A really big bang

Fabricio Alvarado became a leading candidate for president in Costa Rica when he came out strongly against same-sex marriage. This was just after the Inter-American Court for Human Rights called for all countries in the Americas to support our love.

Fabricio’s opponent was Carlos Alvarado (no relation) who campaigned for same-sex marriage.

And Carlos won, 61% to 39%.



Another example of data manipulation. The Sunday Times of London reported that “London overtook New York in murders for the first time in modern history.” In a Twitter thread Patrick Greenfield has a takedown – and graph. The headline implies that the murder rate in London has risen to dangerous levels (New York is so dangerous!!!). But since 1990 the London murder rate has been rather flat, though there has been a slight rise since 2014. This reporting obscures what really happened. In the 1990s the New York murder count dropped from about 2250 in a year to 600 and has steadily fallen since then to about 300. So there is no reason for Londoners to go into a tizzy over living in a dangerous place. The article appears to be an attempt to smear London’s mayor who is Muslim.



There was a computer failure at Eurocontrol, which does air traffic control for Europe. About half of all flights were delayed. Some wonder if the glitch had a little help in happening – was it a hack?

There are Russian subs lurking around trans-ocean fiber-optic cables. Are they planning to cut them or intercept the messages flowing through them? Russians appear to have been mapping our telecommunication infrastructure, perhaps to disrupt it. And they supposedly have a cyberweapon to crash our electrical grid. As for those 60 Russian diplomats the nasty guy expelled – Russia is allowed to replace them. All this prompts Melissa McEwan of Shakesville to write:

We are in real trouble, my friends. As far as I can tell, it looks like we are fucked if Donald Trump continues to do Putin's bidding, for obvious reasons, and we are fucked if he doesn't, because Putin is prepared to pull the trigger on our infrastructure. Which he may do anyway, once Trump outlives his usefulness.

Immigration judges are not a part of the judicial branch of government, but of the Department of Justice. So their boss is Attorney General Jeff Sessions. These judges face a huge backlog of cases so the AG is trying to speed up deportation cases. He is doing so by creating a quota system, in amongst several other tactics to speed up cases. These quotas will affect a judge’s performance review.



Outrider has created an interactive map to show the size of the devastation after a nuke is dropped on your city. Of course, I checked it out for Detroit. I could choose city, the size of the bomb (4 choices), and whether the bomb is detonated on ground or in the air. The map then shows the size of the fireball, the shockwave, the radioactive zone, and the heat blast. Click on the various zones and it describes the kind of destruction, such as a body is vaporized in the fireball and gets 3rd degree burns in the heat blast.

It’s not much help that the blast from the smaller bombs don’t reach to Dearborn, a suburb between me and Detroit. The death toll for the size bomb that North Korea is reported to have is likely above 80,000. And then there is the big bomb, the largest detonated by the USSR. It’s effects reach almost to Ann Arbor with over a million dead.

Motherboard mentions a couple other maps, the Nukemap and Ground Zero.