CSotD: Current Events Roundup

I don’t know if today’s Non Sequitur (AMS) counts as “fortuitous” timing, since nobody in Vermont or the lower Hudson Valley is calling much of anything “lucky” at the moment, but there’s certainly a load of synchronicity in it, since I’m sure Wiley did the strip some time ago but today a lot of people are feeling too close to the river.

In fact, Pedro X. Molina (Counterpoint), working closer to deadline, got back from accepting his award in Oslo just in time to be back in one of the harder hit parts of New York State.

I talked to someone who’d been driving through there during the torrential rains, found the road blocked by a rockslide and was just in time to have the road behind him also blocked by a rockslide. Fortunately, there were somewhat smaller boulders in that second slide and they were able to clear enough space for everyone to back out, turn around and go find a detour.

More rain is possible this weekend. Be careful out there.

Juxtaposition of the Day

(Adam Zyglis)

(Mike Peters — AMS)

I haven’t heard of any insurance companies threatening to pull out of New York or New England, and given that our major floods seem to come a decade apart, it seems unlikely. I guess we’ll have to see how things go with climate change, however, since we can’t keep doing this every year or two.

I can understand their reluctance to play the same old game over and over, though, in areas where hurricanes and wildfires are becoming a regular event.

I heard someone on the radio — short trip, so I didn’t catch a name — suggest that we switch coverage rules so that awards would take into greater consideration what the homeowner had done to limit damage.

This could include, for instance, adding a berm in a flood-prone area or taking measures to lower wildfire risks. The system would thus provide greater incentives for people to take sensible steps to lower their vulnerability, and would save insurers (and FEMA) money by lowering their need to protect people who don’t.

It made me think of a housing development in the foothills above Colorado Springs that had a covenant requiring cedar shake roofing which made all the houses look lovely, until a wildfire swept through the area.

I’m not sure the insurance companies or FEMA should have been on the hook for that decision.

Gotta take on John Cole for perpetuating a myth. You can’t blame the Founders for the current plague of guns. The Second Amendment was intended, as it says, to allow a “well-regulated militia” because the Founders feared a standing army (which also explains the Third Amendment).

After the War of 1812 proved the inability of militias to protect the nation, the army and navy were reformed and the Second Amendment, like the Third, became vestigial and largely forgotten.

Until a group of gun nuts and antigovernment screwballs brought it up again at the Cincinnati Revolt and turned the NRA from a gun-safety educational group into an ammosexual political lobby.

If you’re serious about the problem, you need to learn where it came from. It has nothing to do with the Founders.

And speaking of screwballs, Jimmy Margulies (KFS) exposes the nutcase obsession with Hunter Biden that has led to ridiculous, paranoid theories about the Magical Traveling Coke Bag, which, according to the loonies, moved from a well-traveled public area of the White House into just about every other part of the building, and was dropped there by the Bidens two days before they were present.

Or possibly it was planted there, though it’s hard to figure out why.

Doesn’t matter. The idea that a baggie with a small amount of cocaine just slipped out of someone’s pocket when they went for a handkerchief or a wallet or their phone is impossible because that would be an accident and not a Monstrous Deep State Plot.

This would be laughable if stupid, paranoid people did not vote, but they do. In large numbers.

(Ann Telnaes)

The decision by the FDA to make nogestrol (the “Opill”) available over the counter seems like a major victory for women’s control over their own bodies.

For younger women, it means no longer having to get parental permission, which, in abusive families, is a significant problem, but, even in functional homes can lead a girl to put off the move, often with the obvious results.

And the Opill itself, because of its essentially harmless nature, skirts the objections thrown up by that judge in Texas who is attempting to ban the “morning after” pill, though it does require you to think of it ahead of time.

However, as Telnaes points out, this development doesn’t mean the Supreme Court couldn’t, as Clarence Thomas has threatened, reconsider Griswold v Connecticut and allow states to ban birth control entirely.

And if you think that would only impact a few local places, take another look at how politics have developed since Roe v Wade was overturned.

Y’all better show up at the polls, because those other folks most certainly will.

To end this roundup on a somewhat optimistic note, Bruce MacKinnon suggests that copyright is about to be devoured by AI, and I recognize the threat.

But Sarah Silverman and a couple of other writers have launched a copyright infringement suit against OpenAI and Meta, and, with any luck, this will be a case of getting ahead of the problem.

After all, we all know that, while the croc has a powerful bite, if you get him with his jaws closed, they’re easy enough to keep closed.

Come to think of it, there are any number of things we’ve talked about today that are easier to keep shut in the first place than to deal with after you’ve let them get moving.