Wednesday: Hili dialogue

September 27, 2023 • 6:45 am

Welcome to a “hump day” (“Araw ng umbok” in Filipino), Wednesday September 27, 2023, and National Chocolate Milk Day. This was the only milk I drank in the junior-high cafeteria, and it costs 2¢ per half pint. When I was very young, my father Floyd used to tell me that chocolate milk came from brown cows—and I believed him.  Surprisingly, many adults still do today!

It’s also Ancestor Appreciation Day, National Day of Forgiveness, World Dense Breast Day (a couple of my female friends have this mammogram-frustrating issue), World School Milk Day, National Corned Beef Hash Day, National Women’s Health and Fitness Day,World Tourism Day, National Gay Men’s HIV/AIDS Awareness Day, and, in Poland, Polish Underground State’s Day. 

It’s Google’s 25th birthday, and if you click on the Google Doodle below, you’ll see their celebration:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the September 27 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The breaking news is that, in a civil suit, a NY judge found the Trumpster was guilty of grossly inflating his property values (the overvaluation could be over $2 billion!) in order to make himself look wealthier than he was. The judge reamed the Orange Man out in his decision, and the result is that there will apparently be no civil trial—only a determination of what his penalty will be.

A New York judge ruled on Tuesday that Donald J. Trump persistently committed fraud by inflating the value of his assets, and stripped the former president of control over some of his signature New York properties.

The surprising decision by Justice Arthur F. Engoron is a major victory for Attorney General Letitia James in her lawsuit against Mr. Trump, effectively deciding that no trial was needed to determine that he had fraudulently secured favorable terms on loans and insurance deals.

Ms. James has argued that Mr. Trump inflated the value of his properties by as much as $2.2 billion and is seeking a penalty of about $250 million in a trial scheduled to begin as early as Monday.

Justice Engoron wrote that the annual financial statements that Mr. Trump submitted to banks and insurance companies “clearly contain fraudulent valuations that defendants used in business.”

Mr. Trump, for his part, noted that Justice Engoron was a Democrat and called him “deranged.”

While the trial will determine the size of the penalty, Justice Engoron’s ruling granted one of the biggest punishments Ms. James sought: the cancellation of business certificates that allow some of Mr. Trump’s New York properties to operate, a move that could have major repercussions for the Trump family business.

The decision will likely end Trump’s control of much of his empire, including his flagship “Trump Tower” in Manhattan. But the penalty, $250 million, is chump change for Trump, and even though he be guilty, he’s not a convicted criminal, for this is a civil suit.  He won’t be wearing stripes.

*Amazon is getting sued by both the Federal Trade Commission and 17 states for creating a retail monopoly through illegal business practices:

The Federal Trade Commission and 17 states sued Amazon on Tuesday, setting up a long-awaited antitrust fight with the e-commerce giant that could alter the way Americans shop for everything from toilet paper to electronics online.

The 172-page suit, the federal government’s most significant challenge to the power of the online store, accused Amazon of protecting a monopoly over swaths of online retail by squeezing merchants and favoring its own services.

For consumers, that meant “artificially higher prices” as merchants were blocked from selling their products for less on other sites, and a worse shopping experience as Amazon boosted its own products and peppered its search results with ads, the lawsuit said. The retailer’s tactics made it impossible for its rivals to compete, the agency and states said.

“A single company, Amazon, has seized control over much of the online retail economy,” said the lawsuit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington. “It exploits its monopolies in ways that enrich Amazon but harm its customers: both the tens of millions of American households who regularly shop on Amazon’s online superstore and the hundreds of thousands of businesses who rely on Amazon to reach them.”

What could happen? The article isn’t really clear:

The F.T.C. asked the court to issue an injunction blocking Amazon from engaging in “unlawful conduct” and raised the possibility of altering the structure of the company. But it stopped short of detailing how the court could clip Amazon’s dominance, such as breaking apart elements of its business. The agency could become more specific if it succeeded in proving Amazon violated the law.

I use Amazon a lot because of its one-stop shopping, and I’m curious about how the suit, if successful, will affect the shopping experience. The article implies that Amazon’s prices will be lower if the government wins, but to know that you have to do what I hate: COMPARISON SHOPPING. On the other hand, I don’t want to benefit from illegal business practices.

*A deadly childhood brain cancer that’s invariably fatal now may be susceptible to a new method called “intensity focused ultrasound.” Only two children in the world are trying out the new method, and both have the deadly cancer diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma, or DIPG, which is diagnosed in about 300 children a year.

First, the little girl gets to choose the smell of the anesthetic that will put her to sleep: cotton candy. Then doctors place a helmet over her head so that hundreds of tiny metallic devices inside it can fire sound waves through her skull into the tumor in her brain. The goal: to open the brain’s protective barrier, clearing a path for a chemotherapy drug nicknamed the Red Devil.

You may know that there’s a protective “blood brain barrier,” which evolved to protect the brain from assault by chemicals and infectious agents elsewhere in the body. This method is designed to circumvent that barrier

DIPG becomes entangled in the brain stem, making it inoperable most of the time. Drugs have difficulty even reaching the tumor. Blocking the way are tightly packed cells inside the brain’s blood vessels that keep out toxins. Doctors call this the blood-brain barrier. While radiation can improve DIPGsymptoms briefly, in virtually all cases the tumor starts to grow again within six to 12 months.

Here’s how it works:

The Food and Drug Administration has approved the use of focused ultrasound to treat seven conditions, including cancer that has spread into the bones, Parkinson’s disease and prostate cancer. The technology is in various stages of development and testing for more than 160 other medical conditions, including congestive heart failure, traumatic brain injuries, arthritis, glaucoma and schizophrenia.

. . .“This noninvasively gets us to parts of the brain that are inaccessible,” he said. “It allows us to do something that is really unprecedented.”

While focused ultrasound has been used to treat cancers in the prostate, breast and other organs, none of those are encased in bone, said Nir Lipsman, a neurosurgeon at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Hospital, which is collaborating on a DIPG clinical trial with another medical center in Toronto.

. . . Moreover, Callie’s trial marks the first time focused ultrasound has been used on the brain stem, which is responsible for crucial functions such as breathing, heart rate and balance, Lipsman said. “There’s basically no margin for error.”

. . .On July 13, with Callieanesthetized, hospital staffers place a metal frame over her to keep her head in place, then a rubber membrane containing water through which the sound waves will travel on their way into her brain.

At 8:41 a.m., they wheel her into the MRI room and position her head inside the helmet and the scanner. The MRI beams images of her brain back to a room filled with monitors. There, doctors map the precise locations and intensity levels of the sound waves to be aimed at Callie’s brain. Twice, they return to the MRI room to make small adjustments to the helmet.

. . . One final step must be taken before doctors can trigger the sound waves and attempt to open the blood-brain barrier. Fonseca prepares a vial containing tiny microbubbles, each less than one-hundredth of a millimeter in diameter, thinner than a human hair.

. . .Five minutes later, doctors begin directing the sound waves into the tumor, stimulating the bubbles so that they ricochet around inside the blood vessels of the brain. The pinballing bubbles cause the vessels to widen, creating temporary gaps in the blood-brain barrier.

Around noon, the focused ultrasound procedure finishes and doctors examine new MRI images, checking to make sure the blood-brain barrier inside the tumor has opened.

Finally, at 2 p.m., doctors administer a bright red liquid, the chemotherapy drug doxorubicin, known as the Red Devil both for its color and harsh side effects, such as severe nausea, vomiting and even possible heart muscle damage.

This is a very comple and clever way to obviate the blood-brain barrier to allow the chemo inside (that’s why brain tumor are usually treated with radiation).  But if it works it would be a remarkable feat of scientific medicine. I hope it does, but the tumor in the other child to get this treatment did not become smaller.

*While U.S. universities cope with rising costs by raising tuition (often, it seems, more than necessary), universities in the UK can’t do that, for their tuition is capped by the government. This is leading to a serious crisis in the UK,

The U.K.’s storied universities have a problem. They lose money on almost every British student they teach.

The country’s university system boasts 11 of the world’s top 100 universities, with three in the top 10—in a country that has just 1% of the global population. The system’s health has an outsize impact on both the future of the world’s sixth-biggest economy and globally important research.

I couldn’t find a list of the world’s best universities that had three ones from the UK, though all lists included Cambridge and Oxford.  I found one list that had 3 in the top 12: University College London besides the other two.

That system is increasingly at risk from politics. Unlike in the U.S., where private universities and many state schools set their own tuition, in England and Wales the government sets a price cap on tuition for all domestic undergraduate students—the same cap for every college from Cambridge to Coventry. Since 2010, the price cap has remained essentially frozen, even as inflation sharply raises costs. Northern Ireland cuts tuition in half for domestic students. In Scotland, there is no tuition at all.

. . .The upshot: While U.S. universities charge ever higher tuition in an arms race for the best facilities and research, leading to a soaring student debt crisis, U.K. universities have the opposite problem. They aren’t able to charge enough.

To bridge the gap, they are cutting back on everything from research to teacher salaries to dorm rooms, and teaching more classes online. They are increasingly relying on foreign students, who are charged market rates. And they are cutting back on local students: The percentage of British teens going to college is now falling for the first time in generations.

“It’s a turning point,” said Simon Marginson, a professor of higher education at the University of Oxford. Even the U.K.’s most elite universities could see finances and quality decline if the government doesn’t step in, he said. A new report this month by the House of Lords said the university funding system in the U.K. wasn’t sustainable and faced a looming crisis.

Matthew may have to go on strike again! But the only solution to this crisis that will keep a credible university system in the UK is to either raise tuition or taxes. That will happen for sure.

*And bye-bye to the glaciers of Austria: a sad story of global warming from the AP:

High up on an Alpine ridge beneath a ceiling of ice, water drips from above into a cave formed by the slowly shrinking Jamtalferner glacier.

In just a few years, Jamtalferner will be gone, and in a few decades, so might the rest of Austria’s glaciers as human-caused climate change warms up the world.

Andrea Fischer, a glaciologist with the Austrian Academy of Sciences, has witnessed this significant glacier retreat. She and her team measure the ice to understand how climate change affects the glaciers, now and in the future. In the last few years, the Austrian glaciers have started losing mass from chunks breaking off onto dry land — a process known as dry calving, not seen in past centuries in the region.

“A few years ago we thought that they would last until about the end of this century, but now it looks like at the end of 2050, at the end of the first half of the century, there’ll be no glaciers in Austria anymore,” said Fischer.

And that’s all she wrote.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, we have a lovely photo of the Princess musing on her insignificance:

Hili: Do we have any influence on reality?
A: A very small one.
Hili: That’s what I was afraid of.
(Photo: Sarah Lawson)
In Polish:
Hili: Czy mamy wpływ na rzeczywistość?
Ja: Bardzo mały.
Hili: Tego się właśnie obawiałam.
(Zdjęcie S.L.)

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

A groaner from Barry:

From David:

From Nicole:

From Masih, more Iranian women’s hair flying free:

Titania retweets her alter ego. Read the whole tweet and then the associated article in Spiked:

From Barry: All that information stored in a tiny, tiny brain!

A helpful kitty:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, an eight year old girl, gassed upon arrival:

Tweets from Professor Cobb. This first story (from the Dodo, of course) is a heartwarmer:

Both Matthew and I want to see the other 190 videos!

. . . and a groaner:

36 thoughts on “Wednesday: Hili dialogue”

  1. On this day:
    1066 – William the Conqueror and his army set sail from the mouth of the Somme river, beginning the Norman conquest of England.

    1590 – The death of Pope Urban VII, 13 days after being chosen as the Pope, ends the shortest papal reign in history.

    1669 – The Venetians surrender the fortress of Candia to the Ottomans, thus ending the 21-year-long Siege of Candia.

    1791 – The National Assembly of France votes to award full citizenship to Jews.

    1821 – The Army of the Three Guarantees triumphantly enters Mexico City, led by Agustín de Iturbide. The following day Mexico is declared independent.

    1822 – Jean-François Champollion officially informs the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres in France that he has deciphered the Rosetta Stone.

    1825 – The world’s first public railway to use steam locomotives, the Stockton and Darlington Railway, is ceremonially opened.

    1908 – Production of the Model T automobile begins at the Ford Piquette Avenue Plant in Detroit.

    1928 – The Republic of China is recognized by the United States. [The Republic of China is, of course, Taiwan and not to be confused with the People’s Republic of China. The US withdrew its recognition in 1979.]

    1944 – The Kassel Mission results in the largest loss by a USAAF group on any mission in World War II.

    1956 – USAF Captain Milburn G. Apt becomes the first person to exceed Mach 3. Shortly thereafter, the Bell X-2 goes out of control and Captain Apt is killed.

    1962 – Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring is published, inspiring an environmental movement and the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

    1975 – The last use of capital punishment in Spain sparks worldwide protests.

    2008 – CNSA astronaut Zhai Zhigang becomes the first Chinese person to perform a spacewalk.

    2020 – Second Nagorno-Karabakh war: Azerbaijan launched an offensive against the self-proclaimed Republic of Artsakh, inhabited predominantly by ethnic Armenians. [The conflict has just flared up again, with the BBC reporting yesterday that “42,500 ethnic Armenians have now fled Nagorno-Karabakh – more than a third of the population of the enclave which Azerbaijan seized last week”.]

    Births:
    1507 – Guillaume Rondelet, French physician (d. 1566). [An anatomist and a naturalist with a particular interest in botany and ichthyology. His treatise on marine animals was a standard reference work for about a century, but his lasting impact lay in his education of a roster of star pupils who became leading figures in the world of late-16th century science.]

    1552 – Flaminio Scala, Italian playwright and stage actor (d. 1624).

    1842 – Alphonse François Renard, Belgian geologist and petrographer (d. 1903).

    1861 – Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, American poet and author (d. 1933).

    1871 – Grazia Deledda, Italian novelist and poet, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1936). [The second woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, after Selma Lagerlöf.]

    1917 – Benjamin Rubin, American microbiologist (d. 2010).

    1922 – Arthur Penn, American director and producer (d. 2010).

    1924 – Bud Powell, American pianist and composer (d. 1966).

    1928 – Margaret Rule, English archaeologist and historian (d. 2015).

    1929 – Calvin Jones, American pianist, composer, and educator (d. 2004).

    1932 – Marcia Neugebauer, American geophysicist.

    1942 – Alvin Stardust, English singer and actor (d. 2014).

    1943 – Randy Bachman, Canadian singer-songwriter and guitarist.

    1947 – Meat Loaf, American singer-songwriter, producer, and actor (d. 2022).

    1953 – Diane Abbott, English journalist and politician, Shadow Secretary of State for International Development. [The UK’s first female black MP and longest-serving black MP. A close ally of Jeremy Corbyn, she is currently suspended from the Labour Party after a letter she wrote to The Observer was criticised for downplaying the racism experienced by Jews, the Irish, and Travellers.]

    1958 – Irvine Welsh, Scottish author and playwright.

    1972 – Gwyneth Paltrow, American actress, blogger, and businesswoman. [And purveyor of woo.]

    1991 – Simona Halep, Romanian tennis player. [Currently suspended from competition after testing positive for a banned substance, roxadustat, at the 2022 US Open.]

    When, musing on companions gone,
    We doubly feel ourselves alone:
    1911 – Auguste Michel-Lévy, French geologist and academic (b. 1844).

    1917 – Edgar Degas, French painter and sculptor (b. 1834).

    1921 – Engelbert Humperdinck, German composer and educator (b. 1854).

    1944 – Aimee Semple McPherson, Canadian-American evangelist, founded the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel (b. 1890). [Pioneered the use of broadcast mass media for religious services and appeals for donations. Gave highly stage managed weekly sermons at Angelus Temple, an early megachurch.]

    1960 – Sylvia Pankhurst, English activist (b. 1882).

    1965 – Clara Bow, American actress (b. 1905).

    1972 – S. R. Ranganathan, Indian mathematician, librarian, and academic (b. 1892).

    1979 – Gracie Fields, English actress and singer (b. 1898).

    1981 – Robert Montgomery, American actor, singer, director, and producer (b. 1904).

    2003 – Donald O’Connor, American actor, singer, and dancer (b. 1925).

    2012 – Herbert Lom, Czech-English actor (b. 1917).

    2017 – Hugh Hefner, American publisher, founder of Playboy Enterprises (b. 1926).

    2018 – Marty Balin, American singer, co-founder of the band Jefferson Airplane (b. 1942).

    Reply

  2. But the penalty, $250 million, is chump change for Trump

    But is it? Quite often, rich people do not have as much liquidity as you might think. Trump might find it harder to lay his hands on $250 million than you might think.

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    1. Especially since he apparently has a habit of exaggerating how rich he is… I have no idea how reliable estimates of his net worth are, but if they include assertions by the man himself, 250 mio could be a massive problem.
      (I wonder if him declaring bankruptcy would finally make some people realize he’s not all he claims to be… or if they would just be outraged at the injust punishment their hero has received.)

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      1. While he has never declared personal bankruptcy, he has had many of his companies do so over the years, but his fans still think he is a business genius.

        It is the Trump Organization (the primary Trump business entity) and perhaps some other connected businesses that will be fined, not Trump himself. Though that may be a distinction with little difference. I don’t think the affected companies have the option to declare bankruptcy either. Court appointed officials will take control of the businesses and liquidate as necessary to come up with the funds to pay whatever judgement the civil trial comes up with. Much like certain categories of bankruptcy.

        If this judgement stands and the process proceeds normally, this will be a really big blow to Trump. As in the worst thing that has ever happened to him.

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  3. Is anyone else having a bit of an issue commenting since the latest wordpress upgrade? I submit a comment and it takes about five minutes to appear (even if I clear the cache and reload, try other browsers etc. If I re-submit I get told it’s a duplicate, so it does go through, and eventually it appears, but with no edit option.

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    3. Yes. I see delays from both using my iphone and ipad. But was waiting for jerry to find a new wordpress guru and some stabilization before saying anything

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  5. (Bold added):

    “A few years ago we thought that they would last until about the end of this century, but now it looks like at the end of 2050, at the end of the first half of the century, there’ll be no glaciers in Austria anymore,”

    This is a clear promotion of the “Absolute Zero” masterplan that goes beyond the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, setting 2050 as the new world to be.

    Reply

        1. Nope, a thought-starting argument. As your hero James Lindsay likes to say (and then forgets to apply), the Marxists love to smuggle in a lie by combining it with a truth. It may very well be that all kinds of leftist groups are trying to ride on the climate change bandwagon to reach their own goals, but anthropogenic climate change is real, unfolds pretty much as predicted, and poses real problems that need to be addressed. If you can’t see that, and can’t separate that from your “the UN have been captured” panic… you may want to consider the possibility that you have fallen into an ideological trap yourself.

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    2. Just as well the master planners are honest enough to call it Absolute Zero. Net Zero makes it sound do-able, the theory being we’ll be OK as long as, by 2050, we are removing CO2 from the atmosphere as fast as we are emitting it from all the industrial, electrical, and transportation processes that keep us alive.

      But really there is no Net. Processes to remove CO2 either from the atmosphere or from power-plant exhaust stacks are cantankerous, expensive, and require large quantities of non-emitting, nearly free electricity. Most require high-temperature process heat as well to regenerate the various adsorbents and catalysts. In any event we are far behind schedule in getting any carbon-capture scheme up to scale where it would get us to Net Zero by 2050, even if it “worked.” Nor do we have any identified source of energy to power the machines world-wide. The extracted CO2 can’t be sold to defray costs. It must be stored underground forever in a manner that keeps it from leaking back into the atmosphere. Think thousands of gigatonnes of nuclear fuel waste that has to be kept under pressure so it won’t evaporate. Or you can make eye-wateringly expensive bricks with it.

      The enviros don’t like carbon capture yet because, they say, it allows the oil and gas companies to not go bankrupt. Their vision is that we really do get to Absolute Zero by 2050: no fossil fuels, no fertilizer, no cement, no mining, no steel-making, not even in China, India, and Southeast Asia. Only then, someday, the magical carbon-capture machines will make us Net-Negative and return atmospheric CO2 levels to pre-industrial times, allowing the world to “heal” (i.e., cool.) Wait a few centuries and the glaciers will start to come back.

      It is not climate-science denialism to argue that this is insane and is not going to happen. Most of the world’s people seem to agree, going by what they do, as opposed to what they suffer their government leaders to say at conferences. Just look at the tourists in the AP photo essay. How much did they emit to get to that glacier and ride a fossil-fueled snow-cat to play on it?

      Reply

      1. Glaciers are still melting – there was a funeral for one. CO2 and water are warming the planet.

        Surely, you can admit that one truth insight?

        Surely, you would not betray hard-working scientists’ work?

        Surely, you can admit just a little bit of your very long comment is not iron-clad, and see the new basis that we all must adapt or it won’t work?

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        1. Not sure if you are writing tongue-in-cheek, but whether or not you are, there seems to me to be a huge hurdle we must address in some fashion. You and I can adapt, or try to. We might impoverish ourselves trying to be as small as possible carbon emitters. But it won’t make a bit of difference if India and China continue as they are, and all we shall see, rather than a net zero utopia, is a world dominated by those two nations that is worse off from a carbon standpoint. How is that an improvement, and how shall we avert this undesirable outcome? Serious question.

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          1. Leslie and I just like to practice for when the thought reform sessions happen.

            See Lifton, 1961.

          2. I can add to this serious question by plugging a novel by Kim Stanley Robinson: The Ministry for the Future. Readers who are nihilists in regards to climate change (looking at you Leslie M.) might be challenged by its premise, situational ideas and solutions (most very BIG solutions). Anyway, its central premise is based on a 20 million+ death toll in India by a heat-wave, and it proceeds from there. In other words, it starts off asking and answering, what will be the tipping point? And then presents a very realistic scenario of how the tip can change humanity and how humanity might prevail. Interesting, imaginative and has profound implications and unexpected scenarios. Yes, I really liked the novel and thanks to Jez for bringing it to my attention.

          3. Serious answer: unless we come up with technological solutions that replace fossil energy with something cheaper and approximately as convenient, we’re screwed – it’s a multiplayer prisoner’s dilemma, and there will always be some country that says “the others are cutting down on oil and gas? Awesome, more for us!”.
            Fortunately, we’re almost there when comes to electricity, with the price drops in PV and wind. Storage is still an issue, but there are promising developments. Heating and especially traffic are tricky, because fossil fuels are unrivaled when it comes to energy density, and batteries have their own problems, but it’s not unsolvable either.
            Also, I think that we seriously need to look into geoengineering – artificial aerosols, cloud whitening etc. It’s not a cure, but it can least buy time to come up with and roll out better solutions.

      2. Agreed. Most of the people in the world don’t care anyway because they are too busy just surviving and think it is all the industrial countries fault and if we destroy our economies attempting the impossible they will laugh and just carry on and those who believe the “ second coming” is before 2050 do not have to worry at all because all will be “sorted”, applies to a fair percentage of the USA and the Americas and many elsewhere.
        Whether or not I have and are doing my bit is hard to quantify, judging by the frequency that my neighborhood still cuts its grass with gasoline powered ride on mowers and the number of large pick up gas trucks for one person and leave their outside lights burning 24-7 they do not seem unduly concerned either.

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        1. And most (all?) of those who believe that the “second coming” will save them don’t believe mankind has the “power” to destroy the world via climate change. Their thinking goes something like, god created the world and only god can destroy it (via the second coming). It’s a scary reality how many zealots with their superficial world-view are totally fine with the Earth being destroyed since to them it’s god’s plan and they’ll be up in heaven either way. Religion poisons everything.

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          1. So Mark, what do you propose we do, based on your knowledge of game theory solving collective action problems? It is incumbent on those who say we need to “do more” to say what, exactly, we should be doing, knowing that our adversaries, whose behaviour we can’t control, aren’t playing the same game and will surely try to profit from our losses. If windmills make electricity more expensive (which they do–unreliability is very costly), then industry will move to places that don’t use windmills. No conspiracy theories, just the Invisible Hand working its discipline.

            By the time even that one glacier in Austria (not to mention all the others in the Alps) is gone, I’ll be dead and decayed, not in Heaven. Religion has nothing to do with this. Fundamentalist Christianity might motivate some of the parochial Americans you know but it doesn’t move the Chinese Communist Party or India’s Modi. They just want cheap electricity and coal for their blast furnaces. Whether believers or atheists, most people pursue their earthly self-interest, the more assiduously when they realize that covetous others are standing by waiting for them to stumble. Religion might poison everything but it doesn’t explain very much of anything, not with 1.4 billion Godless communists in China.

          2. I’m criticizing religion in America, specifically its flocks’ denial/disregard of climate change (and I’m implicitly criticizing religion as a whole re. its reluctance to deal with reality based on science/clear evidence/even common sense). I’m not arguing that if all the religionists came on board, the climate crisis would be solved or even alleviated (there’s not even a subtext of that in my comment). Can’t I just have a rant about zealots in America not giving a shit about the reality of climate change, and how that’s not cool (IMO)? Must I somehow prove via logical reasoning that “religion poisons everything” without relying on game theory, Modi’s theocratic-leaning India (proof of the claim), or billions of godless Chinese communists (disproof of the claim)? When it comes to American climate change policies, the religious zealots, and the politicians who use said zealots, are not lending a helping hand…that’s the simple gist of my comment. Your argument is, “so what, even if they change views and lend a helping hand, we’re still doomed.” OK, I buy that too, but that has nothing to do with my general anti-religion comment. Just trying to uncomplicate your complications and I’ll reiterate, religion poisons everything.

      1. Well some 5G Cell towers close to airports have been showed to interfere with Aircraft FMCW Radio Altimeters but not the PRF variants ( not common) no evidence that they directly affect humans except encouraging to much PED time, micro chips in vaccines, seriously are people that gullible and have to admit knowing absolutely nothing about “chem trails”.

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  7. If you hear a loud sucking sound in the night it could be lots of moving vans hauling loads of fraud from New York south to Florida where something besides woke goes to die. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.

    On another note, I see North Korea is kicking the American soldier out of the country. He must be a real sweetheart.

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    1. Of course, he appeals everything. And mostly loses appeals. Considering some of his lawyers on this case received fines for their performance it is not likely appealing will accomplish a thing.

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      1. Five of Trump’s lawyers have already been sanctioned by the judge. They’ve each been ordered to pay $7500. May not be much to them in terms of money but badly damaging to their repulations. They were warned.

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  10. https://blog.simplejustice.us/2023/09/27/tish-james-dubious-win/

    By granting summary judgment, the only question remaining in the trial court is sanctions, which will be left to the judge to impose. But the one thing that will assuredly happen is that Trump will appeal. He will seek a stay of execution and appeal the summary judgment, which the Appellate Division will review de novo, since it wasn’t a jury verdict but only one judge’s opinion. Maybe it will uphold the ruling if no material issue of fact can be found, but maybe not. A judge’s summary judgment ruling is never as bulletproof as a jury’s verdict based upon its determination of credibility of witnesses that testified before it.

    While not so much a legal consideration, there remains a special concern that derives from this being Trump. A trial, with the testimony of witnesses being reported and parsed within an inch of its life, would serve the public best to establish that these were lies, knowing and deliberate lies, from a man whose entire persona is built on lies. At least for some, seeing it happen before them might make it clear who he is and what he does. Instead, they will only have the word of that New York Democrat judge whom Trump calls “deranged” and hates him. This was an opportunity lost.

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    1. It’s my understanding that Trump had the choice to have a jury trial or bench trial and he and/or his lawyers chose the bench trial instead. I’ve listened to a number of lawyers discuss the case and I recall at least three saying that. Please correct me if I’m misremembering. Thanks!

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  11. The punchline in Andrew Doyle’s post got clipped. It is, “So now the conference will have an all-white panel for the sake of ‘diversity.'”

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