Monday: Hili dialogue

January 29, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to January 29, 2024, and National Corn Chip Day.  I have nothing to say about them save that they’re okay with sandwiches but I prefer potato chips.

It’s also Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day (like many, I love to pop those bubbles!), National Carnation Day, Curmudgeons Day (for ME!), Freethinkers Day, National Puzzle Day, Seeing Eye Dog Day, and Kansas Day (in Kansas, of course, marking the day the state was admitted to the Union in 1861). 

Sadly, they’re now making new bubble wrap that ships flatter but doesn’t pop!!!

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the January 29 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*We’re getting closer to a “hot war” with Iran. Yesterday three U.S. troops were killed and 34 were injured in Jordan, where (I didn’t know) there is an American military base.  These are the4 first American combat deaths since the war in Gaza started.

Three U.S. troops were killed and at least 34 were injured Sunday in Jordan, U.S. officials said, in the first deadly military action against American service members since the war in Gaza began immediately threatening to widen the war into a wider regional conflict.

President Biden on Sunday announced the deaths, saying in a statement that the unmanned aerial drone assault was carried out by “radical Iran-backed militant groups operating in Syria and Iraq.”

The names of the slain service members were withheld pending notification of their families. While previous incidents have resulted in some injuries to U.S. troops, Saturday night’s attack was the first instance of American service members being killed by hostile fire.

The one-way attack drone struck the living quarters of a base, a defense official said, causing injuries ranging from cuts and bruises to brain injuries and some that required a medical evacuation. The Pentagon said in a statement that 25 service members were wounded in the attack. The number of wounded is expected to rise as more troops report injuries, said the defense official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity around the incident.

The attack came as Jordan attempts to walk a line in the conflict, quietly partnering with the United States on counterterrorism while looking to avoid the wrath of Iran and other regional neighbors. While the defense official said the attack happened at a base known as Tower 22, in northeast Jordan near the border with Syria and Iraq, both Jordan and a senior official from the Islamic Resistance in Iraq claimed that the attack targeted a U.S. base in Tanf, on the Syrian side of the border.

Officials are trying to determine why air defense failed at known as Tower 22. The U.S. troops at the base are serving on an advise-and-assist mission with their Jordanian counterparts, the defense official said.

Here’s a WaPo map of where the drone strike took place, clearly a strategic location.

Now the headline announced that the drone strike came from “Iranian-backed militants”, that’s seemed only an unsubstantiated guess—unless you think (and this isn’t far fetched) that all militants in the area are backed by Iran. However, the NYT said this:

In a statement, the Iranian-backed militias who call themselves the Axis of Resistance claimed responsibility for the attack on the base in a remote desert area of Jordan, saying it was a “continuation of our approach to resisting the American occupation forces in Iraq and the region.”

Our showdown with that oppressive theocracy draws ever nearer, though Iran prefers that others do its dirty work. Still, the U.S. will have to respond some way; they will not be able to remain sitting ducks in Jordan for terrorist’s drones.

*The Wall Street Journal announces, depressingly, that the IDF has only destroyed roughly 20% of Hamas’s tunnels beneath Gaza, (The Times of Israel says the destruction is 20%-40%.)

As much as 80% of Hamas’s vast warren of tunnels under Gaza remains intact after weeks of Israeli efforts to destroy them, U.S. and Israeli officials said, hampering Israel’s central war aims.

Thwarting Hamas’s ability to use tunnels is the keystone to Israel’s effort to capture top Hamas leaders and rescue the remaining Israeli hostages, Israeli officials have said. And Israel has said it has conducted strikes on hospitals and other key infrastructure in its pursuit of the tunnels.

Disabling the tunnels, which run for more than 300 miles under the narrow strip—or roughly half the New York City subway system—would deny Hamas relatively safe storage for weapons and ammunition, a hiding place for fighters, command-and-control centers for its leadership, and the ability to maneuver around the territory unexposed to Israeli fire, Israel has said.

If you’re an American, your hard-earned money has helped build these tunnels, along with funding terrorism in other ways. The U.S., for instance, has given UNRWA $1 billion since 2021.  But I digress:

U.S. and Israeli officials have had difficulty precisely assessing the level of destruction of the tunnels, in part because they can’t say for certain how many miles of tunnels exist. The officials from both countries estimate 20% to 40% of the tunnels have been damaged or rendered inoperable, U.S. officials said, much of that in northern Gaza.

Israel is “thoroughly and gradually dismantling the tunnel network,” the Israel Defense Forces said in a statement. The White House and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment.

Israel has units that specialize in clearing tunnels but many of those troops are engineers trained to destroy them, not search for hostages and top Hamas leaders, U.S. officials said. In particular, more troops are needed to clear the tunnels, the officials said.

In addition, Israel’s primary war aims—killing or capturing top Hamas leaders and rescuing the roughly 100 remaining hostages—are, at times, at odds, officials said.

The map from the WSJ.  Even ten years ago, the tunnels were everywhere:

Two things is are sure; Israel is going to have to demolish all of those tunnels, and it will take a very long time.

*Black clergy have banded together to demand that Biden get a cease-fire going in Gaza, a unity that bodes ill for Biden’s re-election.

As the Israel-Hamas war enters its fourth month, a coalition of Black faith leaders is pressuring the Biden administration to push for a cease-fire — a campaign spurred in part by their parishioners, who are increasingly distressed by the suffering of Palestinians and critical of the president’s response to it.

More than 1,000 Black pastors representing hundreds of thousands of congregants nationwide have issued the demand. In sit-down meetings with White House officials, and through open letters and advertisements, ministers have made a moral case for President Biden and his administration to press Israel to stop its offensive operations in Gaza, which have killed thousands of civilians. They are also calling for the release of hostages held by Hamas and an end to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.

The effort at persuasion also carries a political warning, detailed in interviews with a dozen Black faith leaders and their allies. Many of their parishioners, these pastors said, are so dismayed by the president’s posture toward the war that their support for his re-election bid could be imperiled.

“Black faith leaders are extremely disappointed in the Biden administration on this issue,” said the Rev. Timothy McDonald, the senior pastor of First Iconium Baptist Church in Atlanta, which boasts more than 1,500 members. He was one of the first pastors of more than 200 Black clergy members in Georgia, a key swing state, to sign an open letter calling for a cease-fire. “We are afraid,” Mr. McDonald said. “And we’ve talked about it — it’s going to be very hard to persuade our people to go back to the polls and vote for Biden.”

Any cracks in the ordinarily rock-solid foundation of Black support for Mr. Biden, and for Democrats nationally, could be of enormous significance in November.

Well that’s a threat, isn’t it.?  “Stop the war, let Hamas regain control over Gaza, continuing its terrorism, or we’ll vote for Trump.” Frankly, I’m baffled. Blacks and Jews used to be friends, but here’s a group of black pastors implicitly asking that terrorism against Israel continue—or else.  As far as I can see now, almost everything that’s happening is endangering Biden’s victory. The black pastors are even more anti-Israel than the International Court of Justice, and that’s saying a lot.

*From the Free Press, a piece called, “MLK’s former speechwriter: ‘We are trying to save the soul of America’.”

And Jones is still, in his mind, having conversations with his friend, who was assassinated at the age of 39 on a Memphis hotel balcony in 1968. Especially now, as America’s racial climate seems to have worsened, despite the fact that King successfully fought to ensure all Americans are given equal protection under the law, regardless of their skin color. A poll from 2021 shows that 57 percent of U.S. adults view the relations between black and white Americans to be “somewhat” or “very” bad—compared to just 35 percent who felt that way a decade ago.

Jones knows exactly what King would have felt about that. He says it out loud, and directs it to his late mentor: “Martin, I’m pissed off at you. I’m angry at you. We should have been more protective of you. We need you. You wouldn’t permit what’s going on if you were here.

“We are trying to save the soul of America.”

. . .“Regrettably, some very important parts of his message are not being remembered,” Jones said, referring to King’s belief in “radical nonviolence” and his eagerness to build allies across ethnic lines.

“Put in a more negative way,” he added, King’s messages “have been forgotten.”

Jones raised a lot of money for the movement and helped write some of Dr. King’s iconic speeches and essays, simply because King didn’t have time. King remarked that Jones’s mental synch with him was so close that Jones was “right in my head.”

So, when asked if America has made any progress on race, Jones is dumbstruck. “Are you kidding?” he said, with shock in his voice. “Any person who says that to the contrary, any black person who alleges themselves to be a scholar, or any white person who says otherwise, they’re just not telling you the truth.

“Bring back some black person who was alive in 1863, and bring them back today,” he adds. “Have them be a witness.”

. . .He adds that it’s possible to read Kendi’s prize-winning book, Stamped from the Beginning, and “come away believing that America is irredeemably racist, beyond redemption.”

It’s a theory he vehemently disagrees with. “That would violate everything that Martin King and I worked for,” he said. It would mean “it’s not possible for white racist people to change.”

“Well, I am telling you something,” Jones adds. “We have empirical evidence that we changed the country.”

And this, relevant to the black pastors mentioned above:

He said he has seen how, days after the attack, college students—many of them black—marched on campus, chanting for the death of Israel.

“It pains me today when I hear so-called radical blacks criticizing Israel for getting rid of Hamas. So I say to them, what do you expect them to do?”

He continues: “A black person being antisemitic is literally shooting themselves in the foot.”

Long before October 7, Jones has proudly shown his allegiance to the Jewish people: a gold mezuzah—the small decorative case, which Jews fix to their door frames to bless their homes—is nailed outside his Palo Alto apartment.

I suppose if I could bring back two people who were voices for reason, and let them comment on today’s doings, it would be Martin Luther King and Christopher Hitchens. (Third would be Thomas Jefferson.)

*And here’s biology clickbait if ever the was such a thing: a NYT piece called: “The sex-obsessed marsupials that will sleep when they’re dead.”

Scurrying along the dense brush of coastal woodlands and forests, the small, mouselike antechinus appears more unassuming than many of Australia’s marsupials. But for the three weeks of their breeding season, the males transform into absolute sex-obsessed lotharios.

“They have this super bizarre breeding system, which is quite common among flies and some fish, where the males live one year, have a single shot at securing all their reproductive success, and then they die,” said John Lesku, a zoologist at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, who has spent a decade studying antechinuses.

So committed to the live fast, die young lifestyle, a male antechinus even forgoes one of the most essential biological needs: sleep. In a study published Thursday in the journal Current Biology, Dr. Lesku and his colleagues discovered these marsupials shave off, on average, three hours of sleep per night during their mating season, with some individuals forgoing even more.

Antechinuses engage in suicidal reproduction, a biological phenomenon called semelparity that has been observed in other marsupial species, like kalutas. Males are known to ramp up their physical activity during their mating season, but how their sleep quality changed — antechinuses typically sleep around 15 hours a day — remained elusive.

They couldn’t measure sleep directly, so used titers of oxalic acid and testosterone as surrogate measures of sleep. I assume they know what they were doing.

Male antechinuses lost, on average, three hours a night during their mating season. Going to 12 hours from 15 may not sound like much, but “if you were to extend your waking day by three or four hours a night,” Dr. Lesku said, “your performance at simple hand-eye coordination tasks would be reduced to the level of someone legally intoxicated.”

. . .A question remains: Is this sleep deprivation a factor in the huge die-off so soon after the sowing of marsupial wild oats? It’s a hypothesis proposed based on dead male antechinuses appearing, at least superficially, like chronically sleep-deprived laboratory rats. Dr. Lesku isn’t too sure, especially now with these findings.

“Three hours of sleep loss is not lethal in any animal we know of,” he said. “So what’s killing these males after one year? These males are just programmed to die, to end their evolutionary longevity after one year.”

So they don’t know if the lack of sleep contributes to death, but regardless, it’s an indication that reproduction is so important to these mammals that they spend almost all their time searching for mates.

Here’s one from Wikipedia, which notes this:

Antechinus have an extremely unusual reproductive system. The females are synchronously monoestrous with mating occurring over a short three-week period. The males experience mass mortality after mating, with male survival only observed in very rare cases.

Males can mate more than once, of course, and a single mating can last more than 12 hours. No wonder they die after their short mating season! As to why this marsupial species is so unusual, I have no idea. Here’s a photo:

This image was originally posted to Flickr by Patrick_K59 at https://flickr.com/photos/63175631@N02/17067818099

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Malgorzata explains the dialogue, “Those ‘influencers”‘are very noisy and they will always shout over Hili’s reasonable statements.”

Hili: I’m thinking about a career as an influencer.
A: Forget it, they are meowing louder.
In Polish:
Hili: Zastanawiam się nad karierą influenserki.
Ja: Zapomnij, one miauczą głośniej.
And a picture of Baby Kulka:

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

Two from somewhere on Facebook. First, the Ultimate Oreo (fake, of course):

This really wouldn’t bother me, but it would a lot of people:

From Stacy; the answer is obvious:

From Masih, who shows four Kurdish political prisoners to be executed on charges of “spying for Israel”.  They were hanged this morning.

A long tweet from Bill Ackman announcing that a ton of people from Business Insider—which went after his wife Neri Oxman for plagiarism of her Ph.D. thesis after his attack on Harvard’s antisemitism and on Claudine Gay for plagiarism—are being laid off.  How could Ackman accomplish this? (The tweet is very long.)

From Malcolm; does this guy know he has a cat on his hood?

From Merilee: okay but not excellent imitations of politicians on DeSantis dropping out of the GOP primary:

From Barry; I may have recently posted this but, if I did, it’s worth seeing again:

From Jay: Noa Tishby, an Israeli activist, interviews some pro-Palestinian demonstrators. They have no clue about the identity of the river and the sea!

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a boy gassed on arrival, age 1:

Two tweets from Matthew. The first is a byproduct of his upcoming biography of Francis Crick:

A woman with very high biological fitness. Six generations living at the same time!

13 thoughts on “Monday: Hili dialogue”

  1. On this day:
    1845 – “The Raven” is published in The Evening Mirror in New York, the first publication with the name of the author, Edgar Allan Poe.

    1850 – Henry Clay introduces the Compromise of 1850 to the U.S. Congress.

    1856 – Queen Victoria issues a Warrant under the Royal sign-manual that establishes the Victoria Cross to recognise acts of valour by British military personnel during the Crimean War.

    1863 – The Bear River Massacre: A detachment of California Volunteers led by Colonel Patrick Edward Connor engage the Shoshone at Bear River, Washington Territory, killing hundreds of men, women and children.

    1886 – Karl Benz patents the first successful gasoline-driven automobile.

    1907 – Charles Curtis of Kansas becomes the first Native American U.S. Senator.

    1936 – The first inductees into the Baseball Hall of Fame are announced.

    1940 – Three trains on the Nishinari Line; present Sakurajima Line, in Osaka, Japan, collide and explode while approaching Ajikawaguchi Station. One hundred and eighty-one people are killed.

    1991 – Gulf War: The Battle of Khafji, the first major ground engagement of the war, as well as its deadliest, begins between Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

    2002 – In his State of the Union address, President George W. Bush describes “regimes that sponsor terror” as an Axis of evil, in which he includes Iraq, Iran and North Korea.

    2009 – Governor of Illinois Rod Blagojevich is removed from office following his conviction of several corruption charges, including solicitation of personal benefit in exchange for an appointment to the United States Senate as a replacement for then-U.S. president-elect Barack Obama.

    2017 – A gunman opens fire at the Islamic Cultural Centre of Quebec City, killing six and wounding 19 others in a spree shooting.

    2020 – COVID-19 pandemic: The Trump administration establishes the White House Coronavirus Task Force under Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar.

    Births:
    1688 – Emanuel Swedenborg, Swedish astronomer, philosopher, and theologian (d. 1772).

    1737 – Thomas Paine, English-American political activist, philosopher, political theorist, and revolutionary (d. 1809).

    1852 – Frederic Hymen Cowen, Jamaican-English pianist, composer, and conductor (d. 1935).

    1860 – Anton Chekhov, Russian playwright and short story writer (d. 1904).

    1861 – Florida Ruffin Ridley, American civil rights activist, teacher, editor, and writer (d. 1943). [One of the first black public schoolteachers in Boston, and edited The Woman’s Era, the country’s first newspaper published by and for African-American women.]

    1862 – Frederick Delius, English composer (d. 1934).

    1880 – W. C. Fields, American actor, comedian, and screenwriter (d. 1946).

    1881 – Alice Catherine Evans, American microbiologist (d. 1975). [Today’s Woman of the Day, see next post below.]

    1913 – Victor Mature, American actor (d. 1999).

    1915 – Bill Peet, American author and illustrator (d. 2002).

    1916 – Roy Markham, British plant virologist (d. 1979).

    1923 – Eddie Taylor, American electric blues guitarist and singer (d. 1985).

    1933 – Sacha Distel, French singer and guitarist (d. 2004).

    1939 – Germaine Greer, Australian journalist and author.

    1940 – Katharine Ross, American actress and author.

    1943 – Tony Blackburn, English radio and television host.

    1945 – Tom Selleck, American actor and businessman.

    1947 – Linda B. Buck, American biologist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate.

    1948 – Raymond Keene, English chess player and author. [Keene has on several occasions been accused of plagiarism. In 1993 John Donaldson accused Keene of committing plagiarism in The Complete Book of Gambits (Batsford, 1992). Donaldson wrote “Just how blatant was the plagiarism? Virtually every word and variation in the four and a half pages devoted to Lisitsin’s Gambit in Keene’s book was stolen.”]

    1949 – Tommy Ramone, Hungarian-American drummer and producer (d. 2014).

    1952 – Tim Healy, British actor.

    1954 – Oprah Winfrey, American talk show host, actress, and producer, founded Harpo Productions. [Her real name is Orpah; people kept getting it wrong and the error stuck.]

    1971 – Clare Balding, English broadcaster, journalist and author.

    1982 – Adam Lambert, American singer, songwriter and actor.

    1985 – Rag’n’Bone Man, English singer-songwriter.

    I guess I just process death differently than some folks. Realizing you’re not going to see that person again is always the most difficult part about it. But that feeling settles, and then you are glad you had that person in your life, and then the happiness and the sadness get all swirled up inside you. (John Prine):
    1763 – Louis Racine, French poet (b. 1692).

    1820 – George III of the United Kingdom (b. 1738).

    1888 – Edward Lear, English poet and illustrator (b. 1812).

    1899 – Alfred Sisley, French-English painter (b. 1839).

    1916 – Sibylle von Olfers, German art teacher, author and nun (b. 1881).

    1928 – Douglas Haig, 1st Earl Haig, Scottish field marshal (b. 1861).

    1933 – Sara Teasdale, American poet (b. 1884).

    1934 – Fritz Haber, Polish-German chemist and engineer, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1868).

    1956 – H. L. Mencken, American journalist and critic (b. 1880).

    1959 – Pauline Smith, South African novelist, short story writer, memoirist and playwright (b. 1882).

    1963 – Robert Frost, American poet and playwright (b. 1874).

    1964 – Alan Ladd, American actor (b. 1913).

    1967 – Harold Munro Fox, English zoologist (b. 1889).

    1974 – H. E. Bates, English writer (b. 1905).

    1976 – Jesse Fuller, American one-man band musician (b. 1896).

    1977 – Freddie Prinze, American comedian and actor (b. 1954).

    1979 – Sonny Payne, American jazz drummer (b. 1926).

    1980 – Jimmy Durante, American entertainer (b. 1893).

    1984 – Frances Goodrich, American actress, dramatist and screenwriter (b. 1890).

    1992 – Willie Dixon, American singer-songwriter and producer (b. 1915).

    2009 – John Martyn, British singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1948).

    2015 – Colleen McCullough, Australian neuroscientist, author, and academic (b. 1937).

  2. Woman of the Day:
    [Text from Wikipedia]
    Alice Catherine Evans (born on this day in 1881, died September 5, 1975) was an American microbiologist. She became a researcher at the U.S. Department of Agriculture where she investigated bacteriology in milk and cheese. She proved that Bacillus abortus (called Brucella abortus) caused the disease brucellosis (undulant fever or Malta fever) in both cattle and humans which led to the pasteurization of milk in US in 1930. Evans was the first woman president elected by the Society of American Bacteriologists.

    The younger of two children, Evans was homeschooled at a farm in Pennsylvania until the age of six and then attended a one-room school house where she earned outstanding grades. In 1886, she and her brother survived scarlet fever.

    She attended the Susquehanna Collegiate Institute in Towanda, where she played on a women’s basketball team. Viewed as an unladylike sport, at one game a doctor refused to treat Evans’ dislocated finger.

    After graduating, Evans became a teacher, later writing that she did so because it was the only profession open to women and found it boring. After four years of teaching, she took a free course for rural teachers at Cornell University meant to help them inspire their students to love science and nature. After receiving a scholarship, she wanted to continue her studies in science. Cornell offered bacteriology for free tuition in order to encourage students to pursue the still new science. While at Cornell, Evans worked as a housekeeper and doing clerical work in the alumni library, earning her the nickname “the grind.” She earned a B.S. in bacteriology from Cornell University in 1909, and was the first woman to receive a bacteriology scholarship from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she earned her M.S. the following year. At the end of her studies, her professor Elmer McCollum asked if she would wish to continue her studies, offering her the school’s chemistry fellowship. Due to the financial strain of her studies, she decided to enter the workforce instead.

    Evans was offered a federal position at the Dairy Division of the Bureau of Animal Industry at the United States Department of Agriculture. She accepted the offer and worked in Madison, Wisconsin for three years, refining the process of manufacturing cheese and butter for improved flavor and investigating the sources of bacterial contamination in milk products. She was the first woman scientist to hold a permanent position as a USDA bacteriologist and as a civil servant was protected by law. Each year, Evans took one undergraduate university course, learning German in order to read research reports (prior to World War I, Germany led in bacteriology).

    In 1913, Evans relocated to Washington, D.C., where the USDA had built a new wing. The Bureau of Animal Industry tried to block women from joining them, but Evans unwittingly was admitted through a loophole. She found the Dairy Division more welcoming than the larger Bureau. While there, she worked with Charles Thom and when he left Evans was sent to the University of Chicago to study mycology so she could replace him as the mycologist.

    Evans became interested in the disease brucellosis and its relationship to fresh, unpasteurized milk. Her investigation focused on the organism Bacillus abortus, known to cause miscarriages in animals. She discovered that the microbe thrived in infected cows as well as animals that appeared healthy. Reports hypothesized that since the bacteria was found in cow’s milk, a threat to human health was likely.

    Evans decided to investigate whether the disease in cows could be the cause of undulant fever in humans. She warned that raw milk should be pasteurized to protect people from various diseases. She reported her findings to the Society of American Bacteriologists in 1917 and published her work in the Journal of Infectious Diseases in 1918. She was met with skepticism, particularly because she was a woman and did not have a Ph.D. After publishing, Evans decided to let the issue rest, knowing that her findings would be tested and verified with time.

    Evans joined the United States Public Health Service’s Hygienic Laboratory in April 1918 to study epidemic meningitis, “one of the dread diseases of World War I.” That October, when the Spanish flu came to Washington, D.C., she was asked to change her research’s focus to the flu. Early in her work studying the flu, she was infected, and was confined to bed for a month. When soldiers returned from World War I and Streptococcus spread throughout shanties and tents they lived in, Evans changed her focus again. Her studies of streptococci continued throughout many years of her work. She observed and published about the nascent stage of phage twenty-three years before Winston R. Maxted and Richard M. Krause published similar findings.

    In 1920, Dr. Karl F. Meyer and his team confirmed Evans’s observation of cow’s milk as a source of human brucellosis. Outbreaks in 1922 inspired Evans’s continued research, which included studying blood samples and infecting a heifer with Brucella melitensis to see if it would be infected. Despite her colleagues’ skepticism, Evans’s work was repeatedly confirmed.

    However, Dr. Theobald Smith remained an outspoken critic of Evans’s discovery. In 1925, after learning that Smith had raised doubt about her findings in the National Research Council, Evans began to worry that the objections of a scientist held in such high esteem would delay the recognition of her findings. She reached out to William H. Welch, the Dean of the School of Hygiene and Public Health of the Johns Hopkins University, to aid in her communications with Smith. Six months after Smith responded to a letter from Welch, asking Evans to suspend “judgment until the unknown factors responsible for or contributing to the incidence of the human cases have been brought to light,” Evans was invited to sit on the National Research Council’s Committee on Infectious Abortion, which was chaired by Smith. At the Hygienic Laboratory, Evans was infected with undulant fever in October 1922, a then-incurable disease that impaired her health for twenty years. Initially, Evans was diagnosed with Neurasthenia due to the lack of recognition of brucellosis. However, in 1928, doctors found lesions from which Brucella was cultivated while performing unrelated surgery on Evans, confirming her diagnosis.

    Eventually, Brucella was confirmed as the disease that caused what was then known as undulant fever and Malta fever. In 1928, in recognition of her achievement, the Society of American Bacteriologists elected Evans as their president, making her the first woman to hold the position. Evans’s findings led to the pasteurization of milk in 1930. As a result, the incidence of brucellosis in the United States was significantly reduced.

    Because of a hypersensitivity to brucellar antigen, Evans paused her work with brucellae. In 1936, she resumed her work, but did not handle living cultures. In this study, the team surveyed three cities looking for evidence of brucellar infection and the cause.

    In 1939, Evans turned her attention to Hemolytic streptococcus, which she focused on until her retirement.

    Evans officially retired in 1945 but continued working in the field. Following her retirement, she became a popular speaker, especially with women’s groups. She gave lectures to women about career development and pursuing scientific careers.

    After being retired for sixteen years, Evans returned to writing about brucellosis. With the advent of disability insurance, the literature began suggesting malingering as a cause for failing to recover from brucellosis, so Evans encouraged further study into the disease.

    In 1966, Evans protested against the disclaimer of communist affiliation on the Medicare application, claiming that it violated her right to free speech. In January 1967, the Department of Justice agreed that it was unconstitutional and did not enforce the provision.

    Evans was awarded honorary doctoral degrees in medicine (Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, 1934) and in science (University of Wisconsin–Madison and Wilson College, 1936). She was appointed a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, served as Honorary president, Inter-American Committee on Brucellosis (1945–57), and became an Honorary member of the American Society for Microbiology (1975).

    Evans had a stroke at the age of 94 and died on September 5, 1975, in Alexandria, Virginia.

    In 1983, the American Society for Microbiology established the Alice C. Evans Award and in 1993 she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. The bacterium Enemella evansiae was named after her in 2020.

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

  3. I learned the other week that the Democratic National Convention is in Chicago this year. If the Gaza war goes on until the Convention in August (seems late?), I expect we will see big protests from the anti-Israel crowd. I wonder if the DNC and the Chicago PD are prepared to handle those in a way that prevents the disruption of the Convention. They may be in a damned if we do, damned if we don’t situation, having to choose between chaos on the floor or scenes of cops breaking heads again.

    1. Well, that’s a good point! TJ is a fount of timeless wisdom on many subjects, but most people would agree that race relations isn’t one of them. But, in fairness, the TJ that Jerry had in mind was surely a modern-day TJ, with updated beliefs. As a TJ fan, I, too, would be very interested in hearing what THAT TJ had to say

      1. I’d be quite interested to interrogate the original TJ on that topic, to see how he reconciled different aspects of his thinking.

      2. I agree. I would value conversing with him even though he was “unenlightened.” I might, however, have to rebury him if he didn’t shape up!

  7. So much to comment on here, but I want to draw attention to Noa Tishby’s reporting from a pro-Hamas rally at the Sundance Film Festival. Jerry cites this above as well: https://x.com/noatishby/status/1749549584743829863?s=20.

    *This* is the kind of idiocy that we’re dealing with. People who have no idea what “From the river to the sea means,” people who think that rapes were alleged but not confirmed, people who do not believe that Hamas is in Gaza, people who think that Israel occupies Gaza (despite having been out of Gaza since 2005), and people who think that Israel should be dissolved.

    It’s difficult even to imagine that so many stupid people were even capable of assembling in the same place at the same time.

    Noa Tishby is a treasure for bringing this travesty to our awareness.

    1. In the 1930s there were a lot of stupid people who thought Hitler
      would Make Germany Great Again.

  8. Corn chips I can ignore, but having discovered corn nuts, I am in love! Never had them in the UK (maybe they have appeared there now?) but used to buy them in Spain, where they helped me to consume, shall we say, adequate?, quantities of red wine. I can’t buy them in NS either, but amazon will send me hominy which I can deep fry or oven roast and salt. I even tried making hominy out of popping corn and some soap-maker’s lye. Sort of worked. But giant hominy works better. Soak it overnight, then dry it off. Deep fry until just going golden brown, drain on kitchen paper, salt and eat.

  9. If people don’t like Bidens’ support for Israel, then they should vote for trump. That’ll show him.

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