10:12 – Happy birthday to me. I turn 3F today. Only one more year until I hit the Big Four-Oh. A year after that, I’ll be eligible for Medicare, assuming it’s still around two years from now.
Barbara got me the perfect gift for anyone with an interest in science: Derek Lowe’s The Chemistry Book: From Gunpowder to Graphene, 250 Milestones in the History of Chemistry. Recommended.
Big article in the paper this morning about the increasing violence in cities. After peaking in 1990, violence in cities had declined significantly over the next 20 years, but now it’s started to increase dramatically in many (but not all) cities. Apparently, no one in authority can figure out why this is happening, or maybe it’s just that they’re not allowed to say. Hint: it has to with the large increase in the population of underclass scum. That, and forbidding the police to deal with them.
Back in the Good Olde Days, cops divided people into three categories: cops, civilians, and scumbags. They treated civilians politely, and never, ever beat or shot them. They treated scumbags as they deserved to be treated, and beat or shot them as necessary. In olden days, mistreating civilians was the fastest way for a cop to commit career suicide, while treating scumbags harshly was just another day at the office. Nowadays, the situation is, if not quite the opposite, uncomfortably close to being so. Cops now shoot more middle-class civilians than they do underclass scumbags. Killing a middle-class person has become almost a protected activity for cops, while killing an underclass scumbag invariably results in severe blowback, often career-ending. This has to change.