Manatees, and rare whales

As soon as I post about the visiting manatee, two Rice whales are spotted fifty miles out. I can’t help but wonder if these are the same two spotted last year off Galveston. Some intrepid marine scientist needs to get out there and stick a tracker on them. Alas, all the intrepid marine scientists I know specialize in ecology rather than whales.

Welcome the manatee to the coastal bend

Again, some brave manatee headed west, ducked under the deep south, crossed the Houston ship channel, and arrived here in Corpus Christi.

May it find its fill of sea grass.

A baseline

Mo Husseini has written a list that has garnered attention, 50 Completely True Things, related to the Gaza war. Those who take large issue with the list (hummus excepted) include the most hardcore advocates for both sides of the conflict. Those who mostly agree may differ in what they think should be done, and even the side with which they largely align, yet hold some hope of discussing the issues in somewhat rational fashion.

There is one item that deserves amplification:

No. 37: No one in the Levant is indigenous. Every fucking empire in history has fucked their way through the Levant. There is no pure indigeneity.

The Levant has been occupied for hundreds of thousands of years, likely by Neanderthals as well as by modern humans. The Natufian culture there 14,000 years ago was grinding grain and brewing beer. The Egyptian pyramids, the Phoenician culture, the Hebrew and Aramaic languages, the Jewish religion, would not show up for another ten thousand years, give or take. Those all are recent developments relative to the long, complex mess of human dispersal, settlement, and competition.

The moment anyone tries to justify what any side to a war wants because of history more than a couple centuries past, they should be shut down. It is past. Everyone then involved is long dead. I don’t care who might have been your distant ancestor, what religion they were, or where they lived.

The current round of cease-fire talks seem to have failed. More thousands will be killed because of that. Most or them, innocent. Most of them, Palestinian.

Robert Farley points out that the horror this war has brought the Palestinians serves the benefit of Hamas.

The coup’s aftermath, part 10

Arizona just handed down indictments for the 2021 fake elector scheme there, becoming the fourth state to do so. Beyond the fake electors themselves, the indictments level felony charges at the usual list of Trump’s lawyers and assistants. John Eastman, Rudy Giuliani, and their confederates are facing multiple trials for crimes that might result in decades of prison time.

The Arizona indictment includes Christina Bobb, who currently is serving as the RNC’s senior counsel for election integrity. Watch for the calls from senior Republicans that she should step down from that role.

Wisconsin still is mum on whether it will indict those responsible for the fake elector scheme there.

Painting shows German WW I destroyer run aground.

Of ships and migration

There are articles in the Baltimore Banner andthe  Washington Post about how frequently large ships lose power near US ports.

It doesn’t seem a migration unless we see a painted bunting on our back pond. This year, we’ve seen the usual warblers. Except, we saw a northern water thrush.

Just a short trip to Reynosa

Some poor ocelot failed to make it across Texas Highway 281 three years ago, killed by someone perhaps going down to Reynosa for some shopping.

But, the ocelot wasn’t expected there. Its DNA analysis was just announced, and points out they have expanded more than the wildlife folks knew.

Law and response

I am not surprised that medical abortions managed remotely and abortions overall both rose nationally after the Dobbs decision. But, I am surprised that there has been a significant bump in the rate of tubal ligations. See the blue curve on the graph, right. (Cite.)

An abortion is a transient decision about when and with whom to have a child. Women I know who have had abortions had other children after. In contrast, a tubal ligation or vasectomy is a more permanent decision. Likely, the increase after Dobbs are people who were thinking about such anyway. (Note, though, that the graph shows a jump in rate, not mere count.)

Political winds influence how young people see the future, and what decisions they make partly as a consequence. It’s easy to speculate that the authoritarian turn in the US makes the future less welcoming to the young.

Some of the red states also are making themselves less welcoming to physicians.

Watch for dead cats

Trump Media (ticker: DJT) closed at $26 yesterday, up 16% from its previous close. That might be an inflection from its precipitous decline. Or, it might be the start of a dead cat bounce. The future will tell.

My prediction is that this venture, too, will end up in court.

If a stock declines 69% from its top, then rises 16% from that point, what is its percent decline from its top? If you answer 53%, return your passing grade in high school algebra, and let someone else handle your investments. (The correct answer is 64%.)

Orca rage?

I’m skeptical that the orcas off the Iberian peninsula have rational motive in attacking small yachts. I doubt, also, that they are acting from grief or rage. As Jacob Stern puts it:

Projection and anthropomorphization are only shortcuts to a shallow sympathy. Orcas really are capable of intense grief; they are also capable of tormenting seal pups as a hobby. They are intelligent, emotionally complex creatures. But they are not us.

I’ve seen nonsense hoping those orcas go after the yachts of the very rich. What those writers miss is that all of the boats attacked so far have been relatively small. The largest I’ve heard was a 50′ charter yacht. About the size of whales. And all have been sailboats. None have been the floating palaces that billionaires build.

White, rural rage?

Tom Schaller has penned an editorial on the danger that the white, rural right poses to American democracy, a companion piece to his book on the topic.

Nicholas Jacobs complains that Schaller goes too far:

Ruralness is not reducible to rage. And to say so is to overlook the nuanced ways in which rural Americans engage in politics. They are driven by a sense of place, community and often, a desire for recognition and respect. This, as I have recently argued in a new book, is the defining aspect of the rural-urban divide — a sense of shared fate among rural voters, what academics call a “politics of place,” that is expressed as a belief in self-reliance, rooted in local community and concerned that rural ways of living will soon be forced to disappear.

Well, those rural denizens are partly right. Their communities and ways of living are rapidly changing in ways they cannot prevent. That is what capitalism does, and long has done. (Which explains why the entertainment industry continually invents sanitized versions of the past to serve as mythical American homelands. The Old West. The Old South. The old farm. Mayberry.)

The fact that people are facing real issues doesn’t mean their response to those is rational. They still might be conspiracist, nativist, and full of resentment.

Tom Scocca points out some related problems with Jacobs’s criticism.

The painting shows rural workers today, likely not many white.