Welcome to the Monday, October 7, 2024, one year exactly after Hamas’s butchery in southern Israel. There will be memorials at my University today, but also demonstrations by members of the University community who embrace terrorism and hate Israel. In fact, such demonstrations are worldwide: in the U.S., in Europe, and in Australia. Those who celebrate the anniversary of 1200 Jews are morally defective, and I am still amazed that so many people are like this. Read Bari Weiss’s piece, “A year of revelations” at the Free Press (archived here), which includes this:
So there will be no closure today. Though on October 7, 2024, as with every single day that has elapsed since October 7, 2023, I will think of the human beings—each one a world unto herself—destroyed by terror. I will pray for the hostages and the recovery of those who have been liberated. And I will pray for a lasting peace. Not just for Israelis, but for the Palestinians and the Lebanese and the Yemenis and the Iranians and the Syrians and all those tyrannized by murderous governments and terror groups who choose death over life. And I’ll pray for America, my home.
We expected Hamas to kill Jews. We didn’t expect Americans to celebrate it.
The site has collected all stories about the war over the last year and put them on this site.
Posting will be light today as I have a few October 7 events to attend.
This cartoon (h/t Alison) should say, “It’s the day they let them go”:
As for food, it’s National Frappé Day, an iced drink that asymptotically approaches a milkshake:
A frappé (pronounced frap-pay) is an iced beverage that has been shaken, blended or beaten to produce a tasty, foamy, and refreshing drink. It is served cold, often with whipped cream and toppings. You can add ice before or after beating the coffee and custom additives such as sugar, milk, vanilla, and sweet sauces. It depends on what you are shaking or blending it in: a shaker, frappé maker or blender. An ice-crushing blender is better than a shaker for blending a frappé.
Coffee or Not?
Though a frappé has been traditionally made with coffee, you can make other flavorful frappé drinks with teas, juices or hot chocolate; the possibilities are endless. There are many different variations of this popular blended icy drink that was first inspired in Europe, decades ago. The word frappé comes from the French verb frapper which means to slap, knock, or beat.
Here’s the original coffee frappé without milk, though in New England a “frappe” is what people call a regular milkshake with ice cream:
It’s also Bathtub Day, National Chocolate Covered Pretzel Day, Blue Shirt Day (a sign to prevent bullying), World Architecture Day, National Flower Day, and National Propane Day.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 7 Wikipedia page., which lists this as one event:
2023 – Hamas and several other Palestinian militant groups launch an attack into Israel, which results in the deaths of around 1,200, mostly civilians, and taking more than 240 hostages, including civilians and soldiers. The attack initiated the Israel–Hamas war.
It’s estimated that around 100 hostages remain in the tunnels below Gaza, and of these, about a third are said to be dead.
Da Nooz:
*Andrew Sullivan, in his latest Weekly Dish piece, “Why Vance matters“, touts the VP candidate as a harbinger of a bright new GOP.
By far the biggest revelation of last Tuesday night was what happens to American politics if you remove Donald J Trump.
Everything instantly changes.
We actually had a civil, lively debate between a sane, reconstructed Republican and a likable, if jittery, Democrat. Not in the distant post-populist future, but now. It was a fleeting snapshot of a politics without madness. Yes we can!
Does that mean that JD Vance told the truth? Nope. Among the untruths: hospitals in Springfield have not been overwhelmed by new immigrants; Trump did not salvage Obamacare — he tried to repeal it; and the Trump tax cuts benefited the wealthy far more than the middle class. Walz was better but still couldn’t admit he made up being in China during the Tiananmen massacre (he missed it by a couple of months); absurdly claimed that border crossings were down from the Trump era; and invented the idea that Project 2025 would create registries of pregnant women.
But the thing about these untruths is that they were perfectly, reassuringly, normal. Politicians fib; they exaggerate; they elide uncomfortable truths. It all eventually gets filtered out in the democratic process. Liars aren’t necessarily bad presidents. Bill Clinton proved that. What has changed in this past decade is a whole new category of total gaslighting, an endless series of total lies designed solely to defend the ego and interests of Donald J Trump.
If Vance has a problem, it’s that he’s Trump’s lickspittle:
And this, of course, is Vance’s core weakness. He has to remain committed to that Lie, because he is Trump’s vassal. In the debate, he eventually hocked up this sad loogie:
It’s really rich for Democratic leaders to say that Donald Trump is a unique threat to democracy when he peacefully gave over power on January the 20th, as we have done for 250 years in this country.
That takes some balls, doesn’t it? Vance then suggested that government censorship of social media was as big a threat to democracy as … trying to overturn the results of an election by fraud and violence. The argument — a reprise of his flailing in an interview with Ross — is contemptible whataboutism.
. . . Vance has disqualified himself by repeating the Big Lie. It’s why I’m voting, however reluctantly, for Harris. But it’s vital to see that Vance also showed Tuesday night that there may be a Republican future beyond Trump; and that it does not have to be as depraved and deranged as it now is. And this matters. It should matter to you if you’re a Democrat as well as a Republican, because we have two parties, and bringing one of them back to some kind of sanity is vital if we are to rescue liberal democracy.
Very few seem interested in this right now, in nursing the signs of pro-family policy pragmatism on the right, a more realist foreign policy, and a less culturally progressive government. Some still want to return to the party of neoconservatism and open borders, and would rather destroy the GOP than reform it. That’s why they’ve done all they can these past few years to prevent any Republican alternative emerging. The campaign against DeSantis was brutal, and relentless and it worked.
Sane liberals have also assailed Vance, many with zest. Part of it is his submission to Trump; part is his constant ideological reinvention. Fair enough, I guess. But part is also, it seems to me, the usual educated liberal’s contempt for an intellectually curious conservative. I just wish they’d stop for a second and listen to some of Vance’s answers on Tuesday night: the way he acknowledged Republican flaws (on abortion, for example); the way he reached out personally to Walz (over his son witnessing a shooting); the way his voice modulated when weighing various points; the way he seemed focused on solutions rather than slogans, as in his agreement with Walz on a federal family leave program.
I’m so sick of politics that I didn’t listen to the Veep Debate, and I haven’t read Vance’s book, which friends tell me is good. Since there’s no chance I’m voting for the GOP Presidential ticket, I don’t care. Ask me again in 2028.
*I didn’t realize how much news anchors made until I read this WSJ article, which says that they’re not only not getting pay raises, but may get pay cuts. Crikey, some of them earn as much as major league baseball stars!
The rampant cost-cutting across a media industry struggling to transition to the streaming era is finally coming for the sacred cows: star talent.
At Disney’s ABC, “Good Morning America” anchors George Stephanopoulos, Robin Roberts and Michael Strahan, who each have deals valued at $25 million annually, will face an uphill battle in coming negotiations to maintain that compensation, people familiar with the situation said.
At NBC, “Today” anchor Hoda Kotb said late last month she is ending her run on the show. Had she opted to sign a new deal, she would likely have faced a significant cut to her roughly $20 million-a-year contract, people familiar with her exit said.
Co-host Savannah Guthrie, whose current deal has more than a year to run, may face the same situation with her similarly-valued contract, but has some leverage given Kotb’s exit, people close to the network said. Puck earlier reported on Kotb’s exit.
ESPN, meanwhile, recently laid off senior NBA writer Zach Lowe, one of its star analysts, after it had already said goodbye to other big names like Robert Griffin III.
Agents for big stars have gotten a message loud and clear from network suits: Don’t expect a raise and be prepared for a pay cut.
“The day of the media icon, the standout, stand-alone center-stage TV personality, is coming to end,” said Frank Sesno, a professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University and a former Washington bureau chief for CNN.
The reasons for the newfound vulnerability of elite talent are manifold. Media companies are staring at diminishing returns from their legacy cable and broadcast TV operations, and their streaming businesses aren’t generating the returns to make up for the shortfall.
At that same time, many companies are making costly bets on sports rights—seen as vital to have any hope of surviving in a cutthroat business. Disney and Comcast’s NBCUniversal are each partners in a massive new NBA deal that kicks in with the 2025-26 season.
There’s more, but I really can’t be arsed to feel sorry for someone who makes $25 million per year not getting a pay raise.
*Over at the NYT, Linda Greenhouse, who covers the Supreme Court, writes about culture wars in her column, “One big decision awaits the Supreme Court“.
The most important decision the Supreme Court’s justices will make in the new term that begins on Monday transcends the questions presented in any of its many cases. It is whether the court will resume or refrain from injecting itself into the country’s culture wars.
Although it may be hard at this point to remember anything about the court’s last term aside from the presidential immunity decision with which it ended, the fact is that the term was largely devoid of culture war material. The justices stopped short of ruling on the merits of the two abortion cases they had initially agreed to decide. And there were no decisions that dealt explicitly with religion, though, of course, nearly every anti-abortion law, such as Idaho’s Defense of Life Act at issue in one of those cases, can be traced to a religious view of when life begins.
That hiatus can’t last. Dozens of religion cases are making their way through the federal and state judicial systems, many filed by plaintiffs with the Supreme Court in mind. That is hardly surprising. The court’s recent decisions, including those in favor of a football coach who commandeered the 50-yard line for public prayer and a web designer whose religion supposedly prevented her from creating wedding sites for same-sex couples, have emboldened those seeking to elevate the role of religion in public life. Further, these individuals and organizations have found ardent allies among judges named to the lower federal courts by President Donald Trump.
Several years ago, I used the phrase “grievance conservatism” to describe Justice Samuel Alito’s odd assertion, made in a 2020 speech to the Federalist Society, that “in certain quarters, religious liberty is fast becoming a disfavored right.” Grievance conservatism, I wrote, is “fueled by a belief that even when it’s winning, it’s losing, and losing unfairly.” Surveying the current landscape, however, I think the phrase is due for a refinement. What we are seeing now is grievance Christianity. . .
. . . Judge Traynor agreed. “It is a precarious time for people of religious faith in America,” his explanation began. He was just getting started. “It has been described as a post-Christian age,” he continued. “One indication of this dire assessment may be the repeated illegal and unconstitutional administrative actions against one of the founding principles of our country, the free exercise of religion.”
The judge speculated that the government’s real goal “may be to find new ways to infringe on religious believers’ fundamental rights to the exercise of their religions.” But “wisely,” he went on, “our founders provided a separate but equal branch to keep this lawlessness in check.” In a final footnote, he wrote that “unchecked government power creates martyrs,” offering as examples the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and St. Thomas More.
. . . But several religion-driven appeals have recently been filed at the court. One challenges a Maryland school board’s refusal to let parents take their elementary-school-age children out of class to avoid participating in lessons based on “inclusive storybooks” that depict diversity in sexual and gender identity. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit rejected the request by a group of parents to block the school board’s policy. The parents’ petition asserts that in the absence of an opt-out provision, “parents essentially surrender their right to direct the religious upbringing of their children by sending them to public schools.”
I have a bit of a problem with the last sentence there. Although I agree with Greenhouse in the main that the Court has a problem with too many pious Catholic justices enforcing their own religious views on the law, what do we do when teaching evolution goes against a child’s upbringing. Can they opt out of biology class? Is this argument not analogous to the “diversity of sex and gender” argument made above? I suppose there is a distinction, as one is simply teaching the facts of science while the other is stuffing ideology down the throats of children.
*The Washington Post discusses how Israel managed to pull off the Grim Beeper episode (the article is archived here).
None of the users suspected they were wearing an ingeniously crafted Israeli bomb. And even after thousands of the devices exploded in Lebanon and Syria, few appreciated the pagers’ most sinister feature: a two-step de-encryption procedure that ensured most users would be holding the pager with both hands when it detonated.
As many as 3,000 Hezbollah officers and members — most of them rear-echelon figures — were killed or maimed, along with an unknown number of civilians, according to Israeli, U.S. and Middle Eastern officials, when Israel’s Mossad intelligence service triggered the devices remotely on Sept. 17.
The WaPo pieced together the details from several sources:
Hezbollah was looking for hack-proof electronic networks for relaying messages, and Mossad came up with a pair of ruses that would lead the militia group to purchase devices that seemed perfect for the job — equipment that Mossad designed and had assembled in Israel.
The first part of the plan, booby-trapped walkie-talkies, began being inserted into Lebanon by Mossad nearly a decade ago, in 2015. The mobile two-way radios contained oversized battery packs, a hidden explosive and a transmission system that gave Israel complete access to Hezbollah communications.
For nine years, the Israelis contented themselves with eavesdropping on Hezbollah, the officials said, while reserving the option to turn the walkie-talkies into bombs in a future crisis. But then came a new opportunity and a glitzy new product: a small pager equipped with a powerful explosive. In an irony that would not become clear for many months, Hezbollah would end up indirectly paying the Israelis for the tiny bombs that would kill or wound many of its operatives.
Because Hezbollah leaders were alert to possible sabotage, the pagers could not originate in Israel, the United States or any other Israeli ally. So, in 2023, the group began receiving solicitations for the bulk purchase of Taiwanese-branded Apollo pagers, a well-recognized trademark and product line with worldwide distribution and no discernible links to Israeli or Jewish interests. The Taiwanese company had no knowledge of the plan, officials said.
. . . As it turned out, the actual production of the devices was outsourced and the marketing official had no knowledge of the operation and was unaware that the pagers were physically assembled in Israel under Mossad oversight, officials said. Mossad’s pagers, each weighing less than three ounces, included a unique feature: a battery pack that concealed a tiny amount of a powerful explosive, according to the officials familiar with the plot.
In a feat of engineering, the bomb component was so carefully hidden as to be virtually undetectable, even if the device was taken apart, the officials said. Israeli officials believe that Hezbollah did disassemble some of the pagers and may have even X-rayed them.
Also invisible was Mossad’s remote access to the devices. An electronic signal from the intelligence service could trigger the explosion of thousands of the devices at once. But, to ensure maximum damage, the blast could also be triggered by a special two-step procedure required for viewing secure messages that had been encrypted.
“You had to push two buttons to read the message,” an official said. In practice, that meant using both hands.
In the ensuing explosion, the users would almost certainly “wound both their hands,” the official said, and thus “would be incapable to fight.”
polls from PostTrak weren’t any better. It got a meager half star out of five possible.
There’s more, but you have a free link above.
*I saw the first “Joker” movie, and wasn’t thrilled, but many were. It is the highest-grossing movie based on a comic book, and won two Oscars, including Joaquin Phoenix for best actor. So why did the sequel flop? Go see the Rotten Tomato reviews. which are dire on the part of both critics and audience:
“Joker: Folie à Deux” is the No. 1 movie at the box office, but it might not be destined for a happy ending.
In a turn of events that only Arthur Fleck would find funny, the follow-up to Todd Phillips’ 2019 origin story about the Batman villain opened in theaters nationwide this weekend to a muted $40 million, according to studio estimates Sunday, less than half that of its predecessor. The collapse was swift and has many in the industry wondering: How did the highly anticipated sequel to an Oscar-winning, billion-dollar film with the same creative team go wrong?
Just three weeks ago, tracking services pegged the movie for a $70 million debut, which would still have been down a fair amount from “Joker’s” record-breaking $96.2 million launch in Oct. 2019. Reviews were mixed out of the Venice Film Festival, where it premiered in competition like the first movie and even got a 12-minute standing ovation.
But the homecoming glow was short-lived, and the fragile foundation would crumble in the coming weeks with its Rotten Tomatoes score dropping from 63% at Venice to 33% by its first weekend in theaters. Perhaps even more surprising were the audience reviews: Ticket buyers polled on opening night gave the film a deadly D CinemaScore.
. . .In his review for The Associated Press, Jake Coyle wrote that “Phillips has followed his very antihero take on the Joker with a very anti-sequel. It combines prison drama, courthouse thriller and musical, and yet turns out remarkably inert given how combustible the original was.”
The sequel has already been the subject of many think pieces, some who posit that the sequel was deliberately alienating fans of the first movie. In cruder terms, it’s been called a “middle finger.” But fans often ignore the advice of critics, especially when it comes to opening their wallets to see revered comic book characters on the big screen.
“They took a swing for the fences,” Dergarabedian said. “But except for a couple of outliers, audiences in 2024 seem to want to know what they’re getting when they’re going to the theater. They want the tried and true, the familiar.”
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili spots a crow:
Hili: I see a bad omen.A: Where?Hili: It’s sitting on a branch and caws.
Hili: Widzę zły omen.Ja: Gdzie?Hili: Siedzi na gałęzi i kracze.
*******************
From Cat Memes:
From The Dodo:
From Jesus of the Day. What the deuce?
From Masih, nasty words from Ali Khamenei about the Oct. 7 massacre:
Islamic Republic leader declares; Oct. 7 attacks were ‘Logical and Legal’.
This man is a mass murderer.
Believe it or not, both the United States and Europe have failed to designate Khamenei personally for the human rights abuses and terrorism he oversees. Shut up. pic.twitter.com/1NvkozruKv— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) October 6, 2024
From Simon; I guess the photo is real (yes, Musk is an immigrant):
Trump travels to state on Southern border to greet an immigrant. Weird.
(Photo @JimWatson_AFP) pic.twitter.com/tHkRv33BSW— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) October 6, 2024
From Luana; bad science in (of all places!) Scientific American:
Hard competition, but this may be the worst paragraph of all time in “Scientific American”.
Here is how I think it happened:
The author of this article was predisposed to thinking that there are no biological differences.
Then she read this thing about pacesetters, in which… pic.twitter.com/C9xWw9NFQ3
— Jonatan Pallesen (@jonatanpallesen) October 6, 2024
From Malcolm: cats in dogs’ beds. CATS WIN!
Cats occupying dog’s beds 🤣 pic.twitter.com/yDd7zbHwh4
— No Cats No Life (@NoCatsNoLife_m) September 30, 2024
From my feed, a funny-faced kitty:
her mascara is ruined 😭 pic.twitter.com/S81Z3dgEzI
— Why you should have a cat (@ShouldHaveCat) October 6, 2024
From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I posted.
It’s the birthday of a 26-year-old Dutch woman, murdered at Auschwitz. https://t.co/D469zSNtTh
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) October 7, 2024
Two tweets from Emeritus Professor Cobb. The first gets a “!”:
Man sits by me on train.
MAN: Loads of psychopaths around here
ME: Really?
MAN: Loads mate
ME: How’d you know?
MAN: There’s signs aren’t there?
ME: I guess?
MAN: I love them
(47 minutes of awkward silence.)
Man leaves train, he has a bike. I realise he was saying ‘cycle paths’.— Paul Watson (@paul_c_watson) October 4, 2024
. . . and an Olympic high-jumping moggy:
— Why you should have a cat (@ShouldHaveCat) July 30, 2024
“cycle paths”
Oh man, that is good!
October 7. lāmāh pānêkā tastîr (Ps 44:25a).
Nobel Prize today is exciting!
As a retired aero engineer, I could use a reference on micro-rna for dummies.
It’s exciting partly because a Nobel for RNA silencing was won back around 2010 by Andrew Fire and Craig Mello.
Ambrose and Ruvkin were in that crowd, winning awards together sometimes, but it was puzzling how the Big Call was made.
Now it seems that clearly, the RNA silencing mechanism is one major thing, while micro RNA regulation is another with distinction – but yeah, what is this distinction?
We shall see. The Nobel summary is very good, but short.
There is one piece of news from a few weeks ago that I’m surprised has not had more of an impact. Trump gave orders to have the military protect the capitol on January 6, and those orders were disobeyed.
Trump lies, but people also lie about Trump.
https://cha.house.gov/2024/9/transcripts-show-president-trump-s-directives-to-pentagon-leadership-to-keep-january-6-safe-were-deliberately-ignored
Days before January 6, 2021, President Trump met with senior Pentagon leaders urging them to do their jobs to protect lives and property. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley, recalls a conversation between the Acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller, and President Trump:
Milley: “The President just says, ‘Hey, look at this. There’s going to be a large amount of protestors here on the 6th, make sure that you have sufficient National Guard or Soldiers to make sure it’s a safe event.’… [POTUS said] I don’t care if you use Guard, or Soldiers, active duty Soldiers, do whatever you have to do. Just make sure it’s safe.’ [SecDef] Miller responds by saying, ‘Hey, we’ve got a plan, and we’ve got it covered.’”
On January 5, the Secretary of the Army, Ryan McCarthy, placed unprecedented restrictions on DCNG Commander Major General William Walker to prevent any movement to the Capitol without Secretary McCarthy’s explicit permission on January 6 and 7.
On January 6, 2021, the outer perimeter on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol was breached by rioters at 12:53pm. The DCNG arrived five hours later. Click here to view the timeline.
These transcripts prove President Trump’s senior Pentagon leaders were focused on OPTICS, instead of doing their job, as the Capitol was breached:
Miller: “There was absolutely – there is absolutely no way I was putting U.S. military forces at the Capitol, period.”
I seem to remember hearing that he didn’t want any support there. But I guess that was a false memory? I don’t doubt it.
If he did ask for support, this indicates to me that A) he had some idea of the potential for the J6 protests; but B) that he did not want them to access the Capitol building, which then throws the narrative that his goal was insurrection out the window. Had Trump’s recommendation been taken, the crowd might not have gotten out of hand, and if they had, then they would have been dealt with before it went too far. That means they would not have gotten into the Capitol building. So therefore his intent was not a riot to stop the vote. This does change some things in my mind.
Excellent discussion of antisemitism with Melanie Phillips on Triggernometry.
Sorry – I gave the YouTube URL and got the above?
The link is fine. The video is embedded properly.
We are discouraged from embedding video thumbnails or whatever. That’s what Neil was apologising for. See Da Roolz number 16 which also contains a method to avoid thumbnails.
I didn’t know about that rule. The rule doesn’t absolutely forbid them either.
But thanks for pointing it out.
This may be the old man in me talking, but I think we have too many movies and TV shows where the protagonist is a villain. Obviously, this is not a new thing, but, whether Edward G. Robinson’s The Hatchet Man or Bonnie and Clyde, the villains got their comeuppance. Nowadays it seems like the villains are held up as exemplars, certainly as sympathetic characters. It is hard to focus on a character and not be sympathetic to them and their struggles. It’s like a Stockholm Syndrome for fiction. I think the modern trend began with The Sopranos. (Sure, Tony got shot(?), but this was hardly represented as justice.) This is made worse by the trend of showing actual heros as being anti-heros. That’s why the Christopher Reeve Superman and Adam West Batman will always be better than subsequent efforts to show those characters.
Tony did not get shot; the ending of the series left him alive but with an unknown fate.
I am also an old man, and I am also bothered by movies and TV shows that show criminals winning. Isaac Asimov once said that he objected to violence in movies and TV shows; when people said that violence exists in real life, he said “I object to that even more.” I don’t mind most fictional violence, but I do dislike shows that let the villains get away with it. For instance, the movie “Unfriended 2: Dark Web” featured a world-wide cult who track down and kill a group of innocent 20-somethings who click on their website. It was a suspenseful premise, and I wondered how the good guys would defeat the baddies. SPOILER ALERT: they don’t. The film ends with the cult killing off all the young people and the members grinning victoriously at the camera. I wonder if such movies contribute to the paranoia and conspiracy theories so common today.
I remember when “Night of the Living Dead” came out, with its shocking ending where the good guys don’t prevail. I recall a movie reviewer saying much the same as in the above comments. Not sure what this means, other than this has been going on for awhile.
Don’t forget, Night of the Living Dead was intended as social commentary as well as horror.
Its protagonist was a black man. After serving as the voice of reason and unity for the people trapped in the house, surviving the horror and the stress and doing his best to help the others, in the end, at dawn, as rescuers came, he was mistaken for a zombie and casually shot.
Devastating.
I don’t have a problem with films that defy the “good guys win in the end” convention. But I also like films that embrace it, that give the audience a sense of closure and hope. Each has its place.
Am Yisrael Chai!
Male pacesetters are allowed in the London Marathon for both female and male runners and also in many other races.
Pacers help in three ways that I know of:
1) they keep a consistent pace so the runner can focus on just staying up with the pacer rather than constantly checking her/his watch to stay on the desired pace;
2) psychologically, it’s easier to run with someone than solo. We like to stay with the pack, even if that pack is faster than we would run alone. This is why you’ll usually see the runners in a bunch during the race until the final stretch;
3) Pacers block some of the air resistance, conserving energy that would otherwise be used to fight this resistance, same as drafting in cycling or auto racing.
Out of those 3, the first two advantages seem to apply equally to male or female runners. The third one may benefit females more, as the male pacer would likely be larger than the female racer, providing a larger shield against the wind resistance than a female pacer would.
Note too that for men running at the top level, the pacers can’t maintain the same speed as the elite runner that they’re pacing for the entire race (if they could, they wouldn’t be pacing, they’d be the racer), and so they drop out after a predetermined time, after which the racer proceeds solo. In the case of a male pacer with a female racer, the male is likely able to finish the entire race at a speed equal to or faster than the female racer, so a female would get a longer benefit from the pacer than her male racing counterpart.
But what do I know. SciAm is the expert of The Science and if they say this is another example of the patriarchy keeping women from breaking running records, who am I to argue. After all, since there are no inherent biological differences between men and women, it must be something else, right?
If I had that cat with the “ruined mascara”, Id name her Alice (Cooper, of course).
SCHOOL’S OUT!
Ha!
The Grim Beeper story is fascinating. Mossad is very good.
The over 4000 comments at the lefty Washington Post are trending indignant. Human rights violations blah blah blah.
Although some are saying that Hezbollah deserved it. (They did.)
I can’t hear of a frappé without thinking of a splendid afternoon and evening over forty years ago in London. My boss, Sir Arnold Elton (the urologist with the biggest private practice in the country—lots of Saudi prostates were handled by him!—but I worked for him at an NHS hospital) took his ‘firm’ and ward sisters out, first to the Royal Society of Medicine for tea, then onto his club, the RAC, for dinner. He insisted the ward sisters should have a crème de menthe frappé, though I expected they would have preferred something more modern. We had an excellent meal and a tour of the club (you should Google the swimming pool!)