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Hopeless Solo

This is a woman with severe mental issues. She was charged with assault up around Seattle after smacking some family members around during an argument, but she seemed to have found a way to skate out of that. Then the former goalie for the Seattle women's soccer team went off to the Olympics and got in trouble again:

Hope Solo reacted the way any elite athlete would to news she had been suspended for six months and her contract terminated by the U.S. Soccer Federation in the wake of calling the Swedish team “a bunch of cowards” after the U.S. women’s national team was eliminated from the Rio Olympics.

She cursed. She hugged her husband. She broke down.

“Six-month suspension. No pay. Terminated contract. Effective immediately,” Solo said in a hotel conference room as she hugged her husband, former NFL player Jerramy Stevens. “Terminated contract! Not just a suspension!”

Well, she may have been sort of talented as a soccer goalie, but she clearly is unstable. It's surprising that she didn't try to beat up her husband.

I don't follow sports, but I've read enough about her to know that I don't want to see her name again. Maybe she can be retrained. I understand that Goodwill is looking for new employees.

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Pits

There we go again. "Pit bulls".

JEFFERSON COUNTY, Colo. -- Two dogs have been euthanized after attacking and killing a 60-year-old woman Monday night, the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office said.

Susan Shawl was attacked by her son's dogs at her home in the 31900 block of Black Widow Drive in the Conifer area, the sheriff's office said. Two suspected terrier-pit bull mix dogs were involved in the attack.

The owner (the son) was also injured in the attacks as he tried to intervene. Unquestionably, a terrible set of events.

But let's get a few things straight. There is no such thing as a pit bull, much less a "terrier-pit bull mix".

This is a pit bull. Except that it's an American Staffordshire Terrier. Any dog with a more or less square head and boxy body tends to be referred to in media as a pit bull. This is erroneous. The closest thing to a pit bull is the hybrid - a cross between bulldog and terrier. This produced an animal with the strength and endurance of the former, together with the agility and speed of the latter. It also came with an unfortunate additional effect derived from the terrier: the tendency toward hyperactivity and their innate generally fearless attitude.

It is this hybrid combination that proves so problematic - and at times deadly - in an urban setting. What are referred to as pit bulls are actually bull-terriers, and they're actually quite useful on the open range, where the terrier's hyperactivity, speed, and agility, coupled with the bulldog's endurance and tenacity, make them effective tools for herding cattle as well as containing vermin.

Again, the issue is less with the bulldog than the terrier; terriers make excellent rat eliminators, for example: they latch on and shake the offending animal violently until it is well and truly dead. Coupled with the strength of a bulldog, this can be problematic in animal/human encounters, as we have once more unfortunately seen.  The hyperactive nature of the terrier seems to dominate, and it doesn't take much to set them off.

Therein lies the problem. Bulldogs aren't generally an issue; they're pretty laid back unless working. Terriers, by contrast, tend to require firm supervision; they were bred to kill. Hybridizing the two gives a larger, stronger animal with a terrier mentality that is not, in general, compatible with an urban environment.

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They Call It The Array Of Things

Chicago's department of transportation has installed the first pair of units containing a computer, camera, and sensors in their "Array of Things" project, and they expect to have 500 of them up and running across the city by the end of 2018. That assumes, of course, that they aren't shot to pieces by the end of 2018, so good luck with that.

Catlett and other proponents of the Array of Things say the big data it collects will help the city run smarter by tracking traffic patterns, detecting flooding and analyzing air quality in certain neighborhoods, among other things.

Air quality monitoring might be one thing, but you don't need big data in a place like Chicago to detect traffic patterns: if there's a road, there will be traffic on it. Want to detect flooding? Look out the window.

The project is a collaboration between the University of Chicago, Argonne National Laboratory and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. AT&T is the internet provider for the project, which is backed by a $3.1 million grant from the National Science Foundation.

Ah yes - big federal money. There we go.

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Sharks!

It seems that the waters of south Long Island, New York are heavily populated with great white sharks. Only a couple of things have been known about them until now: they get pretty big, and they cover a lot of water. Nobody knows when or how they mate, though it is known that they give birth to live young.

Digging through historical data, researchers noticed something interesting: over the past two centuries, a lot of four-foot-long great whites were caught around Long Island, but not elsewhere in the North Atlantic. This led them to suspect that the area might harbor what amounts to a nursery for the animals.

Also, OCEARCH tagged a 16-foot long female named Mary Lee back in 2012, and its return to New York this May suggested to them that she was coming to give birth.

Through a just-completed two-week research expedition off the South Shore of Long Island, researchers think they have discovered a great white nursery in New York's backyard, and possibly, what one called "the holy grail of the research": a birthing site.

During their trip, they'd hoped to catch a couple of baby sharks, but they ended up with a total of nine during that time.

Chris Fischer, founder of OCEARCH, told CBS that finding the nursery is "probably the most significant discovery we’ve ever made on the ocean."

Fischer told the network that Long Island's waters are "definitely the nursery, probably the birthing site" for great whites in the North Atlantic.

They bring them up with an hydraulic platform, and in the span of fifteen minutes, they weigh and measure the pups, take a muscle biopsy, and drill a small hole through the dorsal fin in order to attach a GPS tracking tag. Then it's back into the water for them, and they remain in the general area until they mature - at about 20 years of age. When they surface, the tracking tags ping a satellite, and the pings are returned to the ground station. The data are displayed in real time on the OCEARCH website.

Apparently, they name every shark they tag, and they've tagged a lot of them of various species. Personally, I'd go with numbers: GW9, for example, would be great white #9, while T2 would be tiger shark #2. I assume they do the naming thing instead in an unlikely effort to humanize them, so that people can more easily identify with them. Yeah, that'll work.

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Small Dog Issues

He may not be very big, but he's death from the ankles down when some stranger steps onto the property.

He also has a severe herding instinct. When it gets dark out, it's time to move people into their bedrooms. It's most annoying when they don't cooperate. However, once they finally get where they're supposed to be, he faces the doors in case anything happens.

At dawn, it's time to rise and shine, so he shakes - which rattles the tags on his collar. If that's insufficient, he jumps onto the beds and begins digging people out from under the covers.

Keeping track of everything is his job, and he takes it very seriously. There is a time for sleeping, a time for waking - and oh yes, a time for feeding the Guardian of the Property.

Portland: Streetcar Charlie's Buddy Shorty Figures He Might Lose His Re-Election Bid

And so he wants some sort of legacy: Tax The Rich. There's a unique idea.

The proposal, sources tell WW, calls for imposing a 10 percent surcharge on corporations that pay their CEOs 100 to 250 times what they pay a typical employee, and a 25 percent surcharge on companies that pay their CEOs more than 250 times what they pay a typical employee.

Well, it must be admitted that CEO pay is in many cases beyond the pale - Sen. Manchin's daughter is bringing down $18 million a year as CEO of Mylan, and the only things she's ever done are lobbying and jacking up medication costs. So Shorty's got a point, but there aren't that many CEOs in Portland who would be subject to that proposed set of surcharges, and they'd probably just move to Clark County, Washington if he managed to push it through. He's clearly getting desperate, wants to be seen as a populist fighting for the little guys, yadda yadda.

Unfortunately, his opponent in the election is even farther to the left, and there's little question that, given the low-info voters in Portland, she's likely to win.

Goin' Solar

Two Oregon universities had a bunch of solar panels installed. It didn't exactly go well:

But the projects were plagued by early concerns. The first developer selected by the Oregon University System pulled out because of worries about the state's tax credit system. The second went bankrupt. The third developer managed to complete the project. But to maximize profits, it used solar panels assembled by inmates at the federal prison camp at Sheridan. The 93-cent-an-hour prison labor flew in the face of promises by then-Gov. John Kitzhaber that the project would create local family-wage jobs and spur Oregon's economy.

So none of the promised benefits were actually delivered, but the universities eventually did end up with 21 acres of biodiversity-killing solar PV arrays - which in 15 years will produce progressively less energy, and at the end of the 25-year lifespan of the arrays will produce zero energy. One wonders what they plan to do with 21 acres of useless PV arrays containing gallium arsenide and other toxics.

And there have been other issues:

Martin Shain, the lead consultant on the state's $24 million "Solar by Degree" project, was indicted Thursday by a Marion County grand jury on two counts of first-degree forgery. Shain is accused of creating a phony invoice from a fictional subcontractor that was pivotal in getting nearly $12 million in tax credits from the Oregon Department of Energy.

Oh my. A "green energy consultant" stands accused of felonies? You don't say!

My heavens. Shirley, there must be some mistake.

The Feb. 25, 2011, invoice from Solar Foundation Systems detailed construction expenditures on each of the solar arrays. It was crucial to show that work was under way or the state would withhold the tax credits that accounted for half the project's cost.

There was just one problem. Solar Foundations didn't exist.

That's kind of a big problem.

The state bureaucrats eventually ended up with Solar City for the project, and that company's been pretty dicey ever since Elon Musk started it.

The California firm is under investigation by the U.S. Department of Treasury for allegedly inflating the costs of its solar installations in order to garner larger federal tax credits. The same question is potentially at issue in Oregon.

I talked with a Solar City rep a while back, since they were going to give us free solar panels and installation and so on. And after 25 years, I'd own the system free and clear, which some folks seem to think is a great deal. But as mentioned above, solar panels die at around 25 years. Disposal of hazardous waste from the panels wouldn't fall to the company, it would be up to me. Overall, it didn't look like that great a deal. Naturally, Oregon bureaucrats went for it.

Free is a very good price - until it isn't.

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Kremlin Opposition Mortality Rate Continues To Climb

Vladimir Putin's enemies appear to have an uncanny knack when it comes to unexpectedly dying, no matter where they are.

In November 2012, a 44-year-old man died while out jogging near his Surrey home. The man was reported to have been in robust health, and police declared that the death was not suspicious.

But here are a few more facts: The jogger was a Russian banker who had fled Russia after helping expose tax fraud that implicated both the Mafia and the Russian state. Traces of a rare, poisonous flowering plant were found in his stomach.

The Brits didn't know quite what to make of it.

But a botanist at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, southwest London, was called in just last year to conduct more tests. What she found caused a sensation, says Harding: Gelsemium elegans, a lethal plant favored by Chinese and Russian assassins.

The plant grows in the Himalayas, and certainly wouldn't have found its way into the man by accident. It's somewhat reminiscent of Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian security agent, who died in 2006 after drinking tea laced with the radioactive element polonium-210 at a London hotel. 

It's curious how these things happen; a ricin pellet here, polonium there, Gelsemium over in the corner. Or in the case a few months ago of a former advisor to Putin who unfortunately had a falling out with him, an unexplained beating death:

Mikhail Lesin, a former Russian press minister and adviser to President Vladimir Putin, was found dead in November 2015 in a Washington, D.C., hotel. The D.C. medical examiner concluded he died from blunt force trauma.

While correlation does not necessarily equal causation, it can raise a certain degree of suspicion. Clearly, these are assassinations, which might lead one to inquire as to who might have wanted these people dead.

"The important thing to know about an assassination is not who fired the shot, but who paid for the bullet."

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Yellowstone Shut Down

LIVINGSTON — Tens of thousands of dead fish have closed Montana's Yellowstone River and stirred new worries Monday about lasting impacts to the region's lucrative outdoors industry.

Gov. Steve Bullock declared an "invasive species emergency" over an aquatic parasite blamed for the dying fish. A 183-mile stretch of the Yellowstone and all waterways that drain into it have been closed since Aug. 19 to prevent the deadly parasite from spreading. The unprecedented move came after thousands of dead mountain whitefish started washing up on the river's banks downstream from Yellowstone National Park.

It's unclear how closing the waterways will have any particular impact upon the parasite, although it's possible that managers may suspect that rafts and other watercraft might be serving as transportation vectors, thus prompting the closure. One thing that seems fairly certain: a successful parasite doesn't kill its host species; although small numbers of other fish species have been affected as well, the primary target appears to have been mountain whitefish, which have been dying quickly and in large numbers. That doesn't bode well for long-term survival of the parasite.

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Facebook Fakes

Last Friday, Facebook abruptly fired human editors that worked on their "trending news" section and replaced them with an algorithm, a move which didn't work out so well as the algorithm immediately began posting fake news.

This morning, Trending promoted this as its top story related to the trending topic "Megyn Kelly." The story was up for several hours, and is completely false.

Given the results, it seems safe to suggest that their news algorithm isn't exactly ready for prime-time and that a human touch is still needed to weed out the garbage.

Instead of paying humans to "write topic descriptions and short story summaries," the company said "we’re relying on an algorithm to pull excerpts directly from news stories." Which is why millions of Facebook readers this morning saw the "news" that Megyn Kelly is a traitor who has been fired.

What their algorithm actually caught and posted as "breaking news" was really nothing more than a rant from a disgruntled anti-Kelly blogger - and apparently avid Trump supporter - whose site is misguidedly named "Conservative 101". Obviously, if the blogger was actually conservative, he/she would recognize that The Donald isn't.

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