Welcome to the Cruelest Day: Tuesday, November 12, 2024, and it’s National French Dip Day, celebrating not a swim in the Seine but, as Wikipedia notes, a ” hot sandwich consisting of thinly sliced roast beef (or, sometimes, other meats) on a “French roll” or baguette.” Here’s one with fries, au jus, ketchup, and beer. Hungry?
It’s also Chicken Soup for the Soul Day, celebrating the inspirational book, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Day (the women’s rights advocate was born on November 12, 1815), National Pizza With the Works Except Anchovies Day (that’s RIGHT! no fish on pizza!), and Happy Hour Day.
Here I am feeding a squirrel at Botany Pond. The handful of resident “tree rats” have become tame, and have learned to climb up the leg of my jeans to get a prized walnut. Video by Peggy Mason:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the November 12 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*I had hoped to announce the winner of the Booker Prize this morning, but I guess it’s a bit early for them to have been awarded. At any rate, here are the six finalists, and if you want to guess or give your take on any you’ve read, please do so in the comments:
‘James’ by Percival Everett
The favorite for this year’s prize, according to British bookmakers, “James” is a retelling of Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” from the perspective of the Black man fleeing enslavement in Twain’s novel.
‘Orbital’ by Samantha Harvey
The second favorite, according to the bookmakers, “Orbital” is about six astronauts working on a space station racing around Earth.
‘Creation Lake’ by Rachel Kushner
Kushner’s novel is about a spy-for-hire who infiltrates a commune of environmental activists in France — apparently, though she doesn’t know who’s employed her, on behalf of agricultural conglomerates that want the commune’s members jailed.
‘The Safekeep’ by Yael van der Wouden
In some literary quarters, “The Safekeep” has garnered attention for one main reason: It includes a lot of sex. In fact, as one Times reviewer has noted, it features a whole “sex chapter.”
The Booker Prize’s judges have said they shortlisted the book, van der Wouden’s debut novel, for far more than its eroticism. “The Safekeep,” they said in a news release, is “a compelling and atmospheric story of obsession and secrets.”
‘Stone Yard Devotional’ by Charlotte Wood
In Wood’s seventh novel, which Riverhead Books will publish in the United States on Feb. 11, a woman leaves her job at a wildlife nonprofit, apparently overcome with despair at her work’s lack of impact, and retreats to a convent where her solitude is interrupted by, among other things, a plague of mice.
‘Held’ by Anne Michaels
Bookmakers’ long-shot for this year’s award is “Held,” a novel that starts with a soldier in the trenches of World War I and then jumps back and forward through time, to touch on four generations of the man’s descendants, including a war correspondent and a worker in a refugee camp.
I’m betting on James, which not only has had good reviews, but the subject matter is ideologically salubrious.
*I’m keeping an eye on the House of Representatives, as the final tally hasn’t yet been made, and I’d prefer a Democratic House so that Trump doesn’t get a trifecta (the legislative, administrative, and judicial branches. Here’s the latest:, with the Republicans needing 4 more votes to control the House but the Democrats needing 15.
However, 270 to Win gives this breakdown, with Dems needing only 9 but Republicans needing only two. I guss this is a difference in how the sites call races.
At publication time of this article, Republicans lead 216-209 in elections where a winner has been projected, just short of the 218 needed to retain the majority. The party will need to win two of the remaining 10 uncalled races.
A breakdown of the party holding each of the ten remaining races follows. Incumbents are running in all but CA-47.
Democrats: AK-AL, CA-09, CA-21, CO-08, CA-47
Republican: AZ-06, CA-13, CA-27, CA-41, CA-45
Thus far, 12 seats have flipped, six from each party. Six incumbents – three Republicans in New York, two Democrats in Pennsylvania, and one in Oregon – have been defeated. See the Changing Parties table >
The Alaska election will go to a ranked choice tabulation if no candidate gets a majority. If needed, that will take place on November 20.
Of the ten still uncalled elections whose percentages are given, the GOP narrowly leads in five, creeping ever closer to that 218 mark—in which case we can all move to Canada.
*More biased reporting from the BBC (h/t Jez), which didn’t do its fact-checking:
The question: how is it the BBC consistently platform witnesses who are publicly aligned with Hamas (a few examples 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10)?
Yesterday, the BBC ran another story about a ‘massacre’ in Gaza. We have now seen it countless times – Hamas propaganda make an empty claim – and the BBC rush to promote it.
The latest headline covered both Gaza and Lebanon.
‘Israeli strikes on north Lebanon and Gaza kill dozens, officials and rescuers say’.
The only named Gazan based source for the claims in the BBC article was a Dr Fadel Naim, director of the Al-Ahly hopsital:
The report from the good doctor is grim. Of the 17 bodies his facility received ‘nine’ were women – thus strongly implying this was a random attack that killed women – not terrorists.
But is there any reason the BBC should not have reproduced the claim of Fadel Naim? Did the BBC do the slightest bit of due diligence on this witness, before sharing his lies to the world?
The answer is no. They could not have checked at all.
If the BBC journalists had even bothered to look – they would have seen that this man openly supports terrorism and should not be trusted. In the end, it is left to people like me to do their job for them.
The doctor, besides being director of a Gazan hospital and a supporter of terrorism (see his social-media posts in the article), rubs elbows with the leadership of Hamas:
From scanning the photos on his own public timeline, it soon becomes apparent that this doctor is no idle supporter of terrorism. This is an image from his daughter’s wedding. The top table at the event included not just Fadel Naim, the BBC ‘witness’ – but also Ismail Haniyeh – the (then) leader of Hamas in Gaza:
Such are the reliable sources used by the BBC
*As if there’s not enough to be depressed about now, three big guns in national security and public health have published a WaPo editorial called “The U.S. could soon face a threat ‘more powerful’ than nuclear weapons.” It’s biological weapons, Jake, made more dangerous with genetic engineering, (Article is archived here.)
President Richard M. Nixon’s bold 1969 decision to renounce biological weapons and spearhead a treaty to ban them helped contain the threat of a man-made pandemic for half a century.
But our inheritance from Nixon is now fading. And in this age of synthetic biology, unless we act quickly to deter our adversaries from making and using bioweapons, we could face disaster in the near future.
The nightmare of a biological holocaust is far from fanciful. A recent Post investigation showcased Russia’s reopening and expansion of a military and laboratory complex outside Moscow that was used during the Cold War to weaponize viruses that cause smallpox, Ebola and other diseases. In China, senior military officers have been writing for years about the potential benefits of offensive biological warfare. One prominent colonel termed it a “more powerful and more civilized” method of mass killing than nuclear weapons. An authoritative People’s Liberation Army textbook discusses the potential for “specific ethnic genetic attacks.”
At the same time, breakthroughs in gene-editing technology and artificial intelligence have made the manipulation and production of deadly viruses and bacteria easier than ever, for state and non-state actors alike. The 2019 outbreak of covid-19 in Wuhan, China, which might have involved an accidental leak of an artificially enhanced coronavirus, offers a sense of the stakes: Some 27 million people have died as a direct or indirect result of that virus. And researchers around the globe — civilian and military — are tinkering with viruses far deadlier than that one.
So the U.S. is not supposed to be making bioweapons, but the tenor of the article is that we’d damn well better, as Russia and China could be doing it. (Many people take issue with the “lab-leak” hypothesis.) So what do we do?
Treaties and conventions alone cannot solve this problem. Nor are nuclear deterrence models quite up to the task. The prospect of mutually assured destruction is unlikely to inhibit death-obsessed terrorists who have a better shot at acquiring bioweapons than nuclear weapons. Dictatorships might be tempted to unleash a bioweapon if they are confident the nations they target would struggle to pinpoint the source of the attack — and if the attackers believe they can do more damage to their enemies than to their own population. They might, for example, covertly vaccinate their people before launching an attack. Or they might succeed in developing pathogens capable of disproportionately affecting specific ethnic groups, as envisioned by Chinese generals.
No, the authors suggest that we develop better intelligence and an early-warning system:
This is why biological surveillance, detection and attribution must become a core national security function, and not merely a public health activity, of the United States and friendly nations. Congress, working in consultation with the Defense Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, should immediately establish and fund a new intelligence discipline: biological intelligence, or BIOINT, to mobilize allied governments and private companies to detect and assess high-risk scientific research and incipient biological threats.
. . . The United States must also show that it has the will to impose steep costs on those that pursue, much less employ, bioweapons. We must also learn how to respond to pandemics with vastly greater speed and dexterity than during the coronavirus pandemic. We must improve on the success of Operation Warp Speed, the public-private partnership that delivered coronavirus vaccines in record time, and replicate that model to mass produce rapid tests, protective equipment and therapeutics quickly enough to mitigate the death and disruption that could be caused by a biological attack.
They don’t suggest that we start developing bioweapons, but toward the end of the article they do speak darkly of “countermeasure” development, and it’s not clear what that means. Deterrence must entail some form of reprisal. Perhaps via nuclear weapons?
*According to the Wall Street Journal, the antisemitic violence in Amsterdam was highly organized, beginning with calls for a “Jew hunt” (article archived here):
Ziv and scores of other Maccabi supporters had traveled to the Dutch capital for a match with local team Ajax on Thursday night. Little did they know that, earlier in the day, they had become a topic of discussion on popular messaging apps, where users were calling for a Jodenjacht, or “Jew hunt.”
From late Thursday and into the early hours of Friday, Dutch authorities said, mobs unleashed a wave of violence, chasing Israelis through the streets on motorbikes and beating them. The attacks came after videos circulated online of Maccabi fans pulling down a Palestinian flag and chanting about Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. Police said 25 to 35 people were injured in Amsterdam.
The campaign was organized, Dutch authorities said, and the attackers were equipped with fireworks and moved quickly, targeting Israeli fans with “hit-and-run” assaults. Police said they were investigating who instigated the assaults and how they were coordinated.
. . . .More than 60 people were arrested before and during the soccer match, prosecutors said. Only one arrest has been disclosed since then. Four suspects, including two minors, remained in custody on suspicion of participating in violence, the prosecutors’ office said. Officials declined to identify the arrested suspects.
Maccabi fans interviewed by The Wall Street Journal said the violence came to a boil after two days in which they were stalked and harassed in Amsterdam—during a week that the Dutch commemorate Kristallnacht, when German Nazis attacked Jewish people and property on Nov. 9 and Nov. 10 in 1938. Some Maccabi fans said they saw taxi drivers using their phones to document their whereabouts.
Messaging app Telegram was used to talk about “going on Jew hunts,” Amsterdam Mayor Femke Halsema said. “This is so shocking and despicable that I cannot get over it yet. It is a disgrace,” she said.
A screenshot of a pro-Palestinian WhatsApp group chat, viewed by the Journal, called for a “Jew Hunt” on Thursday and referred to a standoff on Wednesday night in which a group of Israeli fans were cornered by a crowd that police said included taxi drivers who had responded to an online call to mobilize.
“They knew everything,” said Shachar Bitton, a 30-year-old Maccabi fan. “They knew exactly where we stayed. They knew exactly which hotels, which street we were going to take. It was all well-organized, well-prepared.”
This was organized by Muslim immigrant to Amsterdam, and similar attacks (not this organized, though) have happened in other European countries. It’s part of a larger scheme to make the entire West into an Ummah, starting by making it Judenfrei. I’ve already heard from two people who said they will no longer go to Amsterdam. I can’t share that sentiment, as it’s a wonderful city, but it’s gotten somewhat less wonderful in the last week.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Editor-in-Chief Hili is driving his employees hard!
A: Can we return to the computer?Hili: Do you have another idea?
Ja: Czy możemy wrócić do komputera?Hili: Masz inną propozycję?
*******************
From Science Humor, a SpaceX replica:
From Cat Memes. I believe I’ve shown this before:
More from Cat Memes; an acquisitive moggy:
From Masih, who has escaped another assassination plot. Here she calls out a German journalist for Der Spiegel who dons a hijab when interviewing an Iranian official. That bowing to misogynistic dress codes by Westerners has always irked Masih:
I’m in Berlin celebrating the 35th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a powerful symbol of resistance against tyranny. Yet, it deeply troubles me to see Spiegel’s journalist don the forced hijab and obediently interview the regime’s foreign minister. This plays into the… https://t.co/RBa8ryDi59 pic.twitter.com/QcVtLk5XEA
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) November 11, 2024
From Simon, who says that Oded has “nailed it”:
Not a cellphone in sight, people just living in the moment pic.twitter.com/ow4ltTkHru
— Oded Rechavi (@OdedRechavi) November 11, 2024
Here are some progressives losing it when someone maintains that men who identify as women should be allowed to compete against biological women. That claim has to have played some role in the debacle that affected the Democrats last week. No, opposing that claim is NOT “transphobia.”
“I am NOT going to listen to transphobia at this table!”
CNN panelist loses their mind over “slur” used by Republican strategist during trans sports debate. pic.twitter.com/5PXnSJW4A0
— Brigitte Gabriel (@ACTBrigitte) November 9, 2024
From Luana; one that I retweeted. It will get pushback for sure.
It’s a misguided effort to insert into nature what we think is ideologically good. But activists never seem to realize that one can say that sex is for all intents and purposes binary without being transphobic. The former is a biological fact, the latter a bigoted viewpoint. https://t.co/2NAUGOyYwN
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) November 11, 2024
From my feed. What a great idea, and also a lucrative job!
There’s a guy on tiktok who owns a company where you can complain about your boss anonymously and he goes to your work and cuss them out for you 😂 pic.twitter.com/m8SOA97mWv
— Isa (@isaperezxx) November 10, 2024
From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted:
A Dutch girl was gassed to death the day she arrived at Auschwitz. She was eleven. https://t.co/iCZWbKEiXe
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) November 12, 2024
Two Bluesky “tweets” from Dr. Cobb. First, an attentive mother squid:
Y’ALL! Scientists at Schmidt Ocean just captured this rare video of an open-ocean squid caring for its young. That pearl-packed black bag between its tentacles is a brood pouch, each pearl is a developing baby squid (you can see a few hatch out at the end). Nature is so cool. 🧵🪼🦑🐙🌿🧪
— Rebecca R Helm (@rebeccarhelm.bsky.social) 2024-10-28T17:26:41.268Z
There are two jokes here, but I can see only the first one:
Two nuns are driving through Transylvania in the dead of night. Suddenly a vampire lands on the hood of their car. He's pounding on the glass!One nun says to the other, "Show him your cross!"The other nods firmly. She sticks her head out the window and yells, "Get the fuck off the windshield!"
— John Wiswell (@wiswell.bsky.social) 2024-11-09T18:50:04.231Z
“National French Dip Day, celebrating not a swim in the Seine but […]”
🤣
Best results when spoken aloud.
…. lil help with the vampire joke?
I get the “cross” meaning as angry.
But the 2nd joke – something to do with hood/windshield/glass…?
Or maybe homonym (homophone) confusion of your vs you’re (you are)?
Definitely that.
Jerry means that there’s a second joke below the vampire one, but it’s not visible and instead there’s a note that says “The author of the quoted post…” .
[ GIF of Captain Picard facepalm ]
I’ve been reading Sam Harris’s reflections on the election. The first half is very good, but then Sam indulges his TDS and goes down with a new affliction: Musk Derangement Syndrome:
Pretty fair! Thanks for asking.
Yes!
You really think that in the old Twitter moderators vetted information fairly (as opposed to policing pronouns)? I think it’s good that there’s at least one major “public square” forum where info is not “vetted”, because, no, I do not trust anyone to vet the info for me. I prefer to do that for myself.
Harris’s MDS totally lacks specifics and examples as to stuff Musk has got wrong (though I expect that, given how much Musk Tweets, some fraction will be midjudged). But, I’ve seen a fair fraction of Musk’s Tweets over the last couple of years and am ok with it in the round.
1) Any left-wing billionaire (or non-billionaire) is free to do the same on X. [Just for example, Obama Tweeted plenty of activist misinformation to his 140 million followers over the election.] 2) This is what most of the “mainstream” media has felt like to me, ever since the time of Damore’s Google memo.
No, it isn’t. Of course there are a lot of cranks and nuts, along with many, many knowledgable and sensible people, and along with many, many people rebutting the falsehoods. The cure for wrong information is better information.
Where, Sam, do you suggest that we have the public-square fact-based conversation? As Hitchens asked, who do you trust to do the censoring? Who do you trust to decide for you, before you even see it, what is factual? I bet that, whoever you give that task to, will quickly become keen to remove facts that are actually true, but which are inconvenient for their political view. This is why no-one trusts the “mainstream” media nowadays.
Sam, the first half of your essay documents how the Democrats lost because they embraced gender ideology. Well, now ask, if Twitter had always been there, run by Musk along present lines, maybe gender ideology would not have been able to gain its stranglehold? Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
Thanks for your concern, Sam, but overall I’ll take the free-for-all of Musk’s Twitter over the alternatives, and put up with the misinformation and crank stuff that is (sadly but unavoidably) a feature of free speech in a free society.
Agree!
Agree about Musk Derangement Syndrome. Sure there are cranks on X: just like there are in real life. I can decide who to ignore.
The excellent Sam Harris seems to say that more than half of the voters are Trump fans and are excited about what he plans to do. Many who voted for Trump are dismayed that they felt he was the less-awful choice.
This election, for many, was a referendum on four years of Biden (and Harris). Voters felt they would get four more years of possibly worse, as Harris likely would have been (like Biden), a puppet controlled by unseen progressive hands.
Many Americans are grimly glad Harris lost–full stop. Trump’s administration may get some things right, but many Americans (even many who voted for him) also know he’s a truly bad person.
My thoughts exactly, but you said it much better than I could have.
Since many people are complaining that X allows freedom to spout things that may be misinformation, and have expressed views favoring government oversight, I’m sure those same folks would be on board with Trump appointing a social media czar on day one of his new administration to handle this.
Interesting how the “who do you trust to do the censoring” question sounds ludicrous when you change who leads the censoring.
I really like Sam Harris, but his TDS and MDS are too much. Given his background, you’d think he’d be more introspective as to how the fear he feels was due to media manipulation and misinformation. In his debate with Ben Shapiro, he made reference to Trump appointing the My Pillow Guy to a cabinet position (a completely illogical take), which Shapiro shot down given his own knowledge of potential Trump appointees. Fear has been implanted into a large portion of this nation; I don’t know how to eliminate it except by open discourse, which many of those people living in a fear bubble avoid.
IIRC, Shapiro told Sam to the effect that he had direct contact with someone in the know about the significant likelihood of Pompeo becoming secretary of state. I wonder if Shapiro was surprised by Marco Rubio’s selection. Based on his sterling track record and titanium spine, I contemplate his diplomatic gravitas and epistemic humility in discussions with, say, Sergei Lavrov. The same with Nikki Hailey doppelganger Elise Stefanik as U.S. ambassador to the U.N.
Yeah? Like what, for example?
Like repeating the claim that Trump was referring to white supremacists when he said there were “very fine people on both sides”.
Musk lost me when he retweeted – within an hour of the first reports – a tweet claiming that the attack on Paul Pelosi was the result of a consensual homosexual encounter gone wrong. A truly smart person would have judged that to be questionable, at best.
Then there’s his promoting the theory that the lack of an assassination attempt on Harris is suspicious, an indication that the attempt on Trump’s life is part of a left-wing plot.
The video of him yucking it up with Tucker Carlson about the lack of assassination attempts on Harris is a bit disturbing, too, at least to me.
The guy, obviously, can spot a good technology investment. Other than that, though, he ain’t right in the head, IMO.
He did indeed judge it to be questionable, his words referring to that claim in that Tweet were “There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye”.
[I’m not saying that the Tweet was well-judged, but that’s very different from your report of it.]
Come on! In context, he was making a jocular dig at Harris, saying she is just a puppet with no policies of her own, who would be controlled by others (hence no-one is trying to assassinate her, since it would be pointless).
You may disapprove of this sort of somewhat tasteless joke, but in no way was he trying to construct a conspiracy theory.
Of course in Australia our free speech is under threat with the government trying to bring in a misinformation bill. They hate X and will try to limit its influence.
Not to mention the stop the under 16yo no social media account allowed. On the surface it sounds like a fine idea but in reality it is a digital ID scheme and everyone else has to be age verified.
They are a very unpopular government so their solution seems now to control the information available and create better policies.
Governments seem to have a great distaste to being found to have lied. Social media can both reveal and propagate a lie.
The concept of trust us we are the government and know the truth is nonsense.
It’s true that the subject of James is “ideologically salubrious” (what a great word), but it’s also a FANTASTIC book. Don’t imagine it’s some kind of woke “corrective” to Mark Twain. It’s NOT. He’s a huge Twain fan, and it’s a wonderful piece of extremely high level “fan fiction.” In case you haven’t read Huck Finn, read it first, and then James. You’ll enjoy it even more.
Got it on my kindle app😃
I planned to read it anyway since the reviews are good. But call me cynical in my dotage.
I see no reason to automatically consider Gaza women peaceful. Even if Hamas keeps women away from certain positions, I remember that the Palestinian suicide bombers of the early 2000s included quite a few women, and at least in one location IDF recently found (and killed) women holding Israeli hostages:
https://jewishchronicle.timesofisrael.com/journalist-doctor-held-israelis-hostage-in-gaza/
+1
RE Jerry writing:
It’s judenrein, not Judenfrei. Judenrein = clean of Jews. Jews are vermin, carriers of disease, in this world view.
In 19. century Germany and during Hitlers reign, both judenrein and judenfrei were used.
Insightful correction, thanks.
Yep, I stand corrected. However, I maintain that Judenfrei, or free from Jews, conveys ROUGHLY the same idea.
There are suggestions of chicanery in some of the undecided Congressional races. The long delay in concluding the vote counting along with late night surges in ballots that contain votes for only the Democratic candidate fit a suspicious pattern. Expect legal challenges.
Source, please?
Of course there are. Any Republican loss is because of fraud, yet every Republican win is fair and square.
Joke:
I was at Barnes & Noble earlier and I asked the clerk if they had Donald Trump’s new book on how to deport illegal immigrants.
She immediately said to me, “Get the fuck out of here and don’t come back!”
I said, “Yes, that’s the one. Do you have it in paperback?”
That’s a good one. You made me laugh.
Apropos laughter: The Onion, the satirical news magazine, it’s YouTube channel shows new signs of life. A 3-minute news video that caught my attention:
New Trump Ad Shows Montage Of People He’ll Kill If Elected | Onion News Network, Oct 31, 2024, 3 mins
The Onion was funny once. Their old stuff with a shirtless Joe Biden https://theonion.com/shirtless-biden-washes-trans-am-in-white-house-driveway-1819570732/ was pretty good. But then they decided that satirizing certain sacred cows was going to hurt the party and stopped doing that and focusing on unfunny attacks against republicans written in a satirical style. Similar to how many commenters on this site wanted our host to not criticize the Democrats because it could affect the election. Looking at the site link you sent, it looks like this is still the philosophy.
The Babylon Bee is more right leaning but at least they’ll rip on anyone, and they’re actually funny. For example, today’s headlines include:
– Sad: Candidate Who Bankrupted Campaign Will Never Have Opportunity To Fix Nation’s Economy
– It Has Begun: JD Vance Sneaks Into Woman’s House To Check If She’s On Her Period
I’ll take actual satire rather than party-line confirmation-bias based attempts at humor any day. But to each his/her own.
Agreed. For the Babylon Bee to come out with headlines like:
“I’ve done more for Christianity than Jesus Christ”, declares Trump.
… is both funny and highly commendable. Too many left-wing “comedians” have forgotten that they should be holding the left to account, because without self-criticism any ideology goes badly askew.
That’s a good one!
🙂
A comment on Coel (comment # 3):
Where did Sam Harris think all the woke people hung out (and organized their mobbing) before Musk took over Twitter? On Twitter. So much for the vaunted Twitter vetters that Musk fired.
Sam Harris wants people to leave X. To go where? Say, you are a sex realist who opposes the trans nonsense that Harris opposes too. Can you post your opinions on this issue on Bluesky? I don’t know. (I have never looked at this app.) It would not surprise me if the answer were “No, you can’t.”
It is pretty well known that the mainstream media, under the guise of fighting misinformation, has itself spread lies and disinformation and character assassination.
I suspect that on Bluesky lots of people have posted their take on the Trump getting elected president again to the effect that America is too racist and misogynist a society to elect a non-white woman president. This is obviously false (but in line with the woke obesession with race and gender). The US electorate elected Obama president twice, and more voters voted for Hilary Clinton in 2016 than for Trump (Clinton just did not win the majority of electoral college votes). If race and sex cannot explain Obama’s wins and Clinton’s loss, why should their combination explain Harris’ loss? Did such takes get censored on Bluesksy because they are misinformation?
Hmmm, you wouldn’t get your sandwich with “au jus”, but rather just with “jus”. I worked for a caterer during college and we underlings always groaned when the boss asked for the “au jus sauce”.🙈
I think it’s just one of those illiteracies that make phrases adopted piece-meal from foreign languages more recognizable in English speech. If I told the waiter that I thought the jus was too salty, he’d have no idea what I was talking about, even while looking right down at my plate. When the light went on he’d say, “Oh! You mean the oh-zhoo! I’ll get you some from another batch.”
Yes, I just copied the caption to the picture and didnt think, but you are of course right.
I watched the two videos of the entrepreneur on TikTok who started a company where you can hire him to go to your workplace and chew out your boss. Basically, it looks like an invasive form of DEI. The man shows up, announces himself as an agent of OSHA’s (?) Diversity Affairs, says a bunch of stuff that makes it sound like he’s from the government and is dealing with a formal complaint — and then accuses the boss of racism or worse.
I think it’s intimidating and more than a little chilling, menacing rogue DEI agents hired by people who may or may not have a legitimate complaint but can now wield the power to publicly call people out at their workplace and make them and their colleagues think there’s some official US record involved. To me, it looks borderline illegal.
There may soon be a lot of real-life but now unemployed DEI apparatchiks who will be looking for work with that outfit. At least they’ll have the lingo down pat to sound convincing.
The BBC has become worse than useless as regarding Hamas’s war on Israel. If Hamas would surrender and release the hostages, the war would instantly come to an end.
I’ve wondered about the efficacy of biological weapons for decades, knowing that they could be game-changing, but hoping that they aren’t developed or used. They are particularly risky because there is little to prevent bad actors from using them. With nuclear weapons, a first use would automatically trigger a devastating reprisal. There isn’t such a thing with biological weapons—or at least the reprisal wouldn’t be in the form of instant destruction—so the main thing keeping them from being used (other than not yet having one that would be effective) is the goodwill of leaders, that is, their moral sensibilities. How can we have confidence in that? We can’t.
Amsterdam: Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO or the Anti-Defamation League, made a brief, but chilling, statement regarding the pogrom in Amsterdam.
https://youtu.be/MmgMqt-CYtE?si=YzHlEpUsNKYLI-cz
“Countermeasures”
These can be as simple as sanitization and PPE, but I suspect they mean vaccines and other potential measures to stimulate immune responses.
There will be those in Washington DC arguing that the lesson of the pandemic is not that we should cease gain-of-function research, as some have argued, but that we should enhance it and similar work: “What if COVID had been far more deadly and released intentionally? We need to be ready. It would be irresponsible not to do everything we can to defend against such threats. We must develop effective countermeasures, and the only way to do so is to have detailed, hands-on knowledge of the threats.”
I am afraid that if a very deadly pathogen, such as smallpox, were unleashed on purpose by China, they could count on successfully protecting its own population, but United States would be eliminated as a world player if population loss were comparable to what happened in Europe during the Great Plague. That’s not something a country can just shake off. Of course, China knows that it would devastate the world economy too, on which they depend, so I count on them not doing it. Regardless where the Covid virus came from, China fared better than most (any?) other countries during Covid pandemic. Their authorities’ disregard of personal rights worked to their advantage. The lockdowns were brutal but effective.
The United States, in contrast to China, has a culture of personal freedom that regards ANY government action that limits individual freedom as incompatible with country’s values. So of course many resisted and denounced public health measures, to their great detriment and loss of lives.
I am not against personal freedom, quite the opposite. But people need to understand that the state is not ONLY there, as per Karl Marx, to oppress individuals. It is ALSO an association of individuals for common benefit. When it is demonstrably engaging in PROTECTING people, they better comply with the directions. But what we saw was villification or dismissal of anyone who would make that point, along with rebellion, conspiracy theories, character assassination of public officials, the lot.
That type of behaviour may one day kill your country.
Why was there rebellion?
-“Two weeks to flatten the curve”
-Skateparks filled with sand, single surfers chased by cops on an empty beach
-Epidemiologists: “Wear your mask and stay 6 feet away or you’re going to kill grandma!”
Also epidemiologists: “You and 50,000 friends want to stand next to each other and yell and spit and smash windows and burn up buildings without masks? We’re cool with that.”
-Churches in old drive-in theaters in which parishioners sat in their own vehicles safely spaced away from others were broken up
-Big box stores in MI partitioned off arbitrarily so that they could sell wood and lights but not paint or garden supplies
-Gov. Whitmer’s husband calling up a boat storage place to get his boat out, against state policy, and mentioning who he was so he could make it happen
-Nancy Pelosi going into a closed salon to get her hair done
-Gov. Newsom having a dinner at French Laundry with friends, maskless, while all of the other restaurants in the state were shut down
-NY sending infected patients back into nursing homes (I’ll grant this is more due to lack of information at the time)
-Chris Cuomo visiting his property with his family while supposedly sequestered in his basement by himself
-AOC, Stacey Abrams, and others maskless while not in photo op moments and only donning their masks for the camera, while those around them followed had to keep their masks on
-School closures even after it was proven that children were at an extremely low risk; this especially negatively affected disadvantaged communities
-Elites sitting at home still getting paid while the common folk still had to go into 7-11 and work serving the public
-Elites at fancy parties maskless while the hired help is masked
-A vaccine rushed out without normal testing, and silencing of critics who expressed concerns about side effects
-Ignoring of comorbidities such as obesity when they were obvious
-Favoring dispensing of vaccines based on race rather that risk factors
Those are just off the top of my head, since you brought it up. In other words, it was not a shared sacrifice; the government applied arbitrary rules that the public recognized as BS, and many in power acted as if they were above the rules, and that affected trust in all of the other rules.
And you’re right – we do have a very strong culture of personal freedom and individual liberty. On the other hand, if we have a common enemy, and we’re not lied to, we can pull together like no other country on earth.
I don't think you can. I don't think the USA was ever particularly special in that regard but now there is far too much "I'm all right Jack" attitude for it ever to work again.
As an example, there is common enemy – climate change – and you are not being lied to (except by the deniers), but you are also not pulling together.
I’ll admit I overreached with that comment!
The problem I think with climate change is that it is not viewed as a common enemy, an existential threat, but rather an inconvenience. Then it becomes a question of whether the inconveniences involved in fighting it is better or worse than changes required to adapt to it. Extremists pouring soup on artwork will never convince blue-collar Joe that he should pay a higher electric bill to fight climate change.