eric_mathgeek | Reading

Gentle reminder: This blog post is public. I don't expect anyone to comment. There's good reason for anyone (not just anti-fascists) to withhold comment.

Click to read the long-ish quotes and commentary...

The Jacobin is a democratic socialist website, so it's generally classified as "far left". It is also classified as "high reliability" with factual sourcing of its statements, which is what makes it a trustworthy source of information. They recently published this article with some eyebrow-raising details. I'll quote just two of them here.

"... the top 10 percent of American earners were responsible for almost half of consumer spending in the second quarter."
"While the wealthiest tenth of Americans owns nearly two-thirds of all assets, the bottom half of households, representing over 160 million Americans, hold just over 5 percent of total wealth." (emphasis mine)

The USA is facing a potential government shutdown. Again. Of course we all expect the Democrats to capitulate completely to Republican demands. Again. Neither party will do anything to damage the plutocratic system that they enjoy, which is exactly what must happen for the rest of us to get anything like normalcy in common life again someday. We've tried everything except taxing the rich, and we're all out of ideas. A similar shutdown happened in 2011 here in Minnesota state government. I wrote this about it:

Suppose a government needed to acquire 20% of all money circulating in its economy to keep its civilization content. If you can't collect any more money from the poor ("squeeze blood from a turnip" is a phrase that comes to mind) then you have to tax the rich since they have the majority of the money anyway. Republicans seem hellbent on protecting the rich on both the national and state levels, however, so now we get to see what it's like to do without much of the government. They couldn't legislate their way to smaller government, so I guess they intend to starve it instead. They're having much more success with that method.

It's now 14 years later, and it's still true. I stand by every word. Why can't we just tax the people who have basically all of the money to keep society running?

Bonus! In addition to continuously over-taxing the wrong people while protecting the plutocracy, we get fascism too. The MAGA doom has literally brought a president's accountable-only-to-him, masked, armed fighting force to grab helpless families on the streets of the USA. Where are all of those "Don't tread on me" people now? Henceforth, they shall be known as the "Tread on them, but not me" people.

Trump even authorized use of "full force" (suggesting military warfare to kill opponents) while sending troops to Oregon. What lawlessness is happening in Oregon that threatens the ICE facility there? What did Trump claim as the justification for this implausible order? He sure didn't say it's because a Portland police officer testified in court that ICE is "instigating" clashes with protesters. Yes, the local authorities testified in court that Trump's ICE is causing problems for the city. People who grew up under dictators and escaped to the USA are speaking out about what we all see is happening.

I warned before, and I hope everyone has reached by now some place that they consider safe. As safe as it gets these days, anyway. Good luck out there.

mellowtigger

Hope spent much of today in severe constipation. She was vomiting all over the house. She was straining to poop everywhere. She kept returning to the desk where I was working at my job to strain near my keyboard. I had conflicting wishes about whether she would finally succeed or not. When I took her to the animal hospital back in July, the vet there just used her hands at Hope's haunches to push the poop out directly. I wish I had that skill, but I'm just afraid to hurt her. I tried using a paper towel to gently press around her anus. Hope growled her displeasure at me but held her position bravely. It didn't help, though. The vomiting and straining continued for several more hours.

Finally, I found a very large poop behind my chair in the living room, and she was acting much more normal again. It's weird to be so glad about a bowel movement. I was so thankful that another crisis was averted that I wanted to share a photo.

Click to see the large poop from the old, frail cat...

constipated kitty poop at long last, 2025 September 27 Saturday

In less literal but more figurative poop news, I'd like to say that most of the information on the internet these days about the highly unusual 3I/ATLAS object is just... well... poop. I recommend not trusting any search engine or social platform to give you any good information at all. This search link, however, will give you actual published scientific papers on the topic.

https://arxiv.org/search/?query=3I+Atlas&searchtype=all&source=header

There seems to be a lack of recent official observations published. I found a video that explained the very limited field of view of our space-based telescopes. It described how they must always point away from the sun to escape damage to sensitive detectors, so there's really only about a 90-degree arc in which they are allowed to point at any given time. They have about a 270-degree arc that is forbidden, because it is too sunward-facing. As they travel with us around the sun, these space-based telescopes can eventually watch all of the sky. At any given time, however, there is a very large exclusion arc. 3I/ATLAS has traveled far enough into our solar system that it is now out of arc-range for those instruments. Instead, ground-based observatories are trying to collect data.

Or so I'm told by the internet. I wish I could source those details for confirmation, but I haven't been able to do so yet. So maybe that's all poop too. I wish I had more official training in astronomy. This is exactly the kind of thing I'd like to know more about.

mellowtigger

During the last week, I have completely ruined my online tracking data. I couldn't even guess what data algorithms now conclude about me from my behavior. I've watched video material from the far right and left, trying to make some sense of what's going on during these turbulent times. I've searched text that is problematic.

Most of what's out there is awful, low-data, conspiracy-related, emotionally-manipulative triviality. There are a few rare nuggets of appreciated perspectives, from sources that I never would have visited, absent our current point in history. In that vein, I wanted to record a handful of things that I was glad I watched, despite how uncomfortable some of it is. There was:

insightful observation from a professional USA-trained sniper (1 (contains some blood in still-frame images) and 2 (follow-up with some corrections)),
moving comments from black pastors (1 and 2), and one of those videos includes a pastor saying they were called by the federal government to ask what they would say during their first sermon after the shooting,
which connects too obviously to the disturbing warnings about coordination and manipulation that this historian explains happened with churches and other institutions in the past,
potential manipulation on the ABC news network of judicial video covering the accused assassin (watch 5 minutes starting here),
very powerful words from a black woman, Joy Reid, offered here by an old white guy, which is important because sometimes words from an ally can pierce mental resistance against issues presented by whichever minority uses the same words, and
uplifting encouragement here from a journalist and Nobel Peace Prize winner.

I'm sure that I've never heard the phrase "spicy whites" before, but I think I kind of like it. I wouldn't have heard it during the last week either, except that I was deliberately exploring outside my usual territory and arrived someplace new where I heard Joy Reid speaking.

Part of the danger of my most recent adventure is that I would get suckered by false information... and I was. I found a particular YouTube video very moving and politically significant. While I was writing this post, I tried to source the supposed speech quotations. I eventually realized that the whole thing was fictional. No such speech. Inspiration crushed with the false attribution. I dislike this modern age of digital falsehoods.

mellowtigger

This YouTube video reveals a very interesting discovery about our population living near the southeastern (and northeastern) coastlines of the USA. In maps of the USA, the southeastern states almost always feature heavily in the least-well-off areas of the nation. There were (and still are) good reasons to blame their socioeconomic policies for that big discrepancy. Researchers, however, have found a climate connection that was on nobody's radar as a possibility.

These researchers from University of California, Berkeley, tried for 5 years to find a flaw in their research, because the results were so surprising. After each and every hurricane that reaches these areas, there is a persisting health deficit that lingers in the area, even amongst people who were not born at the time of the hurricane. This deficit persists years afterward, peaking about 6 years (68.6 months) after the initial landfall event. It is cumulative with additional hurricanes that may arrive later, so more hurricanes means even more excess total deaths later. These less-visible indirect deaths eventually affect 300X more people than the direct deaths caused by the hurricane itself. The reasons for these excess deaths? State and local governments have reduced capacities after each storm, individuals have less spare money after repurchasing and rebuilding after each storm, and stress is always bad for health, regardless of circumstance.

Watch on YouTube

It's a fascinating 14 minutes, if you can spare the time to watch the whole video. Here's the Nature article, if you prefer text and graphs.

mellowtigger

Here's a quick Public Service Announcement for anyone who lives in the city of Minneapolis. Check online for your utility bill. Minneapolis changed their billing system, and old autopay settings are no longer functioning.

Apparently they've been emailing me to pay my bill recently, but those emails go to a Yahoo account. Yahoo changed their email interface a while back, and it's awful. I have a difficult time finding things that formerly were easy to find. Tonight, I got an automated phone call about paying my bills. Good thing. I checked online, and I discovered I needed to set it up all over again for autopay... and pay my accumulating bill.

So... go check your account.
https://ub.minneapolismn.gov/iwr/

mellowtigger

True, it's not MoodyMonday, but it's in the same vein, and it's getting harder to compartmentalize the various atrocities on the news these days

Last week, Brian Kilmeade of Fox News recommended killing homeless people. Media likes quoting the phrase "involuntary lethal injection", but the true meaning was just a few words later when Kilmeade finished with, "just kill them".

This week, I don't think it's making national news, but Minneapolis had 2 more mass shootings. At 2 different homeless camps. I just watched this news channel's story about it. Not once did I notice anyone mention Kilmeade. According to the story, these shootings are clearly the fault of homeless people and their sympathizers. As far as I know, nobody knows the shooters' motivations, because we don't know who shot all of those people. Kilmeade, though, clearly moved that Overton window and shifted expectations. Stochastic terrorism is a term that I keep seeing reasons to mention.