Monday: Hili dialogue

April 29, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to  the top o’ the week: Monday, April 29, 2024, and National Shrimp Scampi Day, a dish I’ve never had.  It looks good, though:

Jon Sullivan, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also International Dance Day (UNESCO), National Rugelach Day (one of the few good items in Jewish “cuisine”), and Day of Remembrance for all Victims of Chemical Warfare. 

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

Da Nooz:

*A Harvard geneticist, who looks remarkably young for being 54, is determined to reverse aging in humans, and says he’s doing it in other animals. I’m dubious:

Harvard geneticist David Sinclair, who has said his “biological age” is roughly a decade younger than his actual one, has put forward his largely unlined face as a spokesman for the longevity movement.

The 54-year-old has built his brand on the idea that aging is a treatable disease. The notion has proven so seductive that legions of acolytes follow his online postings about his research and the cocktails of supplements he consumes to stave off the inevitable.

A tweet:

His social-media accounts are a platform for assertions that his work is pushing nearer to a fountain of youth. He claimed last year that a gene therapy invented in his Harvard lab and being developed by a company he co-founded, Life Biosciences, had reversed aging and restored vision in monkeys. “Next up: age reversal in humans,” he wrote on X and Instagram.

On Feb. 29, in the eyes of many other scientists working to unlock the mysteries of aging, he went too far.

Another company he co-founded, Animal Biosciences, quoted him in a press release saying that a supplement it had developed had reversed aging in dogs. Scientists who study aging can’t even agree on what it means to “reverse” aging, much less how to measure it.

The response was swift and harsh. The Academy for Health and Lifespan Research, a group of about 60 scientists that Sinclair co-founded and led, was hit with a cascade of resignations by members outraged by his claims. One scientist who quit referred to Sinclair on X as a “snake oil salesman.”

Days later, in a tense video meeting, the academy’s five other board members pressed Sinclair to resign as president. He contended that the press release contained an inaccurate quote, according to people who were in the meeting, but he later stepped down.

Sinclair’s work is published regularly in top-tier scientific journals and has brought attention to an emerging field vying for credibility and funding. He has parlayed his research into hundreds of millions of dollars of investment in various companies, more than 50 patents and prominence as a longevity influencer.

Along the way, his claims—especially in his social-media posts, interviews and his book—have drawn criticism from scientists who have accused him of hyping his research and extolling unproven products, including some from companies in which he had a financial interest.

I’m dubious, but of course it’s my job to be dubious. But the others in his field are also dubious:

Companies are exploring techniques such as rejuvenating cells, with an aim to reverse diseases and restore cell functions that can diminish with age. Dr. Shinya Yamanaka and John B. Gurdon won a Nobel Prize in 2012 for their pioneering work in cell reprogramming.

The pushback against how Sinclair portrays his work reflects a conviction that a field once considered fringe is gaining legitimacy. As money pours in and scientists start companies, they are assessing one another’s work as both expert colleagues and business rivals.

Some longevity researchers caution that rejuvenating some cells isn’t the same thing as reversing aging in people. “Reversal of aging is a term I stay away from. The evidence in humans isn’t there,” said Dr. Bruce Yankner, a professor of genetics and neurology at Harvard and co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research.

I think Deepak Chopra made the same claim a while back, but of course he’s visibly aging!

*There’s a big decision awaiting Netanyahu and the war cabinet: prioritize the return of the hostages—which means a cease-fire and a deal—or go after Rafah to eradicate Hamas while risking the deaths of hostages.

Israel faces a stark dilemma as it weighs a ground invasion of Rafah, Hamas’s last bastion in southern Gaza, according to Israeli officials and analysts.

Should it go ahead with a full-scale attack? Or should it suspend the operation in favor of a possible cease-fire deal with Hamas for the release of hostages still held in the enclave?

The prospect of an either-or decision to hold off temporarily on invading Rafah, or even permanently, comes as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces intense pressure both abroad and at home. International diplomats are pushing to break a deadlock in cease-fire negotiations, and will meet this week in Saudi Arabia for talks, and hard-liners within Mr. Netanyahu’s government are insistent that the Rafah operation goes ahead soon.

Israel Katz, the Israeli foreign minister, made the equation clear this weekend.

“If there will be a deal, we will suspend the operation” in Rafah, he told Israel’s Channel 12, echoing what officials have been saying privately about the planned ground invasion of the city that has alarmed Israel’s allies. Mr. Katz is a member of Mr. Netanyahu’s security cabinet, but not the smaller war cabinet overseeing the campaign in Gaza. Both groups have met in recent days to discuss the issues.

And Benny Gantz, a member of the war cabinet, struck a similar tone on Sunday. While “entering Rafah is important for the long battle against Hamas,” he wrote on X, securing the release of the hostages “is urgent and much more important.”

Hamas is offering only 33 hostages, and then what? After they’re released, will the cease-fire end?  Not on your life.  Hamas will not surrender, and the Israeli people are hugely in favor of invading Rafah. If Hamas isn’t destroyed, far more than 100 Israelis will be killed by terrorists in the future.  The government, in which Netanyahu is being threatened by his war cabinet that they will withdraw their support if Rafah is prioritized over hostages, seems far less sensible than the Israeli people. All I can say is this: if Israel stops the war to get hostages, and doesn’t go into Rafah, it is the equivalent of Israel committing suicide. That may seem histrionic, but think what will happen if Hamas is allowed to regain control of Gaza.

*The WaPo discusses the dilemma facing Jewish students on campuses, many of whom don’t like the destruction of Gaza (do read the story with this archived link) to see the opening bit about a remarkable Jewish student at Barnard, Dahlia Soussan. But here’s the generalism:

For Jewish college students, this is a moment of intense and sometimes conflicting emotions as many college campuses erupt in loud protests against Israel’s conduct in the war and, in some cases, its existence — all while the deadly war in Gaza presses on and Israeli hostages remain in captivity.

It adds up to profound questions over what it means to be a young Jew in America in 2024. For some, the overriding feeling is one of fear and pain. Others have joined with the protesters, seeing the opposition to the war in Gaza as an opportunity to live out Jewish values taught growing up about justice and the value of human life. And many others are conflicted, seeing nuance when it feels like so many around them see black and white.

“A lot of students I talk with in the last few months are genuinely torn and confused but don’t feel they can ask their questions,” said Rabbi Jill Jacobs, a human rights advocate who helps train rabbinical students and others.

It’s been that way since Oct. 7, she said, when the war began with an attack on Israel by Hamas, the militant group that runs Gaza, killing about 1,200, according to Israeli estimates, and taking more than 250 hostage. After that, Israel launched a counterattack that has killed over 34,000 Gazans, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

Jewish students are left pinballing between emotions: worry over Israel’s safety and the fate of the hostages, fear of rising antisemitism at home, empathy for Palestinians.

It is not true that Jewish students, or me, are indifferent to the suffering of Palestinian people. But some of us think that that suffering can be laid at the door of Hamas, even though it should be avoided as far as possible.

*In his weekly Free Press column “Things worth remembering,” Douglas Murray discusses “Allan Bloom on the ‘charmed years’ of college” (archived here).  You should listen to “the speech”.  An excerpt:

These beautiful institutions, such as Columbia and Yale and Harvard, used to be places of learning. How did they end up being the American epicenter of Jew-hate and everything else that is moronic? How could a place of learning become a place where automatons shout and repeat phrases just taught to them, and think that screaming the same thing over and over is any kind of persuasive tactic?

Such actions are, in fact, the antithesis of what the university is meant to be about. One reason that intelligent, educated, civilized people do not spend their spare time screaming the same slogans over and over is that it is the opposite of intellectualism. It is the opposite of dialogue, inquiry, and rationalism—all things that the universities were meant to encourage.

How did this happen?

One person who explained how it went wrong was the political philosopher and writer Allan Bloom, whom Thomas Chatterton Williams wrote about so beautifully for The Free Press last month.

It is strange to think that Bloom’s masterpiece, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students, is now almost four decades old. Bloom anticipated and diagnosed everything that is going wrong on campus today—in the 1980s. Of course, since then, the situation has only become worse. Indeed, when we recall the university of the 1980s and 1990s, it seems like a vague, halcyon memory that bears little, if any, resemblance to our current, more dire straits. (It is also a reminder that simply diagnosing a problem cannot by itself solve that problem.)

Bloom gave the speech to the freshmen who had just arrived at the university, and it could not have been more scintillating, more inspiring, or more true.

In his remarks, Bloom gives the students a glimpse of “the higher life”—the life that they should aspire to. And he puts the university in the center of that quest, explaining what the four years ahead of them truly mean, and what they can and should be used for.

I have quoted this speech quite a number of times myself while speaking on university campuses, usually after some depressing experience. During my own adult life, university students have changed from being grateful and courteous to visiting speakers into being so entitled that today, they tend to imagine they are the ones who are doing you a favor by honoring you with an invitation to their institution.

Again, this is an inversion of what the university should be. But I must defer to Allan Bloom in explaining that noble and higher purpose. For everybody who has forgotten the purpose of the academy, or who thinks—as it is easy to think today—that the whole thing should be burned to the ground, here is Bloom at Depauw, reminding us of what higher learning should be—and could be again:

“This is the moment in your lives. You have four years of freedom to discover yourselves: the space between what is most likely the intellectual wasteland most of us leave behind and the inevitable dreary professional training that awaits you after the baccalaureate.”

*The AP reports on what I see as a form of pervasive cowardice among protesting students. They claim they are fighting for the right, and want to change people’s minds, but the new form of “civil disobedience” comes with a demand that the students not be punished if they break any rules or laws.

Maryam Alwan figured the worst was over after New York City police in riot gear arrested her and other protesters on the Columbia University campus, loaded them onto buses and held them in custody for hours.

But the next evening, the college junior received an email from the university. Alwan and other students were being suspended after their arrests at the “ Gaza Solidarity Encampment,” a tactic colleges across the country have deployed to calm growing campus protests against the Israel-Hamas war.

The students’ plight has become a central part of protests, with students and a growing number of faculty demanding their amnesty. At issue is whether universities and law enforcement will clear the charges and withhold other consequences, or whether the suspensions and legal records will follow students into their adult lives.

Terms of the suspensions vary from campus to campus. At Columbia and its affiliated Barnard College for women, Alwan and dozens more were arrested April 18 and promptly barred from campus and classes, unable to attend in-person or virtually, and banned from dining halls.

Questions about their academic futures remain. Will they be allowed to take final exams? What about financial aid? Graduation? Columbia says outcomes will be decided at disciplinary hearings, but Alwan says she has not been given a date.

“This feels very dystopian,” said Alwan, a comparative literature and society major.

And so they kvetch, willing to break the rules but scared witless that it might “hurt their careers.”  How much, then, do they care about their causes? Had I not gotten my C.O. status during the Vietnam War, I was 100% prepared to go to jail. I wouldn’t have even thought of begging for some kind of amnesty.  This concern with the protestors’ “principles” harming their careers shows more than anything the solipsism, the “me” part, of modern campus activism. Remember, they are warned beforehand of possible penalties, and then go ahead to break the rules anyway.  I wouldn’t be so hard-nosed about this if the protestors are not only destroying my beloved academia, but the Enlightenment values behind a liberal education and, indeed, behind America itself.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili thought that Andrzej hated molehills, but he doesn’t.

Hili: Time to remove these molehills.
A: Are they bothering you?
Hili: No, but I thought they were bothering you.
In Polish:
Hili: Pora usunąć te kretowiska.
Ja: Przeszkadzają ci?
Hili: Nie, ale myślałam, że tobie przeszkadzają.
And a photo of the affectionate Szaron, sleeping in the grass:

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

From reader Pliny the in Between’s Far Corner Cafe:

From Jesus of the Day. Would you eat one?

From The Dodo Pet:

From Masih: an Iranian woman saved from suicide.

Deeply deluded protestors at UCLA, both privileged and paying huge tuition bills. They don’t know squat.

At George Washington University.

AOC goes to The Columbia Encampment, and of course embraces the pro-Palestinian protestors:

From Malcolm; cat meets baby:

From Simon; Leonardo drew cats:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted:

Two tweets from the estimable professor Cobb. The first is Joe Biden aping Reagan’s claim that he wouldn’t take advantage of the youth and inexperience of his opponent. This is a good move!

Matthew and I love mimicry because it shows how close natural selection can take a creature to its optimum, and in this case we have a good idea what that optimum is (full camouflage):

 

29 thoughts on “Monday: Hili dialogue”

  1. Shrimp scampi: it IS good. Look at that butter foam…butter, garlic, wine…all your basic food groups…what more need be said. Oh and I’ll have mine on fettuccine, please.

    Reply

  3. Another instance showing the hypocrisy of the Progressive protestors at colleges. A Native American is mobbed for holding a sign saying, “Hamas supporters are not welcome on Native Land.” Her sign was torn up.

    Reply

    1. Now the oppressed are waring against each other. I’m not at all surprised.
      And did other notice the meek and humbled performance of the normally “in your face” AOC amidst the protest campers?

      Reply

  4. Humza Yousaf has just resigned as Scotland’s First Minister and leader of the SNP. He always seemed a mediocrity to me, out of his depth, having attained his situation owing to his identity, in an SNP party determined to virtue signal. And, as often with “identity” hires, he continually made out that he was the victim and that no-one respected him for his merits. He was the one who pushed through the “hate speech” legislation that hasn’t gone down well.

    Brendan O’Neill has was similarly unimpressed with him.

    Reply

    1. That article by Brendon O”Neill is a superb testament to complete failure of the idiot Hamza “useless” Scotland is well rid of him and let us hope all his “idiocy” is gone with him.

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    2. Thanks for the link. Excellent article:

      “It’s an administration devoted less to unleashing Scotland’s potential than to taming its bigotries. It’s concerned less with meeting Scots’ needs than with policing their feelings. This is why his speech on the unbearable whiteness of Scottish politics was so important.”

      Reply

  5. “How did they end up being the American epicenter of Jew-hate and everything else that is moronic?” Was thinking yesterday about violence in education, and you have to admit schools are historically an emotionally charged ideological battleground – from the Scopes monkey trial, to integration and forced bussing (see Canarsie and racial tensions for example). My local area had an outbreak of what we now call “widespread first amendment activity” in the 70’s over school textbooks (That we’re 50 years behind TN is about right 🙂

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  6. 1. ” “Reversal of aging is a term I stay away from. The evidence in humans isn’t there,” ”
    -Bruce Yankner

    That is what I call anti-gnosticism. I’d go further and say evidence will not ever be there, just like a perpetuum mobile. Bravo.

    I can say I did the cold showers to consume brown fat a number of times, and there’s something to it. But my fingernails still need to be clipped…. thank .. Ceiling Cat… because before aging reverses, it would necessarily… HALT.

    #degrowth
    #death cult

    2. As we enjoy the easily-manipulated hipsters’ campus cosplay, consider this quote:

    “In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.”

    “WORKINGMEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!”

    -Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, p.243,
    Manifesto of the Communist Party
    1848 (first publication), 1988 Prometheus Books, Guildford, CT

    Reply

    1. Wrt aging it’s well known that aging can be slowed over a few dozen generations by selection for individuals that delay reproduction into later life.

      https://www.nature.com/articles/hdy198566.pdf

      This kind of pleiotropy (genetic variants that have multiple effects on survival and on reproduction) means that efforts to delay aging within a single generation by manipulating gene expression will probably have unintended consequences.

      But I have to admit Dr. Sinclair does look fabulous for fiftysomething.

      Reply

      1. [ FYI I am not being snarky at you, but David Sinclair ]

        Does David Sinclair know D. melanogaster, or Mus musculus language?

        No. But he knows English, and can abuse language which can manipulate the desperate among us to change their behavior until they get the result they want – or see what they want – no matter what happens. I think that’s been seen before. What’s dangerous here is the medical training launders the thought. Also been done.

        So – ask your doctor – an independent doctor – if retroaging is for you.

        [ this statement is not intended to treat or cure any disease ]

        Reply

  7. On this day:
    1429 – Joan of Arc arrives to relieve the Siege of Orléans.

    1770 – James Cook arrives in Australia at Botany Bay, which he names.

    1826 – The galaxy Centaurus A or NGC 5128 is discovered by James Dunlop.

    1910 – The Parliament of the United Kingdom passes the People’s Budget, the first budget in British history with the expressed intent of redistributing wealth among the British public.

    1916 – Easter Rising: After six days of fighting, Irish rebel leaders surrender to British forces in Dublin, bringing the Easter Rising to an end.

    1945 – World War II: Adolf Hitler marries his longtime partner Eva Braun in a Berlin bunker and designates Admiral Karl Dönitz as his successor.

    1945 – Dachau concentration camp is liberated by United States troops.

    1946 – The International Military Tribunal for the Far East convenes and indicts former Prime Minister of Japan Hideki Tojo and 28 former Japanese leaders for war crimes.

    1953 – The first U.S. experimental 3D television broadcast shows an episode of Space Patrol on Los Angeles ABC affiliate KECA-TV.

    1967 – After refusing induction into the United States Army the previous day, Muhammad Ali is stripped of his boxing title.

    1968 – The controversial musical Hair, a product of the hippie counter-culture and sexual revolution of the 1960s, opens at the Biltmore Theatre on Broadway, with some of its songs becoming anthems of the anti-Vietnam War movement.

    1974 – Watergate scandal: United States President Richard Nixon announces the release of edited transcripts of White House tape recordings relating to the scandal.

    1975 – Vietnam War: Operation Frequent Wind: The U.S. begins to evacuate U.S. citizens from Saigon before an expected North Vietnamese takeover. U.S. involvement in the war comes to an end.

    1986 – A fire at the Central library of the Los Angeles Public Library damages or destroys 400,000 books and other items.

    1986 – The United States Navy aircraft carrier USS Enterprise becomes the first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier to transit the Suez Canal, navigating from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea to relieve the USS Coral Sea.

    1991 – A cyclone strikes the Chittagong district of southeastern Bangladesh with winds of around 155 miles per hour (249 km/h), killing at least 138,000 people and leaving as many as ten million homeless.

    1992 – Riots in Los Angeles, following the acquittal of police officers charged with excessive force in the beating of Rodney King. Over the next three days 63 people are killed and hundreds of buildings are destroyed.

    1997 – The Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993 enters into force, outlawing the production, stockpiling and use of chemical weapons by its signatories.

    2004 – The final Oldsmobile is built in Lansing, Michigan, ending 107 years of vehicle production.

    2015 – A baseball game between the Baltimore Orioles and the Chicago White Sox sets the all-time low attendance mark for Major League Baseball. Zero fans were in attendance for the game, as the stadium was officially closed to the public due to the 2015 Baltimore protests.

    Births:
    1667 – John Arbuthnot, Scottish-English physician and polymath (d. 1735). [Best remembered for his contributions to mathematics, his membership in the Scriblerus Club (where he inspired Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels book III and Alexander Pope’s Peri Bathous, Or the Art of Sinking in Poetry, Memoirs of Martin Scriblerus, and possibly The Dunciad), and for inventing the figure of John Bull.]

    1854 – Henri Poincaré, French mathematician, physicist and engineer (d. 1912).

    1858 – Georgia Hopley, American journalist, temperance advocate, and the first woman prohibition agent (d. 1944).

    1863 – William Randolph Hearst, American publisher and politician, founded the Hearst Corporation (d. 1951).

    1879 – Thomas Beecham, English conductor (d. 1961).

    1882 – Hendrik Nicolaas Werkman, Dutch printer, typographer, and Nazi resister (d. 1945). [Set up a clandestine printing house during the Nazi occupation (1940–1945). He was shot by the Gestapo in the closing days of the war, three days before the city he lived in was liberated.]

    1887 – Robert Cushman Murphy, American ornithologist (d. 1973).

    1893 – Harold Urey, American chemist and astronomer, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1981). [His pioneering work on isotopes earned him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1934 for the discovery of deuterium. He played a significant role in the development of the atom bomb, as well as contributing to theories on the development of organic life from non-living matter.]

    1894 – Marietta Blau, Austrian physicist and academic (d. 1970). [Credited with developing photographic nuclear emulsions that were usefully able to image and accurately measure high-energy nuclear particles and events, significantly advancing the field of particle physics in her time. For this, she was awarded the Lieben Prize by the Austrian Academy of Sciences. As a Jew, she was forced to flee Austria when Nazi Germany annexed it in 1938, eventually making her way to the United States. She was nominated for Nobel Prizes in both physics and chemistry for her work, but did not win. After her return to Austria, she won the Erwin Schrödinger Prize from the Austrian Academy of Sciences.]

    1895 – Malcolm Sargent, English organist, composer and conductor (d. 1967).

    1899 – Duke Ellington, American pianist, composer and bandleader (d. 1974).

    1901 – Hirohito, Japanese emperor (d. 1989).

    1907 – Fred Zinnemann, Austrian-American director and producer (d. 1997).

    1909 – Pearl Laska Chamberlain, American pilot (d. 2012). [Today’s Woman of the Day, see next post below.]

    1917 – Maya Deren, Ukrainian-American director, poet, and photographer (d. 1961).

    1922 – Toots Thielemans, Belgian guitarist and harmonica player (d. 2016).

    1928 – Heinz Wolff, German-English physiologist, engineer, and academic (d. 2017).

    1929 – Jeremy Thorpe, English lawyer and politician (d. 2014).

    1931 – Lonnie Donegan, Scottish-English singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 2002).

    1933 – Willie Nelson, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, producer and actor.

    1935 – Otis Rush, American blues singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 2018).

    1938 – Bernie Madoff, American businessman, financier and convicted felon (d. 2021). [Admitted mastermind of the largest known Ponzi scheme in history, worth an estimated $65 billion.]

    1954 – Jerry Seinfeld, American comedian, actor and producer.

    1957 – Daniel Day-Lewis, British-Irish actor.

    1958 – Michelle Pfeiffer, American actress.

    1962 – Polly Samson, English novelist, lyricist and journalist. [Married to musician and Pink Floyd’s guitarist David Gilmour, she has written the lyrics to many of Gilmour’s songs, including some on Pink Floyd’s last two albums.]

    1970 – Andre Agassi, American tennis player.

    1970 – Uma Thurman, American actress.

    Life is both sad and solemn. We are led into a wonderful world, we meet one another here, greet each other – and wander together for a brief moment. Then we lose each other and disappear as suddenly and unreasonably as we arrived. (Jostein Gaarder, Sophie’s World):
    1768 – Georg Brandt, Swedish chemist and mineralogist (b. 1694). [He discovered cobalt c. 1735, making him the first person to discover a metal unknown in ancient times. He is also known for exposing fraudulent alchemists operating during his lifetime.]

    1903 – Paul Du Chaillu, French-American anthropologist and zoologist (b. 1835). [Became famous in the 1860s as the first modern European outsider to confirm the existence of gorillas, and later the Pygmy people of central Africa. He later researched the prehistory of Scandinavia.]

    1916 – Jørgen Pedersen Gram, Danish mathematician and academic (b. 1850).

    1917 – Florence Farr, British actress, composer and director (b. 1860). [She was a friend and collaborator of Nobel laureate William Butler Yeats, poet Ezra Pound, playwright Oscar Wilde, artist Aubrey Beardsley, and many other literati of London’s fin de siècle era, and even by their standards she was “the bohemian’s bohemian”.]

    1951 – Ludwig Wittgenstein, Austrian-English philosopher and academic (b. 1889).

    1967 – J. B. Lenoir, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1929). [His full given name was simply “J. B.”; the letters were not initials. During the early 1940s, Lenoir worked with the blues artists Sonny Boy Williamson II and Elmore James in New Orleans. He was later influenced by Arthur Crudup and Lightnin’ Hopkins. In 1949, he moved to Chicago, where Big Bill Broonzy helped introduce him to the blues community, and he became an important part of the city’s blues scene.]

    1968 – Aasa Helgesen, Norwegian midwife (b. 1877). [The first female mayor in Norway.]

    1980 – Alfred Hitchcock, English-American director and producer (b. 1899).

    1993 – Mick Ronson, English guitarist, songwriter and producer (b. 1946).

    2006 – John Kenneth Galbraith, Canadian-American economist and diplomat, United States Ambassador to India (b. 1908).

    2008 – Albert Hofmann, Swiss chemist and academic (b. 1906).

    2011 – Joanna Russ, American writer, academic and radical feminist (b. 1937).

    2012 – Roland Moreno. French engineer, invented the smart card (b. 1945).

    2014 – Bob Hoskins, English actor (b. 1942).

    2015 – Jean Nidetch, American businesswoman, co-founded Weight Watchers (b. 1923). [In 2018, the company rebranded to “WW”, which is unfortunate when you say it out loud given why most people join!]

    2020 – Guido Münch, Mexican astronomer and astrophysicist (b. 1921).

    Reply

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

      Woman of the Day pioneer Alaska aviator, bush pilot and flight instructor Pearl Chamberlain born OTD 1909 in West Virginia, the first woman to fly solo along the Alaska-Canadian Highway. She insisted on teaching everyone who wanted to learn to fly, including Native Alaskans; one of her pupils became the first Native Alaskan pilot employed by a scheduled airline.

      Pearl grew up in the Appalachian Mountains and learned to fly in a Kinner Fleet bi-plane in 1933.

      In 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt approved a plan by the Civilian Pilot Training Programme to train 20,000 civilian pilots a year as a pool of potential military pilots that he believed the country would need soon. It had to admit women and black men, both then widely thought incapable of learning to fly, and it only admitted one woman for every nine men. Pearl signed up and used the time to earn her instructor credentials. She was then given black students to instruct. Every single one she taught received his wings.

      When the USA joined the Allies during WW2, Pearl served as a Women’s Airforce Service pilot and also as a cryptologist at the Pentagon where she received the first message from Guadalcanal.

      After her honourable discharge in 1945, she bought a 1936 Piper Cub and flew from North Carolina to Fairbanks, Alaska, intending to become a bush pilot. She wasn’t alone in the cockpit. A mouse kept running over her feet on the rudder pedals. Along the way, she encountered two other airplanes making the same journey and a woman travelling in one of the other airplanes asked to join her, saying she had no confidence in the ability of her pilot. His plane subsequently went down and was never found.

      Pilot jobs weren’t all that difficult to come by in Fairbanks but nobody wanted a woman pilot unless it was to work in the office. Pearl tried Nome and had no success there either until one of the pilots at Rainbow Skyways reported for duty drunk. It was the opportunity she needed. She held down two jobs simultaneously: teaching school in the winter and teaching students to fly in the summer. That’s when she tutored a young Native Alaskan man with potential. Other pilots warned her Native Alaskans couldn’t fly but she took no notice. He become the first Native Alaskan captain of a scheduled airline.

      In 1946, Pearl became the first woman to fly solo in a single-engine plane, a Piper J-4, along the Alaska-Canadian Highway. That’s 1,387 miles from Dawson Creek, British Columbia, to Delta Junction, Alaska, via the Yukon.

      Pearl was a life member of The Ninety-Niners, the group of 99 women set up by Amelia Earhart in 1929 to support and advance the development of women pilots. She met Amelia briefly but held the view that Jacqueline Cochran and Jerri Cobb were the best women pilots of the era. Of Amelia Earhart, she said: “She got lost”, which didn’t accord with her own no-nonsense approach to flying.

      Pearl held that every hour spent in the air gave you an extra day on earth. She might have been onto something. She only gave up flying at 97, and died in 2012, aged 103.

      https://twitter.com/TheAttagirls/status/1784832272216051735

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      1. I love her comment regarding Amelia Earheart, “she got lost” didn’t she just? I don’t think she has ever been found has she?

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      2. The Ninety-Nines are alive and well. My daughter got a scholarship from them to get her multi-engine rating. She went on to serve as a regional president and served on their scholarship committee when not flying jets. Pearl would be happy to know that bad-ass women pilots are alive and well.

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    2. Harold Urey’s influence went well beyond chemistry. When I was a teenager, I met him when he was on one of the NASA Surveyor moon soft landing working groups with my father. There is a nice 1972 homage to Dr. Urey and his key role in getting the moon into play in the nascent NASA astronomy program by NASA’s Homer Newell. “Harold Urey and the Moon” is at

      https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?bibcode=1973Moon….7….1N&db_key=AST&page_ind=4&plate_select=NO&data_type=GIF&type=SCREEN_GIF&classic=YES

      (Edit note from jim: i think the string is pasted right for the url but i cannot make it a hot link for some reason. In any case you can simply google “harold urey and the moon”)

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  8. In high volume pizzerias in NJ, Shrimp Scampi is typically served over linguine. I judge places by the shrimp to pasta ratio.

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  9. The story of geneticist David Sinclair’s overreach on anti-aging claims reminded me of Netflix’s excellent documentary Bad Surgeon: Love Under the Knife. In that case, the subject was stem cells and their ability to grow new body parts — and it’s pretty astonishing. The World Expert Supersurgeon, lauded by medical peers and popular media alike, turned out to be fudging it more than a little.

    In three parts; I recommend it.

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  10. Markéta Glaserová was such a beautiful girl. Had she lived, today she would be a great-grandmother.

    Amnesty? Sorry.

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  11. Our friend and excellent commenter here Skeptic wrote this yesterday: “To be fair, if I were living in Gaza I too would be claiming I support Hamas – for the same reason everybody in Nazi Germany claimed to love Hitler, everybody in the USSR to love Stalin, etc.”
    ———————————————-to which I reply:

    Sure – but the “threatened to vote” (for Hamas) aspect while true doesn’t counter the fact that EVERY SINGLE ACTION of every Pal I’ve heard from or seen or read in the last 40 years toes that line – irrespective of their location, right to speak freely, etc.   Exiles in free countries, even protected by anonymity, all agree: “River to Sea”.

    I’ve often asked the Pal “allies” who, exactly, are the “Peacemakers” on their side.
    Crickets. 40 years of silence.

    And were they to exist in their small numbers, the assassin’s veto silences these mythical peacemakers just as it silenced (hanged, dragged behind vehicles) non-Hamas voting politicians in 2006-ish in Gaza.

    It is easy for us secular westerners to imagine that “most Pals just want peace and co-existence”. Feels good. 
    It is hard for us to imagine a scenario where nearly all of a population are gripped by a genocidal, maximalist, eliminationist culture – it is so distant from our mindset. But it is utterly the case in the Levant. It is the central core of “Palestinian culture” no less.

    D.A.
    NYC
    re-posting my own column of the other day, variously syndicated, about this mindset broadly:https://democracychronicles.org/temporal-orientations-in-politics/

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  12. Ahhhh… seeing the lovely AOC on campus up there makes me double my donation to whoever is opposing her in the primary or the election. Ditto terrorist Tlab.

    After voting (since 2000 and becoming a US citizen) my political life had previously been just the arguments in my column/articles – which have a respectable readership but don’t move the needle. I also worked as a volunteer attorney on the Hillary campaign in 2016 in Brooklyn.

    But in the past few years I’ve started giving money to politicians. Never thought I’d be giving money to Republicans but if that’s what it takes to counter the terrorist “Squad” – let me get my credit card.
    D.A.
    NYC

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  13. “. . . it is the equivalent of Israel committing suicide.”

    I imagine that this is what many in the West would like to see. After all, why should Israel be the only one of us not engaged in civilizational suicide? Why should they fight for their so-called self-defense? Simply so they can impose their “values” on others, that’s why. And the babies, oh my! Everywhere! Can you believe it? At this rate, there will be no getting rid of the Jews. Everything they do seems a bit self-absorbed and domineering. They need some lessons from those of us who turn our attention to empathy and peace.

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  14. “All I can say is this: if Israel stops the war to get hostages, and doesn’t go into Rafah, it is the equivalent of Israel committing suicide. That may seem histrionic, but think what will happen if Hamas is allowed to regain control of Gaza.”

    Those two painful sentences were crafted in cold rationality. Sadly, I concur.

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  15. Prof(E) “Israeli suicide” comment.
    If it’s any conciliation I believe Israel will never be caught off guard again no matter how they decide to proceed from here.
    Adding, if Ukraines’ and Russian use of drones is anything to go by, war is a changing beast and they had better get their act together fast.
    I.e. the Ukrainian drones operate on 2 frequencies to outmaneuver blocking interference tactics and working on drones that direct themselves scanning the topography to reach their target. Equates to no central control needed.
    If the IDF had bolstered the border when told of unusual behaviour it could have meant only terrorist combatants and not this heavy civilian loss of life and destruction may have occurred.
    If true also that misogynist commanders played a role in this miscalculation some reflection and organisation needs be had on that count.
    That said there is this below.
    https://www.timesofisrael.com/parents-protest-idf-decision-to-move-surveillance-soldiers-nearer-to-lebanon-border/

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