Around My Hat

• Chauncey DeVega (Indomitable) quotes a black Republican who witnessed When It Changed in 1964.  (Jackie Robinson was a Republican.  Now go read the quote.)
• The history of tornado prediction, and a period when the mention of twisters was forbidden.  (Slate, via Atlas Obscura.)
• How the Media messed up primary coverage (or what makes the most noise gets covered, with the introduction of the Kardashian coefficient and an exploration of media biases):

  Just as with absolute numbers, the positive or negative nature of the media coverage is of no importance. What is important is the distance from 0—or irrelevance—one is at any given time. This idea, which the constantly trolling Donald Trump has exploited to perfection, we’ll call the Kardashian coefficient, or |k|.

  (The rest of the paragraph explains.)
• From Aeon:  Police working off outdated and false beliefs.

  Toward that end, our team questioned police officers on a number of different topics, asking them to call out certain patently false statements:
  
  · Police can tell when a suspect is lying
  · People confess only when they have actually committed the crime they are being charged with
  · Most judges and jurors fully understand court instructions
  · Eye-witnesses are always the most reliable source of case-related information
  · Most mentally ill individuals are violent
  · All psychopaths are criminals
  · We need to be ‘tough on crime’ by giving convicted felons harsher punishments
  · The death sentence is an effective way to deter criminal activity
  · Excitement improves memory
  
  Research has demonstrated that none of these statements is true, yet we found that, in our questionnaire of 50 true or false items just like this, our sample of police officers scored no better than the general public. Police officers got 39 per cent wrong and members of the public got 37 per cent wrong. The police seemed to know as little about these important policing issues as everybody else.
  
  Making matters worse, we found that our sample of officers generally indicated they exhibited higher confidence in their judgements than the general public, making them more confidently wrong.

  Explains a lot, eh?

• On Thursday, Senator Jerry Moran, who is also the former head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, came out and said what needed to be said: Senators should meet with Merrick Garland, hold hearings, and vote. Because the Constitution demands it.

  Crooks and Liars.  On the case.
  
• There's a phrase for this, enunciated by Edward G. Robinson in Little Caesar:  "He can dish it out, but he can't take it."

There are a few obituaries I need to post.  Soon.