Thursday: Hili dialogue

September 8, 2022 • 6:30 am

Greetings on Thursday, September 8, 2022: National Date-Nut Bread Day. I love the stuff, especially slathered with cream cheese, but I’m not sure about the hyphen between “date” and “nut.”

It’s also National Pledge of Allegiance Day, marking “the anniversary of the day the Pledge first appeared, in 1892, in The Youth’s Companion“, International Literacy Day, World Physical Therapy Day, Star Trek Day (the series debuted on this day in 1966), and National Ampersand Day (&).

A bit about the origin of the Ampersand, which once was seen as the 27th letter of the alphabet:

The ampersand, also known as the and sign, is the logogram &, representing the conjunction “and”. It originated as a ligature of the letters et—Latin for “and”.

Here’s the evolution of the symbol from “et” to “&”:

Stuff that happened on September 8 includes:

It’s a big statue: 5.17 meters (17 feet!) tall. I would claim that this is one of the finest works of sculpture in history, and of course many agree.

As Wikipedia notes about this town “it is the oldest continuously inhabited European-established settlement in what is now the contiguous United States.”

Here’s the “Illustrated Police News sketch of Dr George Bagster Phillips examining the body of Annie Chapman at 29 Hanbury Street”.  He’s “pronouncing life extinct”:

The words “under God” were not in the original pledge, but were addd in 1954. Here’s the deified Pledge:

“I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all,”

The name is actually a national slur. As Wikipedia notes,

The use of the term Scotch in the name was a pejorative meaning “parsimonious” in the 1920s and 1930s. The brand name Scotch came about around 1925 while Richard Drew was testing his first masking tape to determine how much adhesive he needed to add. The bodyshop painter became frustrated with the sample masking tape and exclaimed, “Take this tape back to those Scotch bosses of yours and tell them to put more adhesive on it!” The name was soon applied to the entire line of 3M tapes.

Here’s an early can of Scotch tape:

  • 1935 – US Senator from Louisiana Huey Long is fatally shot in the Louisiana State Capitol building.

He died 31 hours later, while his assassin was killed on the spot, riddled with 60 bullets from Long’s bodyguard. Long was a piece of work: a populist huckster beloved by many in Louisiana. Here’s his video promising to “share the wealth.” His campaign slogan was “Every man a King”, which was also the title of his autobiography.  Well, Long became a king, but I don’t think his constituents got close. . ..

Sing along with Senator Huey:

Here’s the Pines Express, with footage of the last run. Look at that locomotive!

Here’s the pardon:

  • 1978 – Black Friday, a massacre by soldiers against protesters in Tehran, results in 88 deaths, it marks the beginning of the end of the monarchy in Iran.

Da Nooz:

*The second suspect in the Canadian mass stabbing incident has been apprehended but, weirdly, died in (but not from) police custody. That means both suspects are dead, and a motive might never come to light.

Three days after a brutal mass stabbing devastated a rural Indigenous community in Saskatchewan, the two brothers who were wanted in the violent attacks are dead, though witness accounts indicate that one of the men, Myles Sanderson, was responsible for the deaths of 10 of the victims, according to a law enforcement official.

Myles Sanderson died Wednesday after experiencing “medical distress” following his arrest, Saskatchewan Royal Canadian Mounted Police Assistant Commissioner Rhonda Blackmore announced at a press conference. His brother Damien Sanderson was found dead the day after the attacks, police said previously.

*I heard this on the news today (oh boy!), but I couldn’t believe it. Texas is a hotbed of perfidy and bigotry, and that was shown once again by yesterday’s ruling from a Texas federal judge. Under the Affordable Care Act, HIV prevention drugs were covered for free. Not necessarily true, now? Why, because the judge affirmed a challenge to that law based on its supposed infringement of religious freedom.

US District Judge Reed O’Connor in Fort Worth on Wednesday granted summary judgment to Braidwood Management Inc. in its challenge to coverage of Gilead’s Truvada and Descovy. The two pre-exposure prophylactic drugs, commonly known as PrEP, are taken daily by hundreds of thousands of Americans, particularly men who have sex with men.

The suit is being led by attorney Jonathan Mitchell, the Republican former solicitor general of Texas known for his efforts to restrict abortion access in the state. Mitchell argues that mandatory PrEP coverage forces Christians to subsidize “homosexual behavior”.

There’s the rub. Christians don’t have to help keep gay employees alive, because gayness is counter-Scriptural. Let the government do it.

O’Connor, a George W. Bush appointee, said the government failed to demonstrate a state interest in providing coverage of the drugs that overcame the plaintiffs’ religious objections.

The judge reserved deciding the “appropriate remedy” for resolving the claim, and it’s unclear what impact the ruling will have beyond the plaintiff company, which employs about 70 people. He said there was no evidence that the government couldn’t assume the cost of providing PrEP drugs to people who are unable to obtain them from religious employers.

PrEP drugs can cost as much as $20,000 a year, according to the ruling.

I would hardly believe that if Jesus was a real person, and if the myths about him in the Bible were true, he would say that this behavior is “un-Christian.” Let the government pay for the drugs! The problem is that the people who own Braidwood Management will pay the taxes that fund any government subsidy for the drugs. They’ll be subsidizing homosexuality no matter what they do!

*The Washington Post has information about some of the classified documents seized during the government’s raid on Mar-a-Lago. One of them dealt with a foreign government’s nuclear capabilities (I guess Iran) and others were deeply, deeply, classified, requiring Presidential approval to even look at them. These are the documents freely available to anybody visiting Mar-a-Lago:

A document describing a foreign government’s military defenses, including its nuclear capabilities, was found by FBI agents who searched former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and private club last month, according to people familiar with the matter, underscoring concerns among U.S. intelligence officials about classified material stashed in the Florida property.

Some of the seized documents detail top-secret U.S. operations so closely guarded that many senior national security officials are kept in the dark about them. Only the president, some members of his Cabinet or a near-Cabinet-level official could authorize other government officials to know details of these special-access programs, according to people familiar with the search, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive details of an ongoing investigation.

Documents about such highly classified operations require special clearances on a need-to-know basis, not just top-secret clearance. Some special-access programs can have as few as a couple dozen government personnel authorized to know of an operation’s existence. Records that deal with such programs are kept under lock and key, almost always in a secure compartmented information facility, with a designated control officer to keep careful tabs on their location.

But such documents were stored at Mar-a-Lago, with uncertain security, more than 18 months after Trump left the White House.

That’s the bad news. Do you want the good news? There isn’t any. More bad news:

*Some of the Gulf states are upset at the content of Netflix shows, and have warned that legal action will follow if Netflix doesn’t clean up its act, expunging anything that doesn’t conform to Islam. I bet, as the Guardian suggests here, that it involves anything that smacks of acceptance of homosexuality.

A group of Persian Gulf states have threatened Netflix with legal action if it continues broadcasting content that “contradicts” Islam, while Saudi state media indicated that the offending material centred on shows depicting sexual minorities.

A statement issued jointly by the Saudi media regulator and the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), headquartered in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, did not specifically identify material, referring only to content that “contradicts Islamic and societal values”.

“The platform was contacted to remove this content, including content directed to children,” the statement said.

Regional authorities “will follow up on the platform’s compliance with the directives, and in the event that the infringing content continues to be broadcast, the necessary legal measures will be taken”.

The Gulf Cooperation Council includes Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

There was no immediate reaction from Netflix.

Once more religion poisons something. Why should what consenting adults do behind closed doors be of ANY interest to Islam, much less Allah? And if there’s a lawsuit, what could the Gulf states do. I can’t see any action beyond kicking Netflix out of their broadcasting. But ten to one Netflix will act as the de facto censory, as there are $$ to be had from the Middle East.

*Had enough bad news? There’s more coming. I would have thought that because Georgia went to Biden in the last election (though narrowly), and one of the reasons for that was Stacey Abrams’s tireless and savvy work, that she’d be a very viable candidate for governor. And she is a candidate for governor, but she’s struggling. According to the NYT, she’s behind a Republican in the polls.

Georgia Democrats have grown increasingly pessimistic about Stacey Abrams’s chances of ousting Gov. Brian Kemp from office, pointing to her struggles to rally key parts of her party’s coalition and her inability to appeal to a slice of moderate Republican voters who can decide the state’s elections.

Public and private polls have consistently shown her trailing Mr. Kemp, a Republican seeking a second term. And, in a particularly worrying sign for Ms. Abrams, polls also show she is drawing less support than the other high-profile Democrat on the ballot, Senator Raphael Warnock, who is seeking a first full term.

The gap between the two Democrats, which is within the margin of error in some recent surveys and as wide as 10 points in others, highlights the extent of her struggles. Though she is beloved by Democratic voters, she has lost some ground with Black men, who provided crucial backing in her narrow loss to Mr. Kemp in 2018. And while Mr. Warnock draws some support from Republican moderates, Ms. Abrams — who has been vilified more by the G.O.P. than any other statewide figure — has shown little sign of peeling off significant numbers of disaffected Republicans.

*But here’s some good news sent by reader Jez, who sent me a link to a BBC article about a woman who detected a change in her husband’s odor 12 years before he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. She detected the same odd odor on afflicted people later when when she went to a Parkinson’s support group. And, sure enough, there may be changes in skin chemistry detectable well before symptoms set in:

Researchers in Manchester have created a new method which they say can detect the disease in three minutes.

Further study will be required to validate the findings before they can develop a diagnostic test that could be used in clinics or by GPs.

Their work was inspired by Joy Milne, a retired nurse from Perth.

Joy, 72, knew her husband Les had Parkinson’s more than 12 years before he was diagnosed when she identified a change in the way he smelled.

“He had this musty rather unpleasant smell especially round his shoulders and the back of his neck and his skin had definitely changed,” she said.

She only linked the odour to the disease after Les was diagnosed and they met people at a Parkinson’s UK support group who had the same distinctive smell. Les died in June 2015.

But there’s something odd about that report, for it said that Joy knew her husband had Parkinson’s 12 years before he was diagnosed, though she didn’t connect the odor with the disease until after he was diagnosed. Those statements are contradictory.

Oh well. The important thing is that research is uncovering the basis of that odor and using it to provide early and fast diagnosis for this debilitating (and incurable) disease:

Now a team in the University of Manchester, working with Joy, has developed a simple skin-swab test which they claim is 95% accurate under laboratory conditions when it comes to telling whether people have Parkinson’s.

The researchers analysed sebum – the oily substance on skin – which was collected by using a cotton swab on patients’ backs, an area where it is less often washed away.

Using mass spectrometry, they compared 79 people with Parkinson’s with a healthy control group of 71 people.

The research found more than 4,000 unique compounds in the samples, of which 500 were different between people with Parkinson’s and the control group.

I’d like to see the differences, and whether they’re qualitative (compounds present only in people with Parkinson’s, for example) or quantitative (average difference in quantity of compounds, which is more likely and implied below. The test is supposed to be “95% effective, but we need to know the number of false positives and false negatives. There’s a publication (which I haven’t read); and another BBC article says this:

The research revealed that a number of compounds, particularly hippuric acid, eicosane, and octadecanal, were found in higher than usual concentrations on the skin of Parkinson’s patients.

They are contained in sebum – the oily secretion that coats everybody’s skin, but which is often produced in greater quantity by people with Parkinson’s, making them more likely to develop a skin complaint called seborrheic dermatitis.

Lead author Prof Perdita Barran, from the school of chemistry at the University of Manchester, told BBC Scotland: “What we found are some compounds that are more present in people who have got Parkinson’s disease and the reason we’ve discovered them is because Joy Milne could smell a difference.

As Jez said:

Although there is no cure for Parkinson’s disease, this potential test could be administered by general medics and give results in minutes. Currently, diagnosis can take years and requires specialist input. An early diagnosis would give clarity and allow those with the disease to make the most of life before the worst symptoms kick in.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn,

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is licking her chops:

A: What are you thinking about?
Hili” About what I’ve just eaten.
In Polish:
Ja: O czym myślisz?
Hili: O tym co już zjadłam.

. . . and a photo of Szaron among the apples:

**************************

A cartoon from Leigh Rubin:

From Merilee: a cat biker gang:

From Nicole. Seagulls love fries!

The Tweet of God is a bit salacious today. . .

More from Masih on the Iranian oppression of women. “There” should be “their,” of course, but I can’t believe they’d kill people for homosexuality. (They do.) Gay males are often forced to undergo transsexual surgery so they can have sex with men without being executed. (That’s a legal way to circumvent the prohibition.)

From Simon. I’m sure I’ve posted this infected snail before, but (as Richard Dawkins emphasized in our talk) it show the amazing power of natural selection on the parasitic worm that turns the snail into a sign that says “eat me!” It’s the extended phenotype of the worm! (See more at Wired.)  This is convergent evolution between a worm and a neon sign.

From Nancie. This is a goose, not a duck, but it’s still amazing.

From the Auschwitz Memorial:

Tweets from Matthew. If you don’t know what an arcus cloud is, go here. Sound up for the thunder!

Good way to find a lost child. And yes, watch to the end when Eduardo shows up.

Can anybody find a video of this squid gliding? The video below tells us a lot about this squid, but has only photos and no video.

(I think Richard also mentioned this animal in his discussion of Flights of Fancy):

Learn more about the flying squid:

40 thoughts on “Thursday: Hili dialogue”

  1. His [Long’s] campaign slogan was “Every man a King”, which was also the title of his autobiography.

    It was also the title of a song Huey Long cowrote. Randy Newman — who spent some of his formative, childhood years in Louisiana — covered it on his 1974 album Good Old Boys.

    1. I have always seen far too many parallels between Huey Long and Trump. MAGA is basically Every Man a King all over again.

      1. There are certainly parallels. But Long, for all his faults — and they were myriad — actually wanted to improve the lot of the working stiff. Trump wishes only to enflame them over kulturkampf issues (while padding the wallets of the rich).

  2. News from the UK. There is a health scare with respect to the Queen. Princes Charles and William are on their way to Balmoral (where she is), so it doesn’t look good.

    1. I worried yesterday as she greeted the new PM Truss at Balmoral, it appeared that the top of her right hand was severely discolored or bruised like she had very recently had an IV attached. But she seemed to move well.

    2. Yup, if Liz pops her clogs, as looks likely, the TV and radio coverage is going to drive us all nuts.

        1. For this, PVRs were invented.
          Well, maybe not for this, precisely, but I can handle up to 6 days of channel-to-channel Brenda-paper before having to reach for the DVDs or non-PVR recordings.
          Shrug – the black ties are out. BFD.

        1. .ZA are playing … some ball game? In .UK? Just a second while I dig my games master up and cane his corpse until I get some detail. Be the most useful thing he did in his … corporation (bodily existence, before and after death – is there a better word?).

  3. A document describing a foreign government’s military defenses, including its nuclear capabilities, was found by FBI agents who searched former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and private club last month …

    No different from an overdue library book, as Trump’s lawyers argued to district judge Aileen Cannon in a Ft. Pierce federal court last week.

    1. Who would have imagined that we’d need a law forbidding someone from steering a case to a given court presided over by a judge that they had appointed.

      1. Turns out, this wasn’t the first time Trump tried to steer one of his cases to Judge Cannon, either. Earlier this year, Trump brought a lawsuit in the Southern District of Florida against Hillary Clinton and others over various grievances and filed it in the satellite courthouse in Ft. Pierce, where his appointee, Judge Aileen Cannon, sits as the only district judge. The plan was foiled when the case was instead assigned to Judge Donald Middlebrooks of the court’s West Palm Beach division, a Bill Clinton appointee. Trump then had the chutzpah to move to disqualify Judge Middlebrooks solely on the basis that Judge Middlebrooks had been appointed by the spouse of one of the named defendants.

        Here, have a look at footnote three (highlighted) of Judge Middlebrooks’s order denying the motion to disqualify, calling Trump out for his hypocrisy.

  6. I have found it hilarious how many people on the Arabian Peninsula love the Ellen DeGeneres show. If anything, that shows me how fast younger populations are adapting to the 21st century.

    And my favorite English letter is Ƿ.

  7. I’ve never understood why anyone should pledge allegiance “to the flag.” The flag is just a pattern on a piece of cloth. It misses the point of everything remotely important to pledge allegiance to the flag (adding only as an afterthought “and to the Republic, 4 witchet stands”). What about just having it be some variant of the oaths of office, referring to the Constitution of the United States? Also, the flag is derived from the flag of the British East India Company unless I’m mistaken.

  9. I would claim that this is one of the finest works of sculpture in history, and of course many agree.

    And it inspired the work for which Chris McManus won the 2002 Ig Nobel Prize for medicine.

  10. Scots weren’t always so touchy about ‘Scotch’. Scottish settlers in Ontario, Canada, referred to themselves as ‘Scotch’ and even used ‘scotch’ as a synonym for cheapskate. See John Kenneth Galbraith’s potted history, ‘The Scotch’, which I read a very long time ago.

  11. I’m always fooled momentarily whenever I see a mention of Gulf states in a headline. It’s the same with Georgia–the other one, not Ray Charles’s. I just immediately figured that most likely Mississippi or Alabama had launched a campaign against Netflix. I’m relieved, but only momentarily.

    1. Ha ha, I read that the same way. I had a moment of confusion when I hit the word “Islam”—wait, what?—until it all became depressingly clear.

    3. In the oilfield, you get to check “which Gulf?” pretty damned quick in any recitation of any story using the word “Gulf”.
      Well, outside the USA (in a very international workforce) ; you’d regularly meet Americans fresh out of the bayous who still hadn’t learned that, for example, we drive on the left here. There were others, but predominantly it was Americans.
      Then, of course, there is the fairly prolific oil province of the Gulf of Bohai. But few Americans are allowed to go there, so effectively it doesn’t exist.

    1. ‘Cause Ford forgot to wear his helmet while playing football at U. Michigan (is what Lydon Johnson — who hadn’t much respect for Ford’s intellect — would’ve answered). 🙂

  13. The Pledge of Allegiance is the American shibboleth. Fifty years ago, before passports were required to travel between the US and Canada, I was flying with a one-way ticket from Saskatchewan to Orlando. I was a long-haired blue-jeaned 18-year-old. US immigration didn’t believe I had US citizenship and my Florida drivers’ license wasn’t enough for them. The agent thought I was a Canadian heading south for a winter of citrus harvesting. We had a few minutes face-off, then a supervisor came over. “Mr Miksha, can you recite the Pledge?” Immediately after delivering my twelve seconds of monotone spiel, hand over heart while facing the front right corner of the custom’s line, I was sent off to my plane.

    1. Lucky they didn’t ask you to sing the Star-Spangled Banner, Ron; if you’re like most of the rest of us Yanks, you’d still be in the Immigration lock-up, especially if they expected to hear it sung on key. 🙂

    2. With a name like that, I’m surprised you weren’t jailed on approaching the border, for being a Soviet mental infiltrator. Too cute, too fluffy, too appealing.

    1. There’s an animated GIF somewhere of SpongePants Square-Bob turning over stones, searching for something (a seminal ejaculate, IIRC) to give.

  15. I don’t understand the Texas ruling on the AIDS drug. It’s not only gay men who have the virus. How do these shortsighted bigots justify taking medication away from anyone who needs it?

    1. According to the Fundies, anything that abets a sex act they find squicky violates their religious freedom.

    2. The straight women who have the virus .. well, they’re women : – don’t matter.
      Haemophiliacs with the virus – it serves them right for not being Americans. Where is Haemo, or Philiac, and why aren’t they separated by an ‘ooge wall, yet?
      Straight men – serves them right for not being virgins on wedding night, and not cleaving only unto one for the rest of their life. (Is divorce legal in Texas? Still?)
      The Bible justifies taking punishment “unto the seventh generation” ; that’s where to start in trying to understand these deranged bigot.s

  16. The Texas PrEP suit may well be motivated by religious bigotry. However the Affordable Care Act is ham-handed in mandating that insurance companies cover PrEP without any mechanism to challenge whether this expenditure is a reasonable use of health-care dollars (or forgone insurance-company profits if you like.) The lawyer may be just being creative in finding a seam in the federal monolith to stick his crowbar into.

    PrEP is marketed principally to HIV-negative men who have receptive anal intercourse with partners who have positive or unknown HIV status. For women it’s a niche product aimed at those who are stuck with having sex with a known HIV +ve partner who won’t wear a condom. (I.V. drug users who are for now HIV-negative are another target market.) For all intents and purposes in workplace insurance, PrEP is a drug for gay sex, just like the company says.

    The judge is not “taking medication away from anyone.” He is just saying that if you want to protect yourself from getting HIV from anal intercourse it is not reasonable to make your co-workers pay this benefit for you, especially if they (or the company) raise the specious (to me), but possibly Constitutionally sound, objection on religious grounds of supporting a particularly high-risk form of promiscuity.

    $20,000 a year is a lot of money to spend on each of “hundreds of thousands of [healthy] Americans” who have nothing medically wrong with them, just to keep them from getting a now non-fatal disease that one would think that they would be incentivized enough to avoid with existing behavioural methods. It exceeds the costs used in a British cost-effectiveness modeling study (cited in CMAJ below) that predicted that PrEP would be cost-saving (from expensive infections prevented) if the analysis used a time horizon of 40 years. But it costs a lot up front.

    For a non-binding consensus guideline produced for a country that always has one eye on cost, see below. Note that drugs prescribed to working-age Canadians are paid either out of pocket or by extended health-care benefits offered at the discretion of the employer, much as in the U.S. But our guidelines developers recognize that cost is a barrier to doing everything perfectly, since many patients will indeed be self-paying. And benefits managers would surely baulk at reimbursing a $20,000 prescription every year to a healthy employee with no disease or disability. Our federal government does not mandate that private insurance plans or provincial governments cover or fund any specifically named treatments.

    https://www.cmaj.ca/content/189/47/E1448

    Note that PrEP for men is recommended here only in those who engage in anal intercourse without condoms and who have another high-risk behaviour such as multiple partners in a setting with a high prevalence of HIV. This is a more restrictive recommendation than what the CDC advises in the U.S. where cost is no object as long as the CDC isn’t paying. “Providers should offer PrEP to anyone [without regard to sexual practices] who asks for it.”

    https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/clinicians/prevention/prep.html — click through to relevant pdfs.

    Again, religious objection is not the way to address any important public policy question but the company has a point about being compelled to subsidize high-risk behaviour with its workers’ insurance premiums.

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