Thursday: Hili dialogue

June 6, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Thursday, June 6, 2024, and National Applesauce Cake Day, which is better than no cake at all. Here’s one, topped with cinnamon and sugar, from Wikipedia:

By John Fladd from New Boston, NH, United States – Week 5 – Applesauce Cake on a Monkey Plate, CC BY-SA 2.0, Creative Commons

It’s also the anniversary of D-Day, the day that the Allies landed on Normandy in 1944. Moving on, it’s also Atheist Pride Day, National Churro Day (cultural appropriation, but I do love them!), National Moonshine Day, National Yo-Yo Day, National Higher Education Day, National Day of Sweden, marking the end of the Danish-ruled Kalmar Union and the coronation of King Gustav Vasa, National Huntington’s Disease Awareness Day, Queensland Day in Australia, and UN Russian Language Day.

Today’s Google Doodle (click on link) celebrates the life and work of Jeanne Córdova (1948-2016), a lesbian writer and activist whom Wikipedia calls ” a founder of the West Coast LGBT movement.”

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 6 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Oh dear, a WSJ article called “Behind closed doors Biden shows signs of slipping.” I think we’ve all observed that and haven’t extrapolated it over four years into the future.

When President Biden met with congressional leaders in the West Wing in January to negotiate a Ukraine funding deal, he spoke so softly at times that some participants struggled to hear him, according to five people familiar with the meeting. He read from notes to make obvious points, paused for extended periods and sometimes closed his eyes for so long that some in the room wondered whether he had tuned out.

In a February one-on-one chat in the Oval Office with House Speaker Mike Johnson, the president said a recent policy change by his administration that jeopardizes some big energy projects was just a study, according to six people told at the time about what Johnson said had happened. Johnson worried the president’s memory had slipped about the details of his own policy.

Last year, when Biden was negotiating with House Republicans to lift the debt ceiling, his demeanor and command of the details seemed to shift from one day to the next, according to then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and two others familiar with the talks. On some days, he had loose and spontaneous exchanges with Republicans, and on others he mumbled and appeared to rely on notes.

“I used to meet with him when he was vice president. I’d go to his house,” McCarthy said in an interview. “He’s not the same person.”

The 81-year-old Biden is the oldest person to hold the presidency. His age and cognitive fitness have become major issues in his campaign for a second term, both in the minds of voters and in attacks on him by Republicans. The White House and top aides said he remains a sharp and vigorous leader.

Some who have worked with him, however, including Democrats and some who have known him back to his time as vice president, described a president who appears slower now, someone who has both good moments and bad ones.

. . . This article is based on interviews with more than 45 people over several months. The interviews were with Republicans and Democrats who either participated in meetings with Biden or were briefed on them contemporaneously, including administration officials and other Democrats who found no fault in the president’s handling of the meetings. Most of those who said Biden performed poorly were Republicans, but some Democrats said that he showed his age in several of the exchanges.

Read the rest of it (it’s archived here), and remember that Biden will almost surely get worse. And if he dies. . . well, we will have Kamala Harris as America’s first woman President. Though I voted for Hillary Clinton, Harris is not at all the woman President I want for America.  Still, there’s no way I’d ever vote for Trump. He may look physically healthier, but I’m not sure he is, and for sure he’s mentally deranged, with narcissistic personality disorder (my diagnosis).

*In American courts you’re assumed to be innocent until proven guilty, but if the assertions about Hunter Biden in the news are true, and he really lied about drug use on a federal application to buy a gun, then I don’t see how even a great lawyer can get him off. From CBS News:

The jury has been seated in Hunter Biden’s federal gun trial, and in opening statements Tuesday, the prosecution began, “No one is above the law,” and “the law makes no distinction for Hunter Biden,” the son of the president of the United States.

Prosecutor Derek Hines acknowledged Hunter Biden’s addiction, saying, “addiction may not be a choice, but lying to buy a gun is.” Defense attorney Abbe Lowell, meanwhile, argued that drug addicts often have a “deep state of denial about their drug use.”

After roughly 90 minutes of opening statements, prosecutors called their first witness,  FBI special agent Erika Jensen, and played several audio excerpts from Hunter Biden’s memoir, “Beautiful Things,” that detail the times he said he used drugs.

Hunter Biden’s sister, Ashley Biden, and first lady Jill Biden are in the courtroom on Tuesday, as they were on Monday. Hunter Biden’s wife, Melissa Cohen Biden, and Hollywood lawyer Kevin Morris are also in court. While the excerpts were being played, some of the jurors grimaced while Ashley Biden and Jill Biden reacted emotionally, with Melissa Cohen Biden offering support to the first lady and the first lady putting her arm around Ashley Biden’s shoulder. Ashley Biden eventually left the courtroom.

Some from the NYT, which adds information about text messages to his brother’s widow (with whom he was involved):

The first day of testimony in Hunter Biden’s trial on gun-related charges kicked off Tuesday with the surreal sound of the defendant’s own voice ringing through the courtroom, narrating his descent into drug addiction, when prosecutors played the audiobook of his memoir.

It ended with bitter written words: the introduction of expletive-laced, panicked texts to Hallie Biden, his brother’s widow and his onetime girlfriend, berating her for disposing of his handgun and warning, perhaps presciently, that it might set off a federal investigation.

The government’s case against President Biden’s son — for all the drama, media swirl and complex political dynamics — is fairly straightforward: proving that Mr. Biden was abusing drugs when he filled out a federal firearms application claiming he was not an “unlawful user” of controlled substances.

There’s already one irrefutable piece of evidence: Biden’s gun application. The evidence that he used drugs when he filled it out seems irrefutable, too. Together, they spell g-u-i-l-t-y.

*Maarten Boudry has published his own account of our Amsterdam deplatforming on his own Substack account, “The Ideological Subversion of Science“, subtitled: (Or “How I was deplatformed twice at the University of Amsterdam”).  I’ll reproduce stuff that doesn’t overlap much with what I already wrote yesterday:

Irony is dead: a debate at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) about ideological bias in science was cancelled at the last minute due to… the political views of the speakers (including me) about Israel.

He then recounts his own initial and solo deplatforming, leading him to deliver a lecture on global warming remotely, from a private home near campus, and then discusses the BetaBreak deplatforming that we cover in our Quillette piece. He continues:

I will publish an open letter against the academic boycott of Israel in a few days (already published in Dutch), co-signed by prominent academics such as Richard Dawkins, Fania Oz-Salzberger, Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt and (of course) Jerry Coyne, but I can’t tell you how many times I received a reply from a colleague along the lines of: “I fully agree with the substance of your letter, but I would rather not sign it, because I don’t want to get in trouble.” This is the “trouble” you get into: being blackballed and deplatformed at universities.

A university should facilitate maximum viewpoint diversity on contentious issues such as this one: from staunchly pro-Israeli (even more radical than my own moderate position) to fervently pro-Palestinian, with everything in between. In recent years, however, we see worrying signs that an open discussion on this topic (and also on sexuality and gender, or the heredity of IQ, or the negative consequences of migration) is no longer possible at our universities. Although it had no direct link to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the article by Jerry Coyne was meant exactly to push back against this ideological undermining of science and of academic institutions.

When academics complain about the declining trust in science (especially among conservatives and Republicans), they should shoulder some of the blame. If ideological zealots impose their views on the rest of academia, they will only further erode trust in science.

In any event, I wrote a piece in Quillette together with Jerry about our deplatforming experience. I’m allowed to post the first three paragraphs (see below), but for the full piece you’ll need to visit the Quillette website. For now, this piece is free, but it will be paywalled in a few days. You can support Quillette—a bastion of free thought in my view—by becoming a subscriber.

*The NYT Sunday Magazine has an article by editor Rachel Poser, “Ibram X. Kendi faces a reckoning of his own.” (You can also find it archived here.) As you may know, Kendi has had a fall from grace in the last few years:

Four years have gone by since George Floyd was murdered on the pavement near Cup Foods in Minneapolis, sparking the racial “reckoning” that made Kendi a household name. Many people, Kendi among them, believe that reckoning is long over. State legislatures have pushed through harsh antiprotest measures. Conservative-led campaigns against teaching Black history and against diversity, equity and inclusion programs are underway. Last June, the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions. And Donald Trump is once again the Republican nominee for president, promising to root out “the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”

Kendi has become a prime target of this backlash. Books of his have been banned from schools in some districts, and his name is a kind of profanity among conservatives who believe racism is mostly a problem of the past. Though legions of readers continue to celebrate Kendi as a courageous and groundbreaking thinker, for many others he has become a symbol of everything that’s wrong in racial discourse today. Even many allies in the fight for racial justice dismiss his brand of antiracism as unworkable, wrongheaded or counterproductive. “The vast majority of my critics,” Kendi told me last year, “either haven’t read my work or willfully misrepresent it.”

Criticism of Kendi only grew in September, when he made the “painful decision” to lay off more than half the staff of the research center he runs at Boston University. The Center for Antiracist Research, which Kendi founded during the 2020 protests to tackle “seemingly intractable problems of racial inequity and injustice,” raised an enormous sum of $55 million, and the news of its downsizing led to a storm of questions. False rumors began circulating that Kendi had stolen funds, and the university announced it would investigate after former employees accused him of mismanagement and secrecy.

. . . Boston University had recently released the results of its audit, which found “no issues” with how the center’s finances were handled. The center’s problem, Kendi told me, was more banal: Most of its money was in its endowment or restricted to specific uses, and after the high of 2020, donations had crashed. “At our current rate, we were going to run out in two years,” he said. “That was what ultimately led us to feel like we needed to make a major change.” The center’s new model would fund nine-month academic fellowships rather than a large full-time staff. Though inquiries into the center’s grant-management practices and workplace culture were continuing, Kendi was confident that they would absolve him, too. In the media, he’d dismissed the complaints about his leadership as “unfair,” “unfounded,” “vague,” “meanspirited” and an attempt to “settle old scores.”

In the fall, when I began talking to former employees and faculty — most of whom asked for anonymity because they remain at Boston University or signed severance agreements that included nondisparagement language — it was clear that many of them felt caught in a bind. They could already see that the story of the center’s dysfunction was being used to undermine the racial-justice movement, but they were frustrated to watch Kendi play down the problems and cast their concerns as spiteful or even racist. They felt that what they experienced at the center was now playing out in public: Kendi’s tendency to see their constructive feedback as hostile. “He doesn’t trust anybody,” one person told me. “He doesn’t let anyone in.”

This is a long, thoughtful, and fair article, and seems to conclude that although Kendi’s ideas are generally good and iinfluential, he lacks the ability to run a center that can translate them into positive “antiracist” action. He also seems somewhat paranoid and oversensitive, though I can understand that given how the Right has demonized him, but effective leaders need to translate theory into action and learn to compromise. Kendi has never agreed to debate his ideas with anyone, and although I dislike debates, too, he also seems reluctant to debate his ideas with people who work for him.

*According to the NYT, yesterdaty police arrested 13 pro-Palestinian demonstrators who occupied the President’s office at Stanford University. This is a school that, under its new President, has vowed that it’s going to crack down on speech disruptions. (Article is archived here; bolding is mine):

Police officers arrested 13 pro-Palestinian protesters on Wednesday who had barricaded themselves in the office of the president of Stanford University and demanded that administrators meet several demands, including a vote by the university trustees on whether to divest from companies that are said to support Israel’s military.

The administration offices, located in Building 10, were cleared within about three hours, according to Dee Mostofi, a campus spokeswoman, who said that there was “extensive damage.” Several walls and pillars on the exterior were covered in graffiti that criticized the police, Stanford and Israel.

The protesters had entered the building around 5:30 a.m. on Wednesday, and university police officers arrived at the scene after they were alerted of the occupation, according to Ms. Mostofi. The building houses the offices of the university’s president, Richard Saller, and provost, Jenny Martinez, among others.

One officer was injured during the arrests, Ms. Mostofi said, adding that any students who were arrested will be suspended and those who are seniors will not be allowed to graduate.

“We are appalled that our students chose to take this action, and we will work with law enforcement to ensure that they face the full consequences allowed by law,” Ms. Mostofi said in a statement.

Wednesday is the final day of classes for the spring quarter at Stanford. A security guard stationed on the Main Quad warned students who were bicycling or walking to their last classes of the academic year that they would see disturbing graffiti. The spray-painted slogans included “Pigs Taste Best Dead” and “Death 2 Israehell.”

Tell me that this is not only stupidly anti-cop, but also threatening and antisemitic as well. But let’s go on:

The group of protesters, which calls itself the People’s University for Palestine encampment, said in a statement that its members intended to remain in Building 10 until the university met several demands. The group called on the Stanford Board of Trustees to consider next week whether to divest from companies — including Hewlett-Packard, Lockheed Martin and Chevron — that the protesters say provide material and logistical support to the Israeli military campaign in Gaza.

The protesters also demanded that Dr. Saller support the divestment proposal, disclose all of the holdings in Stanford’s endowment and drop all disciplinary measures against Pro-Palestinian student activists.

. . . yep, the usual demands. No punishment!  Divestment!  My prediction is this: they’ll drop the charges, the students will not be punished, but Stanford will not disclose its divestments, either. If the students are punished, whether by the legal system or Stanford, I’d be delighted, for barricading yourself in the President’s office is surely an act of civil disobedience.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Szaron are peckish:

Hili: All roads lead to the kitchen.
Szaron: Yes, but I’m afraid they neglected to fill our bowls again.
In Polish:
Hili: Wszystkie drogi prowadzą do kuchni.
Szaron: Tak, ale obawiam się, że oni znowu zaniedbali zaopatrzenie naszych miseczek.

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

From Unique Birds and Animals:

A cartoon from the Elder of Ziyon (h/t Andrzej):

From The Dodo Pet:

From Masih, and this is surreal:

From Luana. Lady MAGA is a genuine conservative, Trump-supporting gay man, but I can’t guarantee that this back and forth wasn’t staged. It’s still funny, though:

From Simon, and I hope I haven’t posted this before!

From Malcolm, a VERY sad kitten. . .

From my own feed. some nice men:

Fr9m the Auschwitz Memorial, one I retweeted:

From Matthew, an account of the invasion of Normandy, which took place 80 years ago yesterday. Do read it. It looks as if the opening scene of “Saving Private Ryan” s was accurate (it does take place on Omaha beach, the subject of this account).

And lapwings hatching:

59 thoughts on “Thursday: Hili dialogue”

  1. Well, well…WSJ lead quotes on Biden from Mike Johnson and McCarthy…two men of questionable integrity on their best days. As Uncle Joe might say:”Give me a break”.

    In positive news this morning, SpaceX BIG rocket now scheduled for lift off around 8:45 EDT. I have been watching on you tube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTkhv4fvOgA
    Trigger Warning….has a trump commercial at beginning but spacex was not yet on air.

    Oh and excellent quotations from Maarten…very well said!

    1. 20 mins to launch. Will it get as far as the planned soft splashdown, or will it be another RUD? Entertainment guaranteed either way (unless the launch is scrubbed) (Watch on Twitter)

      1. Soft splashdown of the super-heavy booster! Well done guys.

        Starship itself looking good in orbit …

    2. Thank you – always a good idea to leave multiple reminders around so as not to miss things like the launch.

      … looks like there are three large engines with three small in the center… that’s unlike the other rocket that had a large number of small engines from what I recall…

        1. My understanding is that the burning wreckage of Starship hit the ocean in free fall?
          …then again, the SpaceX folks were apparently happy at the outcome :-/

          1. I don’t think it did. It seemed to survive all the way down, and it did a landing burn. It may not have been entirely as “soft” as the landing of the booster, but it was rapidly slowing under a landing burn (until there was a commanded shutdown of the landing burn, not sure why).

          2. Nope, it was hard to see because the camera lens was mostly obscured and some telemetry was not updating, namely the engine icons.

            But putting visuals and what telemetry clues there were together reveals that Starship managed a successful soft splashdown. It successfully reoriented into the “belly flop” position, maintained stability through that phase, successfully reoriented to vertical, successfully relit engines and decelled to approximately 0 as seen per the velocity indicator, and then softly dropped into the ocean.

          3. Huh, thanks for the correction. So it was half melted-down and burned-up, but yeah, apparently it did slow down.
            They are making incremental progress… still skeptical if they manage to fulfill any actual missions before the money runs out.

          4. I am finally getting used to Musk’s rapid design, test, improve, retest philosophy. Knew it at modeling level but had never envisioned at such full scale and cost level. I love to compare public affairs approaches of yesterday’s Boeing/ULA/NASA test vs today’s SpaceX flight. Today was all HD cameras with continous coverage (at least attempted via Starlink) even through plasma blackout for Musk; yesterday (NASA/Boeing) was vintage 1960’s live shots cutting to cartoon like simulation for the really interesting parts of mission….or so it seemed to this 30+ year NASA retiree.

          5. Richard Metzler said,

            “They are making incremental progress… still skeptical if they manage to fulfill any actual missions before the money runs out.”

            I can’t blame anyone for being skeptical, it’s warranted. What they are trying to achieve is very difficult. This test flight was a major mile stone, though. They’ve demonstrated that their novel orbital reentry and landing methods work.

            In my relatively worthless opinion SpaceX will be able to make this launch system work as intended, whether sooner or later I couldn’t guess. As intended means fully reusable, 100-200 tons to LEO, manned missions. They may still have a lengthy development process, but with this 4th prototype test flight they’ve proved all but one major milestone, “catching” the booster and the ship at the launch tower. But today both the booster and the ship made pretty successful virtual tower landings, so that is a good sign.

            As far as money, that is not likely to dry up on them. Their Starlink communication system is very successful and is already making them all the money they need to continue development, users and income are steadily rising as they continue to build the system out, and it is only at a fraction the size of the full system planned.

          6. Even without the now-profitable Starlink, SpaceX’s workhorse is the Falcon 9. This is currently responsible for 90% of the world’s tonnage to orbit, and being reusable has vastly lower costs, and is so much more profitable, than any competitor.

            Non-afficionadoes may not realise what SpaceX are currently achieving — with cheap, reusable rockets they are 20 years ahead of any competitor.

            (The only other Western competitors, ULA with their Vulcan and ESA with their Ariane 6, neither of which have flown yet, are being kept alive only by government subsidy, since Europe and the US want at least one alternative to SpaceX. Other than that there’s only the Chinese and the Russians.)

  2. At risk of dominating the thread early on here, I do want to add, uncharacteristically positive for me, that Stanford did not dither and did act on the little thugs with some dispatch, so maybe they will enforce punishment this time. I am cautiously optimistic.

    1. I just hope they also sue the protestors for the damage caused. Then, even if the public authorities punt on the charges, as they have in other places, there will still be consequences.

    2. Me, too, about being cautiously optimistic. Maybe the college admins have learned (finally) that they need to act immediately and decisively else they risk weeks of protests, demonstrations, occupations, vandalism, violence, and misery. Seems like a no-brainer to me that once these things grow large enough, it takes much more to unravel them.

  3. You did post the Eric Metaxas tweet before, but I am not sure that it is blasphemy, as it fits perfectly into the Christian narrative. One reason Christianity flourishes is that you can twist its stories into any narrative you wish to tell.

  4. “but if the assertions about Hunter Biden in the news are true, and he really lied about drug use on a federal application to buy a gun, then I don’t see how even a great lawyer can get him off.”

    This will probably come down to a question of lying rather than the original charge, that it was illegal for Hunter Biden, a drug user to buy or own a firearm. An Appeals Court decision in August 2023 struck down that prohibition as a 2nd Amendment violation. Lying on an application is wrong, of course, but it could make the difference between a more serious felony and a minor infraction that could result in a suspended sentence. And the fact that he can be presented to a jury as a remorseful defendant and recovering addict could elicit some sympathy from a jury. As is so often the case, the outcome is less a matter of facts than of the presentation of facts in a courtroom.

  5. Google gives this synopsis of Córdova (Bold aded):

    “Jeanne Córdova was an American trailblazer of the lesbian and gay rights movement, founder of The Lesbian Tide, and a founder of the West Coast LGBT movement. Córdova was a second-wave feminist lesbian activist and proud butch.”

    Wikipedia (bold added):

    “one of the key themes of lesbian feminism is the analysis of heterosexuality as an institution.[2] Lesbian feminist texts work to denaturalise heterosexuality and, based on this denaturalization, to explore heterosexuality’s “roots” in institutions such as patriarchy, capitalism, and colonialism. Additionally, lesbian feminism advocates lesbianism as a rational result of alienation and dissatisfaction with these institutions.”

    (Back to my comment):

    Second-wave feminism is a dialectical development of Simone DeBeauvoir’s One is not born, but becomes a woman in The Second Sex.

    Lesbian feminism is a new one to me. The gnostic disposition of lesbian feminism clearly locates the prison of the true self in the “institution” of heterosexuality, much like Foucault was the gnostic that saw the existence of homosexuality originating in heterosexuality – IOW there should be neither according to gnosis of the prison, which incarcerates the soul.

    The soul must be set free from the prison, which requires consciousness of it first.

    I’ll be getting some Córdova to see precisely what new insight she brought to the development of lesbian feminism – beyond the standard gnostic dialectical development from Simone DeBeauvoir and Foucault, et. al.

    But IMHO I do not see why heterosexuality has to be denaturalized. In fact, IMHO I think denaturalizing anything is insane. I think that discussion came up before – are corrective lenses natural or unnatural etc.

  6. I saw Saving Private Ryan when it came out. I have not served in the military or experienced combat but I was shaken after I got out of the theater. I heard it was pretty rough for vets who watched it. It didn’t win Best Picture which is BS.

    1. The first half hour of Saving Private Ryan was vicious, brutal, unrelenting and absolutely superb.

      The rest of the film was at best poor. Shakespeare in Love was fluffy and silly and harmless but was also just a better film taken as a whole.

  7. “He [Trump] may look physically healthier…” Really? Biden appears slim and fit. Trump is grossly obese and looks every avoirdupois of it. I’d heavily discount this WSJ hit piece.

    1. Size or not, Trump still appears to have much more vitality than Biden. Joe’s public schedule is laughably light and his public demeanor is that of a doddering, old man. For anyone planning to vote for Trump, though, the choice of VP is important, because he could begin a decline at any point or die suddenly.

      1. I couldn’t disagree with you more strongly. Trump is the one who looks confused, demented, and frankly physically disabled in public. (Have you seen the recent video of him frothing at the mouth?) The image of the doddering Biden results from right-wingers cherry-picking only the most egregious instances of Biden’s age-related slowdown. I could link to many videos showing the opposite of doddering, but I won’t waste our time since I presume you’ve already decided that Biden is senile, and nothing will change your mind.
        That said, I will reference one:
        https://youtu.be/C-2sOV3prmU?si=v1Gp9EBg6BK5LQMJ

      2. Let’s remember that Robert Hur has determined that President Biden is not mentally competent to be charged with mishandling classified documents.

        So, either:

        1) Biden is competent and the justice system is corrupt.

        or

        2) The justice system is fair and Biden is mentally incapable of performing the job of president.

    2. Slim and fit, sure, but there is doddering on occasion. A certain confused mien, recognizably elderly. It doesn’t take many videos before you see it. He’s old (so is the orange lunatic) and there’s no denying that it is an issue, especially given his running mate.

      His age, his pandering (on Israel, Title IX, DEI, etc) and his do-nothingness about the border ….well I live in a state that will not go for the felon under any circumstance, this is likely to be the one election where I don’t cast a vote for president. NTAC

        2. There are too many videos of Biden saying the wrong thing, getting confused, reading words like ‘pause’ off the teleprompter and shuffling/falling to pretend he’s healthy.

          Claiming he’s ever been decent would require rebuttal of the videos of him sniffing childrens’ hair, the varied and multiple pieces of evidence of corruption, the diary of his daughter..

          Competent? Maybe once.

          1. “the varied and multiple pieces of evidence of corruption”
            Citation needed.

          2. How about withholding funds for Ukraine until a prosecutor was sacked? Trump was impeached for withholding funds for Ukraine unless they investigated potential corruption, so clearly that must be illegal.

            Or the contents of a laptop the FBI have confirmed has not been tampered with, that references 10% for the big guy?

            Or https://oversight.house.gov/release/comer-seeks-nara-records-revealing-how-then-vp-biden-mixed-official-government-duties-with-familys-influence-peddling/

            Note that evidence does not mean proof.

        3. I think Biden might have early stage Parkinson’s, judging from the stiff look on his face and the voice (edit: his doctor said in February that an MRI showed no sign of it, so I must be wrong, even I know the disease really well). No doubt he is sane and Trump isn’t, but still, it’s a sad state of affairs when in a large democracy one has to decide between two people who in different ways aren’t really fit for office. I remember when the Soviet Union was ridiculed for its “gerontocracy”.

          1. Postscript/edit: It’s anything but trivial, if not impossible, to detect early stage Parkinson’s with standard MRT. MRT is done in cases of suspicion of Parkinson’s to rule out other brain diseases that might be causing the symptoms. Some press article I saw said he had an MRI to rule out Parkinson’s, but as that’s not normally done and I don’t find it in the White House release I doubt it’s true. I can’t even find a mention of an MRT in the White House health assessment document.

          2. If you know the disease well, Ruth, you are probably not wrong. You are more likely to be right than ordinary clinical MRImaging, which is typically normal in early Parkinson’s disease. MR is most useful in ruling out disorders that can mimic PD that might have different treatment or prognosis, particularly as to the time of onset of dementia, typically late in PD. So the physician’s statement that President Biden’s MRI showed no sign of PD, while presumably true, is not completely candid. Of course he may not have had permission from his patient to say more than that.

            https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5514207/

            Let’s be clear for all that patients can be quite debilitated with progressive PD, including difficulty with expressing themselves, without having intellectual impairment. It is a movement disorder, not a cognitive disorder.

            Thinking dirty, the mere fact that the President had an MRI at all means somebody was worried about something.

    3. Yeah, once Trump became a convicted felon, Murdock had to do something to try and change the narrative, so he published this hit piece that cites no one except Kevin McCarthy who had said on many occasions after meeting with Biden over the budget disputes that the POTUS was sharp. It’s pretty obvious what happened here. Gotta keep with the both-sides equally bad scenario (and billionaires want more tax cuts). The GOP has lost their mind over Trump’s 34 felony convictions, that’s the real story (and they had already lost their collective mind before the convictions). I love how they say “it’s helping him.” Yeah, right, you keep telling yourself that. I’ve noticed WEIT has a lot of Biden-haters now, who also “don’t like Trump” except they never seem to want to criticize Trump, just Biden- as if there is actually a valid comparison here. Pretty fishy if you ask me.

      1. He’ll, I’d be happy to throw rhetorical poo all over Trump and the insane Maga hatters. But (1) I limit my comments here, (2) there is enough snark and criticism of the orange lunatic and (3) I’ll make any damn comment I want; I won’t be bullied into ignoring Biden’s shortcomings just to make sure there’s equity in commenting.

        In fact, I’ll just shut up and read Readers Wildlife photos.

        1. Response to 2): There will never be enough snark and criticism of the orange lunatic; only after he’s no longer a threat will it be unnecessary. And snark and criticism is child’s play- screw that. Haven’t you been listening to what he intends to do? Have you gleaned the Heritage Foundation’s 2025 project? All retribution and revenge, but work makes Trump a dull boy. And “he” is recruiting an army of brown shirts ready to pounce. He’s been using Nazi rhetoric and even had an ad talking about a new Reich. This is serious folks! This is not a movement that snark or criticism has a chance of beating. This movement has violence in its core, has “any ends for a means” at its core; those in the cult understand this, those not in the cult think snark and criticism will win or it’s no big deal. When Trump is in the zeitgeist and leads the new Republican neo-fascists there’s no telling what he’ll do, or at least want to do. And remember he has a majority of SCOTUS zealots who are already in his pocket. It’s way past snark or criticism at this point, the guy wants a coup. The freak still acts like he’s POTUS for Ceiling Cat’s sake and an entire political party goes along. How’s that for fucked up?

          Lastly, who is bullying you into commenting or not? I was just pointing out an observation, nothing directed at you. I wasn’t even responding to you, I replied to Mr. Bero.

          RWP is always a soothing experience after certain Hili Dialogues these days…

  8. I don’t really care if Hunter Biden gets convicted or not – if he’s guilty, so be it – but I find the hypocrisy grating. Republicans go on and on about how the case against Trump should never have been brought, and it’s all political, and no regular citizen blah blah, and it’s a witchhunt yada yada… while at the same time a guy who is not even running for office, but merely related to the office-holder, has every aspect of his life turned inside out in search of things to indict him for. Hmmm.

    1. And compare their behavior. One throws up every road block they and their law team can conjure in order to obstruct, repeatedly denigrates judges and witnesses, and their family members, repeatedly violates gag orders, repeatedly encourages their followers to cause trouble on their behalf, and the other does none of those things.

      2. Why does your sound comment need to be repeated over and over…why isn’t the obvious, obvious anymore?

  9. At the risk of stating the obvious, Biden’s age—and Harris’s possible ascendance to the presidency—will be a major track in the election campaign. The Republicans will hammer away at him at every opportunity, and the Democrats—and Biden’s staff—will do everything they can to keep his limitations from view.

    Trump’s vigor is probably more apparent than real—and if real, it’s even more dangerous—but people might very well vote based on which candidate appears to be more sentient.

    1. Biden’s age would not be so bad if the VP was not Kamala Harris. She’s truly awful.

  10. “Because of the latter, we need to pay close attention to Trumps’s personal appearances to get a picture of his status. Teleprompted speeches will not be all that helpful, except that we can make some assessment from his posture, volume, how he forms words, how frequently he pauses, and whether he loses his place. More telling will be impromptu appearances (They will be rare.) and, of course, the upcoming debate.”
    There, fixed it.

  11. Oh I forgot it’s atheist pride day, so here’s some pride:

    Political
    Religions
    Indoctrinate
    Dictatorial
    Evil

    Political
    Revolutions
    Incarcerate
    Deliberate
    Enquiry

  12. “Conservative-led campaigns against teaching Black history and against diversity, equity and inclusion programs are underway.”

    Three cheers for that latter part! As to the first, I would simply ask “Where?” I have read this accusation repeatedly: Conservatives do not want to teach Black history. What I have seen is that they do not want to teach such history infused with the ideology and falsehoods of the 1619 project and various DEI-infected curricula. Has anyone encountered a state legislature or a local school board that is opposed to teaching the history of blacks in America—both the good and the ugly?

  14. More carping about Biden. ( Yes, of course, Biden doesn’t always agree with Israel’s behavior.) Who is your alternative? Who do you think Trump will pick as his running mate? Like Harris or not, she is more competent than anyone Trump will pick. Presidential elections are not about getting your very first choice, but involve making a choice of an individual and probable administration that will best lead us in the near future. Reality: Joe Biden or Donald Trump will be the next President of the United States.

    1. Or the chicken used a diaphragm.
      (From my sketchy knowledge of avian copulation that seems more consistent with the plumbing.)

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