Tuesday: Hili dialogue

June 4, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the Cruelest Day, Tuesday, June 4, 2024, and it’s National Cheese Day. I’ll take either a well-aged Comté (3 years or so) or a very runny Saint-Marcellin, the world’s two finest cheeses.  I remember going into a humble bouchon in Lyon and getting, before dessert, a bowl of Saint-Marcellin, disks,= so runny that it was like a bowl of pudding mixed with skins. It was terrific. (If you can go to Lyon, do: it’s a beautiful city and one of the world’s best eating venues.)

Here’s a small disk of Saint-Marcellin:

Thesupermat, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also Hug Your Cat Day, National Cognac Day, National Cheese Day, International Day of Innocent Children Victims of Aggression, and Tiananmen Square Protests of 1989 Memorial Day. 

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 4 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*As the election draws closer, Biden’s starting to realize that no, Americans don’t want open borders, even though he seems to have come close to creating them. Therefore, he’s going to do something about immigration at this late date.

President Biden is expected to sign an executive order on Tuesday allowing him to temporarily seal the U.S. border with Mexico to migrants when crossings surge, a move that would suspend longtime protections for asylum seekers in the United States.

Mr. Biden’s senior aides have briefed members of Congress in recent days on the forthcoming action and told them to expect the president to sign the order alongside mayors from South Texas, according to several people familiar with the plans.

“I’ve been briefed on the pending executive order,” said Representative Henry Cuellar, Democrat of Texas who previously criticized Mr. Biden for not bolstering enforcement at the border earlier in his presidency. “I certainly support it because I’ve been advocating for these measures for years. While the order is yet to be released, I am supportive of the details provided to me thus far.”

The order would represent the single most restrictive border policy instituted by Mr. Biden, or any modern Democrat, and echoes a 2018 effort by President Donald J. Trump to block migration that was assailed by Democrats and blocked by federal courts.

Although the executive action is almost certain to face legal challenges, Mr. Biden is under intense political pressure to address illegal migration, a top concern of voters ahead of the presidential election this year.

The decision shows how the politics of immigration have tilted sharply to the right over the course of Mr. Biden’s presidency. Polls suggest growing support, even inside the president’s party, for border measures that once Democrats denounced and Mr. Trump championed.

The order would allow border officials to prevent migrants from claiming asylum and rapidly turn them away once border crossings exceed a certain threshold. Government officials earlier this year discussed allowing Mr. Biden to shut down the border if there were an average of 5,000 border crossings in a week, or 8,500 in a single day, but those involved in the negotiations cautioned that the threshold was not finalized and could change. White House officials have been focused on a trigger that would empower Mr. Biden to shut down the border.

Well, we’ll see what that trigger is. But wasn’t this Kamala Harris’s job? Yes it was, but Biden is changing his policy, almost from day to day, to get reelected. Not only on immigration, but on Israel. He is of course better than Donald “I’m a felon” Trump, but I’m not happy about Biden’s representing the Democratic Party. Is this the best we can do?

*Not only is Mexico poised to seat its first woman president, but the projected winner, Claudia Sheinbaum, is both Jewish and was a practicing scientist. Surely this is Mexico’s first Jewish president (albeit a secular Jew), and I’m not sure whether’s she’s the first trained scientist to take the reins:

From Wikipedia:

Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo was born to a secular Jewish family in Mexico City. Her paternal Ashkenazi grandparents emigrated from Lithuania to Mexico City in the 1920s, while her maternal Sephardic grandparents emigrated there from Sofia, Bulgaria, in the early 1940s to escape the Holocaust. She celebrated all the Jewish holidays at her grandparents’ homes.

A scientist by profession, Sheinbaum received her Ph.D. in energy engineering from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). As an academic, she has authored over 100 articles and two books on energy, the environment, and sustainable development. Sheinbaum contributed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and in 2018 she was listed as one of BBC’s 100 Women.

A secular Jewish Ashkenazi scientist. Perhaps we’re related! At any rate, from the AP:

Claudia Sheinbaum seems poised to cement her historic victory as Mexico’s first female president with a supermajority in congress that would let her party pass legislation and budgets unopposed – and perhaps even change the constitution without need for compromise

Sheinbaum, a 61-year-old climate scientist and former mayor of Mexico City, won the presidency with 59.5% of the vote, according to a rapid sample count by Mexico’s electoral authority.

During the campaign, Sheinbaum portrayed herself as a continuity candidate, vowing to keep the policies of her populist predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known popularly as Amlo, who founded the Morena party in 2014 and forged a bond with voters disenchanted with democracy.

López Obrador was constitutionally unable to run again, but chose Sheinbaum as his successor – and she appears to have won 5m votes more than he did six years ago.

“In the 200 years of the republic, I will become the first woman president of Mexico,” Sheinbaum told supporters in a victory speech late on Sunday, to loud cheers of “presidenta, presidenta” – the feminine form of the country’s top political post.

Thanks in part to a constitutional amendment that set the goal of gender parity in all races for elected office and in appointments for top jobs in government, women now hold half the seats in Mexico’s congress and almost half the jobs in cabinet and one-third of the governorships.

What I don”t get is why the press isn’t playing up the Jewish part rather than the woman part. After all, Jews are far rarer in Mexico than are women. And secular Jews count as Jews, too. Just ask Hamas, or remember the old Jewish joke, “What do you call a Jew who doesn’t believe in God?”  Answer: “A Jew.”

*It’s still not clear what “deal” is being brokered between Israel and Hamas. The U.S. says the deal it presented to Hamas was the deal suggested by Israel, while Israel says it’s not exactly true. Is political posturing obscuring exactly what was suggested? How do I know? From the WSJ:

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu showed cautious support for an initiative by President Biden to end the war in Gaza, with the Israeli leader saying on Monday that he is open to a temporary cease-fire to release hostages but wants a free hand to resume fighting Hamas.

Netanyahu’s position raises questions about whether an agreement can be reached. Hamas has said the two sides must agree to end the fighting now and is pushing for written guarantees that Israel won’t restart after an initial pause.

The Israeli leader told lawmakers in private remarks at the Israeli parliament that the wording in Israel’s current proposal for a temporary cease-fire to free hostages allows it to renew hostilities should later-stage talks about a permanent truce fail to progress, according to an Israeli official.

Netanyahu told the lawmakers that during later negotiations for a permanent cease-fire he would insist on freeing all the hostages and destroying the military and governance capabilities of Hamas, according to the official. Those demands are likely to be nonstarters for Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization.

“The proposal allows Israel to preserve the right to renew fighting at any time Israel senses that the negotiations are futile,” the Israeli official said.

Biden appealed publicly to both sides on Friday to reach an agreement, outlining a path to ending the war that he described as an Israeli proposal, which U.S. officials said was also close to Hamas’s demands.

All the hostages, not just part of them, should be freed now (Israel just announced that four more hostages were dead, probably killed together at Khan Younis), and no Palestinian terrorists should be freed from Israeli prisons. Surrender should basically be unconditional, or Israel can continue pursuing Hamas. Hamas members should be lucky to escape with their lives, and it angers me that they want terrorists released and won’t let go of all the hostages—or even tell negotiators how many hostages are left alive.

*Everyone gave me a bunch of guff when I said that it’s possible (perhaps even likely) that the Covid virus came from a lab. But this op-ed by in the NYT by Aliona Chan from the Broad Institute (archived here) makes the case—yes, it’s circumstantial—that a lab origin has a substantial probability. (h/t Michael).

Bolding from the NYT:

Although how the pandemic started has been hotly debated, a growing volume of evidence — gleaned from public records released under the Freedom of Information Act, digital sleuthing through online databases, scientific papers analyzing the virus and its spread, and leaks from within the U.S. government — suggests that the pandemic most likely occurred because a virus escaped from a research lab in Wuhan, China. If so, it would be the most costly accident in the history of science.

  • The SARS-like virus that caused the pandemic emerged in Wuhan, the city where the world’s foremost research lab for SARS-like viruses is located.
  • At the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a team of scientists had been hunting for SARS-like viruses for over a decade, led by Shi Zhengli.
  • Their research showed that the viruses most similar to SARS‑CoV‑2, the virus that caused the pandemic, circulate in bats that live roughly 1,000 miles away from Wuhan. Scientists from Dr. Shi’s team traveled repeatedly to Yunnan province to collect these viruses and had expanded their search to Southeast Asia. Bats in other parts of China have not been found to carry viruses that are as closely related to SARS-CoV-2.
  • Even at hot spots where these viruses exist naturally near the cave bats of southwestern China and Southeast Asia, the scientists argued, as recently as 2019, that bat coronavirus spillover into humans is rare.
  • When the Covid-19 outbreak was detected, Dr. Shi initially wondered if the novel coronavirus had come from her laboratory, saying she had never expected such an outbreak to occur in Wuhan.
  • The SARS‑CoV‑2 virus is exceptionally contagious and can jump from species to species like wildfire. Yet it left no known trace of infection at its source or anywhere along what would have been a thousand-mile journey before emerging in Wuhan. The year before the outbreak, the Wuhan institute, working with U.S. partners, had proposed creating viruses with SARS-CoV-2’s defining feature.
  • Dr. Shi’s group was fascinated by how coronaviruses jump from species to species. To find viruses, they took samples from bats and other animals, as well as from sick people living near animals carrying these viruses or associated with the wildlife trade. Much of this work was conducted in partnership with the EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based scientific organization that, since 2002, has been awarded over $80 million in federal funding to research the risks of emerging infectious diseases.
  •  The laboratory pursued risky research that resulted in viruses becoming more infectious: Coronaviruses were grown from samples from infected animals and genetically reconstructed and recombined to create new viruses unknown in nature. These new viruses were passed through cells from bats, pigs, primates and humans and were used to infect civets and humanized mice (mice modified with human genes). In essence, this process forced these viruses to adapt to new host species, and the viruses with mutations that allowed them to thrive emerged as victors.

It goes on (it’s a long and interactive article), but have a read if you think the changes of a lab leak are near zero. Then you can resume excoriating me.

*Bye-bye First Amendment!  School vouchers, which you and I have to pay for and which subsidize religious schools, are proliferating. I don’t even know why this is legal.

Billions in taxpayer dollars are being used to pay tuition at religious schools throughout the country, as state voucher programs expand dramatically and the line separating public education and religion fades.

School vouchers can be used at almost any private school, but the vast majority of the money is being directed to religious schools, according to a Washington Post examination of the nation’s largest voucher programs.

Vouchers, government money that covers education costs for families outside the public schools, vary by state but offer up to $16,000 per student per year, and in many cases fully cover the cost of tuition at private schools. In some schools, a large share of the student body is benefiting from a voucher, meaning a significant portion of the school’s funding is coming directly from the government.

In just five states with expansive programs, more than 700,000 students benefited from vouchers this school year. (Those same states had a total of about 935,000 private school students in 2021, the most recent year for which data are available.) An additional 200,000 were subsidized in the rest of the country, according to tracking by EdChoice, a voucher advocacy group. That suggests a substantial share of about 4.7 million students attending private school nationwide are benefiting from vouchers — a number that is expected to grow.

The programs, popular with conservatives, are rapidly growing in GOP-run states, with a total of 28 states plus D.C. operating some sort of voucher system. Eight states created or expanded voucher programs last year, and this year, Alabama, Georgia and Missouri have approved or expanded voucher-type programs. Some recently enacted plans are just starting to take effect or will be phased in over the next few years. Here’s a map in the paper (source is EdChoice) showing states in blue with school voucher programs (light blue are smaller programs, dark blue are near-universal programs):

Where’s the FFRF when we need them? Seriously, though, this is surely a violation of the Establishment Clause, and yet you know the Supreme Court would uphold it, especially because most of the religious schools are Catholic ones.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s checking the environment:

A: Where have you been for so many hours?
Hili: I was checking the level of water in the river.
In Polish:
Ja: Gdzie ty byłaś przez tyle godzin?
Hili: Sprawdzałam poziom wody na rzece.

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

From The Cat House on the Kings: Please donate to this cat rescue organization.

From The Dodo Pet:

From Strange, Silly, or Stupid Signs:

Reposted by Masih; just a cartoon today:

From Barry, yet another hawk that goes without food (and it’s confused):

From Luana: A seemingly innocuous but actually invidious college policy:

From my feed; remember that the National Zoo is soon going to get two pandas (on loan):

From Malcolm; thank goodness for glass!

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one I retweeted:

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. First, a white porcupine (looks leucistic rather than albino):

Yep, watch the whole thing.

63 thoughts on “Tuesday: Hili dialogue”

  1. Many people feel that public education, since the woke capture, is like handing your children over to a perverted uncle. IOW are people willing to make the cognitive effort to suppress their evolved, instinctive revulsion to homosexuality for the sake of 3-5% of the population? Intellectually and politically to fit in and go along they’ll parrot “not that there’s anything wrong with that”, meanwhile the instinct is signaling something else, another govt policy that divides people against themselves I should say, like living in authoritarian regimes where you do what you are told what to think whether you like it or not. In the UK police will actually knock you up to “check on your thinking” should you post something untoward.

    1. IOW are people willing to make the cognitive effort to suppress their evolved, instinctive revulsion to homosexuality for the sake of 3-5% of the population?

      What?

      I’d be interested to see what evidence you have that humans in general have an evolved revulsion to homosexuality.

      And, of course, just because something is evolved doesn’t make it morally right, or the opposite morally wrong.

    2. evolved, instinctive revulsion to homosexuality

      Citation needed.
      Projection suspected.

    3. Firstly, I am not sure homosexuality is really an issue. “Queerness” is, but that is only tangentially related to homosexuality.

      I personally see people’s desire to move their kids to better schools as a fairly civilized reaction to what is happening in the public schools. People want their kids to receive a proper education, not turned into Marxist political units or forced to view inappropriate sexual material.

      Even if a realistic plan were devised to overhaul the public schools so that they teach 3rd graders reading and math instead of discussing revolution and anal sex, it would take ages to implement. Vouchers seem like a reasonable short-term solution, even if the kids end up in a school affiliated with a church or synagogue.

      1. Home schooling at parental expense is always an option (or, legally defensible). That is veto power of a parent on what a parent determines to be inappropriate for *their* *own* child.

        Vouchers are just an entitlement bribe for a self-described class of “good” people looking for a government handout.

        Exactly how do parents demanding a government handout teach children to not expect government entitlements?

        Moreover, in so far as children tend to learn from example, how does an educator receiving a salary teach anything “by example” other than how to be an employee? I do not see any instructors at any academic level purposefully diminshing the value of their labor to teach students the “correct” economic values.

  2. My only response to Chan’s op-ed/book promotion is to ask readers to read Paul Offit’s short June 3 substack “Beyond the Noise” and then invest the time (heavily I’m afraid but this has turned into a weighty issue) in the detailed 2hr45min podcast, “Decoding the Gurus” from March of 2023, a few weeks after Chan appeared on Sam Harris’ podcast. The Gurus have a panel of three senior scientists (Kristian Andersen, Michael Worobey, and Eddie Holmes) and engage in a broad and deep science discussion of what was known at that time. It took me three bites to get through the entire podcast but afterwards felt it was the best investment of that time I could have made yesterday. If you want to go straight to the Decoding the Gurus, it is at https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/interview-with-worobey-andersen-holmes-the-lab-leak

    1. Definitely listen to the Decoding the Gurus episode. It is excellent. The three scientists were directly involved in research and in one case investigated the market. The two hosts are have researched anti-vax sentiment and other conspiracy theories. I think there had just been a book by Chan on Matt Ridley, so the podcast is partly in response to the author of the new op-ed.

  3. Occam’s razor has lots of shaving to do.
    There seems very strong circumstantial evidence for the ‘inadvertent lab leak’ hypothesis.
    Wuhan is a long way away from the known areas in southern China/SE Asia that had the closest documented strains to what became covid 19.

    1. The Decoding the Gurus podcast mentioned above foes into this in detail. In short, a virus needs a dense population to jump to humans and start spreading, so it will almost always start in a large city.

      1. [edited to delete my redundant presentation of Chan’s arguments, which I find ~persuasive]

        Jon Stewart said it best: “Maybe it was the fucking chocolate factory.”

      2. Any chance of finding a transcript of that Decoding the Gurus podcast anywhere? I very much prefer reading to listening to podcasts.

    1. Yes-Scott’s piece is excellent-it really goes through the debate. There is nothing new in Chan’s arguments-she has made them all before. None of them are to be dismissed. There are a lot of coincidences that make one uneasy about the zoonotic hypothesis, and no smoking gun piece of evidence has refuted the lab leak hypothesis. But this is not scientific argumentation-it is all circumstantial evidence and when you go through all of it very carefully there are generally good reasons not to take them as seriously as many do, alongside of some (albeit not definitive) reasons to believe it was a naturally occurring event within the Wuhan market. We probably will never know but I most certainly wouldn’t say a lab leak is “probable.”

  5. The press is not playing up the Jewish part (Mexico’s first Jewish president) for the same reason Jews are not playing up the Jewish part. There is nothing to play up. Is Sheinbaum ‘good for the Jews?’ Au contraire. She never denounced October 7th nor Hamas. She is hostile to Israel and does not represent Jewish interests. The Mexican Jewish community is wary of her and rightfully so. Sheinbaum is Mexico’s Bernie Sanders, and like Sanders, aligned with Judaism as eggs Benedict.

    1. Yes, she’s a disaster and an extension of Amlo’s horrible rule. That she is a woman or Jewish is secondary to the fact she is a Marxist.
      David Frum in the Atlantic has followed Mx politics closely.

      D.A.
      NYC

      1. I’ve heard the same thing. She’s just an extension of AMLO, who is term-limited out.

  6. Jerry and friends, I’d like us to reflect on what “open border” means in light of these articles. It seems to me that the USA doesn’t have an open border with Mexico. We have law enforcement constantly patrolling the border and doing their duty in making arrests or facilitating the asylum process. I submit that harping on the “open border” is a right-wing, fear-mongering tactic.
    https://www.cbsnews.com/news/immigration-us-mexico-border-crossings-mayorkas-may-2024/

    https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/national-media-release/cbp-releases-april-2024-monthly-update

    1. It can be contested that the proper duty of a state is to “facilitate” the asylum process, especially when there is evidence from volume alone that it is being gamed by migrants who know they don’t have the chops to be accepted as invited economic immigrants, or who don’t want to bother waiting in line for a Green Card. Because asylum claims are legalistic, not administrative, everyone knows they take many years to adjudicate. Swamping the process ensures that even a person with no valid claim will be able to stay in the country for a long time, having children who will be born citizens, and, odds are, never be deported. Leftists even want to let them vote. For practical purposes, “facilitating” this process just is an open border even if 720,000 unlucky people did get removed last year.

      Asylum is for people fleeing state persecution. There is no reason why anyone lawfully in Mexico needs to make an asylum claim at the U.S. border, or be given an appointment to do so. Mexico can harbour people from state persecution by Guatemala or Venezuela or China just as easily as the United States can. Its own asylum adjudication process can accept or reject asylum claims as easily. Asylum shopping is not permitted under international law: you must make your asylum claim in the first safe country you reach. (That’s why Canada doesn’t accept asylum claimants at our border with you. We turn them back into the U.S. and let you deal with them.). The migrants are coming to the United States because the gettin’ is better there for people without skills or education than it is in Mexico. Some of these migrants might well make good citizens but you don’t know that because the asylum process tests for persecution and, it seems according the Border Patrol, need for “relief”, not usefulness. “I’m here. Feed me.”

      I don’t think it is helpful to dump concern about “open borders” as a right-wing trope, not when “Open Borders!” is a Left-wing rallying cry.

      1. Yes again Leslie. Our asylum laws were built for the immediate post war era and are entirely not fit for purpose anymore.

        D.A.
        NYC
        (legal immigrant)

    2. If they automatically let in anyone who utters the magic phrase “I claim asylum” (where the process effectively means that they are then in permanently), then, yes, it effectively is an open border.

        1. Under Biden, illegal arrivals have averaged over 2 million a year, and deportations have averaged under 100,000 a year.

          In practice, an “asylum seeker” has to get themselves arrested for a fairly serious crime to stand a good chance of actually being deported.

          2. Not sure what your source is for that second number, Coel, but it is off by an order of magnitude. The average removed under the Biden administration is over 1.25 million per year.

  7. 1. “As an academic, she has authored over 100 articles and two books on energy, the environment, and sustainable development.”

    That explains it – the sustainability of the United Nations global occult theosophical regime. See Robert Muller’s New Genesis – Shaping A Global Spirituality (1982) book, or 2000 Ideas For A Better World – available at the UN website. The sacred ESG and SDG objects were presaged in Muller’s gnostic gospels, which include “spiritual evolution” and other insane dialectical blends of science and theosophy.

    2. Every public school in the United States follows the New Age occult doctrine of Social Emotional Learning (derived from Alice A. Bailey’s Education In The New Age (1954) and The Fetzer Institute). SEL is in part rules for a totalizing behavioral control practiced on young children, but the god in SEL is the same as in communism : man creating society creating man. It is then obvious then how Paulo Freire’s Marxist thought reform program for communism works inside SEL.

    But the point is : public schools have been religious since before ~1994, it’s just that there isn’t a conventional god with a beard wearing a toga, it’s a New Age theosophical “god”.

    What is good about vouchers is parents can find a place where their children can read, write, and think independently, without state control of that liberty – and that place might be religious but that’s the parents’ problem, not the state’s.

  8. On the pending Executive Order dealing with the border, the devil, as always, will be in the details. First of all, is it closing the border or is it only the power to close the border if there is “a surge”? Given the open door policy of the Biden Administration, one has to ask what they would consider a surge that would even trigger action. If it is just saying that we have the power to do it when we think we need to, is just wall-paper. The article quoted is also right to point out that Biden has floated quotes for border crossers of 5,000 and 8,500 people per day. This works out to between 1.8 million and 3.1 million a year. Hardly turning off the tap. Unless Biden enacts a policy to deal with the millions who’ve already entered the US under his watch, I don’t think anything he does will help him at the polls.

  9. With regard to school vouchers, there has always been an issue that people who wanted to send their children to religious schools were both taxed to support public schools and had to pay tuition to religious schools. (My experience of Catholic schools in the last couple decades is that many kids who go aren’t Catholic, and the schools themselves hardly are either.) Vouchers are, in effect, giving people their tax dollars to spend on schooling. I don’t have an issue, as an atheist, if they want to spend them to send their kids to religious schools. Hell, if I still had school-age children, I’d be home schooling them.

    1. The problem with vouchers where I live (Arkansas) is that publicly funded education must compete against schools that are not required to meet the same education standards. I happen to live in one of the largest school districts in the state, and it has to deal with many non English speaking students and many of those are from poor families. So the public schools are also saddled with that.

    2. I don’t have children at all, and yet my taxes help pay for public education.That’s fine with me because good, free, compulsory education benefits us all. I am however not happy about my tax dollars supporting private schools. If parents want to shell out for the tuition, let ’em, but I don’t.

      1. I agree. I don’t want to support private schools, especially not religious ones
        (regardless as to whether or not they are “hardly” Catholic these days). Everyone is supposed to support public schooling, so saying that the vouchers are just “giving people their tax dollars” back means that those people are exempted from supporting the public system. But not only are those parents are receiving their own tax dollars “back”, they’re also receiving mine. Anyone who wants to send their children to private school should pay for it directly themselves.

        1. An interesting alternative with a long positive history is *public* religious schools. Several provinces in Canada legislated this approach a long time ago, with public funds (from property taxes) directed towards both systems. I grew up in a small city with parallel Catholic and non-demoninational school systems. Kids could attend either system, and I knew some who switched between them. Non-Catholics could attend the Catholic schools but had to agree to participate in catechism etc. At my schools the nuns had almost all given way to non-religious teachers (including one of my parents) but there were still a few priests around. Overall the Catholic schools had a slightly better reputation for quality of instruction and of school environment, similar to the reputation for French immersion schools in the public system where my kids went. It ~worked, but maybe wouldn’t be feasible for other places and times.

          1. Ahahahahaha religious schools and their “non-demoninational” counterparts how did that get past the autocorrect in my browser?

        2. That’s an interesting argument, Steven E. It’s so sensible and accurate and yet I don’t recall ever hearing anyone phrase the push against vouchers quite that way. We’re giving them their dollars back but they’re still accepting yours (and others’). Hmm…

  10. President Biden has created so much confusion about the war in Gaza that we’ll simply have to wait until it happens to find out what’s going on. I hope that Israel still exists when it’s all over. Maybe it’s already gone. No one knows.

    Nice work, Mr. President.

    1. Registration for the annual Walk for Israel in Toronto this Sunday is up 50% this year, Norman, partly swelled by first-timers like us I suppose. So far no sign it is going to be canceled because its purpose no longer exists, but I will keep you posted if anything changes. Be of good cheer.

    2. “I hope that Israel still exists when it’s all over”

      The Oct. 7 was the worst Hamas could do, and even that happened because the Israeli security forces were caught napping. Since then tens of thousands of people have died, but they weren’t Israelis.

      1. “Since then tens of thousands of people have died, but they weren’t Israelis.” Yes, and that is good and just, as most of them were Hamas. Still more to go, though.

          1. I suspect it is. Hamas lies about everything including, especially, the numbers killed and who it is who has been killed. That means my estimate is as good as anyone else’s and I suspect I am right.

            But in the end, all the deaths attributed to Israel in this war can be laid at Hamas’ feet. Almost every man, woman, child and terrorist in Gaza dead today would be alive if Hamas hadn’t committed the atrocities of Oct. 7th.

    3. Norman, my take, the Israelis aren’t listening to your President, they’re just getting on with it as they see fit. Biden may be confused but the Israelis are not.
      World public opinion, pro Palestinian sentiment is nothing to the centuries of persecution of the Jew (not news to you), except in this age they can fight back and shown their resilience to such attacks, by defence and repelling them!
      Ok, war is uncertain but hell they have no choice with Hamas.
      Up untill now Ukraine though for 3 yrs has been trying to hold back a thug nation and it’s lackies with their hands tired behind their back. Their foe is armed to the teeth, manpower to waste, and on a war budget (it seems) to me, if anything Ukraine should have a beef with Biden (the west) and his/their confusion.

  11. I think that white porcupines may have a beneficial effect on their survival where I live. Coming home from work one night I came close to hitting with my car three different porcupines. They are very hard to see at night.

  12. Mexican elected president is the regression to an authoritarian regime, the one we had for 70 years until the year 2000 when we finally had a change of party in power. These guys want all the power, no checks and balances. It is a truly tragic result.

    1. Thanks in part to a constitutional amendment that set the goal of gender parity…

      What exactly was the amendment? Please note that I’m not saying that it is a good or bad thing; I just want to know more.

      1. THERE WAS AN AMMENDMENT SO THAT POLITICAL PARTIES HAD TO GIVE 50-50% GENDER PARITY TO ALL CANDIDACIES. sorry for the caps.

    2. Jorge, I replied to your comment but fouled something up and it posted as a “new comment” #18. I’m interested in your opinion. It makes little sense down there by itself…

  13. If SARS-CoV-2 was a lab escape, why did it show up at the wet market some (as I understand it) 7km away, where there are all sorts of animals caught in the wild from all over the place and kept in deplorable, tight conditions, and not at the lab?

    Also, as I understand it, the lab was built there because it was a hot spot of emergent viruses, similar to the reason that the CDC is in Atlanta, because at one time Yellow Fever was endemic there.

    And I think the closest relative that has been found to-date is still far to dissimilar – 96%, I believe – to represent the direct ancestor.

    (Source, Vincent Racaniello’s This Week in Virology, which hasn’t taken up this issue in some time – I’d guess at least six mos.)

  14. When my kids were little, we went to a small, intimate zoo near Barrie, Ontario. They had some young white lions on display, and it was amusing to see that they were hunting my kids. They literally hid behind some small trees as my kids walked along the fence, then bounded after them. My kids were oblivious, but it was interesting to see the behaviour.

    1. There’s a difference between a virus that escaped from a lab and a virus that was engineered in a lab. The genome of COVID has been sequenced and it is highly unlikely that it was engineered.

      1. Here is an email from Anthony Fauci, discussing a meeting with several top virologists:

        The call with Jeremy Farrar (Wellcome Trust) went very well. Francis Collins joined and there were several highly credible scientists (including and in addition to the two that I spoke with last night) on the call with expertise in evolutionary biology…they were concerned about the fact that upon viewing the sequences of several isolates of nCoV, there were mutations in the virus that would be most unusual to have evolved naturally in the bats and there was a suspicion that this mutation was intentionally inserted. The suspicion was heightened by the fact that scientists in Wuhan University are known to have been working on gain-of-function experiments to determine the molecular mechanisms associated with bat viruses adapting to human infection, and the outbreak originated in Wuhan.

        https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23879066-wenstrup-letter-to-becerra

        1. My understanding is that indeed it is unusual because of a general thing-the furin cleavage site. However the way the furin cleavage site appears in Sars-COV2 does not look like an engineered cleavage site and more looks like a natural mutation. It has a clunky mutation that is not of the kind you would “engineer” if you are trying to simply alter function and appears more like the clunky mutations that occur naturally.

  16. I’ll only add a small bit to the “natural origins” vs “lab leak” debate. I have found that those who have either worked within highly-sensitive government programs or have done extensive research in formerly-classified archives seem far less likely to write off “lab leak” as conspiracy. I am not talking about highly-classified technical programs such as those about our nuclear command and control systems or the latest in flight or satellite technology. I am speaking of programs that are more intimately intertwined with the political: information operations, various intelligence programs, bioweapons defense and response, special operations actions, any sensitive program involving allied nations and a potential diplomatic tempest, etc. It is the political element involved, not the classification, that makes dissimulation more likely.

    On a related manner. One thing that astounded me about the pandemic was how quickly many intelligent people rallied in defense of—I would say in an almost-uncritical deference to—government narratives across an array of pandemic-related assertions and happenings. (Our preexisting political polarization intensified this—on both poles.) Having done so, few are interested in retracing their steps and reanalyzing the evidence, let alone conducting new research and considering new evidence that might disconfirm previous notions. Where is the independent Covid Commission to assess our strengths and weaknesses, our successes and failures? That we haven’t had one is both telling and concerning.

  17. When they report thousands of innocent deaths mostly children, how many of these children were 14 year old boys with rifles and 17 year old boys with guns?

  18. I heard this very same thing said yesterday on a local radio show here in Tucson (Bill Buckmaster Show) by the host’s regular contributor referred to as a “specialist on all things Mexican” (Keith Rosenblum). He was very disappointed in the results and was of the opinion that the cartels will freely be able to continue running large parts of the country with no restrictions whatsoever. Rosenblum stated that although the president elect is much more sophisticated intellectually (highly educated as Jerry pointed out) and that she will likely be much easier/more pleasant for US politicians/diplomats to interact with, her presidency will just be a continuation of that of Obrador. (But with greater support in the lower offices)

    1. My comment #18 is supposed to tag off of Jorge Juarez #12 above. Sorry for this.

    2. The new president is the political protegee of the old one. The latter (Lopez Obrador) tried during his whole term to overthrow the powers that kept him in check (mainly the Supreme Court and what we call “autonomous organisms”, which are de-centralized groups that have special powers and were created after decades of political struggle). He couldn’t do it completely because he lacked enough senators and representatives to do changes to the Constitution, and any attempts to make a decree (bypassing the houses) were challenged as inconstitutional in the Supreme Court.
      .
      So now, and against most predictions (some say even Lopez Obrador and his cronies were surprised), they won everything. Most of the governors, and most of the two houses, and the presidency. So now the heir of this regime has more power than any president since the old regime that was in power for 70 years for most of the 20th century. They can do whatever they want.
      .
      My prediction is that they will succeed eventually in changing everything to something similar than that old regime. Decades of democratic progress will be destroyed. No checks nor balances, and even free elections are in danger. This will be worse when one of the Supreme Court judges retires, and Sheinbaum gets another of her cronies in there (they already con 3). One more and any attempt to block decrees will be futile.
      .
      On the other hand, I don’t know if she will behave exactly like Lopez. The latter was more akin to the likes of Hugo Chavez (a populist inept president that wants to erase any opposition). Sheinbaum is more cultured, but she has declared her wish to erase those autonomous organisms. And most people think she will follow the will of Lopez (though I think that she may ignore him later, as now she has more power than he ever did… unless he has some dirty stuff to blackmail her). Another thing that indicates she may act like her predecessor is her background as student activist. The likes of her tend to be authoritarian left. My hope is that Lopez dies soon from old age and his poor heart health, so that she can distance from his will faster.
      .
      As for the cartels, I’m not sure what will happen. It seems that she wanted to do something different than Lopez to keep violence in check. But whatever she does, she will continue to rely on the military to fight organized crime (Lopez gave them a lot of power, but strangely, also forbade them from fighting crime too much. He used them more to capture immigrants at Trump’s request. ALso, the cartels dominate so much of the territory (thanks to Lopez inaction )that it will be very hard to fight them effectively. Who knows what kind of pacts they have already in place.

  19. PCCE wrote “Where’s the FFRF when we need them?”

    FFRF is far too busy defending the rights of the most persecuted, oppressed minority on our planet — men cosplaying as women and reading inappropriate sexual material to little kids.

    Sorry, but FFRF is no longer a good organization.

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