Peak Derp

The recent trend is for companies to come up with meat substitutes to replace animals in burgers.

Arby’s looked at this and said, “Here, hold my beer.”

Making burgers from carrots is one thing, but making carrots from burgers is demented:

From venison, elk, and duck to sandwiches with layers upon layers of meat and curly fries stacked on top, Arby’s has offered some particularly unique products in the past.

Now the sandwich chain is flipping the vegan “meat” trend on its head, leaning into its “We have the meats” slogan and creating its most bizarre concoction yet: the “megetable,” a vegetable made out of meat.

And Arby’s new megetable, the “Marrot,” is exactly what it sounds like: a meat-based carrot that not only tastes like the orange vegetable but has much of its nutritional value.

Conceptualized by Neville Craw, Arby’s brand executive chef, and his sous-chef Thomas Kippelen, the Marrot boasts more than 30 grams of protein and more than 70% of the recommended daily amount of vitamin A.

Of course, the first thing that is wrong is that Arby’s is making a meat carrot.

Almost is as disturbing is that Arby’s has an executive chef and sous chef.

Mind blown.

I Think that I Might Have Made My Best Tweet Ever

Tom Tomorrow asked a question:

does anybody know a good place I could take my horse to and ride til I can't no more

— Tom Tomorrow (@tomtomorrow) June 24, 2019

While I do not think that my response was one for the ages, it was pretty good:

Clearly the desert, because there ain't no one for to give you no pain.

— Jack Dorsey Is Objectively Pro-Nazi (M.G. Saroff) (@40_Years) June 24, 2019

I live for these (very) small victories.

Rover McRoverface?

They only want K-12 students to help, so talk to your younger friends, or the children of your younger friends, and get them to suggest “Rover McRoverface.”

You could also suggest “Wade” as in “Rover Wade”, if you want to see someone’s head explode:

NASA’s Mars 2020 rover is beginning to take shape. Earlier this month, crews installed some of its legs and six of its wheels. Now, the vehicle needs a name, and for that, NASA is turning to students. Beginning in fall 2019, NASA will run a nationwide “Name the Rover” contest open to K-12 students in the US. The spacecraft will need a name by July 2020, when it’s expected to launch.

The contest is part of NASA’s ongoing effort to engage the public in its Moon to Mars mission, which will search for signs of microbial life, characterize the planet’s climate and geology and pave the way for human exploration. If you’re not a K-12 student but want to get involved, NASA is also accepting applications to judge the contest submissions.

Republican Family Values

As you may be aware, Duncan Hunter, (the son) of Duncan Lee Hunter, is under investigation for misuse of campaign funds.
What I did not know, until now, was that it is alleged that he spent his money on his girl(s) on the side:

Federal prosecutors alleged in a new court filing this week that Rep. Duncan D. Hunter used campaign funds to help facilitate extramarital affairs, and they want to show jurors evidence of the relationships at his upcoming trial.

The filing Monday alleges Hunter (R-Calif.) used campaign money to fund trips, dinners and drinks with women with whom he was romantically involved — three lobbyists, a woman who worked in his congressional office and another who worked for a member of House leadership.

In the new filing, prosecutors allege Hunter’s romantic entanglements blossomed as he used campaign money for large expenses — such as a ski trip near Lake Tahoe — and small ones, such as Uber rides to and from the women’s homes.

………

Hunter and his wife, Margaret, were charged last year with using more than $250,000 in campaign funds to pay for family vacations, theater tickets and other personal expenses. Prosecutors say he used his campaign account as his “personal piggy bank” to live well beyond his means.

………

Hunter’s wife, meanwhile, pleaded guilty in the case this month and agreed to “tell everything,” according to a copy of her agreement with prosecutors. Prosecutors revealed in another court filing they have texts between Margaret and her husband, who have three children, in which they discussed using campaign funds on personal expenses.

………

Ammar Campa-Najjar, a Democrat who is challenging Hunter in the next election, tweeted that Hunter was “literally in bed with lobbyists.”

(emphasis mine)

The kicker is that he won reelection last year, when he had already been charged.

Trump Is Still Not the Deporter in Chief

There has been a lot of outrage over how DoJ Lawyer Sarah Fabian has been saying that children in detention do not need mattress, or soap, or toothbrushes or real blankets in detention facilities kept so cold that they are nicknamed “Refrigerators”.

Well, it turns out that she’s done worse things.

In particular, she argued for putting children in solitary confinement under the Obama administration:

………

The United States’s loathsome argument—that it is “safe and sanitary” to confine children without soap, toothbrushes, dry clothes, and on concrete under bright lights—is morally indefensible. It’s also a spectacularly foolish argument to raise in the famously liberal Ninth Circuit, where the United States should have expected exactly the reception that it got. And even though the litigation began under the Obama administration, it was the Trump administration that elected to bring this appeal and ask the court to bless these inhumane conditions as “safe and sanitary.” That’s an extremely aggressive legal argument, and one that suggests that the disturbing conditions being reported at confinement centers are intentional, not a sign of mere neglect.

It is right and fit to condemn the Trump administration for its argument and its treatment of children. But it’s wrong to think the problem can be cured with a presidential election. Trump will depart; the problem will not depart with him. This administration is merely the latest one to subject immigrant children to abusive conditions. It’s been 35 years since Jenny Flores was strip-searched in an adult facility. Before Sarah Fabian defended concrete floors and bright lights for President Donald Trump, she defended putting kids in solitary confinement for President Barack Obama.

Remember, the UN has defined solitary confinement as torture, and the DoJ, and ICE, and CBP asked the courts to allow them to torture children with solitary confinement in 2015:

The Department of (in) Justice recently submitted a motion in opposition to a lawsuit filed by mothers and their children who want ICE to stop torturing their children by placing them in solitary confinement.

The DOJ now can be called the DOIJ for its monstrous defense and advocacy for the following policy:

ICE also has family residential standards that govern discipline and cover, among other things, a situation where a resident has participated in the offense of “insurrection,” which is defined as “[p]articipation or encouraging another to participate in unauthorized activity such as protesting or rioting.” See ICE/DRO Residential Standard, Discipline and Behavior Management, at 17, attached hereto as Exhibit O.6

The ICE disciplinary standards state that their purpose is to “provide a safe and orderly living environment” at ICE family residential facilities, and to “manage discipline and behavioral problems in a manner that ensures the safety and welfare of staff, residents, and visitors.” Exhibit O at 1. “Insurrection” is considered a major offense at ICE family residential facilities, and under the standards requires separation from the general population. Id. at 16-17. Medical observation rooms may be used to facilitate this separation.

In other words, if a mother protests or encourages another to protest, DOJ,  led by the lawyer-warrior in favor of locking up toddlers and children, Sarah B. Fabian, ICE has a right to punish the mothers’ children with solitary confinement.

I would note that the pace of deportations under the Obama administration are still outpaced by those of the Obama administration.

There is a special place in hell for both of them.

Good News From Istanbul

In March, Turkey’s Islamist AKP suffered major setbacks. 

Most significantly was that, for the first time in over a decade, they narrowly lost the election for Mayor, which did not just a political earthquake, but would eliminate the party’s control over patronage in Turkey’s largest city.

 Faced with this treat, Erdoğan petitioned electoral commission to invalidate and re-run the elections, and the commission, being largely a tool of Erdoğan did so.

Well, in the new elections, Ekrem İmamoğlu defeated the AKP candidate in a land slide:

Turkey’s opposition has won a high-stakes rerun of the Istanbul mayoral election, a serious blow to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and a landmark victory in a country where many feared democracy was failing.

Shortly after initial results pointing to a landslide win for the opposition coalition candidate, Ekrem İmamoğlu, emerged on Sunday evening, the candidate of the ruling Justice and Development party (AKP), Binali Yıldırım, conceded and congratulated his rival.

The repeat election, designed to undo İmamoğlu’s narrow surprise win in the 31 March contest, was an unprecedented test for both Turkey’s fragile democratic institutions and Erdoğan’s political future.

………

The president issued his congratulations to İmamoğlu on Twitter after initial results showed that with 99% of ballots counted the People’s Republican party (CHP) candidate had increased his lead in March, of 13,000 votes, to an astonishing 777,000, or 54%.

Crowded parties broke out on Istanbul’s main shopping streets and in liberal neighbourhoods.

I rather hope that this is the beginning the end for Erdoğan, btu I rather imagine that the this is the point where the opposition begins fighting with each other.

Linkage

Yes, this is a very young Peter Capaldi:

We are Unbelievably Screwed

Permafrost in Canada is melting at a rate faster than the most alarmist models predicted:

Permafrost at outposts in the Canadian Arctic is thawing 70 years earlier than predicted, an expedition has discovered, in the latest sign that the global climate crisis is accelerating even faster than scientists had feared.

 A team from the University of Alaska Fairbanks said they were astounded by how quickly a succession of unusually hot summers had destabilised the upper layers of giant subterranean ice blocks that had been frozen solid for millennia.

 “What we saw was amazing,” Vladimir Romanovsky, a professor of geophysics at the university, told Reuters. “It’s an indication that the climate is now warmer than at any time in the last 5,000 or more years.“

 ………

 The paper was based on data Romanovsky and his colleagues had been analysing since their last expedition to the area in 2016. The team used a modified propeller plane to visit exceptionally remote sites, including an abandoned cold war-era radar base more than 300km from the nearest human settlement.

 Diving through a lucky break in the clouds, Romanovsky and his colleagues said they were confronted with a landscape that was unrecognisable from the pristine Arctic terrain they had encountered during initial visits a decade or so earlier.

 The vista had dissolved into an undulating sea of hummocks – waist-high depressions and ponds known as thermokarst. Vegetation, once sparse, had begun to flourish in the shelter provided from the constant wind.

………

Even if current commitments to cut emissions under the 2015 Paris agreement are implemented, the world is still far from averting the risk that these kinds of feedback loops will trigger runaway warming, according to models used by the UN-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

 We are in for a world of hurt.

This is a Feature, Not a Bug


Elon Musk thinks that he is this.


He is actually this.


And the polling

It turns out that of all the names given to driver assistance technology, Autopilot is the one most likely to cause over-reliance on the tech.

This is not a surprise. Overselling the feature, and generally overselling the features of his car, has been central to the business plan for Tesla Motors.

Does the name “Autopilot” cause people to overestimate the abilities of Tesla’s driver-assistance technology? It’s a question that comes up in the Ars comments almost every time we write about the feature.

Critics warn that some customers will assume something called “Autopilot” is fully self-driving. Tesla’s defenders counter by pointing out that autopilot capabilities in planes aren’t fully autonomous. Pilots still have to monitor their operation and intervene if they have a problem, and Tesla’s Autopilot system is no different.

A new survey from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety brings some valuable hard data to this debate. The group asked drivers questions about the capabilities of five advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS). They identified the products only by their brand name—”Autopilot,” “Traffic Jam Assist,” “Super Cruise,” etc. Survey participants were not told which carmaker made each product, and they did not learn the capabilities of the products. There were 2,000 total respondents, but each was asked about only two out of five systems, leading to a few hundred responses for each product.

………

For example, 48 percent of drivers said that it was safe for a driver to take their hands off the wheel when Autopilot is active, compared with around 33 percent for ProPilot Assist and less than 30 percent for the other systems named. Six percent of drivers said it was safe to take a nap in a car with Autopilot, while only three percent said the same for other ADAS systems.

Tesla further compounds this issue by promising that full autonomous driving will be available in a matter of the next few months.

This, and Theranos, is what happens when the Silicon Valley, “Fake it Until You Make It,” is applied to the real world.

This is Insanely Cool Tech


Someone has come up with a method of engraving riblets on the surface of aircraft using laser interference patterns.

Riblets are (very) tiny grooves carved in the surface of an aircraft to reduce skin drag:

A process to automatically laser drag-reducing riblets onto the painted surfaces of aircraft has been developed by two German companies, laser surface treatment specialist 4JET and aircraft paint supplier Mankiewicz.

The Laser Enhanced Air Flow (LEAF) technology uses laser interference patterning to rapidly create fine streamwise grooves in the paint topcoat. These microscopic grooves, or riblets, have long been known to reduce viscous drag from turbulent flow over aircraft surfaces.

Riblets have been proven to reduce drag by up to 10%, for fuel savings on long-haul airliners of more than 1%, the companies say. Ways of exploiting this benefit have been previously developed, from covering the airframe with grooved plastic film to embossing riblets into the topcoat during painting. But issues from accessibility to durability have so far prevented adoption.

Removing paint using lasers is a well-known technology, but is too slow to create the high density of riblets required to achieve drag reductions, the companies say. Instead of creating the grooves line-by-line using a single laser spot, 4JET says it has developed a way to speed up the process by a factor of 500 using laser interference patterning.

The laser beam is split into two and recombined on the surface so that the light waves overlap in a controlled way. This superposition creates a pattern with dozens of equidistant lines with alternating high and low intensity within a single laser spot. This allows about 1 m³ (35 ft.³) of riblet area to be created in less than 1 min., the companies say.

Way to think outside of the box.

They Are Concentration Camps

From any reasonable historical perspective, the ICE detention facilities are concentration camps, as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has stated. (Above link to a Jewish historian saying same)

The Germans adopted the term “Concentration Camp” for their camps, which were better described as death camps, because it put a civilized gloss on what was a barbaric enterprise.

This week, conservatives weaponized Jewish suffering to divert discussion from the massive human rights abuses occurring at our border.

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), daughter of the man who called torture “enhanced interrogation,” scolded Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) for using the term “concentration camp” to describe the growing civilian detention system, including the reopening of Fort Sill, previously a Japanese American internment camp, to hold children.

Since then, Jews have split on whether it’s appropriate to use “concentration camp” outside the context of the Holocaust. There are those who find the term too emotionally charged, or who believe the sheer scale of the Nazi Final Solution bars any possible comparison.

Though I disagree, I understand. My father turned seven on June 22, 1941, the day the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. I was raised with the story of how my grandmother saved my dad and aunt with her quick thinking and a cramped spot on a cattle train leaving Odessa for Siberia. Those who remained were shot. As a Jew, I bear witness to the memory of those who did not survive.

I’m also a legal historian, and my research on genocide and crimes against humanity has made clear that while the Holocaust is unique in its scale and implementation, the perpetrators and motivations are not. Genocide is a human crime, not a German one. In the wake of World War II, human rights laws were written in the hopes of preventing future tragedies, not for labeling the past.

You can also listen to George Takei, who spent much of the World War II in US concentration camps:

I know what concentration camps are. I was inside two of them, in America. And yes, we are operating such camps again.

— George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) June 19, 2019

I have not yet had the opportunity to discuss this with a relative who spent much of WWII in a Japanese concentration camp in the Philippines, but I hope to.

But Markets………

It turns out that the massive Southern California Gas leak in 2015 and 2016 was the direct consequence of its negligence and deception.

For some people, this could be seen as an argument for much more aggressive regulation of privately owned utilities, though I see it as an even stronger argument for public ownership of utilities:

For 111 days in 2015 and 2016, more than 100,000 metric tons of methane – a potent greenhouse gas – and other harmful chemicals leaked into the atmosphere from the blowout of well SS-25 at SoCalGas’s Aliso Canyon underground gas storage facility in Los Angeles. The blowout forced the evacuation of more than 8,300 households. Residents exposed to the gas reported nosebleeds, dizziness, and respiratory problems. More than three years later, many report severe health effects.

In May 2019, an independent report commissioned by the California Public Utilities Commission put the blame for this disaster squarely on SoCalGas. In other words, SoCalGas, the largest natural gas provider in the nation, brought us the largest methane leak disaster in United States history.

………

SoCalGas’s disregard for safety was not an aberration. The independent report identifies more than 60 leaks at Aliso Canyon going back to the 1970s that SoCalGas chose not to investigate. Forty percent of the wells at Aliso Canyon reviewed in the report had past failures in the casing that enclose the wells and prevent leaks, with an average of two failures per well. According to the report, SoCalGas knew of these leaks and failures but neglected to conduct detailed inspections or evaluate for disaster potential.

………

In addition to finding negligence, the report also found incompetence. According to the report, SoCalGas should have been able to plug the blowout at SS-25 much sooner. SoCalGas, however, did not conduct the correct modeling in its attempts to plug the leak. Instead, SoCalGas used the exact same strategy in its six unsuccessful attempts. A quote often attributed to Albert Einstein is appropriate here: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” If SoCalGas had competently conducted the correct modeling from the outset, the report finds that SoCalGas could have plugged SS-25 as early as November 13, 2015 — 90 days before SoCalGas actually plugged the well.

It’s really time for California, and the rest of the nation, to make public ownership of utilities less difficult.

Mixed Emotions

I am happy that Donald Trump has not initiated military strikes against Iran in response to the shoot-down of Droney McDroneface, but the fact that he called for them, and then reversed himself, is not reassuring:


President Trump approved military strikes against Iran in retaliation for downing an American surveillance drone, but pulled back from launching them on Thursday night after a day of escalating tensions.

As late as 7 p.m., military and diplomatic officials were expecting a strike, after intense discussions and debate at the White House among the president’s top national security officials and congressional leaders, according to multiple senior administration officials involved in or briefed on the deliberations.

Officials said the president had initially approved attacks on a handful of Iranian targets, like radar and missile batteries.

The operation was underway in its early stages when it was called off, a senior administration official said. Planes were in the air and ships were in position, but no missiles had been fired when word came to stand down, the official said.

………

The retaliation plan was intended as a response to the shooting down of the unmanned, $130 million surveillance drone, which was struck Thursday morning by an Iranian surface-to-air missile, according to a senior administration official who was briefed on the military planning and spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential plans.

The strike was set to take place just before dawn Friday in Iran to minimize risk to the Iranian military and civilians.

My thought go out to the grieving family of Droney, but the air-strike was a bad idea to begin with, and my guess is that it came from the fevered brain of NSC Chairman John Bolton, who would do or say anything to get his war on.

Totally F%$#ing Evil

The Trump administration’s plan to reduce poverty in the United States is to redefine poverty so far down that starvation won’t count as poverty:

In early May, the Office of Management and Budget announced that it was seeking public comments on a proposal to change how inflation and the consumer price index are calculated, and, by extension, how poverty rates in the United States are estimated.

………

Now, however, the Trump administration looks set to head off in the exact opposite direction. It has come up with a proposal to measure inflation by a “chained consumer price index,” which will most likely take millions of people who were previously considered by the government to be living in poverty, and declare that suddenly, magically, they are no longer poor.

The chained consumer price index is a particularly cautious way of measuring inflation: On a monthly basis, it tries to factor in how people change their consumption patterns in response to price spikes or changes in technology. If, for example, car prices significantly increased, but in response, vastly more people used public transport and thus weren’t as impacted by the industry-specific inflation, it would factor that in and reduce the price increase’s overall impact on the inflation rate.

In theory, that’s all well and good — except for the fact that poor people tend to be less flexible in their spending patterns than more affluent Americans. In recent years, economists have found that poor people actually experience higher rates of inflation than do those with more disposable income. If gas prices go up, for example, a middle-class American might choose to counter that impact by purchasing a hybrid or electric car; a poor person likely won’t have the down-payment or the monthly income needed to purchase a new vehicle and will thus be stuck with the old gas guzzler.

Of course, this is also something that the Obama administration proposed, only to retreat when  opposition to this scheme exploded, so while it’s completely evil, it’s by no means unprecedented.