Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Last night I took my host out for Burmese food, since there’s a fairly new Burmese restaurant in Davis called “My Burma“. And of course since neither of us had had Burmese food (there isn’t a single Burmese restaurant in Chicago, though there’s one in the suburbs), we had to go.
It turns out that Burmese food resembles a hybrid between Indian and southeast Asian food, with some unique items like tea leaf salad. We had a largish meal, and I’ll show it below. (The menu is here.). It’s a modest restaurant but the food is excellent. Here’s the interior:
The appetizer: Platha and coconut chicken curry dip, described as “handmade multilayered bread served with coconut chicken curry.” With a couple of good beers, this was an excellent start. You can either dip the bread into the chicken curry or pour the curry over the bread and eat it with a fork. I oped to use my hands.
The restaurant’s most famous dish is the tea leaf salad, described as “fermented tea leaf dressing, lettuce or cabbage, peanut, fried garlic, tomato, sunflower seeds, fried yellow chickpeas, jalapenos, sesame seed, and lemon. They bring it to the table looking like this, with the green tea leaves on top (picture from the website)
. . . and then mix it thoroughly until it looks like what’s below (I would have preferred to sample it unmixed). Our version seemed to lack the tomatoes and jalapenos.
It was very good, with a melange of flavors, but the flavor of the tea leaves wasn’t evident, which was disappointing.
Then two main dishes, the first being chili lamb, described as “diced lamb tossed with chili sauce, garlic, onion, basil, jalapenos, and chili flakes.” The server asked us how hot we wanted it on a scale of 1 (mild) to 5 (fiery), and I said “3.2”. It turned out to be a tasty dish but not very hot, with the scale probably ratcheted down for the American palate:
Second main: Burmese eggplant curry, described as “Burmese curry made with garlic, onion, tomato, and tender eggplant.” It was very good, and yes, the eggplant, while keeping its form, was tender and delicious, in a lovely sauce.
With it I ordered Basmati rice. Rice should really come with the meal rather than requiring a separate order, and I eat a LOT of rice with a dinner like this. Sadly, we got only a small dish that was grossly insufficient. It was good rice, but I needed a HUGE bowl of white rice to sop up all the sauce.
All in all, it’s a good restaurant, especially considering that Davis, for a college town, has a dearth of decent places to eat. If you go, see if you can get a huge portion of white rice, and eat Chinese style, putting the ingredients atop a bowl of the rice. (They don’t use chopsticks, and I guess they don’t in Burma, but I would have preferred them.)
After dinner we went to the David Food Coop, a hippie-ish grocery store that’s been going her since 1972. Like Austin, Davis is an island of Sixties-ness surrounded by a desert of agriculture, and many old hippies are still to be found shambling along the streets of town. (There are also a fair number of homeless people, something I haven’t seen here before.)
And in this cool town, heavily invested in recycling and other green efforts, the Food Coop is the epicenter. It has pretty much everything you want, from loose grains to Dr. Bronner’s soaps, although prices are high because most stuff is organic, and the coolness surely exacts a surcharge. Here are three characteristic items.
In a place like the Food Coop, sugar is demonized. When I did my postdoc here and my parents came to visit (this was probably about 1980), I took them for brunch to a hippy-ish organic restaurant, now defunct, called the Blue Mango. My father ordered coffee with cream, and noticed that there was no sugar on the table. He asked for some. The waiter looked at him with a stinkeye and said, in all seriousness, “Sorry, we don’t have White Death. But we might be able to dig up some honey in the kitchen.” My father, an old-school Army guy, took a pass on the honey.
At the food coop, the Satanic nature of sugar is clear. All items in bins have a four-number numerical code, but it used to be just three numbers. At that time, white sugar was given the Devil’s Number: 666. Now that they have to use four numbers, they simply expanded it, keeping its Satanic qualities:
And they also had this. WTF? What was it recycled from?
One thing that’s always bothered me about the food coop, which prides itself on selling healthy and organic food, is that it also has a whole aisle of homeopathic products, which of course is pure quackery: high-priced water containing not a molecule of the “curative” substance. They should stop selling this useless stuff. Here, ladies and gentlemen, comrades and friends, is a big scam:
But we took a pass on the fraudulent cures because we were there for dessert, and bought bean-curd-filled mochi covered with sesame seeds. They were great (no photo attached).
Greetings from California on Friday, January 19, 2024, and National Popcorn Day. And, so it happens, Chicago has the best popcorn in the world: the “Chicago mix” of caramel and cheese corn from Garrett’s Popcorn Shop, a store exactly as old as I am (get it freshly made, not at the airports). Have a look:
It’s also World Quark Day (quark is “a fresh dairy product that is part of the acid-set cheese group), New Friends Day, Tin Can Day, Gun Appreciation Day (yech!), Husband’s Day (also called “Man’s Day”) in Iceland , and, in Tripura, India, Kokborok Day, honoring the official language of the Indian state of Tripura, also spoken in parts of Bangladesh (the area where Kikborok is spoken is shown in red below)
An immigration deal being crafted in the Senate would limit migrants’ ability to claim asylum at the southern border, a White House concession some progressives say shows that President Biden’s leftward shift on immigration as a 2020 candidate was a blip in his long political career.
“We have talked about the necessary elements to solve this problem,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) said after a meeting with Biden on Wednesday at the White House. Among them, he added, “is reform to the broken asylum and parole systems.”
. . .Biden’s willingness to negotiate with Republicans lays bare what many liberal Democrats have long feared—that he is willing to move to the right to cut a deal on immigration and secure funding for the wars.
A CBS News poll conducted earlier this month found Biden’s approval rating on handling immigration issues to be at a record low, with 68% of those surveyed saying they disapproved of his border policies and 63% saying they wanted him to be tougher.
. . . But with mounting political pressure, Biden has reiterated to advisers that his main priority is to see migration plummet and has signed off on certain measures used by Trump, implementing a version of his predecessor’s asylum rule that would make migrants who move through another country on the way and don’t first apply for asylum in that country ineligible for asylum in the U.S.
I’m not sure how much of a role border policies will play in the November election, but any role they do play will be inimical to Biden’s candidacy. Let’s face it: progressives seem to want open borders, and that, coupled with Biden’s reluctance to curb immigration, has led to the greatest number of border crossings, legal and illegal, that I’ve seen in my lifetime. Immigrants are being sent to cities like New York and Chicago, straining their social-support system. It’s time to bite the bullet and enact a humane but strict immigration policy—before November.
In an expansion of hostilities rippling through the region as the Israel-Hamas war rages on, Pakistan said on Thursday that it had carried out strikes inside Iran, a day after Iranian forces attacked what they said were militant camps in Pakistan.
The Pakistani Foreign Affairs Ministry said that the country’s forces had conducted “precision military strikes” against what it called terrorist hide-outs in southeastern Iran. The Iranian state-owned television network Press TV said that seven foreigners were killed in the strikes.
A senior Pakistani security official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said Pakistan had struck at least seven locations used by separatists from the Baluch ethnic group about 30 miles inside the border. The official said that air force fighter jets and drones were used in the Pakistani retaliatory strikes.
A day before, Iran conducted an airstrike in Baluchistan Province in Pakistan. The Iranian government later said that the strike in Pakistan, as well as attacks it conducted this week in Iraq and Syria, showed that Iran would hit back forcefully at enemies anywhere.
An emboldened Iran has been using its proxy forces against Israel and its allies since the war in Gaza began in October. Those actions, and now the attacks by Iran itself on other countries in the region, have increased the risk that the upheaval washing over the Middle East could grow. Iran has been trying to project strength after recent attacks inside its borders had made it look vulnerable.
Both Pakistan and Iran (the latter country soon to have nuclear weapons despite the U.S.’s frantic negotiations) are cooling their jets now, so this may be a one-off attack. But both countries have their own troubles, with restive populations that don’t like their governments and are being oppressed by those governments. I don’t know what to make of this one.
*Over at the NYT, Nick Kristof (has he ever been right about anything save the oppression of women throughout the world?) warns us that North Korea may be getting ready to launch a surprise attack on not just South Korea, but also, perhaps, Japan and Guam.
The globe is already pockmarked with crises, and here may be another: North Korea is acting in highly unusual ways, leading some veteran analysts to fear it is preparing a surprise attack on South Korea and perhaps on Japan and Guam as well.
I’ve seen many false alarms since I began covering and visiting North Korea in the 1980s. I wouldn’t write about this latest warning except that it comes from two particularly credible experts who bluntly conclude that “Kim Jong-un has made a strategic decision to go to war.”
That’s speculation without hard evidence to back it up, and they acknowledge that this kind of prediction is fraught. But one of those experts is Robert Carlin, who has been analyzing North Korea for 50 years for the C.I.A., State Department and other organizations. The other is Siegfried Hecker, a nuclear expert at Stanford who has visited North Korea seven times and was given extensive access to that country’s nuclear programs; he’s apparently the only American to have held North Korean plutonium (in a jar) in his hands.
Carlin and Hecker published their warning in an essay on the 38 North website, which focuses on North Korea. They raised the possibility that North Korea might use its nuclear warheads to strike the region (it’s not clear if its warheads could reach the United States and survive re-entry into the atmosphere).
Carlin and Hecker both told me that they don’t know when an attack by Kim, the country’s leader, would happen or what form it might take.
. . .My inclination would be to dismiss these warnings — if they were coming from anyone else. But Carlin and Hecker are pros who deserve to have their alarm taken very seriously.
It has been evident for some time that something is afoot in North Korea. . .
Two problems. First, we’re not sure that the DPRK has both nuclear warheads and and a delivery capability. Second, and more serious, such an attack would be suicidal for North Korea. We have nuclear armed submarines off both Japan and South Korea, and there are American nukes in Okinawa. Why would North Korea invite the destruction of their own country? In the end, Kristof brings this up but tries to get around it:
On the other hand, one reason for skepticism is that it’s hard to see how North Korea benefits by attacking its neighbors. Carlin and Hecker don’t have a solid answer for that, but they note that there is a long history of surprise attacks around the world that were surprising precisely because they didn’t make sense to those attacked.
Hecker observed that North Korea is one of only three countries that constitute potential nuclear threats to the United States — the others are Russia and China — yet North Korea lately hasn’t gotten much high-level attention. It should.
More negotiations to curb the DPRK’s nuclear ambitions? Useless. North Korea is desperate to build a bomb regardless of what we offer them. But they’d be idiotic to use it, especially if they struck first. (Nobody is going to strike North Korea first.)
*We’ve previously discussed the criticism that Native Americans from the Navajo tribe leveled at both NASA and commercial space ventures for sending capsules of human ashes to the Moon, since they considered the Moon sacred and didn’t want that sacredness despoiled. There are good reasons to leave the Moon pristine (though it’s way too late for that; among other stuff up there is jettisoned astronaut poop), but native religion is not one of them, for the Navajo are simply trying to impose their religious beliefs on others. That’s a violation of the First Amendment. However, this week the scientific journal Nature caters to the Navajo hectoring in an op-ed, “Stop sending human remains to the Moon.” Excerpts:
On 8 January, US space company Astrobotic launched the first commercial Moon lander, called Peregrine. Among the spacecraft’s 20 payloads were five instruments built by NASA. Other cargo included the cremated remains of at least 70 people and one dog, sent by two US companies, Celestis and Elysium Space, which give people the opportunity to be interred on the Moon.
The Moon is a shared cultural space for humanity. Many people might instinctively feel uneasy about its incipient commercialization, which has happened with little consultation and remains mostly unregulated. Many Indigenous Peoples, including Diné (the people) of the Navajo Nation such as myself, feel a whole other level of unease. For us, the Moon is an ancient relative — Grandmother Moon is a term of reverence shared by many Indigenous Peoples — and we should be careful, diligent and respectful when visiting her.
This was NASA’s mistake: taking seriously indigenous religious concerns:
A similar issue has arisen before. In 1998, then Navajo Nation president Albert Hale condemned NASA for sending a portion of the remains of planetary scientist Eugene Shoemaker to the Moon aboard its Lunar Prospector. NASA apologized and promised to consult Native Americans if it ever planned similar missions.
. . . But the Lunar Prospector incident shows how Indigenous Methodologies can lead the way to healing and partnership. The ceremonies led to a deeper understanding of how differences in star knowledge are to be celebrated, not ignored, and how Diné youth should not be pushed away from our People’s traditional knowledge when we work in the space community. The ceremonial approach co-led by Native American community leaders made room for the hurt felt by the Diné and laid foundations for future collaborations with a shared goal of furthering our connections with the cosmos. NASA delegates participating in person and following the guidance of Native American leaders made a world of difference in turning the incident into a spark of friendship.
Of course there will be more comity if the government or corporations cater to the superstitions and religions of Native Americans (or anyone who’s a believer), but to say that the Navajos have “star knowledge” that western astronomers don’t is ludicrous. It’s time to stop taking these delusions seriously. There will be more missions to the Moon that leave human ashes behind. I don’t think that’s a good idea, but my reasons have nothing to do with the numinous aspects of “Grandmother Moon” (which, by the way, illuminates Navajo ancestors simply by reflecting the light of Grandfather Sun.):
We now have an opportunity for Indigenous People to help guide the caretaking of space, just as they guide the protection and restoration of environments on Earth. To me, Grandmother Moon is sacred, my relative who has lighted my ancestors’ paths for eons. Weaving together Indigenous and Western science could help in resolving issues and lead to the production of policies and innovative approaches that protect and celebrate our shared Moon. After all, don’t we all want to be good relatives?
Nope. We want to stop this insane identity politics as a way of guiding space exploration.
*In her latest NYT op-ed, “When public health loses the public,” Pamela Paul points out the factors, including public health officials themselves, that have caused the public to mistrust the pronouncements of both scientists and those officials:
We all had our uncalm moments during the pandemic. What rankled me during this one was that the science was on my side. Yet here was someone in my community operating within a completely different framework.
In his new book, “Within Reason: A Liberal Public Health for an Illiberal Time,” Sandro Galea, the dean of the Boston University School of Public Health, looks to his own field to explain the animating forces behind some of those disputes.
Despite remarkable successes, Galea argues, public health succumbed to a disturbing strain of illiberalism during the pandemic. This not only worsened the impact of the pandemic; it also destabilized public health institutions in ways that will serve us poorly when the next crisis comes.
Any pandemic finger pointing has to begin with Donald Trump, whose fecklessness in the face of crisis pinballed between falsehoods and crackpot science before settling into outright denialism.
Much harder for non-Trumpers is to recognize that many on the left, including those in the progressive field of public health, reacted with ideological intransigence. If Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida said masks off, blue states encouraged mask wearing, even while students competed in sports or sat in preschool classrooms. Last summer, Francis Collins, the former head of the National Institutes of Health, admitted that the “public health mindset” had been too narrowly focused, which he now calls a mistake. “You attach a zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never quite recovered,” he said.
Galea’s point is not to relitigate Covid’s sore points but to ask: If Americans have come to distrust public health advice, what role may public health officials have played in fostering that distrust?
Paul particularly indicts public-health officials for recommending school closures, which we now know weren’t really necessary and also hurt children’s well being and education. She seconds Galea’s argument that politicizing public health is not only bad for public health, but creates an unproductive us-versus-them attitude that spreads beyond that area. Finally, it increases the mistrust of science, something I’ve written about before. Look at these figures:
It also undermines public faith in science, one of the few institutions that had maintained a high level of trust into the Trump era. According to the Pew Research Center, the percentage of Americans who believe science has a mostly positive effect on society dropped to 57 percent in 2023, from 67 percent in 2016. Those who say they have a great deal of confidence in scientists dropped to 23 percent, from 39 percent in 2020. And these declines took place among both Republicans and Democrats.
Speaking as a now-retired scientist, I have to say that these figures are disturbing. Science isn’t perfect, as it’s a human enterprise and there are simply some facts that elude is, but it’s a damn sight better than politics at finding facts.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is rationalizing. Malgorzata explains: “Hili likes to go into the wardrobe and sleep there. But she doesn’t want to admit that she is just sleeping so she pretends that she is going into the wardrobe to think. But she is not sure where the thinking goes better: in a closed area of a wardrobe or outside, where she can see the world.
Hili: Sometimes I wonder whether it’s easier to think inside the wardrobe or with a view on the world.
A: And what is your conclusion?
Hili: It depends on what I’m thinking about.
In Polish:
Hili: Czasami się zastanawiam, czy lepiej się myśli w szafie, czy z widokiem na świat.
From Masih, who was in an accident (at least I hope it was an accident!):
I survived a multiple car crash. If it wasn’t for the side barriers, I would’ve fallen off the bridge. I’m lucky to be able to walk away unharmed. I was on my way to DC to participate in an event. It is obvious now I see life differently. Please take care of yourself and stay… pic.twitter.com/vpvOOnDJLK
From Students for Justice for Palestine at Columbia University. They were suspended during the fall semester last year for violating campus rules (not for their speech), but they’re back again, just as nasty, historically oblivious, and Jew-hating as ever. I’ve put the full post below this one:
“Students For Justice in Palestine” takes off its mask. It’s not about Palestinians or Israel. It’s a global movement to incite war and revolution against the western democracies. This is what “globalize the intifada means.” pic.twitter.com/zEdwXbUJKf
From the Auschwitz Memorial a survivor from a Sonderkommando member who worked in Auschwitz, survived, and later painted pictures of what it was like to do his job. They are horrifying.
The Sonderkommando were groups of prisoners who, in return for better living conditions, were responsible for disposing of the bodies of inmates who had been killed in the gas chambers, including removing gold teeth and sequestering the belonging the prisoners had when they arrived (you can see this in the picture). Because they were witness to the camp’s horrors, the squads were regularly killed and replaced. Only a very few Sonderkommando survived the war, so it’s amazing that David Olère was liberated after several years. Have a look at the four paintings in the tweet.
19 January 1902 | A Jewish artist David Olère was born in Warsaw. In 1918 he emigrated to France.
In March 1943 he was deported to Auschwitz where he was forced to work in Sonderkommando. After the war he showed the horrifying world of gas chambers in drawings & paintings. pic.twitter.com/SEqCB0yWNB
One tweet from Dr. Cobb today (yes, we have a lot of cats). Was this moggie trained to start at the beginning, or was it just unsatisfied with the results?
If you’re old enough to recognize these poems, you’re at least 60. I remember two of them, and both have the same last line. Your task is to supply the last line, which is the same for both quatrains.
But don’t look at any of the answers in the comments before you guess. I suspect that because we have a “golden years” demographic, the right answer will come soon.
These are from my memory, though I suppose you can find the answers somewhere on the web. No Googling!
Poem#1 (my favorite):
Cattle crossing
Please go slow
Because that old cow
Is some bull’s beau. . .
Poem #2 (this should provide a clue):
In this vale
Of toil and sin
Your head grows bald
But not your chin. . .
Whenever I say that I was lucky enough to have grown up during the apogee of rock music—in the 1960s and 1970s—and that rock music sucks today, I get tremendous pushback from people who think otherwise. Some of them maintain that high-quality rock still exists, but lives in unheard niches inhabited by obscure musicians. Other folks send me names of bands to listen to. Sometimes, they’re okay, like the Staves (now sadly diminished by the loss of one member); but often they’re not rock, and they’re NEVER as good as the best rock bands of my youth, which included Hendrix, the Beatles (the best, of course), the Doors, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Joni Mitchell, Velvet Underground, the Allman Brothers, Fleetwood Mac. . . . I could go on and on. Where are their equivalents today?
The answer is that there are none. Below is what passes for rock music today: autotuned, unmemorable, and unoriginal. Yes have a listen to, Ariana Grande’s highly touted new song “yes, and?” (You could also substitute anything by Taylor Swift for this one.)
Trigger warning: really bad music. Note that this song was put up just 6 days ago and already has 20 million views! Grande and Swift are, to today’s kids, what the Beatles were to us. If you say that the rock quality of both eras is pretty much the same, and each generation just likes the music of their youth, then you don’t have ears to hear.
And now my point: to present the video below made by the great music critic and analyst Rick Beato on how rock music died. (In other words, he agrees with what I said above.)
Here’s Beato’s YouTube intro:
In this episode, my friend Jim Barber and I unravel the tangled web of policy, corruption, and greed that led to the collapse of the music business in the late 1990s.
Beato dates the money-based destructon of rock music (and “most music”) to 1996, when, after passage of the Telecommunications Act, two organizations, Clear Channel and Cumulus, “bought up most of the radio stations”. Local ownership of radio stations died in the face of rampant capitalism that turned a panoply of local stations into just a few homogenous groups. Local D.J.s lost their power as programming devolved to just a few individuals who decreed what should be played on all the stations in their stable.
This led to a reduction of competition between musicians and to the imposition of single people’s tastes on music that was played widely. Consequently, many songs were mixed “to all sound the same” and were produced and mixed by just a handful of people. Beato claims that this homogeneity led to 2012, the year “when rock music completely died.”
It gets more complicated, with much of the machinations involving producers and managers trying to get rich at the expense of musical quality by using their own equipment instead of the studios’ or bands’ own equipment.
This is all quite arcane, but some of it makes sense to me, even early in the morning. In the end, it became too expensive for bands to make music, and rock music simply had become less popular because creativity had been stifled by economic forces.
The question, then, is whether un-stifling creativity could bring rock music back to where it was when I was growing up. Not the same styles, mind you, but a general quality that was quite high, with some groups becoming classics that would endure, becoming the staples of “oldies” stations.
My answer is “no; won’t happen.” For to Beato and Barber’s Theory of Homogeneity I would add my own theory, which is mine, that is this. Here comes my theory. Here it is:
All art forms, I aver, go through the same phases of gradual improvement, reaching an apogee of quality, and then experience a gradual decline into mediocrity. While this is true for music (besides rock, it’s happened to jazz, classical music), it also includes visual arts like painting. These genres simply get exhausted after all the variations have been tried.
And now listen to Beato and Barber on “The Years the Music Died” (my title, taken of course from Don McLean).
Welcome to Thursday, January 18, 2024, and National Gourmet Coffee Day. Make sure that if you celebrate, you simply make regular coffee with good beans (cream and sugar are allowed); for what’s below is NOT gourmet coffee!
“Starbucks – Peppermint Hot Chocolate and Chai Eggnog Latte” by Calgary Reviews is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
Here’s my favorite character in Winnie the Pooh: the lugubrious donkey Eeyore, here illustrated by Ernest Howard Shepard in 1926. (Many readers probably consider Tigger as their favorite character.)
First, Davis didn’t prove much of a respite from frigid Chicago on Tuesday; it was pouring rain all afternoon and evening, not usual for this time of year. Fortunately, the rain stopped and it was cloudy but cool most of the day, though it turned sunny in the afternoon. It’s not hot but tolerable:here’s the weather yesterday morning:
Well 60°F is better than 8°F, the temperature in Chicago. Plus we had a nice Indian dinner Tuesday night. Foreground, my onion uttapam (made with fermented rice+lentil flour), and in the background, my friend’s thali with curried chicken. I was very happy with the uttapam, particularly because it came with copious amounts of coconut chutney, the real reason to eat these things. There was also sambar, a South Indian spicy soup.
*The Supreme Court seems poised to deal a blow to the view that the executive branch of the government can, in effect, enact regulations and laws, putting into effect rules that bypass the legislative branch.
Members of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority seemed inclined on Wednesday to overturn or limit a key precedent that has empowered executive agencies and frustrated business groups hostile to government regulation.
Judging from questions in two hard-fought arguments that lasted a total of more than three and a half hours, the fate of a foundational doctrine of administrative law called Chevron deference appeared to be in peril.
The doctrine takes its name from a 1984 decision, Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the most cited cases in American law. Discarding it could threaten regulations in countless areas, including the environment, health care, consumer safety, nuclear energy and government benefit programs. It would also transfer power from agencies to Congress and the courts.
Under Chevron, judges must defer to agencies’ reasonable interpretations of ambiguous statutes. In close cases, and there are many, the views of the agency take priority even if courts might have ruled differently.
. . . .seJustice Brett M. Kavanaugh responded that “the reality of how this works is Chevron itself ushers in shocks to the system every four or eight years when a new administration comes in.” He said the doctrine affected laws on securities, antitrust, communications and the environment.
Other conservative justices said courts must use the ordinary tools of statutory interpretation to decide what laws mean without giving decisive weight to agencies’ views. The court’s three liberal members, by contrast, said agencies were often in a better position than courts to interpret ambiguous statutes in their areas of expertise.
This looks to be another 6-3 decision. And although this is just my gut feeling, and one that, sadly, puts me with the Satanic Six, it seems to me that the way to make federal laws is through Congress, and the way to judge whether those laws are constitutional is through the federal courts. The problem with letting agencies do this is that they may have more of a political agenda than, say, the Congress plus judiciary combined. (The riposte is that agencies have more expertise.) In this day and age mine may be a dumb opinion, though, and I’m willing to listen to counterarguments.
*More from the Supreme Court, which will soon rule whether Donald Trump’s name can be taken off Republican primary ballots because he’s being tried for promoting insurrection. They will hear arguments on the issue, based on a ruling in Colorado, on February 8, and the sooner they decide, the better. In the meantime, a judge in Maine has put his own ruling on hold pending the decision of the Supremes.
A Maine judge on Wednesday put off deciding whether Donald Trump’s name can appear on that state’s primary ballot, saying the Supreme Court needs to rule on the issue first in a similar case out of Colorado.
The ruling sent the case back to Maine’s secretary of state and put it on hold. It came amid a nationwide push from Trump’s critics to prevent the former president from running for office again.
Section 3 of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution bars from office those who engaged in insurrection after swearing an oath to uphold the Constitution. The amendment was ratified in 1868, and the clause was used initially to keep former Confederates from returning to power after the Civil War.
Trump’s critics have cited the measure in lawsuits arguing Trump is banned from office because of his behavior before and during the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Colorado’s top court last month ruled Trump should be taken off the primary ballot there, and a week later Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows (D) reached the
The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the Colorado case and will hear arguments on Feb. 8. Its ruling on the issue is likely to apply to all states.
Of course it will apply to all states. Much as I’d like to see Trump out of the race, the way I’d interpret the 14th amendment is that someone can be barred for insurrection only after they’re convicted of insurrection. And that hasn’t yet happened to Trump. However, there are those who think he should be allowed to run even if he’s convicted in the insurrection case. At any rate, the primaries will continue to occur, and until a decision is handed down, I suspect Trump’s name will be on them.
*As far as I know, the Covid pandemic is thought by experts to have originated from a lab leak in Wuhan, though that speculation has “low confidence“. And because the opinions of experts go back and forth, so who am I to judge? However, a new report from the WSJ further muddies the waters, claiming that China had the genetic sequence of the coronavirus a full two weeks before letting the world know. That, of course, would delay any vaccine or other palliatives for at least that period of time.
Chinese researchers isolated and mapped the virus that causes Covid-19 in late December 2019, at least two weeks before Beijing revealed details of the deadly virus to the world, congressional investigators said, raising questions anew about what China knew in the pandemic’s crucial early days.
Documents obtained from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services by a House committee and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show that a Chinese researcher in Beijing uploaded a nearly complete sequence of the virus’s structure to a U.S. government-run database on Dec. 28, 2019. Chinese officials at that time were still publicly describing the disease outbreak in Wuhan, China, as a viral pneumonia “of unknown cause” and had yet to close the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, site of one of the initial Covid-19 outbreaks.
China only shared the virus’s sequence with the World Health Organization on Jan. 11, 2020, according to U.S. government timelines of the pandemic.
Grammar point: “only” is misplaced above, it should be between “Organization” and “on”. I am readily exercised, as my friends know, by the frequent misplacement of the word “only.” But I digress:
The new information doesn’t shed light on the debate over whether Covid emerged from an infected animal or a lab leak, but it suggests that the world still doesn’t have a full accounting of the pandemic’s origin.
Yes, why wouldn’t the Chinese immediately tell WHO as soon as it had a good sequence? Did they know the release came from one of their labs? More:
he extra two weeks could have proved crucial in helping the international medical community pinpoint how Covid-19 spread, develop medical defenses and get started on an eventual vaccine, specialists have said. In late 2019, scientists and governments worldwide were racing to understand the mystery disease eventually named Covid-19 that would kill millions and sicken many more.
It “underscores how cautious we have to be about the accuracy of the information that the Chinese government has released,” said Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle who has reviewed the documents and the recently discovered gene sequence. “It’s important to keep in mind how little we know.”
We may never know whether the virus came from the Wuhan lab, the Wuhan wet market, or somewhere else. And I’m not sure how much it matters, save that labs have to amp up their security with unknown microbes. But two weeks in those early days could have saved a substantial number of lives.
*While Thomas Friedman and Anthony Blinken continue to flounder about pronouncing on the Middle East war, floating all kinds of unworkable solutions while showing their failure to grasp the local politics, Bret Stephens once again has it right in a NYT op-ed called “The genocide charge against Israel is a moral obscenity.” Indeed, if you don’t agree with Stephens’s title, I’d say you’ve lost your own moral compass.
In recent decades, as many as three million people perished in a famine in North Korea that was mainly government-induced. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians were gassed, bombed, starved or tortured to death by the Assad regime, and an estimated 14 million were forced to flee their homes. China has put more than a million Uyghurs through gulag-like re-education camps in a thinly veiled attempt to suppress and erase their religious and cultural identity.
But North Korea, Syria and China have never been charged with genocide at the International Court of Justice. Israel has. How curious. And how obscene.
It’s obscene because it politicizes our understanding of genocide, fatally eroding the moral power of the term. The war between Israel and Hamas is terrible — as is every war. But if this is genocide, what word do we have for the killing fields in Cambodia, Stalin’s Holodomor in Ukraine, the Holocaust itself?
Words that come to mean much more than originally intended eventually come to mean almost nothing at all — a victory for future génocidaires who’d like the world to think there’s no moral or legal difference between one kind of killing and another.
It’s obscene because it perverts the definition of genocide, which is precise: “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” Notice two key features of this definition: It speaks of acts whereas part of the genocide case against Israel involves the misinterpretation of quotes from Israeli officials who have vowed Hamas’s elimination, not the elimination of Palestinians. And it uses the term as such — meaning the acts are genocidal only if they are directed at Palestinians as Palestinians, not as members of Hamas or, heartbreakingly, as collateral deaths in attempts to destroy Hamas.
If Israel were trying to commit genocide, it wouldn’t be putting its soldiers at risk or allowing humanitarian relief to arrive from Egypt or withdrawing many of its forces from Gaza. It would simply be killing Palestinians everywhere, in vastly greater numbers, as Germans killed Jews or Hutus killed Tutsis.
It’s obscene because it puts the wrong party in the dock. Hamas is a genocidal organization by conviction and design. Its founding charter calls for Israel to be “obliterated” and for Muslims to kill Jews as they “hide behind stones and trees.” On Oct. 7, Hamas murdered, mutilated, tortured, incinerated, raped or kidnapped everyone it could. Had it not been stopped it would not have stopped. One of its leaders has since vowed to do it “a second, a third, a fourth” time.
This is all correct, and really, I have no use for those people who spend their time accusing Israel of genocide when the real culprits, Hamas, who have openly and gladly admitted their genocidal intentions, are ignored. What a moral travesty it is that no Western nation has accused Hamas (or the countries Stephens mentions above) of genocide! Not one nation in the world is willing to do so.
*We haven’t spoken of the war in Ukraine for a while, as it’s been pushed off center stage by what’s happening in Gaza. But Ukraine is still fighting for its life, and my impression has been that it’s not winning—that slowly but surely, Russia is pushing into the country as well as wrecking it. Now a big military macher at NATO thinks that the whole war needs a rethink, though what that rethink is remains elusive, at least in the AP article that describes it.
Ukraine is locked in an existential battle for its survival almost two years into its war with Russia and Western armies and political leaders must drastically change the way they help it fend off invading forces, a top NATO military officer said on Wednesday.
At a meeting of the 31-nation alliance’s top brass, the chair of the NATO Military Committee, Admiral Rob Bauer, also said that behind President Vladimir Putin’s rationale for the war is a fear of democracy, in a year marked by elections around the world.
Over two days of talks in Brussels, NATO’s top officers are expected to detail plans for what are set to be the biggest military exercises in Europe since the Cold War later this year. The wargames are meant as a fresh show of strength from NATO and its commitment to defend all allied nations from attack.
At this point you may well be asking, “So what? What good do wargames do?”. And you’ll be right given that NATO is not going to commit troops to fighting the Russians. There’s some gobbledygook:
As the war bogs down, and with U.S. and European Union funding for Ukraine’s conflict-ravaged economy held up by political infighting, Bauer appealed for a “whole of society approach” to the challenge that goes beyond military planning.
“We need public and private actors to change their mindset for an era in which everything was plannable, foreseeable, controllable and focused on efficiency to an era in which anything can happen at any time. An era in which we need to expect the unexpected,” he said as he opened the meeting.
“In order to be fully effective, also in the future, we need a warfighting transformation of NATO,” Bauer added.
But what is the sweating admiral trying to say? It turns out to be simple: “Give Zelensky more weapons!” I’m not sure how much of a “transformation of aims that really is. Yes, the UK will send 20,000 more troops to participate in the war exercises, but in the end it comes down to donations from NATO countries:
The U.K. will also send advanced fighter jets and surveillance planes, plus warships and submarines.
With ammunition stockpiles diminishing as allies send military materiel to Ukraine, the Norwegian government said Wednesday it was earmarking 2 billion kroner ($192 million) to boost defense industry production capacity, saying there is “a need for large quantities of ammunition.”
Norway’s Defense Minister Bjørn Arild Gram said that “increasing capacity in the defense industry is important, both for Ukraine, but also to safeguard our own security.”
Half the funds will go to Nammo, a Norway-based aerospace and defense group that specializes in the production of ammunition, rocket engines and space applications, “to increase the production of artillery ammunition,” Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre said.
But I fear that this won’t be enough, for Russia has not only lots of ammunition and weapons, but a lot more fighters. I of course approve of all the help we can give Ukraine, a scrappy little country with tough fighters and tough cats, being slowly nibble away by a rancid dictatorship. But I fear we’ll have to stand by as at least a sizable chunk of Ukraine–if not all of it–will fall under Putin’s control.
*From Tom Gross:
Today, Kfir Bibas, the world’s youngest hostage, is one year old.
He was 8 months old when he was kidnapped at gunpoint with his brother Ariel, age 4, and his parents Yarden and Shiri, from their home on the kibbutz by Hamas terrorists on October 7.
Kfir was born on January 18, 2023.
The Red Cross hasn’t visited them even once.
Spare a thought for Kfir and Ariel the world’s youngest hostages
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili wants Kulka to go back upstairs where she lives:
Hili: Could you facilitate Kulka’s return to her home?
A: But she didn’t ask for it.
Hili: I did.
In Polish:
Hili: Czy mógłbyś umożliwić Kulce powrót do jej domu?
Ja: Przecież ona o to nie prosiła.
Hili: Ja prosiłam.
. . . and a photo by Paulina of Baby Kulka playing in the snow:
*******************
I may have posted this before, but it’s good because it’s true:
I posted this on Facebook 13 years ago today; it’s one of the best cat memes ever:
From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy:
From Masih: These two Iranian journalists were just released after a year in prison for simply reporting on the death of Mahsa Amini. Now they’re threatening to put them back in the hoosegow for now wearing hijabs. Such is life in the Islamic Republic of Iran:
Iranian authorities go after women journalists freed on bail for not wearing hijab
Iranian authorities have threatened to send back to jail two journalists for disobeying compulsory hijab laws just one day after they were freed on bail. Elaheh Mohammad and Niloufar Hamedi had… pic.twitter.com/LQ5afxnaF7
The clip below is from MEMRI, which is always reliable. If you want to see the homophobia of Islam, rarely mentioned by Western “progressives,” have a listen. This was sent by freader joolz, who adds:
I will never understand why LGBTQ ideologists show unconditional support for Palestine. Concern for the citizens is never tempered with ‘….. but their homophobia is unacceptable’ or ‘….. but their treatment of women is barbaric’.
Things in war are rarely 100% good or bad, but pretending that’s the case is delusional.
This tirade was in Jerusalem, but I have no doubt many Palestinian men think this way. It may be a handy link to highlight the cognitive dissonance of those who pretend they are ‘left’, rather than those who are actually left.
The homophobic tirade was actually delivered at the Al-Aqsa mosque, one of the holiest sites in Islam. I wonder how gay people can want this attitude to extent from the river to the sea:
Al-Aqsa Mosque Imam Mohammed Saleem Ali Goes on a Homophobic Diatribe during Friday Sermon: The Palestinian People Will Not Allow a Single Homosexual on Our Land; Such Perversion Brings the Wrath of Allah on Us All #palestinians#alaqsa#homophobiapic.twitter.com/smixjucgaY
And from Jay’s partner Anna; read the thread; I enclose four tweets. Creating a climate hostile to one’s race should extend to all races:
De Piero’s counsel, FAIR network attorney Michael Allen, reacted to the ruling: “This is a strong decision in which Judge Beetlestone, a President Obama appointee, was very clear that if you impose ‘a constant drumbeat of essentialist, deterministic, and negative language’…
— Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism (FAIR) (@fairforall_org) January 12, 2024
In her decision, the judge opined that: "Training on concepts such as ‘white privilege’, “white fragility’, implicit bias, or critical race theory can contribute positively to nuanced, important conversations about how to form a healthy and inclusive working environment [. . . ]… pic.twitter.com/eNzvDYypiz
— Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism (FAIR) (@fairforall_org) January 12, 2024
Two tweets from Professor Cobb. The first one has good news about the saiga antelope (Saiga tatarica), which approached extinction due to poaching (the horns are used in Chinese medicine) and to two episodes of disease that killed many animals.
To show how many disappeared, here’s a Wikipedia map showing the current and past distribution of the two subspecies:
White: historic distribution of the Saiga (Saiga tatarica); green: current distribution of Saiga tatarica tatarica; red: current distribution of Saiga tatarica mongolica
MEMRI is the acronym for the Middle East Media Research Institute, where I spent a bit of time when I was last in Jerusalem. (They also have a headquarters in Washington, D. C.)
They translate pretty much everything that’s put online in the Arab world (ergo requiring a big stable of translators and computers), and MEMRI puts the videos online to let the let the world know what’s going on in the Middle East. They translate stuff from social media, government bulletins, sermons from mosques, schoolbooks, school plays—anything that can give insight into the Zeitgeist in the Arab world. The Arabic, Urdi, Farsi, Turkish, Pashto, and so on are translated into Hebrew and English, and the material they translate is put up at this site. MEMRI also translates some Russian and Chinese articles into both English and Hebrew. (Malgorzata translates many of MEMRI’s English-language articles into Polish, and of those now number 5,022!)
MEMRI’s subscribers include many governments and intelligences services in the West, as well as colleges and universities.
When I asked Yigal why mosques would even want to film sermons full of hatred and condemnation of Jews, he replied that for some reason imams and others can’t resist being on social media.
Before we get to the WSJ article on MRMRI, I’ll retell an anecdote involving its Jerusalem head and co-founder, Yigal Carmon, who previously served for two decades in the IDF, attaining the rank of Colonel, and, well, there’s more from his Wikipedia bio:
From 1977 to 1981, [Carmon] served as an adviser on Arab affairs to the Civil Administration in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. When Menachem Milson was appointed to serve as head of the Civil Administration, Carmon was appointed his deputy. Carmon was appointed acting head of the Civil Administration 26 September 1982 after Milson’s 22 September resignation. He served in that position until Shlomo Ilya became the Administration’s head 29 November.
In 1988, Carmon was appointed adviser on counterterrorism for Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. Following the fall of the Shamir government in 1992, he served for a year as Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s counterterrorism adviser before resigning in 1993 due to his opposition to the Oslo Accords. From 1991 to 1992 he was also a part of the Israeli delegation to peace negotiations with Syria in Washington.
He founded MEMRI in 1998, so it’s just had its 25th anniversary.
All this is to say that Yigal knows whereof he speaks, and he’s served both left-wing (Rabin) and right-wing (Shamir) Israeli governments (Carmon’s own allegiance is on the Left), knows many Arab leaders, and when he says something about the political or military climate in the Middle East, he’s worth paying attention to. (By the way, MEMRI has almost never had any mistranslations of the Arabic, despite embarrassed speakers saying that their words weren’t properly translated.)
And that brings us to my anecdote, which is mine. Here it comes:
Yigal is an email friend of Malgorzata, and she put me in touch with him before I went to Israel last September. The second day I was in Jerusalem, I visited MEMRI, and Yigal took me to lunch, along with a reporter named Benjamin Weinthal (name given with permission). During that lunch, Yigal said offhandedly, “You know, I think there will be a war between Hamas and Israel in September or October.” I was stunned, but the reporter wasn’t taken aback and in fact was the first journalist to report Yigal’s prediction. I said “How do you know this?” Apparently the buzz that MEMRI got from the Arab world had given him a hint. Yigal added that there might be a terrorist attack, and if, say five or fewer IDF soldiers were killed, there probably wouldn’t be a war. But if it were ten or more, he added, Israel would probably go to war.
Of course at that time Yigal had no idea that the attack would be on Israeli civilians, not IDF soldiers, and far more than ten would die.
Later, Yigal gave us a “security tour” of the Jerusalem area, pointing out spots of interest in the Arab/Israeli conflict. When I returned to America, I sent his wife (who also gave me several tours of Jerusalem) a copy of my two trade books as a token of gratitude. They were sent to the MEMRI offices.
On October 6, I informed him that I mailed the books, and wrote this email (I’ve bolded the interesting bits):
From: Jerry Coyne Sent: Friday, October 6, 2023 1:32 PM To: Yigal Carmon
Hi Yigal,
I am sending two of my books, as per your wife’s request, to MEMRI, so if the package below comes, please sign for it. They are autographed.
Hope all is well in Israel. Where is that war you predicted?
best, Jerry
And Yigal answered the same day. Here is what he said:
From: Yigal Carmon To: Jerry Coyne
Fri 10/6/2023 12:43 PM
Thank you , Jerry. We will read at least significant parts of them.
Give me some 3 weeks more – as I predicted. I said Sept. or October….
As you can see, that exchange was on October 6. The very next morning when I woke up, I learned that all hell had broken loose. Hamas had attacked Israel, killing 1200 people, almost all civilians. Yigal was right, but the toll wasn’t 10 or 100, but 1200. A war, according to Yigal’s prognostication, was then inevitable. Yigal’s prediction had been previously published in MEMRI, but apparently the Israeli government paid no attention.
And so it happened, and Yigal’s prediction was mentioned in the new WSJ op-ed below, which gives background and details about MEMRI. But remember, YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST! Click to read, though I can’t find the article archived. I’ll give a few excerpts (indented):
From the article:
Yigal Carmon is one of the few Israelis who can claim to have predicted this war. His Aug. 31 article “Signs of Possible War in September-October” cited provocations by Hezbollah, escalating violence in the West Bank and threats from Hamas as evidence of regional coordination for something big. “Israel will likely be compelled to undertake a large-scale response,” he wrote, “even at the cost of an all-out war.”
Some details were off, but Mr. Carmon says anyone paying attention would have seen the writing on the wall. “They said it all. They said everything,” Mr. Carmon, a former Israeli intelligence officer and counterterrorism adviser to two prime ministers, says in a phone interview from Jerusalem. As president and a co-founder of Memri, the Middle East Media Research Institute, he had publicized Hamas’s videos advertising its drills for an invasion of Israel, as well as its claims that total war was coming.
But Hamas is always threatening war, and most of the time it comes to naught. “If they publish it many times, then you can ignore it?” he asks in response to the point. “I say just the opposite. If they publish it many times, it suggests they mean it and you cannot ignore it. You must take it seriously.”
Unfortunately, the tendency of sophisticated observers is to play down what terrorists say they believe. In a phone interview from Washington, Steve Stalinsky, Memri’s executive director, points out that in all the coverage of the war, “we have heard almost nothing about the Hamas ideology. Yeah, sure, sometimes you hear about the Hamas Covenant”—the group’s charter, which spells out its genocidal intentions—“but that’s it, and no one even prints it.”
Memri prints it, and publishes video compilations of Hamas leaders stating their movement’s goal: to build an Islamic caliphate stretching from Palestine across the region and the world. That sounds more like international jihad than Palestinian nationalism.
. . .Headquartered in Washington, Memri monitors and translates TV broadcasts, newspapers, sermons, social-media posts, textbooks and official statements in Arabic, Farsi and several other languages. The work may be drudgery, but it yields a steady stream of articles and viral video clips that condemn the region’s tyrants, terrorists and two-faced intellectuals with their own words.
Memri also documents Gazans’ indoctrination from childhood into a religious ideology that puts them on a war footing. “Their textbooks are our life,” Mr. Carmon says, “but no one paid attention.” Instead, Israeli leaders were convinced that Qatari money and past beatings would deter Hamas.
It’s MEMRI, for instance, that has brought to the attention of me and many others the Jew hatred taught to Arabic schoolchildren, making us realize that in its most virulent form it’s here to stay for at least another generation.
Here’s another reason why Western governments should be reading MEMRI:
. . .Mr. Carmon directs me to a recent article in which he writes, “Any Arab who hears American officials say that Qatar is America’s ally would burst into laughter—those clueless Americans, who don’t even know that Qatar is spitting in their face with wild anti-U.S. incitement 24/7 . . . because they only watch the deceptive Al-Jazeera TV in English.” On the Arabic-language channel, he says, Qatari-owned Al Jazeera “is the megaphone of Hamas like it was the megaphone of al Qaeda. Every speech, every statement—everything is aired several times until everybody gets it.”
The article faults the Biden administration for “pleading with Qatar” instead of threatening it: “Just one comment by the U.S. administration that it is considering relocating Al Udeid Air Base from Qatar (without which Qatar will cease to exist within a week) to the UAE will set the Qataris running to bring all the American hostages back home.” Instead, while hostage negotiations stall, the U.S. has quietly agreed to extend its presence at the Qatari base for another decade, according to a Jan. 2 CNN report. Mr. Carmon seems mystified by U.S. weakness. “Since when do experienced American officials conduct negotiations without power pressure on the side?”
If intelligence officials in the West aren’t reading MEMRI on a regular basis, they’re making a mistake. As you see, even the Biden administration has been gulled by the Middle East, and this happens pretty regularly. (Anthony Blinken is an especially notable victim, and he passes his gullibility on to Biden. Only someone completely oblivious to what’s happening in the Middle East would now be speaking of a “two state solution” as a way to settle this war.)
Although the WSJ article isn’t archived, perhaps a judicious inquiry will yield you a copy.
Thanks again to Yigal and his family for their hospitality when I was in Israel.
Reader Muffy sent in this photo showing the tracks of animal that she disturbed while cross-country skiing. Your job is to guess the type of animal AND the species. Muffy will reveal it it the comments towards the end of the day, so put up your guesses now:
