Links are at the end.
It’s day 128 of the year, and we’re averaging barely 1.5 mass shootings per day. This is America. We can do better. Statisticians say that the likelihood of any individual American getting caught up in a mass shooting is vanishingly slight, but statisticians are probably liberals and we should our best to own them.
There was an extended period of time when most of the gun hooey in this country was down to the gun manufacturers and the NRA—which outlaws guns at its annual conventions—but it has outgrown its makers. It’s a medical condition now, on both sides of the bullet. People are still more prone to kill themselves with a gun than they are somebody else, and if there’s maybe some identifiable logic behind the push toward ever fewer firearms regulations, it’s still fucking insane.
People like Texas Governor Greg Abbott say the mass shootings are a mental health issue—which would seem to mean that the non-mass, non-suicide ones now claiming 20 thousand or so lives annually are just in the ordinary way of things—meaning the shooters are bent or broken, but it’s him, and everybody like him. They’re insane, and it’s infectious.1
Firearm violence in the US is an unrelenting clinical, public health, societal, and political concern of major proportion. The morbidity and mortality attributed to firearms have continued to increase; have adversely and profoundly affected individuals, families, and communities; and have exceedingly important consequences for all of society. The frequent occurrence of firearm violence and the repetitive episodes of mass shootings highlight the pervasiveness of firearms and the accessibility of assault weapons and serve as grim reminders that every person in the US is potentially vulnerable to firearm violence.
According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 45 000 firearm-related deaths occurred in the US in 2020, representing the highest reported rate (6.1 deaths/100 000 population) since 1994, with more than half of deaths due to suicide and more than 40% due to homicide. Provisional data indicate that these deaths have increased in 2021, reaching more than 48 000 firearm-related fatalities in the US, which would reflect nearly the same number of deaths as those attributable to influenza and pneumonia (53 000) and kidney disease (52 000) in 2020.
This is shit we’re doing to ourselves and to each other, and it’s deliberately spread, and efforts to qualify the problem are deliberately scuttled altogether or at a minimum made more difficult.
But enough of that. It’s Slacker Sunday, it’s a Monday, and somewhere it’s a funday.
“When considering the limited space, energy, weight, and life support systems packed into a spacecraft on a long mission, the study finds that the female form is the most efficient body type for space exploration.”
Phys.org has the scoop on the end of men in space, although we might want to keep some small ones around for reproductive or pleasure purposes, or to break rocks. Or not.2
The study data, combined with the move towards smaller diameter habitat space for currently proposed mission modules, suggest that there may be several operational advantages to all-female crews during future human space exploration missions, with the most significant improvement coming from shorter females.
Delightful news, really.
“They’re newly aware of their power in the world, but their frontal cortex is massively underdeveloped, and their [sense of] social responsibility as a consequence is not so great.”
The subject of the sentence, which appears in an Esquire piece about the mortal and moral implications of the field, is artificial intelligence researchers. The speaker says they’re already past the point where gene editing and cloning technologies were when practitioners of those technologies were reined, and reined themselves, in, and the writer shamelessly (and without ascription) invokes Jeff Goldblum: “Leaving the inventors to decide whether they should do something that they can do is certainly not an acceptable path forward.”3
In the same piece we learned that Shutterstock, which features stock photos, video and audio, now has an AI working for it.4
Goddamn, son.
The Japanese city of Aomori is billed as the snowiest in the world, with an average of eight meters each year and tunnels carved into the snow so that travelers can use the roads.
This story in Sustainability Times describes how the city and two local startups are looking to put their 26 feet of annual snowfall to work generating electricity. The piece is a bit dated—it’s from late last year and the project is supposed to have ended in March of this year, but no report has surfaced as yet.5
[Professor Koji] Enoki’s “snow power” design works by placing heat transfer tubes in the snow while outside air becomes heated by the sun. The temperature difference leads to currents within a turbine system, powering its rotation and producing electricity. It’s expected to cost less than current offshore wind and oil-based sources.
Seems as though driving through a snow tunnel could be claustrophobia-inducing for anyone so inclined. Yes?
“He was acting all crazy up there on the podium, and I just had this gut feeling that if he didn’t hurt me, he was going to hurt someone else.”
The Onion has the scoop on a good Samaritan/vigilante choking out New York City mayor Eric Adams.6
In a viral video that has put heightened pressure on local authorities, a vigilante reportedly killed Eric Adams Thursday after he acted erratically as mayor of New York. “While I didn’t want to do it, [Adams] was ranting and raving incoherently, making me fear for my safety and the safety of everyone around me,” said the unnamed vigilante, who claimed he felt threatened when the visibly unhinged mayor took the microphone at a press conference and began screaming about gutting the city’s social services, an act that left him with no choice but to put Adams in a choke hold for over 15 minutes.
RIP.
“A large portion [of] a freshly paved road in Windward Oahu is about to be ripped up again.”
A lot of counties suffer the occasional inefficiency, but none of them have a light rail project more than $7 billion over budget7 and a $250,000 road improvement project about to be trashed less than a year after completion in favor of a massive water pipe replacement project. But wait! There’s more!
The fresh layer of asphalt is only a few months old. But it’s already been defaced with red and white spray paint. It’s the work of construction crews, that will soon rip through the pavement to replace half century old water pipes that run underneath.
Board of Water Supply officials say it’s a $15 million project nearly seven years in the making. Despite all that planning, word of the work apparently never made it to Honolulu Hale.
. . .
HNN Investigates confirmed, despite both agencies participating in monthly meetings to prevent these types of blunders, the mistake still happened.8
The Hawaii Business Magazine story on the rail project is dated and doesn’t include tidbits like a contractor ordering wheels that didn’t fit the track, and the ballooning cost of relocating utility services, which is at $500 million and climbing. It’s an astonishing tale and not over yet.
Got no wicker, but music? Music we got
The Stroppies, “Levity;”9 Half Waif, "The Caretaker;"10 Modern Studies, "We Are There;"11 Jeanines, "Jeanines;"12 Alysia Kraft, First Light."13
Jeanines is a jangly band with songs almost uniformly less than two minutes long, which requires commitment.
That, Comrades, is all there is
Thoughts and prayers for Eric Adams.
Please share this yere stuff if you like it, and if you’ve not subscribed, please consider doing so—it’s free unless you want to pay. And speaking of paying, I could use and would greatly appreciate six more monthly subscribers ($5/month) to cover the cost of a subscription to that Shutterstock AI thingie.
Be well, take care.