The Nunes memo has been released. It tries to make a big deal out of the fact that the government was spying on Russian agent Carter Page. I just wonder, when the end comes, as it does for all cults eventually, what flavor Kool-Aid will they use?
A big football game is being played Sunday — a really big one, so big it will probably be the highest-rated TV show of the year — so the non-sporting media has lots of football-related, if not game-related, stories to tell.
While the Super Bowl — there, I said it, come get me, NFL — remains the best-watched show of the year, ratings are still down, because all TV ratings are down in our video-on-demand age. The medical and political issues surrounding the game just contribute to the decline, or, as The Atlantic puts it, the league has “a television problem and a football problem.”
The medical part of that football problem isn’t going away, as the New York Times reminds us by printing this first-person account by the wife of a former player in his 40s who almost certainly is suffering from CTE (they can only say for certain once he’s dead).
If you were wondering why so many of our fellow Americans are so screwed up on matters of race, wonder no more. It’s what we teach them, or fail to. The Southern Poverty Law Center found that only 8 percent of high school seniors identified slavery as the cause of the Civil War.
Here’s Why We Science: It’s long been thought that automobiles caused the vast majority of California’s smog problem, which is why the state has such stringent emissions standards. Researchers knew that nitrogen from ground sources, mostly fertilizer, also contributed, but they thought it added about 5% of the total. Oops. By widening their sampling area, they now think excess fertilizer on crops is the source of up to 40% of the nitrogen oxides in the air. I think this is why carpenters say “measure twice.”
Archaeology, or more accurately the laser-mapping tool LiDAR, is the enemy of white supremacy. National Geographic has some stunning maps and graphics of vast Mayan cities lying under the thick jungle canopy of Guatemala. It turns out the small bits of temples and plazas seen by tourists weren’t islands in the jungle, they were the center of sprawling population centers. It now appears the civilization was home to 10 to 15 million people, double or triple what we once thought.
Oh, and don’t forget your booties ’cause it’s cold out there today.