Friday: Hili dialogue

January 5, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Friday, January 5, 2024, and National Whipped Cream Day. Always use the real thing, preferably whipped yourself from heavy cream (it’s not hard).

It’s also George Washington Carver Day (he died on this day in 1943), National Keto Day, National Bird Day , the Twelfth day of Christmas and the Twelfth Night of Christmas, and the Harbin International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival in China. That Festival is a big deal; here’s a video from last year’s festival with an AI voice:

 

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the January 5 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*America and the Jews are finally off the hook for this one: the bombing on Thursday that killed 84 people in Iran during a memorial service for Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, a big-time terror promoter who himself was killed by the U.S. missile strike four years ago. Iran immediately claimed the U.S. and Israel were responsible, though they denied it. It didn’t matter: the chants began. Now ISIS has admitted they did it (Suleimani went after ISIS a lot, for they are Sunnis sworn to kill Shiites).

The Islamic State claimed responsibility on Thursday for the bombing attack that killed 84 people in Kerman, Iran, a day before, during a memorial procession for Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, according to a post on the extremist group’s official Telegram account.

The extremist group called the attack a “dual martyrdom operation,” and described how two militants approached a ceremony at the tomb of General Suleimani and detonated explosive belts strapped to their bodies “near the grave of the hypocrite leader.”

The general, a widely revered and feared Iranian military officer who was the architect of an Iranian-led and -funded alliance of Shiite groups across the Middle East, was assassinated four years ago in an American drone attack.

The Islamic State, a Sunni Muslim organization, considers its mission to kill apostate Muslims, including Shiites. Iran, a majority-Shiite country, is led by a theocratic government in which Shiite clerics are in charge.

In a statement, the Islamic State identified the two attackers as Omar al-Mowahid and Sayefulla al-Mujahid. The group is composed of local affiliates across the Muslim world, but it did not specify the which regional organization was behind the bombings.

The bombing in Iran was the latest bloody episode in the Islamic State’s targeting of Iran, which it considers an irredeemable sectarian foe, one that, along with a U.S.-led coalition, had a hand in defeating the group in Syria and Iraq. It was General Suleimani who built a network of Shiite militias there to repel the group and personally directed efforts to fight it.

As they say, there is no worldwide rancor when Muslims attack other Muslims (it’s not “punching down”), but when Israel does it, game over!

*Now the U.S., not Israel, is “widening the Mideast war”:  yesterday, in Baghdad, we attacked and killed a terrorist who had promoted attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq:

A U.S. airstrike in Baghdad on Thursday killed an Iran-linked militia commander and risked accelerating the regional fallout from Washington’s support for Israel’s military operation in Gaza, even as the Biden administration scrambles to contain the bloodshed.

Explosions occurred in the central part of the city, rattling windows and prompting Iraqi authorities to close off streets nearby. Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba, a militia that has claimed several attacks on U.S. forces, said in a statement that its deputy commander of operations in the Baghdad region, Mushtaq Jawad Al-Saidi, known as Abu Taqwa, was killed in a strike at a logistical support headquarters on Palestine Street.

When nearby residents learned that the blast that ripped through their morning was the sound of an American bombing, they said that fears of further violence began to gnaw at them. “It’s an indication that peace is not lasting,” said Sarah Jamal, 27, who lived several blocks from the strike. “It started in Syria, then Lebanon, then Iran and now here. We’re being dragged into this, and we have no say.”

While the U.S. has targeted militia-linked locations in Iraq and Syria several times in recent months, an American operation in such a central location of Iraq’s capital is exceedingly rare. The Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba group falls under the command of the Iraqi army, which responded swiftly, and in anger, to the strike, saying that it undermined agreements between Baghdad and Washington.

In a statement, the Defense Department described the strike as “necessary and proportionate,” saying the slain commander was “actively involved in planning and carrying out attacks against American personnel.”

According to Wikipedia, Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba is supported by the Lebanese Hezbollah and acts as part of the Axis of Resistance. You can’t widen a war much wider than by the U.S., with troops in Iraq, going after an Iraqi paramitary group supported by Hezbollah.  It is a rare event, but it also shows the U.S. isn’t putting up with terrorists, either. To not respond to the many attacks on our forces in Iraq would be a sign of weakness, something that we definitely don’t need now.

*The WSJ has an article about how the Harvard crisis “signals a broader fight over what a university should be.” Well, what is the fight? I bet you can guess! Remember when Jon Haidt talked about the two brands of university? (Watch the video if you haven’t seen it!)

Gay ascended to the presidency just days after the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action last summer, a ruling that unleashed a roiling debate across the country about the very issues she pursued most stridently. As dean of faculty, Gay had played the role of change agent and pushed progressive ideals, including more racial diversity among faculty and academic disciplines.

The emphasis won fans but also brought detractors, as the school sometimes sanctioned scholars and disinvited speakers with conservative viewpoints, and fell to the bottom of an influential ranking of colleges for free speech.

Under Gay’s leadership, said Avi Loeb, a theoretical physicist in Harvard’s department of astronomy, the mandate of the administrative state of the university continued to expand and shift from serving faculty to monitoring them.

“The message was, don’t deviate from what they find to be appropriate,” Loeb said. “It became more of a police organization.”

Gay’s supporters said she guided efforts to expand student access and opportunity. When she was selected as president, Penny Pritzker, the senior fellow of Harvard’s board, said Gay had already strengthened “Harvard as a fount of ideas and a force for good in the world.”

With the faculty divided over her leadership, Gay couldn’t count on robust backing from perhaps the university’s most crucial constituency when the school’s crisis escalated.

Here’s Dershowitz, erratic in his dotage but sometimes right:

Faculty and alumni who see a broader fight to determine the purpose of a university between principles of truth and social justice celebrated Gay’s resignation.

“This is a good first step but it’s only a first step,” said Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard Law School professor emeritus and outspoken critic of Gay. “What we need now is somebody who is beyond reproach and who will reintroduce meritocracy—instead of identity-based politics.”

In the end, Gay was too woke, but that wouldn’t have been cause to terminate her.  It was her plagiarism. But now that she’s gone, perhaps there can be a conversation about ratcheting back the wokeness, beginning, as Steve Pinker wrote, by getting rid of DEI, promoting full free speech policies, and instituting university neutrality on political and ideological questions.

Here’s a photo of my beloved Harvard from he article (click to enlarge). How could it sink so low?

A pro-Palestinian rally in Harvard Yard in October. PHOTO: JOSEPH PREZIOSO/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

*And over at the NYT again, black columnist Charles Blow (his race is relevant here) takes up the cudgels to defend Claudine gay in a misguided op-ed called “The persecution of Harvard’s Claudine Gay“. (Note: there’s a critical editorial about l’affaire Gay by Ross Douthat as well: “Harvard couldn’t save both Claudine Gay and itself.“) Quotes from Blow:

But the campaign against her was never truly about her testimony or accusations of plagiarism.

It was a political attack on a symbol. It was a campaign of abrogation. It was and is a project of displacement and defilement meant to reverse progress and shame the proponents of that progress.

As Janai Nelson, the president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., posted online, “The project isn’t to thwart hate but to foment it thru vicious takedowns.”

This is what comes out of the south end of a bull facing north. Yes, perhaps some of her opponents were motivated by racism, but the most prominent one, Bill Ackman, withheld money not because Gay was black but because he saw Harvard as antisemitic.  Remember, she’s been President for only a few months, but Harvard’s fall from grace to the position of the worst school free-speech school in America took years. But I digress. More:

Diversity, equity and inclusion, or D.E.I. — the effort to assist and support the underrepresented — turns out to be the ultimate target.

. . .When I spoke with the U.C.L.A. Law and Columbia Law School professor Kimberlé Crenshaw last year about the battle in Florida over the teaching of Black history, she warned that this scapegoating of academics would spread to D.E.I. efforts beyond academia, including in corporate America. “This thing will not be satisfied by one victory,” she said. “This is just one skirmish in a wider, broader battle” to make discussions about the legacy of racism in this country taboo and “to contain the power of Black folks, queer folks, women and pretty much everybody else who doesn’t agree to the agenda of reclaiming this country that the MAGA group claims.”

At the time, I didn’t fully appreciate just how prescient her words were.

Sorry, but there are not just two sides in this battle: MAGA versus DEI-boosterism. There are plenty of people who like diversity (and not just of ethnicity), but aren’t keen to lower standards to get it. There are other ways–ways that don’t involve letting people limbo below the merit bar. They’re harder and take longer, but in the end will be the only ones that work (and by “work” I mean “being fair but not weakening our institutions”). As a friend wrote me just a few minutes ago, Blow “has one story”, and the NYT lets him tell it over and over again.

A tweet from Ayaan about this:

*A bunch of documents connected with l’affaire Jeffrey Epstein have just been unsealed, revealing some names heretofore not connected with the case. Note that these people are NOT proven to have had sex with underage girls, though they will of course be saddle with that implication. I’m sure P. Z. is poring through the documents, slavering over every name that he can tar.  Well, read on:

Newly released court documents describing Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of teenage girls provide a reminder of how the financier leveraged connections to the rich, powerful and famous to recruit his victims and cover up his crimes.

The more than 40 documents released late Wednesday — the latest of thousands that have been made public — were sprinkled with the names of celebrities and politicians who socialized with Epstein or worked with him in the years before he was publicly accused nearly two decades ago of paying underage girls for sex.

Most of those names were familiar to anyone who has followed the scandal closely, including the criminal trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, who was Epstein’s former girlfriend, household manager and chief recruiter of young, vulnerable females.

.  . .The roughly 250 documents being unsealed, starting this week, in one of the lawsuits against Maxwell mostly rehash what has long been known about a man who traveled in elite circles until his July 2019 sex trafficking arrest left him so cornered that he took his own life in jail.

But they have included a few fresh details about a pyramid of abuse that grew over three decades and damaged dozens of teenage girls and young women.

Among the famous people in Epstein’s orbit before he was exposed as a sexual predator were former Presidents Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, singer Michael Jackson and magician David Copperfield, according to the accounts of his victims and other witnesses who were quoted in the newly released documents. None of those men were accused of any wrongdoing.

There were also repetitions of well-known stories about Britain’s Prince Andrew. He was sued by one of Epstein’s victims, Virginia Giuffre, who said she had sexual encounters with the royal when she was 17. The prince, who denied the allegations, settled the lawsuit in 2022.

. . .Sjoberg also testified that she once went to a dinner at one of Epstein’s homes that was also attended by magician David Copperfield.

She said Copperfield did magic tricks before asking if she was aware “that girls were getting paid to find other girls.” One allegation against Epstein and Maxwell was that some girls he paid for sexual acts later recruited other victims. Sjoberg said Copperfield didn’t get more specific about what he meant. A Copperfield publicist didn’t respond to an email seeking comment.

That’s about it: no smoking guns, and not much we didn’t know, except about Copperfield. There’s Randy Andy, of course, but we already know the Royals paid off the girl before they kicked Andy to the curb.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is befuddled.

Hili: What did I come here for?
A: I have no idea.
Hili: This is not a helpful answer.
In Polish:
Hili: Po co ja tu przyszłam?
Ja: Nie mam pojęcia.
Hili: To nie jest pomocna odpowiedź.

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

From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy:

From Science Humor:

The NY Post’s headline on Wednesday. As you recall, they buttressed the plagiarism charges against Claudine Gay (h/t Greg):

From Beth:

From Masih: The Arabic equivalent of the Red Cross, and, like the Red Cross in Gaza, they actually abet terrorists.

From Luana and FIRE. So true!  These people are also called the “yes-butters.”

From Malcolm, a cat that doesn’t work right! (watch video):

From Simon. Rechavi uses videos as analogues of biology, in this case the string of “adenine bases” added to messenger RNA to increase its stability before it’s translated into protein—called the polyA tail.” But look how smoothly these dancers move!

My second favorite big cat (Pallas’s cat is my fave). But look at this majestic snow-covered tiger!

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a 14 year old girl died in the camp:

Two tweets from Matthew. First, Titanicat.  “Draw me like you draw your French cats.”

An illusion, but it doesn’t work very well for me:

35 thoughts on “Friday: Hili dialogue”

  1. On this day:
    1757 – Louis XV of France survives an assassination attempt by Robert-François Damiens, who becomes the last person to be executed in France by drawing and quartering (the traditional form of capital punishment used for regicides).

    1875 – The Palais Garnier, one of the most famous opera houses in the world, is inaugurated in Paris.

    1895 – Dreyfus affair: French army officer Alfred Dreyfus is stripped of his rank and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island.

    1900 – Irish nationalist leader John Edward Redmond calls for revolt against British rule.

    1911 – Kappa Alpha Psi, the world’s third-oldest and largest black fraternity, is founded at Indiana University.

    1912 – The sixth All-Russian Conference of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Prague Party Conference) opens. In the course of the conference, Vladimir Lenin and his supporters break from the rest of the party to form the Bolshevik movement.

    1914 – The Ford Motor Company announces an eight-hour workday and minimum daily wage of $5 in salary plus bonuses.

    1919 – The German Workers’ Party, which would become the Nazi Party, is founded in Munich.

    1925 – Nellie Tayloe Ross of Wyoming becomes the first female governor in the United States.

    1933 – Construction of the Golden Gate Bridge begins in San Francisco Bay.

    1941 – Amy Johnson, a 37-year-old pilot and the first woman to fly solo from London to Australia, disappears after bailing out of her plane over the River Thames, and is presumed dead.

    1944 – The Daily Mail becomes the first major London newspaper to be published on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

    1953 – The play Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett receives its première in Paris.

    1968 – Alexander Dubček comes to power in Czechoslovakia, effectively beginning the “Prague Spring”.

    1972 – US President Richard Nixon announces the Space Shuttle program.

    2005 – The dwarf planet Eris is discovered by Palomar Observatory-based astronomers, later motivating the International Astronomical Union (IAU) to define the term planet for the first time.

    Births:
    1855 – King Camp Gillette, American businessman, founded the Gillette Company (d. 1932).

    1876 – Konrad Adenauer, German lawyer and politician, Chancellor of West Germany (d. 1967). [General Gerald Templer, Director of the British zone of occupation, dismissed Adenauer from his position as Mayor of Cologne for incompetence in December 1945. Adenauer considered the Germans the political equals of the occupying Allies, a view that angered Templer. A little awkward for the Brits when Adenauer was elected the first Chancellor of West Germany…]

    1902 – Stella Gibbons, English journalist and author (d. 1989). [Best remembered for her wonderful debut novel Cold Comfort Farm, but she wrote a further twenty-two.]

    1906 – Kathleen Kenyon, English archaeologist and academic (d. 1978).

    1909 – Lucienne Bloch, Swiss-American sculptor, painter, and photographer (d. 1995). [Apprentice to Diego Rivera and close friend of Frida Kahlo.]

    1917 – Jane Wyman, American actress (d. 2007). [Received an Academy Award and three Golden Globe Awards. First wife of Ronald Reagan.]

    1923 – Sam Phillips, American radio host and producer, founded Sun Records (d. 2003).

    1928 – Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pakistani lawyer and politician, 4th President of Pakistan (d. 1979). [He was deposed in a military coup in 1977 by his appointed army chief Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, before being controversially tried and executed by the Supreme Court of Pakistan two years later. His daughter Benazir was elected prime minister twice before being assassinated.]

    1928 – Walter Mondale, American soldier, lawyer, and politician, 42nd Vice President of the United States (d. 2021).

    1931 – Alfred Brendel, Austrian pianist, poet, and author.

    1931 – Robert Duvall, American actor and director.

    1932 – Umberto Eco, Italian novelist, literary critic, and philosopher (d. 2016).

    1934 – Phil Ramone, South African-American songwriter and producer, co-founded A & R Recording (d. 2013). [It’s quicker to list the stars he didn’t work with…]

    1936 – Florence King, American journalist and memoirist (d. 2016).

    1941 – Hayao Miyazaki, Japanese animator, director, and screenwriter.

    1946 – Diane Keaton, American actress, director, and businesswoman.

    1950 – Chris Stein, American guitarist, songwriter, and producer.

    1969 – Marilyn Manson, American singer-songwriter, actor, and director.

    1975 – Bradley Cooper, American actor and producer.

    1978 – January Jones, American actress.

    1981 – Deadmau5, Canadian musician.

    Death is the ultimate enemy – and I find nothing reproachable in those who rage mightily against the dying of the light. (Stephen J Gould):
    1066 – Edward the Confessor, English king (b. 1004).

    1430 – Philippa of England, Queen of Denmark, Norway and Sweden (b. 1394).

    1917 – Isobel Lilian Gloag, English painter (b. 1865).

    1922 – Ernest Shackleton, Anglo-Irish sailor and explorer (b. 1874).

    1933 – Calvin Coolidge, American lawyer and politician, 30th President of the United States (b. 1872).

    1943 – George Washington Carver, American botanist, educator, and inventor (b. 1864).

    1970 – Max Born, German physicist and mathematician, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1882).

    1979 – Charles Mingus, American bassist, composer, bandleader (b. 1922).

    1994 – Tip O’Neill, American lawyer and politician, 55th Speaker of the United States House of Representatives (b. 1912).

    1998 – Sonny Bono, American singer-songwriter, producer, actor, and politician (b. 1935).

    2003 – Roy Jenkins, Welsh politician, Chancellor of the Exchequer (b. 1920). [One of the “Gang of Four”, senior Labour figures who broke away from the party and founded the Social Democratic Party in 1981.]

    2004 – Norman Heatley, English biologist and chemist, co-developed penicillin (b. 1911).

    2016 – Pierre Boulez, French pianist, composer, and conductor (b. 1925).

    2017 – Jill Saward, English rape victim and activist (b. 1965).

    2018 – Thomas Bopp, American astronomer best known as the co-discoverer of comet Hale–Bopp (b. 1949).

    2019 – Bernice Sandler, American women’s rights activist (b. 1928).

    1. Woman of the day:
      Dorothy Elizabeth Levitt (born Elizabeth Levi; 5 January 1882 – 17 May 1922) was a British racing driver and journalist. She was the first British woman racing driver, holder of the world’s first water speed record, the women’s world land speed record holder, and an author. She was a pioneer of female independence and female motoring, and taught Queen Alexandra and the Royal Princesses how to drive. In 1905 she established the record for the longest drive achieved by a lady driver by driving a De Dion-Bouton from London to Liverpool and back over two days, receiving the soubriquets in the press of the Fastest Girl on Earth, and the Champion Lady Motorist of the World.

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Levitt

    2. 2005 – The dwarf planet Eris is discovered by Palomar Observatory-based astronomers, later motivating the International Astronomical Union (IAU) to define the term planet for the first time.

      It’s discoverer (well, team leader) Mike Brown was so distraught by the consequences that he hung the badge of shame around his neck by adopting the Twitter tag “@plutokiller”. Though I haven’t seen him posting for months – probably another … would “exudate” be a fit name for someone who has left the site because of Musk? (I checked – his Twitter handle is now “Mike Brown does not X” and links to his BlueSky account. When His CeilingCatness is discussing with “TechDude”, a procedure for linking to BlueSky and Mastodon “somethings” and “toots” needs to be on the To-Do list. I humbly suggest.)
      Prof Brown did (and probably still does) an online course (MOOC) on planetary formation, which is really hard work, and very rewarding. It’s several years since I did it, so I hope it has been updated. When I did it, the most popular idea was that, for example, Jupiter took a few million years to form, while Earth-like planets would take tens to a hundred million years. But I was drinking from the firehose this morning and saw a suggestion that a Jupiter-mass planet could form in a few hundred thousand years … which is a pretty violent event.
      Worth following, is @plutokiller@bsky.app !

  2. Yeah – a touch of cream of tartar (pretty sure) helps stabilize the whipped cream. Confectioner’s sugar (especially) and vanilla will make the signature flavor.

    And of course an ice bath of some nature.

    I might have to come up with a new strategy for this, come to think of it – maybe try some variations….

    Great call with noting whipped cream day!

  3. An illusion, but it doesn’t work very well for me

    It works really well for me. In fact, I had to zoom in and line one of the rows up with the edge of the browser window to convince myself that the vertical lines were all perfectly vertical and the horizontal lines were all perfectly horizontal.

    1. If your UI includes a “screenshot” tool with a “select area to grab” option, that would give you two movable sets of slidebars, parallel to the display axes.
      Unless – doesn’t the “K” Desktop Environment include the ability to “snip” freeform areas of the desktop? ISTR …

    2. When I took off my glasses , making the picture blurry, I immediately saw that the lines are straight.

  4. Excellent continuing coverage of l’affaire Gay in WEIT. Thanks, PCC(E)! It is much more complex (not difficult, just of several dimensions and not a simple binary) than the press makes it out to be. Toward better understanding, I second the recommendation you make regarding watching the Jonathon Haidt video of a talk he gave at Duke in 2016. 2016! Seven years ago, but I had forgotten how valuable his insights were (and are). It is a full hour, so set aside the time, but well worth the investment I believe. Readers can click on the hot link provided in the text or just go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gatn5ameRr8

    If you are on the US East Coast, tomorrow’s forecasted snowstorm should give you more than an hour for watching and contemplation.

  7. the Harbin International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival in China

    Recently (last week?) “University Challenge” had one of it’s “name the city from the spot on the land/sea/borders map” picture rounds including a piece of China way north and west of North Korea, and I think north of Vladivostock. I didn’t know where Harbin was before then, but I do now. Given the ice festival – no great surprise.

    My second favorite big cat (Pallas’s cat is my fave). But look at this majestic snow-covered tiger!

    By inference, that’d be an “Amur Tiger”, from the (relative) wilderness of taiga (sorry-not-sorry!) between Harbin and Vladivostock. Sadly, being a big cat between two major industrial cities is … not optimism-making.

    From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy:

    When your only tool is a hammer, every job looks like a nail. (At least this revolver doesn’t have a lanyard ring on the hammer-face of it’s butt.)

    1. I can confirm Harbin being a long way from most having been there when working for the Aerospatiale distributor. The CAAC flight from Bejing was eventful.
      The PLA were/ are manufacturing the Z9 under licence from then Aerospatiale Helicopters now Airbus Helicopters, the AS365N Dauphin. I remember it was very cold and everywhere smelled of coal. Interesting place.

      1. “Dauphin” – that’s the one with the car-door style door ejection mechanism, isn’t it?
        I remember trying to find that ejector with one hand while tightening my seatbelt with the other, and staring straight through the pilots canopy to a view of North Sea in all it’s lethal wetness. As my colleague (watching from beside the helideck as our rotors almost carved into the deck) later put it, “my squishy flight suit moment”.
        Fortunately, the pilots managed to re-start the second engine and pull out of the dive before we hit the sea. There never was an explanation for why that engine flamed out.
        I’m trying to remember which helicopter model we flew out of Busan with some years later. No idea. No flight suit or life jacket either, which was more on my mind at the time. Seven damned weeks for a 4 week hitch.

        1. Dauphin, yes that is the one with the handles you described. I was responsible for the UK CAA Type Certification for the original type, the N model. Not popular for offshore oil and gas support as range and payload were limited. Very popular with the “executive set” as a personal go for. Engine flame out was not common on this type as the Arriel engine(s) was/is a very reliable type. Excess water ingestion could however cause it and if the auto relight system was off or faulty this could cause your experience. I flew in this type a lot and my main criticism would be the howling fenestron “shouting” down the conical fuselage megaphone into the cabin. Happy days.

          1. Agreed – not terribly popular. I probably only used them about every second year. I don’t recall ever using one outside the UKCS, so someone in AeroSpatiale’s sales department did a good job.
            I think only one of the operators flew them. But if they had a fleet for the ego-transport business, they might have got rotated into the offshore fleet as availability/ usage demanded.
            Do aircraft (well, rotorcraft) intended for mainly onshore use (skyscraper office/ hotel/ golf course) get to ditch the buoyancy bags and liferafts? Not that that would really free up any seat space, but it would free up payload. Which isn’t really an issue for ego transport.

    2. They’re rats, Chetiya. Where are you going to release them to? They’re dangerous, destructive, and prolific. You need to kill them. Humanely, but dead. Besides, even if you catch a mother rat alive, the babies she doesn’t come back to will starve anyway.

      1. I used to work on a grain ship. After unloading in Africa, Much of the trip back was spent cleaning the holds, and catching all the rats.
        The ship starts the voyage clean, but the rats are already in the grain bags when they are loaded. They have all the time until the holds are unloaded to work their way into void spaces and passageways, eat, and multiply.

        So anyway, I found that you need to use lots of different types of traps. Rats are smart enough that if they see one of their buddies trapped, they will not be caught the same way. The big down side of those live traps as linked is that it only catches one rat, and there is no such thing as one rat.

        The best thing I know to use is “Tomcat” or other similar brands, which come in big pieces of way, with the poison inside. On the ranch, I cut about a foot of 1.5″ PVC, and glue a chink of poison into the middle. The PVC is so that pets or other critters cannot get at it.

        Squeezing into void spaces like deck hinges in a dark, moving ship’s hold is a pretty creepy experience when you know there are hundreds of rats in there. They get mean when they start to run out of food.

        When I caught them alive, I tossed them over the side. Reading your comment reminded me that they were able to swim an average of 41 seconds before drowning.

        1. Reminds me of the old joke:

          “I have rats ”

          “You should get a ball-bearing mouse trap.”

          “What’s that?”

          “A tom cat.”

        2. Poisoned rodents don’t die instantly or inside bait stations. They become easy and deadly prey for pets and other critters, including raptors, that eat them after they have consumed the poison. Please don’t use poison.

          1. A balance has to be struck. Rats have to be killed, especially since some municipalities will not de-rat a junkpile or other rat-infested locality, so property owners may be on their own. The Canadian province of Alberta is rat-free and intends to stay that way.

            Anticoagulants that deplete blood clotting factors over several days of repeated feeding are reasonable because a predator or scavenger that eats the one rat carcass will not get a lethal effect from that one dose, nor will a child or pet that eats the poison once. You don’t want the rat to die inside a bait station because that will educate other rats to avoid it. Better that he crawls away and dies somewhere else. Resistance to warfarin-like poisons has been reported.

            Rat poison should not be left outside where other free-living animals can get at it and eat it repeatedly.

  9. That mouse trap brought to mind a funny story from my younger days. Once upon a time during that twilight period between school and career I lived in an old home that I rented with another guy. Lots of room and some pretty nice features, but a few of the problems that come with an old home. One such problem, central to this story, was the rats.

    We had rats in the attic space. If you’ve never experienced having a well established population of rats in your home you simply can not imagine how loud they can be. I was amazed. We tried everything to get rid of them, including a professional exterminator. The rats shrugged off all efforts and persisted.

    One night I was awoken, yet again, by the outrageously loud commotion of rats vigorously doing their ratty things up in the attic space. I groaned, rolled over on my side and tried to block the racket from my conscious attention in the forlorn hope of actually getting some sleep.

    And then I hear my housemate stir, his bedroom door open, then another sound I don’t at first recognize. Then creaking. Ahh, he has pulled down the attic access stairs and is climbing up. Then, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM!!!

    I momentarily levitated above the bed, and then started laughing my ass off as I managed to make sense of what had happened. My housemate had been pushed too far. He’d had enough. He had grabbed his .45 semi-auto pistol, poked his head and shoulders up into the attic space and blindly fired three rounds in the general direction of the commotion.

    No rats were harmed, though there was some minor damage to the roof that we had to repair.

    1. Thanks, that is frickin’ funny. Yes, rats are amazingly loud, especially when they’re gnawing on wood! I recently caught 3 in our crawlspace. I hired and inspector who supposedly found where the incursion took place and closed it up. Haven’t heard any activity since. Fingers crossed.

  10. As a resident of Canada, I have to point out re Epstein that none of these girls so far as I know has been alleged to have been under 16, which is the legal age here for sex with an adult (unless unduly influenced which applies at any adult age.). They would still be statutory rapes if committed in jurisdictions with older ages of consent, sure, but when one’s own culture doesn’t make something a crime, it’s hard to regard it as “problematic” anywhere in the world. Why whutzername at 17 got millions of dollars for partying with a prince is beyond me.

    1. Not so much of a prince either. My father told me from his experiences with the DOY in the RN that he was very arrogant, self entitled and much too sure of his own capabilities to be trusted with responsibilities commensurate with his RN rank. He is a veteran of the Falkland Islands conflict where he served as a Sea King helicopter pilot.
      His elder brother the now King however was apparently the complete opposite in the RN, competent, modest, a popular officer keen to learn the responsibilities as a Bridge Officer on the Guided Missile destroyer HMS Norfolk his first RN ship, liked by his crew members and did indeed earn his own ship command, the minesweeper HMS Bronnington.

    2. Epstein’s conviction in 2008 involved a 14 year-old girl.

      Re Wikipedia:

      Julie Brown’s 2018 exposés in the Miami Herald identified eighty victims and located about sixty of them.[9][74][102] She quotes the then police chief Reiter as saying “This was 50-something ‘shes’ and one ‘he’—and the ‘shes’ all basically told the same story.”[9] Details from the investigation included allegations that 12-year-old triplets were flown in from France for Epstein’s birthday, and flown back the following day after being sexually abused by the financier

      1. Well, then. That is a different matter entirely. Thank you.

        My weak response to that is to observe that only in 2008 was the legal age for consent in Canada for sex with an adult raised from 14….and at that time France had no minimum age of consent at all, provided the person could understand what he or she was consenting to and no surprise, duress, or deception was involved. Two men were acquitted in France over a consensual relationship with an 11-year old girl. (The age is now 15. This was in the news during our last trip to France in 2018. The French parliament had defeated, over concerns about autonomy, a bill that would have established 15. It had been expected to pass. I understand it was reintroduced and did become law.)

        The consent laws of both Canada and France were modified on the advice of experts in child development and, in France, out of concern for publicized incidents of lechery that the French public had come to find deeply troubling.

        One does wonder where the parents of the triplets were when all this was going on.

  11. Gay’s and Blow’s response to Gay being forced to resign has me thinking of the Dartmouth scar experiment. In brief:

    – Participants (27 male, 21 female) were told that the experiment was meant to observe if people behaved differently towards those with facial scars.

    – Participants were placed into rooms with no mirrors

    – A make-up artist proceeded to draw a scar on their face

    – After the scar was drawn, participants were given a short glimpse of it with a pocket mirror.

    – Participants were then invited to leave the room and interact with folks in the building.

    – Before they left the room, the make-up artist told the participants that the scar needed some final touch-ups. But, what the make-up artist actually did next was to wipe off the make-up of the scar.

    – Participants left the room thinking they still wore a make-up scar.

    – Participants who thought their faces were scarred overwhelmingly reported back that people stared at their scars, and were mean and rude to them.

    Here’s the abstract of the study:

    https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1981-28014-001

    1. Thanks, I hadn’t heard of that experiment. Highly relevant in today’s climate. If it replicates reliably (you never know…). I looked for reports of replicabilty and at first glance found only this replication by the original author https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232481827_Perceptions_of_the_impact_of_negatively_valued_characteristics_on_social_interaction
      which tries to pry apart different possible explanations for the results (one of them being the demand characteristics of the experiment, which they could rule out).

  13. Sub heading in online NYT today “The Islamic State took responsibility for deadly bombings but Iran’s government facing public anger blamed Israel”
    Jerry wrote today “America and the Jews are finally off the hook for this one”

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