buried down there. Two large kraken disguised as furnaces lurked in the darker nether regions. I would have to walk past them to get to the hidden chamber in the far corner, inside of which was the tunnel leading to an exit door I’m pretty sure I was the only person aware of. This cellar sat beneath a house occupied by a family (mine) that believed in spirits, poltergeists, and all of that. When WP Blatty’s “The Exorcist” came out, my mother obtained a copy and had all the family members read it so we would know what we were up against. That is when I learned that my cousin, at that time a Catholic Archbishop, had been trained as an Exorcist in the Vatican. The scary cellar, the buried chamber in the backyard, the concrete crypts in the woods near my house, the famous haunted cemetery a few blocks away (Graceland, home of Hattie the Hitchhiker, the ghost of a young woman who died on the corner by my house), all of it, created a world of built in horror for my very young self.

I’m sure that growing up in Scary Movie scarred me, but I grew out of it, and forgot about it, and never really thought about how a childhood spent in a world with some very dark corners could have an effect on an adult. Everything was fine. Then, I discovered Jess Lourey’s novels.

Now don’t’ get me wrong. Not all of Lourey’s novels are born in childhood horror of one kind or another, but several are. Her breakthrough novel Unspeakable Things resonates with me, since as an anthropologist with links to forensics and living in the same region, I have special memories of some of the things that shaped that book. The first novel of hers that I read was Bloodline, which is scary novel to Minnesota what a Coen Brothers’ film is also to Minnesota … is it fiction? Or is it documentary? Fiction? Or documentary? Hard to say.

Litani addresses that thing that happened several years ago that you may remember, documented to varying degrees in true-crime news shows ala 48-Hours, when large numbers of people were accused of abusing large numbers of children, but then it all turned out to be made up. Except it wasn’t actually made up, just gotten wrong by the authorities. It happens that the author’s childhood included this story not just because it was on the news, but because it was in her neighborhood, or at least, her extended lived experience as a kid. If I was an author like Jess Lourey, there would be a novel about my basement. Lourey’s novel (this one and others) is better than my basement.

I can judge how fun it is to read a particular book by how many times I highlight a phrase and note “steal this” (I’m a writer). My copy of Litani is full of those marginal notes. The characters are palpable, the story is intense and driving, and the pages demand turning. There be monsters in Litani. Pick this up and discover how central character, the very young Frankie Jubilee, hopes to slay them.

Litani is a free-standing novel, no need to read it in some order in relation to other novels by this author. But Lourey has some that are in order, and a new series coming out, the second one being available now for pre-order. Check out her work. The Quarry Girls, Unspeakable Things, Litani, the first in the new series, The Taken Ones, and the aforementioned Bloodline stand out. An entirely different lineage (only two books so far) concern young Salem and her best friend and various family members engaged in the modern phase of an ancient battle between forces of good and evil, and those two novels are page turners.

Funny thing about many, maybe most, of Lourey’s books: They may be classified as horror, but horror usually has stuff that isn’t real (like “The Exorcist” — yes, for the record I know that is made up!). Lourey’s novels, as far as I know, do not stray into unreality or science fiction. Somehow, they don’t have to, and somehow, that makes the horror more well done than a lot of other stuff that is out there. You can read these novels at night, but the experience might make you give people you meet during the day the side-eye.