Apparently, there are books out there bound with human skin. Of course, my mind having been poisoned by the sick minds in Hollywood, I immediately thought of serial killers. But apparently this is something doctors used to do occasionally with the skin of people who died of natural causes. It reminded me of the story about the doctor who kept Einstein’s eyes. It seems wrong by modern standards, but it seems like in the past it was sometimes considered acceptable scientific practice, and/or even considered a tribute to the dead individual to some extent. I suppose if I felt okay about my body being used as a medical cadaver or a crash test dummy (which is a thing), it would not seem comparatively bad to live on as a book. Maybe someone would like to use my scrotum as a coin purse (not all that far fetched – this is a thing with certain animals).
Category Archives: Web Article Review
Trump, detention camps, and deportation
Trump is talking about incarcerating and detaining all the undocumented immigrants in the United States, which would be about 11 million people. Snopes does a good job of fact checking the specific things he has said about this.
A November 2023 New York Times investigation found that Trump was planning “an extreme expansion” of his first-term immigration policies, including rounding up undocumented people in the United States and putting them in detention camps before expelling them from the country…
Trump had made similar comments in September 2023, saying he would carry out “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” He also said he would be, “Following the Eisenhower Model” for such deportations, referencing a 1954 campaign to round up and expel Mexican migrants named for an ethnic slur—Operation Wetback.
In sum, in December 2023 speeches, Trump did call for mass deportations and emphasized that such migrants come from all over the world, using rhetoric that echoed past speeches. Furthermore, reporting confirms that there are indeed plans for a future Trump administration to build huge detention camps to hold migrants.
Snopes
It is not hearsay that Trump is talking about these things – he gave an interview to Time (covered here, confusingly, by CNN) in which he talked about this explicitly. He says he plans to round 15-20 million people up into detention camps and deport them.
Some people say the Trump-Hitler comparisons are overblown, but it is worth remembering that Hitler had schemes to deport Jews to Madagascar, Alaska, and/or Siberia among other places, before he gave up on those and came up with his “final solution”. The other parallel is that he managed to bring local police and security forces under his central control, which echoes Trump’s discussion of using the National Guard and military here.
The human rights abuses this would engender are fairly obvious, but there are also many practical issues. Citizens of the United States are not required to carry papers proving their citizenship, so who do you choose to detain and how do you go about proving that they are undocumented? It would likely be done on the basis of (perceived) ethnicity, which brings to mind the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War II and the mistaken deportation of Mexican Americans in the 1950s. You could swoop in and interrogate inmates of jails and prisons, which is probably what would actually happen, but this would not add up to millions of people. The other thing you can do, and the U.S. government has done, is swoop into work places and demand to see papers. This is actually somewhat practical since workers are in fact required to prove they are eligible to work. However, being ineligible to work does not automatically mean your presence in the country is illegal. So now people might be swept up and held in detention camps without due process while courts try to figure out who they are. Even if a legal proceeding determines that an individual is in the country illegally, there is the problem of where to deport that person to (once again, see Hitler). Again, people could be held for years without due process while this plays out.
Finally, if you want to make inflation worse, deporting a huge chunk of the low-wage work force is a great way to do that. It would be much more humane and pro-business to expand work permits and temporary visas to let people in who want to work, but put some restrictions on how long they can stay and who they can bring along. This would be a win for human rights and would be business friendly, which at least traditional Republicans are nominally in favor of. The other side of this coin is to encourage U.S. business investment in Latin America, which would have the twin benefits of reducing migration pressure and producing cheap stuff to import, which also helps to hold down prices.
self-driving cars are here
The self-driving car hype bubble inflated and burst a decade or so ago. As tends to happen, the technology disappeared from headlines but continued to slowly progress in the background, and now seems poised to burst onto the commercial scene in a big way.
The key mistake I’ve noticed people making is they don’t seem to realize that autonomous taxis are no longer a hypothetical future technology. They exist, and you can ride in them. Waymo has been operating in San Francisco and Phoenix for a while now and is expanding soon to Austin and to a sort of awkward-to-describe-accurately swathe of Los Angeles County.
Matthew Iglesias
Iglesias says that self-driving cars have been largely excluded from freeways to date and this has limited their appeal in a business sense, but this will gradually change. Driverless trucks and buses will eventually be huge too, although organized labor will fight these tooth and nail as long as it can.
I’ll share a few more thoughts:
- Motor vehicles kill around 40,000 people in the U.S. per year and 1.35 million people globally. There is a double standard where we accept this carnage and yet a small handful of self-driving vehicle crashes or even just nuisances are hyped in the media. Self-driving cars will save a lot of lives and property damage. Amoral insurance companies will surely care about this even if nobody else does.
- Enormous swaths of land are configured the way they are because of cars. It’s not just all the streets and roads, it is all the parking and driveways. Most cars are parked most of the time. And it is not just the physical space those cars need that adds up to a large portion of our landscape, it is the physical space needed for human drivers to maneuver those cars into and out of parking, keep a six-foot-wide vehicle safely within a 12-foot-wide lane, and the spacing needed between cars traveling at high speed due to slow human reaction times. We also want the convenience of parking close to our homes, businesses, and schools to minimize walking. All this will change. Robot cars will be able to park themselves in tight spaces in out of the way places. This will also solve the electric vehicle charging infrastructure problem in cities. They will be able to drop us off and pick us up at our doors on command, which solves the convenience problem. They will be able to space tightly together at high speed. So, they will just take up a lot less space. This may even happen relatively fast. Then humans beings will just sit there and stare at all the space for a long time, maybe decades, but gradually and eventually we will change design standards and zoning codes so that all that space can be repurposed to other things.
Impeach Clarence Thomas Now!
Supreme Court justices make money on speaking engagements and book deals, among other things. But Clarence Thomas is different – the man is clearly on the take. From The Hill:
ProPublica first reported on the trip to Indonesia, writing that Thomas and his wife, Ginni, vacationed with the Crows for “nine days of island-hopping in a volcanic archipelago on a superyacht staffed by a coterie of attendants and a private chef.” The cost of the trip would have exceeded $500,000 for the Thomases, according to ProPublica, but the bill was covered by Crow.
The Hill
Half a million dollars. Does anyone think this is not the kind of money that will influence our nation’s laws in favor of the person giving the bribe? And who is Harlan Crow?
Crow is a member of the founding committee of the Club for Growth and has served on the board of the American Enterprise Institute since 1996.[10][11][12] He has donated almost $5 million to Republican campaigns and conservative groups.
Wikipedia
My verdict: This is corruption and bribery, pure and simple. Congress can impeach a Supreme Court justice and should do this now. Congress can also amend the U.S. Constitution and it should do that too to outlaw bribery of politicians and judges in this country once and for all.
the remaining carbon budget
The last IPCC release covered conditions as of about 2019. There is an effort now to update estimates of key indicators annually in between IPCC reports, called the Indicators of Global Climate Change 2023: annual update of key indicators of the state of the climate system and human influence. I could easily spend a whole day reading and trying to understand the details of this one paper. I’ll pull out just one indicator, which is the “remaining carbon budget”. This metric looks not at annual emissions but at the cumulative amount of carbon emitted since 1850 and how much can still be emitted to keep average global warming under 1.5 degrees C. The results are almost laughable. The IPCC put the remaining budget at 500 Gt (billion metric tons) of carbon dioxide from the start of 2020. This update puts the remaining budget as of the start of 2024 at 200 Gt. Annual emissions are in the 50-55 Gt range, so using very rough layman’s math we have 4 years remaining. There are many reasons this is complicated and uncertain, including periodic adjustment of the target itself, emissions of gases other than carbon dioxide, and aerosols to name a few. But nonetheless, we are a few years away and it is clear the world would be on track to miss this target even if it were making a coordinated effort to prevent this, which it is clearly not. This is not a reason to throw up our hands of course. Any effort to limit the damage, no matter how small or how late, may help lessen or delay the catastrophe we are currently headed for.
What would a real “conservative” agenda look like?
I consider myself a “liberal” to the extent that I think we need major expansion of the social safety net to minimize human suffering and support working families in our country. But let’s say I took a purely rational, “conservative” view. What might that entail?
- A level playing field. High inheritance taxes followed by redistribution using baby bonds or something similar. A public education system that spends the same amount and provides the same opportunities per student, regardless of location or background of the students. It would entail making it much easier for a second spouse to work or start a business, which would mean guaranteed childcare and health care benefits for all.
- A relentless focus on job skills, innovation and productivity growth. This would mean major and equitable investments in education from preschool through college. It would mean big government investments in basic research, not favoring those with military applications. It would also mean subsidies for companies to invest in research and development and skills development for the workforce. It would mean a rational immigration policy focused on letting in those with job skills that add value to our national economy.
- A relentless focus on competition. This would mean vigorous anti-trust enforcement and punishment of price fixing attempts.
Summarizing Project 2025
In fairness, I don’t see much evidence here of the “blueprint for a fascist takeover” narrative some in the left-wing media are pushing. I see misguided yet unimaginitive ideas for a reorganization of the executive branch, which any new CEO of any organization is likely to undertake just to leave his or her (okay, let’s be honest, HIS in this cracker-ass country of ours) mark on the organization. I’ll just summarize my take on this document below.
- Double down on the homophobic, Christian Nationalist agenda. This includes immigration controls and attacks on public education. The immigration controls are counter to the big business cheap labor agenda, though, which raises a conundrum.
- Shamelessly let the fossil fuel industry lobby write the nation’s laws in its favor, at the expense of our nation’s food security, our coastal population centers, and everyone on Earth.
- Shamelessly give the military-industrial complex anything and everything it wants. This crowds out investment in peaceful innovation and technological progress, and greatly increases the risk of nuclear war.
- Shamelessly give the financial industry anything and everything it wants. This includes no functioning health care system in our country, and no regulations to prevent a meltdown of the international financial system such as almost happened in 2008. This is very dangerous.
- To nominally promote “small government and low taxes”, eliminate or slash the funding of key agencies that underpin our nation’s resilience to the existential threats of our age. This includes FEMA (fires, floods) and the CDC/NIH complex able to respond to pandemics and biowarfare attacks, which are eventually coming.
Project 2025, Part 4
Tackling the section called “The Economy”.
- Self-labeled “Conservatives” are not sure if they like free trade or not. Economic and financial conservatives (confusingly known as “neoliberals” in every other country) do. But the xenophobic element does not, so the Republican party is conflicted about this one. This section is “on the one hand… on the other hand…” drivel with no clear policy position.
- They want to get rid of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, because this agency knows the incontrovertible truth about climate change (which is always in quotes in this document) and this is against the fossil fuel industry agenda.
- They want to gut the census bureau, because this agency knows the truth that the United States is under minority rule.
- They want to gut the IRS.
- They want to gut the Dodd-Frank rule and other regulations passed on the finance industry after they shamelessly almost destroyed the world’s economy in 2008. This is just shameless caving to a powerful industry lobby.
- There is a faction that wants to eliminate central banking, or try other yahoo proposals like a return to the gold standard. All this was tried in the 19th century and ushered in a century of chaos, culminating in the GREAT DEPRESSION. This is EXTREMELY DANGEROUS. I am unclear, but I don’t think the executive branch can do this all on its own.
June U.S. election check-in
I’m sticking with 538’s adjusted poll averages here, which consider poll quality and recency.
| STATE | 2020 RESULT | Most Recent 538 Poll Average (as of 6/1/24) |
| Arizona | Biden +0.4% | Trump +4.7% (May 2: Trump +3.2) |
| Georgia | Biden +0.3% | Trump +5.5% (May 2: Trump +5.9) |
| Wisconsin | Biden +0.6% | Trump +1.4% (May 2: Trump +2.6%) |
| North Carolina | Trump +1.3% | Trump +6.2% (May 2: Trump +6.4%) |
| Pennsylvania | Biden +1.2% | Trump +2.0% (May 2: Trump +1.8%) |
| Michigan | Biden +2.8% | Trump +0.6% (May 2: Trump +1.3%) |
| Nevada | Biden +2.4% | Trump +5.9% (May 2: Trump +5.1%) |
In May, 1/7 swing states had large (> 1%) movement toward Biden – Wisconsin.
In May, 3/7 swing states had small (< 1%) movement toward Biden – Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan.
In May, 2/7 swing states had small (< 1%) movement toward Trump – Pennsylvania, Nevada.
In May, 1/7 swing states had large (> 1%) movement toward Trump – Arizona.
So it’s hard to say things are trending one way or the other over the past month, and the trend needs to be significantly in Biden’s favor for him to have a good shot in November. As it stands now, the electoral college would be 312 Trump to 226 Biden, a major defeat. If Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin were to all break for Biden, it would be Biden 270 to Trump 268.
Project 2025, Part 3
Continuing to tackle this thing with the section called “the general welfare”. I’m just reading the summary since the thing is so long. Various authors want to:
- End Medicare and Medicaid. [We are the only developed country without a health care system, and our population is suffering for it. This is a shameless giveaway to the finance/insurance industry.]
- Gut the National Institutes of Health and the CDC. The section makes wild, conspiracy theory-driven claims that there was no scientific evidence that masks or vaccines helped end the Covid-19 epidemic. [Pardon me, but this is radical, dangerous, ignorant, lying bullshit! This also means our nation will not be prepared to respond and recover from the next pandemic, be it of natural or bioweapon origin. This puts our nation at huge risk and is therefore wildly irresponsible and unpatriotic.]
- Double down on fossil fuels, end promotion of alternative energy, fuel efficient and electric vehicles. [We are going to lose our food supply and our coastal cities. This is a shameless giveaway to the fossil energy industry, and it is EVIL.]
- End the Department of Education and let parents decide what their children will believe about the world. This is basically driven by the Christian Nationalist, homophobic agenda, although somewhere in there is a shameless giveaway to the charter school lobby.
- Regarding the EPA – well, finally, here is a federal agency I actually know something about, having spent decades helping local governments and water utilities comply with its mandates. This section doesn’t say a lot about water, and what it does say is not all that controversial – it even has some love for the state revolving loan funds. Otherwise, this section focuses mostly on rolling back regulation of fossil fuels and vehicle fuel efficiency (which in the EPA context means allowing more air pollution), ignoring greenhouse gases, and otherwise leaving most regulation to the states. They want to slash much of EPA’s research and science agenda, and shift oversight of enforcement actions from lawyers to political appointees. None of this is particularly radical, only “conservative” and would probably take us more or less back to the Bush or Reagan years. Failing to regulate greenhouse gases is a crucial moral and practical unforced error for our country of course, I am just saying it is fully consistent with the shameless giveaway to wealth and power agenda the Republican Party has been pushing for the last 50 years.
- Basically bring the DOJ and FBI fully under the control of political appointees. Actually, the propaganda narrative is that the Biden administration has done this, while in reality this is a good example of doublespeak where you accuse your opponent of doing exactly the thing that you plan to do, so that any protest sounds like a childish “I know you are but what am I”?