Saturday: Hili dialogue

October 12, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to SaturCaturday, October 12, 2024, and National Gumbo Day.  Here’s Justin Wilson, making a good Cajun gumbo, I gare-un-tee!  I used to watch this show, mesmerized, when I was a kid. In this bit he begins the preparation of gumbo by telling one of the jokes that made him famous. He wasn’t a Cajun, either, but he was a racist.

It’s also Astronomy Day, World Arthritis Day, National Farmer’s Day (but which farmer is being celebrated?), International Pinotage Day, Freethought Day, Pulled Pork Day (yay!), Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, National Chess Day, Universal Music Day, and International African Penguin Awareness Day. 

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 12 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Florida has had two bad hurricanes in a month, and the NYT explains “How global warming made hurricane Milton more intense and destructive.”  It’s the heat, Jake!

Hurricane Milton walloped Florida with at least 20 percent more rain and 10 percent stronger winds than a similarly rare storm would have done in a world that humans hadn’t warmed by burning fossil fuels, scientists said on Friday.

As a result, Milton may have caused roughly twice as much property damage as that hypothetical storm in a cooler world, a separate team of researchers estimated.

Neither group’s analysis has undergone academic peer review yet. The first, by the World Weather Attribution research collaboration, relies on methods the group has used to estimate the influence of climate change on other extreme weather events, including Hurricane Helene last month.

Warmer air can take up more moisture. So as humans heat the planet, storms like Milton can carry larger cargoes of rain. Warmer seawater also imbues hurricanes with more energy as they traverse the ocean, allowing their winds to strengthen rapidly.

The second analysis, by researchers at Imperial College London, sought to estimate how much more economic loss a storm like Milton could cause compared with a similarly infrequent storm in an alternate version of today’s world, one with the same level of development and hurricane readiness, but without planet-warming emissions.

The researchers drew upon information from previous studies of how the property damage from past hurricanes that hit the United States varied in response to where the storms came ashore and their maximum wind speeds.

High winds aren’t the only cause of destruction during a hurricane: Flooding, storm surge and tornadoes matter, too. But small-seeming jumps in a hurricane’s wind speeds can translate into big increases in damage, said Ralf Toumi, a climate scientist at Imperial College London who worked on the analysis.

*Nellie Bowles has returned with what I hope is now an uninterrupted gig at the Free Press, summarizing the week’s news each Friday. Her latest column is “TGIF: Yes, they can control the weather.”  And yes, I will steal my usual three news items from her large collection. It’s worth subscribing to TFP for Nellie alone.

→ Disaster equity: Should FEMA helicopters try to rescue the most people they can find, or should they try to rescue the gayest people they can find? The answer is obvious, say these FEMA staff trainers. Setting aside the fact that gay people are less likely to know how to rainproof their houses, according to FEMA, “LGBTQIA people. . . already are struggling. They already have their own things to deal with, so you add a disaster on top of that, it’s just compounding on itself.” And: “FEMA relief is no longer about getting the greatest good for the greatest amount of people. . . . It’s about disaster equity.”

That’s right. I’ll be flying away on a FEMA helicopter while some hoard of heterosexuals is left to swim. Good. Correct. Do not send that ladder to them while I am here, stretching out gayly. Haven’t I struggled enough?

→ It’s a live broadcast: As Kamala Harris held a briefing with the Department of Homeland Security about Hurricane Milton ravaging Florida, her team was getting annoying in the earpiece. Kamala had to get them in line: “It’s a live broadcast,” she said, covering her mouth, on the live broadcast, annoyed. I imagine the Kamala Campaign HQ is just playing “Brat” remixes, so maybe it was that. Except, a few days earlier, her teleprompter had gone out, and Kamala got a look of abject fear across her face, laughed a lot, and seemed ready to break into dance. She is Veep, and it’s the best part about her. She acts like a random aunt who got shoved into the spotlight. She acts like me trying to give a bridesmaid toast. It’s a gaffe, technically. Like Donald Trump this week yelling at the Gays for Trump that they “don’t look gay” is a gaffe, technically. But these are my favorite parts about them. It’s the personality section of the pageant, and they’re both crushing. So follow me through a new journey: How I learned to give up and love our candidates!

→ Another Republican against WWII: Royce White, the GOP Senate candidate in Minnesota, has been outed as another guy who thinks his brain is the only one that truly understands World War II. Here he was two years ago on Twitter: “It dawned on me today. . . The bad guys won in WWII. There were no ‘good guys’ in that war. The controlling interests had a jump ball. If you look closely, you see the link between liberalism and communism in the Allied forces.”

I did not realize how common this take was becoming on the right. World War II contrarianism. A whole world of people who think Germany should have taken England, who think we picked the wrong team in the ’40s, and think if London Sieg heil-ed, then at least there’d be no tampons in the boys bathrooms.

I only wish World War II vets were still in fighting shape. Because these Twitter-addled members of the New Right wouldn’t stand a chance. Not that I am wishing for violence more broadly, just that, like any other red-blooded American woman, I am wishing for a brief but satisfying fistfight.

It’s a particularly good column this week, so read it (and subscribe). There is a lot more that I wanted to include, but I’m limiting myself to three.

*From Andrew Sullivan’s latest column, “He’s winning this right now.” If you don’t know who “he” is, the subtitle is “Harris’ fawning media blitz didn’t help much. It may have even hurt.” (Remember, Sullivan has already said, and says again in this column, that he’s voting for Harris:

Harris has also just completed a tour of fawning television interviews — from The View to Howard Stern to Stephen Colbert, who nudged, coached and celebrated their mutual idol. She had a terrific convention and, by everyone’s judgment, won the sole debate. The entire legacy media is behind her, at times embarrassingly so.

And yet, she’s obviously struggling to close the sale. At this point in 2020, Joe Biden, with far fewer resources than Harris, was 10 points ahead of Trump, and finished around 8.4 points ahead in the polling. Biden won the actual election by 4.5 percent, almost half the margin the polls predicted. At this point in 2016, Hillary Clinton was 6 points ahead, finished 3.6 points ahead in the polls, and ended up 2.1 percent ahead in the popular vote.

Run the numbers on Harris and you can begin to realize why smart Democrats are browning their whites. Today, Harris has a lead of just 2.6 percent nationally — much weaker than Clinton and Biden at this point. It’s the same in the swing states. Cillizza notes that in Pennsylvania at this point, Biden was +7 and Harris is barely +1; in Michigan, Biden was + 8, and Harris is tied. If the polls underestimated Trump’s national support by 2.5 points in 2016 and by 4 points in 2020, and the skew continues, then we could well be looking at the first victory in the popular vote that Trump has ever won. More to the point, nothing is really shifting. If anything, there’s a slight drift back toward Trump right now.

The big infomercial push was obviously a response to this. So I dutifully sat down and listened to or watched Harris’ media appearances, to see if she had found a way to close the deal with undecideds. I wanted to hear her answer two baseline questions that are still unresolved in my own mind. Why do you want to be president? And what change would you bring to the White House and the country?

These are not hard questions. They’re the most fundamental to a presidential campaign, and having listened to her closely in these interviews, I still don’t know. She has quietly dropped many previous positions on the border, fracking, Medicare. And, yes, she has offered some new policies. It’s unfair to say she hasn’t by this point. But giveaways to first-time homeowners and entrepreneurs, and help with aging parents and money to new parents, have not exactly seized the public’s attention. She flounders when asked how she’d pay for them, and over all, they remind me of Churchill’s remark: “Take away this pudding! It has no theme.” “I was born in a middle-class family” doesn’t cut it.

The closest Harris has gotten to articulating her agenda is the following, from the 60 Minutes interview:

In the last four years, I have been vice president of the United States. And I have been traveling our country. And I have been listening to folks and seeking what is possible in terms of common ground. I believe in building consensus. We are a diverse people. Geographically, regionally, in terms of where we are in our backgrounds. And what the American people do want is that we have leaders who can build consensus. Where we can figure out compromise and understand it’s not a bad thing, as long as you don’t compromise your values, to find common-sense solutions. And that has been my approach.

This is a classic Harris quote. It’s impossible to disagree with, but it’s also so empty that it’s hard even to agree with it either. It doesn’t tell us what she personally would push for before she’d compromise, what she really has conviction about, what she really believes in. In fact, the more I listened to her in these interviews, the more worried I became that she doesn’t actually believe in anything.

It goes on, but I won’t quote any more lest I be accused of tilting the election towards Trump! Sullivan concludes by reaffirming that he’s voting for Harris and not Trump but adds this:

Can she take a risk? Can she break out of this defensive, insecure crouch? Can she borrow just a smidgen of the fierce game Obama was showing last night? I hope so. But this, I fear, is who she is: reactive, insecure, with no real inner core. And the more you are exposed to her vacuousness, the more the whole fakery of it all sinks in, and the less conceivable she becomes as a president. She has to change that dynamic with something bold and risky. And she has around three weeks to do it.

*The WSJ tells us what a squeaker this election is, despite voters in swing states seeing Trump as better on two main issues, the border and the economy:

Voters in the nation’s seven battleground states see Donald Trump as better equipped than Kamala Harris to handle the issues they care about most—the economy and border security—yet are divided about evenly over which candidate should lead the nation, a new Wall Street Journal poll finds.

The survey of the most contested states finds Harris with slim leads in Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia on ballots that include independent and third-party candidates where they will be offered as options. Trump has a narrow edge in Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. But no lead is greater than 2 percentage points, except for Trump’s 5-point advantage in Nevada, which like the others is within the poll’s margin of error.

Across the full set of 4,200 swing-state voters, Trump gets 46% support and Harris draws 45%. The survey finds that the race in every state—and therefore the presidential election—is too close to call. If Harris wins the states where she leads in the poll, she would win a narrow majority in the Electoral College.

Here are some data: click to enlarge:

More from the WSJ:

The survey also shows that a campaign marked by bitter rhetoric, a switch of candidates atop the Democratic ticket and two assassination attempts on Trump have pushed Americans into their partisan corners, with neither candidate taking a meaningful share of voters from the other’s party. Trump, the former president, is holding 93% of Republicans across the seven states, while Harris, the vice president, retains 93% of Democrats.

Independent voters are evenly divided, 40% for Harris and 39% for Trump—another factor that makes the contest an up-for-grabs race in each state.

“This thing is a dead heat and is going to come down to the wire. These last three weeks matter,” said David Lee, a Republican pollster who worked on the survey with Democrat Michael Bocian.

I have decided not to get nervous about this election, as what will be will be. That’s not to say that one outcome won’t discombobulate me more than the other, but worrying doesn’t accomplish anything, and, anyway, I’m going to Vegas in two weeks (not to gamble: speaking at CSICon).

*Finally, the WaPo answers a question I had asked, “What will happen to the farm animals when Hurricane Milton strikes?” Their answer is “Animals are smarter than us.” Some examples:

[Sara] Weldon — who got hundreds of offers from farm owners across the country to take in her animals — explained that the safest thing for most farm animals during a hurricane is to leave them outside rather than in a barn.

Weldon and her husband filled up their bathtubs in their home with water and bought plenty of supplies ahead of the storm. Outside, they secured all the fencing and stocked up on food for the animals. They kept their 8-month-old donkey indoors with them, as well as their baby chickens.

“Animals are smarter than us,” Weldon said in a phone interview with The Washington Post. “They instinctively know where to go to be safe.”

She and her husband saw that firsthand, when they went outside at 2:30 a.m. during the storm to check on the animals.

“Our pack of donkeys were huddled together,” Weldon said. “They huddle together to be a break in the wind. It’s really cool.”

Still, “I went to bed not knowing if I would see them again,” she said.

Social media accounts like Weldon’s went viral as followers worried about the survival of farm animals across Florida — including Graci Lovering’s horse and 10 cows. She posted a TikTok of her painting names and phone numbers (using an All-Weather Paintstik) on her animals in case the fence surrounding the property was damaged and the animals escaped. It got more than 26 million views.

Here it is:

@graci.lovering

Lord, protect us! #hurricanemilton #cat5hurricane #centralflorida #livestock #floridahorselife #floridahorse #hurricaneequestrian #hurricanecows #livestockhurricane #zoey #buddy #elsa

♬ original sound – Freedom_Lover

Lovering and her family decided not to leave their 32-acre property in Lakeland, Fla. They, too, stayed close to the animals, as their home was also not in a mandatory evacuation zone.

“The animals are safest out in the pasture because if they were in the barn, they could get trapped or hit with a fallen tree,” Lovering said. “Out in the pasture, they can run from debris and fallen trees. These animals know what to do. They put their backs to the wind and stand in a line.”

People from around the world were concerned.

I’m crying just thinking about all the animals. I can’t take it,” someone commented on Lovering’s video.

“PLEASE UPDATE,” another person wrote.

Many other Hurricane Milton animal videos spread far and wide online, including one of a trio of goats wearing life jackets, which has nearly 4 million views.

And here’s that video:

@ispeaktruthbuddy

Goats are ready for Hurrican Milton #milton #florida #hurricane

♬ Rock You Like A Hurricane – Scorpions

Surprisingly, the animals did very well—at least in these stories. They didn’t write about the animals that didn’t make it. And I especially worry about wild birds. I guess the alligators did okay.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is fighting. When I asked Malgorzata “which war,” she said “Any way that comes her way.”  I’ve made her face in this picture my Twitter photo:

A: What are you doing?
Hili: I’m winning the war.
In Polish:
Ja: Co ty robisz?
Hili: Wygrywam wojnę.

And here is Andrzej holding the young daughter of the couple who lives upstairs (photo by Paulina). Andrzej loves kids.

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

From Science Humor:

From Cat Memes; (let’s hope not!):

 

From Jesus of the Day:

From Masih, another Iranian woman with her eye shot out for protesting.

Google translation:  “It’s been two years since I saw the world with one eye. For two years, a terrible paradox has been raging in my life. Sometimes I stay silent for hours in the mirror wondering where is that beautiful eye of mine. Me and this heavy wound that in these two years in isolation have brought the day to the night and have bewitched the night with a torus of terrible darkness.”

Here’s James Carville “browning his whites,” as Sullivan mentioned above. I love this guy!

From Malgorzata: some hypocrisy at CBS:

From my feed. I love animal rescue videos!

From Rowling. The context from the Torygraph:

Four suspected trans rights protesters attacked a gender-critical conference by releasing hundreds of live crickets into a packed auditorium.

The stunt threw the annual LGB Alliance conference into chaos, as a room of about 600 people had to be evacuated on Friday afternoon.

A protester, described as a 17-year-old girl by witnesses, who had been sitting in the crowd, dropped a bag of the insects as one of the final talks of the day was about to start.

Screams and cries broke out from the audience, with some people climbing onto chairs and others running out of the auditorium at the Queen Elizabeth II Centre in Westminster.

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted:

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. First: too many raccoons?

This is sad:

 

31 thoughts on “Saturday: Hili dialogue”

    1. “Gender Critical” refers to the position that women are adult human females and men are adult human males. The Lesbian Gay & Bisexual Alliance rejects the idea that homosexuality isn’t about being attracted to members of your own sex, but being attracted to others with the same “gender.”

      “Ignoring the reality of sexual dimorphism can harm women and members of the gay community whose experience of discrimination is rooted in these real differences between male and female bodies.”

      There are of course conferences and speakers. The crickets were released right before a talk by a whistleblower who worked in a Gender Clinic and recognized the poor quality of the therapy being offered.

      1. Thanks Sastra. I never could have sussed that out on my own. Matter of fact, I am not sure I even really understand it now…fault of my own mental limitations, not your explanation.

        1. I think ‘gender critical’ just means ‘critical of gender theory’, i.e. the concept that everyone has some sort of intrinsic ‘gender’ that is somehow independent of the physical body.

  3. ” . . . at least 20 percent more rain and 10 percent stronger winds than a similarly rare storm would have done . . . Milton may have caused roughly twice as much property damage . . . how much more economic loss a storm like Milton could cause compared with a similarly infrequent storm . . . .”

    Re: “similarly rare storm” and “similarly infrequent storm”: I don’t know what “rare” and “infrequent” mean here. Does it mean one hurricane following another so soon along basically the same track? (I haven’t watched every second of coverage from every media source. Perhaps it’s been mentioned.)

    Re: “may have caused”: let me know when you know for sure. What can’t one say when employing “may” (as well as “might,” “can,” and “could”)? Same with “seem.” The Fri 10/11/24 NPR “Morning Edition” program report on the Nobel peace prize stated that the awarding “seemed” to be a message to N. Korea, Iran and Russia. Why not simply ask the group if that is in fact their message? A reporter’s opinion/perception counts as factual news nowadays.

    1. Oh do I ever agree with you. When the reporters use any of the following words/phrases: might, may, may have, can, could, etc.. it is not news! Another one is, “I think”, which is most often used when the topic is political. I made the mistake of listening to a bit of npr this morning (weekend edition or something…the morning show) and they started discussing what might happen if Israel goes after target a, b, or c in Iran. And they got really into it! Oh, if Israel hits this, then Iran might go after blank and the entire world market might blah blah blah. God! It just made my head explode. There are so many actual things going on in the world today. Why don’t they just tell us what DID happen. Too many talking heads and not enough serious journalism going on these days. With regards to the storm, Bryan stated it simply and succinctly as he always does, there is more private property in existence today and so there is more destruction. Duh!

      1. More private property and more frequent and/or powerful storms are not mutually exclusive concepts.

        2. I see why you’ve said that to me, though. Bryan was talking about it as an additional factor and I made it sound exclusive. I wasn’t clear at all. Thx for pointing it out.

  4. Hurricane Milton walloped Florida with at least 20 percent more rain and 10 percent stronger winds than a similarly rare storm would have done in a world that humans hadn’t warmed by burning fossil fuels, scientists said on Friday.

    Horsesh*t. Since “Climate Change” predates the keeping of hurricane records (which started in 1851), they can’t know that. They are lying.

    Have you noticed everything is Climate Change? Warmer? Climate change. Colder? Climate change. Any negative event is rooted in Climate Change somehow. Where is the negative case? Everything proves climate change. What would disprove it? Why is it that every fix for Climate Change involves the implementation of Progressive policies? How the answer is always about destroying the modern economy? How it’s always the West that is expected to change, but never China (the larger emitter of “greenhouse gases”)? This is all propaganda, and, if the goal was to reduce carbon emissions, we’d be building nuclear power plants right and left. The target—as ever—is Capitalism.

    1. Yes, while there are indeed models that predict that hurricanes should be increasing in number and intensity, as a result of climate change, it’s hard to find actual evidence in the data that this is indeed happening.

    2. The scientists are not “lying” (I’m struggling to comply with the civility roolz here).

      You know, you could click the freaking link and read and evaluate the DATA on which the conclusions are based. Or you could ignore all that and just accuse honest, knowledgeable people of lying horseshit because they don’t bolster your political preconceptions.
      Everyone here has noted your choice.

      I don’t understand your claim that scare-quoted climate change predates 1851, since that’s about the exact same time that anthropogenic CO2 emissions started to increase (and of course anthropogenic climate change is the only kind worthy of political scare quotes). Unless all those communists at NOAA are lying.

      There is more kinetic energy in the atmosphere than there used to be (that’s neither modeling nor lying horseshit but an empirical fact). You don’t see how that might strengthen hurricanes, on average? This isn’t a hard one.

      Alas, you are right about China. Not much else.

    3. Can you give us a link to a climate model that shows that the CO2 added to the atmosphere since the start of the Industrial Revolution has had no effect upon the current global climate?

      1. I noticed Chas didn’t answer your question (I, was wanting the same information) and so I returned to Jerry’s post and hit on all the highlighted sections of the story. Three of them send us to paywalled NYT stories (no biggie, there. I, personally, wouldn’t use NYT as a good resource for such information anyway). There were 3 other highlighted areas that send us to the following (which look like worthy possibilities):
        1. rhess.copernicus.org
        2.worldweatherattribution.org
        3. http://www.imperial.ac.uk
        I’m sorry I’ve not made those into hyperlinks — I don’t know how. I also don’t know for sure if they answer your question, specifically, but they for sure have more backup information about the increased intensity of storms.
        Edit/Add: Check it out! One of the addresses turned itself into a hyperlink. It’s magic! Haha

      2. “Has had NO effect upon the current global climate”…
        I see. You were just piling on and I thought you had a genuine question and, like a nice guy (gal), I went about answering it. Whatever. I found what I genuinely was looking for. No harm done. I’ll stay out of your guys’ way in the future.

        1. I wasn’t asking Chas to back up his statements – I agree with him – I was asking Dr.Brydon. And my question is a valid one – I’ve yet to see an accepted global climate model that has any explanatory power without including the rising levels of atmospheric CO2 as an important factor.

          Thanks for checking those links anyway. Seeing as our host frowns upon prolonged disagreements here, and climate change is a contentious issue, it’s probably best to close on that note.

          1. Yes. I figured that out after I answered the question I thought you were asking. I miss details all the time. I need to slow down and concentrate. I don’t doubt that the climate is warming, by the way. We are in agreement.

  5. Yesterday’s Trump-cult-fest was a few miles from our home. I had claimed a couple of tickets for the event, but decided not to attend to make sure that there were at least two empty seats. Since Trump does not have a snowball’s chance of winning in Colorado, it’s long been clear that his visit to Aurora [barely inside the city limits at the upscale Gaylord Rockies resort] was to demonize Venezuelans, immigrants, Democrats, the media, and anyone else who does not support him 100%. His screed was an endless word salad of lies that seem to become more outrageous at each of his campaign stops, e.g. not only Aurora but all of Colorado has been taken over by Venezuelan gangs who have better weapons than the US military. And just as troubling is his entourage, folks like Stephen Miller who is an immigrant-of-any-stripe hater proclaiming that their administration will make Trump’s America only for “real Americans.” His speech would have fit right in with Hitler’s Germany.

    Interviews with his supporters were much like some of the political cartoons that have been published. One Auroran said “We all know that his claims about Aurora are big lies, but we’re here to support him.” One of the few black men in sight said “I’m here because Harris has not told us anything about what she plans to do.” One young Venezuelan Trump supporter said “I wish he would stop saying that all of us Venezuelans are gang members. I’m not a gang member.”

    To wrap it up, Trump said that his plans to round up illegal immigrants [and by inferences even some legal immigrants] will be called Project Aurora.

  6. “Screams and cries broke out from the audience, with some people climbing onto chairs and others running out of the auditorium…”

    Are people so removed from nature they don’t know that crickets are harmless? I understand people considering the crickets a nuisance and wishing to leave. But it is silly to be afraid of crickets and make a panic.

    1. Yes, really, those people were so silly and hysterical. If I’d been there, I’d have calmly brushed away the crickets and carried on.

      I can’t be too superior, though. If the critters had been spiders instead, I know that I’d have gone stark raving out of my mind.

    2. Videos show that plenty of people stayed. I’m guessing that the initial panic reaction was fueled by people not knowing that the bugs were crickets — or not knowing that they were just bugs in the first place. Attendees had to go through two metal detectors. “Kill the TERFs” is a popular slogan.

    3. Fair point. But when you know your conference is a target and likely be disrupted at some point, you’re already on edge. And now you know you have at least one saboteur in the audience, maybe more. Do you really want to take the time to ID whatever it was then, or move first? It takes very little to cause a disruption.

      And who’s to say the 17yo and a couple of friends couldn’t have started yelling and screaming to set it off? Maybe there will more information or an arrest with charges to come. (I doubt it because others will say it was “only crickets.”)

      But the Trans Activists got what they wanted. If they face no consequences, they will escalate.

    4. The activists have used crickets before. The strategy might be to make managers of venues think twice about allowing gender-critical conferences to book their space. The crickets are harmless but once they start chirping (and multiplying from all the spilled potato chips and donut crumbs lurking in the carpets), the unholy racket will force the maintenance team to hunt them down and fumigate them before they can rent to the next conference. Or hire some hungry cats.

  7. Sullivan’s right. Harris is deflecting and giving answers designed to not lose votes. I’ve done occasional media interviews on behalf of my company, and have gone through media training. We get taught to avoid difficult questions by moving back to pat answers and to always come back to the couple main points that we want to get across. Harris has obviously learned this, and she certainly has put time and effort into making sure she does what her trainers have taught her. That was very evident in the debate as she was highly prepared, and comes across in the interviews. The difference is that when I do it, I come back to certain concrete features of our product that we want to focus on and that I know well (“hey, one more thing I haven’t mentioned yet about our widget is that we’ve reduced our energy consumption by 23%”), whereas when she does it she comes back to vague talking points. Her non-endorsement of Netanyahu was not a dis of him; it was her executing what she was told – don’t alienate either side by making a strong statement either way. The problem with her execution of this type of media strategy is that when you don’t have anything concrete it can make it sound like you know nothing. The other problem is that we expect our leaders to make strong specific statements about at least a couple of things, and to be knowledgeable enough to get detailed when needed. She comes across as not a deep thinker and not genuine.

    1. I don’t think Harris is running for President in the normal sense. She is competing to be the spokesperson for the people who run the executive branch.
      If she wins, she will read what is written on the teleprompter and sign what she is told to sign.
      The DNC could have deposed Biden earlier and had a caucus, but there is a decent chance that someone less malleable would have come out on top.

      That is the best explanation I have come up with. They could have found one of many more qualified and likeable candidates. They have had to call in a bunch of favors to get everyone to feign so much enthusiasm for her, and even that might have backfired. It still might.

  8. I agree, Nellie Bowles is in fine form at TGIF. I love this line in the piece about “debanking”*;

    “As American institutions seek to punish people the interns don’t like, we can expect to see some new efforts.”

    She is an equal opportunity satirist, going after stupidity, cupidity, and hypocrisy wherever she sees it. Those are not hard to find, I’ll admit, but TGIF is a gem.

    *The new fascists have figured out another way to deplatform people whose opinions they don’t like – they “debank” them. Apparently Melania Trump and her son’s bank accounts were closed by the bank because, well, because they’re Trumps.

  9. Regarding climate change and natural disasters, I found this article very interesting: https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/the-role-of-climate-change-in-rising.

    The data-rich article distinguishes between trends in the physical events themselves and other factors—specifically, population growth (affecting exposure to hazards) and changes in propensity to be adversely affected (affecting vulnerability). The article concludes that the latter two are the most important contributors to the increase in the number of damaging storms. Another way to look at it is that exposure and vulnerability are increasing faster than the rate of change in the physical events themselves.

    1. That seems to be pretty common these days. The same goes for wildfires. The truth is that brush and debris have been allowed to accumulate tremendously in recent decades.
      Whether a field is covered with dried fallen limbs and overgrown with brush is a much larger factor when determining risk of dangerous wildfire than whether it is some fraction of a degree warmer this year.

      I don’t think the big conflict is whether the climate is changing or not. If it were completely static , that would be remarkable and unprecedented. The issue is whether all inclement weather is caused by man-made climate change, and whether redistributing wealth to the right people and granting political power to particular groups will change it back.
      Another question is whether changing it back to a colder average would even be a good thing. I am old enough to remember when we were taught about the Roman Climate Optimum, and how that and similar events correlated positively to human advancement.

      Like everything else these days, climate is a political discussion. Saint Greta spends her time alternating between cursing the Jews and denouncing capitalism. It is a predictable cycle.

  10. That Gayle King interview with the grieving father was utterly shameful.

    So very insensitive of her. Imagine if the situations were reversed there would be outcries of racism.

    This was the soft belly of antisemitism. His only concern is the return of his daughter and is not a hard concept to grasp.

  11. It’s best to ignore Andrew Sullivan. He is just a grouchy defiant curmudgeon who throws out negativity for the fun of it, showing off his neo conservative credentials while fooling some people who think he is independent. He is just a show=off wanting to get attention. He has no supporting evidence for his opinions and just relies on his ego and peoples’ gullibility to think he is some kind of genius. he isnt. Not by a long shot. he is a pain in the ass with loose cannon ideas that he hopes enough people will hear and agree with without any supportive evidence. In other words a schmuck.

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