It looks like the 17-year cicada onslaught is beginning. They’ve spent their time developing underground, and now it’s time for them to fuck and die. They live only for a few days and don’t eat during that time. But there will be a lot of them emerging over days and weeks. Here’s where they live. …
Just Asking Questions – Open Thread
To help WaterGirl keep the troubleshooting thread to just that, here’s something I’ve been thinking about. We see statements not unlike TFG’s tweets occasionally emanate from a certain Florida resort. We see quotes in the news about grand political thinking from TFG – endorse this, fundraise that, remove Liz Cheney. But we hardly ever see …
Joan Baez Friday Night Respite Thread
Imagine a young woman, free of makeup, a curtain of black hair, barefoot even in the Massachusetts winter, burnishing 200-year-old ballads in a crammed Cambridge coffeehouse, picking like an old hand at her acoustic guitar. At the launch of the 1960s, this was radical, inverting music on its shiny, hair-sprayed head. Joan Baez landed on …
A Rant On Masks
I see that David Leonhardt is taking a victory lap. He and Nate Silver, and a number of other people, including Zeynep Tufekci, have told us all along that they know better than the CDC and WHY HASN’T EVERYONE BEEN LISTENING TO THEM INSTEAD. Their arguments have been When are we going to be there, …
Where Is The Weapon?
State Department and intelligence personnel have reported neurological symptoms since 2016 that have been attributed to a “directed microwave” weapon. The first reports were from State Department personnel in Havana, Cuba, and the symptoms have been named the Havana Syndrome. No cause of this syndrome has been identified, but it has been attributed to the …
Government By Competent People
One of the things that bugged me about TFG’s interactions with other countries – I can’t call it foreign policy because there was no policy – was there was no subtlety, no pattern, nothing intellectual. There was nothing to analyze beyond “This is bad, we shouldn’t do it.” Some tried, of course. Large numbers of …
What Goes Up…
Satellite watchers are counting down. A 23-ton Chinese Long March rocket has been circling (ellipsing, actually) down and should re-enter the atmosphere any time now. Here’s a list of sites and people to follow who will be following the rocket’s trajectory. The orbit has been erratic as it dips toward the atmosphere, so its exact …