Tuesday: Hili dialogue

December 24, 2024 • 6:45 am

Posting may be light during Coynezaa as I have other work to do and, Professor Ceiling Cat (Emeritus) deserves a rest, too, don’t you think?

There is a special Christmas message from Hili below:

Welcome to Tuesday, the Cruelest Day. It’s December 24, 2024. It is Christmas Eve and also Coynezaa Eve, as well as National Eggnog Day, the libation equivalent of fruitcake: it’s seasonal, it’s dire, and nobody wants any.  But here we have a comedian from Healthy Junk Food dressing up as Martha Stewart (complete with wig) and making Martha’s boozy eggnog.

It’s also Feast of the Seven Fishes, an Italian-American holiday in which you eat a variety of seafood.  Wikipedia explains:

The Feast of the Seven Fishes typically consists of seven different seafood dishes. The tradition comes from Southern Italy, where it is known as The Vigil (La Vigilia), but with no mention of the number seven. This celebration commemorates the wait, the Vigilia di Natale, for the midnight birth of the baby Jesus. The long tradition of eating seafood on Christmas Eve dates from the Roman Catholic tradition of abstaining from eating meat on the eve of a feast day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the December 24 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Parts of the House Ethics Committee’s report on Matt Gaetz (erstwhile nominee for Attorney General) are becoming public, and they’re not pretty.

The House Ethics Committee accused former Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s former pick for attorney general, of regularly paying for sex, possessing illegal drugs and having sexual relations with an underage girl, according to the panel’s report.

The report, which was released on Monday, found that from at least 2017 to 2020, Mr. Gaetz “regularly paid women for engaging in sexual activity with him”; and, in 2017, “engaged in sexual activity with a 17-year-old girl,” the report said.

The Ethics Committee found that from 2017 to 2019, Mr. Gaetz used or possessed illegal drugs, including cocaine and ecstasy “on multiple occasions,” and accepted lavish gifts, including transportation to and lodging in the Bahamas, in excessive of permissible amounts.

“Representative Gaetz has acted in a manner that reflects discreditably upon the House,” the report stated.

. . . .The Ethics Committee concluded that Mr. Gaetz violated state sexual misconduct laws, including Florida’s statutory rape law, and violated House rules concerning gifts and misuse of his official office.

However, the committee said it did not find conclusive evidence that Mr. Gaetz violated federal sex trafficking laws.

“Although Representative Gaetz did cause the transportation of women across state lines for purposes of commercial sex, the committee did not find evidence that any of those women were under 18 at the time of travel, nor did the committee find sufficient evidence to conclude that the commercial sex acts were induced by force, fraud, or coercion,” the panel wrote.

But the release of panel’s findings did not come without significant internal strife among the Ethics Committee’s members. The report makes clear the committee’s Republican chairman objected to its release.

There is no way Gaetz could have stayed in the House if this was released, much less become Attorney General. Whether the House should have leaked/released this given that such release is against the rules for someone who’s no longer a member of the House is a different matter, and not one I’m much concerned with. It’s almost certain it would have leaked anyway, and, after all, it bears on Gaetz’s fitness for almost any job.

*Biden finally did something good with his power to pardon or commute people’s sentences: he commuted the sentences of nearly every federal inmate on death row!

resident Biden, citing moral and policy objections to capital punishment, said he was commuting the death sentences of 37 inmates Monday, a move that prevents President-elect Donald Trump from executing most men on federal death row.

“Make no mistake: I condemn these murderers, grieve for the victims of their despicable acts, and ache for all the families who have suffered unimaginable and irreparable loss,” Biden said.

But, citing his early experience as a public defender as well as decades in federal office, “I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level,” the president said. “In good conscience, I cannot stand back and let a new administration resume executions that I halted.”

The 37 men, all convicted of murder, will serve life imprisonment without parole.

. . .Biden left death sentences in place for three inmates found guilty of terrorism or hate-motivated mass killings: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who with his now-dead brother bombed the 2013 Boston Marathon, killing three and wounding more than 250 others; Robert Bowers, who killed 11 people in the 2018 attack on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh; and Dylann Roof, who in 2015 killed nine at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C.

Also excluded are four servicemen convicted of murder and held on the military death row at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.

Those spared include a former Marine who killed two young girls and later a female naval officer; a Las Vegas man convicted of kidnapping and killing a 12-year-old girl; a Chicago podiatrist who fatally shot a patient to keep her from testifying in a Medicare fraud investigation; and two men convicted in a kidnapping-for-ransom scheme that resulted in the killings of five Russian and Georgian immigrants.

Well, my druthers as a determinist is to commute the sentences of all of them.  I see no sense at all in the state’s killing someone, regardless of how horrific their crime. But at least 37 men won’t have to die prematurely, for it’s almost a certainty that Trump wouldn’t have commuted any of these death sentences.

*Today a space probe is going inside the Sun’s corona, and will presumably survive. It’s an amazing mission!

This holiday season is not immune to NASA barging in: On Dec. 24, the agency’s Parker Solar Probe will make its closest approach to the sun. At 6:53:48 a.m. Eastern, the spacecraft will be just 3.8 million miles from our home star — well within the sun’s searing corona, or atmosphere. To use a sports analogy, if the distance between Earth and the sun were reduced to the length of a football field, the Parker Solar Probe will be at the sun’s 4-yard-line, deep within the red zone. It will also be traveling 430,000 miles per hour — approximately 60 times faster than the fastest airplane ever, and just a smidge slower than the speed of lightning strikes here on Earth. And it will absorb a dose of solar radiation that is about 600 times stronger than what we get here on Earth.

That is the fastest that any human-made vehicle has ever traveled!

This solar brush-pass is a trip to hell and back.

These extreme numbers, and the thermal and technological challenges in keeping the spacecraft alive, explain why a Parker Solar Probe-type mission was more dream than reality for half a century. I believe the probe is one of the most difficult and historic missions NASA has ever done. Over my career as a space scientist, I built and operated a number of sun-observing instruments. I was part of the team that defined the solar probe mission, and later, as NASA’s science chief, I named the mission, oversaw the project’s final development and saw it launched on Aug. 12, 2018.

The choice of the mission name was meant to tell a story. In 1958, young astrophysicist Eugene Parker made a prediction so original that it might have ended his career: the solar atmosphere produces supersonic wind that carves out the heliosphere. That is a sphere of solar influence filled with a tenuous magnetic fluid that washes over everything in our solar system. This corona is only visible to our unaided eyes during total solar eclipses — like the one that captivated the United States in April.

Parker’s prediction flew in the face of the scientific beliefs at the time, and it immediately put him at odds with scientific leaders who considered his idea outrageous, or worse. The scientist lost his job as a lecturer, and one referee at the Astrophysical Journal suggested that Parker “go to the library to learn, instead of writing papers like this.” An editor overruled the naysayers and bravely published the paper.

But science is not a popularity contest. Parker’s theory made testable predictions about the approximate speed, density and temperature of the supersonic solar wind, and about the shape of the magnetic field it carries into space. Some simple but pioneering space-based experiments proved Parker right within a few years.

And the mission:

Still, a good understanding of the near-solar environment remained elusive. How does the sun, with a surface temperature less than 10,000 degrees Kelvin (17,540 degrees fahrenheit), produce a corona that measures 1 million degrees or more? How does the sun accelerate particles to near light-speed — the same particles that contribute to space weather events such as auroras when they impact Earth? And how is this accelerator powered from within the sun?

Finding answers required sending a spacecraft very, very close to the sun, because the most important physical processes in the solar corona are magnetic in nature and remain hidden from remote observations.

Here’s a short video about the approach. The probe was launched in 2018: six years ago!

*As I expected, Luigi Mangione has pleaded not guilty to 11 NY state charges involved in his alleged assassination of United Healtcare CEO Brian Thompson. (He’ll later stand trial on four federal charges, to which, I believe, he’s also pleaded not guilty):

The man accused of fatally shooting the CEO of UnitedHealthcare pleaded not guilty on Monday to state murder and terror charges while his attorney complained that comments coming from New York’s mayor would make it tough to receive a fair trial.

Luigi Mangione, 26, was shackled and seated in a Manhattan court when he leaned over to a microphone to enter his plea. The Manhattan district attorney charged him last week with multiple counts of murder, including murder as an act of terrorism, in a state case that will run alongside his federal prosecution.

His initial appearance in New York’s state trial court was preempted by federal prosecutors bringing their own charges over the shooting. The federal charges could carry the possibility of the death penalty, while the maximum sentence for the state charges is life in prison without parole.

Prosecutors have said the two cases will proceed on parallel tracks, with the state charges expected to go to trial first.

One of Mangione’s attorneys told a judge that government officials, including New York Mayor Eric Adams, have turned Mangione into a political pawn, robbing him of his rights as a defendant and tainting the jury pool.

. . . . . Mangione is being held in a Brooklyn federal jail alongside several other high-profile defendants, including Sean “Diddy” Combs and Sam Bankman-Fried.

During his court appearance Monday, he smiled at times when talking with his attorneys and stretched his right hand after an officer removed his cuffs.

Outside the courthouse, a few dozen supporters chanted, “Free Luigi,” over the blare of a trumpet.

Natalie Monarrez, a 55-year-old Staten Island resident, said she joined the demonstration because she lost both her mother and her life savings as a result of denied insurance claims.

“As extreme as it was, it jolted the conversation that we need to deal with this issue,” she said of the shooting. “Enough is enough, people are fed up.”

Fine; object to denial of health claims and criticize the system, but cheering on someone who is likely to have been a cold-blooded killer makes me fed up, as in the long run it’s going to justify or promote vigilante justice. Mangione may be thought to have been paying a “trial penalty” for not pleading “not guilty,” but let’s face it: given the evidence, it’s likely he’ll be convicted and spend the rest of his life in jail, if not on death row.  He had nothing to lose by pleading “not guilty.”

*In a related article at the Free Press, Gurwinder Bhogal recounts a lot of online interactions he had with Mangione beginning in April up to Mangione’s disappearance before he killed.  They discuss philosophy, agency, Stoicism, and other topics, and, to be honest, I didn’t find Mangione that interesting, though his early lucubrations may help people decide why he killed. There is a bit of information about how CEO Brian Thompson may not have been as immoral as people think:

Much more puzzling than the cruelty was the stupidity. Mangione had seemed intelligent, far too intelligent to do something so dumb. Sure, smart people are better able to rationalize stupid actions and beliefs, but Mangione’s alleged rationalization, given in a 262-word “minifesto,” was nowhere near the intellectual standard I would’ve expected of him.

The data blogger Cremieux Recueil dismantles the minifesto line by line, but, to give an example, it claims “the U.S. has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy,” ignoring the fact that the U.S.’s healthcare costs are broadly in line with its income level, and its life expectancy has little to do with health insurance and much more to do with Americans being disproportionately obese, violent, and drug-addicted. Further, the minifesto makes basic factual errors, like confusing market cap with revenue. The writer even admits he doesn’t know what he’s talking about: “Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument.”

Not only was the justification for the targeting of Thompson stupid, but the targeting itself was stupid. While it’s true that UnitedHealthcare has the highest denial rate for medical claims, the CEO doesn’t set the approval rate of a health insurance company’s payouts—that’s done by the actuaries, who themselves are constrained by various considerations, such as the need to keep costs low, including for policyholders. But even if Thompson did have carte blanche to set his company’s approval rates, it wouldn’t have made a big difference.

Health insurance companies don’t get rich by denying payouts for claims. As the economics blogger Noah Smith points out, UnitedHealthcare’s net profit margin is just 6.11 percent, which is only about half of the average profit margin of companies in the S&P 500. If UnitedHealth Group decided to donate every single dollar of its profit to buying Americans more healthcare, it would only be able to pay for about 9.3 percent more healthcare than it’s already paying for.

According to the Harvard economist David Cutler, who has written extensively about the U.S. healthcare system, the main reason healthcare costs in the U.S. are high is because of administrative inefficiencies. Insurance companies and organizations that deal with them, such as hospitals, have become bureaucratically bloated to administrate a wildly unstandardized healthcare system, and this bloat now accounts for one-third of the delta between U.S. healthcare costs and those of other high-income countries.

The ultimate point here is that Thompson was not the problem. He was a normal, flawed guy trying to keep costs low both for his company and his policyholders, while keeping his fiduciary duty to shareholders, whose investment his company depended on. He was a cog in a vast and unfair system that’s controlled by no single person but by the cumulative actions of millions of people operating in their own immediate interests. Kaczynski called such decentralized problems “self-propagating systems,” recognizing that they weren’t the result of human coordination, but rather, a lack of it.

I have no dog in this fight except to say that Thompson didn’t deserve to be killed for doing his job. Even if his job was immoral, it wasn’t illegal.  But it’s the holiday season, so let’s move on. . .

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, we have a grumpy post and a Christmas wish from Hili:

Hili: No Christmas tree, no presents.
A: Wait for the evening.
Hili: So where have you hidden the presents?
And a Christmas message from The Princess
Wszystkim naszym czytelnikom, niezależnie od koloru poglądów, uznania wyższości kotów nad psami oraz świątecznej orientacji życzę spokojnych i smacznych świąt.
—Hili
In Polish:
Hili: Ani choinki, ani prezentów.
Ja: Poczekaj na wieczór.

Hili: To gdzie te prezenty schowałeś?

To all our readers, regardless of the color of their views, appreciation of the superiority of cats or dogs, or their festive orientation, I wish peaceful and tasty holidays.
—Hili

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

From Cat Memes:

From Things With Faces:

From Jesus of the Day: It’s sausage to me!

There are no tweets from Masih today, so let’s have one from JKR.  Clownfish!

I feel like doing this sometimes, but I woiuldn’t have the guts:

From Malcolm, a trusting cat:

From Simon, who’s in Massachusetts and adds this: “-2f in northern MA this morning. And off to look at outside lights tonight. Wish me luck.”  Good luck, Simon!

The main argument for a Strategic BItcoin Reserve seems to be that Bitcoin holders worry about an impending shortage of greater fools and need the US government to act as the greatest fool of last resort.

— David Frum (@davidfrum.bsky.social) 2024-12-21T20:16:15.052Z

You can read about Proposition 36 here; it’s for repeat offenders:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one I retweeted:

A French girl, murdered upon arrival at Auschwitz at age 11. Her capital crime? Being Jewish.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2024-12-24T11:32:46.236Z

Two posts from Dr. Cobb. First, the brave torrent duck (GOAT means “greatest of all time”):

Incredible video here from Violet Wu. Apparently this is Macaulay Library’s top-rated video of 2024. Featuring the GOAT duck- Torrent Duck.

— Dan Baldassarre (@evornithology.bsky.social) 2024-12-22T16:23:28.852Z

And a tweet about one delusion dispelled by the advocate of another (tweet on Matthew’s account):

Deeply upsetting for the kids (and the parents!) but surely the Universe’s irony meter must have broken at the sound of this vicar using evidence to suggest that a widely-held magical belief isn’t true, especially at this time of year… http://www.theguardian.com/education/20…

— (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2024-12-15T06:47:52.279Z

21 thoughts on “Tuesday: Hili dialogue”

  2. “resident Biden, citing moral and policy objections…”

    Was that omission of the Letter P from the quotation an accident or was it intended to say that Biden now just a resident of the White House?

  3. Ha! I commented to my wife when I read about the vicar telling a primary school class that Santa isn’t real, that it was bit rich for him to be debunking imaginary beings. She huffed and looked rather disapproving.

  4. Thank you for bringing the Parker Solar Probe to our attention. NASA has a number of long-lived space science projects. They take years to conceive and plan, more years to become a funding priority, and more years to execute, only during and after which data can be assessed and original questions answered in whole or in part. I have thought that it would be good if these projects each had a lecture or two talking to its technical aspects including background science much like Scientific American articles USED to do in the 1960’s and a science and society policy piece on the process it took to bring the project from a germ of a thought to fruition. These videos should be used in K12 schools as monthly enrichment for faculty and students. They should be made by scientists themselves, not education or public affairs specialists.

    2. Parker Solar Probe
      – here in New Zealand we university graduates are confused. Why doesn’t NASA send the probe at night to avoid being fried by the intense solar radiation during the day?

      Ramesh
      Doctoral health sciences graduate of Otago University NZ, on behalf of all new foundation science students of Auckland University.

  5. Regarding Gaetz, Mollie Hemingway has a piece in The Federalist discussing the credibility problems of the two accusers, which led the FBI not to prosecute Gaetz. Has no one noticed that these allegations of sexual misconduct against Republicans seeking prominent offices tend to appear just in time to smear them before confirmations?

    1. Yes, a vast deep-state conspiracy perpetrated by hundreds of federal employees, or…

      … Matt Gaetz is an a-hole.

      1. The two women could still be liars, even without a great state conspiracy.
        And yes, Mr. Gaetz could still be an a-hole.
        Surely when someone emerges from relative obscurity in a bid for higher office, the motivated borrowers will set to work finding stuff to bring him down even if it wouldn’t pass the “reasonable likelihood of conviction” test for the FBI to bring charges. That doesn’t take a conspiracy of hundreds abusing their public trust. The incentives just have to be pointed the right way at a time-sensitive deadline for, oh, two or three political hacks plus some office staff.

        1. It is a matter of parsimony.

          The US House of Representatives is a place of “relative obscurity?”

          People seeking high office should be subjected to heightened scrutiny, including elucidating questionable acts that do not rise to the level of criminal prosecution.

    2. Set aside Gaetz and the fact that the Justice Department opted not to prosecute. I am more amused by the liberals who pretend to care about someone’s sex life and whether they paid “sex workers” or used illicit drugs.

      1. Re paying for sex, consider Rob’t A Heinlein’s comments on marriage in various works. (You can ask your friendly neighbourhood AI for details.)

  6. Someone pointed out yesterday that the fact that Biden commuted only some of the Death Row prisoners is actually worse than if he had commuted all of their sentences. Rather than an ethical statement that the death penalty is wrong (something Joe Biden probably doesn’t believe anyway), it indicates that “he” (or whoever) looked at the murderers and decided that some of the worst of the worst deserved to live and some didn’t. Apparently, the guy who killed two kids and a sailor and two guys who killed families with children deserve to live. The guy who was involved in twelve murders deserves to live but Dylann Roof who killed nine deserves to die.

  7. There are no rules of the House of Representatives that preclude releasing the Gaetz report. Releasing an ethics report after a representative has resigned is not unprecedented.

  8. *Today a space probe is going inside the Sun’s corona, and will presumably survive. It’s an amazing mission!

    You know how brains work… I wondered if the electronics on the space probe are based on silicon-carbide semiconductor materials, et voilà

    Spacecraft with high temperature, radiation hard silicon carbide (SiC) electronics will enable challenging missions in both the inner and outer solar system.

    Radiation hard high temperature silicon carbide electronics will play a key role in future missions to the solar system’s most hostile environments. Long-term operation of landers on Venus’s scorching 460 °C surface will require the use of uncooled silicon carbide electronics. For spacecraft operating near the Sun, silicon carbide electronics would enable significant reductions in spacecraft shielding and heat dissipation hardware, so that more scientific instruments could be included on each vehicle. Silicon carbide’s imperviousness to both heat and radiation will enable descent probes to return data from much deeper into the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn.

    Sleep soundly, PCC, it’s gonna be OK.

    https://www1.grc.nasa.gov/research-and-engineering/silicon-carbide-electronics-and-sensors/benefits“

  10. I loved, loved, loved the “Martha Stewart” eggnog video. Too funny. Also loved the ducks riding the rapids. I could watch that one for hours.
    Merry Christmas Hili. Have an eggnog (without the booze), you deserve it.

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