Jeff Davis County is fixing to get itself sued over First Amendment issues

That is, if recently arrested independent journalist David Flash has both the money and mind to do that.

At the same time, this:

“The profession has to police itself,” said Renita Coleman, a professor of journalism and media at the University of Texas at Austin. “Because our reputation with the public is really all journalists have. Our credibility hinges upon us doing the right thing.”

Is a reminder that independent journalists can be jackwagons. 

That said, so can members of the mainstream media.

Also, this:

Max Resnik, director of growth at Documenter Network City Bureau, a civic journalism program that has trained more than 4,000 residents across the country to document similar public meetings, said it does not matter whether Flash is a professional journalist. Every resident has the right to record, document and publish public meetings, he said.

“By preventing reporting from happening or discouraging reporting in those public meetings, it sends a chilling effect to other residents and reporters,” Resnik said.

He also pointed to the state’s open meeting handbook, which government officials and members of the public must comply with. Any person, the handbook says, “may record all or any part of an open meeting of a governmental body by means of a recorder, video camera, or other means of aural or visual reproduction.”

Reminds us that one doesn't have to call oneself a journalist to do what Flash generally does.

If Flash is harassing anybody? Let Jeff Davis County file official charges.

My personal take on what bits I glean from the story? Flash is likely not violating any laws. That said, is he glory-hounding a bit? Probably.

If "zero" represents the typical reporter or editor at the typical small-town newspaper or other traditional media outlet and "ten" represents full-on Joey Dauben, Flash is probably in the "4-6" range.

We have a second — and much better — lawsuit against the Ten Commandments in Texas

And this one is a much better vehicle than the first one, for this reason right here:

“As a rabbi and public school parent, I am deeply concerned that S.B. 10 will impose another faith’s scripture on students for nearly every hour of the school day,” said plaintiff Rabbi Mara Nathan (she/her). “While our Jewish faith treats the Ten Commandments as sacred, the version mandated under this law does not match the text followed by our family, and the school displays will conflict with the religious beliefs and values we seek to instill in our child.”

As I noted when the first suit was filed, it was primarily about personal aggrievement. This one expresses the universal First Amendment problem.

If that doesn't do it, having someone from a non-Abrahamic religion will add to it:

“S.B. 10 imposes a specific, rules-based set of norms that is at odds with my Hindu faith,” said plaintiff Arvind Chandrakantan (he/him). “Displaying the Ten Commandments in my children’s classrooms sends the message that certain aspects of Hinduism — like believing in multiple paths to God (pluralism) or venerating murthis (statues) as the living, breathing, physical representations of God — are wrong. Public schools — and the state of Texas — have no place pushing their preferred religious beliefs on my children, let alone denigrating my faith, which is about as un-American and un-Texan as one can be.”

For good measure, a secularist, or at least a "none" of some sort, is part of the suit:

“We are nonreligious and don’t follow the explicitly religious commandments, such as ‘remember the Sabbath.’ Every day that the posters are up in classrooms will signal to my children that they are violating school rules,” said plaintiff Allison Fitzpatrick (she/her).

So, yes, this is "the vehicle."

Texas Progressives talk campaigns and the Fourth

Off the Kuff rounds up the latest word on who is or at least might be running for what.

Related to the Fourth of July, SocraticGadfly first said the US of A is still a republic not a democracy (if that) and then riffed on Reality Winner.

The Fifth Circuit has said that Senate Bill 4 from 2023, which turned unauthorized border crossings into state crimes, is unconstitutional.

Kenny Boy Paxton has dropped his appeal of his office whistleblowers' lawsuit, but the problem remains that, as things stand, the Lege still has to appropriate the payout, to which it already said nyet before.

Trump's admin is now doing what it can to bar Mexican truck drivers.

Taylor Crumpton goes stanning for Beyonce's Black-pride brownwashing of American Indians and barfs me. (That's the correct description, Kuff, not yours.)

Lone Star Left has an early look at Democratic state legislative candidates. At least it admits its partisanship is anti-independent (and anti-third party) as well as anti-Republican.

Steve Vladeck tries to make sense of SCOTUS' terrible term.  

Deceleration has issues with Trump's deep sea mining order.  

Pete Vonder Haar muses about post-apocalypse culture.

Happy 100th birthday to quantum mechanics!

Left: The first lines of the letter sent by Werner Heisenberg to Wolfgang Pauli on 9 July 1925, explaining his efforts to interpret quantum physics differently. (Copyright: Heisenberg Society) Right: Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg and Enrico Fermi take a break by Lake Como during the 1927 International Congress of Physicists, where the new quantum mechanics was discussed in depth. (Image: Wolfgang Pauli Archive, CERN) 

I'm a day late, but, via Joe Costello, redeeming himself, July 9, 1925, per CERN, is when Werner Heisenberg officially told Wolfgang Pauli that he was going to get rid of this whole nonsense of "orbits" (that unfortunately is still taught in many places in Merikkka at the elementary level and even beyond).

Note I said quantum mechanics, not quantum theory. That, of course, without him fully realizing what he was doing at the time, and instead postulating to evidence, was 125 years ago, when Max Planck simply couldn't solve black-body problems in terms of classical physics and so proposed the "quantum" as an indivisible, granular unit of energy.

From that, among many other things, arose Niels Bohr's "planetary" model of atoms, with electrons rotating atomic nuclei (neutrons still unknown) in orbits. Despite Bohr being his mentor, Heisenberg vowed to kill this.

CERN quotes from his letter to Pauli:

“All of my pitiful efforts are directed at completely killing off the concept of orbits – which, after all, cannot be observed—and replacing it with something more suitable.”

And, per Pauli's famous bon mot, which has spread far beyond modern physics, Heisenberg was far from being Not.Even.Wrong.

Eventually, his matrix mechanics were shown to be inferior in SOME WAYS to Erwin Schrödinger's wave mechanics.

But, Heisbenberg was still king of the hill, as he showed two years later when, in response to Einstein himself at the famous 1927 Solway conference, he articulated the Uncertainty Principle, which remains the "one ring to bind them all," not just of quantum mechanics, but also of gravity and Einstein's special theory of relativity. 

Einstein's reaction was itself wrong on the reaction, but right on the insight of what Heisenberg meant. 

"God does not play dice with the universe."

There is no god, not even in the sense of him and Spinoza, since physical "laws" are empirically based and Einstein's own rejection of a cosmological constant turned out to be a bad move — based on empirical data. 

And, to the degree this phrase is seen as confirming Einstein as a physical and also a philosophical determinist, he was wrong there — as wrong as little Bobby Sapolsky, whom I just murdered recently. (Figuratively!)

Contra both these? I quote Julius Caesar:

"Alea jacta."

That's the bottom line. 

Einstein was right to see how the principle, as articulated by Heisenberg, meant the universe had a fundamental "graininess," which translated into a fundamental indeterminency. That, in turn was not something in either Special or General Relativity. 

And, speaking of wrong? Schrödinger was wrong about his infamous cat. 

And, Kurt Gödel refuted Einstein even more, along with Alfred Tarski

A drying Rio Grande won't fix itself

The Observer reports from south of the border on the drying up of Mexico's Conchas River. It's a good story; the river is Mexico's main contributor to the Rio Grande and is the heart of a 1944 treaty. Related to that, local Chihuahua unrest against Mexico's federal government started in 2020. But now, the drought is so bad that many area farmers are beyond protest. And, as the story notes, many of them have gone to El Norte.

Trying to fix border water allocations, primarily here but also in the Southwest on the Colorado, is going to get ever more problematic.

Per the above? 

Strangeabbott likes to thing he's part of the federal government when Washington makes a decision under international law over which he has no power, but that he doesn't like. The sensical amendment to the 1944 US-Mexico water treaty that governs the Rio Grande is the latest. Let's add in, which the Trib doesn't, that then-Mexican President Lopez Obrador, beyond the drought hitting both sides of the river, had cited Strange's floating border barriers as part of why water was being held up. Big John Cornyn and Havana Ted Cruz, per the story, also didn't talk about that.

And, as I noted not quite a year ago, to which the Observer refers, part of this is Texas' fault. Tributaries on the north side of the Rio Grande, and the reservoirs they fill on the lower stretches of the river, are running lower and lower on water.

Per what happened on the Guadalupe last weekend, this too is part of climate change and neither tots and pears nor pouts and posturings will change that. 

Brendan the History Nerd Toddler, the cult-followed book review idiot

This guy on Goodreads.

He calls himself, after his name, "History Nerds United."

Worse, he has a website, which he started three years before joining Goodreads. (Or rejoining, or jumping from Amazon, reading between some lines.) I had thought of deleting this post until I clicked through, but the "about" made me double down instead. 

First, plenty of history lovers, like me, don't consider ourselves "nerds." And, from that about:

Brendan Dowd is a full-time government consultant but is always a History Nerd. He lives in Vienna, Virginia with his daughter whom he regularly tortures with the double whammy of dad jokes and history jokes. He is the son of a history teacher (big surprise) and is originally from New York.

If your mom or dad think they're a nerd too, oy vey. 

Related is that this plays up to all sorts of history stereotypes. (And, if your mom or dad do that, too? Oy vey.)

I called him, in a comment on his review of "The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV" the History Toddler instead of Nerd. Why? This:

I plan on going on quite a bit of diatribes in this review. So, before you say, "Brendan can you get to the point, please?" I will summarize it with this. Helen Castor's The Eagle and the Hart is magnificent and you should read it. It is long and in-depth but never boring. It is a dual character study while also putting its time period in perspective. It is definitely going on my list of best books of 2024. Okay, now on to the diatribes! If you want to exit now, I thank you for your time.

Still with me? Great! Now that the impatient and rude people have left, let me tell you something. I believe Richard II might be the reason men named Richard are nicknamed Dick. (My apologies to all Richards who do not deserve it.) Do I have any scholarly source on this? Absolutely not. Will I look it up? Definitely no. Was this all to elicit a cheap laugh from those people who share my sophomoric sense of humor? Not entirely! Castor's narrative did make me believe he is one of the worst English kings in history.

How can anybody take him seriously as a reviewer, at least anybody who actually cares about learning about history in depth? We start with pretentious, pontificating prattle. Then, it's off to insulting anybody who won't agree that his pretentious, pontificating prattle is more than that. Then, there's the claim that, after admitting his humor is sophomoric (grow up), that it has real insight behind that. (It does not.)

And, if he actually cared about history, and about getting his cult followers to learn it, he would have told them that Dick as a synonym for Richard predates Richard II. 

Again, how can anybody take him seriously. Well, his cultish followers do. And, I guess they like being, or at least being called, nerds as well.

So I mentioned that in this bon mot:

God, what a stupid review, with the second paragraph. Perhaps you could retitle yourself "History Nerd Toddler."

Which apparently fed his ego (shock me):

But that means you liked the other paragraphs though, right? By the way, truly enjoy you being so obsessed with my reviews. Thanks for reading!

To which, one last reply:

I just like pointing out stupidities. Otherwise, don't flatter yourself. (Not that that admonition has any chance of success.)

From here on out, I call him out in my reviews, as I first did here.

And also, dood, an occasional comment elsewhere doesn't mean obsessed. I think I've commented on four or five of his reviews.

Otherwise, taking right-wing nut job Maureen Callahan's book about JFK seriously, let alone 5-starring? You're not even serious as an alleged historian. He also reads a lot of semi-clickbait fluffy history.

And, as exemplified by "The Eagle and the Hart," many of his reviews are surface-level, not noting actual historical problems, as does my review. (I'm often the first reviewer to catch such things.)

And, that gets to the real problem. He says he wants to make history "fun." Fine. But, you know, history is more than just a "story." It's about ... history. And, good historical writing is — accurate, factual, empirical, etc., not just "fun."  (I've updated my Goodreads profile with a more extensive version of this.)

In short, Brendan is giving the cult, and non-cultic readers of his reviews, a bad idea of history. 

I'm going to drop this link in occasional reviews by me of books he's also read.

Side note: The cult didn't really develop until the last 18 months or so, it seems. Older reviews of his have generally no comments. So, was the "History Nerds United" itself a marketing ploy? I would have said yes, at first, but seeing the website game before the Goodreads, I am not sure.

Also, I find the "Dear Reader" affectation an insult to Isaac Asimov, whether Soy Boy adopted it in deliberate imitation of him or not. 

That said, the website has one more bit of pretentiousness, which also means no way in hell I delete this.

Above links to his social media sites, he does NOT say "Follow Me."

Rather?

"Follow Us."

You know exactly what you can do with your "royal we," dude. (And, that's what it is; you may do interviews on your podcast, but your site is a one-man band.)

Actually, per the start of the "about," there's more reason yet not to like him.

Former Army brass hat? Now a "government consultant"? He's either a Nat-Sec Nutsacks™ member (State) or military-industrial complex (DoD). Barf me either way. 

Finally, per Rotary's Four-Way Test, which I thought of?

1. Is it true? Yes.
2. Is it fair to all concerned? Per Walter Kaufman, "fair" in reality and abstract are two different things, and fairness can never be universal all at the same time. It's close enough for jazz.
3. Will it build goodwill? Not a concern.
4. Is it helpful to all concerned? See "fair." It's certainly helpful, IMO, to people needing to find good history books.
   

There you are.

And so, if I AM obsessed, I've excised it, and it is now a WAS.