If Google had been around in the time of Copernicus…

Google bans ads on content, including YouTube videos, with false claims about climate change.

Google said it will no longer display advertisements on YouTube videos and other content that promote inaccurate claims about climate change.

…we might still think the sun goes around the earth. 

Look, I happen to believe the scientists are right about climate change, but the scientists…or philosophers, I guess they were…in the time of Copernicus believed with equal fervor the sun traveled around the earth, and it wasn't just them—anybody with functioning eyes could see clearly the sun traveled from one edge of the earth to the opposite edge, right on schedule, every single day. What could be more obvious?

This was not "disinformation," this was just plain observable truth. Until it wasn't.

Which is not to say disinformation does not exist today, or the climate scientists are wrong. 

But stifling dissenting ideas needs to be done with deliberate caution, if at all. 

Once upon a time

150th anniversary of Great Chicago Fire

The fire burned more than 3 square miles of the city, raged for more than 24 hours, killed about 300 people, burned more than 17,000 structures and left nearly 100,000 people without a home.

The Chicago Fire Department’s training academy, at 558 W. DeKoven St., sits on the site where the O’Leary barn once stood.

And he thought nobody would notice

Internet sleuths* claim Brian Laundrie is hiding under flower bed at parents’ home

*Some guys on TikTok.

[And apologies for giving even more oxygen to this story.]

Welcome to the 21st Century*

Smart robots do all the work at Nissan’s ‘intelligent’ plant

The workers at the factory can focus on more skilled work such as analyzing data collected by the robots, and on maintaining the equipment.

*And we're already 20% through it. Long past time to quit solving 20th Century problems with 20th Century tools and start paying attention to what's happening now. 

If it's not one thing…

America Is Choking Under an ‘Everything Shortage’

“Everything that can go wrong is going wrong at the same time.”

Any questions?

Bears coach Matt Nagy: Forget all that other stuff I said. Justin Fields is our starting QB!

I don’t pretend to understand how the Bears think, in the way I don’t pretend to understand how a cantaloupe thinks.

A pharmaceutical phantasmagoria

 Yep, I've been watching the TeeVee. Haven't done much of that in recent years, or decades for that matter, but I like the Wednesday night Chicago shows and I'm getting into some other stuff as well.

But…it turns out everybody's sick. From illnesses I've never heard of. Not that I doubt they're real, the illnesses: Certainly they are. The good news is, everybody's doing smashingly well by taking pills with strange-sounding names because they have happily avoided any of the dozens of terrifying side effects and therefore were not required to call their doctors immediately. 

It's a wonderful world.

A bumper sticker, of course

First microchips, now Frosty Flakes?

Workers at all of Kellogg’s U.S. cereal plants go on strike

The company acknowledged that it is “implementing contingency plans” to limit supply disruptions for consumers.

2021 has become just one enormous contingency plan, as far as I can tell. 

Getting a handle on the whole Facebook thing

The first and most obvious question to ask, the question from which everything else descends, is this:

How can a company make a $30 billion profit, in one year, by giving away its service for free?

Yikes! This can't be true, can it?

Yellen defends IRS rule requiring banks to report all transactions over $600

Granted, the New York Post is not the most, ahem, unbiased of all possible news sources, but is this"IRS rule" for real?

And what is a "transaction"? Is depositing a paycheck a banking transaction? Buying and iPhone with a debit card? Paying taxes?

Six hundred dollars? Look, I'm all for following the money but this is a little silly, isn't it?

If it's true…

Slipping away at night

 

South Dakota, et tu?

Leaked ‘Pandora’ records show how the powerful shield assets

The investigation dug into accounts registered in familiar offshore havens, including the British Virgin Islands, Seychelles, Hong Kong and Belize. But some of the secret accounts were also scattered around in trusts set up in the U.S., including 81 in South Dakota and 37 in Florida.

The neighbors own three tents

 

The tents were damp from a recent camping trip so the neighbors pitched them in their back yard to dry out. It's rained for at least part of every day since.

Eventually, it will snow.

Schadenfreude*

There's been plenty of that going around, what with the unmaskers and anti-vaxxers and all, and I try to avoid it, but I had a serious bout of it watching the New England v. Tampa Bay football game last night. Word had it people paid up to $1,000 per ticket to get into the stadium, and seeing them sitting there on a 60º evening in the pouring rain, was somehow more fun than the close but thoroughly soggy game. (The Bucs won by two points.)

*Look it up.