Sunday: Hili dialogue

June 30, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Sunday, June 30, 2024. It’s my sister’s birthday (she’s exactly 2½ years younger than I) and my own half-birthday. Happy birthday, sis!  Here she is:

It’s also National Mai Tai Day, celebrating the tropical cocktail that can be quite potent when made with a good dose of high-proof rum:

Kevdo, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also Social Media Day, International Asteroid Day, Nati0nal Meteror Day, National Organization for Women Day, and, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Independence Day, celebrating the independence of the country in 1960 from the cruel rule of Belgium.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 30 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Iran is rattling its sabers again, threatening an all-out war against Israel if Israel goes to war with Lebanon.

Iran’s mission to the United Nations said on Friday that if Israel embarks on a “full-scale military aggression” in Lebanon against Hezbollah, “an obliterating war will ensue.”

The warning came after the Israel Defense Force attacked several Hezbollah positions, in response to the Iran-backed terror group’s latest barrage on northern Israel hours earlier, amid escalating tensions on the Lebanese border.

Writing on X on Friday, the Iranian UN mission said that if Israel were to launch a war on Hezbollah, “all options, including the full involvement of all resistance fronts, are on the table.”

Here’s that tweet, which is now pinned to make it scarier:

Iran’s “Axis of Resistance,” which includes Hezbollah, Hamas, Yemen’s Houthis, and other groups in Syria and Iraq, has been targeting Israel since October 7, when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists stormed southern Israel, killing 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages, sparking the war in Gaza.

Iran itself also launched an unprecedented missile-and-drone strike on Israel on April 14, two weeks after an alleged Israel airstrike near Tehran’s embassy in Damascus killed several senior officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The Iranian strike was almost entirely repelled by Israel, the United States and other allies, though a 7-year-old girl was seriously injured in the attack.

. . .Diplomatic efforts led by the US have so far failed to make the terror group retreat beyond the Litani River — some 30 kilometers (19 miles) north of the border with Israel — in accord with United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah conflict.

Tensions between Israel and Hezbollah have been steadily mounting, with a US official cited in Politico on Thursday as saying that the risk of war is higher than it has been for weeks. According to the official, a major attack by either side could spark a war, which could happen with “little notice.”

. . . Soon after Hamas’s October 7 massacre, Israel evacuated much of its north, fearing Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy in Lebanon, would carry out a similar attack. Some 60,000 residents of northern Israel remain displaced, as the country seeks to remove the terror group from its northern border.

If there is such a war, and I think there’s a good chance it will happen, it will be Hezbollah’s fault, as they’ve been firing lots of rockets at northern Israel, targeted at civilians, for weeks, in violation of a UN resolution.  Why doesn’t anybody criticize Hezbollah for that war crime? You know why: because non-Jews are allowed to do stuff like this. Iran has given Hezbollah thousands and thousands of sophisticated rockets, and Israel would be fully justified in attacking Hezbollah to defend itself. Right now, however, the IDF is occupied with Gaza, but perhaps later. . . .

Israel has barely known a moment’s peace; it’s always getting attacked from the north and south (and now threats from the East) with no provocation.  I hope that if there is a war with Hezbollah, the U.S. will make good on its promises and help out Israel.

*The AP explains “Why it would be tough for Democrats to replace Joe Biden on the Presidential ticket.” Short take: delegates are pledged to vote for him. Dispelling a myth, though, Kamala Harris wouldn’t automatically take his place if he did resign.

. . . it would be nearly impossible for Democrats to replace him unless he chooses to step aside.

Delegates Biden won in the primaries are pledged to support him.

Every state has already held its presidential primary. Democratic rules say that the delegates Biden won should support him at the party’s upcoming national convention unless he tells them he’s leaving the race.

The president indicated that he had no plans to do that, telling supporters in Atlanta shortly after he left the debate stage, “Let’s keep going.” Biden campaign spokesperson Lauren Hitt was even clearer, saying Friday: “Of course he’s not dropping out.”

The conventions and their rules are controlled by the political parties. The Democratic National Committee could convene before the convention opens on Aug. 19 and change how things will work, but that isn’t likely as long as Biden wants to continue seeking reelection.

The current rules read: “Delegates elected to the national convention pledged to a presidential candidate shall in all good conscience reflect the sentiments of those who elected them.”

VP Kamala Harris couldn’t automatically replace Biden. 

The vice president is Biden’s running mate, but that doesn’t mean she can swap in for him at the top of the ticket by default. Biden also can’t decree that she replace him should he suddenly decide to leave the race.

The Democratic National Convention is being held in Chicago, but the party has announced that it will hold a virtual roll call to formally nominate Biden before in-person proceedings begin. The exact date for the roll call has not yet been set.

If Biden opts to abandon his reelection campaign, Harris would likely join other top Democratic candidates looking to replace him. But that would probably create a scenario where she and others end up lobbying individual state delegations at the convention for their support.

That hasn’t happened for Democrats since 1960, when John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson jockeyed for votes during that year’s Democratic convention in Los Angeles.

. . . .In addition to the vice president, others that had endorsed Biden in 2024 while harboring their own presidential aspirations for future cycles include California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Illinois Gov. J. B. Pritzker and California Rep. Ro Khanna.

Nope, the only way that Biden will be off the ballot in November is if the either withdraws or dies. He’s already nixed the former, asserting that when you fall down, you pick yourself up.  That’s what he’s gonna do, and it’s bad news for those of us who would be mortified if Trump were elected again.

*In a bipartisan result, the House of Representatives voted to prevent the State Department from using death tolls provided by Gaza death toll numbers from the Gaza Health Ministry, which of course is run by Hamas. Even the UN has rejected those figures, but apparently most Democratic Representatives think Hamas’s data are just fine.

Lawmakers voted 269 – 144, with 62 Democrats joining 207 Republicans to add an amendment mandating the change to an appropriations bill for the agency not to cite statistics obtained from the Gaza Health Ministry.

The bill needs to pass the Senate.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian-American in Congress, told the House it is “disgusting” that lawmakers would support the legislation.

“This is genocide denial,” she said. “My colleagues want to prohibit our own US officials from even citing the Palestinian death toll. So let me read it into the record. Here are the latest casualties of Palestinians killed: 37,718 Palestinians, including more than 15,000 Palestinian children and more than 86,377 Palestinians have been injured,” said Tlaib, citing Gaza Health Ministry’s figures supported by the names of the deceased and tallies by international groups.

[CONTENT NOTE: The figures that Tlaib just read are grossly inaccurate]

Flouting a UN Security Council resolution demanding an immediate cease-fire, Israel has faced international condemnation amid its continued brutal offensive on Gaza since an Oct. 7 attack by the Palestinian group, Hamas.

More than 37,700 Palestinians have since been killed in Gaza, most of them women and children, and over 86,400 injured, according to local health authorities.

The vote may not survive, though, when it gets to the Senate.

From the Algemeiner:

Tlaib lambasted her peers in the House for the vote, suggesting that they harbor deeply-ingrained “racism” against Palestinians. She dismissed the amendment as an effort to “dehumanize” Palestinian people.

“Since 1948, there has been a coordinated effort, especially in this chamber, to dehumanize Palestinians and erase Palestinians from existence,” Tlaib said before the vote. “My colleagues want to prohibit our own US officials from even citing the Palestinian death toll.”

Tlaib is bonkers. The vote was not to cite statistics known to be grossly inaccurate from a terrorist organization.  It is shameful that this one-issue antisemite is serving in Congress. And I’m betting that every member of the Squad voted with Tlaib. This is especially distressing to me as an ex-scientist as those Democrats were voting for the promulgation of figures know to be cooked: they were voting for lies.

*The Washington Post claims that after the Supreme Court decision saying that race could not be an explicit factor considered for college admission, the colleges are indeed complying.  I don’t believe the article at all, for we’ve heard of the many ways that colleges try to circumvent this decision to maintain diversity of race. An excerpt from the WaPo (Adrienne Oddi is vice president of strategic enrollment and communications at Queens College):

A year later, many of the nation’s most selective universities have snapped into compliance with the court’s vision of a colorblind America, reconsidering all the ways they use race as a factor. But that vision has reverberated far beyond academia: Programs meant to diversify companies, public boards and government contractors face a legal onslaught unleashed by the landmark ruling, pushing American society at large toward a new race-neutral era.

While the changes at colleges like Harvard have been dramatic, the principle of race-neutrality is being felt more subtly at universities like Queens that accept more applicants than they turn away. Oddi said the ruling brought more of an “emotional shift than a practical shift” to her office and described how she blinds herself to a student’s race if the student mentions it in an application essay. The Supreme Court wrote that students could discuss race so long as it’s relevant to an experience, such as a time they overcame racial discrimination.

Before the ruling, Oddi said she could “brighten” certain parts of an applicant’s identity while evaluating them “holistically” — including the applicant’s race and ethnicity. If a student wrote about being a biracial woman with a father from the Philippines, for example, an admissions official might note that the university does not see many Filipinos in the applicant pool and that “we would love to have more Filipinos in the community,” Oddi said, posing a hypothetical.

But today, she said, that conversation would not happen at Queens. In fact, Oddi said she feels barred from acting on the student’s racial information at all. Instead of brightening that aspect of a student’s identity, she feels forced to erase it. And that has instilled in her a sense of “sadness” — not necessarily for herself but rather for the students who may feel dissuaded from writing about their whole selves, including race and ethnicity.

But if Oddi is telling the truth about how applicants are evaluated, she’s a rarity.  Here’s what one site says (their bolding)

Now that race-based affirmative action in college admissions has been overturned in a landmark Supreme Court decision, colleges, and universities are scrambling to diversify their student bodies without running afoul of civil rights law.Several top-ranked schools are rolling out a slew of new essay prompts that fish for demographic information with leading questions — and some are going so far as to directly ask about prospective students’ race.

Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore asks students to “tell us about an aspect of your identity (e.g. race, gender, sexuality, religion, community, etc.) or a life experience that has shaped you as an individual…”Meanwhile, Rice University in Houston asks applicants: “What perspectives shaped by your background, experiences, upbringing, and/or racial identity inspire you to join our community of change agents at Rice?”

And every single Ivy League school has added an application question about students’ backgrounds, according to college admission expert and Ivy Coach managing partner Brian Taylor.It’s a clever loophole: ask about race … without expressly requiring students to write about their race.

And some schools aren’t even remotely subtle about their motivations.  Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, even cites the Supreme Court’s decision in its essay prompt.

“In the syllabus of a 2023 majority decision of the Supreme Court written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the author notes: ’Nothing prohibits universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life, so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university,’” the Sarah Lawrence application reads.“Drawing upon examples from your life, a quality of your character, and/or a unique ability you possess, describe how you believe your goals for a college education might be impacted, influenced, or affected by the Court’s decision.”

The DEI steamroller will keep chugging away.  One solution is to cast the net more widely, and require SATs for application, both of which will help boost ethnic diversity—if that’s the kind of “diversity” a school is aiming for.

*I continue to monitor the NYT op-eds for their views on Biden’s performance and their advice on what he should do. Yesterday, Mo Dowd, in a column called “The ghastly vs. the ghostly” (guess who’s who!), advises Biden to drop out. But there’s another column with the opposite advice.

Here’s Mo:

He’s being selfish. He’s putting himself ahead of the country. He’s surrounded by opportunistic enablers. He has created a reality distortion field where we’re told not to believe what we’ve plainly seen. His hubris is infuriating. He says he’s doing this for us, but he’s really doing it for himself.

I’m not talking about Donald Trump. I’m talking about the other president.

In Washington, people often become what they start out scorning. This has happened to Joe Biden. In his misguided quest for a second term that would end when he’s 86, he has succumbed to behavior redolent of Trump. And he is jeopardizing the democracy he says he wants to save.

While nearly all the main columnists, including the mushies Tom Friedman and Nick Kristof (and now Ross Douthat–no surprise!) share Dowd’s views, there’s a dissenter: Stuart Stevens, identified as “a former Republican political consultant who has worked on many campaigns for federal and state office, including the presidential campaigns of George W. Bush and Mitt Romney”. His column is called “Democrats: stop panicking.”

As a former Republican who spent decades pointing out flaws in the Democratic Party, I watch the current Democratic panic over President Biden’s debate performance with a mix of bafflement and nostalgia.

It’s baffling that so many Democrats are failing to rally around a wildly successful president after one bad night. But it does remind me of why Republicans defeated Democrats in so many races Republicans should have lost.

Donald Trump has won one presidential election. He did so with about 46 percent of the popular vote. (Mitt Romney lost with about 47 percent.) The Republican Party lost its mind and decided that this one victory negated everything we know about politics. But it didn’t.

One debate does not change the structure of this presidential campaign. For all the talk of Mr. Biden’s off night, what is lost is that Mr. Trump missed a great opportunity to reset his candidacy and greatly strengthen his position.

Mr. Trump lost the popular vote by a margin of seven million and needs new customers. He could have laid out a positive economic plan to appeal to middle-class voters feeling economic pressure. Instead, he celebrated his tax cuts for billionaires.

He could have reassured voters who are horrified, in the wake of Roe v. Wade’s demise, by the stories of young girls who become pregnant by rape and then must endure extremist politicians eager to criminalize what was a constitutional right for two generations. But Mr. Trump bizarrely asserted that a majority pro-abortion-rights country hated Roe v. Wade and celebrated his role in replacing individual choice with the heavy hand of government.

He could have said he would accept the outcome of the next presidential election. He refused.

For 90 minutes, Mr. Trump unleashed a virulent anti-American rant. The America he lives in is a postapocalyptic hellscape of violence, with people “dying all over the place” — more “Mad Max” than “morning in America.”

So we’re not supposed to worry because Trump screwed up?  But Stevens is an adviser to the Lincoln Project, which is a no-Trump group of Republicans, which explains the column,  He tells Biden—and us Democrats—to hang in there and fight.

Gov. Gavin Newsom of California showed Democrats how to fight after the debate: “You don’t turn your back because of one performance. What kind of party does that?”

Unfortunately, for the moment, it’s much of the Democratic Party establishment. Many of the same people wrote off Mr. Biden in the 2020 Democratic primaries after he was crushed in Iowa and New Hampshire. Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina refused to panic, stuck by Mr. Biden and helped save the campaign. Let his courage and steadiness be a model. My one plea to my new friends abandoning Mr. Biden is simple: Suck it up and fight. It’s not supposed to be easy.

Unfortunately, for the moment I find it hard to fight hard for a man who’s barely sentient. How can you get passionate about a candidate who can barely walk, and freezes up at odd moments?  Yes, I suppose I’ll vote for him if he’s on the ballot, though in Illinois it won’t make a difference, but it would help if there was a candidate I could get excited about.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Szaron are on the hunt:

Szaron: What do you have there?
Hili: I don’t know because it’s hiding itself under my paw.
In Polish:
Szaron: Co tam masz?
Hili: Nie wiem, bo schowało się pod moją łapką.

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

A bumper sticker from Linkiest:

From Science Humor (or the movie “Fargo”):

From: Strange, Stupid, or Silly Signs:

 

The Iranian regime is known for trying to kill or kidnap its opponents in other countries. Masih is one example of that, but here’s an Iranian official in London threatening protestors. I don’t think the finger across the throat is an accidental gesture. Sound up.

From Luana: Wokes vs. Normies: I don’t know of this show. Have a gander, and look for Musk at the end.

From my feed, a swimming porker:

From Malcolm, a FB video showing a d*g with talents:

From Barry, an aborted mission:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I retweeted:

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb, ensconced in Manchester and writing his book.  First, a U.S./British translation guide (I’ll add that “quite” as in “quite nice” really means “not at all”):

A Very Important Experiment with ducks. The first one and the last two, like sprinklers, are clearly the best.

35 thoughts on “Sunday: Hili dialogue”

  2. “Israel has barely known a moment’s peace…”. This is so obvious in Martin Gilbert’s narrated “Routledge Atlas of the Arab-Israeli Conflict” (10th edition) which tells the history in page after page of excellent annotated maps of the area and the year by year and sometimes month to month armed conflicts. I highly recommend this softcover book as a wonderful, historical visual reference.

    1. I couldn’t watch much, because the laugh track was clearly just a generic track, and wasn’t synced to the characters actions/utterances.

    2. More cringe than laugh, I think.
      At least it’s continuing the grand tradition of ham-handed, utterly unfunny right wing humor.

  7. Additional problems with dropping Biden are coming to light. It turns out that States have their own rules about candidate swaps. In Wisconsin, for example, the only way a party can change a candidate is upon the death of one. In Nevada the ballot cannot be changed after the fourth Monday in June.

    Really, though, the question isn’t whether Joe should continue to run, but whether he should continue to be President. If he isn’t fit to do one, he isn’t fit to do the other.

    1. Explain to me the process here: how can names on ballots be “set” when we’re still before the party conventions, so Biden is not yet “officially” the candidate?

  9. I will vote for Biden against Donald Trump but I was wondering if Biden could have Parkinsons?

    I was watching the debate and Biden didn’t blink and froze up. The stiffness in his walk also does not look like arthritis. My husband has Parkinsons for 12 years now and it looks a bit like that.
    I am not a doctor but it just looks like that to me.

    I could be totally wrong and this is just a guess based on the stare and the stiffness and the freezing up.
    I will still vote for him if that is the Democratic choice over Trump.

    Happy Birthday and Half Birthday to Jerry and sister!

    1. Another reader with knowledge about/experience with Parkinson’s has made the same observation. Maybe you’re both onto something. I can’t remember who it was, but she’s brought it up a couple of times… I don’t know much about Parkinson’s. Would it be less of a negative wrt Biden’s ability to competently carry out the job?

      1. It is often accompanied by dementia in the later stages. Not always.

        He could have more than one problem.

        The WSJ had an article yesterday about Leonid Brezhnev of the USSR. He was younger than Biden but in poor health after a lifetime of smoking & drinking. He appeared to have dementia, the article says.

    2. You might be on to something there.

      On another note, I’ve been trying to figure out what Biden was actually trying to say, in the worst part of the debate, when he said “We finally beat Medicare”. He seemed to be searching for a certain word, and I think he might have wanted to say “We finally beat the pandemic”. There is a word I always get hung up on during my recall process, and that’s “demographics”. It’s weird. It takes me a couple minutes each time to access it from my memory. I don’t know why.

      I’ve grown accustomed to listening to elderly people with halting speech or people whose native language is not English, and also to very ill people who can hardly speak. I understood everything else Biden said, despite his stutter and halting speech. I could tell when he misspoke his numbers, but he wasn’t lying like Trump did all the way through. I saw two old men running a marathon, but one of them cheated and wore rollerblades. One guy ran fairly but struggled and stumbled across the finish line; he would still be declared the winner, because the other guy cheated and should be disqualified. No matter how good the delivery, lies do nothing to present policies and facts to the voting public. There needs to be real-time fact-checking by the moderators and their assistants in the next debate, no matter who the nominees are. Anything less would be an abuse of what should be journalism and would play into Trump’s modus operandi of hoodwinking the public.

  12. I have been reading the comments about the Trump/Biden situation here for years. Mostly I do not comment, but sometimes I write then delete one instead of posting.

    I am not even a Trump guy. When one of my neighbors who supports him asked my opinion in 2016, I said he seems like what a poor person might imagine a tycoon to be like. I am apparently one of the small minority that do not feel strongly about him either way.

    As for Biden, his frailty and mental lapses are not a thing that happened at the debate. They are something that has been progressing for years. The DNC deserves no sympathy for the situation they find themselves in. They are not frantic because they found out about him, they are frantic because we did, and they cannot hide it any more. They have had years to plan for or prevent this.
    I suspect it has gone on as long as it has because his condition has allowed a lot of ambitious and agenda driven people to run things their way, without executive interference. Unelected people.

    As an example, see the following https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=i9SXdHPf-hU

    Few of us know Trump personally and well. So we rely mostly on media to provide us with the information to form an opinion. In this country, virtually all of the media is aligned with the DNC. Often they are the same people, going back and forth between DNC administration jobs and in the media.
    They use the same language. Early during the Trump administration, they started to use the phrase “Trump claimed without evidence today that…” . Later, they all switched to “falsely”. The one that I remember vividly was “Trump falsely claimed today that a Covid vaccine would be developed by the end of the year”. To use the word “falsely” there implies a deep study of the issue, finding incontrovertible proof that it is not true. They did not do so, because the vaccine was developed by then.

    They do not, and will never, hold Trump (or his successor) and Biden (or his successor) to the same standards, because they are agenda driven. Not liberal, which media has tended to be, but specifically working to support the DNC.

    I suppose my time living in the USSR helped me recognize propaganda disguised as news. I do believe many Americans love Biden and hate Trump because the TV people tell them that is what they should do.

    1. “…virtually all of the media is aligned with the DNC.”
      And yet about half the country manages to live in a right-wing information bubble. Seems odd, don’t you think?

    2. “I do believe many Americans love Biden and hate Trump because the TV people tell them that is what they should do.” Same goes for the dismissal of Bobby Kennedy. It’s why his trouble spot in the electorate is with boomers and those who are older; they are the ones most wed to conventional media–broadcast and print.

      It would have been nice to see Biden collapse on a debate stage a year ago. That’s one reason why we have a primary system—if the voters are allowed to use it. It wasn’t confidence in Biden that kept the challengers away. Ask Bobby Kennedy what happens to party darlings who cross the system.

      It puzzles me that, even now, many liberals, generally the boomers, will not listen to RFK Jr. on an array of political issues because of their perception—in some cases, misperceptions—about his views on vaccines. Yet, they will readily vote for an Administration that dismisses science in favor of ideology on a range of gender-related matters, even if that ideology and resultant practices harm children and roll back protections for women.

      I understand dismissing third-party candidates as a matter of political calculation, and I understand the “lesser of two evils” dilemma, but the rationalizations people are making to cast their votes—now on both sides—simply stuns me. It’s as though intelligent and competency-focused Democrats are getting their comeuppance for ridiculing the “values voters” who swallowed their principles and voted for Trump in 2016. “Party not person” seems the rallying cry. But it is a person who makes decisions in foreign affairs and as the commander-in-chief. It is a person who adversaries gauge. Right now, it seems the game plan is for Kamala Harris to be that person sometime soon in the next term.

      1. I think most of us here share the majority of basic values, but differ on some issues because of lifestyle or upbringing. Many of us have some key issue which is important enough to be a determining factor in how they vote. No matter how much the border crisis affects her family personally, my wife will never vote for anyone who supports abortion restrictions. Although we agree completely on the abortion issue, the border is more important to me.

        I guess the only real point of my commenting on this issue is the hope that people known for intelligence and skepticism will apply that equally to the candidates we seem to be stuck with. As for the TV people, most of us have had the experience of reading or watching reporting on some issue in which we are expert, and found that they misrepresented the facts completely. It is folly to assume that they would try to mislead us on that issue only.

        1. Not to speak ill of your wife, I would like to ask her how she thinks her choice of candidate for President would advance her (and your) views on abortion, since abortion is a matter for the states, now outside the power of the President. (Ditto for climate change, since this turns on self-interested energy decisions made by sovereign counties in Asia, again beyond the power of the President to affect one way or the other, no matter what s/he does domestically or on the foreign policy stage.)

          The border, on the other hand, does seem to me to be an issue that the President can do something about, all by himself or with the help of Congress. So even if abortion and the border were of equally pressing concern to you, it would still be rational to cast your vote about the border because that way you are more likely to get what you want for your country, and not very likely to get stuck with something you and your wife don’t want.

        2. …my wife will never vote for anyone who supports abortion restrictions.

          Even if Biden (or someone else from his side) wins, I’m not sure if a SC vacancy will occur soon 🙂 . Thomas and Alito are the oldest, and they are in their mid seventies. I know of many anti-abortion people who voted for Trump in the hope that he will appoint the ‘right’ justices.

          As for the TV people…

          Do you think that’s just a consequence of how business works? Just as the politicians strive to be elected, maybe TV people identify a big enough demographic and strive to make money by biased reporting. Maybe the best you can hope for are competing biases 🙂

          1. I do think the business of the TV people being biased in a focused, coordinated way is something unique, at least in scale.

            To paraphrase an older statement, in the USSR, the TV and print news people were lying, we knew they were lying, and they knew we could usually divine the truth of the situation by how they phrased their lies.

            I think most people in the US still believe that US journalists still follow the sort of ethics espoused by by Morrow or Cronkite.

            If the media were just doing their normal thing, they would be climbing over each other to break stories on Biden’s many faults and issues. Instead they do their best to suppress or minimize them.

  13. I think National Meteor Day should start just a few minutes after International Asteroid Day.

  14. More about “Asteroid Day”…

    Establishing June 30 as Asteroid Day began with a petition drafted in 2014 to raise awareness about the risks of asteroid impacts on Earth. The Asteroid Foundation was established in 2017 to promote greater asteroid detection efforts and research into asteroid deflection scenarios. (The U.N. officially recognized this day in 2016.)

    June 30 is the anniversary of the 1908 impact by an asteroid (or comet) over remote Siberia in the Russian Federation. Reports suggest that there may have been only three fatalities, but the impact leveled roughly 800 square miles of forest with the energy equivalent of about 185 Hiroshima bombs. In other words, it was on the scale of a major “city killer.”

    Coincidentally, two asteroids of significant size came relatively close to Earth this past week. One passed just yesterday within the orbit of the Moon. This asteroid is roughly twice the size of the asteroid that impacted Russia in 1908. But, for me, the most significant fact of this asteroid is that it was discovered only about two weeks ago. Imagine the headlines — and panic — around the world had it been on course to hit Earth…

    By the way, the second asteroid that I mentioned above was discovered in 2011. It is much larger, though it passed beyond the orbit of the Moon (about 17 times farther out, but still in the neighborhood). Had it impacted Earth, human civilization would have been toast now.

  15. Bit of fun for d_g lovers here which caught my eye on twitter today.

    Which dog breeds are more likely to bite people in NYC (where I live).
    https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1807256723746414626/photo/1

    I note “Australian cattledogs” (I presume Aussie shepherds?) are among the safest.
    I know this from an experiment of one, currently sleeping next to me.
    To wit: https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/06/10/photos-of-readers-93/
    Enjoy your week,
    D.A.
    NYC

  16. This is in response to the 6/30 comments on the difficulties on diversifying student bodies at universities post the Supreme Court ruling. Although I agree that the Court made the wrong decision, I have worked with a several Black educators who were enrolled in a doctoral program at a major research university. I expect that they were accepted into the program so that the school could meet its required federal quota under then existing requirements, as not one of them was qualified for the doctoral level. In one case, I even wondered how a student, a school principal, was even accepted for an undergraduate degree, as her reading/writing/cognition were equivalent to a 4th grade student. I do not see how graduating these individuals benefits them as individuals or uplifts Black people as a whole?

    1. So how then was striking down such practices the “wrong” decision by the U.S. Supreme Court? Many people who support(ed) affirmative-action race preference stated flatly that anecdotes such as yours simply did not happen under race-favoured policies, that they instead gave overlooked black jewels a chance to shine. Institutions will not stop doing such things for perverse agendas until they are told not to. They don’t care that such policies are bad for blacks. They help the activist agenda which is the important thing. Do you think trans-activists lose sleep that their agitation might be bad for children, or for women?

      Maybe we come from different priors. To me it doesn’t matter if the proportion of black or aboriginal students, faculty, physicians, CEOs, or civil servants is zero. There is no reason to pursue cosmetic diversity for its own sake.

  18. It’s my birthday, oh gee,
    I’m as old as can be,
    But there’s one consolation:
    Jerry’s older than me!

    Thanks bro, and everybody else, for the kind wishes! You all made an old lady very happy…

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