Welcome to Friday, May 10, 2024, and National Shrimp Day. Here’s a lovely mantis shrimp, not for eating:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 10 Wikipedia page.
It’s also Clean Up Your Room Day, National Liver and Onions Day (my dad loved the stuff and we couldn’t even stand the smell; it baffles me that some people like it), National Lipid Day, and Golden Spike Day at Promontory, Utah. Wikipedia explains:
The golden spike (also known as The Last Spike) is the ceremonial 17.6-karat gold final spike driven by Leland Stanford to join the rails of the first transcontinental railroad across the United States connecting the Central Pacific Railroad from Sacramento and the Union Pacific Railroad from Omaha on May 10, 1869, at Promontory Summit, Utah Territory. The term last spike has been used to refer to one driven at the usually ceremonial completion of any new railroad construction projects, particularly those in which construction is undertaken from two disparate origins towards a common meeting point. The spike is now displayed in the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.
Here’s a photo:
Da Nooz:
*The big news for Israel supporters is Biden’s claim that he will not sell any weapons to Israel (save for rockets used in the Iron Dome) if Israel makes an all-out assault on Rafah.
A threat by US President Joe Biden that some arms shipments will be frozen if Israel launches a planned offensive in Rafah was met with swift denunciation from government figures in Jerusalem on Thursday, who indicated that the military would push ahead regardless.
The comments from Biden also sparked harsh criticism against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by chief opposition rival Yair Lapid for what he said was the government’s “failed management” of ties with Washington.
In the US, some American Jewish groups and US lawmakers spoke out against the move and others indicated it was unlikely to go beyond words. Former US president Donald Trump accused Biden of siding with terrorists.
Keep Watching
What if00:00/00:09A threat by US President Joe Biden that some arms shipments will be frozen if Israel launches a planned offensive in Rafah was met with swift denunciation from government figures in Jerusalem on Thursday, who indicated that the military would push ahead regardless.
The comments from Biden also sparked harsh criticism against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by chief opposition rival Yair Lapid for what he said was the government’s “failed management” of ties with Washington.
In the US, some American Jewish groups and US lawmakers spoke out against the move and others indicated it was unlikely to go beyond words. Former US president Donald Trump accused Biden of siding with terrorists.
Bomb shelters make good neighborsKeep Watching
In what appeared to be a response to Biden’s decision to suspend key weapons shipments to Israel and his threat that more could follow, Netanyahu on Thursday shared footage of his speech at Yad Vashem earlier this week, in which he said that Israel will stand alone against Hamas if it must.
“Today, we again confront enemies bent on our destruction,” Netanyahu said in the clip posted on X, formerly Twitter, from a Holocaust Remembrance Day event in Jerusalem. “I say to the leaders of the world — no amount of pressure, no decision from any international forum, will stop Israel from defending itself.”
A threat by US President Joe Biden that some arms shipments will be frozen if Israel launches a planned offensive in Rafah was met with swift denunciation from government figures in Jerusalem on Thursday, who indicated that the military would push ahead regardless.
The comments from Biden also sparked harsh criticism against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by chief opposition rival Yair Lapid for what he said was the government’s “failed management” of ties with Washington.
In the US, some American Jewish groups and US lawmakers spoke out against the move and others indicated it was unlikely to go beyond words. Former US president Donald Trump accused Biden of siding with terrorists.
Bomb shelters make good neighborsKeep Watching
In what appeared to be a response to Biden’s decision to suspend key weapons shipments to Israel and his threat that more could follow, Netanyahu on Thursday shared footage of his speech at Yad Vashem earlier this week, in which he said that Israel will stand alone against Hamas if it must.
“Today, we again confront enemies bent on our destruction,” Netanyahu said in the clip posted on X, formerly Twitter, from a Holocaust Remembrance Day event in Jerusalem. “I say to the leaders of the world — no amount of pressure, no decision from any international forum, will stop Israel from defending itself.”
A threat by US President Joe Biden that some arms shipments will be frozen if Israel launches a planned offensive in Rafah was met with swift denunciation from government figures in Jerusalem on Thursday, who indicated that the military would push ahead regardless.
The comments from Biden also sparked harsh criticism against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by chief opposition rival Yair Lapid for what he said was the government’s “failed management” of ties with Washington.
In the US, some American Jewish groups and US lawmakers spoke out against the move and others indicated it was unlikely to go beyond words. Former US president Donald Trump accused Biden of siding with terrorists.
Bomb shelters make good neighborsKeep Watching
In what appeared to be a response to Biden’s decision to suspend key weapons shipments to Israel and his threat that more could follow, Netanyahu on Thursday shared footage of his speech at Yad Vashem earlier this week, in which he said that Israel will stand alone against Hamas if it must.
“Today, we again confront enemies bent on our destruction,” Netanyahu said in the clip posted on X, formerly Twitter, from a Holocaust Remembrance Day event in Jerusalem. “I say to the leaders of the world — no amount of pressure, no decision from any international forum, will stop Israel from defending itself.”
A threat by US President Joe Biden that some arms shipments will be frozen if Israel launches a planned offensive in Rafah was met with swift denunciation from government figures in Jerusalem on Thursday, who indicated that the military would push ahead regardless.
The comments from Biden also sparked harsh criticism against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by chief opposition rival Yair Lapid for what he said was the government’s “failed management” of ties with Washington.
In the US, some American Jewish groups and US lawmakers spoke out against the move and others indicated it was unlikely to go beyond words. Former US president Donald Trump accused Biden of siding with terrorists.
Bomb shelters make good neighborsKeep Watching
In what appeared to be a response to Biden’s decision to suspend key weapons shipments to Israel and his threat that more could follow, Netanyahu on Thursday shared footage of his speech at Yad Vashem earlier this week, in which he said that Israel will stand alone against Hamas if it must.
“Today, we again confront enemies bent on our destruction,” Netanyahu said in the clip posted on X, formerly Twitter, from a Holocaust Remembrance Day event in Jerusalem. “I say to the leaders of the world — no amount of pressure, no decision from any international forum, will stop Israel from defending itself.”
In what appeared to be a response to Biden’s decision to suspend key weapons shipments to Israel and his threat that more could follow, Netanyahu on Thursday shared footage of his speech at Yad Vashem earlier this week, in which he said that Israel will stand alone against Hamas if it must.
“Today, we again confront enemies bent on our destruction,” Netanyahu said in the clip posted on X, formerly Twitter, from a Holocaust Remembrance Day event in Jerusalem. “I say to the leaders of the world — no amount of pressure, no decision from any international forum, will stop Israel from defending itself.”
“If Israel is forced to stand alone, Israel will stand alone,” he pledged, adding, “We will defeat our genocidal enemies. Never again is now.”
*Stormy Daniels finished her testimony against Trump yesterday, and apparently it was quite seamy, though I’d prefer not to hear the details. There’s little doubt they had a liaison, but Trump’s accused not of philandering, but of hiding the hush money. Some details:
During more than seven hours of searing testimony spread over two days, Stormy Daniels recounted a one-night sexual encounter she said she’d had with Donald J. Trump, described taking a $130,000 payment in return for her silence, and swung between defiance and vulnerability in the face of combative questions from his lawyers.
“You made all this up, right?” a lawyer for Mr. Trump asked, to which Ms. Daniels responded with a forceful “No.” And when the lawyer suggested that Ms. Daniels, a porn star, had experience with “phony stories about sex,” she responded that the sex in such films is “very much real, just like what happened to me in that room.”
Yes, porn is “phony stories about sex,” but nobody is going to be fooled by that lawyer’s implications. Whether Daniels’ reply was a good one is unclear, for if it was as real as porn, that seems to say that Daniels wasn’t really into it as sex qua sex. But there’s more:
Ms. Daniels was at times defiant during her testimony, including when the defense attacked her for hawking merchandise to supporters and she responded by likening it to Mr. Trump’s own merchandising. But at other times, Ms. Daniels spoke quietly, seemingly on the verge of tears. Asked by a prosecutor after cross-examination about the effect these events had on her life, Ms. Daniels said she had to hire security, move a couple of times and take extra precautions because of her daughter. Asked if publicly telling the truth has been a net positive or net negative, she responded, “Negative.”
The 34 felony counts of falsifying business records against Mr. Trump stem from his repayment of Mr. Cohen after he became president, and the recording of the checks as “legal expenses” at the Trump Organization. Mr. Trump, 77, has denied any wrongdoing. If convicted, he could face prison or probation.
. . . . During her first day on the stand on Tuesday, Ms. Daniels described — sometimes nervously, sometimes graphically and often hastily — having a liaison with Mr. Trump in 2006, which Mr. Trump denies. She testified that she met Mr. Trump at a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe, Nev., and accepted an invitation for dinner that led to sex in his penthouse suite. “I didn’t know how I got there,” she recalled thinking as she lay on the bed with him. “I was trying to think about anything other than what was happening there.”
* Here’s an op-ed the NYT arguing that divestment demands by college students are ineffectual and performative ( Sernovitz is identified as “a managing director of Lime Rock Management, a private equity firm that invests in oil and gas and clean energy companies and whose investors include colleges and universities.” The article is called Elite colleges walked into the Israel divestment trap.”
College endowment managers no doubt feel beleaguered that pressing moral questions regularly end up on their desks. For that desk is already covered with spreadsheets on another question: how to generate returns for universities that are nonprofits, unfathomably expensive, and desperate to not be just finishing schools for the rich. Last fiscal year, endowments over $5 billion provided 17.7 percent of their university’s budgets. This school year, Williams College charged $81,200 in tuition and fees. But spending per student was $135,600. The endowment helps make up the difference.
Yet activists view endowments with a sense of ownership. They are part of a community that owns this money. They also go after endowments because they lack better targets. It says something about the authority of ideas in our age that students lobby institutions dedicated to the advancement and propagation of knowledge mainly over what they do with their excess cash.
Sernovitz then mentions that the anti-apartheid divestments may have been successful (it’s still debated), but the same isn’t true in his area:
Unlike the effects of the South Africa movement, the early impact of oil and gas divestment by colleges and others has been negligible, or even counterproductive: Oil and gas companies have needed little external financial capital, and hostility to the divestment movement has led Republican-led states such as Florida to restrict E.S.G. investing, which focuses on environmental, social and governance factors. (Note that Florida’s State Board of Administration manages almost exactly the same amount of money as the 10 largest private college endowments combined.)
What the fossil fuel divestiture did establish, however, was that university leaders can be made to concede that their endowments will, in certain circumstances, be guided by the school’s collective values, and that current students can shape those values. And by getting endowments to not invest in the sector in some way, the protesters hardened an abstract moral judgment: that the oil and gas business, and the faceless bureaucrats who work for it, are wrong. Divestment champions hope the symbolic removal of an industry’s “social license” can take on its own power, emboldening government policymakers to regulate that industry or dissuading students from seeking jobs in it.
. . . and there are yet more problems with divesting from Israel:
University leaders could follow the same playbook as they did on fossil fuels and find ways to symbolically divest without disrupting their endowments in any notable way. Based on the size of G.D.P., not investing is Israel directly would be like not investing in Colorado. And despite the chants that charge otherwise, many endowments appear to have little to no direct exposure to Israel or to many of the American companies protesters want to blacklist.
But there’s a key difference between avoiding fossil fuels and shunning Israel. The institutions that divested from oil and gas made sure to describe it as financially prudent, albeit sometimes with shallow investment logic. This time, Israel’s social license is the only thing that is on the table. And if Israel is on the table, what other countries should lose their social license? How many years must pass since what some believe to be a country’s settler colonialist period or messy wars that kill innocent civilians to make it investable?
And if divestment against Israel is carried out, when should it end? Oil and gas divesting is meant never to end; oil and gas consumption is meant to end. Divestment from South Africa ended with apartheid. So university leaders will be forced to ask an often heterogeneous group of students what would earn Israel its social license back. A cease-fire? A new Israeli government? A two-state solution? The end of Israel as a Jewish state?
. . .Listen to the protesters on divestment. They will not stop. They will not rest.
But neither will the markets. They open every morning, Monday through Friday, and university budgets’ demands on endowments never go away. Tuitions are rising. Costs always go up. Colleges should debate deep moral issues and discuss the hard compromises to solve the world’s ills. But we should move those efforts to the lecture halls, away from the investment offices. Divesting is an easy chant. Investing is hard enough as it is.
Well, that’s not entirely convincing. My opposition to divesting in Israel is that it’s performative, and, most of all, wrong, for Hamas is on the wrong side of this war. Nevertheless, the cry is for more investment in Palestine, even those the vast majority of Palestinians back Hamas. As my friend in Berlin wrote (see below), “These are crazy times.”
*Hospitals are now asking patients to pay in advance for surgery and other procedures, forcing some to put off procedures that they can’t yet afford. This is why we need some form of national, affordable health care.
Heather Miconi has seven weeks to come up with $2,000 to pay for surgery her daughter needs to breathe more easily.
Merritt Island Surgery Center in Merritt Island, Fla., billed Miconi in advance of the adenoid and tonsil surgery. If she can’t pay for the surgery before it is scheduled to take place next month, the procedure will be put off.
Miconi, whose insurance won’t cover the cost because she has a high deductible, works three jobs and doesn’t have savings to cover the cost. She is now appealing to strangers through a GoFundMe campaign for help.
For years, hospitals and surgery centers waited to perform procedures before sending bills to patients. That often left them chasing after patients for payment, repeatedly sending invoices and enlisting debt collectors.
Now, more hospitals and surgery centers are demanding patients pay in advance.
Advance billing helps the facilities avoid hounding patients to settle up. Yet it is distressing patients who must come up with thousands of dollars while struggling with serious conditions.
Those who can’t come up with the sums have been forced to put off procedures. Some who paid up discovered later they were overcharged, then had to fight for refunds.
Among the procedures that hospitals and surgery centers are seeking prepayments for are knee replacements, CT scans and births.
Yes, I can understand why hospitals are concerned with repayment, but to endanger patients who can’t pay up at the moment? That’s mean-spirited. I’m actually surprised because some hospitals, despite the law requiring it, refuse to specify charges for procedures, preventing comparison shopping. I’m surprised they don’t ask for tips after it’s all over! Would you go to a restaurant that made you pay upfront before serving you any food?
*A friend wrote me from Berlin this morning saying that these were “crazy times”. Now I understand what she meant: German politicians are getting physically attacked left and right:
A prominent Berlin politician was violently assaulted and suffered injuries to her head and neck, police said Wednesday, in the latest attack on elected officials that raises concern over rising political violence in Germany.
Franziska Giffey, the city’s top economic official, a former mayor and an ex-federal minister, was attacked at an event in a Berlin library on Tuesday by a man who approached her from behind and hit her with a bag containing a hard device, police said.
Giffey was taken to a hospital and treated for head and neck pain, police said. A 74-year-old man was detained and police searched his home, police said. They said the suspect was known to police, but did not give any indication for a motive.
. . .Last week, a candidate from the party of Chancellor Olaf Scholz was beaten up in the eastern city of Dresden while campaigning for next month’s election for the European Parliament and had to undergo surgery.
Police detained four suspects, aged between 17 and 18, and said that the same group had apparently attacked a Greens party worker minutes before they attacked Matthias Ecke. At least one of the teens is said to be linked to far-right groups, security officials said.
Also on Tuesday, a 47-year-old Green Party politician was attacked by two people while putting up election posters in Dresden, dpa reported.
The incidents have raised political tensions in Germany.
Both government and opposition parties say their members and supporters have faced a wave of physical and verbal attacks in recent months, and have called on police to step up protection for politicians and election rallies.
In February, the German Parliament said in a report there were a total of 2,790 attacks on elected representatives in 2023. Representatives of The Greens were disproportionally affected in 1,219 cases, those from the far-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, in 478 cases and representatives of the SPD in 420 cases.
The country’s vice chancellor, Robert Habeck, who is a member of The Greens, was prevented from disembarking a ferry for hours by a group of angry farmers in January, and the vice president of the German Parliament, Katrin Goering-Eckardt, also from The Greens, was prevented from leaving an event in the state of Brandenburg last week when an angry crowd blocked her car.
The causes? Many are suggested: Scholz’s government isn’t popular in the eastern part of the country, neo-Nazis are making trouble, and there is a lot of anti-immigration sentiment. Here’s a self portrait she took in Berlin yesterday, which at least expresses a reasonable sentiment. Yes, what’s written on the sidewalk is “F*ck Hamas.”
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the two cat friends are on the prowl:
Szaron: We have to be very observant.Hili: What for?Szaron: So that no mouse will sneak through.
Szaron: Musimy bardzo uważać.Hili: Na co?Szaron, Żeby się żadna mysz nie prześlizgnęła.
*******************
From Things with Faces:
From the 2024 Darwin Awards:
. . and from Science Humor:
From Masih: Justin Trudeau has a decision to make:
Justin Trudeau: Which Side of History Will You Choose?
The people or the terrorists?
We Iranians welcome the Canadian Parliament’s historic decision to designate the Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization. I hope other parliaments across democracies follow this path.… pic.twitter.com/OjFieh3rFn— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) May 8, 2024
Sci Am goes political again. . .but the takedown is good. (Have you seen Teen Vogue?)
A once eminent publication now Teen Vogue for nerds
— Ed Maguire (@eemaguire) May 8, 2024
JCO weighs in:
Scientific American, once subscribed-to by high school students, of which I was one, seems to have deteriorated into something other than a journal about science & new discoveries; covering issues of the sort written about constantly, nonstop, opinionated commentary on trending… https://t.co/T06S7WtIXm
— Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) May 8, 2024
Speaking of ideology corrupting science, Colin Wright tells us how Yale’s medical students are fed lies. Be sure to click “show more” as it’s a long and disheartening tale. (h/t Luana).
These are the last 6 slides from a BIOL 104: Principles of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology lecture at Yale, a required course for all pre-med students.
The slides attempt to obfuscate what males and females are by asserting that the binary concept of sex is "essentialist" and… pic.twitter.com/xlTGuUUgZy
— Colin Wright (@SwipeWright) May 9, 2024
From Barry, who says, “The cat doesn’t know what to make of it.” It’s clearly some kind of toxic insect, but readers might weigh in:
— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) May 7, 2024
From Malcolm: a bike escalator in Norway. Now there’s a country with panache!
I'm all about this kind of infrastructure. A nice escalator for cyclists in Norway. pic.twitter.com/QQoLNMssf0
— Fascinating (@fasc1nate) April 19, 2024
From the Auschwitz Memorial, a French girl (Jewish of course) gassed to death upon arrival.
10 May 1935 | A French Jewish girl, Bayla Mandelbaum, was born in Paris.
On 31 August 1942 she was murdered in a gas chamber in #Auschwitz. pic.twitter.com/w1cZPnueF4
— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) May 10, 2024
Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. First, a lovely fossil that took 18 years to prepare!
Prepare to meet one of the most beautiful fossils ever. A spectacular crinoid colony.
This Jurassic giant measures over 100 square metres & took 18 years to prepare! On display at the excellent Hauff Museum.
This was one of the 50 fossils featured in, LOCKED IN TIME. pic.twitter.com/uc7yy5sGez
— Dr Dean Lomax (@Dean_R_Lomax) May 9, 2024
This doesn’t look like a tasty meal, but great blue herons will eat anything aquatic:
A great blue heron eating a gator. pic.twitter.com/7FHQE6irtT
— Holley Bendtsen (@BendtsenHolley) May 8, 2024
The Nov election choice almost sounds like 1) Frying pan 2) Fire
Currently reading: How Democracies Die (free at archive.org) after the alarming cover in The Economist – altho as usual suspect overly analytical and not addressing the emotional aspect as Jon Haidt does.
I certainly don’t know all the facts about how the restricted arms shipment will impact the operations in Rafah, but there was an early reaction to the news on NPR, and the commenter there said that Israel has stockpiles of weapons, including heavy bombs, and so they can presumably go ahead anyway. Their view was that this restriction was more symbolic.
(I am just spitballing but it seems…) Yeah. Significant damage to Hamas must be completed by the IDF and Israel must go with whatever it has. The difference between getting everything they ask the U.S. for and getting less translates to number of IDF and Israeli citizen casualties suffered and time to completion. Conversation between Biden and Netanyahu might be:
Prez: so you got what you really need?
PM: yeah. Pretty much, but I will continue to raise hell with you for domestic and international appearances.
PREZ: ok good. I will be doing some shouting too for same purposes too, but let me know by back channels if you find that you really need something more
You’ve alluded to this in previous comments and I’ve thought you were correct then and now. Wasn’t it you who said something to the effect of “watch what they do rather than listen to what they say”? I hope I haven’t misattributed the statement. At any rate, it echos my beliefs.
I dislike the idea of pre-paying for hospital treatment, just as I dislike pre-paying a co-pay when I go to the doctor. If the doctor messes up or doesn’t seem to be paying attention, I should have the option of not paying, just as I would if a plumber came to my house and broke the toilet. You wouldn’t believe some of the useless and incompetent doctors my wife and I have seen. Co-pays are part of the disastrous American medical insurance system, which along with the HMO is ruining American medicine. Medicine is now just a business where the doctor’s goal is to cycle patients in and out as frequently as possible. Now they are making up excuses to get you into the office. (My best friend had to go in to discuss how he had to prepare for a colonoscopy. Why? Last time I had one, they told me that when they told me to get one.) We need more control over our healthcare, and national health insurance would take us in the opposite direction. By the way, one of the good things that happened under Trump was the law that hospitals have to publish their prices. But have they?No. Where’s the DOJ on that?
> the law that hospitals have to publish their prices.
But have they?
No. Where’s the DOJ on that?
+1
They haven’t, and it should be a big bi-partisan issue.
From which I infer that the for-profit parts of the US hospital industry have invested sufficiently in “lobbying” (alternative spelling of “bribing”) politicians in both camps.
Which also raises the obvious question of – does the not-for-profit part of the US health industry use that as a marketing tool to try to expand market share against the for-profits? Or do their senior administrative staff anticipate moving into higher-paid jobs in the for-profit sector? Which again fingers the bribery of lobbying, but outside the political sector.
Much of the so-called not-for-profit part of the health industry involves different accounting rules so there is no “profit”, but those running the not-for-profit hospital systems profit very nicely.
In 2021 the head of the non-profit Sentara health system had 33 million in total taxable and non-taxable pay.
As to paying in advance, there was a Chinese restaurant in Toronto that was telling black would-be customers that they had to pay in advance because the owner had observed that at least in his neighbourhood, black customers were more likely to dash for the door without paying for their meal. The Human Rights Commission (and his Canadian-born children) eventually came around and told him you can’t do that.
From the hospital’s point of view, the patient (who willingly bought a high-deductible plan) who says she can’t come up with $1200 in advance is the same patient who would refuse to pay the bill afterward. (And who knows, maybe she has a track record we’re not told about.) I know sympathy is not my strong suit but bad debts make health care more expensive for everyone else.
Oh yes I would (“… believe some of the useless and incompetent doctors my wife and I have seen”)! I’ve seen them, too! The doctors now sit at least 10 feet away from you (god forbid they should have to touch you) and hammer codes into their laptops. I despise our modern day health care system. The insurance companies and big pharma own it. It is criminal!
What on earth are blue heron’s stomachs made of to eat a gator? Kevlar? Those four clawed feet desperately trying to get out! How quickly before gator would be unable to struggle inside, and is due to lack of air, special stomach acid, or both? A few seconds or a minute??
[The image hasn’t opened for me – trying alternative methods. Meanwhile…]
Do herons swallow struggling prey whole, or do they kill it (bill and/ or foot claws) before swallowing it? One of the comments say they’re swallowed alive.
In either case, don’t they swallow food into the crop, which may well have structures not present in the stomach. In particular “gastroliths” which reduce the food to … pick a word – pulp, powder …
Looking closely at the pix … they’re swallowed head-first – so the notoriously weak abductor (opening) muscles of the crocodilian’s jaw can’t bring the teeth to bear (or are they adductor muscles?). There’s a reason that “croc wranglers” use duct tape or rubber bands to keep their charge’s jaws closed : it is sufficient. Similarly, the closeness of the throat around the limbs would keep them in their streamlined “swimming” posture, keeping the digital claws pretty much out of play. At least until the crocodilian suffocates.
A meal this size would probably take several tens of minutes to completely swallow down to the crop (at the base of the neck, IIRC from dissecting chickens), so that most of the body would still be in the throat at the time of death, with the limbs constricted, streamlined, against the crocodilian’s body.
I bet the crop (as opposed to the stomach) has significant movement sensors, to detect death throes, then cessation of movement, before passing the now-quiescent meal onto the stomach for it’s acid+proteinase bath.
Owls (and the like) produce “pellets” of ex-mouse fur and the indigestible bits of bones. Teeth in particular. Do these semi-aquatic theropod dinosaurs also regurgitate the indigestible bits – rather than passing them through?
What is the fossil record of “owl pellets”? And their big brothers? The topic would straddle the fields of ichnology (study of trace fossils) and of “body fossils”, because for the meal it’s just en route to immortality after “post-mortem processing” while for the theropod, it has just left a behavioural trace fossil.
Thinks … there’s at least one record – I remember reading the paper and wincing – of study of a tyrannosaur (inferred from size and formation-level ecology) coprolite, commenting on the corroded and comminuted (ground-down) texture of the bits of bones contained in it. Which is good enough for coprolites – a venerable field. But I don’t recall seeing anything about “crop contents” and pellets.
If a tyrannosaur had a crop, then I’m sure that gastroliths and concentrations of “last meal” remains would have been mentioned at some point in excavation reports. Which I don’t remember seeing, while gastrolith concentrations have been frequently reported in associations with sauropod dinosaurs. So … are avian crops a convergent development after the theropod-avian branching point, or are theropod crops present, but not strongly developed (the teeth and claws evidently being enough to dismantle the meal into non-struggling parts)?
Hypothesis – juvenile large theropod dinosaurs may have had crops, until the animal reached sufficient size to dismantle dinner themselves. Or maybe, if they grew up in family(-ish) flocks, they effectively externalised their crops to family(-ish) care and the anatomy reduced to a developmental stub.
(I leave the putative familial links as “-ish” because of things like ostrich brooding habits. Do we have any experts on ostrich anatomy in the house? Do they have crops?)
That went further than I expected.
Wow! Loved the thoroughness of Gravelinspector-Aidan’s reply! I didn’t even consider “…the limbs would keep them in their streamlined “swimming” posture, keeping the digital claws pretty much out of play.”
I identify with the cartoon frog’s strategy of strangling the heron trying to eat him. To me, the thought of being swallowed whole is far worse than being bitten in half and dying quickly.
The cat is investigating a Leaf-footed bug, which is a plant sucking Hemipteran. They are harmless, but the will defend themselves by emitting a strong aromatic odor.
Next time i see a skunk, I shall insult it by calling it an insect-mimic.
I wonder, slightly, why homesick Americans haven’t released enough skunks into the British (/ European) countryside to establish invasive colonies of skunk. I infer the environments are sufficiently dissimilar that it doesn’t work, for the skunk.
There is a population of skunks in the UK. My daughter just photographed a brown skunk visiting the vets. It is legal to have as a pet but illegal to remove the scent (if that’s what it is) gland.
Hadn’t heard of that. Well, horses for courses. What’s their econiche in their home territory? Small predator, so they’d have to compete with foxes, badgers, stoats/ weasels, invasive mink, and (in/ around towns) cats. So they’d struggle to establish a breeding population.
The leaf-footed bug is in the family Coreidae (Hemiptera). You often can see the openings to the scent glands on the sides of the thorax, they usually look like a little pair of lips above the middle legs or between the middle and hind legs.
Can anyone explain why holding up an arms shipment to Ukraine is an impeachable offense, but holding up an arms shipment to Israel is perfectly fine?
In the case of Ukraine, we were told that once Congress appropriates the money, the president can’t hold it up.
That again. That is a case of summarizing an accusation of wrong-doing without actually mentioning the wrong-doing.
It’s great to see Colin Wright continuing to push back on the pseudoscience of gender ideology. Prior to the roll-out of transgenderism, I had never heard the charge that acknowledging sex as a binary trait was “biological essentialism.” Yet, I keep seeing it in op-eds and professional society statements (and now Yale lecture slides). But if anyone is guilty of “essentialism” it is clearly the gender activists who claim sex is what someone thinks they are, not what type of gametes their bodies evolved to produce. It’s like the claim that immaterial “souls” exist somewhere in the universe and then become incorporated into human brains at conception or somewhere along the developmental pathway. In addition to being incoherent, gender ideologues claim gender (or sex, as it is often muddy what they mean) is an essence of a person that must exist prior to the person. It is an unfalsifiable and overly complicated claim, and of course, one that apparently applies only to humans and none of the other animals on the planet.
It did go far, but it was a great trip. A stream of consciousness on something I’ve wondered but never pondered; how do birds survive these kinds of things? Thanks for the interesting comment.
oops – meant for GravelInspector’s comment up there ^
Thanks.
You could almost hear my braincell chittering away in the background going “Remember this? This is relevant!” Well, I could hear it.
+1
President Biden has punctuated his “ironclad” support for Israel by limiting the weapons it needs to eliminate Hamas. He is trying to have it both ways—claiming to support Israel while at the same time kneecapping the “Zionist entity.” You’d think that there were an election coming up, wouldn’t you?
Since the fastest way to improve the civilian plight in Gaza is to defeat Hamas as a fighting force—enabling aid to flow unimpeded—Biden’s meddling has arguably made the situation worse.
And speaking of the upcoming election, Biden has lost my confidence and Trump never had it. There will be other options, Kennedy for instance (not for me), but I wish there were yet another option available on the ballot: None of the Above. The risk, of course is that None of the Above might win!
That bike escalator looks dangerous. If you can’t ride up a hill, get off the bike and walk up it. Or get a car.
Agreed! I’m all in on bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure, but that escalator doesn’t look like a good idea.
Riding my new bicycle one day, I was a young pre-teen when my father allowed me to hold onto the fin of his 1957 Dodge sedan for several blocks in Queens, New York City. (So, no, it wasn’t somewhere in a rural countryside.) He wasn’t going fast, but it could have been my last (hitch). If a father did that today, he’d probably be cited for child endangerment. Fond memory, nevertheless. I’d definitely try that bicycle escalator.
The Golden Spike ceremony may have been the first news story to be transmitted live. A reporter was on the scene describing what was happening by telegraph. The story was relayed to telegraph stations across the country where crowds gathered to hear the news. Later on those people would say that they “heard” the spike being driven.
What the heck do they mean with “aspects of the physical material world that cannot coevolve”? Do they mean the physical enviroment can’t cope with a gene mutation?
That people suffer from sickle cell anemia because the enviroment can’t keep up?
Is there is a way in which that is true, some deepity perhaps (we all miss you, mr. Dennett)?
Meh!
Nothing like that! They’re not trying to do science, they (I mean the plural) already told us what it is:
It’s performance all the way down!! 😖
https://imgur.com/oXK1DWr
“Performativity Biology”? Most of this appears more suited to a social philosophy class, where they can wallow in their Judith Butler-isms to their hearts’ content, than a science class, where they should, um, do science.
Oh, but I’m forgetting, “science” is whatever they want it to be. Just another social construct to be reshaped at will.
The photo of spray-painted graffiti on the ground — “F*ck Hamas” — reminds me of two photos I took of graffiti in France following the Islamist attack on the office staff & cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo — one saying (in French) “I am Charlie,” the other one picturing a clenched pencil held in a fist of defiance.
https://x.com/Jon_Alexandr/status/1658959700371857409
The House of Commons resolution is not binding on the Canadian Government. For the Revolutionary Guards to actually be legally designated a terrorist organization, the Prime Minister would merely have to convince his Cabinet toadies to issue an Order-in-Council adding the Guards to the list of organizations proscribed under the Criminal Code. Parliament doesn’t have to pass any new legislation. He has been stonewalling doing this for reasons that don’t make a lot of sense except that he doesn’t want to. Worried about Islamophobia I suppose.