First bike!

Next week, we’re driving all the way to Madison to see my daughter and son-in-law and granddaughter, and we’re bringing a present: her first bike. I got it all assembled today, although I’m going to suggest that Kyle & Skatje give it a once-over and make sure I didn’t forget something.

I remember my first bike, and really, my only bike. We were poor, so we had to take whatever we could get, and my father was quite proud to have gotten this used bike from a friend. I was 7 or 8, and he gave me this monstrous adult bike (I’d grow into it), dark red, with the words “English Racer” written on the frame (I later learned that it wasn’t really a racing bike, but a Raleigh Sports bike.) It was very light and stripped down, only 3 speeds — high, higher, and so high you’ll rupture yourself trying to turn that crank — and no fenders, which was not a great option in the Pacific Northwest, where I’d spend most of my adolescence with a muddy stripe up my back. It had these tires that were about as thick as my index finger, so no, this wasn’t for riding on the back roads.

Also, no training wheels, of course.

So my dad taught me how to ride by putting me on this razor thin rail on wheels, where I couldn’t simultaneously sit on the seat and reach the pedals, and pushed me off down the driveway. I had to learn to balance or die.

As you can see, I didn’t die. That was my bike all through grade school, and I think my parents didn’t junk it until I went off to college — at least, it disappeared then, and I don’t think it flew away. It was a great bike. Meanwhile, my brother would get a 10-speed with fat tires — I felt sorry for him that he was driving such an inferior vehicle. My bike was a beast to get rolling from a stationary start, but once you got moving, I could easily outrace my brother and all of my friends. As long as there was no turning involved. Or braking. Or going uphill. Downhill on the straightaway, it was glorious.

I don’t think Iliana’s bike will have the staying power of my old Red Racer, but it’s a much more practical and safer way to start bicycling. Maybe when she gets older she can get a skinny death machine and terrorize everyone going down hills.

Maybe crime is spread through the drinking water?

Royce White is a former professional basketball player who really, really wants to replace our Democratic Senator, Amy Klobuchar. Say what you want about Klobuchar, I don’t think she’s going to be sweating over this race.

White posted a map of the “out-of-control crime” in Minneapolis and said we need to refund the police.

One problem.

White, a 33-year-old retired NBA player who was recently accused of dropping $1,200 of campaign funds at a Miami strip club, appeared to have ripped the graphic from another account on X who had shared it sarcastically. It showed dozens of green dots, which indicated working fountains, and a handful of red and yellow dots, which signified those broken and being repaired across Minneapolis.

Hey, you never know. Maybe he’s like John Snow and the Broad Street Pump — he’s discovered a previously unknown vector for the spread of crime, not cholera, in the city. Unfortunately for that hypothesis, he quickly deleted his tweet, and is now really angry at the people who exposed his foolishness (not to mention his abuse of campaign funds at a strip club.)

You’re a cuck. We’re leaving the plantation, White tweeted at a Minnesota-based reporter, Christopher Ingraham, who pointed out the error. You and your weird liberal buddies read it and weep.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, he’s running for office as a Republican.

If only they hadn’t made that last comment

Honestly, I could have ignored this. It’s nothing but familiar anti-trans stupidity, inventing sharp distinctions out of blurry ones, pretending overlaps in morphology don’t exist. There’s just so much of it that I don’t have the will to address it all. But that last bit…I saw red.

Male skeletons literally have more ribs than female skeletons and many other differences. Did you go to an online college?

That is simply not true. Did you go to a bible college?

“There’s something to be said for Minnesota nice”

I read a horrific story about road rage. A 35 year old man was so outraged about getting honked at that he followed the honker to her home, spun donuts in her parking lot, punched her in the face, and chased and ran over her boyfriend killing him. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison.

That’s just one ugly story. What was interesting is that the article ranked states for road rage, and number one at the top was Arizona.

A recent study from FINN put Arizona’s road rage score at 8 out of 10, the highest in the U.S. The state also came out on top for confrontational drivers.

“A huge 81% of drivers in Arizona have been yelled at, insulted or threatened when driving,” according to the report. “As well as this, a shocking 22.5% of drivers in the state have been forced off the road.”

Arizona ranked ahead of Montana, South Carolina, Arkansas, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Georgia, Tennessee, Mississippi and Alabama for road rage.

Where’s Pennsylvania? Once upon a time I had a daily commute on the Schuylkill Expressway, and that was mildly terrifying. I once saw a truck cut off a guy on the freeway entrance, and the guy pulled out a pistol and started peppering the truck. You do not want to be on the Schuylkill at rush hour.

But then…a nice surprise.

The best state to avoid road rage? Finn said Minnesota, where drivers encounter the least aggressive driving in the country. There’s something to be said for Minnesota nice, apparently.

As usual, the author doesn’t understand “Minnesota nice,” a phrase referring to the extremes of passive-aggressive behavior here. But sure, come to Minnesota, where we probably won’t force you off the road and murder your boyfriend. Probably.

Do other countries have this sick obsession with flags?

I was checking my calendar as I do every morning, when I discovered that today, 14 June, is an official US holiday (but not a federal holiday — sorry, you don’t get to take a day off work). It’s Flag Day!

I’ve never been much of a fan of flags. I got weirded out back in third grade when I suddenly realized that the morning ritual the school put us through every day was to pledge allegiance to a flag, and I just plain stopped. I’d stand up and try to blend into the background, because I didn’t want to get beat up on the playground afterwards, but wouldn’t say any words. Why? Because they were stupid. A flag is a colorful piece of cloth, nothing more, and not a sentient being or a principle or a deity.

Flag Day has a new level of meaning this year, because flags have become a potent symbol of political disagreement. We’re a polarized nation, so why not trot out a big flag, the uglier the better, to declare your affiliation? I’ve noticed that most of my neighbors don’t have any flags at all; there’s just one house several blocks away that I see with flags tacked up everywhere. They’re all Gadsden flags or blue line flags, and they’re interspersed with Trump signs, and they’ve got “JESUS” spray-painted on their roof.

Maybe flags do have a useful function, then. They’re markers for where the town assholes live.

With that purpose in mind, then, we can see the latest scandal in a new light. Justice Samuel Alito and his wife Martha-Ann have been warring with their neighbors, waving flags to symbolize their allegiance to the Empire of Assholes.

Martha-Ann, when asked about it by a reporter, started screaming and eventually hoisted another, different, flag up the flagpole—did figure in it. It was more about how the Alitos are, as neighbors and just in general.

So it fit that, when given an opportunity or just a moment of otherwise neutral space through which to charge, Martha-Ann simply ran her mania up there in the assumption that the person who had just begun talking to her at a fundraiser would salute. “I’m putting it up and I’m gonna send them a message every day, maybe every week, I’ll be changing the flags,'” she fantasized, to someone she’d never previously met. “They’ll be all kinds. I made a flag in my head. This is how I satisfy myself. I made a flag. It’s white and has yellow and orange flames around it. And in the middle is the word ‘vergogna.’ ‘Vergogna’ in Italian means shame—vergogna. V-E-R-G-O-G-N-A. Vergogna.” Anyway, it’s a nice thing to think about, someday being able to raise a flag above your home that tells the neighbors that you think they are disgusting and going to hell.

I can see how flags can have some significance. I just don’t see the point of celebrating that.

The time for subtlety is long gone

I find nationalism and racism to be mostly indistinguishable — they’re both reductive and draw false connections and conclusions. At least I’ve got George Orwell to draw a line between patriotism and nationalism.

By ‘nationalism’ I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad’. But secondly — and this is much more important — I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests. Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved. By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.

It’s so strange to live in a time and a place where many people are professing to be nationalists, as if it’s a good and honorable thing. They haven’t learned what it means!

Maybe this cartoon will help.

What’s even stranger is that some people like to argue that fascism is a legitimate political ideology. This cartoon is for them.

Do you think it’s too subtle?

Fathers and sons

I can sympathize with Joe Biden feeling the pain of his son’s conviction.

President Joe Biden said he accepts the guilty verdict of Hunter Biden after his son was convicted by a jury of three federal gun charges Tuesday − a historic first for the child of a sitting president.

“I will accept the outcome of this case and will continue to respect the judicial process as Hunter considers an appeal,” Biden said in a statement.
…
“As I said last week, I am the President, but I am also a Dad,” Biden said. “Jill and I love our son, and we are so proud of the man he is today. So many families who have had loved ones battle addiction understand the feeling of pride seeing someone you love come out the other side and be so strong and resilient in recovery.”

That would be my reaction if one of my kids was a screw-up who got caught: we’re going to have to accept that you committed a crime and are being punished for it, but we still love and support you.

Unfortunately, we’d also suffer some anguish — where did we go wrong? What could we have done to prevent them from taking this path? Did my pursuit of a career do them harm? I don’t have to worry about it since my adult kids are all perfect and delightful, but I imagine the Biden family is doing some soul-searching, and if they’re not, they’re not good people.

You know who are not good people? Republicans. Apparently, some of them are very good at cutting human feeling out of their lives. Like, say, Clarence Thomas.

One of the many corruption scandals in his life is that he accepted somewhere around $150,000 to pay private school tuition for his grand-nephew. He and his wife were legal guardians for this kid between the ages of 6 and 19. Clarence said he was raising this boy, Mark Martin, as his son.

Then Mark’s life went awry, he was doing drugs and playing with guns. He has been arrested and is awaiting a mandatory 25 year prison sentence. He’s a great big screw-up. So, the response from Clarence Thomas and his wife is to pretend they don’t know him, to cut their adoptive son out of their lives.

Now 32 years old, Martin told BI in an interview from the Jasper County Detention Center in South Carolina that Clarence and Ginni Thomas washed their hands of him years ago.

“I haven’t really heard much from them in a long time,” Martin said. “I tried to communicate with them a couple of times, but I’ve never gotten any response.”

Yikes. I cannot imagine turning my back on my kids like that, cutting off all communication. I feel pain right now that we live so far apart that we can only see each other sporadically.

But then, ol’ Clarence made his feelings known early when he preferred getting millions of dollars from his billionaire buddies to his son’s company, and sent Mark off to military school.

While his own father was incarcerated, Martin remembers much of his childhood as the Thomases’ ward as relatively privileged. Together, Martin said they traveled to more than 20 countries; he frequently spent summers wakeboarding or waterskiing and babysitting Crow’s son when the elite families vacationed together.

That all stopped when Martin entered high school, he said, when the Thomases decided they “just didn’t have time to deal with” him and sent him away to the boarding schools. From his freshman year of high school on, Martin said he rarely saw his Supreme Court-justice great-uncle or his wife, who Martin said had raised him “like another mother and father” since childhood.

Rich Republicans can’t be like the mother and father I knew, or have tried to be, I guess.

Maybe Mark Martin disappointed his grand-uncle by growing up to be such a small time crook rather than a big-time rotten crook like Clarence Thomas.

Everyone likes to vacation in Spain

I wouldn’t mind going there myself. But you know who really loves going to Spain? It’s not the British. It’s the invertebrates.

There is a path through they Pyrenees, the Pass of Bujaruelo, which is where all the insects funnel through on their way to summering in Spain. It’s been known for a long time that this is the place to find swarms of insects flocking south.

The Pyrenean mountain range and the Pass of Bujaruelo. (a) The fieldwork location (red marker) within the Pyrenean mountain range; image taken from Google Maps. (b) The valley that channels the insects over the Pass of Bujaruelo (red arrow) and the surrounding geological formations.

In autumn 1950 David and Elizabeth Lack chanced upon a huge migration of insects and birds flying through the Pyrenean Pass of Bujaruelo, from France into Spain, later describing the spectacle as combining both grandeur and novelty. The intervening years have seen many changes to land use and climate, posing the question as to the current status of this migratory phenomenon. In addition, a lack of quantitative data has prevented insights into the ecological impact of this mass insect migration and the factors that may influence it. To address this, we revisited the site in autumn over a 4 year period and systematically monitored abundance and species composition of diurnal insect migrants. We estimate an annual mean of 17.1 million day-flying insect migrants from five orders (Diptera, Hymenoptera, Hemiptera, Lepidoptera and Odonata) moving south, with observations of southward ‘mass migration’ events associated with warmer temperatures, the presence of a headwind, sunlight, low windspeed and low rainfall. Diptera dominated the migratory assemblage, and annual numbers varied by more than fourfold. Numbers at this single site hint at the likely billions of insects crossing the entire Pyrenean mountain range each year, and we highlight the importance of this route for seasonal insect migrants.

Who is caravaning over the mountains? Everyone. But mostly flies, and mostly pollinators. Lots of midges, gnats, hoverflies, all these small underappreciated flies that do a lot of the work of pollinating (it’s not just bees, you know.)

Classification of the migratory assemblage. Average ratios of insects showing migratory behaviour collected in the intercept trap and butterfly counts over 4 years sorted by (a) order and (b) family. (c) Migratory behaviour of insect groups based on southward scores. ‘High-altitude’ migrant insect groups (red), and ‘Flight Boundary Layer’ migrant insect groups (blue). Missing values indicate fewer than 100 individuals in the sample of head- or tailwinds. Southward scores of 100 indicate all individuals were going south, 0 that the same number were going south as north, and negative values indicate that more were going north than south under a particular wind condition.

We’re talking millions of migrants, probably billions. Of course, they estimate that the total mass of all those insects was about 140kg per season. One or two Cantabrian brown bears ambling across the pass would outweigh all those insects in mass, but would probably have a negligible ecological impact in comparison.

This was a study of one pass with a convenient bottleneck to enable effective counting. Insects are flooding across the length of the Spanish/French border, and further, some of them keep going across the Mediterranean and take tours of Morocco.

Numerous studies have found a consistent south or southwest bias in migratory insect headings across Europe, suggesting insects from a large geographical area are filtered down into the Iberian Peninsula, passing through the Pyrenees each season. This makes insect migration bottlenecks within the Pyrenees important locations for censusing species and monitoring numbers. We estimate that the total number of insects moving across the Pyrenees mountain range reaches into the tens of billions. This number is of comparable size to those from radar studies across a similar-sized area. Insects are known to cross the Pyrenees not only in the centre where the Pass of Bujaruelo is situated, but also along the coasts. Williams et al. observed some southward movement of butterflies in October along the coast at Argelès-sur-Mer, where the Pyrenees descend to the Mediterranean Sea. Similar southward movements occur along the Atlantic seaboard. To accurately quantify the total number of migratory insects crossing the Pyrenees, extensive deployment of monitoring resources and techniques is needed, including the use of vertical-looking radars.

I’m reading that and thinking that if I were a spider, I’d want to set up a nice web across the Pass of Bujaruelo. Unfortunately, this study didn’t look at spiders. They weren’t migrating, after all, they were just setting up shop in the pass and taking advantage of all the tourists.

Also guilty, guilty, guilty

Hunter Biden has been found guilty, deservedly.

Hunter Biden was found guilty on Tuesday of lying about his drug addiction on a gun application form five years ago.

First lady Jill Biden was not present in the packed courtroom as the verdict was read, but she reportedly arrived minutes after. President Joe Biden’s brother James and sister-in-law were in the room alongside Biden’s wife, Melissa Cohen Biden. As the verdict was read, AP reported that Hunter Biden, 54, showed little emotion and stared straight ahead.

A sentencing date will be set at a later date, and Biden now faces a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000 for each of the three counts he was convicted on.

I have no doubt that Hunter Biden was one screwed up dude, a long-time drug addict who was rightly held responsible.

I do wonder about proportionate sentencing, though. That was his crime, lying on a gun registration form? And he’s going to get years in prison for it? OK, I’ll keep that in mind when Trump gets some lenient sentence for lying on a tax form.

Let the ‘lab leak’ conspiracy theory die already

Well, good. Now Orac dismantles the “lab leak” nonsense promoted by Alina Chan and the NY Times.

Even so, before I close, let me just reiterate that it is not impossible that SARS-CoV-2 arose in a lab, either due to scientists carrying out modifications on existing coronaviruses or from a collection of natural coronaviruses, in which the virus escaped. The claim is not impossible, like the claims made for homeopathy. However, as I like to say, just because a hypothesis is possible does not mean that it is equally possible (or even more so) compared to a competing hypothesis. You have to look at the evidence. Lab leak conspiracy theorists love to point out missing evidence that would make a natural zoonotic origin for SARS-CoV-2 an unquestioned slam dunk, even as they gloss over the fact that their evidence base is nothing but holes that they try desperately to fill with appeals to personal incredulity that the virus could have arisen naturally, wild speculation as to how it might have escaped from a lab, conspiracy mongering about “cover-ups” everywhere, and lots and lots drawing links between facts and observations that are probably unrelated. Moreover, if there’s one thing that all versions of lab leak share, it’s suspicion and constant finger pointing at the Chinese for being less than enthusiastic and cooperative about letting investigators into the Wuhan Institute of Virology to try to determine if a lab leak happened. This is, of course, not surprising and not in and of itself evidence for a lab leak. China is an authoritarian regime, and such regimes tend to be secretive.

Note that, since this is Orac, what follows after that “before I close” is 1700 words of even more debunking.

Just as well, there is no last word when trying to deal with the lunacy of committed kooks.