Welcome to Tuesday, January 30, 2024: the penultimate day of the month. It’s National Croissant Day, a day of cultural appropriation but man, those things are good, especially in France. Here’s a specimen of what was voted the Best Croissant in Paris in 2020, purchased from La Maison d’Isabelle. It was only one Euro, I believe, and was excellent.
It’s also National Plan for Vacation Day (I am–to South Africa), and Fred Korematsu Day in California, Florida, Hawaii, and Virginia (Korematsu was a Japanese-American civil rights activist, born on this day in 1919, who fought the incarceration of American citizens of Japanese descent during WWII). Finally, it’s Martyrdom of Mahatma Gandhi, assassinated in Delhi on this day in 1948, along with its related holidays of Martyrs’ Day in India and School Day of Non-violence and Peace in Spain.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the January 30 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*According to the NYT, Hamas is considering a new peace proposal, with their demands including the full withdrawal of IDF troops from Gaza and also the release of many Palestinian prisoners from Israeli prisoners (including those captured on October 7), all before any hostages are released. Do not believe that this will lead to peace. Israel will never accept such a deal, especially one that requires a cease-fire and the withdrawal of IDF troops. The NYT, of course, thinks this deal is viable. It is not.
*More trouble for UNRWA: The IDF has given the U.S. a dossier on the activities of UNRWA members as participants in the Oct. 7 massacre of Israelis. This dossier is probably going to cause a lot more UNRWA employees to be fired. So far 13 countries have suspended their donations to UNRWA : the U.S., Canada, Australia, Britain, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Finland, Estonia, Japan, Austria and Romania.
One is accused of kidnapping a woman. Another is said to have handed out ammunition. A third was described as taking part in the massacre at a kibbutz where 97 people died. And all were said to be employees of the United Nations aid agency that schools, shelters and feeds hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
The accusations are contained in a dossier provided to the United States government that details Israel’s claims against a dozen employees of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency who, it says, played a role in the Hamas attacks against Israel on Oct. 7 or in their aftermath.
The U.N. said on Friday that it had fired several employees after being briefed on the allegations. But little was known about the accusations until the dossier was reviewed on Sunday by The New York Times.
The accusations are what prompted eight countries [JAC: more now], including the United States, to suspend some aid payment to UNRWA, as the agency is known, even as war plunges Palestinians in Gaza into desperate straits. More than 26,000 people have been killed there and nearly two million displaced, according to Gazan and U.N. officials.
The UNRWA workers have been accused of helping Hamas stage the attack that set off the war in Gaza, or of aiding it in the days after. Some 1,200 people in Israel were killed that day, Israeli officials say, and about 240 were abducted and taken to Gaza.
But, as you see below, we’ve known for years that UNRWA is complicit in Palestinian terrorism. It took the war between Hamas and Israel to bring the facts to such public attention that countries could no longer ignore it. Believe me, there are a lot more than 12 UNRWA employees that need to be fired: so many, in fact, that there’s little doubt that the agency needs to be dissolved, and its mission subsumed under the UN’s regular agency for helping refugees, UNHCR. It’s a travesty that Palestine is the only territory to have its own refugee agency, which is one reason, of course, that it’s become rotten to the core, for there’s no oversight.
*Hillel Neuer, head of the NGO UN Watch,writes more about UNRWA at The Free Press, “The UN’s terrorism teachers.”
This agency was chartered after the 1948 war that established the state of Israel. Since 1950, UNRWA has provided the bulk of social services at Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, the West Bank, and Gaza, including the crucial task of teaching Palestinian children and adolescents.
But the notion that it is primarily an agency for the relief of refugees is a front. UNRWA’s main task is political. Palestinians who work for UNRWA call it “the main political witness to our cause.”
UNRWA exists to perpetuate Palestinians as refugees. Unlike the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, which since World War II has been responsible for the welfare of all refugees in the world, and has worked toward their resettlement and relocation, UNRWA deals only with the Arabs from Palestine and has a completely different objective.
Millions of Palestinians who attend UNRWA schools in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, and Gaza are taught that the war of 1948 is not over, and that they have a “right of return”—meaning, to dismantle and take over Israel.
The UN betrays its mission by signaling to the Palestinians that the war is not over, and to keep fighting.
UN Secretary General António Guterres said he was “horrified” to discover that UNRWA employees participated in the invasion and massacre of October 7. But in reality, their actions merely translated UNRWA’s core message into action.
UNRWA’s involvement in Hamas and its terrorism has been known for years:
But UNRWA’s entanglement with Hamas violence goes much deeper. For example, UNRWA employees have held Israeli hostages captive in their homes, using UNRWA facilities to move them from place to place.
From the protection of UNRWA schools, Hamas shoots at IDF troops and fires rockets at Israeli towns. The floor above an UNRWA kindergarten in Gaza was booby-trapped with explosives by Hamas. UNRWA facilities are routinely used to conceal weapons.
UNRWA resources have been used to build and supply Hamas attack tunnels, many of which are constructed underneath UNRWA facilities.
Neuer goes on to give horrifying antisemitic messages gleaned from UNRWA chat groups; many like this one:
Despite all their required “neutrality” training, other UNRWA teachers serving as administrators in the group also have no compunction about declaring their support for the murder of Jews.
On the morning of October 7, admin Israa Abdul Kareem Mezher, an elementary school Arabic language teacher in Gaza, posting under the username “Sun of Sunshine,” ecstatically celebrated the Hamas terrorists: “May Allah keep their feet steady and guide their aim”; “pray for the Mujahidin”; “God protect them and bring them back safe.” As news of the Hamas atrocities began to spread, Mezher cheered, “God is the greatest.”
. . .The UN almost never speaks out, however. “It would put our staff in jeopardy to call out Hamas for use of our buildings or schools,” a UN official told CBS News.
In October, this fear apparently caused UNRWA to delete its announcement that Hamas had stolen fuel, medical supplies, and other humanitarian aid intended for Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Gunmen are routinely seen commandeering aid trucks entering UNRWA facilities in Gaza, or carrying off sacks of UNRWA food.
Neuer will be tesitfying about this in the U.S. Congress today.
I had a bit of a squabble on Facebook yesterday (always a big mistake!) with some nudnik who said that a mere dozen people from UNRWA involved in October 7 wasn’t all that important given the size of the organization. I referred this person to the article above. And now look at the article below:
*The Wall Street Journal (archived here) now estimates that about 1,200 UNRWA members were involved with militants. That of course is a rough figure, but it sure ain’t 12! Nope, it’s two orders of magnitude higher. Here’s what, as they say, “you need to know”. I’ve put a bit in bold:
At least 12 employees of the U.N.’s Palestinian refugee agency had connections to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel and around 10% of all of its Gaza staff have ties to Islamist militant groups, according to intelligence reports reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Six United Nations Relief and Works Agency workers were part of the wave of Palestinian militants who killed 1,200 people in the deadliest assault on Jews since the Holocaust, according to the intelligence dossier. Two helped kidnap Israelis. Two others were tracked to sites where scores of Israeli civilians were shot and killed. Others coordinated logistics for the assault, including procuring weapons.
Of the 12 Unrwa employees with links to the attacks, seven were primary or secondary school teachers, including two math teachers, two Arabic language teachers and one primary school teacher.
Yep, these must be a few of the many UNRWA teachers who inculcate Palestinian children with hatred of Jews and the desire to be martyrs. But wait—there’s more that you need to know:
The information in the intelligence reports—based on what an official described as very sensitive signals intelligence as well as cellphone tracking data, interrogations of captured Hamas fighters and documents recovered from dead militants, among other things—were part of a briefing given by Israel to U.S. officials that led Washington and others to suspend aid to Unrwa.
Intelligence estimates shared with the U.S. conclude that around 1,200 of Unrwa’s roughly 12,000 employees in Gaza have links to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and about half have close relatives who belong to the Islamist militant groups. Both groups have been designated as terrorist organizations by the U.S. and others. Hamas has run Gaza since a 2007 coup.
“Unrwa’s problem is not just ‘a few bad apples’ involved in the October 7 massacre,” said a senior Israeli government official. “The institution as a whole is a haven for Hamas’ radical ideology.”
An Unrwa spokesperson on Monday declined to comment, saying an internal U.N. investigation into the agency was under way.
It if wasn’t so dire, I’d laugh at the thought of the UN investigating UNRWA. If the UN wants their investigation to be credible, if they want countries who suspended donations to even think of starting to donate again, they’d be much better off getting some objective and outside organization to do this investigation. After all, the evidence that UNRWA was involved with terrorism has been known for well over a decade, and surely the UN was aware of this.
And to finish with some advice from the Elder of Ziyon:
If critics of defunding UNRWA really cared about Gaza civilians, they would be asking for nations to compensate for suspending UNRWA funds by giving more money to UN agencies that actually do important work as their main functions, like the World Food Programme or the World Health Organization. While they are also biased against Israel, they at least do real work, and have professionals who create plans on how best to help Gaza civilians under trying circumstances.Those who insist on funding an agency where most of its budget does not help people in need of food or medicine don’t really care about Gaza. They care about UNRWA’s main mission of keeping the fictional “refugee” issue alive forever and delegitimizing Israel.
*All “progressives” agree with the (false) notion, appearing in a JAMA editorial that “race and ethnicity are social constructs, without biological meaning,” so why is the WaPo beefing that new Alzheimer’s drugs haven’t been sufficiently tested in African-Americans? Luana and I already established that the JAMA statement is pig soap (if it weren’t, how could 23andMe work?).
First, it’s well known that the incidence of Alzheimer’s is much higher in blacks than in whites. Of course that could be due to “cultural difference”, but there are data showing that there are certainly genetic differences behind some of that disparity (see here and here, for example). So when somebody beefs about not including blacks in a study of drugs or disease, remember that such a complaint is an implicit acknowledgement that there are likely biological features connected with human race, even in the old, crude “5 race” sense. Race may be partly a social construct, but it’s for sure not entirely a social construct. From the WaPo:
But as [Robert] Williford and his doctors embark on this treatment, they are doing so with scant scientific data about how the medication might work in people of color. In the pivotal clinical trial for the drug, Black patients globally accounted for only 47 of the 1,795 participants — about 2.6 percent. For U.S. trial sites, the percentage was 4.5 percent.
The proportion of Black enrollees was similarly low for Eli Lilly Alzheimer’s drug, called donanemab, expected to be cleared by the Food and Drug Administration in coming months. Black people make up more than 13 percent of the U.S. population.
The paltry data for the new class of groundbreaking drugs, which strip a sticky substance called amyloid beta from the brain, has ignited an intense debate among researchers and clinicians. Will the medications — the first glimmer of hope after years of failure — be as beneficial for African Americans as for White patients?
“Are these drugs going to work in non-Whites? And particularly in Blacks? We just don’t have enough data, I don’t think,” said Suzanne E. Schindler, a clinical neurologist and dementia specialist at Washington University in St. Louis. “In general, the default is that they will work the same in everybody, but we don’t really know that for sure.”
The situation casts a spotlight yet again on the decades-long failure of researchers to reflect the increasingly diverse character of the patient population in the United States, and underscores the stark disparities in Alzheimer’s treatment and care. Black Americans develop the disease and related dementias at twice the rate of their White counterparts, but are less likely to receive specialized care and are diagnosed at later stages, studies show. That’s an urgent problem considering that the new drugs must be used early to have an effect.
And the Post is right. Certainly lifestyle and cultural differences can contribute to medical differences between races, but we have substantial evidence that genetics, can, too. After all, “race” is not just skin pigmentation, but a group of correlated genetic traits that evolved when our ancestors lived in different parts of the globe. And some of those traits might affect disease incidence, what kind of treatments are best to use, and so on. Certainly when you’re doing a test of drugs or of genes connected to disease, race—even self defined—should be taken into account.
*I don’t know why Trump would want to get a federal abortion ban since the Supreme Court has left it to the states, and most Americans were happy with the Roe v. Wade decision, but given the use of drugs to effect abortions (“abortifacients”), I bet you can guess how he could do it, a question discussed in the NYT op-ed “How Trump could institute a backdoor federal abortion ban.” Here’s the way:
A second Trump administration could still try to eliminate access to the drug nationwide even if the court sides against the anti-abortion plaintiffs in Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine. The road map created by Project 2025 calls on the F.D.A. to limit access to mifepristone and ultimately withdraw it from the market as a drug “proven to be dangerous to women and by definition fatally unsafe for unborn children.”
The scientists at the F.D.A. might not even need to be on board with this plan for it to work. The secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, a presidential appointee, can override the F.D.A.’s drug approval decisions — a fact that raised red flags at the height of the Covid pandemic. As the authors of Project 2025’s road map recognize, Republican control of Health and Human Services could mean the end of the most common abortion method in the United States in blue as well as red states.
Leading anti-abortion groups also have coalesced around plans to revive the 1873 Comstock Act; what remains of the broad and archaic law could, anti-abortion groups claim, punish anyone receiving or mailing any “obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile article” with up to five years in prison for a first offense. Abortion opponents have reimagined Comstock for a Trump Department of Justice as a way to effectively ban most abortions everywhere, pointing to language in the statute that makes it federal crime to mail or receive any item “designed, adapted or intended for producing abortion.”
The statute hasn’t been enforced much, if at all, in cases of abortion in about 100 years and has been construed as protecting the ordinary practice of medicine since the 1930s. But anti-abortion groups, which are cherry-picking words to turn the statute into a no-exceptions ban, hope that a second Trump administration would ignore federal precedent.
Project 2025’s road map argues that a Republican Justice Department should enforce Comstock “against providers and distributors” of abortion pills. A Trump administration could follow through on these plans by prosecuting doctors and drug companies anywhere in the country: The Comstock Act, as a federal law, could be read to override state protections for abortion rights.
Some key abortion opponents, like the former Texas solicitor general Jonathan Mitchell, argue that Comstock should be interpreted as an effective ban on all abortions because every procedure that takes place in the United States relies on some item placed in the mail, from a surgical glove to a curet. Mr. Mitchell and his allies read the law to exclude explicit exceptions for the life or health of the patient.
Understood in this way, the law could punish women who receive abortion-related items or information using the Postal Service or another carrier or even websites. If a Trump Justice Department began prosecuting doctors for prescribing or shipping pills in New York or California, that would certainly draw a court challenge, and the administration may not have the legal authority to follow through on the plans drawn up by anti-abortion strategists. But abortion opponents like their chances in the Supreme Court and have prepared arguments for Mr. Trump to use that are tailor-made for its conservative supermajority.
Well, if Trump gets elected, which seems likely when I wake up at about 2 a.m. and start perseverating, I’d be willing to bet that this strategy won’t work. When the Supreme court handed over abortion decisions to the state, I doubt that they’d then allow the federal government to use archaic laws to put them back in the hands of the federal government.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Malgorzata explains: “Hili, naively, thought that the reality should make sense. Now she discovered that it doesn’t. But she is not sure whether it’s her perception which is faulty or the reality really went off the rails.”
Hili: I’m skeptical.A: Why?Hili: Nothing makes sense.
Hili: Jestem sceptyczna.Ja: Dlaczego?Hili: Nic nie ma sensu.
*******************
From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy:
From Alison:
From David:
From Masih. the wife of a Kurdish political prisoner, executed this morning by the Iranian regime for “spying for Israel”:
The regime in Iran might execute her husband tomorrow. 💔 https://t.co/ZV9CL0yigr
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) January 27, 2024
From Bryan, who notes that the headline says it all. If Israel is an “ethnostate,” what about the Islamic Republic of Iran, which has virtually no Jews. Or virtually any state in the Middle East? Also, Hamas was
This ignorant, adult pro Palestine protester got humiliated by a 12 year old boy.
The kid certainly knows his stuff, good for him. The woman did not and it showed. 👌🏼
pic.twitter.com/ZCqtZkKaLb— Chris Rose (@ArchRose90) January 28, 2024
From Simon, who says he didn’t even know this was “a thing” (neither did I!). Ms. Carroll should sell off the judgement to someone else given that she’s 80.
Pre/post judgment int rate is likely 9%. There's an industry devoted to buying judgments. Regardless, Trump will have to post security if he wants to appeal as he did w/ prior 5M judgment which won't be easy given liquidity issues he'll have after Justice Engoron is done w/ him. https://t.co/N5tkz7bKBa
— Richard Signorelli 🌱🇺🇦 🌊 (@richsignorelli) January 28, 2024
From Jon, a brave Ukrainian soldier with three brave Ukrainian kittens on his shoulder (there’s some music):
Glory to our Defenders!
📹- b_r_o_d_y_a_g_a_99/TikTok pic.twitter.com/8wMm1zeCqw
— Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) January 28, 2024
From Orli. Note that Harvard has aTitle VI suit against it for creating a climate of antisemitism:
Someone took the time to deface every single Jewish hostage poster on Harvard's campus with antisemitic slogans and denial.
I guess they just wanted to make sure their Jewish peers received a warm welcome for the new semester.
Shame on Harvard.@ShabbosK pic.twitter.com/e6sR5dL3Cz
— Hen Mazzig (@HenMazzig) January 22, 2024
From Malcolm; my favorite of all wild felid species, this one clearly on the hunt. There’s marching music.
The steady pace of Pallas's cat shows that it's a natural at strutting the catwalk. pic.twitter.com/XQmleGKdk0
— People's Daily, China (@PDChina) January 22, 2024
From the Auschwitz Memorial, a woman gassed upon arrival:
30 January 1894 | A Slovak Jewish woman named Blanka Lang was born in Velka Bytca (Nagybicscse).
She was deported to #Auschwitz in June 1944 and murdered in a gas chamber. pic.twitter.com/iSdmClERMZ
— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) January 30, 2024
One tweet from Dr. Cobb today, showing an illusion. I don’t understand this one, though; I’m putting it up so readers can explain it. (I can’t brain today.)
The left face appears whitish while the right one blackish, though they are the same black and white stripes. pic.twitter.com/xfTVjTnv4n
— Akiyoshi Kitaoka (@AkiyoshiKitaoka) January 13, 2024
Wow. I am onboard with Princess Hili today. Thanks Malgorzata.
Since this would be a simple commercial transaction. I can’t see why the judgement-buying corporation even need to be American, or based in America.
Imagine the shade that Trump would colour if the judgement (and right-of-harassment) were sold to, say, Mexican immigrant-owned company. Definite Porterhouse blue territory.
The “shade is interpreted differently depending on context” version (first pair) is well known – the human visual system is largely relative, not absolute. Amongst other things, this is why Pantone and other printing specialists (Munsell, in my industry) have a business selling colour reference sets.
The second set of figures seems to have had the image overlaid with B/W stripes, but the strips then flipped vertically. So, what indeed is going on … the visual system is weird.
Then there are the artists who paint pictures. Every color mixed and applied changes it’s relative value with every color applied nearby. It can drive you to strabismus.
Selling of judgements makes sense; it’s just a debt. However, there would be a great deal of risk in the Trump judgement, which will certainly be released on appeal.
I assume you mean “reversed” on appeal, DrB. Can you identify any issue raised by Trump’s lawyers in either the first or second trial that could possibly result in reversal of the verdicts against him?
Trump’s lawyer at the first trial (at which his liability for sexually assaulting and libeling Ms. Carroll was established) put on an incoherent defense. At the second trial (with liability having already been established at the first) the only issue was the amount of damages Trump owed Ms. Carroll for continuing to libel of her after he was found culpable at the first trial.
It is possible, of course, that an appellate court could reduce the the size $83.3 million judgment the jury awarded at the second trial (known legally as “remittitur”), but given the blatancy of Trump’s continued libeling of Ms. Carroll, a large punitive damages award was to be expected, so I doubt it.
Thanks Ken, for the reassurance that there IS a God.
On this day:
1607 – An estimated 200 square miles (51,800 ha) along the coasts of the Bristol Channel and Severn Estuary in England are destroyed by massive flooding, resulting in an estimated 2,000 deaths.
1649 – Charles I of England is executed in Whitehall, London.
1661 – Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, is ritually executed more than two years after his death, on the 12th anniversary of the execution of the monarch he himself deposed.
1703 – The Forty-seven rōnin, under the command of Ōishi Kuranosuke, avenge the death of their master, by killing Kira Yoshinaka.
1820 – Edward Bransfield sights the Trinity Peninsula and claims the discovery of Antarctica.
1826 – The Menai Suspension Bridge, considered the world’s first modern suspension bridge, connecting the Isle of Anglesey to the north West coast of Wales, is opened.
1835 – In the first assassination attempt against a President of the United States, Richard Lawrence attempts to shoot president Andrew Jackson, but fails and is subdued by a crowd, including several congressmen as well as Jackson himself.
1847 – Yerba Buena, California is renamed San Francisco, California.
1858 – The first Hallé concert is given in Manchester, England, marking the official founding of The Hallé orchestra as a full-time, professional orchestra.
1862 – The first American ironclad warship, the USS Monitor is launched.
1908 – Indian pacifist and leader Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi is released from prison by Jan C. Smuts after being tried and sentenced to two months in jail earlier in the month.
1911 – The destroyer USS Terry makes the first airplane rescue at sea saving the life of Douglas McCurdy 16 kilometres (10 mi) from Havana, Cuba.
1920 – Japanese carmaker Mazda is founded, initially as a cork-producing company.
1930 – The Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union orders the confiscation of lands belonging to the Kulaks in a campaign of Dekulakization, resulting in the executions and forced deportations of millions.
1933 – Adolf Hitler’s rise to power: Hitler takes office as the Chancellor of Germany.
1939 – During a speech in the Reichstag, Adolf Hitler makes a prediction about the end of Jewish race in Europe if another world war were to occur.
1948 – Following the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in his home compound, India’s prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, broadcasts to the nation, saying “The light has gone out of our lives”. The date of the assassination becomes observed as “Martyrs’ Day” in India.
1956 – In the United States, Civil Rights Movement leader Martin Luther King Jr.’s home is bombed in retaliation for the Montgomery bus boycott.
1969 – The Beatles’ last public performance, on the roof of Apple Records in London. The impromptu concert is broken up by the police.
1972 – The Troubles: Bloody Sunday: British paratroopers open fire on anti-internment marchers in Derry, Northern Ireland, killing 13 people; another person later dies of injuries sustained.
1995 – Hydroxycarbamide becomes the first approved preventive treatment for sickle cell disease.
2020 – The World Health Organization declares the COVID-19 pandemic to be a Public Health Emergency of International Concern.
Births:
1882 – Franklin D. Roosevelt, American lawyer and statesman, 32nd President of the United States (d. 1945).
1902 – Nikolaus Pevsner, German-English historian and scholar (d. 1983).
1912 – Barbara W. Tuchman, American historian and author (d. 1989). [Today’s Woman of the Day, see next post below.]
1915 – John Profumo, English soldier and politician, Secretary of State for War (d. 2006).
1923 – Marianne Ferber, Czech-American economist and author (d. 2013).
1925 – Douglas Engelbart, American computer scientist, invented the computer mouse (d. 2013).
1927 – Olof Palme, Swedish statesman, 26th Prime Minister of Sweden (d. 1986).
1929 – Lucille Teasdale-Corti, Canadian-Italian physician and humanitarian (d. 1996).
1930 – Gene Hackman, American actor and author.
1931 – Shirley Hazzard, Australian-American novelist, short story writer, and essayist (d. 2016).
1937 – Vanessa Redgrave, English actress.
1937 – Boris Spassky, Russian chess player.
1944 – Lynn Harrell, American cellist and academic (d. 2020).
1946 – John Bird, Baron Bird, English publisher, founded The Big Issue.
1947 – Steve Marriott, English singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 1991).
1951 – Phil Collins, English drummer, singer-songwriter, producer, and actor.
1962 – Mary Kay Letourneau, American child rapist (d. 2020).
1974 – Christian Bale, British actor.
1974 – Olivia Colman, English actress.
1981 – Peter Crouch, English footballer.
True love makes the thought of death frequent, easy, without terrors; it merely becomes the standard of comparison, the price one would pay for many things. (Stendhal):
1606 – Everard Digby, English criminal (b. 1578). [A member of the group of provincial members of the English nobility who planned the failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605.]
1836 – Betsy Ross, American seamstress, said to have designed the American Flag (b. 1752).
1838 – Osceola, American tribal leader (b. 1804).
1858 – Coenraad Jacob Temminck, Dutch zoologist and ornithologist (b. 1778).
1928 – Johannes Fibiger, Danish physician and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1867).
1934 – Frank Nelson Doubleday, American publisher, founded the Doubleday Publishing Company (b. 1862).
1947 – Frederick Blackman, English botanist and physiologist (b. 1866).
1948 – Orville Wright, American pilot and engineer, co-founded the Wright Company (b. 1871).
1951 – Ferdinand Porsche, Austrian-German engineer and businessman, founded Porsche (b. 1875).
1958 – Ernst Heinkel, German engineer and businessman; founded the Heinkel Aircraft Company (b. 1888).
1973 – Elizabeth Baker, American economist and academic (b. 1885).
1980 – Professor Longhair, American singer-songwriter and pianist (b. 1918).
1982 – Lightnin’ Hopkins, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1912).
2006 – Coretta Scott King, American author and activist (b. 1927).
2011 – John Barry, English composer and conductor (b. 1933).
2014 – Greater, oldest known greater flamingo and Feast Festival 2021 mascot (h. c.1919–1933).
2015 – Geraldine McEwan, English actress (b. 1932).
2016 – Frank Finlay, English actor (b. 1926).
2016 – Georgia Davis Powers, American activist and politician (b. 1923).
Woman of the Day:
[Text from Wikipedia]
Barbara Wertheim Tuchman (/ˈtʌkmən/; born on this day in 1912, died February 6, 1989) was an American historian and author. She won the Pulitzer Prize twice, for The Guns of August (1962), a best-selling history of the prelude to and the first month of World War I, and Stilwell and the American Experience in China (1971), a biography of General Joseph Stilwell.
Her father, Maurice Wertheim, was an individual of wealth and prestige, the owner of The Nation. magazine, president of the American Jewish Committee, prominent art collector, and a founder of the Theatre Guild. Her mother was the daughter of Henry Morgenthau, Woodrow Wilson’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire.
While she did not explicitly mention it in her 1962 book The Guns of August, Tuchman was present for one of the pivotal events of the book: the pursuit of the German battle cruiser Goeben and light cruiser Breslau. In her account of the pursuit she wrote, “That morning [August 10, 1914] there arrived in Constantinople the small Italian passenger steamer which had witnessed the Gloucester‘s action against Goeben and Breslau. Among its passengers were the daughter, son-in-law and three grandchildren of the American ambassador Mr. Henry Morgenthau.” As she was a grandchild of Henry Morgenthau, she is referring to herself, which is confirmed in her later book Practicing History, in which she tells the story of her father, Maurice Wertheim, traveling from Constantinople to Jerusalem on August 29, 1914, to deliver funds to the Jewish community there. Thus, at two, Tuchman was present during the pursuit of Goeben and Breslau, which she documented 48 years later.
Wertheim was influenced at an early age by the books of Lucy Fitch Perkins and G. A. Henty, as well as the historical novels of Alexandre Dumas. She attended the Walden School on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Radcliffe College in 1933, having studied history and literature.
Following graduation, Wertheim worked as a volunteer research assistant at the Institute of Pacific Relations in New York, spending a year in Tokyo in 1934–35, including a month in China, then returning to the United States via the Trans-Siberian Railway to Moscow and on to Paris. She also contributed to The Nation as a correspondent until her father’s sale of the publication in 1937, traveling to Valencia and Madrid to cover the Spanish Civil War. A first book resulted from her Spanish experience, The Lost British Policy: Britain and Spain Since 1700, published in 1938.
She married in 1940 and during the years of World War II worked in the Office of War Information. Following the war, Tuchman spent the next decade working to raise the children while doing basic research for what would ultimately become the 1956 book Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour.
Following its publication, Tuchman dedicated herself to historical research and writing, turning out a new book approximately every four years. Rather than feeling hampered by the lack of an advanced degree in history, Tuchman argued that freedom from the rigors and expectations of academia was actually liberating, as the norms of academic writing would have “stifled any writing capacity.”
She favored a literary approach to the writing of history, providing eloquent explanatory narratives rather than concentration upon discovery and publication of fresh archival sources. In the words of one biographer, Tuchman was “not a historian’s historian; she was a layperson’s historian who made the past interesting to millions of readers”. Her storytelling prowess was rewarded in 1963 when she received the Pulitzer Prize for her book The Guns of August, dealing with the behind-the-scenes political machinations which led to the eruption of World War I in the summer of 1914.
In 1978, Tuchman was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She became the first female president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1979. She won a U.S. National Book Award in History for the first paperback edition of A Distant Mirror in 1980. Also in 1980 Tuchman gave the National Endowment for the Humanities’ (NEH) Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government’s highest honor for achievement in the humanities. Tuchman’s lecture was titled “Mankind’s Better Moments”.
Tuchman was a trustee of Radcliffe College and a lecturer at Harvard University, the University of California, and the Naval War College. Although she never received a formal graduate degree in history, Tuchman was the recipient of a number of honorary degrees from leading American universities, including Yale University, Harvard University, New York University, Columbia University, Boston University, and Smith College, among others.
Tuchman died in 1989 in Greenwich, Connecticut, following a stroke, at the age of 77.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_W._Tuchman
It is hypothesized – though disputed – that this event was the result of a submarine landslip in the St George’s Channel, which generated a “tsunami” in a relatively earthquake-free part of the world. Nova Scotia suffered a small number of fatalities following a landslide-amplified tsunami in 1929.
The tsunami interpretation of this event was amplified by the rather fervid discussion of tsunami risks associated with the questionable stability of various parts of the Canary Islands in the early 2000s. Which remains a distinct, if hard to quantify, hazard. The ultimate risks are probably fairly low, since the Canary Islands have upwards of 20 scars from major landslips around them (which overprint each other), suggesting that these events are relatively common.
The various Hawaiʻian islands have enough of these “sector collapses” around them to give sufficient cause for concern. Or a resigned shrug.
(Bathymetry maps and sections for both Hawaiʻi and the Canaries are at https://wellsite-geologist.blogspot.com/2019/06/sector-collapse.html.)
Nobody (TTBOMK) has fingered a particular landslide scar in the St George’s Channel as the origin of the (putative) 1607 “tsunami” – but that’s not for lack of plausible targets. The alternative interpretation of “storm surge + tidal bore” is at least as plausible – and no less cheering about the likelihood of recurrence.
The coasts of the North Sea have also been scoured by at least one, and probably more, landscape-powered tsunami in the post-glacial period. The origin here being the accumulation of glacial debris near the “grounding line” of the Norwegian ice sheet into the Atlantic, particularly around the Storegga part of the mid-Norwegian coast. Whether triggered by an earthquake (see “Grand Banks” example) or release of methane from the sediment pile (hypothetical, though plausible) remains unclear.
Whether or not to call these “tsunami” is a minor moot point. They’re not meteorological waves (though in theory a sufficient storm could trigger one). The change in shape (and position) of the seafloor is common with classical earthquake “tsunami”. And at least one case (the Grand Banks case) was triggered by an earthquake starting the landslide. Very moot.
Interesting, thanks!
As Flanders & Swann put it, Nil Combustubus Profumo – “There’s No Smoke Without Fire”.
On this day:
1607 – An estimated 200 square miles (51,800 ha) along the coasts of the Bristol Channel and Severn Estuary in England are destroyed by massive flooding, resulting in an estimated 2,000 deaths.
1649 – Charles I of England is executed in Whitehall, London, resulting in an estimated single death. 🙂
Paging Mr Dick
Mr. Dick he daid.
But you can read the charming story about Mrs. Dick here:
https://shekillslit.com/2018/09/24/how-could-you-mrs-dick/
“The fastest way to a man’s heart is through his torso.” (Quotation marks in original.)
Not all of us are nice.
Two soccer players: Dimitar Berbatov (1981), who did rather well in England; and Juninho Pernambucano (1975), who did well in France.
Politician: Richard Bruce Cheney (1941), who got into a spot of bother while shooting quail.
Jez- I meant to comment on your woman of the day yesterday …Alice Catherine Evans… That was so interesting to me. The woman who wouldn’t die was all I could think of. Her fortitude against all odds blew my mind. Thanks
Thanks, Debi – the resilience of women like her in the face of bigoted adversity is incredible.
Since Jez seems to be making a coffee (boiled water in the cup, instant powder ; as nature and liquid-CO2-extraction intended) I’ll throw in a note for Up Helly Aa being held tonight in Lerwick (Shetland, just off the Norwegian coast). It’s a modern imitation of several older types of event, including cremation of leaders, “ship burials” and mid-winter festivals.
The chances of finding a sober guizer tonight are minimal.
If you can get to Shetland in time, the main events kick off about 3 hours after dark (19:15) tonight.
There’s a “Beltane” Festival in central Edinburgh at the end of April/ start of May each year with all the historical inaccuracy you’d expect. It’s very definitely an experience, though I’m not entirely sure staying sober and straight enough to drive home afterwards was quite the appropriate mindset. But that’s why it’s held in the city centre.
Shetland is not ‘just off the Norwegian coast’, that’s over 50% again further away than Scotland – even if you ignore the Orkneys.
The Shetland Isles are British. Perhaps ‘the cluster of islands NNE from the Orkneys’.
Having worked out of the Shetlands hundreds of time, I know perfectly well where they are.
Many of your Shetland friends will be familiar with the local trope that “We’re closer to Oslo than Westminster.” Which is, indeed the case. Get to the further reaches of the Islands, and you’re close to being closer to Oslo than to Edinburgh.
It’s a long-standing topic, particularly to the (strong) pro-independence movement.
You can always tell a Shetlander. You can’t tell them much, but you’d never confuse one for a Teuchter. There are a lot of Shetlanders who would be uncomfortable at being called “Scottish”, let alone “British”.
“social construct”
What isn’t a “social construct”?
If everything is a “social construct”, then nothing is a “social construct”.
IMHO : “social construct” is an ideological tool for gnostic wizards to control thought with their secret knowledge that the world keeps hidden from everyone on purpose.
Quantum mechanics. Or for that matter (similarly impenetrable to the vast majority of the general public) general relativity.
Or even the idea that, while both of these ideas describe reality to better than 1 part in 10,000,000,000, they are in fundamental disagreement, and probably both are “not right” – within those tolerances.
My proverbial “rock in a sock” is at the “ground truth” end of the spectrum. As you’d place “Marxism”, since your “secret knowledge” criterion is undermined by Marx and Engels publishing their work for anyone to read.
I think “social construct” can safely be left where it started – in the “dismal sciences”.
” … your “secret knowledge” criterion is undermined by Marx and Engels publishing their work for anyone to read. ”
They’re both dead, though.
Robin DiAngelo, Ibram Kendi, and others – perhaps the Society for Putting Soup on Top of Paintings (couldn’t resist a bit of Monty Python) – are alive and well, and able to exert gnostic influence – especially in-person, even – to explain the gnostic temptations in their literature, and further back, even…
Maybe in their soup, too.
Evolution…
PCC(E) : ” Also, Hamas was”
The sentence cut out – Hamas was what?
I wonder though if the kid was Jewish – but even so, admirable he stood his ground and refused to get drawn into a dialectical struggle.
I suppose it should be noted, the free expression – including declining it – on the basis of one’s own judgement.
UNRWA is shocked, SHOCKED, to learn that it has terrorists working for it.
+1
I have a question: WHY is there a question about whether the efficacy of this Alzheimer’s drug* – or any other drug, for that matter – may differ depending on a person’s race? I ask because I’ve never heard of a case where a drug has been shown to ‘work’ (or not work) in people of one race, but to be ineffective for people of another race. Of course, I’m not a doctor, but I was under the impression that the efficacy of most drugs has been shown to be more or less the same among all people, regardless of race – and my assumption has been that this is because most drugs operate at a biological level that is universal among humans.
But, as said, I’m not a doctor (or a scientist), so if anyone knows of a case where there is a racial*difference in drug efficacy (or side effects) I’d be curious to learn about it.
* I HAVE heard of a difference in drug efficacy that depends on hair color – of all things. Specifically, it is a well-established fact that people with red hair require higher doses of anaesthesia than non-redheads. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1362956/
From the paper :
“Conclusions: Red hair appears to be a distinct phenotype linked to anesthetic requirement in humans that can also be traced to a specific genotype.”
Thank you for pointing this out – amazing!
I don’t know what to make of it, but “huh! Who knew?!”
I think you’re going to find that enrollment in clinical trials is a voluntary thing, and also that black enrollment is typically lower than their % of the population in any clinical trial. IIRC, this was true of trials of vaccines vs. SARS-CoV-2.
Probably in part a residual effect of the Tuskegee trials, but I imagine there are other contributing factors.
Yes, low participation rates in trials occurred to me, too.
We often read sensational headlines about the IDF carrying out military operations inside Palestinian refugee camps. The implication, of course, is that Israel harasses and attacks innocents in the very locations where they were sent for their protection. How evil, if true. The reality, however, is that these “refugee camps” are not places where the IDF has directed people to go for their protection. They are Palestinian towns that have been in place for decades. They are governed by Hamas, part of the Hamas terror infrastructure, and they are supported and maintained by the corrupt and Hamas-affiliated UNRWA.
The press—in their zeal to demonize Israel—takes advantage of the fact that ordinary readers think of a “refugee camp” as a place where desperate people have gathered to escape war. This is not the case in Gaza. When news outlets report on an Israeli military operation in a Gazan “refugee camp” aiming to evince moral outrage, they are not being honest. I read such reports with great skepticism.
The scandal surrounding UNRWA is apparently even bigger than previously assumed.
According to a media report, the extent of the alleged connection between employees of the UN Palestinian Relief and Works Agency and terrorists in the Gaza Strip is greater than previously assumed. Not only are twelve of them said to have taken part in the Hamas terror attack in Israel on October 7, as previously known.
The US newspaper “Wall Street Journal” reported on Monday, citing intelligence reports, that around ten percent of all 12,000 UNRWA aid workers employed in the Gaza Strip have links to Hamas or the Islamic Jihad.
https://www.welt.de/politik/ausland/article249811236/Verbindung-von-UNRWA-Mitarbeitern-zur-Hamas-offenbar-groesser-als-bislang-angenommen.html
Hili’s comment reminded me of a valuable lesson that I learned in High School. A teacher said something or other and a girl said “But that isn’t fair.” He said “There are two things you have to remember about life. If you keep these in mind, you’ll be ok. Nothing is fair, and nothing makes any sense.”
This was almost 50 years ago and I have never forgotten it.
On the supposed illusion, the black and white stripes are not the same at all outside the oval of the face and that greatly affects one’s perception of the figures. The stripes that change width significantly at the face boundary are the ones perceived as forming the face.
Plus, the blue facial features are in the white stripes at left, but in the black stripes at right.
Jerry’s point about race in medical trials is valid. If activists say trials should try to find out if blacks and others differ in treatment benefit, they are saying race is biological. They can’t simultaneously say it’s merely a social construct. However…
When a trial is reported, activists ask if the results hold true for some subgroup that is the focus of their activism. The usual approach is to do a subgroup analysis retrospectively to see if the treatment “works” in subjects who belong to that subgroup, and then complain if the results show no statistically significant benefit in them.
This complaint is almost always groundless. Even if the subgroup analysis was pre-specified in the study protocol (and so not open to cherry-picking), the sample size in each subgroup will usually be too small to reliably detect an effect when the analysis is confined to that subgroup, even if the subgroup made up the same proportion in the trial as it does in the general population. The new treatment for heart attack will therefore appear to be no different from control in, say, left-handed deaf people with dyslexia even when it’s highly effective in the whole sample. The only way around this is to design the study to be so large that all the pre-specified subgroups will also be large enough to ensure statistical validity. This is usually a waste of resources as the trial then has to be much larger than it needs to be if we are simply looking for efficacy in the whole group.* (And even then, the more comparisons you make, the more likely one will falsely reject the null hypothesis just from sampling error.)
There has to be some strong biological reason to believe a priori that the treatment might have some differential effect in some subgroup before subgroup analysis makes sense. Sex differences are one example where this may hold. Another is the the initial ECG waveform in suspected heart attack. Racial differences hardly ever meet this threshold, notwithstanding that there are genetic differences among geographically and culturally segregated populations. Merely stating that black people deserve to be analyzed separately or that the trial is invalidated if they are under-enrolled doesn’t cut it.
Being black (or aboriginal) in North America carries a number of socioeconomic co-variates that go along with genetic race that do heavily influence outcomes, or eligibility for a trial. Even if black subjects volunteered in sufficient numbers to make their subgroup statistically valid — they often don’t — you aren’t really taking race per se into account as much as you are genetic and socio-economic determinants of health associated with phenotypic race.
This is not to say that there is no value in doing effectiveness research that tries to find out why members of different socio-economic groups however defined get vaccinated less often despite social marketing directed at them, or have higher risk of heart attack despite being prescribed treatment according to guidelines, or have more obesity and tobacco use despite being poor. But the onus is on the racialists to demonstrate biological differences related to the genome specifically that mediate response to treatment. For example there is a polymorphism in an immune-response gene that seemed retrospectively to be found in more South Asian patients with severe COVID than in South Asian and European controls. I don’t know if this replicated. I cite it just as an example of how genetic variation could act. (There was no evidence that this polymorphism abolished the effect of anti-viral drugs or had any other therapeutic import, though. There is no known basis to use different treatments in patients who had the polymorphism, or in South Asian patients generally.)
And here I have to wonder what the race activists are seeking. OK, black people volunteered (or were eligible) for Alzheimer’s trials in too small numbers for their subgroup to show benefit. So do they want these drugs to be withheld from black patients just because their brethren refused to volunteer (or couldn’t) in sufficient numbers for the trials to demonstrate the same effect as in all comers?
—————-
* The best estimate of benefit for any subject is the estimate from the whole trial, not an estimate derived from retrospective sub-group analysis. There is no a priori reason to doubt that black people benefit less from Alzheimer drugs just because they were under-enrolled in the trials.