Monday catch up

I've been very work busy lately.   Still am.

Here's a catch up of things that have caught my attention:

American infrastructure really does sound crap:

From the Washington Post, a description of the very decrepit sounding courthouse where Trump is being tried in Manhattan:

When I arrived at the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse early Monday morning for a few days of Trump trial tourism, I found Wittes in line holding not one but two pillows: an orthopedic doughnut to sit on and a padded, wraparound lap desk. If I didn’t do the same, he warned, “you’ll come away with injuries.”

He was vindicated within an hour of my arrival in the courthouse.

The courthouse, completed in 1941, apparently has not been updated much since then, nor even maintained. Its seats are hard, wooden pews with curved backs that accentuate the customary journalist slouch as we hunch over our laptops.

Posters warning of asbestos abatement hang in the lobby. The bathrooms have malfunctioning taps, missing toilet paper holders and what looks like years of grime on the floor. The courtrooms have almost no electrical power or internet connectivity, forcing those covering the Trump trial to lug backpacks full of enormous batteries, cables and hotspots. Temperatures fluctuate madly (a source of much irritation to the defendant). The hallways are dark and green, and the fluorescent-lit courtrooms have names such as “Part 59” and “Part 75.” The elevators groan and creak; on the 15th floor, where the Trump trial is held, two of us had to manually push an elevator’s doors closed to get the carriage moving down to the lobby.

Mar-a-Lago it isn’t. This place, built on the site of a 19th-century prison and gallows complex called “the Tombs,” may be as close as Trump gets to prison — and it’s a reasonable facsimile. Attendees get colored “hall passes” that allow them to go to the restroom. Dozens of police guards bark orders (“We’re locking it down!”) and impose byzantine rules: No eating in the rooms, and no loitering in the halls unless you are eating. Multiple layers of security make it so difficult to reenter the building that reporters pack their lunches and eat on benches, or any other space they can claim, on unused floors of the building.

Jealous that I'm not in Tasmania:

More about Buddhist influence only Greeks and others

Remember how three four years ago I posted about my surprise that Buddhists had probably travelled as far West as Egypt well before the time of Christ, and how Greeks had seemingly had some interaction with them?  No?  Well, you just don't pay enough attention.

Anyhow, instead of reading, you can now view a video from the wonderful Religion for Breakfast pretty much on the same topic.  (Lots of people in the comments that follow say things like "yeah, this really is not common knowledge, and perhaps it should be."  So it's not just me.)

 

Climate change and extreme weather

It seems that every few days lately there is another extreme flood from some part of the world, as well as temperature records being broken.  (South East Asia has been dangerously hot for the last couple of months.)

It's kind of interesting how people who decided a decade or two ago that climate change was all an imaginary crock (not that they will admit it, but their implicit view is that it's a grand conspiracy theory by thousands of scientists) can look at the news and just think "meh, the weather hasn't been too exceptional outside my front door lately, so there's still nothing to it."

The old cranks at the remnants of Catallaxy blog will never change their mind - there's too much face to lose by admitting they picked the "crank" side of the debate long ago.  I wonder if Sinclair Davidson has recanted?   We don't hear much from him anywhere any more.