Friday: Hili dialogue

March 3, 2023 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the tail end of the work week:  Friday, March 3, 2023, and National Moscow Mule Day, a drink I like a lot but rarely have. It’s best served in a copper tankard, like below. The recipe is simple (here), involving lime juice, good ginger beer, and vodka. Try one!

 

It’s also Canadian Bacon Day (cultural appropriation!), 33 Flavors Day (Baskin-Robbins, of course), National Cold Cuts Day, National Mulled Wine Day, World Hearing Day, World Wildlife Day, Hinamatsuri or “Girl’s Day” in Japan, and What if Cats and Dogs Had Opposable Thumbs Day. And with that, I can resist this post, one of the best cat commercials ever (we don’t have to worry about d*gs with opposable thumbs, as they’d just be the same):

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the March 3 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Top o’ the Nooz: The jurors in the Alex Murdaugh case didn’t have to deliberate long before they found him guilty of murdering his wife and youngest son: they jawed just three hours before finding him guilty. He now faces 30 years to life for each conviction, and still awaits trial for financial fraud. He’ll leave jail only in a box.  Here’s a screenshot from a NYT video showing him at the moment he was pronounced guilty:

NYT: Pool photo by Andrew J. Whitaker

The paper also has an op-ed by Farhad Manjoo: “Why Alex Murdaugh’s quick conviction worries me.” The main issue is that despite the complexities of this six week case, with dozens of witnesses, the jury breezed through the evidence so quickly. Were they just giving a gut reaction?

*Here’s one potential global war among the several looming now: inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, during an inspection of one of Iran’s nuclear production sites, found uranium particles enriched to 83.7%. Enrichment of 90% is what’s needed to make a weapon, so Iran’s nearly there. I told you so, but that’s not rocket science: everyone knew that they’d get there someday, but various U.S. administrations, including Biden’s, have thought they could bargain Iran out of making nuclear warheads. What a joke! Iran will have its weapons, just as Korea will.

Until the Trump administration’s unilateral withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal in 2018, Iran was known to produce only low-enriched uranium of the kind used in nuclear power plants or for medical purposes. In recent years, however, Tehran has blown past many of the accord’s restrictions, stockpiling uranium enriched to up to 60 percent.

The new report “places Iran on the cusp of weapons-grade fissile material,” said Robert Litwak, a nonproliferation expert and director of international security studies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Iran has long denied seeking nuclear weapons, but many experts believe the regime wants to assemble the key ingredients for a nuclear bomb so it can build one quickly if it decides to do so, a window known as “breakout time. ”

This is a test for Biden:

Pentagon policy chief Colin Kahl offered that breakout time in House testimony Tuesday. Asked by Republican lawmakers why the Biden administration had tried to revive the 2015 agreement, Kahl said, “Because Iran’s nuclear progress … has been remarkable” since the U.S. withdrawal from the deal. Before, “it would have taken Iran about 12 months to produce one bomb’s worth of fissile material. Now it would take about 12 days,” he said, shortening the “few weeks” assessment used by the administration over the past year.

President Biden has said repeatedly that he will not allow Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon, and that “all options” remain on the table to prevent it. Talks his administration began on reviving the nuclear deal are currently off the table as both sides held to hard lines. But the administration still maintains that the best way to resolve the conflict with Iran is through diplomacy.

I don’t believe Biden here but I do believe Israel will do everything it can to prevent Iran from getting a bomb, for what they’d do with it would be obvious. Iran could wipe out their whole country with just a couple of bombs. If this new report is true, it’s entirely possible that Israel will strike Iran to stop the bomb-making, just as they have before. And then all hell will break loose.

*I would never vote for Nikki Haley for President, but I thought she was a damn sight better Republican candidate than Trump; and if the GOP takes the presidency next year, I would at least want a candidate who isn’t mentally ill. In Pamela Paul’s latest NYT editorial,  “The serene hypocrisy of Nikki Haley“, however, doesn’t paint Hailey as that different from Trump (remember, she started out as a pro-Trumper and then backed away from him later, which is worrisome). 

Astonishingly, some people still see Nikki Haley as one of the “good” Trump cabinet members, the future of a more tolerant and accepting Republican Party. [JAC: I guess she’s referring to me.] Like those anti-Trumpers who willfully interpreted each casual flick of Melania’s wrist as a prospect of rebellion, Haley hopefuls want to believe that a conscience might yet emerge from Trump’s Team of Liars, that the G.O.P’s latest showcasing of a Can-Do Immigrant Success Story can somehow undo years of xenophobia.

This requires listening to only half of what Haley says.

But if you listen to the full spectrum of her rhetoric, Haley clearly wants to capture the base that yearns for Trumpism — and to occupy the moral high ground of the post-Trump era. She wants to tout the credential of having served in a presidential cabinet (she was Trump’s U.N. ambassador) — and bask in recognition for having left of her own accord. She wants to criticize Americans’ obsession with identity politics — and highlight her own identity as a significant qualification.

There are plenty of reasons to approach Haley with wariness: her middle-school-cafeteria style of meting out revenge, her robotic “I have seen evil” presidential campaign announcement video, the P.T.A. briskness with which she dismisses a bothersome fact. But most alarming is her untroubled insistence on having her cake and eating it too. Even in short-term-memory Washington, rife as it is with wafflers and flip-floppers, the serene hypocrisy of Nikki Haley stands out. She wants it both ways — and she wants it her way most of all.

Paul then recounts Haley’s hyprocrisy, like first defending the display of the Confederate flag over South Carolina’s Capitol building, and then ordering it removed—but only after a white supremacist Dylann Roof killed 9 people in South Carolna. I’m not worried, though: I have no say in who the Republicans choose as a candidate, and Paul thinks Haley will wind up in the Vice-Presidential pool. Right now–and it’s early days–DeSantis looks like the GOP front-runner if Trump decides not to run.

*Speaking of potential women Presidents, though, I’m not that keen on Kamala Harris, either, who seems to have kept out of sight most of Biden’s term, despite having been named the person in charge of fixing the situation at our southern border. Yes, I know Vice-Presidents are supposed to sit around with their thumbs up their butt and support the President, but she doesn’t seem to have done much of anything, and I’d still rather see Mayor Pete as President (he may have blown that chance, though after his lassitude in getting to East Palestine).

But Donna Brazile, journalist, teacher, political strategist, and twice head of the Democratic National Committee, has an op-ed in the NYT with the title  “The excellence of Kamala Harris is hiding in plain sight.” What? Here’s Brazile’s take: Harris held up under racial scrutiny as a black woman, she traveled the country meeting Americans, has met with foreign leaders, and has done these things:

Ms. Harris has pushed for federal legislation to secure voting rights, worked to expand access to the child tax and earned-income tax credits, is co-leader of the White House Task Force on Worker Organizing and Empowerment, was an integral part of the White House’s push to get Americans vaccinated against Covid, and is the chair of the National Space Council.

But too much of Brazile’s approbation comes from Harris performing decently given that she is black, but how much racism has she really faced? I can’t think of any, although surely there are some dark whispers among Republicans. All in all, though, I thought Harris would do more, and I’m not enthusiastic about her being a replacement for Biden. Given that he will probably run anyway, we’d have another four years to see her mettle.

*We have two cases of lowered standards in the interest of “equity”, one of them worrisome. That’s the lowering of the bar for passing the bar in Delaware, just mandated by the state Supreme Court.

The Delaware Supreme Court lowered the passing score on the state’s bar exam amid other changes reportedly intended to increase racial diversity among the state’s lawyers.

The 200-question multiple-choice exam will be offered twice instead of once a year beginning in 2024 – and its passing score will be lowered from 145 to 143, according to local outlet WHYY.

The number of essays on the exam will be decreased from eight to four, and the number of essay topics will be reduced from 14 to 10.

The clerkship requirement is also being lowered from 21 weeks to 12 weeks, and the mandatory list of 25 legal proceedings that potential lawyers must attend has been shortened to 18 out of 30 possible items.

That’s a pretty severe relaxation of standards! But, in a masterpiece of dissimulation the court’s Chief Justice asserted that this was not a lowering of standards but “a ‘modernization’ of the admission process aimed at aligning with the standards in other states.” As John McWhorter would say, that is simply a lie.

The other bar-lowering was at Columbia University, where McWhorter teaches (he’ll have something to say about this):

Columbia University will no longer require SAT or ACT scores in undergraduate admissions, making it the first Ivy League college to implement the pandemic emergency measure as its official policy.

The Morningside Heights institution first dropped its test score requirement at the beginning of the pandemic when testing sites shuttered, and the measure had been extended through next school year’s admissions cycle, the college newspaper Columbia Spectator reported.

The decision was “rooted in the belief that students are dynamic, multi-faceted individuals who cannot be defined by any single factor,” read the university website.

“Our review is purposeful and nuanced — respecting varied backgrounds, voices and experiences — in order to best determine an applicant’s suitability for admission and ability to thrive in our curriculum and our community, and to advance access to our educational opportunities.”

It’s interesting that they realized that “holistic” admissions were  better than standardized tests just when the country was going whole hog on diversity. What criteria will they use now? Spunk? Personality? (Both of those have been touted as “alternative ways of admitting.”)   (h/t Luana).

*Bad idea of the decade department.This is just plain weird.  During the pandemic, the UK government was contemplating exterminating every cat on the isle(s).  (h/t: Jez)

The UK government considered whether it might have to ask people to exterminate all pet cats during the early days of the Covid pandemic, a former health minister said.

It was unclear whether domestic cats could transmit coronavirus, James Bethell said.

He told Channel 4 News: “What we shouldn’t forget is how little we understood about this disease. There was a moment we were very unclear about whether domestic pets could transmit the disease.

“In fact, there was an idea at one moment that we might have to ask the public to exterminate all the cats in Britain. Can you imagine what would have happened if we had wanted to do that?”

In July 2020, at the height of the Covid crisis, cat owners were warned not to kiss their pets after a female Siamese became the first known animal in the UK to catch the disease.

Wait a tick! Why not d*gs? Why did they single out cats? Are they considered the Jews of pets?  Can you imagine the outcry if they had tried this, given that the UK loves its cats? PLUS there is no cat registry in the UK, so how would they have ensured that all the cats were slaughtered? Everyone would have immediately sequestered their pets, and the stalwart would have rounded up and protected strays. But I want to know why they left out d*gs? Was it because one cat was known to have transmitted the virus?

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Szaron like Laundry Day:

A: This is a freshly washed blanket.
Hili: That’s why it tempted us.
In Polish:
Ja: To jest świeżo wyprany koc.
Hili: I dlatego nas skusił.

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

From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy:

From Nicole:

From Facebook, a John McPherson cartoon:

God toots on Mastodon. What, no heaven? Is he up there all alone?

 

Richard’s tweet about his Spectator piece and Elon Musk’s response:

From Masih. French translation:

The mother of an intoxicated student violently arrested for protesting. This is how a plainclothes agent (the famous “lebass shakhsi”) treats the mother of a poisoned student this Wednesday, March 1 in the 13 Aban girls’ school in Tehran, before arresting her.

From Malcolm, some lovely “dirt art” on a car. Much better than writing “wash me”!

From Barry, “a new kind of rock music” (sound up, of course):

From the Auschwitz Museum: an Orthodox Jew gassed upon arrival:

Tweets from Dr. Cobb: The first one is of one of my grad students (now a prof and dean at Duke), lecturing on a Star Trek cruise. (Mohamed Noor is a big trekkie!):

A sleepy call duck:

 

Matthew’s own tweet, and I agree. Blessed be those who don’t enforce copyrights on stuff that needs to be widespread!

30 thoughts on “Friday: Hili dialogue”

  1. Oh I need to hear this again :

    ” “rooted in the belief that students are dynamic, multi-faceted individuals who cannot be defined by any single factor,” read the university website.
    “Our review is purposeful and nuanced — respecting varied backgrounds, voices and experiences — in order to best determine an applicant’s suitability for admission and ability to thrive in our curriculum and our community, and to advance access to our educational opportunities.” ”

    Shout it from the rooftops!

    Reply

    1. It appears that my (and Jerry’s undergrad) alma mater has made the same decision as Columbia as written in this morning’s Wapo ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/03/02/test-optional-colleges-columbia-william-mary/ ). There is a fairly extensive interview, that really made no sense to me, with some William and Mary dean-types. Why can’t standardized test scores be a part of a “multi-faceted” application? I am not convinced of the value of this approach and the William and Mary representatives seem to sink into words that characterize a move toward mediocrity rather than as aspiration toward achieving the best. I guess their definition of “the best” has moved on since the 20th century as they cherry pick an example of an applicant with a 1500 boards score who did not make the cut and they denigrate the value of what a student produces in sitting for a 3-4 hour test on a Saturday morning. Unless things have changed radically – and they may have- I recall sitting for many tests for three hours at William and Mary….they were called semester exams.

      In the words of one of the borscht belt comedians many years ago: “I feel like the world is a tuxedo and I am a brown pair of shoes”.

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      1. It’s been said many times on these site, but I can never resist the opportunity, either on here or in real life.

        “OH, no! William and Mary won’t do!”

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  2. On this day:
    1857 – Second Opium War: France and the United Kingdom declare war on China.

    1861 – Alexander II of Russia signs the Emancipation Manifesto, freeing serfs.

    1873 – Censorship in the United States: The U.S. Congress enacts the Comstock Law, making it illegal to send any “obscene literature and articles of immoral use” through the mail.

    1875 – The first ever organized indoor game of ice hockey is played in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

    1938 – Oil is discovered in Saudi Arabia.

    1939 – In Bombay, Mohandas Gandhi begins a hunger strike in protest at the autocratic rule in British India.

    1943 – World War II: In London, 173 people are killed in a crush while trying to enter an air-raid shelter at Bethnal Green tube station.

    1969 – Apollo program: NASA launches Apollo 9 to test the lunar module. [The pace at which the project moved forwards is astonishing.]

    1986 – The Australia Act 1986 commences, causing Australia to become fully independent from the United Kingdom.

    1991 – An amateur video captures the beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers.

    2005 – Margaret Wilson is elected as Speaker of the New Zealand House of Representatives. [Until August 23, 2006, all the highest political offices (including Elizabeth II as Head of State), were occupied by women, making New Zealand the first country for this to occur.]

    Births:
    1831 – George Pullman, American engineer and businessman, founded the Pullman Company (d. 1897).

    1839 – Jamsetji Tata, Indian businessman, founded Tata Group (d. 1904).

    1847 – Alexander Graham Bell, Scottish-American engineer and academic, invented the telephone (d. 1922).

    1869 – Henry Wood, English conductor (d. 1944). [Conducted the Proms for nearly half a century, introducing hundreds of new works to British audiences.]

    1882 – Charles Ponzi, Italian businessman (d. 1949).

    1911 – Jean Harlow, American actress (d. 1937). [The “Blonde Bombshell” was just 26 when she died.]

    1920 – Ronald Searle, English-French soldier and illustrator (d. 2011).

    1953 – Robyn Hitchcock, English singer-songwriter and guitarist.

    1968 – Brian Cox, English keyboard player and physicist.

    Didn’t get out alive: (Spoiler: None of us will…)
    1703 – Robert Hooke, English architect and philosopher (b. 1635). [A member of the Royal Society, and its curator of experiments from 1662, Hooke built his own compound microscope and discovered microorganisms in 1665, as, independently, did Antoni van Leeuwenhoek. An impoverished scientific inquirer, Hooke later found wealth and esteem by performing over half of the architectural surveys after London’s great fire of 1666.]

    1959 – Lou Costello, American actor and comedian (b. 1906).

    1961 – Paul Wittgenstein, Austrian-American pianist (b. 1887). [After losing his right arm during WWI, he devised novel techniques that allowed him to play chords previously regarded as impossible for a five-fingered pianist. He commissioned new piano concerti for the left hand alone from famous composers including Britten, Prokofiev, and Ravel.]

    1983 – Hergé, Belgian author and illustrator (b. 1907).

    1987 – Danny Kaye, American actor, singer, and dancer (b. 1911).

    2006 – Ivor Cutler, Scottish poet and songwriter (b. 1923).

    2010 – Michael Foot, English journalist and politician, Secretary of State for Employment (b. 1913). [Leader of the UK’s Labour Party (1980-83), his tragedy was to be too erudite and decent for the political age he found himself in.]

    Reply

    1. “2010 – Michael Foot, English journalist and politician, Secretary of State for Employment (b. 1913). [Leader of the UK’s Labour Party (1980-83), his tragedy was to be too erudite and decent for the political age he found himself in.]”

      Foot led the Labour Party to one of its worst general election defeats of the 20th century in 1983, when Labour lost 60 seats. At least until Jeremy Corbyn led Labour to an even more crushing defeat in the general election of 2019.

      Reply

    2. Yes, Jez, the pace of the Apollo Project was astonishing. My father was involved on the Surveyor soft-landing piece of the overall engineering effort. There were FIVE full scale projects being run simultaneously to make the desired result of a man on the moon before the end of the 1960’s decade happen. There was Project Mercury/Gemini, the “how does man live and operate in space” effort; Project Ranger, the effort to navigate to hit the moon; Project Lunar Orbiter, to learn how to orbit the moon, take high resolution photos of potential landing areas and learn of any anomalous paramters affecting the orbit; Project Surveyor, to soft land an unmanned vehicle getting very high resolution photos and testing surface soil mechanics; and FINALY, the mannedApollo landing itself.

      I watched as my father’s nice 8-4:30, M-F, aeronautical engineering job working on airplane landing gear and braking research for the NACA, became somewhat of a 24/7 requirement with travel from Virginia to the Jet Propulsion Labs on the west coast a constant theme in the newly created NASA. Huge aspirations, budgets, and pressures throughout the decade.

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  3. Yes, well you can count on the press painting any Republican candidate for President as not that different from Trump (or, as they have begin to do for DeSantis, even worse). Since MSM carries more water for the Democratic Party than the Delaware aqueduct, they can hardly be considered objective, even if they haven’t officially rejected objectivity, yet.

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  6. The trick for a Republican challenger to Trump for the 2024 nomination is to convince the Party base that it can carry on Trumpism better than Trump. Although the Party elites would love to get rid of Trump once and for all, their finding a viable alternative is difficult, if not impossible. He remains the odds-on favorite. Only if he becomes physically unable to run could we expect a real race for the nomination. Trump’s chances will be further enhanced should his opposition fail to coalesce around a single opponent. This failure made it easier for Trump to have won the nomination in 2016.

    Reply

    1. The Democratic Party had coalesced around Hillary by the time Super Tuesday rolled around back in 2016 (or, rather, the DNC conspired to make Hillary the candidate, and I say that as someone who is very much not a fan of Bernie Sanders), so they were not late at all. Hell, the Party had decided she would be the candidate as early as 2015, as revealed in the Wikileaks email debacle. Hillary lost because she was a uniquely awful candidate.

      Pokemon go to the polls!

      Reply

      1. I clearly noted that it was the Republican failure to coalesce around an opposition nominee to Trump in 2016 that made it easier for him to gain that party’s nomination. I was not talking about the Democrats.

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      2. “Hillary lost because she was a uniquely awful candidate.”

        I seriously doubt that.

        She lost due to myriad reasons, but the biggest blow came when Comey wrote a letter to Congress, telling them the FBI was re-opening the email investigation 11 days before the 2016 election. Plus Putin.

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  7. “The main issue is that despite the complexities of this six week case, with dozens of witnesses, the jury breezed through the evidence so quickly. Were they just giving a gut reaction?”

    I also find the verdict in this trial rather disconcerting. The prosecution had zero direct evidence of him committing the crime. No DNA, no murder weapon, barely anything at all beyond the fact that he’s a lying liar who lies and has done other bad things. It feels like the case was decided entirely upon the idea that he’s just a bad person. Considering how easy it is for prosecutors and law enforcement to make even good and honest people look like liars and bad people (not that they needed help in this particular case), I can’t help but be a bit frightened by the jury not only being unanimous, but deliberating for only three hours.

    Reply

    1. Being caught on a recording at the scene of the murders just before they happened, having strenuously denied going there on the day in question, possibly struck the jury as a bit of a clincher, I suppose?

      Reply

      1. I do think that’s likely what did it. Unfortunately, even if he had admitted to being there, I still imagine they would have convicted him. Basically the best evidence the prosecution had was that he was there shortly before the murders and lied about it. But (1) I imagine many people would lie about that, if they thought there was no evidence to the contrary, and (2) it doesn’t actually prove anything to the point of close to “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

        I also find it extremely suspect that the prosecution somehow wasn’t able to “get into” his son’s phone with the video on it until just a couple of days before Murdaugh took the stand, only then discovering the video. It gives me the sense that they actually had this video up their sleeve the entire time, and withheld it during discovery for exactly this purpose. I will be interested to see if the process of how they finally managed to crack the phone after over a year of failing to do so is examined. I mean, what kind of special encryption the phone have that they weren’t able to access it for so long?!?.

        Reply

        1. Nothing specific about this case, just wanted to point out that we, the general public, almost certainly don’t have anything like the information that the jury was given on this case. Some years back I was a juror for a murder trial, and it was quite the experience. Fascinating and stressful.

          The evidence that the state showed us (the jury) didn’t include any smoking gun evidence of the actual murder. No one witnessed the murder itself, it wasn’t caught on tape, they didn’t have the gun with prints of the murderer on it. It was much more mundane. What they had done was gathered all the little bits of boring information necessary to reconstruct the movements of both the murderer and the victim throughout the day of the murder. And all that information showed that without doubt the murderer and the victim were in a certain area of about the size of a typical living room at the same moment, the time of the murder. There was no single big piece of this puzzle, it was a whole bunch of meticulously gathered little bits of data. The conclusion was easy enough to describe in an article, but all the data that lead to the conclusion would have taken a transcript of the hours and hours that the prosecution spent presenting this part of their case during the trial. There was much more to the prosecutions case of course, motive, etc.

          Reply

          1. Thanks! That was very interesting.

            I guess I can’t help but be suspicious of this prosecution team, after years of law classes and experience in the legal profession (which taught me how prosecutors and law enforcement can construct what seem like logically ironclad circumstances out of entirely innocuous facts), and, much more importantly, the sudden appearance of the most important piece of evidence in the trial. Either the team trying to crack the phone was as technologically illiterate as my grandparents, or the prosecution withheld the video until the most advantageous moment possible. Considering this, I can’t help but wonder what other shenanigans went on.

            I’d love to hear from Ken on this subject.

          2. I haven’t been following this case, but it does sound interesting. I always like to see what Ken has to say too.

          3. Also, I want to be clear and say that I’m not rendering my own verdict on whether or not Murdaugh is guilty. I have no idea. I’m just bringing up some questions and shining a light on what I believe are some worrisome aspects of this trial that are indicative of wider issues in our justice system.

  8. (Paul Wittgenstein sketch.) And of course brother of Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.
    Some of the left-hand pieces commissioned for P. Wittgenstein have entered the standard repertoire, such as the Ravel concerto.

    Reply

  9. Why bother with ACT / SAT scores when an applicant’s home address and the demographics of her school district provide ample information to screen future members of the activist country clubs?

    Reply

  11. The decision (to drop SAT & ACT scores from admission standards) was “rooted in the belief that students are dynamic, multi-faceted individuals who cannot be defined by any single factor,” read the university website.

    Uh oh. We know where this is going. First Columbia students are too dynamic and multi-faceted to be “defined by” test scores, then they’re too dynamic and multi-faceted to be defined by declaring majors or showing up to class. Eventually the assumption that a Columbia student has to attend or even be enrolled in Columbia University will be seen as reductionist and bigoted. There’s not just one way, ‘phobe.

    This will potentially increase the diversity numbers to “everyone on the planet” and at last we’ll have equity.

    Reply

    1. Didn’t George Santos say he graduated from Columbia? (or was it that he’d founded the institution?) Now everyone everywhere all the time can graduate from Columbia.

      Reply

      1. I speculate that George Santos caused the Nord Stream pipline explosion. (If that’s what it takes to initiate a congressional curiosity about and inquiry into the explosion.)

        Reply

    1. Sorry, I don’t know if you meant to promote this article as your own position, so the following isn’t aimed at you, but at the article.

      This article seems like a whole lot of implication, prevarication, and weasel-wording to make readers think outdoor cats are a far bigger problem than they likely are. I’ve read many similar articles, often with at least some statistics that suggest outdoor cats are dangerous, though never seeming to rise to the level of threatening the extinction of species. Here are some key quotes from the linked article (emphasis mine)

      “Their crimes include contributing to 33 extinctions around the world and counting, to say nothing of their potential to spread deadly diseases like rabies and Toxoplasmosis. They hold…the power to destroy that delicate web—like, well, a cat unraveling a ball of string.”

      That one paragraph alone is a whole lot of doomsaying based on weasel words. First, who knew cats can commit crimes! But anyway. Oh, they have the “potential.” They “hold the power” to do terrible things. They “contribute to” the spread of deadly diseases (well, in that case, we should also kill off all raccoons, coyotes, foxes, etc. You can see where this chain of logic leads). Man, these cats are starting to sound like the Nazi party and advocates of general human extinction to “save the Earth” rolled into one uniquely horrifying and sociopathic species the likes of which we’ve never seen!

      Continuing…

      “Marra tells the story of Tibbles the cat, who traveled with her owner to an untouched island south of New Zealand in 1894. There, she single-pawedly caused the extinction of the Stephens Island wren, a small, flightless bird found only in that part of the world. Most cats aren’t as deadly as Tibbles…”

      Above they give a story with no citation. A single cat driving an entire species to extinction? But let’s say it’s true. The answer here seems to be “don’t bring a cat onto a tiny island with a delicate ecosystem,” rather than “all cats are extremely dangerous serial killers who threaten the very fabric of ecosystems.” And then we see the other reason it’s brought up: to paint all outdoor cats as having the dormant possibility to be so “deadly” as to singlehandedly wipe an entire species from the Earth.

      What an awful article. If they were trying to convince me that the mass killing of cats is necessary, they could have at least presented an iota of data that actually showed such necessity. Instead, they merely implied it via anecdote and wilful misrepresentation.

      Reply

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