Wednesday: Hili dialogue

47 thoughts on “Wednesday: Hili dialogue”

1. On this day:
   1525 – Aztec king Cuauhtémoc is executed on the order of conquistador Hernán Cortés.

   1922 – The United Kingdom ends its protectorate over Egypt through a Unilateral Declaration of Independence.

   1947 – February 28 Incident: In Taiwan, civil disorder is put down with the loss of an estimated 30,000 civilians.

   1953 – James Watson and Francis Crick announce to friends that they have determined the chemical structure of DNA; the formal announcement takes place on April 25 following publication in April’s Nature (pub. April 2).

   1959 – Discoverer 1, an American spy satellite that is the first object intended to achieve a polar orbit, is launched but fails to achieve orbit.

   1966 – A NASA T-38 Talon crashes into the McDonnell Aircraft factory while attempting a poor-visibility landing at Lambert Field, St. Louis, killing astronauts Elliot See and Charles Bassett.

   1974 – The British election ended in a hung parliament after the Jeremy Thorpe-led Liberal Party achieved their biggest vote share since 1929.

   1975 – In London, an underground train fails to stop at Moorgate terminus station and crashes into the end of the tunnel, killing 43 people.

   1983 – The final episode of M*A*S*H airs, with almost 106 million viewers. It still holds the record for the highest viewership of a season finale.

   1986 – Olof Palme, 26th Prime Minister of Sweden, is assassinated in Stockholm.

   1991 – The first Gulf War ends.

   1993 – The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents raid the Branch Davidian church in Waco, Texas with a warrant to arrest the group’s leader David Koresh. Four ATF agents and six Davidians die in the initial raid, starting a 51-day standoff.

   1997 – GRB 970228, a highly luminous flash of gamma rays, strikes the Earth for 80 seconds, providing early evidence that gamma-ray bursts occur well beyond the Milky Way.

   2013 – Pope Benedict XVI resigns as the pope of the Catholic Church, becoming the first pope to do so since Pope Gregory XII, in 1415.

   Births:
   1683 – René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, French entomologist and academic (d. 1757).

   1894 – Ben Hecht, American director, producer, and screenwriter (d. 1964).

   1896 – Mairi Chisholm, British WW1 nurse and ambulance driver (d. 1981). [Today’s Woman of the Day, see next post below.]

   1896 – Philip Showalter Hench, American physician and endocrinologist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1965).

   1901 – Linus Pauling, American chemist and activist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1994).

   1906 – Bugsy Siegel, American gangster (d. 1947).

   1909 – Stephen Spender, English author and poet (d. 1995).

   1915 – Peter Medawar, Brazilian-English biologist and immunologist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1987).

   1925 – Harry H. Corbett, Burmese-English actor (d. 1982). [Like J K Rowling, he had no middle name but invented an initial for professional purposes. He joked that the “H” stood for “hennyfink”, a Cockney pronunciation of “anything”.]

   1929 – Frank Gehry, Canadian-born American architect and designer.

   1942 – Brian Jones, English guitarist, songwriter, and producer (d. 1969).

   1944 – Storm Thorgerson, English graphic designer (d. 2013). [Founded the graphic art group Hipgnosis with Aubrey Powell. He is best known for closely working with the group Pink Floyd through most of their career, and also created album or other art for Led Zeppelin, Wishbone Ash, Phish, Black Sabbath, Def Leppard, Al Stewart, Scorpions, 10cc, UFO, Peter Gabriel, the Alan Parsons Project, Genesis, Yes, Kansas, Dream Theater, Muse, Audioslave, and The Cranberries.]

   1947 – Stephanie Beacham, English actress.

   I would rather live and love where death is king than have eternal life where love is not. (Robert Green Ingersoll):
   2003 – Chris Brasher, Guyanese-English runner and journalist, co-founded the London Marathon (b. 1928).

   2007 – Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. American historian and critic (b. 1917).

   2019 – André Previn, German-American pianist, conductor, and composer. (b. 1929).

   2020 – Joe Coulombe, founder of Trader Joe’s (b. 1930).

   2020 – Freeman Dyson, British-born American physicist and mathematician (b. 1923).

   1. Woman of the Day:
      [Text from The Attagirls X/Twitter account]

      Woman of the Day WW1 nurse and ambulance driver Mairi Chisholm born OTD 1896 in Buckinghamshire. Her courage in tending to injured soldiers a mere 100 yards from the front line of Ypres made her one of the most decorated women of WW1. It is impossible to talk of Mairi without also talking about her friend, nurse Elsie Knocker born in 1884 in Exeter. The two were known as The Angels of Pervyse and they treated British, Belgian, and German soldiers alike.

      Mairi’s family moved to Dorset when she was a girl. Her older brother was a motorcycle enthusiast and she persuaded her father to buy her a Douglas motorcycle too. She learnt how to strip down the machines and repair them. Aged 18, she encountered 30-year-old Elsie who shared her passion for motorcycling, and they competed in motorcycle and sidecar trials together.

      When war was declared in 1914, Elsie felt the call of duty and persuaded Mairi to go with her to London to become despatch riders for the Women’s Emergency Corps. Mairi rode her motorcycle from Dorset to London and was spotted making hairpin corners by Dr Hector Munro who had set up the Flying Ambulance Corps to help Belgians after the German Army invaded Belgium. “He was deeply impressed with my ability to ride through the traffic. He traced me to the Women’s Emergency Corps and…said, ‘Would you like to go out to Flanders’ and I said ‘Yes, I’d love to’.”

      In late September 1914, Mairi and Elsie left for Belgium and spent the first few weeks on the Yser front where they collected bodies and transported them back to base hospitals but by October they had moved nearer Dunkirk, bringing wounded soldiers by ambulance from the battlefield to military hospitals. When the beds ran out, the dead piled up – “No one can understand…unless one has seen the rows of dead men laid out. One sees men with their jaws blown off, arms and legs mutilated” – and Mairi and Elsie realised that many men were dying of shock on the journey to hospital because they were not receiving vital first aid.

      It was not considered fitting for women to be exposed to the dangers of the frontline but in November, they left the FAC and set up a first aid post in a cellar in a badly damaged house north of Ypres, only 100 yards from the trenches.

      The Poste de Secours Anglais (British First Aid Post) was their home for the next three and a half years. The local water was contaminated so they had to import barrels of water from England and could eat only tinned food. They worked long hours under bombardment and were shot at by snipers for months at a time while they treated and saved hundreds of wounded men, including wounded Germans, often carrying them over their shoulders to their first aid post.

      The people of Sutton Coldfield donated a Wolseley ambulance and Mairi risked her life on a nightly basis, driving the wounded soldiers from the front line at Pervyse to the base hospital. Between 1915 and 1917, she transported 1,500 casualties.

      Mairi and Elsie were completely free agents who had to raise their own funds. They had a camera and began photographing the Front, securing them space in British newspapers, and as their fame grew, so did the funds for their first aid post. They returned to London on fundraising tours, riding a sidecar outfit and collecting money, socks, and hats for the soldiers as well as tobacco and cigarettes. The press loved them.

      Proximity to a local Belgian garrison gained them an official attachment to the Belgian military. They were awarded the British Military Medal, made Officers of the Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem and the Order of Leopold II, Knights Cross. More awards followed including the Croix de Guerre.

      In March 1918, Pervyse was bombarded with gas shells. The women’s dog woke them in time for them to put on their gas masks, but he died and they were invalided home. Mairi was able to return briefly to Pervyse before being gassed again. She was by then only 22 years old. When she returned to Britain, she saw out the rest of the war with Elsie as members of the newly formed Women’s Royal Air Force.

      Mairi took up car racing after the war, but her injuries from the gas attack had weakened her heart and she was advised to take life easy. She spent her days with a childhood friend, moving together to Jersey in the 1930s. She died in 1981, aged 85.

      https://twitter.com/TheAttagirls/status/1762742278144016676

      1. They do not make them like that anymore, true heroes. Thank you for the post.

      2. Wow.
         And they had to fundraise to risk their lives!

2. Rare disease day Thursday. My guys are fine on medication, but for thousands it’s a daily terrible struggle.

3. “Like other Chinese manufacturers, BYD benefits from its home country’s lower labor costs, but this explains only some of its success. The fact is that BYD — and Chinese automakers like Geely, which owns Volvo Cars and Polestar brands — are very good at making cars.”

   Who knew it could be that simple.

   1. It’s never that simple. You also need to take into account the fact that China is not quite as transparent as other countries when it comes to reliabilty statistics. In other words, these things may very well be death traps, but you won’t hear about it unless someone collects the various clips of burning BYD cars from social media and connects the dots. Like, for example, this guy: https://youtu.be/yOA7qKMcjcE?feature=shared .
      Now, I’ll have to switch to an electric car at some point… but it sure won’t be a Chinese one.

      1. Sure – not that I know about these things, but The Musky One was saying the natural state of a car company is being dead.

         Prototypes are easy ;
         production is hard ;
         positive cash flow is harder.

         …. etc.… this must be a bigger news item than I thought.

4. I encourage you to read my latest column in Democracy Chronicles.org. My sometime publisher San Diego Jewish News thought it a tad extreme so turned it down.

   These are extreme times, I’d argue. The JN republishes some of my stuff but my atheism bothers them I think. 🙂

   https://democracychronicles.org/palestine-and-the-company-you-keep/

   D.A.
   NYC

   1. I look forward to reading it this morning, David. There also is a good 25 minute video of Douglas Murray in a recent ILTV interview with Emily Schrader in which he discusses his experiences visiting in Israel since the day after oct 7. He includes some discussion of what he terms “the cowardice” of the West. Url is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n41wKt1kmlc

      1. Good Interview with Douglas Murray on ILTV and he is absolutely correct in his view of “Western cowardice” we see it every day on the streets of western cities, in the media, blatantly from politicians of all flavours, rampant antisemitism and a criticism of Israeli behaviour which beggars belief. Islam is the problem which the western democratic countries refuse to even see let alone believe. They simply do not believe when Hamas publicly boasted “ we will come for you next” that they, Hamas sincerely believe what they say.
         The London UK Metropolitan Police “Service” stood by and did absolutely nothing when Palestinian activists beamed anti western and antisemitic imagery on to Big Ben and the UK Houses of Parliament and then when a government politician stated that the city of London is given over to “Islamists” enabled by the muslim Mayor Khan, he was removed from the governing political party by the cowardly prime minister.
         Cowardly does not even begin to describe this behaviour.

   2. David, great article, accurate and written with cutting wit!
      “Your sometime publisher San Diego Jewish News thought it a tad extreme so turned it down.” I cannot think for one moment what scared them, too truthful maybe?
      I particularly liked:-
      “And don’t let some bearded anti-colonial indigenous lesbian dance professor tell you it is about “poverty” or “racism.” Ever. It never is.”
      Still laughing. Thank you.

      1. +1

   3. “. . . a tad extreme so turned it down.”

      You make fun of the loons on both sides of the political aisle, so the publisher is, perhaps, confused about what company you keep. “I thought he was one of us . . . there are only TWO sides, right?”

   4. Thanks for this one, David. In the past I’ve pointed out that the Palestinians are pals with Iran, and we know what they use construction cranes for there.

5. I am aware that this comment will probably elicit much vitriol, but so be it.

   Electric vehicles are not the answer; synthetic fuels are. The US automobile industry needs to be allowed to sell the cars that the US people want to buy ON THE CONDITION that the fuel used in ICE-powered cars not be based on petroleum.

   A pipe dream, you say? Formula 1 is switching to such fuels in just two years. Porsche and Siemens are already producing these fuels.

   According to Volvo, and I think they would know, the manufacture of a battery-electric vehicle produces SEVENTY PERCENT MORE greenhouse gases than the production of an ICE-powered vehicle. Since the life of a battery pack is shorter, much shorter, than the life of an ICE, it is not clear that the reduction in tailpipe emissions ever “catches up.”

   The cost of switching to synthetic fuels is a tiny fraction of the amount we will waste trying to build a robust EV infrastructure. Resources are always finite so the cost of a policy ALWAYS matters.

   Here is the part that will elicit the reaction: most of those pushing for an all battery-electric fleet of passenger vehicles care little about the environment, but are smug, self-righteous and arrogant ideologues in a quest for control and punishment.

   #DeathBeforeEV

   1. “most of those pushing for an all battery-electric fleet of passenger vehicles care little about the environment, but are smug, self-righteous and arrogant ideologues in a quest for control and punishment.”

      I don’t know why you would say this. This isn’t a site where people post comments simply to attract vitriol. Perhaps you’re lost?

   2. I would argue that making millions of cars every year, not matter what powers them, is the problem – well it’s a problem. Pretty much everything about our environment would be better with fewer cars. We need more spaces for humans and fewer spaces for cars.

      1. What do you do if humans tell you they want space for their cars? No culture that can afford them eschews them just to have more space for walking long distances to work and to the well for water.

   3. Serious question: how are those synthetic fuels produced? Where does the carbon that goes into them come from? How expensive are they?
      If someone could find a reasonably cost-effective, carbon-neutral way to synthesize gasoline, I am all for it. Internal combustion engines are awesome, seeing how they’ve gone through 100+ years of aggressive optimization, and gasoline is, and will always be, unrivaled in terms of energy density, safety and convenience. BUT the current ways to generate bio-diesel (from humongous corn monocultures, at a ridiculously low energy-per-area rate) are not a scalable way forward.

   4. I don’t know about vitriol, but a compulsion to call out bad information? Yes, got me on that one. And I don’t even own an electric car.

      Every one of your assertions about electric vs ICE is unsupported by the preponderance of the evidence. BEVs already have lower carbon/lifetime compared to ICE cars, even in worst case circumstances. Worst case meaning the vehicle and battery made by the highest carbon producing manufacturer (Currently all Chinese companies.), and the car used in a region with the highest electric costs (California, Europe).

      And you, and the sources you are very likely relying on, don’t seem to understand that as all industries in general, including energy production, reduce their carbon production that the gap between BEVs and ICEs continues to get bigger over time. Not to mention advances in battery technology, which have been ongoing at the production level for years now.

      Carbon neutral liquid fuels for ICEs would be just fine. At least as far as carbon production goes. That might even become a thing. However, it won’t be able to compete with electric in efficiency, ever, due simply to the laws of nature. That of course doesn’t guarantee that carbon neutral liquid fueled ICEs won’t become a thing. If enough people want them it could happen. But it does stack the odds against them.

      Another indicator on which way the wind is going to blow is to look at what has already happened in the market. BEV passenger vehicle sales have been growing at an accelerating rate. Probably simply because so far production has not been able to meet demand. Meanwhile, ICE sales have been falling, and losing market share. Another market metric, the title of best selling passenger vehicle in the world was held by the Toyota Corolla for about 40 years. Until the 4th quarter of 2023. Since then the title has been held by a BEV, the Tesla Model Y.

      Even in the US electric car makers can’t make electric cars fast enough, yet, to meet demand. Lots of people in the US want them. The US car manufacturers can produce whatever kind of vehicles they want. Good luck to them. They are way behind.

      1. To be fair to Rules of logic, he was not claiming, exactly, that life-cycle CO2 emissions from petroleum cars were less than for battery EVs. If you (or someone else) can keep the EV running long enough, it wins. He was observing, correctly, that the emissions of making an EV (and its battery) exceed substantially that of making a combustion car. If the fuel for combustion could be produced from its own exhaust without producing CO2 in the process, then the over-all CO2 produced would be much less than for either an EV or a petroleum car, chiefly because less mass of minerals need to be mined and shipped long distances for making lithium-ion batteries. This is what Porsche is trying to do.

         What’s overlooked in the EV-vs-ICE debate (except here by jeremyp) is that EVs win only at the margin. Yes, to drive 100,000 miles is an EV you emit less CO2, but not enough less to make much difference to climate change. To get to NetZero by 2050 we will have to do without personal motor transportation of any kind and make other deep sacrificial changes in childbearing, immigration, diet, aviation, use of cement and other manufactured goods. EVs are considered the low-hanging fruit because with EVs the transportation sector sort of looks the same as now: one person drives his car alone to work whenever and wherever he feels like it, and refuels his car at night with tax-free “fuel” as a bonus. Think how much harder it’s going to be to reach the fruit higher up that imposes real burdens.

         1. I understood Rule of Logic fine, but you’ve misunderstood me. By carbon/lifetime I absolutely meant that the making of the vehicle and the battery were included, as they should be. As I attempted to make clear by, “Worst case meaning the vehicle and battery made by the highest carbon producing manufacturer.”

            “If the fuel for combustion could be produced from its own exhaust without producing CO2 in the process, then the over-all CO2 produced would be much less than for either an EV or a petroleum car, chiefly because less mass of minerals need to be mined and shipped long distances for making lithium-ion batteries.”

            Yes. But, that is a pretty big “if.” And how far away is that technology? And the capability to produce it at the scale and cost necessary to be practical? And carbon free? No matter how you slice it it’s going to take energy, even if it’s an engineered organism doing the bulk of the chemistry. If your energy production is carbon free, then perhaps it’s possible to achieve carbon free fuel production. But if that’s the case, then it’s also possible to achieve carbon free battery production. Actually, if carbon free energy is a given that’s already the case. And given that happy state of affairs, both ICEs and BEVs carbon free, you still have energy efficiency to contend with. Several conversions, losses at every one, the worst inherent in the Carnot cycle. BEVs win that hands down.

            What people often overlook is that BEV technology has been rapidly improving and continues to, batteries, power management and motors. The arguments many opponents of BEVs use are up to 20+ years out of date. Also often overlooked is the fact that energy production is also changing, and as it does the case for BEVs vs ICEs improves.

            Meeting net zero by 2050 is one metric, but hardly the only one worth considering.

            1. I was only trying to argue both sides of the question, to be fair, in different posts. Rules of logic didn’t explain what he meant by non-emitting synthetic fuel. (Most people think synthetic gasoline is made from coal.) I don’t have to believe in it to explain how it’s done. I hope it all hangs together eventually. The market will decide the BEV-ICE contest if not too distorted by subsidies, green or otherwise. If the Chinese can sell an electric car that Americans will buy for $11,000, bring it on.

               All the western world’s governments have embraced NetZero by 2050.
               The rest of the world has not. It is good news to hear that meeting NetZero by 2050 is not the only metric for us to worry about, either, because we have to figure out a way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere at scale before “net” means anything. More non-emitting nearly free energy needed there, too.

   5. Cars burning synthetic fuel are still electric cars. The only difference is that the electricity, vast quantities of nearly free electricity, is used to electrolyze expensively deionized fresh water into hydrogen, and more electricity is used to push the hydrogen and CO2 “uphill” to methanol, and then further back uphill to fully reduced hydrocarbons like kerosene. Introducing the branches to make the mixture we call gasoline is another hurdle. It can be done but you need to expend more energy than you will get out when you burn it, just as plants do in photosynthesis. The waste heat produced in each direction is gone forever.

      Synthetic fuel is literally made from its own exhaust. If you have limitless energy from non-emitting sources you can make this perpetual-motion machine work. But you also need a limitless supply of fresh water for the hydrogen. The resulting water vapour from combustion eventually rains out back to earth somewhere but not necessarily close to, say, the Great Lakes where you took it from. Because the area drained by the Lakes is surprisingly small, the rain is overwhelmingly likely to fall straight into the oceans or on windward coastal mountain slopes, and not replenish the Lakes. Remember, burning petroleum fuels (and natural gas and most coal) adds fresh water to the world’s ecosystems. Electric fuel doesn’t.

      Electric-fuel production will have to compete with other demands on non-emitting, weather-dependent electricity as we “electrify everything.” Back-of-the-envelope calculations I’ve seen guess it would be competitive at scale with petroleum gasoline at $20/gallon. Would the world’s drivers accept a tax on gasoline of this magnitude to induce them to switch to electric fuel, or would they have to be compelled to buy it at whatever cost?

      Your truculent vitriolic tone against battery electric vehicles is off-putting. I should disclose that various levels of my government are trying to realize an industrial strategy (i.e., subsidies) centred around domestic production of EVs and their batteries, which is going to look foolish when US$11,000 Chinese cars with cheap Chinese batteries flood the market here.

   6. “vitriol”

      A favorite of mine Hermetic alchemy :

      “… sixteenth-century advice in the form of the motto interiorem terrae rectificando invenies occultum lapidem (“Visit the interior of the earth and by rectifying you shall find the hidden stone”), an acrostic that spells out VITRIOL ”
      -Principe, L. M.
      What is Alchemy? p.120

      There’s a cool drawing readers can find – search “Azoth of the philosophers”. The “stone” is The Philosopher’s Stone.

      As for the specific topic : I like electric better than ICEs. But whatever ideas or problems anyone might put forth or show – none of it justifies handing control over all energy to unelected “stakeholder capitalists“. Exactly what level of control over practically everything (the 17 SDGs) will be needed?

   7. IDK why you would expect vitriol. Nobody here is “pushing for an all battery-electric fleet of passenger vehicles.”

      When my Prius got totalled I would have preferred to replace it (same year etc.) but my used Leaf was cheaper to buy, run, and maintain. I don’t care if gasoline for the Prius is over-taxed, or that if only there was justice in the world I could have put synthetic fuel in it. I’m responding to incentives to own the Leaf. Introspection suggests I’m not a “smug, self-righteous and arrogant ideologue [on] a quest for control and punishment.” YMMV.

6. Our NASA field laboratory at the Langley Research Center took these government shutdowns very seriously in the 80’s and 90’s. If I recall correctly, those officially deemed “essential personnel” were the only ones allowed on campus. This was pretty much limited to safety and security so the guard force and fire department continued to work as did anyone (generally a very few engineers and technicians) responsible for supporting astronauts in orbit at the time on either Station or Space Shuttles. As the Director of the lab pointed out to us, he was NOT essential and would be spending the furlough at home just like almost all of the rest of us!

7. I found it (mostly) amusing when I read yesterday that neither Israel nor Hamas got the message that a cease-fire would be in effect by Monday. My first thought was that Biden had gotten ahead of his skis in exuberance because he thought that the negotiations were making some progress.

   But then I came to the more cynical thought that maybe President Biden was trying to jam Israel into accepting a plan that was not acceptable. Now that I know that the “plan” includes only some of the hostages, not all of them, that it doesn’t include a Hamas surrender, and that it doesn’t include deportation of the Hamas leadership to Antarctica (where they belong), I can only conclude that Biden either had a mental lapse (doubtful) or he was trying to pressure Israel into a deal quickly.

   Why would he do that? Because the State of the Union address is coming up next week. He wants to be able to claim victory—even if it means defeat for Israel. Playing politics with Israel’s fate as a nation is not a good way to gain a talking point to appease the antisemitic far left. Israel needs to persevere in the war until a real deal emerges.

   1. I assume that you were just on a roll, Norman, and sans a proof-reading editor, you aimed the Hamas leadership into Antarctica. Please let’s leave Antarctica free of this nasty business and confine the thugs in a SuperMax for the rest of their evil, miserable lives.

      1. LOL.

         Mea culpa for throwing Antarctica under the bus.

8. That Pires video is simply astounding. Can you imagine hearing the orchestra starting to play and realize you prepared the wrong concerto? What poise from both Chailly and Pires–especially Pires! May she live forever.

   1. Yeah, that’s literally a nightmare. But imagine how much worse it would have turned out if she hadn’t played the correct one in past!
      One more aspect that hasn’t been remarked on: I know professional musicians do things differently, but as an amateur, the thought of going on stage as a soloist without ever having rehearsed the piece with the ensemble is mind-boggling.

9. The Guardian reports that a tiny transparent fish from Myanmar, only about 12 cm long (about 0.4 inches) can make a very loud noise, as loud as a gunshot or siren.

   It’s difficult to verify who made the mistake – you or the guardian – since you forgot to post the link to the Guardian story (a caption in the video says 12mm) but I think it should be 12mm.

   —

   From Gravelinspector: a sated cat

   The image below simply has an exclamation mark and the words “not found”. It doesn’t surprise me that sated cats are “not found”, especially considering today’s photo of a chubby Hili.

   1. 12mm is closer to 0.4″ than 12cm is!

10. Echiuran worms, still making the same shape/size mud tunnels their ancestors did in the Precambrian. They have not evolved much since then, maybe because they found perfection hundreds of millions of years ago. I personally adore these conservatives.

    1. The echiurans have evolved a ton. Closely related to capitellids and other worms that are segmented with repeated body parts – echiurans have lost all their segmentation, limbs, bristles. Oldest fossils are ~300 Mya, not Precambrian.

       Lots of other animals live in u-shaped burrows, and lots of echiurans don’t, so those old trace fossils don’t mean much imho.

11. Mitch McConnell will be stepping down as Senate Republican leader in November.

    1. Yes! I just read https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68428697.

    2. Good riddance! Except he’ll probably be replaced by a MAGA nutter.

    3. Yes, I just heard that – because he thinks it’s time to hand over to a new generation. Are Joe and the Donald listening?!

       1. I think the real reason is he’s not MAGA (even though he did everything Trump wanted and vice versa). But he knows Trump runs the GOP nowadays and he hates Trump.

12. Re: Pizza Hut sign.

    Well, that’s what you get for ordering brisket at a pizza parlor.

13. The Michigan protest vote doesn’t mean much. Biden still got 80% of the vote, Trump only got 68%. That’s bad for an incumbent President…all the primary results so far have been bad for an incumbent. What should be especially alarming to Trump is the high percentage of Independents and Republicans who say in exit polls “they won’t vote for Trump no matter what.” And out of the 13% “non-committed” protesters against Biden, I’m sure that percentage will shrink in the 2024 general. The MSM’s analyses: “this is bad for Biden” is hyperbole, as is their harping on his age, verbal slip-ups, etc.

    1. I agree. It’s almost as if the so called liberal press (I’m looking at you NYT) are working for the Trump campaign these past several years.

       1. The MSM is useless in their coverage of Trump vs. Biden. They’ve normalized Trump and over exaggerated Biden’s foibles to somehow create a “balance” of these two legitimate Presidential contenders. It’s just another “both-sides” trope that is a disastrous way to cover American politics at this juncture. And yes, as you suggest, it makes it look like the “liberal” press is routing for Trump. I’m sure he makes a lot more money for them than boring Biden does, and that’s the true motivator of the MSM nowadays.

          And I just heard that SCOTUS added two more months to the case of whether or not a sitting President is above the law. They should have just let the lower court’s 3-0 ruling stand that a sitting President isn’t above the law, and swiftly move the case along, but no, they want to help Trump run out the clock. It’s terrifying how corrupt many justices on the “highest court in the land” are.

          John Oliver had a hilarious bit a couple week’s back where he offered Clarence Thomas $1,000,000/year for the rest of his life plus a multi-million dollar tour bus if he stepped down. It’s a legit offer too. Unfortunately, America’s not that lucky.

          1. I read about that John Oliver offer a couple of days ago. Cracked me up. Would have been even funnier if Thomas had accepted. He seems craven enough to me for that to be possible. But, as generous as the offer was it probably wasn’t enough to tip the scales between avarice and loss of face in the right direction.

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