Welcome to CaturSaturday, September 21, shabbos for all Jewish cats and National Chai Day. Remember, posting will be light this weekend due to Dawkins being in town on his Farewell Tour and various events occurring. Tonight: the Final Talk in Chicago. See you there!
It’s also International Red Panda Day, National Pecan Cookie Day, World Alzheimer’s Day (props to my good friend who has contracted this ailment), International Day of Peace, International Eat an Apple Day, National Beef Stroganoff Day, and National Sponge Candy Day. Here’s a cute but educational video about red pandas (Ailurus fulgens; the sole living members of the mammalian family Ailuridae):
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the Sept 21 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*If Hezbollah has an appetite for war, now would be the time for it to attack the Jews, for Israel has been mopping the floor with Hezbollah, injuring thousands in targeted strikes involving sabotaged beepers and walkie-talkies, knocking out a hundred missile-launchers, destroying missiles, and now killing the military commender of Hezbollah after having killed his predecessor a few days ago. In fact, the war between Israel and Hamas actually began on October 8, when Hezbollah launched missiles at Israel after the October 7 butchery of Jews, so be aware that Hezbollah started it. More carnage is in the offing. If Hezbollah would stop firing missiles at Israel, none of this would be happening:
The Israeli military on Friday carried out an airstrike in Beirut that it said killed a senior Hezbollah commander wanted by the United States for his role in bombings in the 1980s that killed hundreds.
Hezbollah did not immediately confirm that the commander, Ibrahim Aqeel, had been killed in the strike.
It was the second Israeli strike in two months that was intended to kill a top Hezbollah official in Lebanon’s capital, and it came amid a flurry of attacks by both sides that have raised fears of another full-scale war erupting in the Middle East.
The Israeli strike on Friday flattened a residential high-rise building in the heart of Dahiya, a densely populated suburban neighborhood south of the city’s center where Hezbollah holds sway, according to local residents. Residents described a chaotic scene as ambulances raced through the streets. Lebanon’s health ministry said at least 12 people were killed and dozens more were injured, including children.
Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the Israeli military spokesman, told reporters that Mr. Aqeel was meeting other senior commanders underneath the building in an attempt to “use civilians as human shields.” The New York Times could not independently verify that information.
In a statement, the Israeli military described Mr. Aqeel as the chief of Hezbollah’s military operations directorate and the de facto commander of the Radwan force, an elite commando unit. The statement claimed Mr. Aqeel had plotted a never-implemented Hezbollah invasion of northern Israel similar to that of the Hamas-led assault of southern Israel on Oct. 7.
Israel and Lebanon have been on edge for days since pagers and walkie-talkies belonging to Hezbollah members blew up en masse this week, killing at least 37 people and injuring thousands in Lebanon in attacks widely attributed to Israel. Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, had vowed retribution for the explosions.
Now you’re going to hear people wringing their hands about how a “wider war” is happening, but what is really happening is that Israel has had enough bombardment (Hezbollah was firing missiles every day at Israel for months, and much of northern Israel), and is fighting back. Even the idiot Blinken is calling for peace; he, among all Biden administration officials, has been the person most responsible for tying Israel’s hands and trying to prevent the IDF from winning. Israel has every right to attack Hezbollah, and it’s done a pretty good job so far, avoiding killing civilians with those targeted beepers and bombing military sites. It’s salutary to remember that a binding UN resolution proscribes Hezbollah from doing what it did since last October 8 (unprovoked attacks on Israeli civilians), and the UN, with thousands of UNIFIL troops stationed in Lebanon, is supposed to stop this. It angers me deeply that the UN doesn’t enforce its own resolution, and that people keep forgetting that Hezbollah has been committing daily war crimes on the Israeli populace for nearly a year. Where is the accusation against Hezbollah in the International Court of Justice?
*Well, I’ll be. After sanctioning miracles for years, including the apparitions that draw gazillions of Catholics to Fátima and Lourdes, the Vatican has decided that it will no longer grace the appearance of such apparitions with the notion of “reality”. This is because a half dozen kids claim they saw the apparition of the Virgin Mary in Bosnia and Herzegovina (article archived here), and the Vatican isn’t fully buying it:
In June 1981, six children between the ages of 10 and 16 claimed that the Virgin Mary had appeared to them on a stony hilltop near the village of Medjugorje, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The children said she had shared messages of peace and prayer with them.
The visionaries, as the group became known, say that the Virgin has been returning to Medjugorje (pronounced mehd-JOO-gor-ee-yeh) ever since. Their claim has drawn millions of the faithful from around the world, transforming the once tranquil farming village into a major pilgrimage site.
From the outset, though, the alleged apparitions have polarized Roman Catholic opinion. Millions of believers say they have found spiritual solace in Medjugorje, with dozens of reports of miraculous healings, conversions and religious callings. Others dismiss the sightings as a hoax, in part because they have continued so long and occurred with clockwork regularity.
After years of commissions, analyses and pronouncements from the Vatican and local officials, the Vatican issued a document on Thursday “to conclude a long and complex history that has surrounded the spiritual phenomena of Medjugorje.”
Acknowledging the “positive encouragement for their Christian life” that many pilgrims receive at Medjugorje, the Vatican has decided to authorize public worship there.
But the document, signed by Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, the head of the Vatican’s doctrine office, stressed that its decision was not meant to verify the presence of a supernatural phenomenon at the site.
Given that apparitions or other sightings are private experiences for individuals, the church does not require the faithful to accept the authenticity of such sightings. In this case, the document states that “the faithful are not obliged to believe in it.”
The new guidelines, which some Catholics oppose, are evidence based, and of course it would be hard (but not impossible: you could use photography and the like) to give fairly convincing evidence that the Virgin Mary really showed up. But there are the new Vatican Roolz:
Several investigations into the origins of the apparitions have been inconclusive.
Two early investigations led by the Diocese of Mostar-Duvno in Bosnia and one carried out by the former Bishops’ Conference of Yugoslavia failed to provide definitive conclusions. One of Pope Benedict XVI’s top cardinals led a commission to examine the apparitions, but its findings were never published.
The Vatican said its conclusions on Medjugorje were based on new, comprehensive guidelines for evaluating visions of the Virgin Mary and other supernatural, faith-based phenomena that it issued last May.
According to the new rules, the church will no longer issue declarations that accept the supernatural origin of such phenomena, as the Vatican had at Fátima, in Portugal; and Lourdes, in France, two important shrines dedicated to the Virgin Mary.
My question is whether they’ll apply these rules to apparitions of the past, especially like those at Lourdes, which still draws 5 million people a year, many hoping to be cured because Mary supposedly showed up there. This is all religious quackery, of course, but given the crowds and money, the Vatican is NOT going to re-examine Lourdes. But why apply empirical standards to the past that they now have abandoned? It’s faith, of course: you don’t want to shake the faith of someone with a fatal disease who can no longer hope for cures at Lourdes.
And sticking to empirical standards, the Vatican would also need to decommission a number of saints. For to become a saint, one must posthumously have caused two documented miracles. (The “devil’s advocates” are there to question those miracles. You may remember that Hitchens was one of the devil’s advocates when the Vatican beatified Mother Theresa in 2003. He failed, of course.) If there were no evidence of the supernatural, the Catholic Church, and most Christian denominations, would simply go out of business.
*Shohei Ohtani, who entered American professional baseball after becoming a star in Japan, may now become the greatest player in the history of baseball, though he needs to keep up his accomplishments for a longer time (he’s 30). He was a terrific starting pitcher and an excellent fielder (he’d pitch one day out of four or five and then play in the outfield the other days), and was also a powerful hitter. Yesterday, playing for the Dodgers against the Miami Marlins, he set a record that nobody else has ever attained—and the season isn’t near being over. He had six at bats, six hits, three home runs, ten runs batted in, and, for the first time in the history of the game, joined the 50/50 club: 50 stolen bases and 50 home runs for the season:
Perhaps the most talented player ever to step onto a baseball field put the ultimate exclamation point on a season unlike any other in a way that only he could: by delivering what might have been the greatest game in major-league history.
Shohei Ohtani, the Los Angeles Dodgers two-way superstar with abilities rivaled only by Babe Ruth himself, woke up Thursday morning with 48 home runs and 49 stolen bases. It had been clear for weeks that he would soon become the founder and sole member of the 50/50 club, an accomplishment that was all but inconceivable before he arrived.
But the mere act of amassing heretofore unimaginable statistics in a sport that is almost as old as the Civil War wasn’t enough for Ohtani. He also needed to do it in a way nobody would ever forget.
Three homers. Two doubles. Two steals. Ten RBIs. And a 6-for-6 outing at the plate in a 20-4 beatdown of the Miami Marlins. That was Ohtani’s ledger on Thursday, yet another improbable chapter in a tome all of his own. By the end of it, 50/50 might as well have been the ancient past. Ohtani was already at 51/51. And if all that wasn’t enough, his heroics also clinched a postseason spot for the Dodgers, meaning that after seven long years, Ohtani will finally have his chance to shine on the October stage.
“I’m happy, relieved and very respectful to the peers and everybody who came before who played the sport of baseball,” Ohtani said afterward, through an interpreter.
In many ways, Ohtani’s achievements stand so far ahead of what had previously seemed possible that it might as well be its own language. There had been two other instances before Thursday of somebody recording six hits, three homers and 10 RBIs in a single game. Cincinnati Reds catcher Walker Cooper did it back in 1949—but he went 6-for-7, whereas Ohtani was a perfect 6-for-6.
Ohtani remains a designated hitter while his elbow heals from a pitching injury (his pitching record before the injury was 38-19), and I suppose they’re letting his arm rest by not making him play in the field, either. But he steals bases as almost an fun hobby, and hits like a demon. Here’s a video of him entering the 50/50 club, and it may well be the greatest day any player has had in major league baseball:
*As usual, I’ll steal three items from the incomparable Nellie Bowles’s weekly news digest on the Free Press. Yesterday’s column was called “TGIF: No one ate Miss Sassy” (that must be a cat). The page is archived here.
→ Hezbollah has to give consent: Israel planted explosives in thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies that were then sold to Hezbollah—and this week, Israel detonated those explosives remotely, destroying Hezbollah’s communications system. The international community is aghast! Yes, Hezbollah has fired thousands of rockets into Israel for almost a year now. Yes, Hezbollah bombed a youth soccer game in Israel, killing 12 Israeli Druze children in Majdal Shams (Hezbollah denied involvement). But that’s not starting war. No. That’s solidarity. When Israel hits back at Hezbollah, that’s starting war.
As Young Turks founder Cenk Uygur put it: “Israel hasn’t been defending itself for months, this is just an offensive war that Israel is starting all over the Middle East.” Again, guys, I’m being really clear: The soccer field bombing was mere Hezbollah self-defense. You have no idea how hard a Druze teen kicks a soccer ball.
Here’s UN chief António Guterres: “I think it’s very important that there is an effective control of civilian objects, not to weaponize civilian objects.” Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez has this to say: “This attack clearly and unequivocally violates international humanitarian law and undermines US efforts to prevent a wider conflict.” It’s only odd because she didn’t say anything about Hezbollah bombing that Israeli kids’ soccer game. She’s actually never tweeted about Hezbollah before. Odd. Weird. Civilian objects, like the pagers that terrorists use, are sacred. . . .
AOC, like Ugyur and Guterres, is out to lunch. This is the first tweet she’s ever made about Hezbollah, and she’s defending the terrorists, ignoring the fact that Hezbollah has been violating international humanitarian law for a long time, firing missiles into Israel at civilians for months. Did AOC mention the 12 Druze (Israeli) children killed on a soccer field by a Hezbollah missile? Nope. Her empathy is strictly limited to Hamas and Hezbollah.
AOC’s tweet and a response:
→ No one ate Miss Sassy: Not to go so hard on J.D. Vance but he has continued going hard on the idea that all these Haitian immigrants are coming in and eating your pets. Asked for proof, J.D. Vance has been pointing to the twisted tale of Miss Sassy. Springfield, Ohio resident Anna Kilgore noticed that her cat, Miss Sassy, was missing. She suspected—nay, she knew—it was the Haitian neighbors. And with smells of cooking spices so rich and foreign, it could only be the flesh of one Miss Sassy. She filed a police report. It was written about locally. J.D. grabbed on. Later, after J.D. gave this to The Wall Street Journal as evidence of Haitian pet-eating, the paper looked into Miss Sassy. It turns out she is alive, all her perfect drumsticks attached to her juicy, roastable body. That fluffy bag of white and dark meat was just relaxing in Anna Kilgore’s own basement, waiting for some hot sauce. (Sorry, I just get hungry at the thought of cats!)
The WSJ also describes what happened next in that little Ohio town in this strange saga, which ought to have stayed local: “Kilgore, wearing a Trump shirt and hat, said she apologized to her Haitian neighbors with the help of her daughter and a mobile-phone translation app.” Might J.D. do the same?
→ Abortion stories are not going away: This week brings the harrowing tale of Amber Nicole Thurman, a 28-year-old mom who died of sepsis. Thurman arrived at a Georgia hospital in the middle of a miscarriage. She had to wait 20 hours while doctors hemmed and hawed on the vague language around the state abortion ban’s medical exceptions. A group of expert doctors with the state deemed her death “preventable.
Until red states can figure out how to prevent horror stories like that of Amber Nicole Thurman, they’re not exactly selling the country on pro-life legislation. It’s like trying to sell me on a government-run health system when Canada is right there. No one is fooled. We know how this goes.
*And since it’s Saturday, let’s turn to the reliable “Oddities” section of the AP. This is an animal story that sounds dire but turned out well:
It’s a good thing seals aren’t on a humpback whale’s menu.
A photograph by a whale-watching naturalist captured a seemingly bewildered seal in the mouth of a humpback whale after the giant marine mammal accidentally gulped it last Thursday in the waters off Anacortes, Washington.
The food mix-up began while a Blue Kingdom Whale and Wildlife Tours boat spotted birds flying over a school of fish and a humpback whale swimming toward it, Captain Tyler McKeen said. He said the humpback then used a lunging feeding technique, where the whale opens its mouth wide and takes in small fish and water. But instead of remaining underwater afterward to filter through its baleen, it surfaced and began opening and closing its mouth.
After the whale went back underwater, photographs and videos were checked by whale watchers.
“It only took a couple seconds for everybody to pull up the frames and zoom in,” McKeen said. “That’s when we saw the seal. It was a funny, funny moment for everybody. I mean, it probably wasn’t that funny for the seal.”
A photograph by Brooke Casanova shows the seal, which presumably was also hunting the fish, emerging from the bottom of the whale’s mouth. McKeen recorded a phone video where the seal is getting flushed out.
Here’s a tweet showing a bewildered-looking seal sitting in the mouth of a humback whale. I don’t think a baleen whale could swallow a seal anyway, but I might be wrong:
Seal Takes a Ride in Humpback Whale’s Mouth https://t.co/JHuZAWu5IJ
— ExplorersWeb (@ExplorersWeb) September 18, 2024
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is mad at Kukla. Why? Malgorzata explains: “Andrzej was discussing something with Kulka and Hili got jealous.”
Hili: Do not anthropomorphize Kulka.A: Why?Hili: She is just a cat.
Hili: Nie antropomorfizuj Kulki!Ja: Dlaczego?Hili: To tylko kot.
And a picture of poor Baby Kukla, who was dragged hard by Hili:
More: Reader Divy’s cat Jango sent a romantic email to Hili (below), and Andrzej also featured it on Listy:
Translation: “Meanwhile, from across the ocean, Hili received a friend request. (Original Polish: “Tymczasem zza oceanu Hili otrzymała zaproszenie do przyjaźni.” Here’s Jango’s email; love is in the air!
*******************
*From Cat Memes:
*From the 2024 Darwin Awards/Epic Fails:
From Strange, Stupid, or Silly Signs:
From Masih, Pelosi on one side, an attacked Iranian woman on the other (it looks like an acid attack):
Today, I’ll be speaking at @TheAtlantic Festival, taking the same stage where Nancy Pelosi, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Jamie Dimon have spoken.
I hope they hear my voice and the voices of millions of women who have lived under Islamic states, telling the U.S. government that… pic.twitter.com/GH8rjnXSZg
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) September 20, 2024
From Simon, who says this:
”The letter excerpt here is amusing although i think blaming feminization for the change in the approach taken by administrators is overly simplistic”:
Letter from the administration of Wadham College at the University of Oxford in 1968 shows how universities dealt with student protesters before the feminization of academia pic.twitter.com/cQJhU9AYaH
— Nathan Cofnas (@nathancofnas) September 19, 2024
From Thomas, who says, ”You need this cat.” I do!
This device reduces your headache..🐈🐾😂 pic.twitter.com/taXMy5Y2eH
— 𝕐o̴g̴ (@Yoda4ever) September 18, 2024
I suspect this is a leucistic fox. And of course it was I who first classified foxes as Honorary Cats!
I swear foxes are dogs and cats at the same time pic.twitter.com/3OaYhkBvRG
— Nature is Amazing (@AMAZlNGNATURE) September 19, 2024
A geeky double-entendre chemistry joke:
Excellent chemistry meme.
I hope it goes chiral! pic.twitter.com/00HtiNRtC0— Prof Alice Roberts💙 (@theAliceRoberts) September 19, 2024
From the Auschwitz Memorial, two French siblings (the girl was nine) gassed to death upon arriving at Auschwitz:
21 September 1932 | French Jewish girl, Florette Dawidowicz, was born in Paris.
She was deported from #Drancy to #Auschwitz on 24 August 1942. She was murdered in a gas chamber after arrival selection with her younger brother Simon. pic.twitter.com/ArYtDhwkZr
— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) September 21, 2024
Two tweets from the lately-retired Dr. Cobb. First, from SMBC, Matthew says ”Genuine LOL in fourth panel.”
Bonus comic on https://t.co/djxjgI7VZG pic.twitter.com/Fs5W7g0ywL
— SMBC Comics (@SMBCComics) September 20, 2024
And a geeky but cool inside science joke:
“I accept you without revisions” https://t.co/zqehsFrtdH
— Dr Amanda Moehring (@FlyBehaviour) September 20, 2024
So great that Richard Dawkins is doing this tour – I give my thanks to Richard for showing what clear, strong, written expression of ideas, thought, and the spoken word looks like.
Changing subject:
My dream last night :
I wrote a substantial comment on WEIT. On second thought, went to trim it.
When I went to trim it, was past 10:00 min.
A user comments that my comment was too long.
Then I woke up.
Ha ha ha. Say it ain’t so!
Regarding the Marian apparitions at Medjugorje: The seers had little shame. One vision is ok, a few are a blessing, but claiming that the Virgin Mary appears to you hundreds of times according to a fixed schedule is a bit much. And then there was that:
> On 21 June 1983, one of the seers, Ivan Dragičević, sent a threatening message allegedly from the Gospa to the bishop, in which she requested the bishop’s conversion regarding her apparitions, otherwise, he would be “judged by me and my son Jesus.”[35][36] On 6 February 1985, Ivan Dragičević sent somewhat more tolerant message from the Gospa, with her stating that if he did not believe in her apparitions, at least he should not persecute her priests who believed in her messages and promoted them.[35][37]
Earlier visionaries like the foolish girl at Lourdes were quickly shut up after entering a monastery. Their tales tend to become more and more fantastical, but it matters little because the actual events are quickly forgotten when they enter legend, as pious believers will swallow any tale with amazing credulity. Doubts arise chiefly when the message is not “authentic”, i.e. contains teachings the believer disagrees with. In this case, the message was liberal enough (supportive of interfaith efforts) for the church not to be concerned, and not so conservative that only traditionalist Catholics would embrace it.
I don’t begrudge them their apparitions. Whatever works. I believe NONE of it. Nothing to moan about, here.
Thanks for the piece on Ohtani. Amazing. I have seen his name in headlines on the sports page but never read the articles as I lost interest in baseball some years ago as it became way too technical for me. How many pitchers do teams regularly use in a game now? I grew up loving baseball when expertise of a fan was simply maintained with an annual subscription to “Sporting News” and the accompanying gift of “One for the Book”. But this guy’s record has surely got my attention.
The pitcher situation has changed: almost never does a starting pitcher finish the game: that is reserved for the “closer pitchers”. There are other changes, too, but to me they don’t diminish the pleasure of watching the game, which I do but rarely.
And regardless of the changes, Ohtani is a phenomenon.
Yes, I agree, and he is even more of a phenom perhaps as pitchers are more precisely dialed in to batters.
In the old days, failure to pitch a complete game was just that, a failure. These days pitchers (called starter) seem to be looked to for just 4-6 innings, followed by several relievers, maybe even just for one batter, and finally a closer to end the game. You kids get off my lawn!
Thought that was MY lawn.
I grew up with great complete-game pitchers like Seaver (my hero), Gibson, Palmer et al.
Now with the DH, the stupid extra-inning runner on second base, the middle-reliever/ closer thing etc., my lawn is ruined. I hate the long-ball emphasis too; give me an infield single, stolen base, fielders choice, and sacrifice fly please.
But I still live baseball nevertheless. Ohtani is an unbelievably great player.
It’s unclear that is meant by “. . . visions of the Virgin Mary and other supernatural, faith-based phenomena. . . .” That could include saints’ miracles, but it might not. Perhaps Lourdes just made a stink about competition.
I had thought the office of the Devil’s Advocate had been abolished. I had to look a bit, but found this, indicating yes and no:
This policy is not retroactive. The miracles of saints that have already been accepted would not be put under review. (There would obviously be nothing left if you accepted a historian’s standard of evidence, as Christianity has far too many documents that can be used to show its development is all too human. You will not be surprised by the drop in Lourdes miracles thanks to greater medical scrutiny.)
I don’t think Lourdes needs to fear competition. It is popular, perhaps too popular, and new exciting revelations at fresh locations would help. Lourdes itself is part of the Catholic Revival, which drew on popular piety to revive the Church following the French Revolution. Its mass tourism is hardly medieval! Novel mysteries and revelations like those created by the Fatima apparitions have been important to sustain Catholic belief. It has been claimed that in Italy Padre Pio is the number one recipient of prayers. But since he died, there has hardly been anything new. What has been offered is usually rejected by the Church because it is too old-fashioned, and too embarrassingly plagiarized. I think the Vatican would like a new Fatima, but is too constrained by the zeitgeist and modern science to get one.
The novelist Emile Zola, who was a religious sceptic and very anti-Catholic, wrote a trilogy of novels in the 1890s, sparked by a visit he made to Lourdes in 1891. They are not exactly his best books, but the first of them, ‘Lourdes’, conveys well the extent to which the fallout from Bernadette’s hallucinations had become a major industry even by then.
The other two novels, ‘Rome’ and ‘Paris’, don’t really reward the time it takes to read them.
The phrase “devil’s advocate” has now entered the language and is used metaphorically. So it lives on that way.
As to Amber Thurman (R.I.P), it appears that she died of sepsis after taking abortion pills, but it’s not clear that anti-abortion laws were to blame, as argued in The National Review and The New York Post. There have, in fact, been a significant dearth of abortion horror stories since the Dobbs decision.
Ohtani is a phenom and all, but I take serious issue with the announcer’s claim that “this is the greatest day in baseball history.” It’s not even close. THIS was the greatest day in baseball history:
Bah. Mets 1969.
Hey, this is a really big story just out of my state of GA. It concerns an insane rule just passed by the State Election Board – which is packed with Trump supporters.
“The rule approved Friday mandates the poll manager and two poll officers in each precinct each count the number of paper ballots in each ballot box to compare with the total generated by the ballot scanner.”
What are the odds that three separate hand-counts of thousands of ballots will ALL match the machine count? Given human fallibility, the obvious answer is minuscule.
The transparent purpose of this slimy rule is to give the election board ‘legal’ grounds to refuse to certify election results in the likely event their orange-haired boy has lost.
And even if certification is forced through by the courts, they are knowingly manufacturing, in advance, pseudo-irregularities that can be weaponized as ‘evidence’ of cheating by the election denier movement. Let’s not forget that Trump has claimed that if he loses, that in and of itself will constitute evidence that the Democrats have ‘stolen’ the election – again!
There are tons of articles about this outrage. I myself am just spitting.
You might hate me for this — I hope not —
I actually would like to see us go back to paper ballots. I do not trust the computers at all. I get your point, though. I’m aware this was forced through in Georgia because of pressure from Trump and that’s not cool at all. I’d like to see some uniformity in the process from state to state. Again, I don’t trust the computers. Never have.
The UK only does hand counts of ballots. If an election is very close there’ll be a recount, maybe two.
It’s worked for the last 200 years, and continues to work now.
Quite why the US feels the need to use easily hacked machines is entirely confusing.