Month: July 2024

Sunday: Hili dialogue

July 28, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Sunday, July 28, 2024, and National Milk Chocolate Day. Cadbury’s used to be my favorite when I was younger, but I haven’t had it for years.  Here’s how it’s made:

It’s also National Soccer Day, National Hamburger Day, Parents’ Day, Fiestas Patrias, celebrating the independence of Peru from Spain by General José de San Martín in 1821. Ólavsøka Eve in the Faroe Islands, and World Hepatitis Day, which I’ve celebrated by getting two out my three Hep-B shots for Africa (the third is in four months when I’ll be back, but I’ll have acquired a lot of immunity with the first two shots. 

There’s another Google Doodle today (I guess there’s going to be a daily one during the Olympics., each honoring a different sport); click to see where it goes:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the July 28 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The advice for Kamala Harris is already coming thick and fast from the NYT, leaving aside the misguided encomiums like Lydia Polgreen’s “I was a Kamala skeptic. Here’s how I got coconut-pilled.” (???) More sensible words come from Harvard political-science professor Michael J. Sandel in a NYT op-ed called “How Kamala Harris can win.” It’s pretty obvious:

Over the past week, Ms. Harris has been campaigning on protecting democracy, the rule of law and reproductive freedom from another four years of Donald Trump. As a forceful defender of abortion rights and a former prosecutor, she is ideally equipped to make these issues the centerpiece of her campaign. She relishes reminding voters of Mr. Trump’s status as a felon. “I took on perpetrators of all kinds,” she declared in her first campaign rally, at a gym in Milwaukee on Tuesday. “So hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.”

Let’s stop here for a second. The Supreme Court has said that abortion rights devolve to the state level. Although I agree with Harris that Roe should be the law of the land, even if Harris is elected how can she make Roe the law of the entire country?  It would require, I think, a constitutional amendment, and that isn’t going to happen. So making her “platform” the spread of abortion rights doesn’t seem sensible. But on with the Harvard professor:

But standing up to Mr. Trump and defending reproductive rights is not enough. To defeat him, Ms. Harris needs to address the legitimate grievances he exploits — the sense among many Americans, especially those without a college degree, that their voices aren’t heard, that their work isn’t respected and that elites look down on them. She needs a message that reconnects the Democratic Party with the working-class voters it has alienated in recent decades. Delivering this message may not come naturally to her as a former senator from California, and Mr. Trump has wasted no time attempting to brand her a “radical-left lunatic.” But if she wants to shape a progressive politics that can wrest the future from the MAGA movement, then she has to try. It could be the difference between victory and defeat this November.

. . .To begin addressing the anger and polarization gripping this country, Democrats need to recall what brought us to this volatile historical moment: An overwhelming majority of Americans — some 85 percent — believe that their leaders don’t care what they think and that they lack a meaningful say in shaping the forces that govern their lives.

This sense of disempowerment underlies the Republicans’ most potent issues in this campaign: inflation and immigration.

If Ms. Harris continues to repeat economic facts without acknowledging most voters’ feelings, she will fail to address the mood of discontent that has her running just behind Mr. Trump in the polls. Low unemployment, robust job growth, rising wages — by the usual metrics, the economy has been a success during the Biden years. And yet inflation looms so large for voters that most disapprove of the president’s handling of the economy. Why? Because inflation is not merely about the price of eggs. Many voters experience it as an assault on their agency, a daily marker of their powerlessness: No matter how hard I work or how much I make, I can’t get ahead or even keep up.

And why was the surge in illegal border crossings so troubling, even for voters who live far from the southern border? Not because they believe Mr. Trump’s florid demagogy about criminals, rapists and residents of mental hospitals pouring in but because they see a country unable to control its borders as a country unable to control its destiny — and as a country that treats strangers better than some of its citizens.

To me this seems exactly right. The problem is that these stands are not characteristic of the Democrats in general or of Biden in particular, and so Harris would be forced to explain what looks to the electorate like a pandering pivot (and in fact that’s what it will be). Trump on the other hand, has been banging this drum for years, and his choice of Vance was made explicitly to that end. Vance can’t be accused of a sudden volte-face to pander to the electorate, but Harris would certainly be hammered by the Democrats for hypocrisy of she suddenly became the Candidate of the Middle Class and Poor.

*A new Wall Street Journal poll shows that Harris has effectively erased Trump’s lead, so that the candidates are tied as of now:

The presidential race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump is essentially tied, according to a new Wall Street Journal poll that shows heightened support for her among nonwhite voters and dramatically increased enthusiasm about the campaign among Democrats.

The former president leads the current vice president 49% to 47% in a two-person matchup, but that is within the margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points. Trump held a six-point lead earlier this month over President Biden before he exited the race and backed Harris.

On a ballot test that included Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other independent and third-party candidates, Harris receives 45% and Trump gets 44%. Kennedy is backed by just 4% and 5% remain undecided. Biden trailed in the multicandidate contest by six points in the last poll.

Harris has made strides in reassembling the coalition that put Biden in the White House in 2020, one that had been fraying under the stress of unease about his physical and mental sharpness. Black, Latino and young voters all showed greater support for her than they did for Biden in a Journal survey taken in the days after his disastrous debate performance on June 27.

A reshuffling of the demographic mix of Democratic support could alter the states where Harris might be competitive against Trump, a Republican running for a third time. Greater backing among nonwhite voters could help her in the more racially and ethnically diverse battleground states—Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and North Carolina—where Biden was struggling.

Harris is supported by 63% of nonwhite voters in the two-way race, up from the 51% Biden had in the last WSJ poll. While an improvement for Harris, her support is still below the 73% of nonwhite voters who, according to exit polls, backed Biden in 2020 when he narrowly won the White House.

The vice president is drawing a larger share of young voters, those under age 30, than Biden was earlier this month. But she still has less support among them than he did in his narrow 2020 victory.

These were the data as of yesterday afternoon:

This could be a temporary bounce or it could reflect a permanent change, with the race remaining too close to call right up to finish line. All we can do is wait and see.

*The Olympics have started with a stupendous opening ceremony on the Seine, even in the rain, including Snoop Dogg carrying the Olympic flame—which happens what looks like a huge blunt (see last tweet below)—and, to Matthew’s annoyance, an Olympic flame that isn’t even a flame!

The main Olympic results from CNN:

I was rooting for Ledecky, who had won 11 Olympic medals, seven of which were gold (I’m not sure the bronze from yesterday is in that total). And of course all eyes are on Simone Biles, who staged a remarkable recovery after pulling out of the last Olympics, and now seems to be in excellent form.

*Speaking of the Olympics, the AP has two more stories of interest:

First, an Aussie field-hockey player had part of his finger amputated so he could compete in the games. As far as I know, this is a precedent:

Olympians come in all shapes and sizes. Rarely do they come deliberately amputated.

Australia field hockey player Matthew Dawson took his determination to compete in the Paris Olympics to another level by amputating part of a finger to ensure he’s able to take part.

The 30-year-old Dawson severely injured the ring finger on his right hand two weeks ago in practice. Surgery would have required months of recovery time, jeopardizing his likelihood of being ready for the Olympics.

Captain Aran Zalewski said teammates were shocked. Dawson’s wife warned against making any “rash choice.” Despite that, Dawson told 7News in Australia he made “an informed decision.”

Considering himself “very fortunate that it’s just a little bit of my finger,” Dawson views this sacrifice as part of the commitment required to pursue his “Olympic dream” — much like the years of practice and tough personal decisions that define an athlete’s life.

Second, Canada, of all countries, has been penalized in Olympic women’s soccer for spying on an opposing team using drones!

FIFA deducted six points from Canada in the Paris Olympics women’s soccer tournament and banned three coaches for one year each on Saturday in a drone-spying scandal.

The stunning swath of punishments include a 200,000 Swiss francs ($226,000) fine for the Canadian soccer federation in a case that has spiraled at the Summer Games. Two assistant coaches were caught using drones to spy on opponent New Zealand’s practices before their opening game last Wednesday.

Head coach Bev Priestman, who led Canada to the Olympic title in Tokyo in 2021, already was suspended by the national soccer federation then removed from the Olympic tournament.

Priestman and her two assistants implicated in the case, Joseph Lombardi and Jasmine Mander, are now banned from all soccer for one year.

FIFA fast-tracked its own disciplinary process by asking its appeals judges to handle the case.

As head of state, I think Justin Trudeau holds the ultimate responsibility for this reprehensible and unsportswomanlike conduct, and should be forced to resign.

*According to The Jerusalem Post, a rocket struck an Israeli soccer field in the northern part of the country, killing 12 people—including children and teenagers (all the dead were 20 or younger). At least 30 were wounded. It was a Druze town, which means the inhbitants were Arab Israelis. That could account for the terrorists retracting their responsibility (see below).

Following a direct hit in the area of Majdal Shams, a Druze village, on Saturday evening, nine  [now 12] were killed, among them children and teenagers between the ages of 10 and 20. Dozens were wounded to varying degrees and were transported to hospitals by Magen David Adom teams and IDF helicopters, Magen David Adom said in a statement.

The rocket hit a soccer field near a playground.

According to an IDF situational assessment and IDF intelligence, the rocket launch toward Majdal Shams was carried out by the Hezbollah terrorist organization, the IDF reported.

A senior official from Lebanon’s Hezbollah group, Mohammad Afif, told Reuters on Saturday that the group was not responsible for the strike.

Upon arrival at the scene, senior MDA medic Idan Avshalom stated, “We arrived at the soccer field and saw destruction and items on fire. Victims were lying on the grass, and the scenes were difficult. We immediately began triaging the injured. Some of the injured were taken to local clinics, and our teams were directed to those clinics as well. During the incident, there were additional alerts, and medical treatment for the injured is still ongoing.”

. . . The residents of several localities in Northern Galilee were told to stay near shelters, including in Nimrod, Neve Ativ, Odem, El-Rom, Merom Golan, Ein Zivan, Ortal, Sha’al, Qela Alon, and Ramat Trump Heights, according to military guidelines, following several barrages of rockets. Additionally, Wast Junction and Brown Junction in the area are closed to vehicle traffic.

In the most recent barrage of rockets since the hit in Majdal Shams, 100 rockets were reportedly fired, according to the Hezbollah-affiliated Al-Mayadeen network.

Earlier, a barrage of rockets was fired Saturday evening toward Neve Ativ at 5:55 p.m., which included approximately 10 projectiles from Lebanon, the IDF reported. All projectiles fell in open areas and there were no injuries reported.

This is a huge deal, not only because it was children who were killed, but because rockets have come from Lebanon ever since October 7, and up to now Israel has retaliated by simply trying to take out the missile sites. Only one or two people have been killed since the Iron Dome has taken down the missiles (Israel doesn’t ever fire at Lebanon first.)

Now we have a larger death toll, and Malgorzata says that “Israel must do something bigger now.”  As the Times of Israel reports:

An Israeli security source is quoted by Sky News Arabic as saying Israel will respond forcefully to the deadly Hezbollah rocket strike on Majdal Shams, “but we don’t intend to spark a war.”

Although Hamas has a presence—and weapons—in Lebanon, it’s fairly certain that the rockets came from Hezbollah. First, there’s this:

Iran-backed Hezbollah has denied responsibility for the deadly attack, but the IDF and US intelligence have stated that the terror group fired the deadly projectile.

And then an admission of responsibility, followed quickly by a denial of responsibility—probably when the terrorists learned they had actually killed Arabs. “The Islamic Resistance” is a slogan used by Hezbollah.

Admission and then sudden denial, both reported by a Lebanese site sympathetic to Iran:

I remember when Biden said last year that the U.S. would prevent any other country from taking advantage of Hamas’s attack on Israel, but so far he’s done absolutely nothing about these repeated war crimes (forbidden by a binding UN Security Council resolution) from Hezbollah. But now his administration says this:

The Biden administration is concerned that today’s deadly Hezbollah strike could spark an all-out war between Israel and the Iran-backed terror group, an administration official tells Axios.

“What happened today could be the trigger we have been worried about and tried to avoid for 10 months,” says the official.

What it’s really saying seems to be this, “Hey Israel: don’t do anything except fire a few rockets back as per usual. If there’s a big war now, it’ll be Israel’s fault.” Maybe if Biden had kept his word and gone after Hezbollah months ago with sanctions or threats, Israel wouldn’t be facing this now.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the cats are trekking:

Hili: We are going east.
Szaron: What do you mean, east?
Hili: East from the western hedge.
In Polish:
Hili: Idziemy na wschód.
Szaron: Na na jaki wschód?
Hili: Na wschód od zachodniego żywopłotu.

And here is Jango, reader Divy’s tabby, who has a beautiful ticked coat:

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From Philip Anderson in The Absurd Sign Project Censored 2. This must have been a Hispanic driver:

From Cat Memes:

From Dotty Jo Van Pelt at Strange, Stupid, or Silly Signs:

From Masih: another Iranian woman arrested, this time for filming the morality police harassing her for not wearing hijab. And if you read the long tweet, the woman was forced to “confess” and to repudiate Masih, who of course is now living undercover. On the right, she must have cut off her hair in protest.

From Luana: transwomen go to other countries where they’re allowed to compete against biological women, thereby creating an unfair situation for natal women.  Athletic associations are cottoning onto this stuff and starting to put restrictions or bans on transwomen competing in women’s sports:

From Malcolm, a fake but funny meme:

I’m a big fan of Larry, the Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office, and am glad to hear he’s okay (Larry is now a Senior Mouser at 17 years old):

This is ineffably sad and made me weep, but such is life—and its end:

From the Auschwitz Memorial: one I retweeted:

Tweets from Professor Cobb.  Here’s a musical family making fun of J. D. Vance to the tune of ABBA’s “Dancing Queen”:

I tweeted something like this and though I was original in noticing it.  How stupid to think that I’d be the only one!

And a special tweet on Crick’s birthday:

Caturday felid trifecta: Larry, the world’s most-cited cat; testing a cat’s agility limits; why cats steal; and lagniappe

July 27, 2024 • 10:30 am

This will be the last Caturday felid for a while because I’ll be in the air heading to Africa a week from today.  I’ll be gone for a month, and don’t know how often I’ll have internet.  However, Matthew has vowed to continue Hili’s daily dialogue.

Cat posts will resume when I return. As always, I do my best.

The first item today reports a well-cited cat but also demonstrates the weakness of the scientific citation system against scams.  The article below (see also this article from ZME Science)  is from the website of Reese Richardson, a “a PhD candidate working in metascience and computational biology at Northwestern University.”

Click to read how Reese used this scam to get his cat to have a huge rate of citation as author of scientific papers:

Reese saw the ad above on Google Scholar and it turned out to advertise a service that “helped” scientists to manufacture fake citations of their papers—for a price. As Richardson notes:

The advertisement links to several success stories consisting of unredacted “before” and “after” screenshots of clients’ Google Scholar profiles. These clients had apparently bought anywhere between 50 and 500 citations each. Of 18 apparent previous clients, 11 still had active Google Scholar profiles that we could visit. All identifiable clients were affiliated with Indian universities except for two: one client affiliated with a university in Oman and one client in the United States. Although the advertisement also mentions Scopus, we did not find evidence of this company successfully boosting these clients’ Scopus citation counts.

Here’s how it worked:

How was this company so effective at manipulating citation counts? For some clients, a wealth of citations came from dozens of papers in the same suspicious journal. These were probably papers on which the company had sold authorship. In one instance, the highest numbered reference in the text of the paper was Reference 40, while the reference list extended up to Reference 53. References 48 through 53 were to the client.

For most other clients, the scheme was more brazen. Inspecting citations to these clients revealed dozens of papers authored by such celebrated names as Pythagoras, Galileo, Taylor and Kolmogorov. The papers were not published in any journal or pre-print server, only uploaded as PDF files to ResearchGate, the academic social networking site. They had since been deleted from ResearchGate, but Google Scholar kept them indexed. Although the abstracts contain text relevant to their titles, the rest of the paper was usually complete mathematical gibberish. We quickly recognized that these papers had been generated by Mathgen (a few years back, Guillaume Cabanac and Cyril Labbé flagged hundreds of ostensibly peer-reviewed papers generated by Mathgen and its relative SCIgen).

At this realization, this company’s citation-boosting procedure fell into sharp focus:

  1. Get contracted by a client.
  2. Auto-generate several nonsense papers with Mathgen [Optional: change the titles and abstracts to something more plausible for the citation context].
  3. Insert citations to several of the client’s papers at a random point in the nonsense paper.
  4. Upload the nonsense papers to ResearchGate.
  5. Wait for Google Scholar to index the nonsense papers and their citations to the client.
  6. Congratulate the client on their newfound academic clout [Optional: delete the nonsense papers from ResearchGate].

The upshot: Richardson, knowing how to do this for free, decided to make Larry, his grandmother’s cat, a highly cited researcher.  In fact, for a short while Larry was the most highly-cited cat in the world. Here he is with Reese’s dad (photo from website):

Out of all the cats with human-ish names in our lives, “Larry Richardson” sounded the most like a tweedy academic and thus was a natural candidate for the title of world’s highest cited cat. As far as we could tell, the standing record-holder was F.D.C. Willard, a Siamese cat named Chester whose owner Jack H. Hetherington added him as an author on a physics paper because he had accidentally written the paper in the first person plural (“we, our”) instead of the first person singular (“I, my”). Chester went on to author one more paper and a book chapter under this name, which have since accumulated 107 citations according to Google Scholar. This was the bar to clear.

And so Reese fabricated 12 papers with his cat namesake as author and went through the procedure above, uploading the fake papers to ResearchGate. Eventually, Larry got 132 citations!:

Larry Richardson is officially history’s highest cited cat (according to Google Scholar, at least).

Notice the cat photo, which should have been a giveaway:

And the point:

Of course, this isn’t about making a cat a highly cited researcher. Our efforts (about an hour of non-automated work) were to make the same point as the authors of this aptly titled pre-print: Google Scholar is manipulatable. Despite the conspicuous vulnerabilities of Google Scholar (and ResearchGate), the quantitative metrics calculated by these services are routinely used to evaluate scientists.

Of course revealing the scam had the predictable consequences: Google removed all of Larry’s citations, though not the fake papers in which he was cited. As Reese says, “Larry held the title of world’s highest cited cat for exactly one week.”  Who knows how many other fake cat authors lurk in the crannies of Google Scholar?

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Here’s a video from FB of an agile cat. It didn’t make it through the 5 cm (about two-inch) slot, but simply jumped over the whole apparatus.

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As you’ve seen on this site several times, cats sometimes take up a life of crime, purloining socks, toys, shoes, and even underwear, and stashing the goods or bringing them home. The Guardian takes up the vexing questions of Why Cats Steal (click on screenshot below):

The answer: “We don’t know”:

The thieves went for particular items. Day after day, they roamed the neighbourhood and returned home to dump their loot. Before long they had amassed an impressive haul: socks, underpants, a baby’s cardigan, gloves and yet more socks.

It’s not unusual for cats to bring in dead or petrified mice and birds, but turning up with random objects is harder to explain. Researchers suspect a number of causes, but tend to agree on one point: the pilfered items are not presents.\

“We are not sure why cats behave like this,” says Auke-Florian Hiemstra, a biologist at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center, a museum in Leiden. “All around the world there are cats doing this, yet it has never been studied.” He now hopes that will change.

Apparently a cat mom can even teach their offspring to steal, something that’s new to me:

The clothing crime spree, perpetrated this year by a mother and her two offspring in the small town of Frigiliana in Spain, has made neighbourly interactions somewhat awkward for their keeper, Rachel Womack. But for scientists such as Hiemstra, it has provided fresh impetus to study the animals. “I want to know exactly why they do it,” he says. “And documenting cases like this could be the start of more research in the future.”

And theft can be on a grand (larceny) scale:

More pressing for Womack is how to return the stolen stuff. Daisy, Dora and Manchita can bring in more than 100 items a month. One recent arrival was a little stuffed bear. Before that, a baby’s shoe. Returning the items, without knowing the rightful owners, isn’t proving easy. “She’s just annoyed,” says Geene. “There are so many, she doesn’t know how to give them back.”

The Frigiliana three are repeat offenders, but they are not the only cats to be rumbled. Charlie, a rescue cat from Bristol, was dubbed the most prolific cat burglar in Britain after bringing home plastic toys, clothes pegs, a rubber duck, glasses and cutlery. His owner, Alice Bigge, once woke to a plastic diplodocus, one of many nabbed from a nearby nursery, next to her head on the pillow. It reminded her of the infamous scene in The Godfather. She puts the items on a wall outside for owners to reclaim.

Another cat, Dusty from San Mateo in California, had more than 600 known thefts, once returning with 11 items on one night. His haul included Crocs, a baseball cap and a pair of swimming trunks. The bra found in the house was fortunately spotted on a video of Dusty coming in. In a feat of accidental social commentary, another cat, Cleo from Texas, came home with a computer mouse.

Several theories are floated, including cats liking the smell, disliking the smell and wanting to remove stinky objects form their territories, looking for attention, engaging in mock hunting, or simply playing.  I can see how to test some of these theories, but not all, and the ultimate explanation is untestable:

Jemma Forman, a doctoral researcher at the University of Sussex who has studied cats playing fetch, agrees that the pets do not come bearing gifts. She says: “When it comes to cats, normally the explanation is they’re doing it for themselves.”

That’s a bit tautological, as there must be some “reason” embedded in the cat’s neurons, but it could be inaccessible.

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From Letters of Note, here’s a cat-related missive from the famous Nikola Tesla of electricity fame.

I must tell you a strange and unforgettable experience that stayed with me all my life. . .

It happened that one day the cold was drier than ever before. People walking in the snow left a luminous trail behind them, and a snowball thrown against an obstacle gave a flare of light like a loaf of sugar cut with a knife. In the dusk of the evening, as I stroked [my cat] Macak’s back, I saw a miracle that made me speechless with amazement. Macak’s back was a sheet of light and my hand produced a shower of sparks loud enough to be heard all over the house.

My father was a very learned man; he had an answer for every question. But this phenomenon was new even to him. “Well,” he finally remarked, “this is nothing but electricity, the same thing you see through the trees in a storm.”

My mother seemed charmed. “Stop playing with this cat,” she said. “He might start a fire.” But I was thinking abstractedly. Is nature a gigantic cat? If so, who strokes its back? It can only be God, I concluded. Here I was, only three years old and already philosophising.

However stupefying the first observation, something still more wonderful was to come. It was getting darker, and soon the candles were lighted. Macak took a few steps through the room. He shook his paws as though he were treading on wet ground. I looked at him attentively. Did I see something or was it an illusion? I strained my eyes and perceived distinctly that his body was surrounded by a halo like the aureola of a saint!

I cannot exaggerate the effect of this marvellous night on my childish imagination. Day after day I have asked myself “what is electricity?” and found no answer. Eighty years have gone by since that time and I still ask the same question, unable to answer it.

Nikola Tesla
Letter to Pola Fotić4
23rd July 1938

This reminds me of a line from the best cat poem ever written, “For I will consider my cat Jeoffry,” by Christopher Smart:

For by stroking of him I have found out electricity.

Read that poem if you haven’t yet. It may have been written in the throes of mental illness, as Smart was confined in an asylum when he wrote it, but I haven’t seen a better paean to cats.

h/t: Ginger K., Gregory

Reader’s wildlife videos

July 27, 2024 • 8:15 am

We have one more batch of photos in the tank, but fortunately we have Tara Tanaka’s videos.

Here’s what Tara said about this video of wood storks (Mycteria americana) in a rookery.  The baby is adorable:

We got a sit on top kayak that I can shoot from and I’ve been going out every couple of week at sunrise and shooting video.  Here’s one from a month ago.  The rookery is SO loud!

Saturday: Hili dialogue

July 27, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to CaturSaturday July 27, 2024, and both National Scotch Day and National Crème Brûlée Day.  For the former, I’ll have a Springbank, and I’ll eat the latter but always think that the portions of Crème Brûlée are too small.  Now they caramelize the top with a blowtorch, as in this photo from Wikipedia:

cyclonebill from Copenhagen, Denmark, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also Bagpipe Appreciation Day, National Chicken Finger Day, National Day of the American Cowboy, National Drowning Prevention Day, and, in Puerto Rico, José Celso Barbosa Day, celebrating the father of the statehood movement in Puerto Rico, born on this day in 1857.

There’s a Google Doodle today marking a new Olympic event. Click on it to see where it goes:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the July 27 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

Content warning: today’s section contains criticism of the Democratic Party and its Presidential candidate. This is not to be construed as support for Trump but as disappointment with my own party.  If you think Kamala Harris is the political equivalent of Wonder Woman, it’s best to skip today’s nooz.

*Over at TGIF, Suzy Weiss present Nellie Bowles’s weekly news summary, poking a bit of fun at Kamala Harris in the title: the column is called “TGIF: The week unburdened by the week that has been.” As usual, I present three of TGIF’s entries:

→ Okay, but now we’re all thinking it: J.D. [Vance] definitely did not have sex with a couch, and it would be ridiculous to suggest he did have sex with one, so everyone please stop saying that J.D. had a relationship with that brown sectional over there. A bizarre AP headline, “No, J.D. Vance Did Not Have Sex with a Couch,” was meant to fact-check claims that in his book, a young J.D., with a rubber glove and a dream, tried to have a baby with two couch cushions. Which turned out to be totally made up. But then the AP took down the article, which on one hand might be them trying to claw back the silly “fact check” altogether, but on the other makes it seem like they are retracting the fact that he definitely didn’t have sex with a couch! I’m exhausted, but now I feel weird about taking a nap in the living room.

 → Is Josh Shapiro too Jewish? One name high on Harris’s shortlist is Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania. Shapiro would make a lot of sense. No state is more important to Kamala’s chances than Pennsylvania, where Shapiro’s approval ratings are through the sloped roof. He is also a moderate capable of talking about Republicans like they are human beings. (Watch his tribute to Corey Comperatore, the firefighter and father murdered in the Trump rally shooting.) What’s not to like? Describing the pros and cons of picking Shapiro, CNN’s John King said, “He’s a first-term governor, he’s Jewish, there could be some risks in putting him on the ticket.” Is the election on Rosh Hashanah or something?

To understand what King, however inelegantly, was getting at, look no further than an article in The New Republic by David Klion. Klion says that Shapiro has been “egregiously bad on Palestine” and that his selection therefore threatens the unity of the Democratic Party. Klion’s evidence of this egregious badness relates not to Shapiro’s record on the actual war in Gaza (not something that state governors really have much say over), but the tough line he has taken with anti-Israel activism. You see, Shapiro dared to suggest that campus encampments aren’t great. And as Pennsylvania attorney general, he targeted BDS campaigns because they are “rooted in antisemitism.” Which they are. It seems that Klion’s understanding of “egregiously bad on Palestine” is just “pretty good on antisemitism.” But we wouldn’t want to upset the Iranians, uh, I mean the base.

It’s sad that Shapiro is criticized as “bad on Palestine” when, in fact, I see the opposite. Klion’s remarks exemplify some of the rot infecting the Democratic Party.  Have a look at the New Republic article, a publication that I’m now ashamed to have written for. Here’s part of Klion’s article:

Unfortunately, Shapiro also stands out among the current field of potential running mates as being egregiously bad on Palestine. It’s not just that he, like many Democrats, is an outspoken supporter of Israel—though he certainly is, having championed Israel’s war against Hamas consistently and without any apparent concern for Palestinian civilians. Shapiro has, moreover, done far more than most Democrats to attack pro-Palestine antiwar demonstrators, in ways that call into question his basic commitment to First Amendment rights.’

Back to the Free Press:

→ Kamala is brat, Biden is boots, please God send the asteroid today: I’ve learned the hard way—and by that I mean my parents once asked me what “WAP” meant—that certain things should never be explained with words. It’s not that it’s impossible, it’s just that it embarrasses everyone.

That’s how I feel about the whole Kamala-is-brat thing. Brat is a good album about partying and getting older and having anxiety that was released earlier this summer by Charli XCX. But it’s since been adopted by too-online and very young people as a personality, and by Kamala Harris’s campaign as a mode to relate to those very young people. Her campaign is leaning into the whole green look of the album to try and win over Gen Z, and generally recasting her many viral moments—“You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” “I love Venn diagrams” “What can be, unburdened but what has been”—as calling cards. It’s like when Hillary went on Broad City, only this time more cringe.

And now we have Jake Tapper and Greg Gutfeld grappling with the “essence” and the “aesthetic” and overall vibe of brat girl summer. We used to be a serious country. We used to make things.

Here’s the thing about Kamla: she is hilarious and campy, but unintentionally so. Any goodwill that her goofy dances or weird turns of phrase garner should be considered bonus points, not game play. Was there ever any doubt that Fire Island would go blue? We’ve been debating whether Kamala’s meme campaign is a good move for her prospects in the Free Press Slack, and here I’ll borrow from my older and wiser colleague Peter Savodnik: “There is nothing more pathetic than an older person who cares what a younger person thinks is cool.”

*Is the Democratic Party becoming the anti-Israeli party, or even he party of antisemitism, like Labour used to be in the UK? I’m, by no means a fan of Netanyahu, but it seems to me uncivil to invite him to address a joint session of Congress and then walk out when he’s speaking or, like the execrable Rashida Tlaib, hold up signs with the false accusation of genocide. A tweet:

From Nancy Pelosi, who doesn’t seem to realize what a ceasefire really entails (she also boycotted Netanyahu’s talk). I retweeted it:

The extreme American Left is, of course, what they call “anti-Zionist,” but videos like the one below, which Andrzej posted, make it clear that “anti-Zionism” is really a euphemism for “antisemitism”, as sympathy for Palestine has morphed into sympathy for Hamas. Hamas! The “progressive” left has been captured by sympathy for terrorists  And I disagree with the video’s claim that vandalism or assaulting cops should be permitted as “freedom of speech”. Signs, permitted demonstrations, yes, and also flag burning. Those are all examples of freedom of speech. Breaking the law, however, is “civil disobedience.”

From Brendan O’Neill in Spiked:

What would you call a gathering of angry people marching behind a giant, grotesque effigy of a horned Jew with blood dripping from his mouth? A gathering at which one attendee held up a placard calling for a ‘Final Solution’ for ‘the Zionists’? A gathering at which people giddily waved the flag of a movement that is devoted to the murder of Jews? A gathering at which there were banners and speedily daubed graffiti on public monuments singing the praises of this Jew-killing outfit? I would call it a fascist rally. And yet, bizarrely, when just such a rally took place in Washington, DC yesterday, the liberal media called it an ‘anti-war protest’. Were they watching something else?

Let’s speak frankly: yesterday’s protests in Washington, DC against the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, were deeply disturbing. They were riddled not only with the febrile Israelophobic bigotry we’ve come to expect from the supposedly progressive left, but also with open anti-Semitism. With classic anti-Semitism. With expressions of virulent contempt for the Jew as blood-drinker, the Jew as child-killer, the Jew as such a key source of the world’s ills that a ‘solution’, ideally a ‘final’ one, must be found to his continual ailing of the human race. This was a hate-fest masquerading as concern for Palestinians.

Consider what many in the press are referring to as ‘the Netanyahu puppet’. What cowardly euphemising. This was no mere mocking likeness of the Israeli PM – it was a repulsive caricature of The Jew. Displayed outside Congress, where Netanyahu was speaking, it contained almost every anti-Jew trope. Blood-spattered horns sprouted from the Jew’s head. His hands and mouth were generously smeared with fake blood, as if this creature had freshly feasted on human flesh. His white shirt was red with blood, too – the spillage from his vampiric gorging.

It was right out of Medieval Europe, where eruptions of anti-Semitism were fuelled by ‘folk beliefs’ about Jews having ‘horns and big noses’.

. . . Protesters scrawled graffiti all over the Columbus statue in Union Square. One of the scribbled defacements said: ‘Hamas is coming.’ Seeing self-styled radicals applaud a reactionary army of Jew-haters who would hurl every they / them from a 10th-floor window faster than you could say ‘Queers for Palestine!’ would be funny if it were not so revealing of the crisis of our own civilisation. Writing ‘Hamas is coming’ on a public monument is not protest – it’s Jew-taunting. It’s a gross threat to the Jews of DC that the monsters who killed a thousand of their co-religionists nine months ago might come for them next. It’s the moral equivalent of writing ‘The KKK is coming’. It’s worse, in fact, given that the last time racist Klansmen lynched a black person was in 1981, whereas the racists of Hamas lynched a thousand Jews as recently as October.

Here’s a photo of the Netanyahu (and antisemitic) puppet referred to by O’Neill (there’s no credit so I can’t give credit to the photographer):

WASHINGTON, DC – JULY 24: Activists carry a puppet of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a protest near the U.S. Capitol on July 24, 2024 in Washington, DC. Activists staged multiple protests near the Capitol to protest the visit of Netanyahu to Washington and to protest the war in Palestine. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

*And Kamala Harris, who is very likely to be considerably less sympathetic to Israel than was Biden, is already taking the hard line against Israel. She’s made the Pelosi Mistake of thinking that a cease-fire will end terrorism and bring peace to the Middle East. From the Times of Israel:

US Vice President Kamala Harris insisted Thursday that she would not be “silent” on suffering in Gaza while also touting her pro-Israel bona fides, in comments made shortly after meeting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Her remarks drew furious Israeli complaints that they could complicate efforts to reach a deal with the Hamas terror group to free hostages and end the war in Gaza.

Speaking to reporters after what she called a “frank and constructive” meeting with Netanyahu at the White House, Harris said it was time to end the “devastating” war sparked by the Hamas terror group’s brutal October 7 attack on Israel, in comments that some saw as a sign of a possible shift in Washington’s stance as the presumptive Democratic nominee for president takes center stage.

“What has happened in Gaza over the past nine months is devastating. The images of dead children and desperate hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes displaced for the second, third or fourth time,” Harris told reporters. “We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering and I will not be silent.”

. . .The vice president noted that she pressed Netanyahu on the “dire” situation in Gaza during their 40-minute meeting in Washington, while also stressing the importance of reaching a deal to free hostages and end the war.

Harris said she “expressed with the prime minister my serious concern about the scale of human suffering and Gaza, including the death of far too many innocent civilians. And I made clear my serious concern about the dire humanitarian situation there.”

And here is the most misguided thing she said:

“It is time for this war to end, and end in a way where Israel is secure, all the hostages are released, the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can exercise their right to freedom, dignity and self-determination,” Harris said.

Does VP Harris have a plan for how this is to happen? Does she think the war should end and leave Hamas in power? If so, how will Israel remain “secure”, especially since Hamas has vowed to enact another thousand episodes of the October 7 butchery.   And how can the Palestinian people exercise their “right to freedom” when they don’t have it now, as there hasn’t been an election in Gaza and the West Bank since 2006?  The Palestinian Authority still pays Palestinian terrorists who kill Jews, and UN-funded textbooks glorify the killing of Jews.  This doesn’t happen in Israel with respect to Palestinians.  Is Harris ignorant of all that?  I’d say “no, she can’t be,” but I’m not so sure. I think she’s trying to appeal to the “progressive” left.

And what does she mean by “far too many innocent civilians”, given that Hamas embeds itself among civilians and knew very well what would happen when it attacked Israel on October 7? Of course it horrible to have noncombant civilians killed, but sn’t a ratio of 1 to 1.3 dead Gazans to dead Hamas combatants—a ratio far lower than in any war seen to date—bespeak the care with which the IDF is going after Hamas? No, because Harris is victim of Left-wing anti-Israeli sentiments, and apparently doesn’t realize what those figures mean. Sorry, but I’m plenty worried about how Harris, if she wins, will handle the war. Of course I’m not worried enough to vote for Trump.

*Andrew Sullivan weighs in on the Democratic candidate in his Weekly Dish column called “The Kamala Chimera” and subtitled, “The Dems’ weakest and wokest candidate becomes the nominee.” He gives plenty of links so you can check out his claims. And there’s a lot more to the piece than I’ve excerpted here:

With Harris, amnesia is essential. We all have to become unburdened by what we — and, more specifically she — have been. And beneath the enthusiasm linger some obvious, loud, unanswered questions. Why did Biden so quickly put his weight behind a vice president he had previously ignored, sidelined, and regarded — according to almost every media outlet — as something of a burden? Why has Obama taken his sweet time to endorse her, after calling for an open nominating process? And why did no other viable candidate come forward to challenge her?

The official answer is that a Harris nomination avoided a mess at the convention, quickly united and energized the party, safeguarded Biden’s war chest, and solidified the demographics of the base. Fair enough, and it seems to have worked (although I suspect a little chaos and a fresh face emerging from the convention would still have been preferable).

But there are other plausible explanations for Harris’ unexpectedly sudden dominance. Could it be that Biden and all of Harris’ rivals still expect to lose in November, and Harris is a useful sacrificial lamb? Or that Biden suspects that a Harris defeat would vindicate him in retrospect? Or that the Dem governors knew it would be political death to challenge a black, female candidate for president in a woke party, and see 2028 as by far their best shot?

I suspect it’s a mix of all of the above — and not quite the strategic breakthrough some may want it to be.

Some of the many issues Sullivan raises, which I’m glad because I don’t have to do it:

Her record on the national stage — from 2019 till now — is that of a super-woke leftist. In speech after speech, and in an ad she narrated just before the 2020 election, she insists on the need for “equity” as well as “equality,” and by “equity” she means that “everyone ends up in the same place.” She is a presidential candidate who endorses “equality of outcomes” over “equality of opportunity,” a position that even Communist China has now abandoned.

One moment in her catastrophic 2020 campaign for the Dem nomination also stood out for me. There was a discussion in a debate about issuing an executive order that would ban all assault weapons. Biden made the simple point that this was not within the president’s constitutional authority: “There are some things you can do [as president]. Many things you can’t.” Harris replied, giggling: “I would just say, Hey Joe, instead of saying no we can’t, let’s say yes we can. And yes we can!” As she said this, she burst into hysterical laughter. Go watch the clip. She’s not a serious person.

In the only primaries outside California she campaigned in, she favored decriminalizing illegal border crossings and compared ICE to the KKK. On June 1, 2020, as BLM riots were so spreading out of control that even the NYT had an A1 story the day before — “Appeals for Calm as Sprawling Protests Threaten to Spiral Out of Control” — she tweeted out a bail fund for those arrested in the rioting, and urged people to donate. As the chaos surged in June, she told Stephen Colbert:

They’re not going to stop. This is a movement, I’m telling you. And everyone beware. They’re not gonna stop … They’re not going to let up and they should not. And we should not.

Also in June 2020, she said on national television, “It is outdated, and it is actually wrong and backward to think that more police officers will create more safety.”

Harris believes illegal aliens should get work authorization and free healthcare. She favors unproven, irreversible medical experiments on gay, autistic, and trans children. She favors, and the Biden administration has enforced, systemic government discrimination against men, whites, Jews and Asians to compensate for past discrimination against African-Americans and women. Her Senate record is one long series of DEI initiatives. And yes, Biden selected her using a DEI process: no men were to be considered, and in the hysteria of 2020, white women were also seen as no-go areas for the veep role.

Her record as vice president rivals Dan Quayle’s. Every single media outlet, including all the mainstream ones, said so until last week. No, she wasn’t given the formal title of “Border Czar,” because such a title doesn’t exist. But she was the administration’s “point-person” on immigration and the Southern border, as every media outlet also told us until this week. So she is strongly attached to the Democrats’ weakest issue by far: mass, illegal immigration.

After Sullivan brings up her notorious inability to run a staff because she alienates them all, he finishes this way.

But I’ll say this. Harris is one of the weakest and wokest Democratic candidates there is. She cannot credibly appeal to the center after such extreme-left posturing; she cannot run a campaign; she cannot run an executive office; she has never been able to win elections outside the left-liberal, one-party state of California; and she has nothing to offer to those of us who really, really don’t want to vote for Trump but don’t want to unburden ourselves of every moderate or conservative principle we ever had. Apart from that, she’s perfect.

Okay, I’ve had my say, somethings through others. Now for something a little lighter from the AP’s “Oddities” section. First, a food travesty: the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that “boneless” chicken wings can have bones!

Consumers cannot expect boneless chicken wings to actually be free of bones, a divided Ohio Supreme Court ruled Thursday, rejecting claims by a restaurant patron who suffered serious medical complications from getting a bone stuck in his throat.

Michael Berkheimer was dining with his wife and friends at a wing joint in Hamilton, Ohio, and had ordered the usual — boneless wings with parmesan garlic sauce — when he felt a bite-size piece of meat go down the wrong way. Three days later, feverish and unable to keep food down, Berkeimer went to the emergency room, where a doctor discovered a long, thin bone that had torn his esophagus and caused an infection.

Berkheimer sued the restaurant, Wings on Brookwood, saying the restaurant failed to warn him that so-called “boneless wings” — which are, of course, nuggets of boneless, skinless breast meat — could contain bones. The suit also named the supplier and the farm that produced the chicken, claiming all were negligent.

In a 4-3 ruling, the Supreme Court said Thursday that “boneless wings” refers to a cooking style, and that Berkheimer should’ve been on guard against bones since it’s common knowledge that chickens have bones. The high court sided with lower courts that had dismissed Berkheimer’s suit.

“A diner reading ‘boneless wings’ on a menu would no more believe that the restaurant was warranting the absence of bones in the items than believe that the items were made from chicken wings, just as a person eating ‘chicken fingers’ would know that he had not been served fingers,” Justice Joseph T. Deters wrote for the majority.

This is reprehensible.  Every sane person knows that chickens don’t have fingers, and, anyway, a misunderstanding of that nature wouldn’t be dangerous. On the other hand, thinking that boneless wings really were boneless can be dangerous, as it was to Mr. Berkheimer. The Ohio Supreme Court is even crazier than the U.S. Supreme Court!

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Szaron are plotting social justice:

Hili: We have to save the world!
Szaron: How?
Hili: By meowing. Everybody does it.
In Polish:
Hili: Musimy zbawić świat!
Szaron: Jak?
Hili: Miaucząc, wszyscy tak robią.

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

From Cat Memes:

From The Dodo Pet:

Reader (and origami master) Robert Lang also saw a “thing with faces” and reports this:

I’ve enjoyed the occasional “Things with Faces,” including today’s; and this evening I was sitting in my Mom’s hospital room and saw this on the wall:

Robert adds:

On the topic of pareidolia, I was really excited when I found what I thought was the face of Jesus on my grilled cheese sandwich the other day, but it turned out it was the face of his next-door neighbor Shmuel, which isn’t worth anything. So close!

From Masih, a women getting four years in prison for not wearing a hijab.  How oppressive can that country get? (sound up). Masih is the conduit of these videos to the West, which is why Iran keeps trying to kill her.

From Luana. Donalds is a Republican, but his words resonate with me.

From Malcolm. Cats and dogs hug! It’s the very fulfillment of the prophecy of Isaiah!

 

From my feed. If only ducks would do this!

Yes, this is a real lake, 40 m above the ocean. Read about it here.

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I tweeted:

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. I hope the owners recivered their d*g!

Matthew says, “Just as you begin to get bored, he nails it”:

Shorter version of the ideological capture of science funding by DEI

July 26, 2024 • 10:00 am

The other day I wrote about the paper below that has now appeared in Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics (click headline to read; download pdf here).

It detailed how, over time, federal grand funding by agencies like the NIH and NSF has gradually required statements from the applicants about how they will implement DEI in their grants or, for group or educational grants, will select candidates to maximize diversity and create “equity” (i.e., the representation of minoritized groups in research in proportion to their occurrence in the general population).

If reading the big paper is too onerous for you, one of the authors (Anna Krylov), along with Robert George (“a professor of jurisprudence and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University”) have published a short précis in The Chronicles of Higher Education, a site that usually doesn’t publish heterodox papers like this. You can read the shorter version simply by clicking on the screenshots below:

I won’t go through the whole argument, but will simply give an example of how each agency requires DEI input to create equity, and then show why the authors think this is bad for science and for society.

DEI statements have been made mandatory for both the granting agency and aspiring grantees, via two federal acts and the federal Office of Management and Budget:

. . .  a close look at what is actually implemented under the DEI umbrella reveals a program of discrimination, justified on more or less nakedly ideological grounds, that impedes rather than advances science. And that program has spread much more deeply into core scientific disciplines than most people, including many scientists, realize. This has happened, in large part, by federal mandate, in particular by two Executive Orders, EO 13985 and EO 14091, issued by the Biden White House.

. . . . As the molecular biologist Julia Schaletzky writes, “by design, many science-funding agencies are independent from the government and cannot be directed to do their work in a certain way.” So how do Biden’s executive orders have teeth? The answer: They are implemented through the budget process, a runaround meant, as Schaletzky says, to tether “next year’s budget allocation to implementation of ideologically driven DEI plans at all levels.”

One example of capture of each organization, but the paper gives more details:

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA):

For its part, NASA requires applicants to dedicate a portion of their research efforts and budget to DEI activities, to hire DEI experts as consultants — and to “pay them well.” How much do such services cost? A Chicago-based DEI firm offers training sessions for $500 to $10,000, e-learning modules for $200 to $5,000, and keynotes for $1,000 to $30,000. Consulting monthly retainers cost $2,000 to $20,000, and single “consulting deliverables” cost $8,000 to $50,000. Hence, taxpayer money that could be used to solve scientific and technological challenges is diverted to DEI consultants. Given that applicants’ DEI plans are evaluated by panels comprising 50 percent scientists and 50 percent DEI experts, the self-interest of the DEI industry is evident.

Department of Energy (DOE):

In a truly Orwellian manner, the DOE has pledged to “update [its] Merit Review Program to improve equitable outcomes for DOE awards.” Proposals seeking DOE funding must include a PIER (Promoting Inclusive and Equitable Research) plan, which is “encouraged” to discuss the demographic composition of the project team and to include “inclusive and equitable plans for recognition on publications and presentations.”

National Institutes of Health (NIH):

The National Institutes of Health’s BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) initiative requires applicants to submit a “Plan for Enhancing Diverse Perspectives (PEDP).” By “diverse perspectives,” the NIH explains that it means diverse demographics. In the agency’s own words, “PEDP is a summary of strategies to advance the scientific and technical merit of the proposed project through inclusivity. Broadly, diverse perspectives refer to the people who do the research, the places where research is done, as well as the people who participate in the research as part of the study population [emphasis ours].”

The NIH’s efforts toward advancing racial equity also offer an invitation to “Take the Pledge,” which includes committing to the idea that “equity, diversity, and inclusion drives success,” “setting up a consultation with an EDI [DEI] liaison,” and “ordering the ‘EDI Pledge Poster’ (or … creat[ing] your own) for your space.

Three years ago the NIH tried to incorporate DEI into its most widely-awarded grant, the “R01,” by asking investigators to give their race and then saying they’d fund some grants that didn’t make the merit cut but were proposed by minority investigators. But I guess they decided that awarding grants based on race, and discriminating against white investigators whose proposala had higher merit scores, was likely to be illegal. They quickly scrapped this program, but DEI, like the Lernaean Hydra, always grows a new head.  As you see, DEI back again in a more disguised form.

National Science Foundation (NSF):

Scientists applying to the National Science Foundation for what are known as Centers for Chemical Innovation grants must now provide a two-page Diversity and Inclusion Plan “to ensure a diverse and inclusive center environment, including researchers at all levels, leadership groups, and advisory groups.” They must also file an eight-page “broader impact” plan, which includes increasing participation by underrepresented groups. For comparison, the length of the scientific part of the proposal is 18 pages.

Those are the four largest grant-giving agencies in the federal government, and their largesse to science amounts to $90 billion per year.

Why is this DEI practice harmful? The authors give a handful of reasons:

These requirements to incorporate DEI into each research proposal are alarming. They constitute compelled speech; they undermine the academic freedom of researchers; they dilute merit-based criteria for funding; they incentivize unethical — and, indeed, sometimes illegal — discriminatory hiring practices; they erode public trust in science; and they contribute to administrative overload and bloat.

While well-intended, as are nearly all efforts to lend a hand to those disadvantaged by their backgrounds, most of these practices are probably illegal because they practice discrimination based on race or other immutable traits. The only reason DEI stipulations remain, I think, is because nobody has challenged them. To bring the agencies to court, one needs to demonstrate “standing”—that is, the investigator has to demonstrate that they have been hurt by the practices.  And, as you can imagine, finding someone like that would be hard, as they’d be forever tarred as racist.

Nevertheless, nobody wants to exclude minorities from science. But the paucity of black and Latino scientists is due not to “structural racism” in science (encoded rules that impede minorities), but to a lack of opportunity for disadvantaged groups starting at birth, which leads to lower qualifications. The way to solve this problem is to create equal opportunity for all, a solution that will solve the problem for good but is at present impossible to implement. Until then, all the granting system should do is cast a wider net, for the more people who apply for money, the greater the chance of finding more diverse people who pass the merit bar. And merit must remain the criterion for funding if we want to keep up the standard of American science. While I continue to believe in a form of affirmative action for college admissions, to me that’s where the buck stops. After that, all academic achievements should be judged without considering minority status.

And that seems to be happening, for in almost every venue, DEI efforts are waning.

Readers’ wildlife photos

July 26, 2024 • 8:15 am

We’ve been saved by the submission of two batches of photos, and as I go to South Africa for a month next week, photo posting will pause. I hope people will accumulate photos to send here during my absence (I will of course try to post.

Today’s photos are from Damon Williford, whose notes and IDs are indented. Click on the photos to enlarge them.

Attached are photos of various species of birds from my local area that I’ve taken this year between March and June. These photos were taken within a 120-mile radius of my home in Bay City on the central Texas coast (more or less equidistant between Houston and Corpus Christi).

Black-bellied Whistling Duck (Dendrocygna autumnalis):

Black-bellied Whistling Duck:

Mourning Dove (Zenaida macroura):

Black Vulture (Coragyps atratus):

Turkey Vulture (Cathartes aura):

Mississippi Kite (Ictinia mississippiensis), an adult:

Mississippi Kite, a fledgling:

Crested Caracara (Caracara plancus:

Snowy Plover (Charadrius nivosus):

Semipalmated Plover (Charadrius semipalmatus):

Ruddy Turnstones (Arenaria interpres):

Dunlin (Calidris alpina) developing breeding plumage:

Sanderling (Calidris alba) in breeding plumage:

Another Sanderling but a juvenile:

Willet (Tringa semipalmata):

Friday: Hili dialogue

July 26, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Friday, July 26, 2024, and National Bagelfest Day. Still, I will rant once again at the degradation of this Jewish foodstuff, meant to be smaller and chewier than the giant pillows of Wonder Bread that are proffered to the American public as “bagels.”  I’m not even sure if you can get the real ones in America anywhere now, but below is one with a schmear that I got in one of Montreal’s great bagel bakeries, where they boil them with water and honey and then bake them over a wood fire. My legs are to scale. Sesame seeds are permitted, but stuff like blueberries and chocolate chips are verboten.

It’s also National Coffee Milkshake Day, Aunts and Uncles Day, and World Tofu Day, and Esperanto Day, celebrating a language I once tried to learn, but that nobody speaks.

There’s a Google Doodle today. What do you think it’s honoring? Click to see:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the July 26 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*According to the NYT, and in line with a Supreme Court order allowing local removal of homeless camps, the governor of California is going to remove some of them.

Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered California state officials on Thursday to begin dismantling thousands of homeless encampments, the nation’s most sweeping response to a recent Supreme Court ruling that gave governments greater authority to remove homeless people from their streets.

Homeless encampments have vexed California, where housing costs are among the nation’s highest, more than any other state. An estimated 180,000 people were homeless last year in California, and most of them were unsheltered. Unlike New York City, most jurisdictions in California do not guarantee a right to housing.

Mr. Newsom, a Democrat, called on state and local leaders to “humanely remove encampments from public spaces” in an urgent manner, prioritizing those that most threaten health and safety.

His executive order could divide Democratic local leaders in California, some of whom have already begun to clear encampments while others have denounced the decision from conservative justices as opening the door to inhumane measures to solve a complex crisis.

The order also comes as Democrats are uniting around Vice President Kamala Harris, a former senator and prosecutor from California, to replace President Biden on the ballot this fall. Republicans have frequently pointed to homelessness in California as an example of the state’s purported decline under Mr. Newsom and other Democrats, and they are expected to do the same with Ms. Harris in the coming weeks.

The Supreme Court decision on June 28 upheld an Oregon city’s ban on homeless residents sleeping outdoors. The Court of Appeal for the Ninth Circuit had found in earlier opinions that it was unconstitutional to punish people for sleeping in public spaces when they had no other legal place to spend the night.

The article suggests, in the last bit, that Newsom is doing this now as a political move, to deflect criticism of Kamala Harris. I can’t believe that’s true, but I also feel sorry for the homeless people. I have read that many of them have been offered real housing that is not too shabby, but have refused. But many are also mentally ill, tossed out on the streets, and may not qualify for such housing.

*This is going to be a brutal campaign season. Kamala Harris’s sudden popularity has, as the WSJ editors admit, taken the Republicans by surprise, and the GOP is also using maladaptive criticisms, like going after Harris’s lack of children (WTF?). There will clearly be a substantial Democratic bounce in the next polls. But in its news section, the same paper says that there is going to be a “brutal Trump-Harris battle.”  That’s undoubtedly true, so keep your cool, folks:

Against the backdrop of a sitting president relinquishing his candidacy, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump escalated attacks on each other, setting up a brutal election campaign with either side painting the other as a threat to the country’s future.

Both Harris and the former president held events Wednesday, looking to make their case to the American people as the latest polls show a close contest—something the Trump campaign dismissed as a brief “honeymoon” for Harris.

Harris criticized Trump for handpicking three Supreme Court justices “because he intended for them to overturn Roe v. Wade.” Trump, in his first rally since Biden dropped out of the race, called Harris “a radical left lunatic who will destroy our country.”

Wednesday’s three-way montage of a lame-duck president, a vice president thrust to the top of the ticket overnight, and a recently shot former president seeking a comeback captured this remarkable moment in politics and the Democratic campaign that is suddenly invigorated by recent shake-ups.

Biden told the nation from the Oval Office that he left the race to defend democracy and that “the best way forward is to pass the torch to a new generation.” In his remaining time in office he said he would focus on several issues, including lowering costs and growing the economy.

I still haven’t listened to Biden’s speech, which apparently avoided his age issues, but listening right now would make me sad, and I need to keep an even keel before I leave the country. In the meantime, here’s Harris’s first campaign ad, which you can watch and comment on. Is it effective?

*I was trying to ratchet down coverage of politics, but that seems to be all that’s in the news. The WaPo, for instance, has a piece called “Why almost everyone assumes that Kamala Harris has to pick a White man as VP. Okay, I’ll bite, but I’m sick of vetting candidates by their ethnicity or gender.  To me, a woman President and a woman VP would be fine.

As soon as it became clear that Vice President Harris was going to emerge as the likely Democratic presidential nominee, a certain knowing joke emerged almost simultaneously on social media: images of various “whites” — white wines, white paint chips, white crackers — with captions implying that these were Harris’s vice-presidential choices.

“Kamala’s VP options,” posted one user on X, above an array of cream-colored paint samples labeled “Trustworthy Whites: 40 of our best whites.” “Kamala looking for a VP,” wrote another, above a photo of bottles of supermarket white wines labeled with an “Interesting Whites” sign. “Kamala’s menu of potential VPs,” posted a third, above a menu featuring descriptions ranging from “light crisp dry whites” to “rich whites.”

Even “The Daily Show” got in on the gag, repurposing the photo of Harris receiving the 2020 call from then-candidate Joe Biden that he had chosen her as his No. 2, with the caption: “Hello, is this the Midwest White Guy Emporium?”

If the tone was wry, it also reflected the near-instantaneous assessment that hardened among lawmakers in Washington, strategists and operatives throughout the country, as well as ordinary voters: that Harris, who is Black and Indian American and if elected would make history as the first female president, must choose someone White as her running mate — and preferably a White guy.

It remains unclear who Harris will ultimately alight on as her No. 2. Though the list of would-be contenders is heavy with White men — Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina, Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona and Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, to name a few — a few more diverse options, such as Govs. Wes Moore of Maryland and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, have also appeared.

But the degree and speed with which the conventional wisdom took hold — that if she wants to win, Harris must choose a White man as her vice president — reflects, at its most cynical, that the nation will tolerate only so much deviation from its White male founding, even as the overall political world is more diverse than ever.

“It is not surprising that the conventional wisdom would be we’ll put a woman at the top of the ticket, but there has to be — and I’m putting it in quotes here — ‘balance,’ which is always part of the equation,” said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.
Yes, racial and gender balance by all means. Yet it makes little sense unless you think that there are characteristics ubiquitous in every person of a given ethnicity or gender that would affect how they conduct the executive branch of government. I don’t buy that: it’s patronizing and sterotyping. If I had my druthers, Whitmer would be at the top of the ticket, but she’s a Gone Girl for at least four years.

*The Free Press has a piece called “Gaslighting the public on Kamala Harris as ‘Border Czar‘.” All of us remember when Harris was tasked with dealing with the southern border of the U.S., but now the MSM are pretending that that was all a lie.  This has really got me peeved at the liberal media trying to rewrite history as they did in Nineteen Eighty-Four. At least tell the truth!

On March 24, 2021, Axios published a story with the headline “Biden Puts Harris in Charge of Border Crisis.”

Politics reporter Stef W. Kight informed us that the vice president would be “addressing the migrant surge at the U.S.-Mexico border” and that Harris would “lead efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle (Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador) to manage the flow of unaccompanied children and migrant families arriving at the border in numbers not seen since a surge in 2019.”

Lest anyone wonder whether this was a big job with a great deal of responsibility, a White House official told reporters: “President Biden said during the transition, whatever the most urgent need, he would turn to the vice president, and today he is turning to the vice president.”

Today—July 24, 2024—the same reporter at the same outlet has a story headlined “Harris Border Confusion Haunts Her New Campaign.”

Kight now reports: “In early 2021, President Biden enlisted Vice President Kamala Harris to help with a slice of the migration issue.” (Emphasis mine.)

We are told that there is “confusion around the VP’s exact role” and that “early media misfires and the rapidly changing regional migration crisis has made the issue a top target for the GOP trying to define their new opponent. And it has become even more critical for Harris to find a clear border message, fast.” The story also quotes former Department of Homeland Security secretary Jeh Johnson: “She is not the border czar.”

. . . Nor was Axios alone in correcting the record when it came to Harris.

Time weighed in with its own dispatch (“Kamala Harris Was Never Biden’s ‘Border Czar’ ”), as did USA Today (“Harris’ Border Work Was on ‘Root Causes’ of Migration; She Wasn’t in Charge”), and CBS (“The Facts about Kamala Harris’ Role on Immigration in the Biden Administration”), and The New York Times (“Why Republicans Keep Calling Kamala Harris the ‘Border Czar’” ).

And on and on.

. . . It should be noted that all this is more than a little ridiculous, since no one in the United States government is technically a czar of anything. How does one “fact-check” that which is only an informal title?

Nevertheless, it was an informal title widely used. Here’s The New York Times in 2021: “Ms. Harris will also soon be taking over work from a departing official with years of experience. Last week, Roberta S. Jacobson, the former ambassador to Mexico chosen as Mr. Biden’s ‘border czar,’ said that she would retire from government. She said she was happy to see Ms. Harris assume the work of stemming migration from Central America.” And here’s The Washington Post that same year, describing the vice president as taking on “the lead role on the overall border and regional issue.”

Also worth noting is that all of this “reporting” has taken place without Harris having uttered a single word about her border-related responsibilities. In other words, nothing has actually happened other than Republicans calling Harris what Axios and other media outlets once called Harris. This is, as always, not about providing readers with much-needed news or analysis—but just making sure, in case anyone is worried—that journalists are still doing their all for Team Blue.

Below is my favorite newsman, Lester Holt, interviewing Harris about the border, and it’s clear that she was indeed tasked with tackling that issue (not necessarily solving it).

*Who says that AI is useless? Here we have a Representative, Jennifer Wexton (a Virginia Democrat), giving a speech on the House floor. Why this is remarkable is that she was robbed of her voice by a neurological disorder.  But AI has enabled her to give speeches in her former voice.

When Jennifer Wexton rose Thursday to speak on the House floor, something she has done countless times before, the congresswoman used a voice she thought was gone forever.

After a rare neurological disorder robbed her of her ability to speak clearly, Wexton has been given her voice back with the help of a powerful artificial intelligence program, allowing the Virginia Democrat to make a clone of her speaking voice using old recordings of speeches and appearances she made as a congresswoman. She used that program to deliver what is believed to be the first speech on the House floor ever given via a voice cloned by artificial intelligence.

“It was a special moment that I never imagined could happen. I cried happy tears when I first heard it,” Wexton told The Associated Press in the first interview she’s participated in since attaining her new voice.

Standing at a lectern on the floor, Wexton rose to commemorate Disability Pride Month, a time each July that aims to commemorate the Americans with Disabilities Act, the landmark 1990s civil rights law aimed at protecting Americans with disabilities. But her speech was also a symbol of her strength in the face of a debilitating disease.

“I used to be one of those people who hated the sound of my voice,” she remarked from the floor. “When my ads came on TV, I would cringe and change the channel. But you truly don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone, because hearing the new AI of my old voice for the first time was music to my ears. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard.”

Wexton’s voice now plays out of her iPad, propped up using a rainbow-colored floral case. During the interview at her dining room table in Leesburg, Virginia, the congresswoman typed out her thoughts, used a stylus to move the text around, hit play and then the AI program put that text into Wexton’s voice. It’s a lengthy process, so the AP provided Wexton with a few questions ahead of the interview to give the congresswoman time to type her answers.

Her disease is progressive supranuclear palsy, a progressive brain disease that usually kills its sufferers between 6 and 9 years from diagnosis. Poor woman! But she’s also a brave woman, keeping on keeping on. Politicans, of course, have to have a voice; I don’t think there’s ever been a mute person in Congress.  Here below is her AI-generated speech, using words taken from speeches given when she could talk:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Szaron is getting more intellectual!

Szaron: Let’s talk about social stratification.
Hili: Maybe another time.
In Polish:
Szaron: Porozmawiajmy o społecznej stratyfikacji.
Hili: Może innym razem.

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

From Cat Memes:

From Science Humor via Dominka Harmat. I have no idea if this is true:

From Strange, Silly, or Stupid Signs via Saf Stern:

From Masih, more protestors facing execution in Iran, you can find their stories here, here, and here.

From Malcolm, a real-life Tom and Jerry. I hope they stayed friends.

From my feed: these deer are famous and have had years of practice:

From Luana. I can’t believe this is happening in the U.S., and, what’s worse, the cops stand by and do nothing during this vandalism. Who’s running the reailroad?

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted:

Two tweets from the famous Dr. Cobb.  First, the problems of English (but “row” could be pronounced with the “ow” of “owl” if “row” means “squabble”):

Amazingly, Carter is still alive, but I don’t think in any condition to understand the dearth of guinea worms: