Monday: Hili dialogue

November 11, 2024 • 6:45 am

Well, the “work” week has begun again: it’ Monday, November 11, 2024, and National Sundae Day (on a Mondae!).  Here is a massive sundae as served at Margie’s Candies in Chicago, a wonderful, old-fashioned place (the Beatles ate there!). 15 scoope of ice cream, bananas, caramel sauce, hot fudge sauce, and all the trimmings!  You’ll have to go with at least a half-dozen people. I’ve never had this one, as I go with only one other person, but their hot fudge and turtle sundaes are sublime! It’ll set you back sixty bucks.

It’s also Origami Day, Pocky Day (celebrating the Japanese treat of coated biscuit sticks, which, because they resemble the number 1, are fêted on 11/11), Veterans Day, and Death/Duty Day, honoring those who died in World War I, which ended at 11 a.m on November 11, 1918. 

To celebrate Origami Day, I’ll show a creation by one of our readers, Robert J. Lang, one of the world’s greatest origami masters (see his website here) as well as a physicist. About the artwork below he says, “Here’s a Greater Kudu created after seeing one during a trip to Africa a few years ago.”  Remember, this is made from a single sheet of uncut paper (reproduced with permission):

And it’s Veterans Day, as I noted. Google celebrates former and current American service members with this Doodle (click to go to page):

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the November 11 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

Today will be the last day that I publicize articles analyzing the election and why the Democrats lost big time. We don’t really know, and everybody has their own definitive answer!

*The New Republic asks us a patronizing question, “Why does no one understand the real reason why Trump won?”  And they have an answer different from the ones I’ve shown over the last two days:

These conversations have usually proceeded along lines where people ask incredulously how a majority of voters could have believed this or that. Weren’t they bothered that Trump is a convicted felon? An adjudicated rapist? Didn’t his invocation of violence against Liz Cheney, or 50 other examples of his disgusting imprecations, obviously disqualify him? And couldn’t they see that Harris, whatever her shortcomings, was a fundamentally smart, honest, well-meaning person who would show basic respect for the Constitution and wouldn’t do anything weird as president?

The answer is obviously no—not enough people were able to see any of those things. At which point people throw up their hands and say, “I give up.”

But this line of analysis requires that we ask one more question. And it’s the crucial one: Why didn’t a majority of voters see these things? And understanding the answer to that question is how we start to dig out of this tragic mess.

The answer is the right-wing media. Today, the right-wing media—Fox News (and the entire News Corp), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeartMedia (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more—sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win.

Let me say that again, in case it got lost: Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times. Not The Washington Post (which bent over backward to exert no influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper’s Harris endorsement). Not CBS, NBC, and ABC. The agenda is set by all the outlets I listed in the above paragraph. Even the mighty New York Times follows in its wake, aping the tone they set disturbingly often.

If you read me regularly, you know that I’ve written this before, but I’m going to keep writing it until people—specifically, rich liberals, who are the only people in the world who have the power to do something about this state of affairs—take some action.

. . .This is the year in which it became obvious that the right-wing media has more power than the mainstream media. It’s not just that it’s bigger. It’s that it speaks with one voice, and that voice says Democrats and liberals are treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your daughter.

And that is why Donald Trump won. Indeed, the right-wing media is why he exists in our political lives in the first place. Don’t believe me? Try this thought experiment. Imagine Trump coming down that escalator in 2015 with no right-wing media; no Fox News; an agenda still set, and mores still established, by staid old CBS News, the House of Murrow, and The New York Times.

That atmosphere would have denied an outrageous figure like Trump the oxygen he needed to survive and flourish. He just would not have been taken seriously at all. In that world, ruled by a traditional mainstream media, Trump would have been seen by Republicans as a liability, and they would have done what they failed to do in real life—banded together to marginalize him.

. . . Liberals, rich and otherwise, live in a bubble where they never see this stuff. I would beg them to see it. Watch some Fox. Listen to some Christian radio. Experience the news that millions of Americans are getting on a daily basis. You’ll pretty quickly come to understand what I’m saying here.

The unnamed author (surely NR editor Michael Tomasky) says that two-thirds of American have a diet of this kind of news.  But what do we do about it? After all, it’s freedom of the press and of speech? Do we create more left-wing sites or somehow make them appealing to right wingers (but HOW?).   Readers are invited to weigh in.

*Ezra Klein joins the postmortem chorus with a NYT op-ed called “The Democratic blind spot that wrecked 2024” (archived here).  I find the column a bit convoluted and hard to read, but the gist of it seems to be that Biden never experienced a big reversal of party votes during his midterm—not of the magnitude that Obama did.  And the argument proceeds:

If Democrats had been wiped out in the midterms, the pressure on Biden to be the transitional figure he’d promised to be would have been immense. If he’d run again despite that pressure, he might have faced serious challengers. But Democrats fared far better than they had expected. The president’s saggy approval rating and the widespread anger at inflation were nowhere to be found in the election results. In their first referendum under Biden, Democrats did much better than they did under Bill Clinton or Obama. Any pressure on Biden to step aside — and any possibility of a real primary challenge — ended.

. . . When I talked to some of Biden’s top political advisers after the midterms, they told me that the president’s approval rating was no longer an electoral indicator worth obsessing over. In a nation this sharply polarized, any president would be unpopular. But that wasn’t a harbinger of electoral doom, as long as the alternative was even more unpopular. Democrats didn’t need to change voters’ minds about Biden so much as they needed to keep reminding them of the chaos and consequences of Trump. The 2024 election, they said, would be about Dobbs and democracy.

This permitted the Biden administration — or what would later be called the Biden-Harris administration — to avoid the pivot previous Democratic presidencies have followed after the midterms. In 1994 and 2010, Democrats suffered shellackings, to use Barack Obama’s memorable term. In each case, the administration took the beating as a signal and refocused itself on the voters it had lost. This led, for Clinton, to triangulation and welfare reform; it led, for Obama, to a sequence of bipartisan budget negotiations and a re-election campaign laser focused on economics.

But the Biden administration wasn’t forced into that kind of pivot. It wasn’t blind to voter anger over inflation or the border, but it wasn’t stung by the kind of electoral rejection that forces administrations to alienate their core supporters by swinging to the center. There were no bipartisan negotiations over an anti-inflation or deficit reduction package and few highly public and painful efforts to change course. Biden remained preoccupied, understandably, by Ukraine and then Oct. 7 and the war between Israel and Hamas.

. . . . I think this dynamic helps explain a political blindness that Democrats developed around Biden. There was always a huge gap between the near reverence for Biden among Washington Democrats and Biden’s weak approval rating. One reason Biden was so beloved among congressional liberals was that, unlike previous Democratic presidencies, his administration didn’t reorient its politics in a way that alienated its base in order to win back disaffected voters. There’s a reason Biden’s staunchest defenders, even after the disastrous presidential debate, were Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Instead of focusing on the voters they were losing, Biden and the Democrats kept focusing on the voters they were winning. Biden’s re-election campaign kicked off at Valley Forge with a speech on the threat Trump posed to democracy; Harris’s campaign made its closing argument at the Ellipse, in Washington, where Trump whipped up the mob that stormed the Capitol.

So Klein argues that had the Dems faced the rebuffs of a midterm defeat, they would have done something about it: either pivoted to a more centrist stance or chosen a Biden replacement for this year who was not Kamala.  Here we have yet another theory. And, as I once read in a spoof of sociobiology that described a ludicrous adaptive theory, “All this is as plausible as anything else.”

*The Ukraine is suffering massive damage from Russian missiles and drones, but for the time being it’s giving Russia as good as it gets, even targeting Moscow.  And North Korean troops have no entered the fray.:

A massive drone strike rattled Moscow and its suburbs overnight into Sunday, injuring several people and temporarily halting traffic at some of Russia’s busiest airports, officials reported. Meanwhile, a huge nighttime wave of Russian drones targeted Ukraine.

This came after Russian President Vladimir Putin signed into law a pact with North Korea Saturday night, obliging the two countries to provide immediate military aid using “all means” if either is attacked. The agreement marks the strongest link between Moscow and Pyongyang since the end of the Cold War.

Earlier this week, Ukraine reported that its troops engaged for the first time with North Korean units. U.S. officials earlier confirmed the deployment of at least 3,000 North Korean troops to Russia, while Kyiv has repeatedly said the number is far higher. This has fueled concerns of a marked escalation in Moscow’s war on Ukraine, and tensions spilling over into the Asia-Pacific.

. . . .Both Moscow and Kyiv have kept a tight lid on casualty figures since the start of the full-scale war despite regular reports of Russian forces taking huge losses following “human wave” attacks that aim to exhaust Ukrainian defenses.

However, the chief of the U.K. defense staff, Tony Radakin, told the BBC that Russian forces had suffered their worst month of casualties in October since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. He said Moscow’s troops suffered an average of 1,500 dead and wounded per day, bringing their total losses in the war to 700,000.

According to Radakin, ordinary Russians were paying “an extraordinary price” for the war, even as a grueling, monthslong Russian offensive in Ukraine’s industrial east continues to eke out gains. He did not say how U.K. officials had calculated the Russian casualty figures.

“There is no doubt that Russia is making tactical, territorial gains and that is putting pressure on Ukraine,” he said. But he added that they were “tiny increments of land,” and Moscow’s mounting defense and security spending was putting an increasing strain on the country.

I worry a lot about Ukraine, as it may suffer so much attrition that it’s forced to reach a deal with Russia in which it loses a substantial amount of land.  But even if that happens, I hope that they do substantial damage to the Russian troops and to the North Korean ones as well.  I’m pretty sure that neither of those armies want to be attacking Ukraine, for the DPRK soldiers are far from home, and probably infected with worms as well.

*In their desperation to prevent Trump from further “conservatizing” the Supreme Court, some Democrats are now calling for liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor to step down so Biden can appoint a liberal and presumably young replacement before Trump takes office. She’s only 70, young for such a justice, but the news yesterday reported that she has diabetes, and the more dangerous form. Sotomayor ain’t having it:

Despite calls from some liberal activists for Justice Sonia Sotomayor to step down while Democrats can fill her seat before political power changes hands in January, she has no plans to retire from the Supreme Court, people close to the justice said.

“This is no time to lose her important voice on the court. She just turned 70 and takes better care of herself than anyone I know,” said one person close to the justice, suggesting that progressives turn their attention to other ways of safeguarding the Constitution after President-elect Donald Trump takes office.

Sotomayor, appointed in 2009 by then President Barack Obama, is the senior member of the court’s liberal minority, which by custom makes her its leader. Outnumbered by six conservatives, including three appointed by Trump during his first term, the liberals have increasingly been reduced to dissenting opinions that argue the majority has made grave errors on matters from abortion rights to presidential power.

“This would probably be a good day for Sotomayor to retire,” David Dayen, executive editor of the liberal American Prospect magazine, wrote the day after the election on social media. The same day, the former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan, noting the justice has had Type 1 diabetes since childhood, resurfaced his April op-ed suggesting that it was time for Sotomayor to go.

I can imagine how distressing it is to be in her shoes and hearing people say, in effect, “You should make way for a younger and healthier justice, as you might die in the next four years.”  As long as she’s healthy and able to do her job, I say leave the woman alone. After all, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was 81 when the calls came for her to retire.

*There was, as you probably heard, a mass excape of Rhesus macaques from a research facility in South Carolina.  43 of the primates made their Great Escape, and they are wily and hard to catch. In fact, they’ve recovered only one.

One of 43 monkeys bred for medical research that escaped a compound in South Carolina has been recovered unharmed, officials said Saturday.

Many of the others are still located a few yards from the property, jumping back and forth over the facility’s fence, police said in a statement.

The Rhesus macaques made a break for it Wednesday after an employee at the Alpha Genesis facility in Yemassee didn’t fully lock a door as she fed and checked on them, officials said.

The monkeys on Friday were exploring the outer fence of the Alpha Genesis compound and were cooing at the monkeys inside. The primates continued to interact with their companions inside the facility on Saturday, which is a positive sign, the police statement said.

Alpha Genesis CEO Greg Westergaard relayed that efforts to recover all the animals will persist throughout the weekend and for as long as it takes, the statement said.

It will take a LONG time, and winter is coming on. . . . .

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili shows some arachnophilia:

A: What are you doing?
Hili: I’m trying to befriend a tiny spider.
In Polish:
Ja: Co ty robisz?
Hili: Próbuję się zaprzyjaźnić z pajączkiem.

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

From Jesus of the Day.  Everything in Australia wants to kill you!

From Strange, Stupid, or Silly Signs:

*From Laurie Ann via her Welsh husband:

Masih tweets an MSNBC news report on the plot to kill her (and Trump).  One person has been arrested, while two others are Iran, beyond reach of the law:

I was reading Frans de Waal’s book The Bonobo and the Atheist last night, and was upset by his constant coddling of religion, saying that the New Atheists are misguided and that there’s no good reason for them to criticize religion.  And then I remembered stuff like this. I don’t care about the West and Israel stuff as much as I care about this death, which is due to Islam (called “this culture”) here:

An old Jewish woman gets attacked in the Amsterdam riots. I’m sure the tweet is kidding about “big consequences”. There will be no consequences for the attackers.

Two from my feed. I don’t get the first one, but I hope it isn’t a trap to catch and then kill birds. Ignore it.

. . and an IDF video showing Hamas torturing Gazan civilians. WARNING: TORTURE!  But this has to be put up somewhere. I don’t know how people can do stuff like this:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, some history of the “Death Wall,” which you’ll see if you visit:

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb.  Matthew says, “Who needs Twitter?” and is sending Bluesky posts that he finds, which are easier to embed:

First, a strange night-blooming flower pollinated by moths:

This flower looks like wrongly imagined, badly executed AI, but it’s real. It’s Trichosanthes pilosa var. pilosa (Cookie M CCBYNCND2). It’s night-blooming & pollinated by hawk moths. #Cucurbitaceae #pollination #Botany #TeamMoth #Sphingidae 🌾🧪🌱

— Scott Zona, Ph.D. (@scottzona.bsky.social) 2024-11-10T12:00:03.000Z

And a science in joke.

FFSwww.sciencedirect.com/science/arti…

— Alejandro Montenegro (@aemonten.bsky.social) 2024-11-09T14:12:26.168Z

59 thoughts on “Monday: Hili dialogue”

  1. I don’t buy blaming the right-wing media for the Dem’s loss — what about Matt Taibbi’s research, what about X and social Media, what about all those left-wing reporters and editors? My friend lives in Austin, Blue city, academics, university crowd. They blame racism and sexism. I live in a small Red community of shrimpers, mechanics, scufflers. For them it’s definitely the economy, and they were sick and tired of the left and the press telling them everything is wonderful. My friend in the Texas valley, Hispanic majority, sends a link that says Hispanics are capitalists and that’s why Trump carried Cameron County. Interesting that Collin Allred beat Cruz there.

  2. If you suspect the country is too racist and sexist to elect a black woman, is it a good idea to run a black woman as your candidate? That is my problem with the racism and sexism excuse for the loss. It implies that the democrats have only now found out that the country is racist and sexist.

    1. Exactly my thought.

      Also, if Democrats wrongly conclude that voters rejected Kamala only because she was black and a woman, and then never nominate another such candidate again, then it will be the Republicans who have the first female president of color. There’s no reason why someone like Condoleezza Rice couldn’t become a future GOP presidential candidate.

  3. Origami is an ancient art, but what’s surprising is that it was relatively recently in 1954 that Akira Yoshizawa invented a notation to describe how to make the various folds. The notation itself is not particularly complicated as there are only a few basic folds that need to be described.

  4. The right-wing media argument is something of a cop-out and something of a warning. The warning is that some would like to enact censorship. The cop-out is, Why do they think there is right-wing media in the first place? Clearly many people found mainstream media to be a problem. It’s no secret that for decades the media has leaned left (when was the last time that there was a major network anchor that was considered conservative at the time?). Nowadays MSM is often described as being a branch of the Democratic Party. The conservative media couldn’t have succeeded, though, if the information it provided and the viewpoints it expressed weren’t consonant with what its consumers experienced and thought. Just as we have a range of political viewpoints in this country, there is a need for a range of media converge in line with them. The Dems did not lose because the MSM didn’t try hard enough.

    1. I agree perfectly.
      Also, about this item in the New Republic article: “Didn’t his invocation of violence against Liz Cheney … disqualify him” — if the Trumpistas “didn’t see it”, it is because it’s not really true unless one wants to be very misleading. I happened to look for the original context of this piece of Trump idiocy I read about in the legacy media because I was so shocked, then found a full video of the scene and what he says is, in his typical meandering stupid Trumpian way, she is a war hawk, and maybe she wouldn’t be such a war hawk and so keen to send 10 000 troops to face combat in all kinds of situations, if she herself were the one standing there with a rifle in her hand looking at lots of rifles facing her, instead of sitting happily in a cozy home in Washington. You may agree with him or not, but it wasn’t a call to kill Liz Cheney.

      1. I fully agree. That was a stupid charge for the MSM to make.

        Same with the “Very good people on both sides” nonsense. He didn’t mean what has been imputed to him with that brief snippet taken out of context.

        And, IMO, the same with the dictator for a day comment. To me, stupid as it was, he was making a joke, not stating a future action.

    2. “Nowadays MSM is often described as being a branch of the Democratic Party”

      LOL.
      Yes, many people are saying this…in the right-wing media.

  5. The Harris to the Supreme Court idea is laughable for all sorts of reasons, but, most practically, the Senate would never confirm a nominee in the time remaining before the Inauguration. Hell, taking into account holidays, there are only four weeks left in the year. There is also some genius out there that thinks Biden should resign so Harris can be the first female President for a few weeks. I’d love to hear Joe and Jill’s reaction to that idea.

  6. Blaming the “right wing” media is the silliest analysis yet. The fact is that vast numbers of people quite rightly no longer trust the “mainstream” media because it has become a dishonest shill for left-wing politics. The media continually yelling “fascist” had little effect because people no longer trust the media. Examples of dishonesty include:

    Continually assuring us that Biden was “sharp as a tack” (when they knew he wasn’t); deliberately misrepresenting what Trump said about a “bloodbath” if he wasn’t elected; deliberately misrepresenting what he said about Liz Cheney; deliberately misrepresenting his “very fine people” remarks and his “day one dictator” remarks. Then there was the editing of an interview with Kamala Harris to edit out a bad answer and edit in a better one (and then refusing to release a transcript).

    Then there’s been the utter refusal to question trans ideology, or the idea of self-IDing into women’s sports, or the (non-existent) evidence base behind “medically necessary gender-affirming health care”.

    And the refusal to question notions of “systemic racism”, and the refusal to admit that black men are killed by police at a higher rate only because they commit vastly more serious crime (or to point out that if they simply comply with police instructions and don’t resist arrest, then their chances of dying vanish to near zero). [Or to admit that Floyd’s death was due to a heart attack brought on primarily by a drug overdose.] And they treat people like Joy Reid as mainstream voices (the equivalent white person would be Nick Fuentes, and Reid should be regarded similarly).

    Then there is their shutting down of anything they don’t like as a “conspiracy theory”, including any discussion of the long-term effects of immigration at levels of 4 million a year, or the idea that covid might have been a lab leak (it probably wasn’t, but it’s a valid question to ask), or any account of Hunter Biden’s laptop. This is all while promoting largely-false conspiracy theories of their own, such as the idea of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

    And there’s the absurd double standards, such as the idea that covid lockdowns and masking are absolutely necessary … except when it comes to BLM protestors! Or their aghast horror at Trump who (shock!) “wants to prosecute his opponents” (gasp!) at the same time as gleefully proclaiming “he’s a convicted felon; he’s going to jail!” (for an obviously trumped-up charge from a partisan prosecutor).

    If the Democrats want to win next time they need the left-leaning media to be honest and to welcome dissenting voices, and that’s mostly for their own benefit, because Democrats need to stop believing their own propoganda.

    4. +1, and agree with every word, execpt this:
      “brought on primarily by a drug overdose.” I’d say the proximate cause was the stress from being arrested and restrained, without which the drug overdose wouldn’t have been a problem. But premeditated murder it was not.

      1. I would rather we didn’t think of George Floyd’s death as being from a heart attack in custody. I was going to let it pass but since it drew a comment…

        Really (according to the jurors’ own words) it was Derek Chauvin’s failure to respond promptly to Mr. Floyd’s having stopped breathing while in the officers’ control and custody that set the jury unanimously against him. I think this is an important distinction. It is not culpable for a suspect to have a heart attack or stop breathing during lawful use of force and restraint. That would make it illegal to subdue any large fat person over 30 resisting arrest, drug-intoxicated or not, should he die. There is an activist presumption that if a policeman has to use enough force to subdue a member of an oppressed class that he dies, it must have been unlawfully unnecessary force. Not so. If the force is excessive from other process evidence (independent of outcome), that’s another story.

        In the end, I think it was the common-sense revulsion over the prolonged apparently callous restriction of Mr. Floyd’s breathing, never mind where Mr. Chauvin’s knee was, during which he appeared dead, that got him convicted. Even if the police commanders lied about that restraint being unauthorized, the jury in its common sense was not unanimously convinced that it was unreasonable force.

        Here’s where it gets murky in my mind. The likelihood of survival from cardiac arrest on the street is so poor that you could raise reasonable doubt that Mr. Chauvin could have saved Mr. Floyd’s life even if he had recognized that he had no pulse and started CPR immediately. Then, if his use of restraint had been lawful up until that moment, it’s hard to see how delayed treatment could have caused a preventable death. Certainly it wasn’t a good look for Mr. Chauvin to do nothing for several minutes but the prosecution still has to prove that the negligence (or whatever) caused Mr. Floyd’s death. I don’t know if this was raised at the trial. It is a different kind of evidence from what Dr. Tobin was discussing in the mechanism that led to the cardio-respiratory arrest. This was the key to the most serious charge the jurors had to consider and it’s clear they had to scrabble around in their minds to convict. In addition, his apparent disregard allowed the jury to believe that at some point he had intended Mr. Floyd’s death even if he didn’t actually cause it.

        As the years go by I’m more and more satisfied that the jury made of imperfect humans got it right. I’m impressed that they were able to come to this same conclusion in real time amidst the constant threat of aggrieved violence in Minneapolis. If any of you out there are reading this, here’s a tip of the hat to you.

    5. “for an obviously trumped-up charge from a partisan prosecutor”

      Charges for which a jury of his peers unanimously found him guilty. He’s been guilty of this kind of fraud his entire career. The guy is a walking illustration of fraud. Phony to the bone.

    6. Great summary.
      I had to laugh at this: “The Washington Post (which bent over backward to exert no influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper’s Harris endorsement”. No, they didn’t do an official endorsement, but was there any doubt whatsoever who they supported?
      The major media sources tried desperately to control the narrative, and their exaggerations were exposed, which led to mistrust. People who get their news from the conventional media all “know” that Trump wanted to have Liz Cheney executed by firing squad. Those of us who spend very little time watching TV but more on the internet knew right away that the major media was lying. This is why the Democrats want the internet regulated and censored – so that fewer people can control the narrative. It’s much easier to control the few cable news stations than it is the myriad of web denizens. Yes, some internet stories are fake. I’ve seen them and occasionally been tricked. But the information is often quickly corrected by some other story that comes along. On the internet, you are too easily fact checked. On the networks, a story like Hunter’s laptop being disinformation, Trump calling white supremacists fine people, etc., can carry on for much longer as it’s a single source information distribution system and the narrative much easier controlled.

      Maybe the biggest red-pill moment for me was the BLM marches at the height of the pandemic, with all the epidemiologists signing on to support and the media proudly covering, and then the “mostly peaceful protests” comment.
      It’s not OK to go surfing by yourself, but it’s OK to stand shoulder to shoulder converting spit and mucous into virus-laden aerosol by shouting, and to burn, loot, and destroy the neighborhoods of those you purport to help. That did it. I saw it clearly, and became aware (woke?) when I saw that the narrative being pushed didn’t match reality.

      For a take on how democrats and republicans have changed their information communication style, see https://x.com/devon_eriksen_/status/1855663441115013489?s=46

  7. Doctors all know of patients with type 1 diabetes who manage to get into mid-life without suffering any of the long miserable list of complications. Whether it’s something they do, something we help them do, or just dumb luck, they seem to lead charmed lives. A classmate of mine has had the disorder since childhood. He is still in law practice and must be about Justice Sotamayor’s age. The management of type 1 diabetes has made great strides but there is something about the protoplasm of people who can discipline themselves to deal with total lack of natural insulin that can kill them in a few days if they slip up.

    I know nothing at all about Justice Sotomayor’s health or fitness but trying to manipulate her into retiring for that reason alone seems unfair.

    1. She’s had Type 1 diabetes since she was 7.

      Wikipedia says it knocks about a decade off lifespan but that’s an average and it doesn’t give a standard deviation.

    2. Remember RBG and Amy Barrett. (And I loved RBG, don’t get me wrong.)

      Is staying on the SCOTUS for X more years more important than the cultural and political impact of Trump’s (or a future GOP POTUS) appointment of a young, very conservative justice?

      I admire Stephen Breyer’s decision to retire when he did.

  8. Let’s see. It wasn’t long ago that the Dems wanted to:

    1. Get rid of the filibuster.

    2. Pack the Supreme Court.

    3. Award electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote.

    Do Dems still want these things? I’m guessing no, because they have no principles beyond an immediate win.

    1. And get ready for a big pivot on the part of Dems to now have stronger voter identification laws….too much of the riff-raff voted for Trump this time so we need to clamp down on that.

  9. Probably Michael Tomasky:

    “Why didn’t a majority of voters see these things? And understanding the answer to that question is how we start to dig out of this tragic mess.”

    Aufheben der Democrats round two in the Church of Perpetual Sublation.

    (Round one this year was when Our Lady of the Immaculate Election was installed as candidate for President).

  11. If any origami shape can be decomposed into a few, repeatable folds (as Tim says above), perhaps one can use the mathematical rules of origami to create new forms. One could even set a computer to explore the possible forms and create some new objects. Some of them might even be useful beyond their intrinsic beauty.

    I am reminded of how AI can resolve protein structures so effectively.

    Thoughts?

    1. Great question. I ask to ramble for fun :

      I’d point out though that the computer program was trained on an experimental database. I call this “solving the protein folded problem”. If a protein fold (yes that is a thing) was not observed, then I’m not sure what the program does. I imagine there are more calculated protein folds than observed protein folds. Some folds do different things that are unexpected in different contexts – e.g. “Moonlighting proteins” (that’s a thing too).

      Experimental protein folding is a different thing. One name that comes to mind is Christopher Dobson. Generally, those experimentalists look at the pathway the amino acid chain takes as it curls/folds up into its in vivo shape.

      Obv. I have an interest emphasizing experiment – though theory is of course great.

  12. Just thinking, as I read even more election analyses. It would be interesting to see a survey of voters on when they decided who they were going to vote for. A lot of the Democratic messaging (like trying to bring in the Cheneys et al.) seemed to be aimed at undecided swing voters. I get the impression that the lines were drawn a long time ago, perhaps even before Harris got the nod. In the same vein, it would be interesting to see a survey around who on the left decided to stay home as a result of the change to Harris and her campaign.

    1. Survey of one here — I decided as I walked into the voting booth to vote for Harris rather than leaving the top of the ballot blank — the other women’s issue, reproductive choice, that and I believe Trump is mad.

      1. But how did a vote for Ms. Harris advance the cause of abortion on demand? Even if you are a single-issue voter, doesn’t your choice have to have some causal relationship to your desired outcome? Ditto the anti-abortion single-issue voters. I really don’t get what people on either side are hoping to accomplish in voting that way for President.

    1. Would that not be”forced” to marry Jez. “Can” yes, but what 9yr old wants that geezer as a play friend.

  14. In my opinion, Ezra Klein is correct. Democrats read (including Biden and his staff) too much in the 2022 mid-terms.

  15. On the Yemini “bride” and Palestinian interrogations….
    Religion of Peace, my friends, religion of peace.
    Don’t be “Islamophobic” now. Good kids.

    D.A.
    NYC

  16. Regarding that NR article: Someone posted it on FB as a knock-down reason why Trump won.

    In my opinion, that article proposes just a variant on the “Trump voters are stupid” argument. They’re too stupid to understand that Fox News is lying to them.

    I just listened to most of Al Franken’s most recent podcast on the election with Norm Ornstein. Their take is again, mostly: Dumb Trump voters, the MSM was biased against Harris (WTF?), America racist, etc.

    If this is the best we Dems can come up with for the reasons Trump won, we are doomed to continual failure.

    I can recommend a few articles over at the Free Press. (Sometimes, the Free Press writers drive me crazy; but then that’s true of almost any site.)

    I Raised $50 Million for the Democrats. This Week, I Voted for Trump

    The Democratic Coalition Has Shattered. Here’s How to Rebuild It

    Democrats Picked the Wrong Women’s Rights Issue

    1. He argued that given the Democrats lost by only 2% that some small change in strategy could have given them the push. I agree 100%. Less wokeness probably wouldn’t have hurt. Some MSNBC hosts saying the only reason she lost was she was a black women suggests they have big blind spots. I still like Stephanie Ruhle though. Inflation was a big issue and i think difficult to present. The US did tremendously better with their economy than the rest of the world. However, not everyone in the US was doing as well as they were before Covid. Telling people to imagine how much better they are doing than Europe just doesn’t sell. It’s still a REALLY good outcome, but it doesn’t count with a lot of people. I think this is all pretty uncontroversial. However, contrary to many of these posts, I do think the “right wing media” presented tremendous problems for the election. This is actually the single most frustrating thing for me to think about. I don’t like the Democrats. I don’t like constantly dealing with wokeness. I actually side with a lot of center and center right people on their criticisms of these issues. People on this board. I think the efficiency of higher education is a joke and I’ve had this view for close to two decades. I don’t fit the description of a leftist. The difficulty is that I strongly disagree with the ethical behavior of the some of the “right wing media” described in The New Republic article. When you do this people have a tendency to think you’re defending the other side. I’m really just attacking who I say. The absurd failures of left wing media certainly don’t make the right wing correct. For example, some of The Free Press seems pretty good and some of it reminds me of the IDW. Just a love for being edgy and contrarian. Some of these journalists I’m sure have had good criticisms of the Covid response. I’m skeptical they have good criticisms to some of the looney criticisms of the Covid response. Rogan for example devoted tireless energy to attacking the vaccines in 2021 and 2022. During much of that time the benefit of getting vaccinated was enormous. We know this because the difference in death rates between vaccinated and unvaccinated people was staggering. When have any of these people spoken out against that for the grotesque stupidity it was. I genuinely wish once the vaccine was known to be effective that they just opened everything up. No bitching about totalitarianism and if the unvaccinated died they did it of their own free will. Still tragic, but saving people from themselves is too expensive. I know a biological man boxing a woman is impressively stupid, but I think a few less people have died from it. I actually wonder how many of the the anti-woke are perversely happy Trump won just so they can stick it to their cultural opponents and continue to market their brand of journalism. Sorry about the long post, but I already wrote it. Gonna take some advice and be done with politics for a while. Stay atheists guys!

  18. As not a US citizen.
    All the gnashing and wailing is relevant, but it is simple imo. Wrong Dem candidate. It seems difficult for a woman for one and I dont know why that is. I can guess of course.
    What made the voters think differently about Harris and immigration? An actual issue, nothing, as she did nothing from what I have gleened from WEIT post, comments, other sources. For someone responsible for immigration it could have been spelt out what they did do and how it was obstructed, counter criticism and rhetoric? Nothing from what I saw or heard. Confrontational? not necessarily, just loud and clear.
    … for some perspective, Ukraine is actually fighting and dying for their freedom, their right to chose democracy.

    1. Sam referred to a survey that found that “Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class” was the top reason for not supporting Harris among 1) all swing voters and 2) swing voters who voted for Trump. For anyone interested in seeing the complete ranking of reasons, those results can be found here. Scroll down to the table.

      1. And, of course, people would always own up to being misogynistic or racially prejudiced…

        1. And, of course, some people will reject any data that they perceive to contradict their prior beliefs.

          1. Since you are a well-known statistician, I would have expected you to understand the problem of taking people’s responses at face value.

  20. This is one of the most absurd takes on a solution to the Democrat woes I have read in a long time …..

    until people—specifically, rich liberals, who are the only people in the world who have the power to do something about this state of affairs—take some action.

    Good grief people who enjoy their luxury beliefs and are mostly immune from any repercussions from policy changes wrt immigration and the economy etc are to be their saviour.

    This could not be anymore condescending or tone deaf. Poor people please be quiet and listen to what the wealthier members of society have to say.

    And they wonder why a lot of the population don’t believe or trust the media. Not even blind Freddy could be this daft.

    1. Boy, do I agree with your take on that ridiculous, condescending statement. That really pissed me off.

  21. There’s very little I disagree with our host on on his website, but giving largely uncritical air to that “right wing media is why Harris lost the election” piece is one of them. Fortunately the majority of comments seem to have pushed back and more articulately than I could.

    I’d add that I reckon this website, with its entirely commendable stand against many of the key trans issues, support for Israel, anti-left ideology corrupting science and institutions, anti-the biased NYT, supporter of Nellie Bowles and the Free Press, etc. would get lumped in with “right wing non-mainstream media” itself by the writer of that piece.

    This new “right wing media” seems actually to be the media that resists bias and embraces facts and truth. And that’s how they’ve managed to fill a rather large niche. (Fox excluded obviously.)

  22. It’s never the old guards of either party that vote them in. It’s the middle ground in the swing states where people are mor modest. They voted him in, they voted him out and now back in again.

  23. Just to come back to post something few will read anyway given I’m a good day late. It seems pretty straightforward to me why Trump won:

    1) The left/mainstream media are not to be trusted. When you cry wolf/call someone Hitler too often it fails to have an effect. Coel, above, does a great job calling them out.
    2) Many “never Trumpers” from 2016 changed their tune because 2017 to 2021 did not pan out as stated. Jan 6th was not a good look, but the checks and balances prevailed and Trump’s actual involvement was arguably negligible. Certainly not worthy of the subsequent hand wringing. Ben Shapiro explains this in that debate with Sam Harris; the swing from never to proud to vote for the man. Even if the worst happened on Jan 6th (Mike Pence killed/Pelosi kidnapped) I simply do not believe we’d not have an autocracy in America. Power would have transferred on Jan 20th. I’ll go on record now and say that power will transfer on Jan 20th 2029 also. Or the next time the Dems win. As all Dems know or they wouldn’t have run Biden or Harris.
    3) I went to see Rory Stewart in Perth the other night and he mentions Trump being a convicted felon, but with no context. Yes he was found guilty by a jury of his peers, but it’s pretty hard not to notice that these and other charges have more than a sniff of law-fare. This, in my opinion, is a worse attack on democracy than Jan 6th. There were Democratic judges trying to keep him, unjustly, off the ballot in their states. The rape conviction is a sign of our times (believe all women – unless they were Israeli and attending a music festival of course) – it has a specious feel to it.
    4) Then you see the guy on stage/listen to him in full rather than the edited clips by CNN and you realise he’s actually quite a funny guy with tongue firmly in cheek a lot of the time. It’s also hard not to believe he does not love America and want it and its people to prosper. He’s more grandfatherly now – almost.
    5) Yes, there are many missteps. But how much time does he spend talking live? Heaven forbid someone record everything I say over a similar timeframe.
    6) Once you realise or have sympathy with some of the above you get to his policies; and they’re good. They’re sound and they are what most Americans want. If I were a single issue voter (I’m not an American voter, by the way) the trans stuff in kids would be it. I’d overlook almost all else. He’s just come out very strong against the current madness and I applaud him. I am happy to switch parties depending upon their stated policies; I voted both Tory and Labour in the UK.
    7) Second would be a strong stance on supporting Israel/anti-Hamas and Iran. Tick.
    8) A strong border. Tick.
    9) Economy. Tick. There’s no consensus on what makes a good economy and everybody has their own ideas and I don’t see anything obviously wrong with his and the economy appeared strong under his previous leadership.
    10) Abortion. He’s not anti-abortion as such, just wants some limits. He put the decision back in the respective states. Roe vs Wade, whilst I supported it, sounds to have been genuinely bad law and never a federal issue. Yes he’s caused harm by allowing it to be overturned, but now it’s up to voters to change their state governments. I, personally, am pro-abortion for any reason up until 14 weeks or so and only thereafter for excellent reasons.
    11) And the Dems have gone so far left/pandering to their fringe and X it’s ridiculous.
    12) And the sanctimony! Oh my lord, like is there anything more fun to rebel against?
    13) And and and the hypocrisy! “Sanctuary Cities” throwing their toys out when they actually had to put their money where their mouthes are. Martha’s Vineyard was embarrassing. This just one of roughly a million examples. Talk about luxury beliefs.

    Apologies for the long post Jerry – I know it’s against the rules! (If you even see it.) I appreciate I may have been misinformed, and not all of the above is my actual views. Just what an American may legitimately believe. I also don’t mean to offend or cause argument. I would probably have voted Trump simply on his stated policies, although would have liked a better person running. I’ll bow out here 🙂

    2. I read it.

      And I think most of your points are good ones. Especially 6-8 and 10-13.

      10: the GOP made the right mouth noises, in the end (though I think they are lying; time will tell) and enough voters bought it. It took the force out the abortion issue, which the Dems relied far too heavily (and confidently) on.

      9: Really? What effect did Trump have on the numbers? None. I’ve kept track of key numbers for 3 decades now and there was no Trump EffectTM.
      Harris had the bad luck of the 2022 inflation bubble. The vibe was: Things are too expensive.

      And on that subject, when the tariffs go on all Chinese goods (and they slap-back tariffs on US production, which Trump will have to once again subsidize with taxpayer dollars), we could see a proper inflation spiral. Certainly prices for everyday goods are going up commensurate with the tariffs.

      Back to 6: RFK Jr. in charge of HHS (which includes the FDA)? FFS! He’s a loon.
      I am VERY afraid of the clown car of grifters Trump will put in charge of critically important parts of the Federal government.

      But I think you hit the main heads of why Trump and the GOP trounced (trounced, admit it fellow Dems) the Dems this year.

      First step: It wasn’t because:
      The voters are stupid (of course some few are)
      The voters are racist (of course some few are)
      The voters are sexist (of course some few are)
      The voters are transphobic (of course some few are)

      The voters are basically interested in everyday issues like cost of food and fuel, security, safety, etc. The Dems dropped the ball on this one. The majority of voters favor Israel over Hamas. The majority of voters, although they think transpeople should all be treated fairly, don’t think biological men should be competing in women’s sports or be placed in women’s only spaces like women’s prisons. And the GOP made the right mouth noises about abortion (see my note above).

  24. The agreement Russia and North Korea have signed is a troubling development. What NK people edure daily is horrendous and now they’re being sent into the meat grinder war of attrition. What a putrid existence. I hope more can safely defect to South Korea. Putin has become even more maniacal joining this pact and I fear for Ukraine.

  25. I’m not denying that child marriage is a huge problem in Yemen, but the particular story you posted seems pretty fishy. The man pictured in the image is not a Yemeni. He’s a British imam who was sent to prison in 2011 for abusing children: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-wiltshire-15557455

    I guess it’s possible he moved to Yemen after his release and continued abusing children, but I think it’s unlikely. Also he would be 80 years old now, not 40 as claimed in the pictured article.

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