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There's a huge bunch of flooding in Yellowstone National Park. It started with heavy rain yesterday that led to a mass melting of the high altitude snowpack. Net result is instant 100 year floods on multiple rivers through Wyoming and Montana. Here's a video of some of the flooding. That video shows the North Entrance road which comes into the park from the northwest side (starting at a town, Gardiner, Montana) and runs along side the Gardiner River, which is a minor river which dumps into the Yellowstone River - the latter is the largest tributary of the Missouri River.

Anyway, this shows the crazy erosion power of a mountain river that's flooding. With normal spring melt level (which is when the river is at its routine highest seasonally), the river moderately erodes its banks, but hasn't threatened the road in decades. But with this higher level of flooding, the road has been completely cut through in five places in the video. In addition to the road bridge (which is still in place in the video), there was a trail bridge about a mile north of the road bridge which was washed out too (it's almost center in the last frame, you can see a pull out on the right between road and river with a trail on both sides of the river - the bridge would have been in between the trail parts).

Finally, I linked to the map so you can see what the stretch looked like before the flooding. The helicopter is flying from south to north along the road. By coincidence, the video starts about where the tag is on the map.

Two of the four people accused of planning to kidnap the governor of Michigan have been acquitted of all charged. The jury hung on the other two.

"Through confidential sources, undercover agents, and clandestine recordings," the Justice Department announced in October 2020, "law enforcement learned particular individuals were planning to kidnap" Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and "acting in furtherance of that plan." But it turned out those individuals included the government's "confidential sources," who pushed the half-baked scheme and orchestrated acts "in furtherance of that plan" even when the defendants resisted it.

The appearance of entrapment, coupled with the difficulty of distinguishing between fantasy and criminal conspiracy, explains the embarrassing outcome of a federal trial that ended last week, when jurors acquitted two alleged conspirators and failed to reach verdicts for the other two. It was a well-deserved rebuke of investigative methods that crossed the line between prevention and invention.

Two of the six original defendants, Ty Garbin and Kaleb Franks, pleaded guilty and testified for the prosecution, saying they willingly participated in the kidnapping plot. But the record compiled by the government shows FBI agents and their informants were determined to advance a narrative that would justify their efforts.

Remember how I repeatedly warned about historical entrapment schemes by the FBI? This outcome is why. Even with two alleged co-conspirators pleading guilty and testifying against the rest as well as the testimony of four informants and undercover officers, they still couldn't make the charges stick against anyone.

They can retry the remaining two, but it's not going to look good when two cohorts have been acquitted of similar charges.

And as I noted, this same sort of problem holds for the would-be insurrectionists of January 6. It's much of the same failed tactics, particularly in relying on people to testify in exchange for lighter sentences.

Another example is the Rittenhouse trial which blatantly ignored the obvious self-defense argument. Unfortunately for the prosecution in that trial, the jury didn't ignore it as well.

It's time to understand why these high profile court cases didn't succeed as expected. The big one is a disregard for law. It's not merely incompetence. These trials are showboating and we see the consequences of that, such as the above lack of convictions.

I was trying to put together some musings I had about experimentation at the society level with an eye to eventually making society better, but suffered from serious writer's block. So here's what I have.

First, the observation that we can look at a society as a bunch of humans with infrastructure. This infrastructure appears at many levels: individual biology/psychology, culture, rules and trade, the traditional sort of infrastructure (energy generation, roads, emergency services, telecomms, internet), and education/knowledge.

Today, we bring a lot of interesting tools to the table for improving society. First, we have a better understanding and knowledge of the workings of society. Second, advancing technology allows us to do things that weren't possible before. A key one is things are becoming less scarce. We may even be on the verge of the post-scarcity society where basic human needs are "too cheap to meter".

Second, it seems a fine environmental for experimenting with a variety of possibilities that would be legally and culturally acceptable to a degree.

For example, we're already trying out non-traditional relationships like same sex marriage and internet discourse with considerable success.

I wish society was more open to economic/trade experimentation (like gig economy, high frequency trade (and other automated trade mechanisms), and cryptocurrency).

Finally, not much point to experimenting, if one doesn't pay attention to the results. For example, we have vast improvement in the human condition due to the present economic system (global trade, capitalism, plus widespread democracy), but I still see people pushing old narratives that ignore that. Similarly, the economic experiments I mentioned above all have resistance from sources that usually can't be bothered to find an actual problem (gig workers are "exploited", HFT is stealing pennies from grandma every time she trades, and cryptocurrencies are for tax evasion).

On that last point, it doesn't make sense to do experiments, if you can't perceive what works or not in those experiments.

I've been keeping up with the Ukraine conflict. I find it interesting how the proponents of the Russian side rely heavily on fallacies, whataboutism, and other dishonest rhetoric.

One of the more peculiar stances is an ad hominem where the news media of most of the developed world is partially or completely disregarded. Here's an example:

[Pav:] You don't seem to want to realise no mainstream source will ever give you a reason to believe anything that would make you less willing to pay taxes to defence companies. Perhaps you own some shares, or feel you benefit in some other way? I suppose it IS within the realm of possibility, though only by cosmic accident. It IS strangely fascinating and amusing talking to someone who is a true believer in the broken window fallacy (probably in the form of post WWII parables).

If you look at Pav's other postings on this, it's a remarkable dysfunctional chain of this crap. Even when he cites links, not a one supports his claims. For example:

[Pav:] Right.

This post contains Pav's defective arguments in a nutshell. It's just a story about the Ukrainian Prime Minister whining about his allies' statements with counterwhining from sources associated with the allies. What we actually had been speaking about at that point in the thread was violence, psychopaths, and corrupt oligarchs, none of which found their way into Pav's source.

Here's another example. MSNBC gets photobombed (they showed uncritically neo-nazi symbols on the uniforms of the soldiers involved in the video) by the Azov Battallion, which a genuine neo-nazi military unit in the Ukrainian military. So what? This is far from the first time covert product placement has been a thing in military news.

Another example is a blogger link from this post. It's just a few pages of pulling stuff out of the author's ass confidently. For example:

Ukraine’s President Zelensky told visiting US Senators in early June that the country’s military defense against Russia and the completion of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline are inextricably intertwined.

Once the project is completed, Ukraine will be deprived of the funds required to fund defense spending and defend Europe’s eastern border.

“Nord Stream 2 will cut Ukraine off from gas supplies, which will cost us at least USD 3 billion per year.”

Zelensky, always the joker, wants Russia to pay $3 billion per year so he personally can defend Europe from Russia who is paying him.

Notice how the author smoothly transitions from a fact - that Zelensky stated that closing a particular pipeline would cost the Ukraine a lot of money - to the unsubstantiated claim that Zelensky then wants Russia to pay for it. This is then further logically mangled into the idea that it somehow explains the Ukraine-Russian friction we're seeing now.

Zelensky’s Ukraine is shuffling Europe, NATO, and the US closer and closer to the line where one mistake in diplomacy, one stupid move by any of Ukraine’s infamous Neanderthal nationalist volunteers, and bang!

Let us further note that such infamy is only on the Russian supporters side. Somehow everyone else has come to grips with the reality that there's a small number of fascists/neo-nazis in the Ukraine military. My favorite quote of this batch:

In response to this, Ukraine mobilized over ½ its army or over 170,000 troops to the frontline with all the heavy weapons at its disposal accompanying them.

This force was a supposed counter to the Russian invasion army, which again, was just over the border.

In reality, the Russian army staged planned war games near the city of Yelnya, 160 miles (257 kilometers) from the Ukrainian border. You read that right, the Russian army was160 miles away from the Ukrainian border even though every major western publication made it sound like they were already in Kiev.

As I noted at the time, now those "war games" are inside the borders of the Ukraine. Looks like the Ukraine was right on that one!

While I didn't say it at the time, if the author is so horribly wrong about the "war games" and the infamy of Ukrainian troops what else is he horribly wrong about? This isn't the alternate media source I'm looking for.

Then there's the king of one liner putdowns:

[fustakrakich:] "Your" take is just mass media propaganda. Nobody wants war but the US

And yet we see Russia making those aggressive moves towards war. It also furthers the propaganda narrative that this is merely a showdown between Russia and US with Ukraine interests being completely irrelevant.

Also that Runaway journal was about some academic blaming the US or possibly the Western world for the conflict. At one point Runaway claimed:

[Runaway1956:] You didn't listen to the man, did ya? The "west" engineered that coup. Mearsheimer doesn't say so, but I'm aware that the Koch brothers were prime movers in the coup. We quite literally backed fascists and neo-Nazis in the coup.

In other words, there was no support for Runaway's assertion there from his source. In fact, I've googled this subject a bit and never found Runaway linking to a source for the Koch brothers accusation - though if he had, I would have stated that it shows good taste in revolutions on their part.

Anyway, I think this illustrates some of the weirder failures of the pro-Russian side in this conflict. Namely, obsessing over sources of evidence rather than the evidence itself. But given how unflattering that evidence is, maybe this is the best they can do?

All I can say is that it's probably a lot safer to complain about media bias than to defend Putin only to have him stab you in the back a few weeks later. But it begs the question: why is imaginary CIA/MIC involvement enough to completely torpedo a media source, but not being horribly wrong and/or irrelevant?

Ok, so I think almost everyone here has heard about the Canadian truck convoy (protesting vaccine requirement for truck drivers crossing the Canada/US border). Things have been steadily escalating over the past few weeks (arresting people for passing supplies on to the protesters and firing the Ottawa police chief for not taking a harder line on protesters, for example).

The latest is insane.

Using powers granted under the Emergencies Act, the federal government has directed banks and other financial institutions to stop doing business with people associated with the anti-vaccine mandate convoy occupying the nation's capital.

According to the regulations published late Tuesday, financial institutions are required to monitor and halt all transactions that funnel money to demonstrators — a measure designed to cut off funding to a well-financed protest that has taken over large swaths of Ottawa's downtown core.

"Financial institutions" aren't just banks.

The government is also ordering insurance companies to suspend policies on vehicles that are part of an unlawful "public assembly."

These financial institutions can't handle cash, issue a loan, extend a mortgage or more generally facilitate "any transaction" of a "designated person" while the Emergencies Act is in place.

The regulations define a "designated person" who can be cut off from financial services as someone who is "directly or indirectly" participating in a "public assembly that may reasonably be expected to lead to a breach of the peace," or a person engaging in "serious interference with trade" or "critical infrastructure."

So basically, the Canadian government chickened out and mandated instead that the banks and insurance companies to do everything. Then rat out their customers to the government once they're done.

Banks also are required to "disclose without delay" the "existence of property in their possession or control" or "any information about a transaction or proposed transaction" related to a "designated person" to both the RCMP and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS).

"Those authorities are now in force and they're being used," said Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino. "It's incredibly important that we follow the money."

It's not "incredibly important" for anyone interested in rule of law, due process, or proportionality of punishment. And the final part:

The Emergencies Act and its associated regulations are in effect for only 30 days; that period could be shorter if Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his cabinet revoke it or if Parliament scuttles it after a vote. But a senior government official said there could be long-term implications.

"For the most part, financial institutions can decide who they do business with and they may decide to cease offering financial services," the official said.

Mark Blumberg is a lawyer at Blumberg Segal LLP who specializes in non-profit and charity law. In an interview, he said that while the Emergencies Act gives banks time-limited powers, these institutions "may just decide to shut the person's account down" because there could be "huge risks" for banks servicing these customers in the future.

So rather than deal with the protest in a sensible manner (they're breaking the law, right?), the Canadian government has put forward this ridiculous "emergency" and deputized a bunch of businesses to go crazy with legal immunity (but only if they toe the government line). In the meantime, the protesters can lose their insurance and freeze finances. So what's going to happen to protesters of any sort in the future, if banks and insurance companies see them as liabilities due to this emergency?

Now imagine if Trump and US financial institutions had this kind of power over BLM protesters. Wouldn't be a problem, right?

Hopefully, this will get reversed in the Canadian courts, because otherwise it's a huge move towards tyranny, particularly of the fascist sort.

While reading the recent story about the Chinese lunar rover examining a boulder at close range, I thought of an interesting question. How much would lunar boulders move over billions of years and what would be pushing them around? It seems like an appropriate model would be a very warped billiard table covered in a layer of thick sand with the boulders more or less loose on the top. The sand corresponds to lunar regolith which is a thick layer of meteorite-caused dust that covers the entire moon.

Slight vibrations shouldn't move them much because they would be nestled in that regolith. But enough occurrences of large forces say from nearby earthquakes or asteroid impacts could move them a great distance over those long periods , I guess it depends on whether the regolith rapidly absorbs the energy of the boulder or not.

It seems like a random walk computer model that one could run with modest resources once one can characterize how the forces would act on these boulders.

Distribution of boulders and boulder tracks might well inform us of how common and how big such disruptive forces are as well as the locations of any repetitive forces (say from a fault zone).

While I don't think it's likely, even the heat/freeze cycle of lunar day/night might move these things around.

So what do you think?

SoylentNews is about a third funded for the six month period through the end of December, a bit over $1200 out of $3500 asked. Seems pretty cheap to me for what's offered, and only needs a few more people to open their wallets to stay funded through the end of this year.

A few times recently I've run into really infantile thinking. One is in the awful story about the UN decided to make a new vacuous right to "access" to a clean environment. The other was in turgid's excellent journal about a post-scarcity economy and how it would affect our need to work.

Here's an example from the UN story:

[AC:] It is simple. Everyone gets a clean environment (free from lead, etc.) with safe clean drinking water.

The standards for what counts as safe have already been established. Here are water regulations for the US. Similar standards exist for other known toxins. Our issue is that you only get a safe clean environment if you can afford it. And, even then, the multi-million dollar houses in West LA turned out to be sitting on toxic waste that seeped over from the 'other' side of town / the toxic dumping predated turning formerly industrial areas into residential areas.

In other words, we want X so make a right to have X. Doesn't sound like the poster even cares how to do it or whether it'll even work because of course, it'll just work out of the box like all our other rights do. [Edit: cooler prose]

While I discussed that a bunch there, here's a summary of why I think just creating a right to something won't work.

In turgid's journal, we have an even sillier example:

[AC:] We have scarcity because right wingers like you desperately want the scarcity to exist. Your only objective is to exploit the working class as much as possible. To use the OP's analogy, you right wingers are the Ferengi.

Just like the Ferengi, you're not interested in scientific and technological progress that would raise the quality of life, reduce scarcity, and improve environmental conditions. Instead, you defend rent-seeking parasites who actively oppose scientific and technological advancements. A fine example is the fossil fuel industry, which should become obsolete as new technology develops and matures. Instead of allowing scientific progress to proceed, the fossil fuel industry engages in misinformation to protect a dying business model and oppose newer and better technologies.

We need less right wing rent-seeking parasites. We need to move past the lie that people are poor because they haven't worked hard enough, when the wealthiest members of our society tend to either inherit their wealth or build it through the exploitation of others. Left to your own devices, right wing psychopaths like you will cut corners with things like safety in factories, all the while demanding workers put in more labor for less pay. You right wingers are sick individuals, happy to let others languish in scarcity and work in dangerous conditions, all so you can line your pockets with more money.

There's a reason that Starfleet officers are warned about the Ferengi when they're at the Academy.

If only we could do something about the rightwingers, then we'd have post-scarcity right now.

What's missed in that verbiage is that you don't live in a society capable of either delivering a nebulous right to "access" to something nor supporting a post-scarcity economy. The cart is before the horse.

It's not rich people or failwingers holding you back. It's reality. That's why you didn't get your lollipop.

I think it's time to dispute such magic thinking. Our world didn't come easily. Just since civilization started, there have been hundreds of generations toiling - making our world what it is. But now, it's supposed to be simple. Just deliver the lollipops.

Well, just like those hundreds of other generations, you'll have to work for it. Maybe someday we'll never have to work to make our world a better place, but that hasn't happened yet.

I feel the need to lessen or worsen the current dearth of whatever it is that we're low on.

Normally, when I hear "bear repellent" at Yellowstone the speaker is referring to some variation of bear spray, a pepper spray that is similar in intensity to that used for self-defense and by the police to subdue people. It turns out bears don't like it either, so it is heavily and officially recommended as a backcountry deterrent for just about anything bigger than you are.

In addition to successful uses on bears, I've heard of it getting used on elk, bison, and of course, anything else that moves. Legendary tales are passed around about the tourist who used bear spray on a mouse in their room in the Old Faithful Inn (a dirty secret here is that animals don't respect our boundaries, and can be found anywhere they can get into which is anywhere), clearing out the wing for a night. No word on whether they got the mouse or not.

Then there's my mental understanding of how the tragic term "bear repellent" came to be. Apparently, a mom heard bear spray and thought "just like mosquito repellent". Two (or was it three?) kids in the emergency room later, I bet she changed her mind on that.

Anyway, I was visiting one of the sites I monitor beans at when I overheard someone talking about repelling bears with ABBA. I asked for details.

They (three female coworkers) took a simple trail loop, but got off it by accidentally following one of the many phantom trails that veer off any trail in the park. It took a couple of hours to find their way back (they went way off) and the night was falling. They were rightly concerned about bears and decided to make a lot of noise to scare them off.

This involved singing which might have sounded worse than it sounds. The designated singer, whom I was speaking with, started with Bohemian Rhapsody. After that was nixed, she sang American Pie. The committee then decided that Dancing Queen had the necessary combination of bear repelling factor and listenability.

Since the group wasn't eaten by bears and hadn't gone mad from earworms, it clearly worked.

Once again, I see several stories where people voice concern about the direction society heads in, labor-wise, and then propose solutions to make it worse. For example:

[Mykl:] This is actually the exact problem in the US at the moment. Money is trickling to the top and not making its way back down. Those at the top are hoarding it, thus keeping it out of, and slowing, the economy. This in turns damages the businesses that they own, because their customers can't afford to spend money that they don't have.

The problem would be largely solved by handing out a bunch of cash to employees, who will use it to go out and spend, stimulating the economy and generating demand (thus improving the outlook of business). It would actually be a win-win, but the cash hoarders can't see beyond having the biggest number in the bank they can (which they'll never spend).

The big thing missed is that due to inflation, hoarding money means losing money. Rather than wonder why businesses aren't hiring people or building up capital right now, Mykl merely suggests that the business give away that money to create a little short term economic activity and something that will be better than the present state of affairs while ignoring that the business has just thrown away its cheapest means to expand and employ more people. Later on in the same thread, we have this gem:

[deimtee:] I think this is actually becoming one of the major problems, especially on the small end of the investment scale. At some point, the economy is producing enough to feed, house, and entertain everyone without requiring anywhere near enough human work to keep everyone employed.

Investing in a new business requires identifying an under-filled need in order to attract customers. It is getting to the point where starting a new business means competing with a giant company, it is just not viable unless you can come up with something that is both truly new and valuable. Not many people can do that, and every time one does there is one less opportunity left. At the same time, big companies are streamlining and using automation and economies of scale to reduce the number of employees.

The solution, of course, was to shrink the labor market, not fix the problems described above.

[khallow:] Deliberately shrinking the labor market won't identify under-filled needs nor create more small and medium sized businesses.

[deimtee:] The labour market is currently over-supplied. This is evidenced by the difficulty young people have in entering it. Raising the retirement age is like eating your seedcorn. By the time those geriatrics are finally knocked off by COVID 2040 or something society is going to hit a wall where no-one knows how to do the jobs. 30 year-olds on unemployment for 10 years are not ideal trainees and no trainers will be around anyway. Early retirement forces the companies to train the next generation now.

Yes we should be massively investing in life-extension, medical research, space, all that stuff. Now what percentage of people do you think can realistically contribute to that sort of endeavor? I would say less than 1% of people have the capability to undertake research at that level.

Notice the insistence on shrinking the labor market even when presented with clear evidence that we need that labor for hard, open-ended problems and to preserve institutional knowledge. In the recent story, Kill the 5-Day Workweek (which was about some business that does 4 day workweeks), we see more examples of this dysfunctional reasoning in action. There's anecdotes about bad bosses, insistence that economies is less rigorous than physics, and lots of fantasizing about all the amazing things you'd do, if your employer was forced to give you one more day off. Let's start with the "bullshit jobs":

[Thexalon:] Counterpoint: A lot of jobs are completely useless and exist for basically bullshit reasons. If you've ever worked in a larger corporation or non-profit, you will have no difficulty identifying a bunch of Wallys or Peter Gibbonses walking around who are accomplishing absolutely nothing but vaguely looking like they might be working. And no, that's not limited to government, because despite what a lot of libertarians seem to think private corporations are not even close to perfect models of efficiency.

To summarize the above link, some clueless idiot doesn't understand a variety of jobs. So those jobs must not have a reason for being and are thus "bullshit jobs". Notice that once the author has failed to understand the purpose of these jobs, he then has to come up with a conspiracy theory for why they exist.

[author David Graeber:] The answer clearly isn't economic: it's moral and political. The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the '60s). And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them.

Who here really thinks that Joe Billionaire is going to burn money on that?

Then there's the fantasizing about how shortening the workweek and the amount of work per job won't have any impact on competition from other countries.

[AC1:] A lot of Asian companies still work on Saturday (6 day week ). If going to a 4 day workweek in any way hurts productivity these Asian firms will have an advantage

[AC2:] Ridiculous, and already proven wrong since they are open an extra day already and haven't taken all the business.

"Proven wrong" because those Asian companies haven't eaten entirely our lunch. We still have some left. Funny how half a century of off-shoring can be ignored.

Moving on, it wouldn't be complete without a contribution from the peanut gallery. fustakrakich continues his bid to destroy Western civilization:

[fustakrakich:] Also demand a six hour work day. Make each day a little less tiresome

Here's my take on all this. It's basically a supply and demand problem in the developed world. Due to labor competition from the developing world, developed world labor has lost much of its pricing power. For some reason, most of the above posters think we can get back to higher labor prices by reducing the supply of labor. What's missing from that is that the developing world is still increasing its supply of labor (more from building out trade/transportation infrastructure to populations than from birth rate). Those moves won't actually reduce labor supply as a result.

Instead, let's increase the demand for labor. Rather than rhetorically ruling out the creation of new businesses and such, how about we enable those things to happen. Because plenty of new businesses still happen - indicating the narrative is faulty.

But that would mean acknowledging that protecting labor is less important than nurturing business growth and creation. Who will do that?