All posts by Greg Laden

Happy Memorial Day: Take Down Your Flag

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There is a story about a young woman named Yara. Yara worked for the city of Franklin in the clerk’s office. During election season, she worked mainly on elections, and during the rest of the year, other things, including staffing the “input line,” the main telephone interface with the public.

One fine June morning she left her house in a quiet cul-de-sac walking distance from City Hall. It was actually her parent’s house; she was living with them until she saved up enough money to move to the Boston area, where she had deferred admission to a graduate program in public policy. Her passion was to work for the government, because she believed public service to be her calling, and she believed in good government. This was something she picked up from her grandfather, who had been a civil servant in Iran; he was an honest government worker, who believed in the elusive concept of democracy. Thus his removal to the united States decades earlier.

Anyway, Yara headed out towards work and as she passed by two side-by-side homes near the corner, the shuddered a bit, thinking about the occupants. They were known to her as MAGA people. One of the residents, a man in his 50s, had one time let himself into Yara’s home while the family was eating dinner, to tell them what the #BLM sign they had just put out on their lawn really means. About how it was racist, and all lives actually matter. And so on.

Read the rest on my substack.

Is global warming speeding up?

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Is global warming speeding up?

There has been some discussion about this recently. For some, if you look at the changes in global surface temperature, it seems like the rate of warming has increased. For others, an apparent uptick in rate of warming is just a normal short term shift in the rate of warming that is offset by prior and future downturns in rate. Regardless of whether there is a change in rate of warming, the question itself brings up a number of sub-questions of interest. Some of these questions are about climate science, some are about how to wrangle and interpret data, and some are about the rhetorical interface between science and the public conversation.

I have some thoughts.

Criminal Justice Framing and Philosophy: The Crime Wave

Substacked

It is campaign season, so let’s talk about how thoughtful politicians running for office might frame their messaging related to criminal justice. (Originally posted here)

Criminal Justice and Public Safety are non-partisan universal issues that affect everyone, but many politicians wrongly define justice in a way that makes no one safer, that solves no serious problems, but that helps candidates that abuse crime statistics to win elections using fear as a motivator for taking people’s votes.

Every single person deserves to feel safe — and actually be safe — in their homes and workplaces, and as they travel about in their daily lives. For this to happen, there must be an ongoing, honest, and accurate assessment of the threats that exist in each environment where we live, work, or recreate. This means carefully and honestly tracking crime waves, and understanding what they are.

Long term, crime in Minnesota is way down since initial European settlement. Frontier mentalities, copious firearms, and other factors fostered a huge crime wave in much of the US, peaking prior to the 1920s. Nationally, the homicide rate peaked at about 10 killings per 100,000 per year, but in the “Wild West,” which included Minnesota, homicides were as common as ten to 15 times that.

That wave ended as the cowboy days waned, over the decades leading up to and including World War 2, and we really haven’t seen crime waves that bad since.

A second national wave in violent crimes including homicide built up in the 1970s and 80s, separating the US from all of the other industrialized nations. This is seen as a result of our nation being awash in poorly regulated firearms, significant economic disparities, and other factors.

Today, our rates of violent crime have dropped significantly, but the factors that support it are still there, so both violent and other crime rates are more likely to rise up in the US than most other places, in short term, often local or regional, waves. The Covid crime wave, largely now abated, was an example of this.

Crime waves are waves, like waves on the water. The largest waves you’ll normally see on a pond or small lake can be measured in inches, while the largest waves you’ll see in an ocean storm can be measured in yards. The US, in terms of criminal violence and other offenses, is like the ocean, compared to other industrialized countries.

The potential range of variation, and the maximum size, of any crime wave is much greater in the US than most other places in the world. This unique threat to life and liberty for every single American is the result of the unique ways in which we’ve treated violence and criminal justice, firearms, and punishment. We are among the most heavily armed populations, we are among the most incarcerated populations, we have a stronger link between racism and violence than most other places, we have a legal system that imposes thought-free sentencing requirements on judges, we foster the sentiments of revenge and rage, we meet violence with violence with the death penalty, and we have a highly militarized police force. These approaches cost money and have not worked as promised. Taxpayers have been duped into supporting a miniature military defense industry that has nothing to do with our national defense. And none of this makes anyone be any safer.

We need good policing, and we need to look at causes of crime even as we attend to consequences. A current example demonstrates this. We are experiencing a mini-crime wave in the theft of certain models of cars that are easy to steal with the use of a readily available technology. Kids — often as young as 11 — have been stealing these cars for joy rides in which the driver can barely see over the wheel. This looks like a crime wave in car theft, but it is such a unique situation that it really should be thought of and addressed separately. In Hennepin County, the County Attorney’s office has been working with municipal police to identify the likely culprits — it is a known subset of kids doing this — in order to approach the families involved. Instead of barging in and laying down criminal charges, the county criminal justice staff are having conversations with families, intervening socially rather than with handcuffs and arraignments. This program started in June 2023, and as of the end of the year, most of the kids for which this intervention happened had stopped breaking the law, and thefts are way down. Nobody’s going to jail, nobody’s going to emergency, the mischief is being managed, and if the car companies do the right thing, maybe it will become harder to for a middle schooler on an errant mission to steal a Kia or a Hyundai.

Thinking. Smarts. Compassion. Understanding. Seeing past the veil of rage through which one sees only retribution. Finding the problem and solving it, instead of reacting to the problem and fumbling through whatever makes one feel good. Justice for all no matter who they are, protection for all members of our society, and the control of crime waves requires a better plan that we are only now starting to see being implemented as a new generation of experts takes the helm. Fund a better police force, a better criminal justice system, and a better prepared and more thoughtful society. That is mid 21st century criminal justice.

My Bear And Man Thing

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Years ago I wrote about the bear and the man, sans the bear. (But there was a dog.) I thought it might be a good time to reprise.

Bold Assertions

Do you know me? Yes? How well and for how long, and how good is your memory? If you’ve known me for a while you might remember that in 2009, as chief proprietor of a widely read science blog, I shocked many people in the skeptics/science world (aka Friends of Big Bang) by coming out firmly against rape. Within a year or so I came out with another shocker: I suggested that under certain circumstances men out alone at night, when encountering a women also out alone at night, might give her a wide berth in order to not engender fear. Cross the street instead of bearing down (as it were) on the person you don’t even know.

These bold assertions overlapped in time with Elevatorgate. Remember that? My position — no on rape, and also no on being a dick — were sufficiently shocking in the world of self styled intellectuals (and actual intellectuals such as Richard Dawkins himself) that I and all the others who were saying similar things at the time were attacked relentlessly by a then growing MRA movement (Men’s Rights Activism). In fact, I’m pretty sure that Rebecca Watson and the women of Skepchick, PZ Myers, Myself, and a couple of others fueled the growth of that movement without intending to do so. As recently as several months ago, one of the MRAs threatened to harass one of my family members “until the day he dies” out of spite.

Read the rest on my substack!

Oldsplaining The Young Is Cheugy

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How many times have you been to a political meeting and someone says “we need to get more young people on board” or “we need to reach out to yoots” or words to that effect? Lots of times. Maybe almost every meeting that goes longer than a half hour, and they all go longer than a half hour. The conversation often veers into a discussion of strategies to find and recruit young folks, and sometimes, into a complain session about what the young folks are doing wrong….

Read my latest Substack. Also, bonus section on why you are wrong about polling. HERE

Worried there won’t be a Trump-trial before the election? Don’t worry. That is what we want!

2024 Election

“I think the last two or three years of watching the criminal justice system has resulted in two very important changes in our culture, at least in the subculture of the oddballs that pay a lot of attention. 1) We all have law degrees from Podcast University; and 2) Historic events have knocked the judges and the high level prosecutors off whatever pedestals on which we might have previously set them. The Supreme Court can decide to set the Constitution on fire, when it is convenient. While there are many excellent judges on the Federal bench, there are some real scoundrels. Special prosecutors have always been suspect, but we now know that our absurd tradition of always siccing Republican prosecutors against Democratic electeds is, well, absurd. ”

See my latest substack HERE.

Mann’s victory seems to be timed perfectly to match its significance in today’s political climate

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Michael E Mann, climate scientist, has won a law suit against iffy academic Rand Simberg deplorable radio jock Mark Steyn, for defamation. The details are in the statement released by Mann and his legal team, below.

This entire drama started with the famous “climategate” episode, in which emails passed among scientists were kidnapped and tortured to make them look like admissions or proof of a conspiracy to rig the climate data to show that global warming is real. There were conspiracy theories before that, of course, but this one was firmly tied into science denialism by the global right wing, and ultimately, the American right wing and republicans in Congress. This and related parallel shenanigans involving Congressional committees set the cultural stage for neo-conspiracies such as birtherism, and ultimately, conspiracies related to election denial.

We are seeing multiple juries of ordinary citizens and judges with diverse backgrounds awarding all of us with truth in the E. Jean Carrol case, the Michael Mann case, and elsewhere. The arc of the universe does not bend towards justice. Clearly, when left on its own, it bends away from justice. But persistence and simply being right can push it in the right direction, and that is what we are seeing now.

Thank you Mike Mann, congratulations!

This is How Trump Ends

2024 Election, Politics

Trump’s support comes from a minority of Americans who are true believers mixed with a similar number of individuals who support him out of either convenience or fear. Among those fearful of him, or more exactly, fearful of attacks or undermining by violent supporters or politically equipped sycophants, are elected or appointed officers of the state, including members of Congress and the likes of Supreme Court Justices. I’ll let this idea digest for a moment while I provide an important digression.

Consider the question, “What if Trump is convicted of a crime, are you not concerned about the violence that would ensue?” That is a self defeating and misguided consideration, and here is why.

We are concerned about violence, don’t want violence, and are thus compelled to consider options that reduce violence even if they involve putting aside justice and the law. This happened after the Civil War when Jefferson Davis and other luminaries of the defeated South were not put on trial for their obvious crimes. This may have happened when Nixon was pardoned by his fellow Republican after having crashed the Presidency with his crooked behavior. This happens whenever some kid hands over their lunch money to some bully to avoid a punch in the nose (even when the punch in the nose is extremely unlikely, since most lunch-money seeking bullies are weak weenies).

Consider these three possible scenarios implied by this question:

1) Trump becomes president
2) Trump loses the election to Biden
3) Trump is jailed or somehow kept out of the race because he is an insurrectionist, a massive fraud, and an unredeemable crook.

Which one of those three gets us violence? Let’s look at each case, in reverse order.

3) Trump gets busted out of the presidency, with some combination of state and federal prosecutors and administrative rulings taking him out. Trumpers attack various government buildings, maybe some people get shot, there is some threatening behavior, maybe violence, at polling places, and so on. We have a country of justice and laws, police and other entities to enforce those laws, and, when push comes to shove, a stalwart citizenry that loves democracy and will not stand for this behavior. A period of significant violence happens but ends in several weeks, and after that, we have mostly stern looks and the occasional bar fight.

2) Trump and his followers repeat the January 6th series of events, but this time their starting position is weaker and everyone is ready for them. There may be more violence than the last January 6th insurrection, but it is better contained. The level and kind of violence is much like option 3 (above), but with different timing, happening mostly after the election or inauguration, rather than mostly before.

1) If Trump wins, there will be violence. Reporters will be jailed, concentration camps will be built, the “justice” department will prosecute and detain Democrats across the board. Wars of convenience will happen, all the usual dictator stuff. There will be violence against all of us, INCLUDING Trump’s supporters. Democracy will end, a fascist state will be implemented, and even when Trump dies, that will continue under his replacements, for a hundred years or longer.

So which of those do you want? The squirming and whinging about violence, and avoiding it by doing the wrong thing rather than the right thing, gets us option 3. I assure you, you want option 1 or option 2.

Now, back to the point, how it ends.

Given the context I’ve provided above, that there are different categories of supporters of Trump, and different kinds of threats from Trump, I suggest the following may happen.

Right now, the Supreme Court is being handed an opportunity to affirm that Trump carried out insurrection. They do so. they are also given the opportunity to affirm that Colorado should not put Trump on the ballot because of the appropriate section of the Fourteenth Amendment. They do so.

But this is the Fourteenth Amendment of the US constitution, not the Colorado constitution. With this matter before them, SCOTUS also determines that Trump, insurrectionist that he is, can not be on any ballot. SCOTUS ends Trump.

The support within SCOTUS for Trump is not really support for Trump. It is a combination of conservative ideation, a power opportunity with Trump’s Republicans in charge of the narrative even if they are not in charge of the country, and fear. But that fear will become nightmare if Trump is elected. After his election, the Supreme Court will have to do exactly as Trump directs, with every decision, or they will be jailed or made moot. But, nobody has ever been able to follow Trump’s directives over the long term because he is an out of control nut-bag. The members of SCOTUS know that if Trump is elected, their lives are in danger, and their careers are over.

So, SCOTUS tears off the band-aid and takes Trump off the ballot in all 50 states with one swift unappealable but very appealing decision.

That is how Trump ends.

Does the turkey make you sleepy?

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Maybe tryptophan, an ingredient in turkey makes you sleepy. Maybe not. I suspect it is has either no effect or a small effect. But when people say “the turkey makes you sleepy because it has tryptophan in it,” they are repeating an easily disprovable myth.

Let’s say tryptophan makes you sleepy. Why does turkey take the rap? Other things with tryptophan: Cattle, swine, chickens, fish. Pretty much, animals. Plants too. Tryptophan is a basic building block, aka amino acid, in your basic biological protein.

So if turkey makes you sleepy because of tryptophan, then when you mix up that whey protein super shake, to up your protein intake on a gym workout day, you should pass out. If you consume 120 grams of protein in your workout juice, that’s 2,160 mg of tryptophan.

If you look at a USDA list of nutrients, and search for tryptophan, you’ll find that pork, steak, hamburger, turkey breast, etc. etc. all have almost identical amounts of the amino acid, because the are, after all, almost identical animals (all tetrapods) at the 20,000 foot level (but don’t drop your turkey out of a helicopter at any altitude). But turkey breast has a tiny bit more than the other, for random reasons.

I think the real reason you take a nap is because you need a nap and the turkey takes the rap for your nap. The turkey is none the wiser, so go for it.