Photo by A Bear
In the foreground, a swimmer is observing the herring school in shallow near-shore water. The boat behind him is a boat assigned to do test samples of the herring to evaluate when to harvest them at the prime time. The red flag with a white diagonal stripe is to alert boats there is a diver/swimmer nearby.
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I'm sure the person ordered this just so they could post a photo, but I wonder how it tasted and how much it cost.
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Sen. Mitt Romney was booed by over 2,100 Republican delegates for the party’s state convention: "I’m a man who says what he means, and you know I was not a fan of our last president’s character issues,” Romney said as crowd shouted “traitor” or “communist”https://t.co/jJKMPZBFHJ
— Amanda Golden (@amandawgolden) May 1, 2021
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In 2019, Donald Trump was POTUS and Bill Barr was the US Attorney General.
The DOJ in late 2019 covertly obtained access to my iCloud and never notified me.
— Rudy W. Giuliani (@RudyGiuliani) April 30, 2021
They invaded the attorney client relationship as we were defending against the phony impeachment.
These prosecutors violated the laws, not me.
If again, nothing is done, you could be next.
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The Arizona Senate is shopping for an election doctor who will give them the fix they crave: an election audit conducted with secret methods and guaranteed to provide them with the election results they want:
Cyber Ninjas is a Florida firm with no election experience run by Doug Logan, who has shared unfounded conspiracy theories claiming the official 2020 presidential election results are illegitimate. His attorney is seeking to have its policies and procedures for protecting voter privacy kept secret, arguing that they are trade secrets.
Arizona Republicans have engaged in non-stop f*ckery in their futile effort to overturn the November election results. My only question is how many of them are actual crackpots who bought into Trump's Big Lie about the election, and how many are cynical politicians who prey on a crackpot Republican base that has become indistinguishable from the mainstream GOP?
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In January, Bloomberg reported that vaccine refusal rather than production was the problem in India. The claim was that Indian pharma could make 500 million doses a month, but the Modi government was offering it to other countries because Indian medical personnel were refusing the vaccine over safety concerns.
Although the government pushed hard to vaccinate, the pleas fell on deaf ears. A more longstanding problem was low levels of mask compliance, as this article from October 2020 reports.
My impression is that the recent surge of cases has changed views in India. A concern, however, is that mutations have proliferated.
Mutations to the virus occur all the time, but most of them are clinically insignificant. Still, keeping the number of transmissions low is important because the more transmissions, the more mutations, and the greater the chance of a mutation that isn't blocked by the vaccine.
I've never heard the elevated risk of vaccine-resistant mutations mentioned by those who regard mask-wearing and vaccination as a simple matter of personal choice. The decision to go unmasked, undistanced and unvaccinated jeopardizes everyone's safety, including those who have been vaccinated.
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I'd have been shocked if the Minnesota jury didn't find Derek Chauvin guilty on all three counts, but as many prosecutors and defense attorneys have said, you never know what's going to happen in that jury room.
I don't know if Chauvin was the sort of cop who had a habit of taking things too far or if something in the dynamics of the moment took him to a place of madness, but on the face of it, he murdered George Floyd. It wasn't a close call.
Historically, police officers who murdered citizens while on the job weren't held to account. The simple fact is that without video, the police are going to be believed over citizens. The problem is that police lie and citizens lie. Cameras don't settle all disagreements regarding the use of force, but bodycam, security, and bystander videos give police, prosecutors, juries, and the public a lot more to work with.
Even with video, however, we can disagree over what constitutes "objective and reasonable" use of force, including deadly force. As I mentioned previously, and I will get to this in another post at some point, I'm afraid I have to disagree with many people who see a plainly unjustifiable shooting in the Adam Toledo case. On close inspection, the shooting looks justified to me, but I'm viewing the video with some knowledge of guns, shooting, and most importantly, a better acquaintance with the science of human perception than the typical person viewing the Adam Toledo video. But I'm not going to go further with that case now.
Then, yesterday, we had another public convulsion with news of the shooting of sixteen-old Ma’Khia Bryant by a police officer in Columbus, Ohio. Many people assumed, upfront, that the shooting was unjustified. Some were raging at police to release the video, which they did within hours of the shooting. The video shows the view from the bodycam of the officer who shot Ms. Bryant. She is the girl seen in this screengrab with a knife in her hand.
But screengrabs can mislead us, as I believe a widely circulated screengrab of Adam Toledo with his empty hands raised is misleading. To evaluate these cases, we've got to see all of what the officer saw, in motion, as it occurred. In Ms. Bryant's case, that video is available here. I'd suggest watching the first 13 seconds several times, tracking the movements of everyone visible. I think the shooting was not only justified but necessary and just in the nick of time to save the life of the woman in pink.
In the first 6 seconds of the video, we see a woman in a pink tracksuit moving from center frame to left as the woman seems to walk diagonally toward the officer from the officer's perspective. The woman is in the parkway, close to where the driveway meets the street. Off to the right, maybe 10-15 feet away, a group of at least four more people is clustered in the driveway on the other side of the sidewalk.
Suddenly, this group scatters explosively with a woman in shorts backpedaling away from Ms. Bryant, who appears to have a knife raised to her. The woman moving backward falls to the ground in the parkway. Ms. Bryant circles around her, appearing to go at the woman on the ground before she breaks away and charges the woman in pink, knife pulled back to her side, then raised over the woman in pink who has fallen back on the hood of a car as she tries to escape being stabbed by Ms. Bryant. At that moment, the police officer shoots Ms. Bryant, who immediately falls to the ground.
Some people on social media said that police should have talked to Ms. Bryant, calmed her down, or intervened in some other way. None of that seems realistic given the scene that unfolded in that six seconds with several moving and shifting parts. You may have noticed, for example, that a man was also part of the attack on the woman who fell to the ground. He kicked her in the head just as Ms. Bryant shifted her attempted knifing from the woman on the ground to the woman in pink. And Ms. Bryant, who was several feet from the officer, did not appear to be listening to anyone. She was running and trying to stab people who were trying to escape being stabbed by her.
If I had to guess, I'd say Ms. Bryant was in a blind rage, and not responsive to words or commands. But we don't need to know that to see how the police officer saw it and to see why it was reasonable for him to believe that he had to shoot Ms. Bryant to save the life of the woman in the pink tracksuit. It was a split-second decision that looked like the right decision even in retrospect.
That's how I saw it after watching the video several times, stopping and restarting the video each time to isolate what happened in the first 13 seconds with particular attention to the 6 seconds leading up to the shooting. If you've got a different opinion about what occurred after carefully reviewing the video, I'd love to hear it.
By the way, we should avoid judgments of the officer's actions based upon the background of the individual who was shot. It doesn't matter if the person was a troubled teen, a gangbanger, or someone who had a hundred arrests under their belt, just as it doesn't matter if the individual was an honor student and a sweet kid. We should only judge a police officer's decision to use deadly force based upon the reasonableness of his actions in light of what the officer knew and saw, especially in the moments leading up to pulling the trigger. A debate over whether Ma'khia was a sweet kid, a holy terror, or something in between may be relevant to her loved ones, but it's irrelevant to the question of whether the shooting was justified.
Paula Bryant tells me her 16 year-old daughter Ma’Khia Bryant was an honor roll student and a sweet child. Ma’Khia was shot and killed by a @ColumbusPolice on Legion Lane at 4:30p today. pic.twitter.com/0FfbQVEgSD
— Lacey Crisp (@LaceyCrisp) April 21, 2021
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Thanks to A Bear who says, "I went for my beach walk yesterday and found an artifact apparently left by a wandering Inuit."
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If Officer Eric Stillman is charged in the tragic shooting of 13-year-old Adam Toledo, he would have a strong defense based on the published video and the testimony of psychologists who study perception. I expect the defense will try to hire Dan Simons (University of Illinois) or someone with a similar background in visual cognition.
The shooting was a perfect storm of factors that caused the officer to think he was about to be shot. The fly in the ointment for the defense could be that experts may be afraid to testify because the mob would try to ruin their careers and make their lives a living hell.
I'm a strong critic of police culture and practices, especially the CPD, but I think the crowd has this case wrong. A combination of confirmation bias and a lack of understanding of the human perceptual system are factors. I'll have more to say about this case when I've got more time to write.
Or did you want me to say the same thing as everyone else?
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WSJ:
University of Oxford scientists plan to reinfect dozens of adult volunteers with the coronavirus in the second U.K. clinical trial to study deliberate Covid-19 infection in quarantine—this time among people who have already recovered from the virus.
This seems like a direct but ethically sketchy approach to studying the limits of post-COVID immunity.
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Sheryl Gay Stolberg and at the NY Times explain the messaging conundrum facing public health officials who are addressing the Johnson and Johnson vaccine "pause."
The crux of the problem:
But where scientists saw prudence, public health officials saw a delicate trade-off: The blood clotting so far appears to affect just one out of every million people injected with the vaccine, and it is not yet clear if the vaccine is the cause. If highlighting the clotting heightens vaccine hesitancy and helps conspiracy theorists, the “pause” could ultimately sicken — and even kill — more people than it saves.
“It’s a messaging nightmare,” said Rachael Piltch-Loeb, an expert in health risk communications at the N.Y.U. School of Global Public Health. But officials had no other ethical option, she added. “To ignore it would be to seed the growing sentiment that public health officials are lying to the public.”
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Love this. You can clearly see the grip, release, rotation, and movement.
Brent Honeywell, Screwball (slow) 🍯
— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) April 11, 2021
First Major League K. pic.twitter.com/OLKKxhfhz5
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Last night, Fox News's Tucker Carlson rebuked a federal judge's decision to deny bail to a 1/6 Capitol invader and his mother.
"Neither Lisa Eisenhart or her son damaged any property in the Capitol or committed any violence — they just walked in to what we used to refer to as 'The People's House," Carlson said. And yet somehow Joe Biden's Justice Department convinced a federal judge that Lisa Eisenhart was quote 'a threat to our Republic' and her son was a 'would-be martyr.' Keep in mind, these are people whose crime was trespassing in the Capitol. We're not endorsing that, but some perspective please."
This is an interesting way to characterize a man who stormed the House floor wearing military-style garb, face masked, hands gloved, and carrying flex cuffs.
Here's a photo of Eric Munchel doing what Tucker Carlson characterized as just walking in and trespassing.
If the same man dressed the same way, carrying flex cuffs, just walked into Carlson's house while his terrified family hid in a closet, would Tucker say that he should be granted bail because he was just trespassing?
Of course, he wouldn't. This sort of disingenuous reporting is typical at Fox News. And this wasn't really about this particular defendant. This is about an ongoing push by some at Fox News to downplay the seriousness of what occurred at the Capitol on 1/6.
If Tucker had explained that the right to bail is a bedrock American principle, I'd have no problem with him arguing that Eric Munchel and his mother should have been granted bail. In fact, another judge overruled the judge who denied Munchel and his mother bail and released them to monitored home confinement. When possible, this is the arrangement I'd like to see, at a minimum.
If presumed innocent really means anything, it should mean that pre-trial detention is reserved for those who present a real and immediate danger to others or a substantial flight risk. It would have been more helpful if Carlson had educated his audience regarding the widespread abuse of pre-trial detention instead of arguing that this particular individual deserved bail because he was just trespassing. But discussing pre-trial detention in such terms would probably challenge many Fox viewers who are fine with the mass incarceration of those accused but presumed innocent, even though they have a constitutionally protected right to pre-trial bail under the Eighth Amendment. And all that is beside the point if the underlying intent of the bail discussion was to convince Fox News viewers that 1/6 was merely about some people trespassing.
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Barack Obama: "Citizens United was a bad decision."
Republicans: "You lie, you illegitimate, radical foreign-born, communist, Mau Mau president standing at a podium lecturing us! Citizens United was correct because corporations are people and money is speech."
Democrats: "Okay. Hey businesses, you need to say something.
Corporations say something Republicans don't like.
Republicans: "Businesses need to stay out of politics!"
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