Bad sign for Facebook?

 The most-read story at WaPo: 

Sometimes I think....

 ...about how Morgan Freeman was a working actor, but didn't really become a star until he was around 50.

That gives me hope.

Common Book: Bad books

 The Tin Drum:

A thing I didn't know: Soil

Washington Post: "Research suggests that the world’s soils are now eroding 100 times faster than new soil can form, and an estimated 33 percent of soil is so degraded that its ability to grow crops is compromised."

Also: "The combined debt of all U.S. farmers totals more than $400 billion."

Common Book: The 'demonic energy' of COVID schadenfreude

Sarah Jones, New York: This happened to me recently when I lost my temper with a woman I’d known in college. She is a nurse and wrote on Facebook that she refuses to get vaccinated. I told her that people like her are the reason my grandfather is dead. That wasn’t exactly true — my grandfather died before the vaccines were available — but her indifference toward the virus had irked me. I don’t think I changed her mind. I felt better for an instant and then I went back to feeling angry, both with her and with myself. Whatever compelled me to comment on her Facebook post could have become much uglier if I had allowed it. On the r/HermanCainAward sub-Reddit, people post screenshots of comments from anti-vaxxers who later died of COVID. To some, death has become a spectacle at which they are entitled to gawk. That’s how demonic energy must feel. Right now, it’s everywhere.

We don't have a crime problem. We have a gun problem.

Photo by Mikhail Nilov from Pexels

Henry Olsen at the Washington Post, on the FBI's scary murder statistics: "Murders in the United States rose by 30 percent in 2020, the largest one-year increase on record. There are likely many factors that contributed to the spike, but there’s one thing that clearly did not help: the blanket anti-police mantra adopted by many urban and national leaders after the killing of George Floyd"

It pains me to admit he might be right*. Here's The Guardian in July: 

Homicide rates were higher during every month of 2020 – even before pandemic-related shutdowns started in March, the analysis found. But there was also a “structural break” in the data in June, indicating “a large, statistically significant increase” in the homicide rate, around the same time as the mass protests that followed the murder of George Floyd.

But also: 

A preprint study from researchers at the University of California, Davis, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, suggested that a spike in gun purchases during the early months of the pandemic was associated with a nearly 8% increase in gun violence from March through May, or 776 additional fatal and nonfatal shooting injuries nationwide. The researchers found that states that had lower levels of violent crime pre-Covid saw a stronger connection between additional gun purchases and more gun violence.

And indeed, here's a notable paragraph in another WaPo article on the FBI's statistics:

The FBI data also shows how much killing in America is fueled by shootings. Guns accounted for 73 percent of homicides in 2019, but that increased to 76 percent of homicides in 2020. Gun killings rose 55 percent in Houston, from 221 in 2019 to 343 in 2020. Overall, the city saw more than 400 killings last year.

It's not just that we have more homicides, but a higher proportion of homicides are committed with guns -- fueled by the presence of more guns out in society. We don't have a crime problem, or at least not just a crime problem. We have a gun problem. 

* Chicken-and-egg question: Does the murder rate spring from anti-police sentiment, or from police delegitimizing themselves through things like murdering civilians on the street? Not sure the two can be untangled.

Reading…

 …a good novel on paper, not on a screen, slows my brain down wonderfully.