Conspiracy theorists and white supremacists are targeting cell phone towers

In testimony before Congress, the director of the FBI Christopher Wray warned of the rising danger of domestic extremist violence that he says is metastasizing across the country. For the longest time dating back to the J. Edgar Hoover era, the FBI focused much of its efforts on infiltrating antiwar groups and others that were largely peaceful and engaged in promoting civil rights and on behalf of minorities and women, and tended to ignore the threat posed by white nationalists and violent militias. It has taken the Trump era of supporting and inciting those groups for them to wake up to the reality of where the real danger of violence lies.

The insurrection on January 6th was just one manifestation of this trend. Ken Klippenstein reports on other actions that some groups extremist groups are up to.

AS THE BIDEN administration turns its attention to an infrastructure system beset with problems, a strange new issue has emerged: conspiracy theorists. That’s according to a detailed intelligence report, produced by the New York Police Department and obtained by The Intercept, which finds that cellphone towers and other critical infrastructure have become an attractive target for conspiracy theorists, especially in the weeks and months following the presidential election.

Conspiracy theorists, joined by far-right white supremacist groups, “increasingly target critical infrastructure to incite fear, disrupt essential services, and cause economic damage with the United States and abroad,” the report states. Blaming “the current contentious domestic political environment,” the document, issued on January 20 by the NYPD Intelligence Bureau and marked as “law enforcement sensitive,” describes a rash of attacks, some of which involved strikingly sophisticated planning.

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How some spam call frauds work

Like most people, I ignore calls that come from people whom I do not know, presuming them to be either marketing spam or attempts at fraud. But sadly, there is a small percentage of people, many of them older, who answer them and fall for the fraud and can lose thousands of dollars that they can ill afford.

How can it be that people are duped into sending cash to others they do not know? This video explains how some of these frauds work and of the efforts to track the scammers down and apprehend them. The makers of the video put in a lot of detective work to identify the fraudsters and hand the evidence over to the authorities.

The frauds are pretty sophisticated and the scammers proliferate so that shutting down one operation does not end the practice. As the video says at the end, the only way to really stop these frauds is by making as many people aware of these frauds as possible so that the pool of victims becomes vanishingly small.

The making of Sympathy for the Devil

If you are of my generation, you would very likely have heard this song by the Rolling Stones. Apart from simply being a terrific song in its own right, it made a sensation when it was released in 1968 because it featured Mick Jagger singing in the first person as the devil. This was at a time when people were pretty uptight about religious themes being used in pop culture and the band was accused of being satanists. If you have never heard the song, below is a live performance from that year with the master showman Mick Jagger doing his thing. It is amazing that he could keep this up for more than fifty years. As a bonus, you get to see John Lennon and Yoko One among the dancers.


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The story of John Scott and the NHL All-Star game

I am not a fan of ice hockey and have only watched a few tiny snippets of games. But I found utterly fascinating this Radiolab episode that recounted an epic struggle between a journeyman hockey player named John Scott and the National Hockey League establishment.

It happened when two hockey journalists, annoyed with the way that the NHL ran things without any seeming concern for what fans liked and wanted, decided as a joke to start a campaign to get Scott, widely viewed as merely a ‘goon’ or ‘enforcer’ whose role was to physically intimidate opposing players and even fight with them, voted to play in the All-Star game, over the elite, skilled players who usually get this honor. (I find it astonishing that there is a sport in which a player’s designated role is to intimidate opponents, even to the extent of physically attacking them.)
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What makes hummingbirds hum?

I am fortunate in that there are a couple of hummingbirds that live near my home and I frequently get to see them hovering just outside my window, giving me a close-up view. This article looks at what we have learned about how the hummingbirds get their name.

The results reveal that aerodynamic forces produced as the wings move, together with the speed and direction of the wing movements, are largely enough to explain the hummingbirds’ hum.

The team note a crucial factor is the motion of a hummingbird’s wings. While most birds only create lift on the downstroke – found by the team to be the primary sound source – hummingbirds do so on the down and upstroke as a result of their unusual wing motion, which follows a path akin to a U-shaped smile. What’s more, these strokes occur much faster for hummingbirds – about 40 times a second. As a result, the team say, the hummingbird wing movement generates sounds at both 40Hz and 80Hz – sounds that are well within our hearing range and which were found to be the dominant components of the birds’ hum.

But variations of the forces within the strokes, together with further influence of the U-shaped wing motion, generate higher frequency overtones of these sounds.

“The lovely thing about the hummingbirds’ complex wingstroke is that those two primary pulses also cause even higher harmonics,” said Lentink, adding that such tones added to the timbre of the overall sound.

“It truly is the specific way that the forces fluctuate that creates the sound that we hear,” he said.

The team applied a simplified version of their theory to data for flying creatures from mosquitoes to birds like pigeons to reveal why their motion produces different sounds.

“It’s the way they generate forces that is different,” said Lentink. “And that causes why they whoosh versus hum, versus buzz, versus whine.”

The Trumps’ shameful lack of leadership in fighting vaccine hesitancy

An NPR poll found little differences in vaccine hesitancy between white, Black, and Latino groups.

Among those who responded to the survey, 73% of Black people and 70% of White people said that they either planned to get a coronavirus vaccine or had done so already; 25% of Black respondents and 28% of white respondents said they did not plan to get a shot. Latino respondents were slightly more likely to say they would not get vaccinated at 37%, compared with 63% who either had or intended to get a vaccine.

However, there were big differences between politically aligned groups.

Among Republican men, 49% said they did not plan to get the shot, compared with just 6% of Democratic men who said the same. Among those who said they supported President Trump in the 2020 election, 47% said they did not plan to get a coronavirus vaccine compared with just 10% of Biden supporters.

Similarly, compared with “big city” respondents, rural residents were more likely to say that they did not plan to take a coronavirus vaccine.

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The madness of US gun policies

We have yet another mass shooting in which a young man killed eight people, six of them young Asian women at three different massage parlors in Georgia. He was apprehended that same day because his parents identified him from surveillance footage after the first shooting and told police that his vehicle had a tracking device and how they could track him down. He seemed to be on his way to Florida to commit more murders.
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Monarch butterfly migration is truly amazing

In the February 15/22, 2021 issue of The New Yorker there is a photo essay by Brendan George Ko of the annual migration of monarch butterflies, with accompanying text by Carolyn Kormann.

The butterflies have never seen the forest before, but they know—perhaps through an inner compass—that this is where they belong. an inner compass—that this is where they belong. They leave Canada and the northeastern United States in late summer and fly for two months, as far as three thousand miles south and west across the continent. The migration is accomplished in a single generation that lives eight months, whereas the return journey north will occur over some four generations, each living four to five weeks. This is the most evolutionarily advanced migration of any known butterfly, perhaps of any known insect.

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