MrG's Blog & Notes

* This is an archive of my own online blog and notes, with weekly entries collected by month.

[MON 01 NOV 21] THE WEEK THAT WAS 43

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: As reported by an article from REUTERS.com ("Southeast Asian States Announce New Strategic Pact With Australia" by Ain Bandial & Tom Allard, 27 October 2021), Australia seems determined to take an expanded role in the Asia-Pacific region -- as demonstrated this last week by an agreement with the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN)" to form a "comprehensive strategic partnership". Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison issued a statement:

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The Australians announced in the wake of the agreement that the country would $154 million USD in projects in Southeast Asia on health and energy security, counter-terrorism, fighting transnational crime, plus hundreds of scholarships. Australia already has bilateral strategic partnerships of various levels with Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, the Philippines, and Vietnam.

Morrison also reassured ASEAN that the trilateral AUKUS security pact recently signed by Australia, Britain, and the USA was not a threat to ASEAN. Morrison said: "AUKUS adds to our network of partnerships that support regional stability and security."

It's a bit puzzling that ASEAN would see AUKUS as a threat, although Asian countries could have reservations about collaborations among the English-speaking club. Obviously, Australia's real concern is China, and that also the major concern of ASEAN nations -- but then again, they also have concerns about provoking China. The Chinese have been working to obtain an agreement with ASEAN, with a virtual summit currently planned.

* There's not much to say about domestic politics for this last week. There's a lot going on, to be sure, but for the moment it's all inconclusive. One amusement did show up on Twitter, in response to a comment from Brigitte Gabriel, an RWNJ with a strong distaste for Muslims:

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"Steve" is, like myself, nobody in particular on Twitter. I'm reminded of Andy Warhol's remark that, in the future, everybody will be famous for 15 minutes. This is sort of true on Twitter, but it's more like going viral for 15 minutes.

* As discussed in an article from ECONOMIST.com ("Remote-First Work Is Taking Over The Rich World", 30 October 2021), the COVID-19 pandemic was a huge boost to working at home, using Zoom to stay in touch with the workplace. Just before the pandemic hit, Americans spent an average of 5% of their worktime at home; by May 2020, it had jumped to 60%.

As vaccination becomes more widespread, there's been some push to get people coming back to the office -- but it's becoming obvious that's not really going to happen. Wall Street banks, which had been boosting a return to the physical workplace, are now backtracking. People like working from home, with most of those that do saying they would like to spend at least half their work hours there.

It's not hard to figure out why. One is the lingering pandemic; although vaccination substantially reduces the chance of being infected with COVID-19 and greatly reduces the severity of the disease, there is still some vulnerability; having a bullet-proof vest doesn't mean anyone wants to get shot at. Commuting can also be a time-consuming and tiring pain -- workers feel that being forced to commute every day is equivalent to a 5% pay cut. In a time of labor shortages, workers have more clout over bosses.

A very interesting possible factor is that remote work is simply more efficient. Economists have been as inconvenienced by the pandemic as everyone else, but it's amounted to a fascinating real-world, macroscale economic experiment. Some studies show remote work is less efficient, but others take a more positive view. A study from Statistics Canada found that more than half of workers who shifted to working at home with the pandemic said they were as productive as before, while a third said they were more so.

One wonders if those who said they got less done simply found that they were too easily distracted at home. Those who say they were more productive found they were actually less distracted, not so inclined to gossip with colleagues or be sidetracked by the buzz of the office. It turns out that remote-work technology doesn't necessarily make communications and coordination more burdensome; well-designed remote-work systems can make it easier. Patent applications for and investment in work-from-home technologies are booming.

If remote work is a good deal, then why not get rid of the office? Only a few companies have gone that route. The number of people moving to cities such as Tulsa, in Oklahoma, which trying to become the global capital of remote work, remains small. A behavioral study says that one problem with remote work is that workers communicating on Zoom don't interact much with people outside their work teams, and so tend to not be tuned to the operation of the greater organization.

It may be good enough to have people come into the office part of the time so they can interact -- though some suggest managers need to be more pro-active than that, bringing people physically together to brainstorm new ideas. Companies will have to experiment, with different organizations coming up with different schemes. However, the office doesn't seem likely to go away any time soon.

* I'm a student of scams -- I don't pull off scams myself, but they intrigue me. I've known about coupon counterfeiting, but tended to think it was a marginal scam. As reported by an article from USATODAY.com ("Virginia Criminal Couponer Who Robbed $31.8 Million Used Funds For High-End Vacations" by Scott Gleeson, 26 October 2021), it turns out that there's big money in it.

A woman named Lori Ann Talens, of Virginia Beach VA, peddled $31.8 million USD worth of bogus coupons, using the money to fund high-end home renovations and vacations. When the authorities raided her home, they found stacks of bogus coupons, rolls of coupon paper, and coupon designs for more than 13,000 products on her computer. Talens used Facebook and Telegram to find coupon buyers, using encrypted communication services to deal with her customers and being paid in cryptocurrencies. Her coupons were very convincing, other than they often had ridiculously steep discounts, allowing products to be obtained almost for free.

The scheme came undone when one of the customers reported it to the Coupon Information Center (CIC) -- a group that deals with coupon fraud. The CIC then bought coupons from Talens, verified that they were counterfeit, and alerted the Postal Inspection Service. She ended up pleading guilty to mail, wire, and health care fraud, and was sentenced to 12 years in prison. Her husband, Pacifico Talens, got 7 years. "Boo-hoo!"

* One of the silver linings of the COVID-19 pandemic was the rapid development of effective vaccines against the virus. As discussed in an editorial from NATURE.com ("The COVID Pandemic Must Lead To Tuberculosis Vaccines", 27 October 2021), that leads to the question of why progress on vaccines for long-established infections has been slow.

Case in point is tuberculosis. It kills roughly 1.5 million people a year, and it seems to be gaining, the central problem being that work on a TB vaccine is underfunded. There are treatments for TB, but not all TB patients can get to them, and TB is acquiring resistance to treatments. A vaccine is better than treatments in any case. There is a TB vaccine, the Bacillus Calmette / Guerin (BCG) vaccine, but it was introduced in 1921, a century ago, and isn't very effective.

The dwindling of funding for TB treatment has had the odd effect of reducing the number of people diagnosed with the disease -- for the simple reason that fewer diagnoses are being performed. Total funding for fighting TB is maybe about half that needed. In 2019, funding for TB research ran to only $901 million USD. In contrast, the US National Institutes of Health alone has set aside $4.9 billion USD for research on COVID-19.

The COVID-19 pandemic, however, has demonstrated what can be done when there's a will to do it, showing that excellent research can be conducted rapidly and safely. Lessons from the pandemic can be applied to the fight against TB and other infectious diseases -- including wide-scale resource mobilization to the use of emerging technologies, such as messenger RNA and other platforms, to create vaccines. Advances in rapid and reliable diagnostics, advanced computation, sequencing and clinical-trial capacity for new vaccines and treatments can all be put to use for TB and other infectious diseases. There's no reason to wait another century to get a better TB vaccine.

[MON 08 NOV 21] THE WEEK THAT WAS 44

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: There were off-year elections on 2 November. Much fuss was made over defeats for the Democrats, but they won some, too -- and things did not go badly here in Colorado. There were three major initiatives; one, Proposition 119, would have raised marijuana sales taxes to pay for out-of-school learning. It got shot down, it seems because it came across as too contrived and gimmicky.

The other two initiatives had a conservative bent. Amendment 78 was an attempt to have the legislature take control of some state government discretionary spending, while Proposition 120 would have cut property taxes. Both were rejected by solid margins. The failure of Proposition 120 was a surprise, since the inflation of housing prices has made property taxes increasingly painful. It appears the majority of Coloradans realized it would put local governments in a painful crunch.

Exactly what lessons this election gave for the 2022 mid-term elections is unclear, things still being so unstable as to make prediction impossible. A lot can, and will, happen in another year.

* Clearly one of the factors in the 2022 elections will be the status of investigations into Donald Trump and his stooges. There's considerable complaint among the Woke Left on Twitter about the current progress of the House 1/6 Committee: "They're too slow! They're not going to do anything! Why isn't Trump being indicted?! Why aren't people being arrested?!"

One Teri Kanefield, a lawyer and contributor to THE WASHINGTON POST and such, made a plea for sanity in an essay titled: "Criminal Consequences & The Threat Of Right-Wing Extremism", presented in a heavily edited form here:

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I'm getting annoyed with all the whining on Twitter about the slow progress of the investigations. Yeah, it's exasperating, but if that's the way it works, that's the way it works. We'll see what happens. [ED: What happened was that Trump was re-elected, of course.]

* I keep backups on three 1-terabyte USB hard disk drives, along with some ongoing work uploaded to OneDrive. One of the USB drives went south, so I got a replacement from Amazon.com. As long as I was loading it up, I decided to make some changes in my archiving strategy, since I so rarely got into the older archives. Now I only keep archives for the last 12 months and for the three years before that, and for every fifth year -- 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015 -- before that, with those five-year archives zipfiled.

I had some problems with creating the zipfile archives, but got it done. However, when I got everything copied over, I was puzzled that one of the disks was about 3/4ths full, while the other two were less than half. What gives?

After much fumbling, I found a Windows app named FOLDERSIZE.EXE that listed the contents of a drive in detail, and found a hidden file named $RECYCLE.BIN that was much bigger on the one drive than the others. I puzzled about that, to remember that it was the Windows Recycling Bin -- which I didn't want on the archival disks.

OK, what to do about it? After more fumbling, I realized that the Recycling Bin app on my PC has a "Properties" icon, which allows selecting an external drive, setting its bin size, and turning backing up to the bin on or off. I set the bin size to 1 megabyte, saved the setting, and then turned off backup, saving the setting again -- do them at the same time, it seems to give uncertain results. Also, I had to turn off backup before I could delete the old oversized $RECYCLE.BIN folders using FOLDERSIZE.EXE. Incidentally, I left a 1-megabyte $RECYCLE.BIN on the USB drives to make sure that Windows wasn't inclined to re-install a recycling bin unprompted.

After that, with a series of doublechecks, I finally got all three drives with the same contents and usage. It was simple in the end, but it took hours, in particular because of hanging up the PC -- I wasn't sure if it was due to bugs in FOLDERSIZE.EXE, or because the PC was too sluggish to handle one or two 1-terabyte USB drives, being plugged in and unplugged repeatedly. I did get rid of FOLDERSIZE.EXE, since my PC reported finding malware after I used it. I also had some problems with DriveBox attempting to back up the USB drives, but I told it not to do that, and it seems to be working okay now. Really, though, is it necessary that this picky stuff take so much time? I'd rather it didn't.

[MON 15 NOV 21] THE WEEK THAT WAS 45

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: As reported in an article from CNN.com ("US, Russia, China, & Pakistan Meet To Discuss Afghanistan As Humanitarian Crisis Deepens" by Jennifer Hansler, 11 November 2021), the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban has effectively led to the breakdown of a country that wasn't in good shape to begin with. This last week, representatives of the USA, China, Russia, and Pakistan met in Islamabad to discuss what could be done about the humanitarian crisis there, with many Afghans facing starvation as winter sets in. There were also discussions with Taliban officials on the sidelines. Millions of Afghans face growing hunger due to soaring food prices, a drought and an economy in freefall, sent into a tailspin by a hard cash shortage, sanctions on Taliban leaders, and the suspension of financial aid.

The deal the US made with the Taliban leading up to the American withdrawal stipulated that the Taliban establish an inclusive government that guaranteed the rights of women and of minorities. Few thought that would happen, and it didn't. The Taliban's interim government -- all male and made up of members of the Taliban and the allied Haqqani network -- has imposed harsh societal restrictions, particularly on women. More than $9 billion USD in Afghan central bank reserves are frozen outside the country, and foreign aid is effectively switched off for the time being.

A joint statement issued by the four-power diplomatic group "called on the Taliban to work with fellow Afghans to take steps to form an inclusive and representative government that respects the rights of all Afghans and provides for the equal rights of women and girls to participate in all aspects of Afghan society."

The group praised the Taliban's commitment "to allow for the safe passage of all who wish to travel to and from Afghanistan and encouraged rapid progress, with the onset of winter, on arrangements to establish airports countrywide that can accept commercial air traffic, which are essential to enable the uninterrupted flow of humanitarian assistance."

In parallel developments, this last week the US and Qatar signed an agreement in which Qatar would represent US interests in Afghanistan. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said: "Qatar will establish a US interest section within its embassy in Afghanistan to provide certain consular services, and monitor the condition and security of US diplomatic facilities in Afghanistan."

Qatar has good relations and influence with the Taliban. In an optimistic view, the Qataris might well be able to help create an "inclusive and representative" Afghan government. That may be expecting far too much, but the Taliban may well have no other choice: with victory, they now have ownership, and are finding out that running a government is much harder than overthrowing one.

* The big business news of the last week was that US giant corporation General Electric (GE), founded 129 years ago, was breaking up, with CEO Lawrence Culp announcing that the firm would split its surviving remaining operations into three public companies:

• A jet-engine operation -- GE turbofans power the majority of all commercial flights, while GE military jet engines power many US combat aircraft.
  
  
• A power operation -- GE systems and turbines generate a third of the world's electricity.
  
  
• A health-care division -- GE systems are the backbone of modern hospitals.

Those are all big news, but they seem limited compared to GE's history. The company lit streets, filled homes with appliances, made locomotives to haul the appliances, and built a huge financing business to keep it all going. Giant conglomerates once seemed to be the way of the world, with CEO Jack Welch taking GE to the heights in the 1980s and 1990s. He retired in 2004 with a severance package said to be worth over $400 million USD -- and then his empire began to fall apart, with rapid CEOs turnover and businesses being spun off. By 2021, GE was a $121-billion USD operation; that sounds good, but that was only a fifth of the value the company reached under Welch.

The latest discard was the sale of the GE aircraft-financing operation, which provided enough funds to ensure that the three new independent operations get started with high-grade credit ratings. Culp, boss since 2018, isn't looking back, saying that GE is trading the "illusory benefits of synergy" for the certain benefits of focus, adding: "A sharper purpose attracts and motivates people."

Conglomerates remain alive and well, as demonstrated by today's most valuable companies: tech firms that have branched out into driverless cars, cloud computing, and so on. However, while size has its advantages, it also has its drawbacks; it can be an ace card or a joker, and in fact breaking up seems popular these days. 140-year-old Toshiba of Japan is also splitting into three separate companies, including an infrastructure services company, an electronics and storage company, and a flash memory company that will keep the Toshiba name.

Johnson & Johnson is splitting up into two companies, one for its consumer products and another for its drugs and medical devices. Other Big Pharma companies, including Pfizer, Merck, and GlaxoSmithKline, have either already spun off large divisions in the past few years or have plans to do so. Liz Young, head of investment strategy at SoFi, a US personal finance company, says: "For survival and keeping up with market trends, companies do have to look at what their most profitable lines of business are and where they should spend most of their time and focus. Competition is fierce. Sometimes you have to break it down to build it back up."

Tech giant Dell recently spun off its cloud business VMWare into a separate company. IBM has spun out its information technology services unit into a new company named Kyndryl -- giving Kyndryl now has more freedom to do joint ventures with IBM cloud rivals. Other companies may find that spinning off divisions will give them greater autonomy to forge business relationships that may have not made as much strategic sense as part of a giant conglomerate.

Spinoffs and asset sales are also a way for companies to backtrack from decisions that investors weren't happy with in the first place. Take telecom giants Verizon and AT&T, the owner of CNN Business parent WarnerMedia, for example. Both stocks have been sluggish in the last few years, it seems in part because of a perception that the two companies strayed too far from their core wireless businesses by jumping into high-profile media deals. Verizon bought AOL and Yahoo to combine them into a unit that it first branded as Oath, and then relabeled Verizon Media. Verizon has sold off the media division, having retained only a 10% stake in it, while AT&T is planning to spin off WarnerMedia. Size matters, but whether the best size is BIG or SMALL: "It depends."

* In business topics more off the mainstream, a video by Jon Sarlin of CNN BUSINESS gave a once-over on Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. It covered the usual ground, pointing out that the cryptocurrency market is worth more than the GDP of Italy -- but that it's difficult to impossible to buy a cup of coffee with it.

After providing a survey of cryptocurrencies, Sarlin then pointed out how unwieldy they are, with a Bitcoin transaction taking like 20 minutes to clear -- and the transactions, it seems, tend to be high-priced in the literal sense. Of course, everyone knows cryptocurrencies are ghastly energy hogs.

Underlying the cryptocurrency craze is an internet-driven techno-libertarianism, with advocates talking about "empowering the individual" with a "people's currency" not controlled by the authorities -- or in other words, existing in the shadow zone outside of the law. An economist named Nouriel Roubini -- of Iranian-Italian origins, a professor at New York University's Stern School of Business -- commented:

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The "1%" usage that Roubini implies is overwhelmingly on the "darknet", the outlaw internet, where transactions are often conducted in cryptocurrencies -- that "outside of the law" thing again. However, for all practical purposes, cryptocurrencies don't exist for mainstream business transactions of everything else.

Can people make money with cryptocurrencies? Sure; people can make money gambling in Vegas, too. Sarlin ended by suggesting the possibility that governments might regulate cryptocurrencies. It increasingly seems like more than a mere possibility.

* On Friday afternoon, the news reported that Steve Bannon -- one of the most prominent and disreputable of Trump's associates -- had been indicted for contempt of Congress. He had been subpoenaed and didn't show, claiming Trump executive privilege as a pretext. The House passed a motion of contempt of Congress against Bannon -- a crime that can get up to a year in the slammer -- but the Department of Justice did nothing. With no action against Bannon, other Trump stooges under subpoena were blowing off the 1/6 Committee as well.

There are suggestions that Bannon is looking forward to being arrested, so he can exploit it for self-promotion. That may be so, but it may also be so that he has a ridiculous view of his own importance, and few really care what happens to him. Indeed, to the extent that people do care, most of them want bad things to happen to him. Incidentally, Andy Borowitz, a humorist who writes for THE NEW YORKER, wrote a fake headline relative to the notoriously unwashed and seedy Bannon:

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In other absurdities, it is reported that anti-vaxxers who have been compelled to be vaccinated by mandates are now resorting to "detox the vax" schemes to neutralize the supposed health threat of the vaccines. In a TikTok video, one Dr. Carrie Madej gave a recipe for a bath with baking soda and epsom salts that will "radiation detox" the subject -- clearing the astral radiations from the vaccine, or whatever. Adding bentonite will "pull out the poisons", and borax -- a potential skin irritant, not to be ingested -- will "take the nanotechnology out of you."

OK, anyone who doesn't recognize this as pure nonsense is beyond help. It does suggest that it might be helpful for Dr. Fauci to recommend harmless "detox the vax" schemes -- take a vitamin C pill every day, that should do it. At least, it won't do any harm.

* Anyway, the world is in an unusually uncertain state these days. It doesn't feel constructive to pay too much attention to the muddle; I'm just keeping an eye on things, and otherwise going about my business. Everything will work itself out as it will, like it or not, regardless of how much I fuss about it. I'm just a spectator -- and I don't mind, that's the reality.

I woke up a few mornings ago with unsettled digestion, my head feeling wooden, my body slightly aching, and very thirsty. It took me a while to think: "Maybe this has something to do with the flu shot I got yesterday?"

Well -- yeah. Funny, I don't recall ever having had much reaction to vaccinations when I was younger. Incidentally, I always get apprehensive and flinch when I get the jab -- so this time, I was playing a game on my smartphone, and I barely felt the jab. Something to remember for later.

[MON 22 NOV 21] THE WEEK THAT WAS 46

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: The 26th Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, AKA "COP26", took place in Glasgow during the first half of November. The end result of discussions was a "Glasgow Climate Pact", elements including:

• The 197 countries involved in the convention achievements committed themselves to accelerating their decarbonization plans and, specifically, to strengthening their emissions-reduction targets for 2030 by next year -- not by 2025, as according to the five-year schedule set out under the 2015 Paris Agreement.
  
  
• Developed countries were "urged" to double funding for adaptation in developing countries by 2025. Developing countries were not happy with this vaporous resolution.
  
  
• Rules to set up a framework for a global carbon market were approved.
  
  
• The need to reduce global greenhouse-gas emissions by a 45% by 2030 was formally recognized.

At the end of the conference, India demanded and got a change in the verbiage, from: "accelerating efforts towards the phase-out of unabated coal power, and of inefficient subsidies for fossil fuels" -- to: "[escalate] efforts to phase down unabated coal power, and phase out inefficient fossil-fuel subsidies".

There were complaints among the conference about watering down a statement on the critical fossil-fuel issue, but the Indians were adamant. COP26 president Alok Sharma wept when he approved the amended package: "To all delegates, I apologize for the way in which this process has unfolded. I am deeply sorry. But I think that, as you have noted, it is also vital we protect this package."

There was a noisy contingent of protesters in Glasgow, and they were angry, with fair reason, with the weak efforts of the conference. From a distance, it seems less distressing. Lacking any real enforcement mechanism, trying to get a voluntary commitment from effectively all the nations of the world on common action is extremely difficult, and it is much less surprising that not enough was done than anything was done at all. From that point of view, COP26 was encouraging.

There is a saying in politics that once people are in agreement in principle, agreement in practice can follow. Indeed, as a bit of a flourish, at the end of the conference the US and China came to their own agreement on limiting carbon emissions. Even that is not enough, but it's much better than nothing. Incidentally, it also illustrated the Biden Administration's willingness to come to agreements with China when possible, while not shrinking from confrontation over points of contention, such as Taiwan.

* I ended up getting locked out of my Twitter account. It started out when I cited a threat somebody had made to a politician, and was suspended for making threats. I appealed, explaining I hadn't threatened anyone, and got back a form rejection. I kept appealing for a few days, just to see if I could get a response -- to conclude that the supposed appeal mechanism was on autopilot, it just discarded every appeal and automatically spat out a rejection.

I had a second Twitter account that was still operational, but Twitter also got stuffier about that. They didn't used to be, and they're still saying in their rules it's okay. It's not. I tried to get rid of the suspended account, and fumbled it, to get locked out. On considering the situation, I threw up my hands: enough already.

Exasperatingly, Twitter kept sending me emails on how I could beg them to unlock my account. I wasn't going to try; it seemed like Twitter was on a tear for shutting down accounts that blinked wrong, I truly doubted that Twitter had the least attention of doing anything but brusquely blowing me off. I've seen this sort of corporate sham before -- pretending to be nice while being uniformly nasty -- and was wise to it. I tried to unsubscribe from the emails, but ran into the account lock, and so I just blocked their emails.

OK, maybe Twitter is getting more serious about dealing with trolls? Incidentally, Facebook -- or "Meta" as it has been rebadged -- has got into trouble for stating that they would clamp down on climate-change denial ... to then run ads that said climate change is a hoax. In any case, for the moment I'm at loose ends and not sure what to do next.

* As discussed in an article from NATURE.com ("The Most Detailed 3D Map Of The Universe Ever Made" by Davide Castelvecchi, 28 May 2021), a survey of the southern sky has helped reveal the overall structure of the Universe, most specifically the workings of the mysterious "dark matter" and "dark energy" that control the evolution of the cosmos. The "Dark Energy Survey (DES)" collaboration mapped the sky between 2013 and 2019 using a 570-megapixel camera at the V?ctor M. Blanco telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. The survey covered a quarter of the southern sky, covering 300 million galaxies.

Such a 3D cosmic map of course probes back through time, the light of more distant galaxies taking proportionally more time to reach Earth. This historical record helps astronomers nail down the forces that govern the evolution of the Universe -- including the dark matter that slows down cosmic expansion, and the dark energy that speeds it up.

The DES team inspected the shapes of 100 million of the more distant galaxies, to see if the shapes were distorted by "gravitational lensing" from intervening mass, including dark matter. The Universe, it appears, is not as "lumpy" as expected. DES member Alexandra Amon says: "We observe our images of background galaxies to be slightly distorted." DES also showed that dark energy has remained uniformly distributed and constant through time.

DES is not over with: the latest results were based on its first three years of data-taking, out of a total of six years. Other observatories are either performing or preparing to perform similar studies.

[MON 29 NOV 21] THE WEEK THAT WAS 47

* THE WEEK THAT WAS: During November there were two major trials, one in Wisconsin and one in Georgia, both of which had indirect lessons. The first was of Kyle Rittenhouse, a teenager who went armed with an AR-15 assault rifle during a night of demonstrations in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He ended up killing two men and wounding another. After a trial, on 19 November a jury cleared Rittenhouse of homicide charges, saying he had acted in self-defense.

There was great outrage on the Left about the verdict, which was called a "miscarriage of justice". However, the crimes for which Rittenhouse was indicted were narrowly defined, and the only legal issue was if he was under attack from the victims when he fired on them. He was -- one had a pistol and pointed it at him -- and so self-defense was an obvious verdict. The fact that Rittenhouse had demonstrated very bad judgement getting in the way of public trouble while carrying an assault rifle was not a factor in the trial, because that didn't involve breaking any laws.

The real problem is American gun culture, and that issue doesn't seem to be converging towards a solution. Right now, support for gun control is not strong; it will pop back up in the future, but for the ugly reason that we'll have more school massacres. As for myself, Rittenhouse is someone I would prefer to forget. He's being played up as a hero by the Right, but all I can think is: "This will not end well for him." -- then go about my business.

The other trial was in Georgia, concerning the death of one Ahmaud Arbery, who on 23 February 2020 had been on a run through the streets of Satilla Shores. Three white men decided he was up to no good and went after him in their pickup trucks, armed; there was a confrontation, with Arbery shot and killed.

On 24 November, a jury found all three men guilty of homicide. Interestingly, Georgia law doesn't have "degrees" of murder as is more or less the norm in the USA, instead specifying either "malice murder" -- that is, a killing out of malice -- and "felony murder" -- that is, a killing as an incidental consequence of a felony crime. The convictions included both. The interesting thing about the verdict was that only one of the jurors was a person of color, but the other jurors were willing to hand out a guilty verdict. Traditionally in the South, white jurors were inclined to give white folks who killed a black person a PASS ... but things aren't the way they used to be.

* As discussed in an essay from ECONOMIST.com ("Midsized Mayhem", 25 November 2021), geopolitics remains focused on, most prominently, the rivalry between the US and China, tensions with Russia placing well second. However, beyond that, smaller powers are throwing their weight around as well:

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The leaders pushing these policies don't have a free hand. Belarus's dictator does what the Kremlin tells him to do, while Pakistan is deeply in debt to China, and few want to provoke the Americans. The Americans may be much less enthusiastic about sending in the troops than they were, but nobody wants trouble with them. However, the smaller powers still have plenty of room to pursue their own agendas:

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Of course, these countries are typically autocratic, and the leadership is often inclined to pursue adventures elsewhere to distract from problems at home. Economic agendas, such as arms deals, also play a role. In addition:

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The end results are bad, Venezuela being an economic basket case, and Ethiopia bogged down in civil war. Adventurism often doesn't work out well over the long run:

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Adventurism starts out as cheap and easy, but gradually becomes expensive and difficult, ending up as a trap. The autocrats who favor it should remember the saying: He who rides the tiger dare not dismount.

* After getting crashed out of Twitter, I'm continuing to be at loose ends, relative to social media. I posed a question to Reddit, setting up an account to do so; nobody was nasty to me and I actually got an excellent for my question, but I felt repelled by the environment. When I was done, I deleted my postings and closed the account. I have nothing against Reddit, I just don't want to be there.

I had made a quick fix to the links on my websites to Twitter, redirecting them to the donations page, but that was strictly temporary. After thinking it over, I figured out I'd start up a forum again. I've run them in the past, they haven't amounted to much, but I just wanted a place where people could comment if they liked. I had to search my memories for a free forum I had once used, trying to remember the name of the place I got it: "Oh yeah, BraveNet." So I got a free forum again. I may post YouTube videos on it.

I also got to thinking that I had a fair number of documents on my website that didn't get any traffic and were going nowhere -- particularly my software documents. I'm going to delete them from the website and put them on a personal webpage on my PC. No point in trying to maintain them any more. I've got more ideas that I'm working on. I'm not in a personally comfortable space these days, but "regression to the mean" tells me I should bounce back, and I get a lot of rethink out of the stress.