Storm Clouds Coming

   

      In many ways I chide myself for not knowing more about clouds, although this post isn't really about that since I've written about clouds in earlier posts.  Still, is it cirrus or circus, cumulus or columbus?  Strata something, but I can only think of those classic guitars.  But once outside, I look up quite often, that "picture show for free thing," the clouds changing as often as the sunrises or sunsets. Some days the skies are stunningly spectacular, and on other days they are almost blank, as if having all been called back inside after recess at school.  I mention storm clouds in the title because we did have our first storm in a long time, my state in the West being in that megadrought and all.  And with the storm came snow which snarled streets and had plow operators work overtime; but the snow also brought a sigh of relief to everyone.  Spring was truly acting as if it were around the corner with some tulip and daffodil bulbs already popping up through the ground.  Besides, that mountain snow would become our water once it melted, and precious little earlier snow was up there, less than half of normal (the recent storm brought us up to 62% of normal).  But even with that, our reservoirs remained at just 2/3 full, as did the Colorado River.  Lake Powell was now so low that if it dropped about another 100 feet, water levels wouldn't reach the lower generators and power would end for about a quarter million residents in 7 states. 

Some redactions on the released Epstein files.  Photo: Jon Elswick/AP

      Now I must admit that such words as "storm clouds" have been used to describe so many things, alliteration if you will.  From jaded romances to murder mysteries, dark clouds are as descriptive as a rising sun, or a gorgeously clear sky (cue the opening of Oklahoma).   And of course, one could easily slip those pesky Epstein files into that category of dark clouds, at least to Trump, as ones floating over his head like flies drawn to hair the color of honey...but wait, I'm only throwing this in briefly because the NY Times mentioned that if the files so far released had been printed onto paper, the pile would be taller than the Empire State building (so much for Pam Bondi slapping a small folder on her desk and telling the American public, "I have the files right here.").  One does have to question however, why the names of so many male politicians, bankers, and such have been redacted but not the names (and often the nude photos) of the often underaged female victims.  Or why certain files and photos have been removed completely (fortunately some journalists were savvy enough to download them when they were first released).  But I digress (those of you who want to delve deeper into this continuing whack-a-mole game of "not me" can read what the Times had to say below)...

     But along with dark clouds may be a bit of what dark clouds bring, and that can be dark waters, as in a sewage overflow almost appropriately happening in Washington, D.C.  The 72-inch-wide pipe, called the Potomac Interceptor, normally carries up to 60 million gallons of waste a day...and it broke, leading to what appears to be the largest discharge of its kind in the nation’s history, wrote a piece in the NY Times.  Trump has ignored the problem for over a month, saying that the problem is D.C.'s and D.C.'s alone, except that a spokesman for D.C. Water, Ammar Moussa, said in a statement. “Since the last century, the federal government has been responsible for the Potomac Interceptor, which is the origin of the sewage leak...the Trump Administration has failed to act, shirking its responsibility and putting people’s health at risk.”  So where the heck is FEMA which handles this sort of emergency (their name after all is Federal EMERGENCY Management Agency)...nope, that money appropriated in case of a government shutdown is for ICE only and not FEMA, so the estimated 300 million gallons of raw sewage (so far) continues to flow freely into the Potomac and out of  Air Force One (semi-joking there).  But the issue isn't likely about FEMA's alone.  Turns out that the governor of neighboring Maryland, Wes Moore, has been critical of Trump's immigration policies and so he and the governor of Colorado (both of whom are Democrats) were not invited to the annual bipartisan National Governors Association meeting, with Trump posting on his social media site that both were "not worthy of being there."  (Wes Moore is the co-chair of the NGA).  Those bipartisan governors' meetings have been held since the founding of the association over a century ago.  The governors' association decided to cancel the gathering entirely, wrote PBS. 

       Dark clouds as emotions can often signify depression, that gloomy outlook as bills keep piling up and jobs keep being cut, all while speakers both human and electronic keep telling everyone how "great" the economy is doing.  And for some, it is indeed doing well (the Republican PAC in our state paid over 1000 people $30-40 an hour to gather signatures to overturn a proposition which both the voters and our state Supreme Court had earlier approved, one that prevented partisan gerrymandering in district voting maps; the PAC effort failed so they appealed to the federal level, which also failed).  But for many, even with risky (but perhaps necessary) loans being quickly approved, dark clouds hiding a brighter future can appear to show little chance of dissipating.  So if you can't make it to Vegas for a chance at quick money, why not just go online?  Prediction market gambling is beyond my understanding, but one reporter from the NY Times dove into it when he tweeted about a stream of Labor Department social media posts parroting messages used by white nationalists and discovered that his post was being bet on for how many views it would receive.  Curious, he found that one of the online bettors was/is an aerospace engineer named Franklin Caldwell II: During Covid, he started down a yearslong rabbit hole of NFTs and cryptocurrencies.  He became a multimillionaire in a hurry — then, in a single transaction, lost $3 million in the form of cartoon crypto tokens.  His latest obsession is Tweem, the platform that let him gamble on my post.  “If I’m going to spend time viewing a tweet, I want to leave with something,” said Caldwell, 35, who added that he had “a passion for predictions.”  Since creating his account around seven months ago, Caldwell has placed more than 25,000 bets — over 100 bets per day, on average.  He had bet that the reporter's post would get 378,000 views (it "only" got 274,000).  Jump over to entertainment and Disney has found that its own "experiences" division (parks, cruise ships, planned vacations and such) produced nearly triple the returns of its streaming and sports divisions, wrote Barron's (Disney owns a majority of ESPN and ABC).  People want an escape to sunnier shores.  Otherwise, as the song swooned, "a single room, a table for one, it's a lonesome town all right."

    The loneliness of depression and things seeming to be insurmountable was sharply reflected in Rental Family, the recent movie starring Oscar winner, Brendon Fraser (for his earlier film, The Whale).  Said one site: It’s an uplifting story about the human need for connection and community, which transcends cultures, countries, and languages.  And wasn't that the antidote to depression, that contact with something real...a person, a pet, a friend, even a stranger who catches your eye?  Certainly not a screen or anime or an emoji.  But maybe a robot?  AI and robots are making headway not only on assembly lines but in nursing homes and others areas in our human-centric world.  Said a piece in Skilled Nursing News: ...a surprise benefit of robots was that residents seemed more willing to share information with the robots than with people, he [Dan Strittmater, vice president of innovation and bench strength for Monarch Healthcare Management] added, regardless of cognitive status.  If that seem a bit difficult to grasp, jump back to Japan and the Brendan Fraser film.  The culture there finds little wrong with "renting" actors to portray everything from a mistress (no sex, just the persona) to a sibling or a spouse...even a parent.  It's The Wedding Date gone wild...but underneath it all, the general goal is that of not being lonely, of appearing to have friends or a loving family.  In the movie, it involves Fraser portraying a child's father so that the single mother can better her daughter's chances to get into a school, only the child soon comes to realize that he is just acting.  Culture aside, it brought to the forefront what many in the world do to impress others, whether that means your own family and friends, or the outside world.  But before long, as with the child, the facade begins to crack...the high lifestyle, the expensive car, the injections to the face, the false laughs or pats on the back, the crypto gambling.  Even with AI, people begin to separate the real from the unreal.  And now there emerges the decision to not have children...

     Wrote another piece in the NY Times about  this country’s all-time low birthrate, down by over 25 percent since 2007 (the year the birthrate began to fall): The political class is worried about the historic drop.  But the biggest change is among the youngest women, who are the least ready to have children...Drops among Hispanic, white and Black teenagers accounted for 37 percent of the national birthrate decline between 2007, when the rate started to go down, and 2019, according to calculations by Melissa Kearney, an economist at the University of Notre Dame, and her colleagues.  White women ages 20 to 24 without a bachelor’s degree were another big contributor, they found.  Together, the two groups added up to more than half of the overall drop...Thirty years ago, the growing number of teenage and single mothers was seen as a societal crisis, with poor economic and health outcomes for mother and baby. The most vociferous critics called these women “welfare queens” and said they were draining public coffers.  Now, the teenage birthrate is down by 70 percent since 2007. And the unmarried birthrate is down by 30 percent.  And the age group now with the highest birthrate?  Women in their early 30s:  And, in a significant reversal, a woman in her early 40s is now more likely to give birth than a teenager.  Such statistics have caught the eye of the ultra-conservative group, The Heritage Foundation (instrumental in writing the playbook for Trump's 2nd term with Project 2025).  Said part of the report:  The question that will determine the course of America’s future is: What happens to a nation when its citizens largely stop having children and eschew marriage?  After all, a woman's place is in the home, isn't it?  Hmm, that fantasy of wife, mother, cook, housekeeper and Epstein trainee has long dissipated, at least for most of society, or maybe not...the United Nations enters its 45th year of working towards that goal of equality for women.  Forty-five years!

Hyundai's Atlas robot

     But those robots?  A report from Bloomberg noted that Hyundai (yes, the carmaker) is making some heads rolls with its new Atlas, "...a sleek machine equipped with human-scale hands, tactile sensing, and fully rotational joints."  Long known for affordable, dependable cars, the South Korean giant is pumping billions into robotics after snapping up Boston Dynamics in 2021 (remember “Spot,” the robot dog?) and luring top talent from Tesla and Nvidia.  The economics are turning heads.  At a price of $100,000, Atlas’ operating cost would undercut the $7.25 federal minimum wage and land well below the $20-$38 an hour typical in auto plants.  Analysts estimate it could replace 3 million to 4 million assembly workers globally once it enters the “workforce” in 2028.  But competition is fierce.  Chinese manufacturers accounted for the vast majority of the roughly 13,000 humanoids shipped globally last year, according to Omdia.  They’re cheaper, too: Unitree Robotics lists its latest model at $49,000, while AgiBot is asking about $14,000 for a scaled-down version.  Even so, investors are betting Hyundai can turn its scale, engineering prowess and early-mover ambition into an edge, and that’s why its shares are on a tear.  

     But there's yet another cloud for humans, that of dementia...in the film, one of the main characters tells Fraser that he wants to go back to a place of his earlier days while his mind still remembers.  And how dark a cloud would that be if you could recognize that things were slipping away, perhaps gradually, perhaps quickly?   Where's that comforting robot...would it appear real at that point, as real as an online romance (and surprisingly, "People ages 50 to 64 were more than twice as likely to report this occurring as those 65 and older," wrote AARP).  A quick peek at one site may prove eye-opening at the number and variety of such scams targeting all ages, even those on the battlefield).  Wrote Tom's Guide about the use of AI in today''s world of online scams: Scammers are becoming a little too convincing and people worldwide are falling for them – hook, line and online sinker – according to the Netherlands-based Global Anti-Scam Alliance (GASA).  The organization’s latest “Global State of Scams Report,” revealed that 2 billion scam victims worldwide lost over $1 trillion dollars to an ever-increasing variety of scams – a little less than 1 percent of the World Bank’s global $106 trillion economic output.  Sheesh, even I'm now seeing those clouds gathering steam (or moisture)...

     And now there are the dark clouds filling the skies of Iran after an escalated attack by the US and Israel (Trump's top military General warned that getting involved in another prolonged Middle East war would severely deplete our available munitions).   And on the other side of the world, while we are busy in the Middle East, should China make good on its threat to invade Taiwan, our military's supply of advanced computer chips used in those munitions would grind to a halt.  "You say you want a revolution?," sang the Beatles,  "we'd all love to see the plan."  So what does one do?  Roll over and wait it out, as some have suggested, which seem to be the decision Congress has made since the start of the year.  Or does one mimic the violence and foul, demeaning language peppered with denial after denial?  The Irish writer, Fintan O'Toole, brought a fresh overseas perspective to the lackeys and lackadaisical attitudes of both the Democrats and the Republicans, one about standing up and not giving in OR giving up: This does not mean aping Trump’s hate-filled rhetoric or opposing the violence of masked ICE agents and armed national guardsmen with violence...The contemporary culture is one in which everyone has at least the illusion of having a voice -- posting on social media provides a simulacrum of public expression.  What is much more important now is whom you speak against -- and whose wrath you are willing to risk in doing so...What should be bleakly consoling is that there is, in any case, no safe option.  The meek will not inherit the scorched earth of post-democratic America.  They will, like democracy itself, be consumed in the fire.  Safety is not available, but resistance is far from futile.  It is what the American republic was founded on, and if the 250th anniversary of that foundation next year is not to mark its obsequies, all obsequiousness must be banished.   It's been a long time coming, but a change is gonna come...

                        

      As far as those clouds, and those terms like advection and orographic, well things get a bit foggy (the first) or cloudy (the latter).  Do the terms cumulonimbus, stratocumulus, or altostratus ring any bells?  Even a tinkle?  Time for me to head back to that geography for kids book and review the basics (I've gone from a time when I would chide myself by saying "I should know this," to the more accepting phrase of " I used to know this...sort of").  Explained the book: Different types of clouds form at different altitudes.  There are three main kinds -- cirrus, cumulus, and stratus.  Cirrus are wispy clouds made of ice crystals.  Cumulus are fluffy, heaped clouds that pile up as warm air rises.  Stratus are layered clouds that form when layers of air cool to the condensation point.  Ahem, not only did I not know those basics, but likely will again fail to file that all away and simply just stare upwards.  Beautiful clouds, I'll say, and truly mean beautiful.

*The NY Times set out to tackle what many of us wonder about: what is taking so long with the Trump-Epstein files (a title trademarked by Jimmy Kimmel).  Here's how their piece began: It’s hard to imagine a more difficult reporting project.  For the past couple of weeks, dozens of Times journalists have been making their way through the three million pages in the latest collection of Epstein files released by the Justice Department, along with 180,000 images and 2,000 videos.  To date they’ve examined only a small percentage of what’s there — much of it uncorroborated, fragmented or redacted.  Many months, maybe years, of work are ahead of them as they dredge the documents for information they can verify and publish.  Readers have questions about that.  How is The Times searching the files?  What’s the objective of the search?  Do we use artificial intelligence to assist with our reporting?  What do we publish and, as important, what do we not publish?  The piece was quite lengthy but here are the main takeaways: We had assembled a team of reporters, editors and others who could jump in when the time came.  They were colleagues in Washington and on our Investigations, National, Metro and Business desks, and engineers and A.I. journalists.  Obviously, you can’t read three million pages.  So we decided to start with search terms...The way they showed up online required us to do a lot of improvising.  We never imagined, for example, that they’d release these in a way that you’d have to click through more than 25,000 pages on justice.gov just to find them all.  Or that there’d be broken links to sift through, and files constantly disappearing and reappearing...There have been big and basic questions about Epstein.  How did he go about doing what he did?  How did he get away with so much for so long?  Who funded it?...Even though these are now public records, it does not mean they are verified, true or accurate.  We’ve tried to strike a balance of reporting thoroughly, explaining the existence of these tips and claims, describing what we are seeing, while also not going too far into the realm of unverified or unverifiable accounts...There’s also been disinformation around redactions, where people are claiming to “undo” redactions using A.I. or other techniques.  We built a tool that checked all three million pages for these so-called undo-able redactions and didn’t find any.  In many cases, what we’re actually seeing in some online videos is an A.I. hallucination of what it assumes is under the redaction black box [they note that AI is not good at filling in predictive redactions]...Trump has a troubling history with women, including being found liable for sexual abuse, and so I understand the instinct on the part of some readers to assume that similar allegations should be treated as if they are likely true.  But we work differently.  We don’t make assumptions; we need to verify, which often means painstaking work that can take time.  In the end, the various editors and reporters had a few thoughts on the files they've come across so far, including these closing comments: I’ve seen a lot of document dumps and the material in this one really has the ability to stop you in your tracks.  There’s an unfiltered nature, especially in some of the correspondence, that I just found unrecognizable...The way that some men talk about women in these documents, reducing them to commodities whose value depends on their hair color or breast size, isn’t at all surprising.  But it’s ugly...I was shocked by the way that Epstein groomed not just women and girls but also powerful men to acquire favor.  His network was so much more extensive than I had imagined...The enormous scope of the story and the reach of Epstein’s collection of contacts still catches me off guard.  You would imagine that we’d feel like we know the whole story by now, but not really.  It is hard to believe that after all that has been said, there is still much to learn about Epstein and his network...It’s the most detailed portrait I’ve seen of an elite class of society operating outside of public scrutiny.  An additional insight into how magazines and newspapers differ from social media in their fact-checking, take a peek into Vaunted, a brief explanation on how The New Yorker does it.  

     And finally, for those you who stuck it out this far, my hat goes off (in the days when people wore hats, and taking them off was a sign of respect) to all of the returning Olympic athletes coming home from Milan, Italy.  None were losers for just getting to be an Olympian means that you have more athletic ability than most....brava and bravo.   And while my memory is vague of the Lake Placid "miracle" of the US Men's hockey team defeating the heavily-favored USSR team (in those days US athletes could not be paid professionals to participate in the Olympics, although teams such as the USSR often ignored this rule), my memory takes me to 4 years later at Sarajevo when the ice skating pair, Jayne Torvil and Christopher Dean, not only dared to creatively dance to the Beatles' Revolution, but went on to score perfect 10s...and that inventiveness was still happening on the ice in Milan 45 years later.  If you're willing to see Torvil & Dean's nearly flawless synchronized performance from 1984, testing not only the waters but the ice, here's a look back at that time...