An invention for our times: a "sargassum barrier"

Details at Bloomberg, where the article discusses attempts to harvest sargassum.  But note these Caribbean barriers are HUGE:

Words for the day: plutocracy and kakistocracy

A plutocracy (from Ancient Greek πλοῦτος (ploûtos) 'wealth', and κράτος (krátos) 'power') or plutarchy is a society that is ruled or controlled by people of great wealth or income. The first known use of the term in English dates from 1631.

An opinion piece in the Washington Post today is entitled "How megadonors circumvent laws to give huge checks to politicians."  Here is a graph of the surge in donations for Congressional and Presential elections:

The explanation:

One big reason for this has been an innovation known as “joint fundraising committees.” Both parties use them. And their influence is growing.

Here’s how they work: Election laws try to limit the influence of any one rich person by capping how much the individual can donate to a given candidate. In 2020, individuals could give no more than $5,600 directly to Joe Biden or Donald Trump. That’s a tidy sum, but it’s not enough to curry favor with Biden, who amassed more than a billion dollars in the 2020 election, or Trump, whose haul surpassed $800 million.

Joint fundraising committees render such limits meaningless. They allow presidential candidates to bring their campaign, their national party and state parties into a single fundraising entity. Donors can give a limited amount to each group, but -- thanks to the Supreme Court’s 2014 decision in McCutcheon v. FEC — they can hit the contribution limit for as many groups as they want.

The result: The maximum donation to these mega-committees is not $5,600. It’s the combined maximum for each participating group.

This is how two donors were able to cut $817,800 checks to Trump Victory, a joint fundraising committee run by the former president in 2020. Multiple donors gave $730,600 to the Biden Victory Fund. Both campaigns amassed hundreds of millions of dollars this way.

And, unlike super PACs — which can raise and spend infinite sums but can’t legally coordinate messaging strategy with candidates — joint fundraising committees allow politicians to have direct control over these pooled funds.

That gives large donors ever-greater power to buy influence with candidates. As Brendan Doherty, a political scientist at the Naval Academy, told me, “Joint fundraising encourages presidents to raise money in even larger amounts from high-dollar donors. That, in turn, has led to them spending more time at fundraisers with people who can cut ever larger checks.”

And candidates love these fundraisers...

More information at the link, but I've already abstracted an inordinate amount.

Many laws have been passed to prohibit or at least regulate this type of actitivy.  And each time the wealthy sit down with some damn lawyers to draft a variant of legislation or an amendment or a new law to allow the money transfers to occur, and these revisions/amendments/whatever are eagerly passed by whatever legislature is in session because the incoming money is going to go to them.  The only people empowered to regulate or limit this activity are the very ones who benefit from it.

In the rest of the Americas this abuse would lead to demonstrations in the streets.  Here the public shrugs their collective shoulders in deference to "freedom."

And don't think the flood of money is somehow magically limited to campaign flyers and badges.  Tons of it get channeled to personal accounts, family members hired for "campaign" activities, private planes, retreats to discuss campaigns in exotic locales, and bank accounts in overseas locations. 

Plus these politicians have inside information on upcoming wars, weapons procurement needs, highway plans, infrastructure upgrades - everything.  And if they can't buy shares in the companies that benefit, they can notify their cousin Sally in Peoria or their high-school buddy in Cheyenne.  

There is an ongoing endless abuse of political power in this country and nobody is making an effort to restrict it.

I have previously decried American plutocracy in a 2014 post, and was roundly criticized by readers who declared that there is nothing preventing the people on the bottom from rising to the top if they only work at it.  That's bullshit too, but I don't have time to write a rebuttal now.

I'm tired of all this bullshit.

Next word: kakistocracy

The earliest use of the word dates to the 17th century, in Paul Gosnold's A sermon Preached at the Publique Fast the ninth day of Aug. 1644 at St. Maries:

Therefore we need not make any scruple of praying against such: against those Sanctimonious Incendiaries, who have fetched fire from heaven to set their Country in combustion, have pretended Religion to raise and maintaine a most wicked rebellion: against those Nero's, who have ripped up the wombe of the mother that bare them, and wounded the breasts that gave them sucke: against those Cannibal's who feed upon the flesh and are drunke with the bloud of their own brethren: against those Catiline's who seeke their private ends in the publicke disturbance, and have set the Kingdome on fire to rost their owne egges: against those tempests of the State, those restlesse spirits who can no longer live, then be stickling and medling; who are stung with a perpetuall itch of changing and innovating, transforming our old Hierarchy into a new Presbytery, and this againe into a newer Independency; and our well-temperd Monarchy into a mad kinde of Kakistocracy. Good Lord!

English author Thomas Love Peacock later used the term in his 1829 novel The Misfortunes of Elphin, in which he explains kakistocracy represents the opposite of aristocracy, as aristos (ἄριστος) means "excellent" in Greek. In his 1838 Memoir on Slavery (which he supported), U.S. Senator William Harper compared kakistocracy to anarchy, and said it had seldom occurred:

Anarchy is not so much the absence of government as the government of the worst—not aristocracy but kakistocracy—a state of things, which to the honor of our nature, has seldom obtained amongst men, and which perhaps was only fully exemplified during the worst times of the French revolution, when that horrid hell burnt with its most horrid flame. In such a state of things, to be accused is to be condemned—to protect the innocent is to be guilty; and what perhaps is the worst effect, even men of better nature, to whom their own deeds are abhorrent, are goaded by terror to be forward and emulous in deeds of guilt and violence.

American poet James Russell Lowell used the term in 1876, in a letter to Joel Benton, writing, "What fills me with doubt and dismay is the degradation of the moral tone. Is it or is it not a result of Democracy? Is ours a 'government of the people by the people for the people,' or a Kakistocracy rather, for the benefit of knaves at the cost of fools?"

Addendum:

Remembering jazz pianist Ahmad Jamal

Saw an article in The Guardian today making note of the death of Ahmad Jamal.

Embarking on a professional music career from the age of 14, over seven decades Jamal forged a unique sound that leapt over genre boundaries. Minimalism, classical, modernism, pop: Ahmad was sometimes likened to Thelonious Monk in terms of his ability to innovate and influence other musicians: his piano would be sampled by the likes of De La Soul, Jay-Z, Common and Nas. The trumpeter Miles Davis once said: “All my inspiration comes from Ahmad Jamal,” writing in his memoir that his friend had “knocked me out with his concept of space, his lightness of touch, and the way he phrases notes and chords and passages”.

Jamal performed jazz, which he called “American classical music” all his life, in the house band for Chicago’s Pershing Hotel lounge – a Black-owned favourite of the likes of Sammy Davis Jr and Billie Holiday, and where he recorded his 1958 breakthrough album, Ahmad Jamal at the Pershing: But Not For Me. The album sold 1m copies and remained on the Billboard magazine charts for more than 100 weeks, making Jamal a household name when rock’n’roll was on the up and jazz was beginning to wane.

More at the link, of course.  I remember being impressed by his music back in the 1960s, to the extent that my senior yearbook biography noted my interest in "Brubeck, Monk, Previn, and Ahmad Jamal."  Then an invasive species of Beatles arrived as I went to college, and I left jazz far behind.

An encounter with "birch water" - updated (again)

One of my first garden chores this spring [written in 2011] was to tidy up a flower bed near the front door.  Last year a birch tree cluster had begun to shadow the bed, so on Monday I pruned a few branches, then sat down to clear some of the detritus of dead material from the flowerbed.  Several minutes later, I noticed that a liquid was dripping down onto the area where I was working.  I looked up to see sap dripping from several of the pruned birch branches.

Several years ago I would have thought no more about it except to view the oozing as a fortuitous feast for any early-emerging Mourning Cloak butterflies.  But two years ago I wrote a post about the drinking of birch tree juice in Russia, and just last month posted a photo of a "sugar-sickle" (frozen dripping tree sap).

I couldn't pass up the opportunity. I used rubber bands to secure sandwich-sized Ziploc bags on the two clipped branches.  By the time I had finished gardening that afternoon, the bag (shown above) had accumulated quite a bit of liquid, and to my surprise it was beautifully clear:

I suppose I had expected some coloration or cloudiness.  When I came out Tuesday morning, I was startled to find both bags substantially distended with birch sap.  It was now impossible to unwind the rubber band, so I brought out a scissors, intending to snip it, then decided it would make more sense to snip a small hole in the Ziploc bag to drain the fluid.  Placing a hole at the top of the bag allowed me

to tip the bag's contents into a container and then leave the bag on the branch to accumulate more fluid.

The next step, of course, was to search the internet for more information.  At Naturespeak I found directions for concentrating maple sap into syrup and into maple candy (a nice article, worth a visit by those interested).  The best source of information I found was at BirchBoy.com, with articles written by people in Alaska, where apparently birch juice processing is an honored pasttime:

Birch syrup is one of the few taste treats unique to Alaska and the circumpolar region. Although many people have never heard of it, birch syrup is not new. Birch trees, like many northern hardwoods, have long been tapped for their sugary, invigorating sap; but because of maple's high sugar content, generous sap flow, mellow flavor, and compliant nature, maple became the premier sugar tree in North America - except for Alaska, where birch trees are plentiful and maples are small and scarce. Birch syrup would have been the only springtime sugar source for Alaska sourdoughs in remote areas. For every gallon of birch syrup he made, the sourdough would have tapped no fewer than a hundred trees, collected more than one hundred gallons of sap, and burned nearly a cord of wood. Folklore relates that the syrup boiled down in open pans was tart, robust, and very dark, but the sourdough must have guarded and savored every drop. Neither did he have to worry much about spoilage, since pure, thick birch syrup seems incorruptible...

There is an outstanding amount of information at that link on the science of birch sap and the techniques for its harvest and for protecting the trees, and the subtleties of rendering it down to a syrupy consistency.

I haven't decided yet whether to undertake that aspect of the adventure.  Everything I've read suggests the process is time-consuming and needs to be undertaken with some degree of care to avoid scorching the concentrate.  I have about a half-liter of fluid now, because the trees are still dripping into this third day (memo to self: in the future don't prune when the sap is running).  That half-liter would be worth about 25 Euros in the Japanese market, so rather than waste it I decided to have some last night with my dinner.

I had a small glass of birch sap with my takeout Chinese food dinner last night.  It tastes pretty much like very fresh water, with maybe just a subtle hint of earthy overtones.  It goes well with General Tso's Chicken.

Reposted from 2011 because Modern Farmer has a report on how entrepreneurs are trying to commercialize "tree water" rather than rendering it into syrup:

A new wave of maple entrepreneurs are skipping the laborious syrup boiling process—where sap is reduced to 1/40th of its original volume to create the beloved pancake dressing—and marketing the pure watery sap as a health drink instead. The first maple water companies emerged over the last few years in Canada, but the idea has now infiltrated the American market. The drink is primarily found in health food stores in New England, but distribution is ramping up and this year’s maple water harvest should hit stores across the country in the coming months...

It’s always been common knowledge among maple syrup producers that taking a sip of sap was a good way to quench their thirst while working in the sugarbush, but apparently the notion that it could be a marketable substance is a new one. The first impression after downing a glass of maple water is that it tastes like water, but with a slightly sweet aftertaste and a tiny hint of earthy, maple syrup-like flavor.

With coco water (and other flavored waters) selling for $4 a pop, it’s a wonder that no one thought of bottling maple water sooner. It’s all-natural, sustainably-produced, vegan, gluten-free, non-GMO, paleo and local...

Between the U.S. and Canada, at least 11 different companies are marketing the drink so far. All of them are recent startups, sporting catchy names like Vertical Water, Wahta, Happy Tree and Sap on Tap.

Reposted August 2015 after reading an article in the Belfast Telegraph about water menus at luxury hotels.

The five-star Merchant Hotel has been home to the world's most expensive cocktail and now it has turned its attention to water by launching Ireland's first dedicated water menu. This summer will see the hotel will launch its new water menu with an exclusive range of 13 bottled waters.

The handpicked selection has been curated to include some of the world’s purest waters, with bottles originating from 10 countries including Italy, Iceland, Finland, the Faroe Islands and Fiji. Prices start from £4.95 and go right up to £26.45 per bottle with a description of the water and its mineral content guiding guests through the options available.

And to keep customers right - the Merchant has also appointed two new water butlers that can help guests choose the water that is right for their palate - by explaining the unique benefits, tastes and attributes of the different brands - many of which can be rarely found in the UK and Ireland. 

More details at the link, but this item caught my eye:

De l’Aubier Maple Sap Water: Canada - £15.50 750ml Btl
This is the only water of its kind in the world. A still water of vegetal origin made from maple sap. Through the biological phenomenon of osmosis, it rises to the tree’s branches during the night and flows back to the roots during the day.  TDS 260mg - Sodium 2mg - Magnesium 2mg - Calcium 2mg.

"The only water of its kind in the world."  Hmmm......

Addendum:  The glass on the right shows what my birch water looked like after I boiled it down in a pan on the stove:

The process did concentrate and intensify the flavor, but frankly it wasn't worth it in terms of my time and the carbon footprint energy expenditure involved.

Addendum:  Found an article in DownEast about one man's effort to promote birch syrup -

So, eight years ago, he started what remains Maine’s only commercial birch-syrup operation. On average, 120 gallons of sap make just 1 gallon of syrup, three times the input needed for an equal amount of maple syrup. The result is complex — sweet, but also earthy and tart.

Reaffirms my previous impression that it's not worth expending the energy to boil down the sap.

Reposted from 2020 to add this gif showing how a tap can be used, and how much water accumulates in a relatively short time.

Weather reporter having fun

Via the wholesomememes subreddit.

"El Mundo"

I was immediately reminded of the one about someone saying "plethora" at a funeral - and all the other related ones ("bargain," "being alive," and "infinity" for example).

And while we're doing lame jokes, remember there is one word that is spelled incorrectly in all dictionaries (this word).

Three Easter messages (updated)

Res ipsa loquitur.  Via the WhitePeopleTwitter subreddit.

I posted the two messages above back in 2023 when Trump used Easter to rage against Biden and the Democratic party.  I considered it to be a travesty of a message for this holy holiday.  Now here's the followup from 2026:

Everyone around the wold is gasping at the utter craziness of this "Easter" greeting.  A declaration of intent to commit universally-recognized war crimes, supplemented by a vulgar profanity that he seems never to use (in public), and closing with a blatant insult to Muslims around the world.

I was going to write an extended condemnation of this message, but found many other responses, including this one -

Never in my life would I ever have guessed that I would be quoting (and agreeing with) Marjorie Taylor Greene, but the fact that a woman previously known for espousing white genocide conspiracy theory with antisemitic and Islamophobic comments should be offering this blatant criticism of Trump shows how far his status has fallen among his former supporters.

You can't unsee this...

... photo of a venomous snake exiting the rear of a frog.  But you can read a possible explanation at Neatorama.  (Image brightened and cropped for size from the original)

Apparently saying "ladies" is a form of "microaggression"

Easthampton is rallying around a superintendent finalist who said his offer to lead the city’s public schools was rescinded after he referred to women as “ladies” in an email — an act some school committee members reportedly viewed as a microaggression. 

Dr. Vito Perrone said the school committee rescinded its offer in an executive session last Thursday, about a week after it voted 4-3 to hire the former Easthampton High School principal... 

The decision hinged on Perrone’s use of “ladies” in an email he sent to committee Chairperson Cynthia Kwiecinski over contract negotiations, he told the newspaper...

Perrone, currently interim superintendent of schools in West Springfield, told the Daily Hampshire Gazette that Kwiecinski said using “ladies” was a microaggression and “the fact that he didn’t know that as an educator was a problem.”

He explained that the terms “ladies” and “gentlemen” were used as a sign of respect when he was growing up, adding that he wasn’t aiming to insult anyone, according to the newspaper.

Perhaps someone can explain this to me; I seem to be out of touch.  Or perhaps there is was some nuance in his email that's not being reported.  Story found at Boston.com.

Addendum:  A big tip of the blogging hat to the reader who found details about this case and the explanation for the offensive characteristics of the term "ladies" in a Boston Globe article.  Several other comments by readers offer additional insights.

Ukranian girl explains the meaning of life

Reposted from 3 years ago, because it's still hits home.

Addendum:  so sad to see this gif link dead.  If any readers remember it ("you go to school, then you work, then you die") and can find a copy for me to embed, I would be grateful.

A man stands on the sidewalk holding a sign...

North Dakota state senators...

 ... defeated a bill to provide free school lunches to low-income K-12 students.

Ten days later they voted to raise the per-diem reimbursements they receive while traveling in the state, from $35/day to $45/day.

"State employees should get a higher per diem because inflation has made eating out much more expensive, he noted."

Michael Palin explores Andrew Wyeth's world

With an initial emphasis on my favorite painting, Christina's World.

Intra-family politics

A New Yorker cartoon.

Global ocean surface temperature at all-time high

I really hate to start my blogging day with a "gloom and doom" item, but the graph is quite striking.

Three years of La Niña conditions across the vast tropical Pacific have helped suppress temperatures and dampened the effect of rising greenhouse gas emissions.

But scientists said heat was now rising to the ocean surface, pointing to a potential El Niño pattern in the tropical Pacific later this year that can increase the risk of extreme weather conditions and further challenge global heat records...

Hotter oceans provide more energy for storms, as well as putting ice sheets at risk and pushing up global sea levels, caused by salt water expanding as it warms.

Marine heatwaves can also have devastating effects on marine wildlife and cause coral bleaching on tropical reefs. Experiments have also suggested that warming oceans could radically alter the food web, promoting the growth of algae while lowering the types of species that humans eat..

Discussion and maps continue at The Guardian.