I don’t throw around the word “hero” lightly. It’s an important, powerful word, and as such I hoard it like a miser, choosing to dole it out with all the associated ceremony to people who do things so trivial and tedious and absurd that it would make an absolute mockery of the word. This is one of those times, and Gareth Wild is a hero. A hero who parked in all 211 spaces in the parking lot at his local Sainsbury’s. //

Oh, and for our non-UK readers, Sainsbury’s is a popular supermarket there, and they’ve actually come up on Jalopnik before, since they keep a fascinating collection of photographs of their parking lots over the years, featuring some wonderful old British iron. //

Me: First question, I guess, is why?

Gareth: I wanted to try this because I enjoy finding fun in the mundane and there’s nothing more mundane than the weekly food shop. It dawned on me after going shopping there for some years prior that it’s the sort of daft project I’d enjoy, like the worlds most boring Panini sticker album.

By and large, members of my generation were raised in households with two parents, and we were taught how to deescalate and talk things out when problems arose. Today, that no longer seems to be the case.

We have a moral and social failing in our country that has caused an increase in mass shooters, predominantly young men. One has to pause to think about what’s different today from 30 or 40 years ago. It certainly isn’t guns, because it’s harder to get guns today than it was in the past, when you didn’t have to go through nationalized background checks. When I was growing up, you could purchase a firearm with no questions asked, yet we didn’t see so many mass shootings.

America’s young men are struggling with mental health issues or are broken and living in poverty with single mothers struggling to survive. Many of them are clearly crying out for help, and we owe it to them to listen. //

Another important facet of this dialogue is religion. I know we don’t often talk about religion these days, but it instills moral and ethical values that are key to a society’s success. It creates boundaries that inform us of what is good and what is bad.

Many of the greatest thinkers known to man have talked about the importance of morality and ethics for all civilized people, how they are key to a good life and setting boundaries against bad behavior. ///

God and the church are the answer that we are looking for to the ills of society

After 58 years operating off the Hudson River in Buchanan, New York, the final nuclear unit at Indian Point closes on Friday at 11 p.m.

Some environmentalists celebrated the closure, arguing the plant’s proximity to New York City makes it unsafe and that climate change can be tackled without this atomic brand of carbon-free electricity source. But its closure has sinister immediate implications: climate change-causing fossil fuels will likely replace that nuclear energy in the near term.

Already, gas-fired generators powered 40% of the state’s power last year, up from 36% the year prior, as a result of Unit 2’s closure, the NY Times reported. That will continue until more renewable projects and energy efficiency measures can get up and running.

“I don’t see a near-future approach that doesn’t require burning fossil fuel,” said Alexander Couzis, the interim dean of the Grove School of Engineering at the City College of New York. “We can’t keep doing business as usual, and then having Indian Point shutting down and at the same time complaining that we’re burning too much hydrocarbon. I mean, something has to give.” //

Both units contributed about 13% of the state’s power in 2019, and about 29% of the state’s electricity is currently derived from nuclear energy. The state’s grid manager, New York Independent System Operator, determined in 2017 that three fossil fuel-reliant plants would be needed to meet energy demands once the nuclear plant shutters. Indian Point’s final reactor provided 1 gigawatt to the electricity grid, which Entergy says was enough to support 750,000 to 1 million homes in the New York City and Westchester area.

His active promotion of abortion means that he has excommunicated himself, the term is latae sententiae, from the Catholic Church according to Canon Law. The left likes to claim this is just Biden enforcing the “law of the land,” and as we have an alleged wall of separation between Church and state, Biden is just doing his job. This is just bullsh**. Since entering office, Biden has acted to expand abortion by his abandonment of the so-called Mexico City policy. This is a willing and affirmative act that knowingly increases the number of aborted babies.

Likewise, Biden’s minions have moved to attempt to overturn a court decision that held that doctors could not be forced to perform sex-change operations against their will. I don’t know why anyone would want to try to force a doctor to do such a thing…you might emerge from the process with excess parts stapled to your forehead…but you know how these people roll, right? Here is a thread with more detail.

Luke Goodrich
@LukeWGoodrich
#BREAKING: The Biden Admin just filed an appeal seeking to force religious doctors and hospitals to perform potentially harmful gender-transition procedures against their conscience and professional medical judgment. This is bad for patients, doctors, and religious liberty. 1/
3:54 PM · Apr 20, 2021

https://mobile.twitter.com/LukeWGoodrich/status/1384596304148398080

Like with abortion, this is not merely the enforcement of something that just happens to exist and which can’t be changed by a president that also violates the Catechism of the Catholic Church and Canon Law, this is Biden aggressively acting to impose policies that did not exist upon the nation of his own volition. //

Allowing Biden to continue to receive Communion while not merely supporting abortion and transgenderism, and homosexual marriage but actively promoting them and sending out his goons to proclaim him to be a devout Catholic is wrong. It is not wrong from a political stand point, it is wrong from a pastoral point of view. Every time Joe Biden steps up to receive the Eucharist he is showing the world that some Catholic bishops believe that there are one set of rules for the mopes in the pews who pay the bills and another set for the Very Important People who send billions of tax dollars to Church causes.

The researchers had gathered together to dig up part of an experiment: an unusual long-term experiment that started in 1879 on the campus of what is now Michigan State University.

A botanist named William Beal wondered how long seeds could remain viable underground. So he designed an audacious study to find out, knowing full well that the answer might not come in his lifetime.

Frank Telewski, a professor of plant biology at the university, explains that Beal got 20 glass bottles. "Those 20 bottles, he filled up with a sandy seed mixture," says Telewski. "And the sandy seed mixture contained 21 species of plants, with 50 seeds per plant."

The plants were just common weeds. The idea was to find out, if farmers faithfully weeded their plots, how long these annoying plants could keep coming up from seeds already in the dirt.

Beal buried the bottles in the ground, keeping the location private so it wouldn't get disturbed. Every five years, he dug up one bottle and checked to see if the seeds inside would germinate. In 1910, when Beal retired, he passed on the experiment to a colleague, who later passed it on to a colleague and so on.

The study has lasted far longer than Beal intended because its caretakers decided to stretch it out. Instead of every five years, they switched to digging up a bottle every 10 years. Then, every 20 years. Telewski helped unearth a bottle in 2000, when he took over the experiment from a colleague. That year, only a couple of different weeds were still able to sprout. //

The researchers waited and waited for about a week. Then, on the afternoon of Friday, April 23, Lowry checked the tray of seeds and saw one tiny green seedling. That means at least one old seed could still germinate, and more could sprout in the days to come.

"We know that seeds can last a really long time in perfect conditions, like in seed storage vaults or the permafrost," says Weber, who notes that Beal's original question is still relevant. "We don't really know how long seeds can last in the soil. And that's where most of the seeds are." //

With four bottles left in the ground, the study should go on for another 80 years.

Elder offered up a few pertinent questions to Mad Max:

The police? All of them? Not just racist white cops? And Waters meant now, today — not decades ago. She said police are “led to believe that their greatest challenge … is to keep … Black people in their place”? Led to believe this by whom?

Is it relevant that many of our major cities have or have had Black police chiefs? Is it relevant that many big-city police departments increasingly reflect the racial diversity of the communities they protect and serve?

Is it relevant that an increasing percentage of the nation’s sworn police officers are officers of color, including the police chief in Minneapolis, where George Floyd died? //

“Police departments across the country have become less overwhelmingly white since the 1990s, according to a study published by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics last fall.

“The agency’s survey of police departments found that the share of white non-Hispanic police fell from 78.5 percent in 1997 to 71.5 percent in 2016.” //

“Irresponsible attacks against the supposedly “systemically racist” police by politicians like Waters are, in part,” wrote Elder, “responsible for the “Ferguson Effect,” the phenomenon of cops pulling back from proactive policing for fear of accusations of engaging in “systemic racism.”

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles County, Waters’ home base, homicides during the first two months of 2021 were up 186% compared with 2020, according to Fox News. //

When cops pull back from proactive policing, crime goes up. By teaching young Blacks that cops hate them, why would a young Black man comply when pulled over by a “systemically racist” cop?

And this failure to comply can turn a traffic stop into something deadly. Waters’ rhetoric has led to an increase in homicides in America’s cities, where the majority of the victims are the very “people of color” she claims to care so deeply about.

While leftists argue that banning camping in the city will just force homeless people to relocate to more rural areas, data suggests that lifting restrictions instead incentivizes homeless people to leave shelters that have strict regulations on drug and alcohol use and instead set up camp in public places.

“After the policy was instituted, the sheltered homeless count decreased 20 percent while the unsheltered count increased by 45 percent, according to the City of Austin’s latest data,” Save Austin Now reports. “In other words, 1/5 of Austin’s homeless left shelters for the streets while the overall number of homeless simultaneously shot up.”

DeSantis’ over-arching point is that such claims of systemic racism are used as a political catch-all, whereby literally everything someone on the left doesn’t like is relegated to some form of systemic racism. That then gives them license to destroy the system instead of just dealing with whatever bad apples may emerge. Thus, the comparison to Marxism is profound and relevant, especially considering that many of those same people self-identify as Marxists.

The real goal of Black Lives Matter and the myriad of other social justice activists out there is not to stop supposed examples of racism (note that even Derek Chauvin was never found to have had racist intentions). Rather, by their own admission, it’s to tear down the system as it exists and rebuild it in a more “equitable” fashion. But forcing equity via the heavy hand of government is, in and of itself, discrimination, because it throws out individual choices and performance in favor of defining people by their immutable characteristics. That’s racism. //

Arcturus77
17 hours ago edited
Bonchie,

I think a more succinct way of explaining the Marxist underpinnings of Critical Race Theory is to note that like "traditional" economic class-based Marxism, CRT posits a zero-sum struggle between groups of people, in its case, based upon racial or other biomarker identities (e.g., gender / sex). Individuals do not exist except insofar as they are members of a group -- and that group is either oppressed or oppressor. CRT is simply a Cultural Marxism.

Unlike other Marxism ideologies and movements that were economic power-based but included a cultural element -- most famously, the Maoist Cultural Revolution and, even more extreme, the Khmer Rouge -- CRT is a uniquely American Marxism. That's because it sidesteps the actual issue of excessive concentration of wealth and power by the overclass (except insofar as the overclass is white) and focuses on culture and racism -- via the "systemic racism" struggle between groups.

This is how multimillionaire Blacks such as the Obamas, LeBron James, and Oprah are, ipso facto, oppressed and a working class white living in a trailer park in Appalachia is the oppressor.

It is getting extra traction in America because corporate oligarchy has discovered the usefulness (at least short-to-medium term) of CRT because, as a Cultural Marxism, it really doesn't upset the highly imbalanced economic system but keeps it in place by keeping the population at war with itself.

It is a profoundly immoral and, operationally, a violent philosophy, but that's the inherent nature of Marxism in whatever form the "struggle" takes.

Facts, truth, reality itself are all subservient to the ideology and its zero-sum struggle. Needless to say, it is a profoundly illiberal philosophy. But young people with no real prospects in society and addicted to social media love it because of its all-embracing explanation of reality and good-versus-evil struggle it posits. Every Marxist movement has been like that.

The tragedy of the Obama presidency was rather than healing America's traditional racial divide, Obama made it acceptable for anyone who had one drop of "BIPOC" blood in them to claim the mantle of oppressed victimhood no matter their actual station or situation in life. //

skeptic62 Arcturus77
15 hours ago edited
Marxism is not about creating a more equitable system; far from it.

Each of us is bestowed with different skill sets. In Capitalism, the best in each field rise to the top, with the rest taking spots on the lower rungs.

For some though, their best if not only skill is the ability to take. Most are just common criminals, but under Marxism the “best” rise to the top by inflaming passions and pitting several groups against one. Until there is only one.

Marxists can’t compete in The Marketplace of Ideas, but they can surely surf the wave of revolution. THIS is why the Marxist Revolution never ends. //

timcooper62 Arcturus77
17 hours ago
I like what you wrote. They don't want to acknowledge the individual because then they may have to acknowledge individual rights. These schemes are the antithesis of individual rights. The individual has no rights under these schemes. Its totally un American and really as you say immoral. Its evil on its face. When people fail, instead of looking inward and making changes to improve, they can claim victim status and blame some oppressor. //

ConservatarianGirl
18 hours ago
For Republicans to be brave, they're going to have to care more about being right than about being liked. //

IrishMailey ConservatarianGirl
15 hours ago
And they need to say over and over: Rep. Lincoln freed the slaves and made them full citizens under the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, Rep. Eisenhower sent NG to desegregate Southern schools, and the 1964 Civil Rights Act comes from a 1957 Eisenhower bill that was defeated by sens. JFK, Johnson, and Al Gore's dad.

That can’t be your name!” she screamed from the cheap seats to another person who literally has that name on their birth certificate.

What you are witnessing is racism by people who claim to be “anti-racist.” They are putting forth the proposition that one can’t be representative of their race if they don’t have a name that sounds traditionally ethnic. Notice the absolute obsession with everyone except who the person actually is as, you know, a person. Racism repackaged is still racism.

What’s even more absurd is how far this strays from other left-wing ideologies. //

Scott Hounsell
@Hounsizzle
For people who think that you can choose your gender, 31 flavors of sexual preference, and all the 75,000 other social imperatives the left pushes, they are really concerned about @NikkiHaley's actual name.

This incident involves an April 29 EL AL flight from New York to Tel Aviv. Flight LY2 was operated by a Boeing 787-9 with the registration code 4X-EDH, which is a roughly two year old aircraft that was delivered to the airline in October 2018.

While flying over Spain, the EL AL pilots informed air traffic control that they suspected a bomb had been planted on the aircraft. As a result, NATO made the decision to dispatch fighter jets, which intercepted and escorted the aircraft. Fighter jets from four different countries took part in this:

Spanish fighter jets escorted the aircraft from Spain to Italy
Then Italian fighter jets escorted the aircraft from Italy to Greece
Then Greek fighter jets escorted the aircraft through Greek airspace
Then when the plane entered Cyprus airspace, Israeli fighter jets escorted the aircraft back to Israel
Fortunately the plane landed safely in Tel Aviv about four hours after the original call was made to air traffic control about a bomb, and just under 10 hours after departing New York. The plane hasn’t flown since. //

Roman says:
May 1, 2021 at 2:14 pm
Fighters allow camera coverage in case a detonation occurs during flight, helps with investigation as to location on aircraft of explosive placement. Betting there is more to the story but will not allow another aircraft to be used again as a missile into a populated area after 9-11. Would have been ready to shoot down over water if intelligence warranted.

McDowell said he hoped China would have enhanced the core stage to perform a controlled deorbit after separating from Tianhe. “I think by current standards it’s unacceptable to let it reenter uncontrolled,” McDowell said.

“Since 1990 nothing over 10 tons has been deliberately left in orbit to reenter uncontrolled.” The Long March 5B core stage, without its four side boosters, is thought to have a “dry mass”, or when it is empty of propellent, of about 21 metric tons in mass.

Holger Krag, head of the Space Safety Programme Office for the European Space Agency, says from their experience, there is an average amount of mass of about 100 tons re-entering in an uncontrolled way per year. “This relates to about 50-60 individual events per year.”

“It is always difficult to assess the amount of surviving mass and number of fragments without knowing the design of the object, but a reasonable “rule-of-thumb” is about 20-40% of the original dry mass.”

Components made of heat resistant materials, such as tanks and thrusters made stainless steel or titanium, can reach the ground. Surviving objects will fall vertically after deceleration and travel at terminal velocity.

Of 943 viewers surveyed: 54% were Democrats, 25% were Independents, and only 18% were Republicans. They also seem to have had 3% go missing, without any explanation as to what those folks were, which makes me question all their other numbers.Many then extrapolated that out to “85% of Americans” approved of the speech, which is not the same thing as 85% of CBS viewers who responded to the survey, who are heavily weighted towards Democrats. It’s not even 85% of CBS viewers. //

Additionally what was funny was they initially reached out to 10,420 U.S. adults. Only 4,211 of that 10,420 planned on watching. But it ended up that only 943 watched and responded to the survey. So, it doesn’t sound like too many people of the folks they reached out to were even interested in watching and/or responding to the survey. People are not exactly enthralled with the idea of watching Joe Biden for any length of time and commenting. //

USMC69
4 hours ago
They reached out to over 10,000 and only 942 responded. Seems to me that means only about 8.5% of Americans approve. I think they got the decimal wrong, but that isn't surprising, they do like to use common core math.

As we previously reported, Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) was subjected to a barrage of racist abuse posted on Twitter from so-called “tolerant” leftists after he gave the Republican response to President Biden’s first address to a joint session of Congress Wednesday night.

Not only were vile comments like “token black Republican” spewed, but the offensive term “Uncle Tim” (crafted for Scott out of the racist slur “Uncle Tom”) trended for roughly 11 hours overnight before Twitter finally found the time to block it from the trending column.

But if you only read the Washington Post’s “report” on the left’s reactions to Scott’s speech, you would never know how despicable and ugly the reactions actually got. //

thidwick Yodas Dad
8 hours ago
“There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.”
― Booker T. Washington

BTW when the NAACP was formed, CP was the respectful term - a pass on the organization's name is appropriate.

A 1966 study by the U.S. Navy noted that "The passage of large-amplitude internal waves could make submarine depth control difficult, particularly when the submarine is running quietly at low speed." The report, titled Internal Waves: Their Influence Upon Naval Operations, added that such waves "could initiate uncontrollable sinking of a submarine."

In World War II, submariners avoided the Strait of Gibraltar partly because they were aware of its reputation for propagating unusual undersea waves that were considered hazardous, David Farmer, a physical oceanographer at the University of Rhode Island, told USA Today in 2014.

At the height of the Cold War in 1984, a Soviet submarine that was apparently running beneath a tanker to mask its exit from the Strait suddenly smashed into the tanker's hull, causing damage to both vessels and forcing the submarine to surface. The collision is thought to have been caused by an internal wave that unexpectedly thrust the submarine toward the surface.

The waves "are generated over steep topography due to the surface tides," he tells NPR. "In the South China Sea, internal wave amplitudes can be about 100 meters (330 feet)."