Number 5. Twitchy dot com. NYC Mayor Eric Adams does a ‘stunning turnaround’ from sanctuary city.
Flexibility, adaptability and spontaneity are the keys to success in 21st century American politics. No one portrays courageous flexibility better than the new mayor of the Big Apple.
Just two years ago, when running for the office, he assured voters that migrants seeking sanctuary would be welcomed in the City during his entire administration.
But then, the Governor of Texas happened, and buses started showing up in the Five Boroughs with the aforesaid migrants seeking the aforesaid sanctuary.
Where humble, hard-working, peace-loving migrants saw new opportunities, so did criminals who occupied the same buses.
Peace-loving migrants wanted nothing more than a fresh start with new opportunities for personal growth. And perhaps for a few felonies such as theft, robbery, assault and murder.
Reassessment was called for, and Mayor Adams was up to the task. He has called for SOME of those who commit felonies to be turned over to ICE (Immigration & Customs Enforcement) and then deported.
I would make a couple of observations about this plan:
If you want to create a migrant criminal recycle program, i.e.: enter the U.S. illegally, commit a crime, get deported, go back to Mexico, re-enter the U.S. illegally, and repeat, this might be a good start.
If you want to only deport “some” of those who commit felonies, you will need a way to separate the desirable felons from the undesirable felons. I am trying to imagine the interview process.
If you think the only way to rid New York City of immigrant criminals is to let ICE handle them, perhaps you should review how we got here in the first place.
Are there not prosecutors and prisons in the State of New York? I know there are; I read about them all the time. But perhaps their attention is focused on white collar real estate crime.
I saw a problem like this once before, when one of the guys at our grocery store worked calmly to sweep aisle 5 while ignoring the shattered jar of tomato juice on aisle 4.
The on-going effort to rid California of CO2, requiring billions of non-existent, yet-to-be-printed, state dollars addresses a greenhouse gas that, according to the Canadian Center for Occupational Health and Safety is
not known to cause cancer
not known to harm the unborn child, and
not known to be a reproductive hazard.
DDT waste, on the other hand, checks all three boxes.
Of course, the world virtually outlawed the use of DDT in 1972. The insecticide known by the simple household name dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane was manufactured by Montrose Chemical Corporation after World War II. When birth defects were attributed to the widespread use of DDT in suppressing malaria worldwide, the chemical company had to stop the manufacture.
I suspect that the number of birth defects, which MAY have been attributed to DDT, was a tiny fraction of the malaria deaths which were surely STOPPED by the use of DDT, but that’s an argument I am not qualified to make, and which I would surely lose, because all environmentalists are really smart and are as pure as the driven snow.
Whereas if I tried to say it was good that DDT removed malaria, I would be the devil incarnate. Almost as bad a New Yorker accused of a white collar real estate crime.
Ceasing the manufacture of DDT meant no more Montrose revenue stream, and thus no support for research into cleaning up toxic waste. The big sewer pipes that carried DDT waste to the edge of the water at Palos Verdes, California, made great villain photos and were an obvious target for an EPA Superfund cleanup site.
But the hundreds, or hundreds of thousands, of steel barrels of the waste, that were barged a few miles offshore and dumped in the ocean, disappeared from view.
Disappeared, until an LA Times article in 2020 showed underwater robot photos of barrels littering the ocean floor and leaking toxic waste.
The feds have ordered scientific papers to be written to document how bad the DDT dumping ground is. The first paper was assigned in 2021 and has yet to be turned in. Three more studies will be required before cleanup can be planned and executed. This will be measured in years, maybe decades.
Meanwhile, dastardly CO2 is chased while DDT continues to seep into the ocean.
Number 3. Nature dot com. the invention of writing on Rapa Nui, aka Easter Island.
This one is surprisingly interesting.
Written language, in the form of drawings (what are called glyphs), has been known for some time to exist on wooden objects discovered on Easter Island, 2,000 miles west of Chile. European missionaries found samples around 1860 and shipped them back home.
The interesting thing is, the wooden planks on which the glyphs were carved could not have come from the island itself. The type of wood is generally native to Africa. And besides that, Easter Island was almost completely deforested around 1200 AD.
Studies of the wood, including carbon dating, indicate it was a material suitable for use in ship building. The age of the wood seems to be in the 1700s. Evidence from a 1770 ceremony observed by a European indicates that natives were observed to write on a wooden object with some type of stylus.
There is no guess as to how long the native population existed on the island prior to European discovery. The fact that they wrote on materials no doubt brought to Easter Island in the 18th century suggests they had a well-developed written language.
One might almost suspect the native population, with no spoken dialect that could be recognized and yet a fairly sophisticated system of writing, could have been present on Easter Island for many centuries.
About 20 years ago a friend, trained as a theologian with an emphasis on ancient populations, suggested to me that after the creation of the world, the human gene pool was perfect. He had a Christian young-earth creationist perspective, meaning that he believed the earth to be no more than about 10,000 years old.
With the fall of Adam and Eve, he said, sin entered, and the moral defect for which they were cursed by God introduced physical disruption to human DNA. That was in fact the essence of the curse.
For centuries thereafter, the inertia of perfect genetic history with only slight deviations made for large, strong, intelligent humans and would go some distance in explaining how some of the ancient wonders of the world came to be. By our standards, the people would have been formidable specimens.
Eventually, the system deteriorated into the physical degradation and rampant disease we see today.
With that worldview, an early tribe of energetic sea-farers exploring the oceans is not far-fetched.
Articles like this highlight the intersection of science and theology.
But it’s not satire, and therefore probably has no place in The Alligator News Roundup. I’m afraid the next one may not be much better.
Number 2. Phys dot org. Super-fast insect urination powered by the physics of superpropulsion.
I only include this one because it is unlikely you have read any article this week on how insects relieve themselves.
Those who know me know that I do not particularly care for bathroom humor, as it is the easy, vulgar refuge of the uninspired. And I confess I had never before considered how small insects pee.
It turns out they do so by shedding droplets one at a time. Tiny insects apparently have developed a way to fling tiny drops of urine at incredibly fast speeds. Using a high speed camera, a researcher from the Georgia Institute of Technology discovered that the glassy-winged sharpshooter expelled one drop of urine at a speed that, in a race car or a rocket sled, would approximate 40Gs.
The ethical aspects of this invasion of privacy aside, the glassy fellow studied with the camera used an internal appendage at his posterior like a flipper on a pinball machine.
I am not making this up.
Furthermore, because the speed of the expelled droplet was faster than the pinball flipper itself, the glassy guy had actually created superpropulsion, a phenomenon that in this case takes advantage of the surface tension in a stored droplet to add to the energy of the expulsion device itself.
Superpropulsion is compared to the energy boost used by a diver timing his jump to the action of the springboard.
How does the glassy-winged sharpshooter know to do this? They haven’t figured that part out yet, but it wreaks havoc in gardens as the droplets travel a great distance as they atomize and spread themselves over the plants indiscriminately.
The insect’s ability to expel viscous waste in this way is proportionate to an adult human trying to throw away a beachball made of maple syrup. It might be useful to study how they do what the researcher calls a “heroic feat of physics.”
Number 1. The Pi Song. www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjOJe99qkNg
This is too good not to share, seeing as how yesterday — the day I am writing this — has been designated as Pi Day.
Not “pie” as in when your mom said, “Look children, I’ve baked a beautiful cherry pie for your supper!” but “Pi” as in when Mr. Spock said, “Computer, this is a Class A compulsory directive: Compute to the last digit the value of Pi.”
(“The Wolf in the Fold” S2E14 December 22, 1967.)
March 14 is Pi day because, as you all remember, the first three digits in the value of Pi are 3 point 14. Ergo, March 14.
Also, as you recall, Pi is the mystical mathematical constant used to identify the relationship of a circle’s diameter and its circumference, as in c=pd. (If you are reading the typed version of this, my apologies. This Substack platform lacks the sophisticated fonts of Microsoft Word, so you’ll have to accept “p” as a representative of Pi.)
Pi has no end, and there is no point in calculating all the digits of Pi. They are always the same and will go on forever.
There is, however, a way to monetize the value of Pi, thanks to YouTube.
Search YouTube for “The Pi Song” (or copy the link in the title to this article and paste it into your browser) and hear a delightful and completely pointless audio version of the first 100 digits of Pi set to upbeat music.
The lyrics begin:
This is pi/ followed by/ 2653589/ Circumf’rence over diameter
7-9 then 323/ OMG, can’t you see/ 8462643, and Now we’re on a spree!
I hope this brings some enlightenment to your otherwise drab day, because today is actually the Ides of March, so deadly for Julius Caesar. But that’s a different story and also has no place in the News Roundup.
Now that you have completely wasted the last 10 minutes of your life, enjoy your weekend! If you are hearing the audio version of this, we will usher you out with a few seconds of The Pi Song from ASAP Science.
Don’t forget to share the episode by clicking the button below. Someone in your life is probably having such a bad day that hearing this episode may actually be a lift!
The Alligator News Roundup