A sin to remember

All the criminal defense attorneys in the world would tell me to shut up now and not say another word, but I have to confess to a crime.

When I was a teen, I was a hardened troublemaker. I would tell my mom I was going to stay the night at one friend’s house but actually I’d go stay the night at another’s, a friend she didn’t approve of as much, and whose parents weren’t going to be home. Sometimes I would say I was going to ride my bike to Beaverton to go to the mall for roller skating and the comic shop on the way home, but actually I’d go to a convenience store and buy 30 pounds of sugary crap, then bicycle out to the Coast Range and picnic (while eating not one damn bit of healthy food) on top of a mountain so that I could look at the ocean without riding all the way down there. Not that the beach had no power to draw me, but even that small bit further would take an extra 20 minutes on the way out AND would guarantee that I would have to ride back up the damn mountain on the way home, with just that extra homeward stretch easily adding another hour and a lot of fatigue.

Oh, and it got so much worse.

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Fucking Latvia. I bet this is rq’s fault somehow.

Apparently there was a secret plot hatched in Latvia 5 millennia ago to release Yersinia pestis into the world in order to take down Constantinople, usher in the Dark Ages, and then prolong them by sweeping through the entirety of Europe in the 14th Century. Per Agence France Presse:

Researchers said Tuesday they had found its first known victim: a hunter-gatherer who lived 5,000 years ago in what is now Latvia, whose remains carried the Yersinia pestis bacteria that causes the disease.

“The analyses of the strain we identified shows that Y. pestis evolved earlier than thought,” Ben Krause-Kyora, head of the aDNA Laboratory at the University of Kiel in Germany, told AFP.

Notice how they aren’t even investigating the possibility that Y. pestis escaped from an early Latvian virology lab? Yet more evidence of widespread conspiracy. The only way to combat this is to rename the Black Death. From now on, we’re calling it the Latvian Plague.

 

Dispatches from the Heat Front 3: Comparisons

I’m going to give you some data. I realize that this data won’t necessarily match what you’re seeing on your local news or on your favorite weather app. The Environment Canada temps may be different than temperatures recorded by other entities (for instance, Weather.com might aggregate data from local TV stations, while EC’s station might be located in a different spot in the same town). So you won’t consistently get one high temp for a city between different websites. One site might have more shade, or be located at a slightly different elevation. My own thermometer is consistently one or one & a half degrees (celsius) warmer than reported local highs, but during windstorms our max wind speeds are typically much slower. So you can’t compare cross platform.

But you can compare EC weather data this year to past years, and right now Campbell River is about 2 degrees over its highest recorded temp on this date in past years. Sure, okay, that doesn’t sound too bad. But it’s Celsius, so it’s more like 3 degrees Fahrenheit to you in the States. It’s not creeping over the past record, this is a solid smashing of the record.

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Dispatches from the Heat Front

It’s not just humans suffering in the heat. My laptop’s fan had been working since I opened the damn thing up. The whole aluminum enclosure was baking. The poor thing was on the bitter edge of terminal heat shock.

So, hoping I was in time, I put it in the shower and rained cold water down upon it. Sadly, I must have been too late because now the thing won’t turn on at all.

Let this be a lesson to you: address your computer’s overheating issues early, before it’s too late.

A creation website is good for something? Who knew?

While seeking general sea pen photos with which to mock Marine Le Pen, I ran into this lovely photo of a sea pen all dressed up for today’s Pride celebrations in NY and other various locations:

Multi colored sea pen, with mostly purple around the rim and generous yellows & sky blues along the stalks. Other colors sneak in here & there.

Le Pen Marin(e), decked out for NY & SF Pride, or maybe in other areas it’s just ready for the local library’s Drag Queen Story Hour.

What really knocked me out is that the image comes from a creationist website. I SWEAR I ONLY READ IT FOR THE PHOTOS. Happy Pride ya perverts!

 

Critical Race Theory Link Round-up & Summer Reading List

This ain’t Pendleton or Calgary, but a round-up you shall have anyway. This here is for all those folks who are wondering what important writing on FtB they might have missed related to CRT… plus a few links to other places like The Root & Wonkette, because I love me some The Root & Wonkette. Hell, when we’re done, you’ll have a whole summer reading list just of CRT related things. Fun!

Let’s start with TheRoot, since there are two pieces there that I consider essential reading.

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How to construct a well thought out sentence

In various places on the internet, people have said that 22 years is not enough of a sentence for Chauvin after his murder of Floyd, since serving as little as 10 more years is possible. I am nearly or maybe actually a prison abolitionist in the longer term*1, but I mostly agree with this given our current laws, practices, and resources. 270 months is a LONG time. Where I differ is that (with what I know now, and understanding this might change if Chauvin himself changes) I want him in prison until at least the age of 65 for the safety of the community, and under supervision until the age of 75. That would require a sentence of over 30 years, minimum, assuming that parole boards made (what I currently think would be) appropriate decisions regarding early release. The 30 gets us supervision until age 75, but even that does not give a strong guarantee of release at or about age 65.

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