Welcome to Thursday, January 8, 2026; I hope you’ve learned to write “2026” when you date your checks (but who writes checks any more?). It’s also National English Toffee Day, classically covered with chocolate. The Heath Bar is a high expression of this confection, comme ça:
It’s also Argyle Day (break out those socks; even I have a pair), celebrating a Scottish design worn by members of Clan Campbell. It’s also Healthy Weight, Healthy Look Day, Bubble Bath Day, and Earth’s Rotation Day, honoring this:
On January 8, 1851, Foucault performed an experiment in the cellar of his home, in which he swung a five-kilogram weight attached to a two-meter-long pendulum. He put sand underneath it to mark the pendulum’s path, allowing him to see any changes in it. He observed a slight clockwise movement in the plane—the floor, and thus the earth, were slowly rotating; the pendulum kept its position. His experiment showed that the earth rotated on its axis. No longer was it just a hypothesis.
My question has always been “if the pendulum is attached to the Earth, as is the floor, why do they move relative to each other? I know I’m stupid about this, but I’m not afraid to admit my ignorance, Here’s an explanation, which didn’t help me. Readers are welcome to enlighten me why the pendulum always stays in the same plane.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the January 8 Wikipedia page.
I’m quite depressed about the world situation, and posting has been thin. However, I haven’t found much to write about that stimulates me, so hang on until I do. Readers are invited (and welcome) to send me links to interesting stuff, but do not ask or expect such things to be posted, as I have to winnow them to find what gets my juices flowing.
Da Nooz:
*As expected, the U.S. is now going to take over and sell all the blockaded Venezuelan oil (which won’t be much for a long time). Conspiracy theories are flying about this, and about Trump striking a deal with Russia, allowing Putin to have part of Ukraine in return for the U.S. getting some assets in Venezuela, though I don’t know which such assets Russia can give us. But there’s no doubt that we’re gonna get the oil.
The U.S. will sell blockaded Venezuelan oil “indefinitely,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said Wednesday, a day after President Trump said Venezuela will give the U.S. between 30 million and 50 million barrels of sanctioned oil.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump said that he has directed Wright to carry out his plan for the oil to be taken by storage ships and transported to the U.S.
“This Oil will be sold at its Market Price, and that money will be controlled by me, as President of the United States of America, to ensure it is used to benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States!,” said Trump.
Trump’s post offered the most detail to date about how he intends to make good on his promise to extract oil from the country.
A senior administration official said the sale of oil outlined by Trump would begin immediately. The U.S. is selectively rolling back sanctions to enable the transport and sale of Venezuelan crude and oil products to global markets, according to the official.
Wright said Wednesday that he was working with the Venezuelan government and that the U.S. would receive Venezuelan oil that is backed up in onshore facilities and floating tankers and then sell it. Many of those barrels were likely bound for China or Russia, say analysts, but have been blocked from the market by a U.S. blockade of sanctioned Venezuelan oil tankers.
“We’re going to market the crude coming out of Venezuela—first this backed up, stored oil, and then indefinitely, going forward, we will sell the production that comes out of Venezuela into the marketplace,” Wright said at a Goldman Sachs conference in Miami.
The proceeds of the sale will be deposited into accounts controlled by the U.S. government, Wright said, and would eventually flow back to the Latin American country to “benefit the Venezuelan people.”
“We need to have that leverage and that control of those oil sales to drive the changes that simply must happen in Venezuela,” he said.
Well, we’re still facing a hostile government in Venezuela. I smell trouble but won’t make any predictions.
*According to the NYT, an old agreement between Greenland and the U.S. gives us almost unlimited rights to occupy Denmark’s territory, even without having to take it over. (Note, though, that another article reports Marco Rubio saying that the U.S. wants to buy Greenland.)
He seems increasingly fixated on the idea that the United States should take over this gigantic icebound island, with one official saying the president wants to buy it and another suggesting that the United States could simply take it. Just a few days ago, Mr. Trump said: “We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security.”
But the question is: Does the United States even need to buy Greenland — or do something more drastic — to accomplish all of Mr. Trump’s goals?
Under a little-known Cold War agreement, the United States already enjoys sweeping military access in Greenland. Right now, the United States has one base in a very remote corner of the island. But the agreement allows it to “construct, install, maintain, and operate” military bases across Greenland, “house personnel” and “control landings, takeoffs, anchorages, moorings, movements, and operation of ships, aircraft, and waterborne craft.”
It was signed in 1951 by the United States and Denmark, which colonized Greenland more than 300 years ago and still controls some of its affairs.
“The U.S. has such a free hand in Greenland that it can pretty much do what it wants,” said Mikkel Runge Olesen, a researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies in Copenhagen.
“I have a very hard time seeing that the U.S. couldn’t get pretty much everything it wanted,” he said, adding, “if it just asked nicely.”
But buying Greenland — something that Secretary of State Marco Rubio told lawmakers on Tuesday was Mr. Trump’s latest plan — is a different question.
Greenland does not want to be bought by anyone — especially not the United States. And Denmark does not have the authority to sell it, Dr. Olesen said.
“It is impossible,” he said.
From the second article:
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has told lawmakers that President Trump plans to buy Greenland rather than invade it, while Mr. Trump has asked aides to give him an updated plan for acquiring the territory, U.S. officials said on Tuesday.
Mr. Rubio made his remarks in a briefing on Monday with lawmakers from the main armed services and foreign policy committees in both chambers of Congress. The same day, Mr. Trump told aides to deliver an updated plan.
As I wrote to a friend who was amazed that Trump was even thinking of acquiring Greenland, “If he tries it, it would be the stupidest thing he’s ever done, and that’s saying a lot! ” I think he needs more medical tests.
*Journalist Anne Applebaum is critical of the way Trump attacked Venezuela to apprehend Maduro, but she thinks that removing him was justifiable. An article on her Substack website, “Spheres of influence” tells us why (h/t Bat).
Even though the the military raid that took Nicolás Maduro into custody does resemble some past American actions, especially the ouster of the Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega in 1989–90, the use of this new language to explain the Venezuelan raid makes the story very different.
At his press conference on Saturday, Trump did not use the word democracy. He did not refer to international law. Instead, he presented a garbled version of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, a policy originally designed to keep foreign imperial powers out of the Americas, calling it something that sounded like the “Donroe Document”: “Under our new National Security Strategy,” he said, reading from prepared remarks, “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again.”
As I wrote in my recent book, Autocracy Inc, Nicolas Maduro was an extraordinarily corrupt, venal, and repressive leader. He was supported by Russian, Chinese, Cuban and Iranian money and weapons. He stayed in power by jailing, killing and exiling his opponents. A case could have been made, not only to Congress but to America’s allies and Venezuela’s neighbors, that his removal would restore democracy to his country and stability to the region. But this is not what the Trump administration chose to do.
Instead, Trump has gone out of his way to portray the capture of Maduro as nothing more than a “win,” for the US president and for US oil companies (who were also not consulted before the raid). On Saturday, Trump patronized and verbally dismissed the leader of the Venezuelan opposition, Maria Corina Machado (a compelling, dedicated woman, whom I interviewed in December 2024). His administration has half-heartedly justified the raid by indicting Maduro for drug trafficking. Given that Trump himself just pardoned the former president of Honduras, who was indicted on drug charges six years ago, this hardly fits into a broader logic.
This is a criminally short-sighted policy. For seventy years, American prosperity and influence have been based on a network of allies who worked with us, not because they were coerced, but because they shared our values. Now those allies will begin to hedge:
Trump’s pursuit of an illusory sphere of influence is unlikely to bring us peace or prosperity—any more than the invasion of Ukraine brought peace and prosperity to Russians—and this might become clear sooner than anyone expects. If America is just a regional bully, after all, then our former allies in Europe and Asia will close their doors and their markets to us. Sooner or later, “our” Western Hemisphere will organize against us and fight back. Far from making us more powerful, the pursuit of American dominance will make us weaker, eventually leaving us with no sphere, and no influence, at all.
Trump and his henchmen will also eventually discover that Venezuelans do have agency. They might even discover that Americans don’t like their expensive, well-trained military being used to replace one dictator with another, for the benefit of Trump’s oil-industry donors. On Saturday afternoon, a few hours after the US military took Nicolas Maduro into custody, I discussed these topics with with my Atlantic colleague, David Frum:
Here’s a 30-minute discussion between Applebaum and David Frum about this (there’s also a transript):
Click to go to her Atlantic article, or find it archived here.
I guess what bothers me is that, given the Internet, all the pundits have to have an INSTANT TAKE on what Trump did. And, of course, it lines up with their political ideology: Left: TRUMP BAD, Right: TRUMP GOOD. That is not a coincidence. Given the recalcitrance of interim President Delcy Rodriguez to change the Maduro policy, the U.S. should set up and help enforce free elections in Venezuela, and then get the hell out. That is my “pundit” take. But an article in today’s NYT reports Trump saying that it could take “years” before the U.S. stopped controlling the country.
*After the Russian sent a vessel to escort the Bella 1, the sanctioned tanker from Venezuela that was fleeing from the Coast Guard, and declared itself as a Russian ship (it can’t do that), the U.S. finally intercepted it.
The U.S. military seized two oil tankers on Wednesday as it tries to choke off most Venezuelan exports of crude, including a Russian-flagged tanker that had been evading American forces for weeks, escalating a confrontation with Moscow after the ouster of its ally, President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela.
The military issued a statement saying that U.S. forces had “seized” the Russian-flagged vessel in the North Atlantic, between Scotland and Iceland, for violating U.S. sanctions.
It later said, in a separate statement, that it had “apprehended a stateless, sanctioned dark fleet motor tanker,” the M/T Sophia, in international waters in the Caribbean, where it was “conducting illicit activities,” and the ship was being escorted to the United States.
The Coast Guard boarded the Russian tanker after a roughly two-week pursuit, according to one U.S. official briefed on the operation. The Coast Guard encountered no resistance or hostility from the crew, the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive military operation.
Russia’s Ministry of Transport confirmed that U.S. forces had boarded the vessel in international waters, adding in a statement that contact with it had been lost. The Russian state-owned broadcaster RT published images of a helicopter approaching the Russian-flagged tanker being pursued by the Coast Guard and said it appeared that U.S. forces were attempting to board. The New York Times was not able to determine when the images were captured.
The thing is that the Russians might have been sending their own navy ships and a submarine to accompany the Bella 1, raising the possibility of a nasty US/Russia confrontation, but all is well; the Russians didn’t try anything funny.
*We all need to watch the new movie “Nuremberg”, which has been highly recommended to me by several people, including my movie-obsessed nephew. And here’s Andrew Sullivan’s reaction that he put on the Substack notes page:
I watched the new movie, Nuremberg, on Amazon last night. I very rarely get emotional watching a film, but I found myself sobbing at a couple of points.
It’s so so easy to get distance from what the Nazis did, to get to some nearFuentes-style abstraction, and to forget the sheer, fathomless, brutal evil of it. The scene when the court – and the world – first sees the footage of the camps is beyond gutting. Silence is the only response imaginable.
And then there is simply the American defense of the rule of law against the rule of men – which was the entire point of the trials. Another abstraction for too many, but the key thing we fought for, as the Allies’ chief prosecutor explained.
And that was the second time I wept. To remember what America once was and did. And to see what this foul presidency and its cancerous fumes now tell the world about us. A permanent stain. A rebuke of all those who once gave their lives for the West. An indecency.
From Rotten Tomatoes. I’m surprised that it’s rated only 72% of critics (but 95% of viewers). The somewhat lower critics’ rating is summarized on the site:
Critics Consensus
Driven by a commanding performance from Russell Crowe, Nuremberg is a handsomely crafted historical drama, but its measured pacing and emotional restraint keep it from fully realizing the complexity of its subject.
Screw the critics; I’m going with my nephew and Sullivan and am gonna watch it. Wikipedia gives a longish summary.
Here’s the trailer. I was surprised to see that Russell Crowe plays Nazi Luftwaffe head Hermann Göring, the most powerful Nazi after Hitler. I thought Crowe would be a judge or something. We all know what happened to Göring.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Szaron discuss food and thought, which is for for thought.
Hili: Have you thought about the question of good food being better than bad?
Szaron: That’s for the deep thinkers. I’m a food lover – some things I gulp down, others I chew over.
In Polish:
Hili: Czy rozważałeś kwestię przewagi dobrego jedzenia nad złym?
Szaron: To pytanie dla wielkich umysłów, ja jestem smakoszem, Jedne rzeczy połykam szybciej, inne jem wolniej.
*******************
From Terrible Maps; a mnemomic to remember the names of America’s Great Lakes:
From The Dodo Pet:
From Cat Memes:
From Masih. The protests in Iran are continuing, and here protestors push back the security forces:
Unarmed Iranians pushed regime security forces to flee. Despite more than 30 deaths over 11 days, protesters are back in the streets from Mashhad to Shiraz, Tehran, and across 100 cities. This isn’t about prices or paychecks, it’s about a nation fed up with the entire regime. pic.twitter.com/8XgbQLpqA6
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) January 7, 2026
*Maarten Budry highlights the GOOD news of 2025, and there is pleny. Here is the introduction and just one tweet in his thread:
I spend a lot of time reading about progress, trying to dig out positive trends beneath all the mayhem & disaster in the news. Yet every year, I discover that I’ve missed the most important (i.e. positive) news. Luckily, Fix the News put together this awesome, inspiring overview. pic.twitter.com/m4O7AHctlK
— Maarten Boudry (@mboudry) January 1, 2026
First read the horrible descripion of trachoma, then realize how amazing this victory is. “It’s one of the most inspiring things I’ve ever heard of, one of best things happening in the world right now, yet not a single major news organisation reported anything about trachoma.” /2 pic.twitter.com/yv6HTk583r
— Maarten Boudry (@mboudry) January 1, 2026
From Luana; another male, and a murderous one, was put in a women’s prison. The trans-identified male only started transitioning after he was confined in a men’s prison. His crime? Killing his wife, and in a brutal way.
A violent male inmate is being held in a women’s prison in Massachusetts after filing a legal complaint with the assistance of the ACLU.
Robert Kosilek brutally murdered his wife after he claimed she had been “transphobic” towards him.https://t.co/jg4x4ihi87
— REDUXX (@reduxx) January 5, 2026
From Malcolm; a d*g joins some kids:
A German Shepherd sits down to play with a group of children in the street… Because for them he is one of them. pic.twitter.com/w2M1h26Cnx
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) January 2, 2026
One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial; a tale of human sacrifice and bravery. Read the Wikipedia link.
Kolbe voluntarily sacrificed his life to keep another prisoner alive. After six of the ten men sentenced to be starved to death died, the guards became impatient and killed Kolbe with an injection. His story is here: https://t.co/x7y0Vf7B48 https://t.co/PgMEZ7uVvO
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) January 8, 2026
Two from Matthew. I love this first one!
— Nina Willburger (@drnwillburger.bsky.social) 2026-01-07T18:03:34.498Z
We STILL don’t know what creature made these patterns on the deep ocean bottom:
We don't know what made this.
— Andrew D Thaler (@drandrewthaler.bsky.social) 2026-01-07T18:01:06.923Z
And it looks like this below the surface.
— Andrew D Thaler (@drandrewthaler.bsky.social) 2026-01-07T18:01:51.106Z
The top of the pendulum is fixed. But the weight is free to move. By inertia, it will keep swinging in the same plane (Newton’s first law of motion says that in order to change the direction of a moving object a force needs to act on it).
The Earth, however, is spinning. So the floor is rotating (one rotation every 24 hours, as compared to a non-rotating observer). So effectively the floor rotates beneath the swing of the pendulum, so the plane of the swing of the pendulum appears to change compared to markings on the floor.
To add to this:
The suspention point of the pendulum is normally attached to a ring that sits on ball bearings so the connection to the planet via the building is rotationally compliant. This allows the change in orientation to seamlessly allow a change without causing too much damping of the oscillation. Obviously a simple pendulum is going to swing less on each swing; that is an interesting thing to watch in videos from the Royal Instution, where a bowling ball is suspended from the ceiling and released when in contact with the lecturer’s nose – as long as they don’t move their head forward it will not hit them on the way back, and this is why they never ask for a volunteer to watch that ball heading for their face! Back in the 1960s, the London Science Museum pendulum was in the entrance stairwell and was a massive brass ball that swung over the heads of those entering. Every couple of hours a functionary in a brown lab coat would catch the pendulum bob and strap it to the iron banister rails and then light a Swan vesta to burn a cotton thread to let it go without adding any sideways influence in the swing. These days that pendulum is inside the building, health and safety being what it is and the entrance being somewhat remodelled it now has a low barrier around it and it is sustained using an electromagnet, in this case set into the floor under the centre point of its swing. In the case of the Houston Museum of Natural History it has a ring electromagnet near the suspension.
A couple of videos of Houston:
An approachable explanation of the principle from Bob the Science Guy:
Bob the Science Guy goofed: an ideal pendulum’s swing time is not exactly the same regardless of the swing arc length. His patter about the pendulum wire’s length and the gravitational acceleration both being constant is true, but those are not the only factors. In practice the effect is very small, which is why wind-up pendulum clocks keep good time even as the swing arc winds down, but the effect is never zero. My inner mathsee strongly objects to the colloquial unscientific use of “exactly the same” to mean “the same for all practical purposes”. Harrumph.
Also, old-style Foucault pendula (such as Foucault’s original) did just fine with the wire fixed to the ceiling (and thus to the rotating earth) without any bearings. Yes, that rotates the pendulum bob wrt its swing plane, but that rotation. is much too slow to have any noticeable gyroscopic effect. I expect the first Foucault pendulum at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry was of this type.
Yes, I think that’s the fundamental answer to Jerry’s specific question, Why does the pendulum swing in the same plane? Because the point of attachment is a rotationally compliant low-friction gimbal joint, no important “stiction” force is exerted on it by the ceiling beam which rotates with the Earth. Since the only force then acting on the pendulum is just the gravitational attraction between the bob and the Earth, which is always in the vertical plane, there is no unbalanced force that could move it out of the original plane in which it started swinging.
This is no different from driving a golf ball. The ball, if not hooked or sliced, goes in a straight line seen in the horizontal plane; its parabolic path is in a constant vertical plane. Most projectiles don’t stay in the air long enough for us to observe the earth rotating under them although this becomes important for accurate ballistic rocketry and long-range naval gunnery. A pendulum is simply a way to keep the movement going long enough for us to detect the earth’s rotation in a small space.
The pendulum in my clock, as the narrator explains, is constrained by its mounting in the clockwork mechanism to swing in the same plane as the clock, the wall, and the Earth all rotating together. As the clock rotates, the plane its pendulum swings in is forced to match the clock because the pendulum isn’t free to hold its original plane while the clock rotates around it. Theoretically, if the pendulum was massive enough, it could tear itself out of the clockwork as its inertia “tried” to keep it swinging in the same true plane while its attachment points in the clock rotated away from it.
Yeah, but tide goes in, tide goes out. It’s driving me Cnuts.
“I guess I don’t understand it, is the tide coming in or is it going out? … It seems like a mysterious thing.”
(G W Bush, 2000)
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
It is better to sleep on things beforehand than lie awake about them afterwards. -Baltasar Gracian, philosopher and writer (8 Jan 1601-1658)
Video circulating yesterday of an Iranian covering over a street sign with a large sticker(?) that re-names the street Donald Trump.
It is a funny thing the pendulum – I am no expert but here’s my troubleshooting type thoughts to see :
The following brief Sixty Symbols video (top notch video series) points out inertial frame at 5:15 : https://youtu.be/sWDi-Xk3rgw?si=Sk75VduQWL8xWged
The inertial frame of the Earth apparently does not share the inertial frame of the pendulum. I think of this (if I am right about it) like a vacuum – the pendulum is in a ‘motion vacuum’. This might be the key to understand the phenomenon. The video also quickly notes important experiments and is overall worth it.
Some other tech details :
A gimbal connects the rod to the apparatus frame. It’s basically a “U-joint” like in a car – e.g. on some control arms. The gimbal or pivot motion is such that it cancels out any connection to the Earth through the apparatus – ideally with ample grease. E.g. a string would twist all up. Etc.
The extremes of rod length and bob mass are important to make Earthly connections negligible. I think making things negligible is key as well.
Great topic!
An interesting and broadly informative 18-minute video on seizing the tanker from merchant mariner and professor Sal Mercogliano posted yesterday at “What’s Going On with Shipping”. Should be at url
Well, thank the FSM there’s finally a better mnemonic to remember the names of the Great Lakes than HOMES! Thousands of kids, rejoice! Especially Lisa!
I came up with a mnemonic for remembering them in order, left (west) to right (east): Sado Masochists Hurt Every One.
Very nice. The best i could come up with was SHMOE.
I loved, and excelled at, mathematics in high school, such that I considered physics as a major. The first year’s physics classes in college, with stuff like Foucault’s Pendulum, did me in, I’m afraid. Here’s an animation that helps somewhat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VooAOjIPIgk
As for Rotten Tomatoes, I’ve long subscribed to the calculation that low (pretentious) critic scores and high popular scores is almost always a good recommendation.
Yeah, always remember that “The Last Jedi” received a good critic score on RT.
Sorry to be a downer, but I’m surprised you didn’t mention the very worst news of all that surfaced yesterday: “Trump to pull US out of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change”. That’s the climate treaty to which most countries belong, and that was ratified by G. H. W. Bush and Congress in 1992. There’s a sliver of hope that Trump can’t pull the US out without permission from Congress. But a Republican-dominated Congress could give him permission.
Coming back to Andrew Sullivan: he likes Jews especially when they are dead.
In 1992, global CO2 output was 23-24 billion tons. In 2024, global CO2 output was 37.8 to 39.6 billion tons. Even Bill Gates has admitted that humanity has more important problems. It’s over. Greta lost
Former NYT columnist Paul Krugman (now on Substack, free most days) writes that we should no longer think of Trump in terms of national interest. He’s more like a mob boss, or medieval ruling family. He’s doing stuff for himself and his family and clique, not for the country.
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-looting-of-us-foreign-policy
My only criticism of Krugman’s point is that this was known about Trump long before his escalator ride into politics. In fairness I’d bet that Krugman has been aware of this for a long time.
I watched Nuremberg. I thought it was terrible. Badly acted. Full of explanatory dialogue. Russell Crowe was not bad. But he did not salvage the film for me.
I haven’t seen it, nor intend to watch it based solely on the trailer, which looks to me like slick Hollywood and over-the-top acting (and I’m not a fan of Mr. Crowe). On the other hand, I was captivated by the six-part series on Netflix, Hitler and the Nazis–Evil on Trial, based on William Shirer’s reporting before, during, and after the war. It features some actual footage from the trials interspersed with reënactments, including an Adolf Hitler who can’t stop waving his arms about. I didn’t realize how close Shirer came to getting himself killed by the Gestapo. Instead of Russell Crowe, now and then you see and hear the real monster Göring.
This is how I might explain it:
Imagine what would happen if you dangled a very heavy object, like a bowling ball from a thin piece of filament attached to a rod. This is pretty much exactly like the pendulum. When you twist the rod in your hand, the bowling ball will not rotate (at least enough to notice) as the torque is too tiny. That’s why when the ball is swinging, it will stay in the same plane, even when there is twisting action on the string. If the string were rigid and not subject to twisting, this would not be the case of course.
“From Terrible Maps; a mnemomic to remember the names of America’s Great Lakes:”
Yeesh, that’s a bit of a yucky mnemonic! But maybe it’s effective precisely because of that.
Also, I was reminded this over the holidays that unless you grew up in the Great Lakes region, you probably know absolutely nothing about these wonders or some of the major landmarks. Was on a tour in San Francisco, and we went over the Golden Gate bridge. The guide described it as “the longest suspension bridge in the country, until NY took the title with the Verrazzano-Narrows bridge in the 60s.”
Wrong! The Mighty Mac, completed in 1957, is much larger, both in total length AND the suspended portion (length between the anchorages). Only if you look at the length of the “main span” (length between the towers) is the GG or VN longer than the Mac. But that is just a portion of the total bridge length.
When there was a break I mentioned this to the guide. I expected him to give the “main span” argument. But he had never even heard of the Mackinac Bridge! He was blown away that such a thing existed when I showed him it on my phone.
A given point on the surface of the earth is in an accelerated frame of reference due to the earth’s rotation. Do this thought experiment: Go to a circus merry-go-round, remove one of the horsies, set up a Foucault pendulum in its place, turn the switch to set the merry-go-round rotating at its constant angular velocity, and set the pendulum swinging. What will happen to the pendulum bob? Now realize that the planet Earth is a merry-go-round.
I’m afraid I have no idea “what will happen to the pendulum bob” in this scenario.
Just when you think there’s nothing to write about, another crisis emerges. This time, it’s that a young woman was killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis and all of the news outlets are posting the video. Predictably, unrest has come to Minneapolis. The death took place just blocks from the George Floyd incident, which doesn’t help matters. Protestors were even marching against ICE last night in Seattle. How far will the unrest go? How many cities will stage protests? How many of those will turn violent? It seems to me that the big cities are sitting on a powder keg.
I wonder if those city officials are thinking, “Gee, maybe filling up our sanctuary cities with illegal aliens whom the federal power would eventually come for, with our help or without it, just possibly wasn’t such a good idea. Now there are so many of them that they, and their advocates and enablers, are a political force willing to use violence, which constrains our ability to democratically change our mind.”
Interesting defense of Trump’s SS.
I strongly disagree. Much more like the Secret State Police.
So enforcing the country’s border laws is Nazism now. Interesting.
FDR deported illegals. He was a member of the SS. Obama put children in cages. He was also a member of the SS.
It would seem that her decision to keep driving her vehicle in an apparent attempt to flee the scene had some modest bearing on the incident.
I’ve read that she was a U.S. citizen, though Trump’s noble ICE seems to have insufficient neurons to understand the concept. Has ICE claimed to have evidence that she was not a citizen?
(I contemplate keeping certified copies of documentation of my citizenship in my vehicle to show ICE, assuming that would make a difference.)
She drove toward and struck the ICE officer that shot her. Not a smart move on her part.
It was a bad shoot. The ICE officer murdered her.
She didn’t strike him. It’s not certain exactly what happened. She may have been trying to hit him, may have been trying to drive away from him.
Thanks for posting that good-news twitter thread from Maarten Boudry. Pinker was right: things are getting better, especially in the developing world from which much of the good news (like the elimination of a horrible infectious disease) goes unreported.
I applaud Boudry.
I look forward to Pinker’s thoughts about the need for increased security at airports, government buildings, hospitals and entertainment venues in the developed (allegedly civilized) world.
In the lobbies of my local health care system’s several hospitals and numerous clinics, in addition to security mechanisms, during the last two years have been installed large signs in bold lettering: “AGGRESSIVE BEHAVIOR WILL NOT BE TOLERATED.” It has come to that. On this particular issue I decline to automatically acquiesce to what I perceive to be Pinker’s blanket and perfunctory (if not dismissive) rejoinder that progress is not linear and “doesn’t mean everything gets better for everyone all the time”.
In the Ancient Days (mid-Seventies) one could simply walk into a concert venue (at least in smaller cities), in two seconds present a hard-copy ticket (previously and straightforwardly purchased on-site from the venue) and expeditiously proceed to one’s seat. In December 1976 I was able to simply walk into the U.S. Capitol and enjoy the view of the city from the balcony. The same with the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian buildings, the Library of Congress, etc.
The most severe security screening for public sites in DC is, of course, for entry to the Holocaust Museum. Even to enter the cafeteria – in a separate building – requires extensive security screening as I recently found during a visit there. Islam has not been a force for good in the world.
This is the first I’ve heard of a new Nuremburg movie. I’m looking forward to the depiction of the prosecutor for the US – Robert H. Jackson. To my mind, he was possibly the best supreme court justice we’ve ever had in this country.
One of the main messages of Nuremburg was that “just following orders” is no defense. But when Sen. Mark Kelly recently made a video to remind members of the military of that legal rule, it enraged President “I wish I had generals like Hitler” Trump so much that he called Kelly a traitor and said he deserved DEATH – in all caps, as usual.
Anyway, I bring this up because Kelly held a press conference yesterday to address the threats and intimidation he’s received as both a senator and former military officer from Trump and Hegspeth.
The press conference isn’t very long and is well worth listening to in its entirety.
As an aside, what about Kelly for prez in 28? By this time, shouldn’t we have narrowed down the field to a few front-runners? If so, who are they? If not Kamala, that is.
I’m not a lawyer, but I suspect the NYT of engaging in motivated misunderstanding of the agreement between the U.S. and Greenland. By my reading, the U.S. would need the consent of Denmark to expand our presence beyond the one base we now have there.
Article 1 of the 2004 amendment to the 1951 Defense Agreement between the U.S. and Denmark states:
In turn, Article II of the 1951 Defense Agreement states that the U.S. and Denmark must agree on the establishment of any new defense area:
As I said, though, I’m no expert.