In the wake of the New York City attack, commentators have criticized Donald Trump for describing the US justice system as a ‘joke’ and a ‘laughingstock’ and initially saying that he wanted to send the driver of the truck Sayfullo Saipov to Guantanamo, though he later walked that back.
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Like many urban elites, I have little or no understanding of the people of central Appalachia, a rural mountainous region that spans southwestern Pennsylvania, southeastern Ohio, eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, and western Virginia. News media accounts (especially during election season which seems to be the only time we pay attention to that region), passing through the occasional town on the way to somewhere else, and seeing films like Deliverance can give a highly misleading picture of the people there as not only poverty-stricken and poorly educated, but even willfully obtuse in acting against their own interests, and being easily seduced by Donald Trump’s bogus promises to bring back coal jobs and rejuvenate the region.
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Via David Pescovitz, I came across this remarkable video of a collision at an intersection when a ‘ghost’ car appears out of nowhere right into the path of another car.
The killing of eight people and the injuring of eleven on the streets of New York City by a man driving a truck has once again shown that in an open society, there is no lack of soft targets that can be attacked by anybody at all. We have to ask ourselves what purpose such attacks on ordinary people serve. One is of course to create fear among the population. But that has no strategic benefit and indeed has negative blowback.
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The negative impact of plastics in our environment is worse than we thought. Earlier alarms had been sounded about plastics concentrating in large areas in oceans, though one must be cautious about how one describes it and calling them ‘giant garbage patches’ is misleading as discussed by the NOAA Marine Debris Program’s Carey Morishige.
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