Welcome to a hump day (“ཧམ་པ་ཉིན་མོ། ” in Tibetan): Wednesday, February 5, 2025, and National Girls and Women in Sports Day (we are referring to biological females here).
It’s also National Fart Day, National Chocolate Fondue Day, and, Disaster Day, World Nutella Day, and National Girls and Women in Sports Day.
There will be no readers’ wildlife today, and posting will be light, for a black canid has come to visit.
Here’s some useful information from the website above, which implies that you should never try to light a fart (read the link),
The methane and hydrogen in farts also make them flammable. This may not sound like that big of a deal, but there are examples of cows farting themselves into flames. That’s right, animals fart too. And the belief that women fart less than men? It just isn’t true. Fart sounds vary and depend on how much gas is released, the force at which it comes out, and the tightness of one’s sphincter muscles. People who have tight anuses have louder farts.
A video of a man using flatulence to light a candle (I saw the cat only later):
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the February 5 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Breaking Nooz: Determined to offend the whole world, Trump, after meeting with Netanyahu, proposed that the U.S. take over Gaza and the Gazans be transferred to other countries like Egypt or Jordan. That is going to go over like a lead balloon.
President Trump declared on Tuesday that the United States should seize control of Gaza and permanently displace the entire Palestinian population of the devastated seaside enclave, one of the most brazen ideas that any American leader has advanced in years.
Hosting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel at the White House, Mr. Trump said that all two million Palestinians from Gaza should be moved to countries like Egypt and Jordan because of the devastation wrought by Israel’s campaign against Hamas after the terrorist attack of Oct. 7, 2023.
“The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it too,” Mr. Trump said at a news conference Tuesday evening. “We’ll own it and be responsible” for disposing of unexploded munitions and rebuilding Gaza into a mecca for jobs and tourism. Sounding like the real estate developer he once was, Mr. Trump vowed to turn it into “the Riviera of the Middle East.”
While the president framed the matter as a humanitarian imperative and an economic development opportunity, he effectively reopened a geopolitical Pandora’s box with far-reaching implications for the Middle East. Control over Gaza has been one of the major flash points of the Arab-Israeli conflict for decades, and the idea of relocating its Palestinian residents recalls an era when great Western powers redrew the maps of the region and moved around populations without regard to local autonomy.
On the other hand, there has to be some solution whereby Hamas doesn’t rule that area. I heard as well that the U.S. proposed that the Palestinian Authority take over Gaza. But that won’t work because Hamas hates the PA (they clashed years ago) plus Gazans want to be ruled by Hamas instead of the PA. This is an almost intractable problem.
More encampments on the way!
Help me Ceiling Cat! The Trump appointee who has frightened me the most, RFK Jr., chosen by Trmp to be the Health and Human Services Secretary, has passed a key Senate committee vote and, given the composition of the current Senate, is likely to be confirmed:
The nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Health and Human Services Department advanced Tuesday after a key swing Republican voted for the nominee in the Senate Finance Committee, likely clearing his path to confirmation.
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R., La.), a medical doctor, voted with all of the committee’s Republicans to support Kennedy’s confirmation.
“With the serious commitments I’ve received from the administration and the opportunity to make progress on the issues we agree on like healthy foods and a pro-American agenda, I will vote yes,” Cassidy said on social-media site X shortly before the vote.
Cassidy had been seen as a pivotal vote for Kennedy’s confirmation after he expressed deep concerns last week during the nominee’s hearings. He arrived late to the committee vote on Tuesday, walking into the room with Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R., S.D.)
Cassidy had said last week that he had been “struggling” over Kennedy’s past comments about vaccines and the role they have played in making some parents hesitant to vaccinate their children.
The Louisiana Republican had urged Kennedy to make clear that he didn’t believe vaccines caused autism, but Kennedy had sidestepped such an endorsement, saying he would review the data.
. . . .The committee vote signaled that Kennedy’s path to becoming the nation’s top health official was becoming smoother. The final tally was 14 to 13.
In the full Senate vote, Kennedy can afford to lose as many as three Republican votes if all Democrats oppose him. In the event of a tie, Vice President JD Vance can cast the deciding vote.
See? All the data show that vaccines don’t cause autism, but RFK Jr. won’t give his opinion. The full Senate vote hasn’t yet been scheduled, but it looks as if this loose cannon will be confirmed. As Country Joe and the Fish sang, “Whoopee! we’re all gonna die!“
*The UN has apparently fired its special advisor on the prevention of genocide simply because she refused to say that there was a genocide going on in Gaza. Now the advisor speaks out in the Free Press:
Last November, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres declined to renew the contract of UN Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide Alice Wairimu Nderitu, who did not label Israel’s war against Hamas a genocide, even while other UN officials have either done so or released reports which make this claim.
On November 26, an editorial in The Wall Street Journal cast Nderitu’s ousting as part of an unofficial UN campaign against the Jewish state and called her “refusal to endorse a lie in service of a political agenda” a “profile in courage.”
But it wasn’t until last week, after attending Monday’s 80th commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz in Poland, on the site where more than 1.1 million people, the vast majority of them Jews, were murdered in the Holocaust, that Nderitu decided to tell the story of her contentious UN tenure.
“This push that I should say that there’s a genocide going on in Gaza? They knew that I’m not a court of law, and it’s only a court of law that can determine whether a genocide has happened,” Nderitu said in an exclusive interview with Air Mail. “But I was hounded, day in, day out. Bullied, hounded, with protection from nobody.”
“It’s instructive that this never happened for any other war. Not for Ukraine, not for Sudan, not for DRC [Democratic Republic of the Congo], not for Myanmar,” she said. “The focus was always Israel.”
“This was a war,” she said. “Palestinians were killing Israelis, Israelis were killing Palestinians. It needs to be treated like other wars. In other wars, we don’t run and take one side and then keep going on and on about that one side. . . . By taking one side, condemning it every day, you completely lose the essence of what the UN was created for.”
She was hounded by social media, hounded by the UN, and eventually left:
The UN civil servant described Nderitu’s statement as “one-sided,” suggesting that it “might cause reputational risk on the image of the United Nations as an independent neutral impartial body.” For an institution as hierarchical as the UN, this kind of direct written critique of an undersecretary-general by a junior staffer was highly unusual, as was his request that Nderitu review her “statement with the aim to ensure greater balance and harmonize it with similar UN leaders’ statements.”
Little more than a week later, Nderitu received a two-page letter signed by an unnamed group of “concerned UN staff including Palestinians.” While they joined her “in condemning the intentional attacks and abduction of Israeli civilians by Hamas,” they wrote, “we expected that your statement regarding Israel’s attacks on and collective punishment of Palestinian civilians would have been equally clear and unequivocal.”
And the UN has the temerity to say that it’s an “independent neutral impartial body!” And remember that the UN-run International Court of Justice is adjudicating a charge of genocide against Israel. Again, I think the UN has served its purpose, and now it should go away. It is not neutral, and in fact is harmful
*In an important case involving free speech and academic freedom, Jonathan Turley reports that a court has ruled against Ohio State in its disciplining of a professor who used the n-word in class in a didactic way. The Professor, Mark Sullivan, was punished by not having his contract renewed. He sued and won; the case ruling is here. From Turley:
We have previously discussed cases (here, here, here, here, and here) of professors being fired or suspended for using offensive terms such as the n-word in discussions or tests. I have generally argued that such usage is protected on free speech and academic freedom grounds. Now, a federal judge has ruled against Ohio State University (OSU) in an important case involving former OSU Professor Mark Sullivan, who used the n-word in a class on dealing with offensive terms. Ironically, the class was called “Crucial Conversations,” but OSU was not particularly interested in what Professor Sullivan had to say.
Sullivan taught the “Crucial Conversations” course to help train students how to communicate productively about difficult topics. Here is how the court described the background facts:
“Crucial Conversations” used a practical, action-based pedagogy. Students begin by critiquing video vignettes of bullying and eventually escalate to simulating difficult conversations themselves in one-on-one and group exercises. Some of these simulations involved mock conflict—complete with intentionally triggering, provocative, disrespectful, or shocking language. Sullivan warned his students in advance that the exercises would involve such language. The theory behind this pedagogy is that a classroom role play provides a low-stakes environment ideal for honing conversational skills.
One role play scenario cast Sullivan as Whitey Bulger (the late Boston based organized crime boss) and a student as a law enforcement officer trying to obtain Bulger’s cooperation. The purpose of this simulation was to teach students how to engage with offensive language (Bulger’s words as recited by Sullivan) while keeping the conversation on track to productive purposes (obtaining Bulger’s cooperation). During the actual simulation, quoting a real statement Bulger made to law enforcement, Sullivan said,
I don’t want to be placed in a prison cell with a bunch of [n-word]s. You make sure I’m in a place with my kind and I’ll talk about who was behind that job of killing [X].
Sullivan hoped for a student response such as,
“I understand you have strong feelings about the kind of cell mates you will be assigned to live with. We will want to listen more carefully to what matters to you as we also work with what is acceptable under prison rules and regulations.”
Sullivan performed this simulation all 49 times he taught the course, without incident for the first 48.
Then he lost his contract after a complaint. The word was used pedagogically, not pejoratively, and according to previous court rulings thus constitutes the proper use of both academic freedom and free speech. Turley comments on the decision:
The court noted that Sullivan was “taking a side” in the long-standing debate over the use of such language and “his whole ‘Crucial Conversations’ course was allegedly a monument to the view that hearing charged language in a classroom is pedagogically worth it.”
Judge Watson found that the balancing test of Pickering “favors Sullivan” and that his language falls squarely in “the robust tradition of academic freedom in our nation’s post-secondary schools.”
It is a very strong opinion supporting both free speech and academic freedom. It is also a compelling reason why Ohio State University needs to have its own “Crucial Conversation” on how it treats free speech.
*The Times of London reports that a French gynecologist was suspended temporarily for refusing to treat a trans-identified man (h/t: Ginger K.). He says that he wasn’t qualified to treat a biological male.
A French gynaecologist has been barred from practising for a month because he refused to examine a transgender patient on the grounds that he was only qualified to treat “real women”.
Dr Victor Acharian was accused of transphobia after he turned the patient away in August 2023, and LGBT groups lodged complaints.
In December he appeared before a disciplinary board of the French Medical Council and he has now been suspended for a month from March 1, with an additional five months’ probation.
. . . The row has drawn national media coverage and polarised public opinion, with some gynaecologists taking Acharian’s side and arguing that treating transgender patients required special training. Feminists also backed him, pointing out that the patient had not had gender reassignment surgery and gynaecological care was not appropriate.
LGBT groups, however, said that transgender patients often faced discrimination or difficulties in gaining access to healthcare.
. . . . Weeks after the incident, Acharian apologised for any offence caused and said he had offered to refer the trans patient to a specialist who could provide appropriate medical care.
The patient, however, described his refusal as “hyper-violent”.
“I was in shock,” the patient said. “It was the first time I had suffered this sort of transphobia.”
Acharian said the patient shouted, “you’re transphobic”, and insulted his secretary before leaving the clinic.
“I was only trying to be honest when I said it wasn’t my specialty and I wasn’t competent. I offered to refer her to services that could take better care of her,” he said.
“I have no skills to take care of men, even if they have shaved their beards and they come and tell my secretary that they have become women. My gynaecological examination table is not suitable for examining men,” Acharian wrote.
. . . Marguerite Stern, a prominent women’s rights activist who has repeatedly clashed with transgender groups over the definition of a woman, said Acharian’s suspension was unjustified.
“Gynaecologists are only qualified to treat women … We are living in a world of lunatics,” she said.
*ArsTechnica summarizes a new PNAS article suggesting that bonobos have a theory of mind, and can (h/t Barry) From ArsTechnica:
A lot of human society requires what’s called a “theory of mind”—the ability to infer the mental state of another person and adjust our actions based on what we expect they know and are thinking. We don’t always get this right—it’s easy to get confused about what someone else might be thinking—but we still rely on it for everything from navigating complicated social situations to avoiding bumping into people on the street.
There’s some mixed evidence that other animals have a limited theory of mind, but there are alternate interpretations for most of it. So two researchers at Johns Hopkins, Luke Townrow and Christopher Krupenye, came up with a way of testing whether some of our closest living relatives, the bonobos, could infer the state of mind of a human they were cooperating with. The work clearly showed that the bonobos could tell when their human partner was ignorant.
The experimental approach is quite simple and involves a setup familiar to street hustlers: a set of three cups, with a treat placed under one of them. Except in this case, there’s no sleight-of-hand in that the chimp can watch as one experimenter places the treat under a cup, and all of the cups remain stationary throughout the experiment.
To get the treat, however, requires the cooperation of a second human experimenter. That person has to identify the right cup, then give the treat under it to the bonobo. In some experiments, this human can watch the treat being hidden through a transparent partition, and so knows exactly where it is. In others, however, the partition is solid, leaving the human with no idea which cup might be hiding the food.
This setup means that the bonobo will always know where the food is and will also know whether the human could potentially have the same knowledge.
The key question, then, was whether the bonobos acted any differently when the experiment was set up behind the solid partition compared to when their human partner could see where the food was hidden.
The answer was yes. When the partition was solid, bonobos were quicker to start pointing to where the food was hidden, and they pointed more often during the 10 seconds between when the partition was removed and the researcher checked the cups for the food. One of the three bonobos tested was impatient and pointed a lot regardless of whether their partner knew which cup held the food, but even then pointed a bit more often when the solid partition was used.
Only three bonobos were tested, but the overall results are significant. I’m not surprised that our closest living relatives can have a theory of mind, for we’ve seen suggestions of it in other animals as well, as in Scrub Jays. It would of course be a tremendous selective advantage to put yourself in another animal’s brain.
*From Colin Wright in the Wall Street Journal, “Trump can ban transgender birth certificates.” (Subtitle: “Most states allow natives to alter their recorded sex, an affront against science and a danger to women.” (Article archived here.)
The unstoppable force of left-wing science denial has collided with an immovable object: Donald Trump. On his first day in office, Mr. Trump signed an executive order titled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” The order affirms that a person’s sex is immutable and intrinsically tied to the type of “reproductive cell”—sperm or egg—he or she can or would produce. It also rejects the unscientific notion that subjective “gender identity” can replace biological sex.
We welcome this return to science-based definitions of male and female. It’s essential, however, to highlight some pitfalls to avoid and draw attention to an area where further executive action is needed to protect women’s rights.
. . .Activists will claim that simple definitions of male and female rooted in biology are incomplete. They will argue that definitions must include sex-related traits such as chromosomal makeup, hormonal profiles and intersex conditions. They hope to complicate the matter so much that any attempt at sex classification will seem inherently flawed, convincing people that it should be abandoned entirely. This is the trap we must avoid by refusing to “expand” on the order’s definitions.
Consider so-called intersex conditions. True intersex conditions, which result in genitalia that appear ambiguous or mixed, affect less than 0.02% of the population. But activists deploy a rhetorical sleight of hand, referencing these developmental conditions to make them seem far more common than they are. Although there are prominent instances of male athletes with such conditions unfairly competing in women’s sports, they are extremely rare and not the most pressing issue. While policies must reasonably address edge cases, we must not treat them as the norm.
More important, the intersex tactic distracts from the central issue: The purpose of Mr. Trump’s order isn’t to protect women’s sports, prisons, rape shelters and bathrooms from people with a rare condition resulting in ambiguous genitalia. Its purpose is to keep men who merely “identify” as female out of women’s spaces. This is what the public demands answers on, and it’s what the order provides.
Crafting policy to this effect is easy: Any rule designed to protect women’s spaces from men should rely on the sex recorded on a person’s birth certificate. No further expansion of the terms included in Mr. Trump’s order is needed for this. “Trans women” are unambiguously male as a matter of biology, and therefore the likelihood that a doctor records their sex incorrectly at birth is effectively zero.
That sounds good to me. But it leaves open the question of what intersex people, rare though they may be, should have on their birth certificates, driver’s licenses, and so on. My own solution is to give them a choice of using “M,” “F,” or “I” for intersex. I suspect most will use either male or female if they think “I” is stigmatizing.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is being bossy:
Hili: Open the door, please.Andrzej: Wait a moment, I have to take off my jacket.Hili: You do not have to.
Hili: Proszę otworzyć drzwi!
A: Poczekaj muszę zdjąć kurtkę.
Hili: Nie musisz.
*******************
From Meanwhile in Canada:
From We Love Animals:
From Now That’s Wild:
Masih is quiet these days. Here’s another person demonized by many (but not me): JKR. But I wonder what her husband’s tee shirts have to do with this issue (watch the commercial embedded in it):
My husband Neil (marathon and endurance runner) just told me he’s bought four T shirts. In years to come, a great question to ask self-proclaimed liberal men will be, ‘which side were you on – women’s rights, or men’s demands?’ https://t.co/bZ8aB8sxwM
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) February 4, 2025
Ricky Gervais posts about his beloved cat Pickle:
Hope you’re having a great day doing things you love, like scraping your teeth on brand new chairs & other fun stuff. pic.twitter.com/9c5XYmKtIl
— Ricky Gervais (@rickygervais) February 4, 2025
From Malcolm, a cat makes its own bed:
He makes his own bed 🐾✨ pic.twitter.com/n6LqC4Cwc3
— Why you should have a cat (@ShouldHaveCat) January 7, 2025
From my feed:
Three humpback whales jumped off the water off Cape Cod at the same time pic.twitter.com/d5UkuHpjlG
— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) February 3, 2025
I had a sad week last week (nothing dire or cat-related, just stupid bs that wears you down), but then today my friend Adelle was casually like “oh, I have something for you” and pulls out AN ENVELOPE OF VINTAGE CAT PHOTOS. It was the right thing at the right time to make everything better. 💕
— Cats of Yore (@catsofyore.bsky.social) 2025-02-03T23:41:20.346Z
From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted
A seven-year-old Dutch girl and her younger sister were killed with cyanide gas upon arriving at Auschwitz.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-02-05T11:09:16.109Z
Two posts from Dr. Cobb. First, a smart cat:
Chicken has learned how to open/shut her food box, now promptly protects it from alpaca
— Nature's masterpiece 🍀 (@nature-view.bsky.social) 2025-02-04T07:12:32.216Z
These insects are about 100 million years old:
Strepsiptera in Burmese amber.#Fossil #Macro #Amber#Burmese #Burmite#Cretaceous#Paleoentomology#Invertebrate
— Oiotoshi Mike (@oiomik.bsky.social) 2025-02-03T20:26:17.070Z
“A video of a man using flatulence to light a candle:”
BEST
HILI
DIALOGUE
EVER
I’m sorry you’re depressed, Dr. Coyne!
Yeah, I don’t know what to make of Trump on Gaza. It’s in line with his previous comments that Jordan and Syria should take in Palestinians. Historically that has proven to be a non-starter. After the last couple weeks, though, who knows?
When Trump met with Netanyahu, he decided to forego his trademark red tie, and instead wear a blue one. Netanyahu wore a Trumpish red tie.
Interested if anyone is seeing a similar pattern on Twitter. Up until the Inauguration, my feed was pretty solidly conservative (I don’t actually follow anyone on Twitter). Then is became strongly mixed, liberal and conservative. Then after Trump announced the Canadian tariffs, it was flooded with Canadians defiant about the tariffs. Then, after Trudeau submitted, my feed for a day was full of Canadians complaining about how horrible Trudeau was (not because of his giving in, but generally). Then the next day, and since, my feed has been full of Brits angry at Starmer, about the rape gangs, and about immigrant crime.
The algorithm is guessing what you’d like to see, and the main starting point for this is the set of people that a user “follows”. If you don’t follow anyone then the algorithm has little to go on, and so it feeds you whatever is trending. And that can vary a lot day to day.
If you want a less variable experience, pick a selection of the sort of thing you want to see, and “follow” them. Indeed, pretty much the entire point of Twitter is that it is highly configurable, in that you can curate the sort of things you want to be fed by choosing who to follow.
That makes sense. It’s interesting to see this other stuff, though.
Bravo to Nderitu.
As far as the US taking control of Gaza, surely that would be an operational and logistical quagmire, but nothing else has worked. If the Egyptians et al are finally going to let them in, maybe the world will have a chance of stopping a place the size of New Jersey and a place the size of 2x Washington DC from continuing to consume a substantial proportion of the air in the global room. There’s more important stuff that needs focus.
The U.N. is an “independent neutral impartial body.” That’s news to me.
And, we’ll see what happens in light of Trump’s Gaza press conference (with Prime Minister Netanyahu), which I watched live yesterday. It was an extraordinary moment when he said that the U.S. would own Gaza—and all its problems, presumably. The remarkable thing is that he said such a thing out loud. It’s pure Trump.
And, as per pure-Trump rhetoric, it unexpectedly creates an entirely new conversation. Even if his “plan” (which I put in scare quotes because it seemed more like a quip he couldn’t keep inside himself than a plan) doesn’t come to fruition, it almost certainly will cause things to happen that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. Something good might come out of it. We’ll see.
As with many of the times Trump talks off the cuff there are some grains of truth hidden amongst the madness. Removing the Gazan Palestinians (and lets face it, the West Bank Palestinians would be next on the list if this ever comes to pass) would be of future benefit to Israel. The idea of ‘a Jewish state for a Jewish people’ is unstable in the long term if almost half the people in the territory are not only not Jewish but feel like they, rather than the Jews, are the historical owners of that land.
If they could get the Palestinians to voluntarily agree to emigrate then it’s a win-win for Israel.
Jordan and Egypt, as well as other bordering Arab states like Syria and Lebanon are, however, poor and have their own political problems. They could not afford to take in 2 million Gazans (and then, presumably, 3 million West Bank residents).
The only countries in the region that have the money to house them would be destabilized by the influx of a radicalized population (just look at what happened Lebanon and Jordan in the past). It would be suicidal for the various gulf state and Saudi royal families to agree to this.
On the plus side, if it did happen, Trump would finally be heavily investing in infrastructure and creating a lot of jobs*.
*sarcasm
Arab states, as I’m sure you’ve seen, seem to all be publicly denouncing this. But privately I wonder if they’re saying or have signaled otherwise. Hoping to hear Malgorzata’s take on this, particularly since I recall that she said that a lot of things from Saudi were showing up in Israeli stores after Oct 7.
While I presume the other Arab states in the region would secretly prefer the Palestinian question to vanish, I can’t see any possible upside for them to try to solve it by taking in millions of impoverished Gazans.
Remember, Trumps ’plan’ involved no cost to the US here. The Arab states would apparently take on the cost of housing the Gazans AND the cost of cleaning up the now empty territory, that will then be owned by the US who will just build seafront condos.
He seems to be unaware that the US is not the only place where mass immigration is unpopular.
The Arab states could kill this idea in a second by pointing out that if Trump annexes Gaza, then the Gazans are the responsibility of the US. If the population needs to be moved anywhere then why not move them to the US, preferably somewhere warm, like Florida or Texas.
The Arabs are the authors of the Pal misery b/c since 1965 they’ve all united to NOT let Pals adapt as immigrants in their countries. So they can’t naturalize like immigrants can do outside the Arab world.
.
The “suffering of the Pals” at the hands of the Joos is the MAIN uniting factor of the entire Islamosphere – the only thing they have unity on is that thinly veiled antisemitism.
.
They despise the Pals for wrecking some of their countries. To wit:
https://democracychronicles.org/worst-houseguests-ever-the-palestinians/
.
And within Gaza particularly but also other parts of the Islamosphere THIS is the upbringing all the kids have received for 70 years.
https://democracychronicles.org/kindergarten-jihad-who-plays-the-beheaded/
.
And the libtarded leftist western media replays the (KGB and Stasi invented) ahistorical lie of the Nahkba.
D.A.
NYC
https://democracychronicles.org/author/david-anderson/
Or bracingly cold and difficult to escape from, like Baffin Island in the temporarily sovereign “post-national state” of Canada.
I see now why Trump wants Canada. Plenty of space to dump people whom you don’t like, to cool down. Like Siberia.
It snowed in Houston two weeks ago. The snow stayed on the ground for three says. I don’t think they would like it here, at least not in the winter.
Yes, it will be interesting. Part of the Palestinian’s problem is that for all this time the other Arab states have refused them refuge.
As long as I can remember, Arab states have refused a population transfer. Considering that they all once kicked out their Jews (most of them are now in Israel) it’s not an unfair suggestion.
But I’d be extremely surprised if any Arab countries agreed.
I have not heard of it lately, but Trumps’ “idea” about making Canada a state would be … interesting to say the least. Whether it becomes one huge state or several very large states, it would necessarily acquire an appropriate number of Electoral College votes for its population, and guess what would happen to the Republican/Democratic balance in our elections?
Ignoring the fact that Canadians would still (majority) want universal health care, our independent (and in many ways superior) education system, one of the official languages to be French (try and take that away and the Quebecois will revolt) our gun laws not yours etc…
Nevermind the mess that would be the legalities of getting the First Nations to agree to such an annexation in violation of all the deals they have signed over the years…
Further, since we Canadians mostly don’t want this, I expect that it would lead resentment for generations.
You may as well speculate about the the EU joining the US.
Yeah, I don’t see this happening. Among other things, as Mark suggests, all of the new States would undoubtedly be fairly blue.
Elections? I don’t think so. By the way, musk took over NOAA today. All the computers will probably be scrubbed of any mention of climate change.
Mark,
The Electoral College (and Congressional) problem could be easily finessed by annexing Canada as a single large territory with no seats in the Senate or House, as you did during the western expansion. Congress could allow the territory to elect a territorial council to look after local affairs like potholes, sewers, and vaccinations but Washington would make all the big decisions without Canadian voice, including how much federal money, if any, to send to the territory as grants. It would be up to Congress to decide about any new states and what their borders would be, maybe decades later (92 years for Alaska.). American border states could always be expanded, with their consent, to take in our half-dozen large metropolitan cities. All of them, except for a couple in Alberta, conveniently border blue states. New York could easily absorb both Toronto and Montreal. Then you would have almost all of Canada’s economically relevant population living and voting in existing blue states, just making them bluer without having to create any new states at all, ever. (You would have to gerrymander the new House districts carefully to avoid adding net Democrats.). The rest of the territory would rapidly depopulate as everyone who could, including all the recent immigrants from hot countries, would move south where it’s warmer.
Many of the tax-funded comforts like free healthcare that Canadians take for granted and “would not give up” they would not be able to afford anyway after the economic warfare that was intended to bring them to heel. We’d surely have to pay federal taxes to Uncle Sam. Annexation would be on your terms, not Canada’s. If you didn’t think Quebec would play nice in a single Canadian territory — it wouldn’t — you could always create two non-voting territories, “Quebec” and “RestofCanada”, which is how we pretty much think of ourselves anyway. And then oppress each territory differentially, as necessary.
As Canadian commenters never tire of threatening, many of your 40 million new citizens would be to varying degrees sullen, resentful, disloyal, and violent. You might want to make them only nationals, not citizens. Perhaps after a couple of generations of schoolchildren had grown up knowing themselves only as Americans you could dangle citizenship and maybe even statehood, selectively, in front of them.
Of course this modest proposal is intended as food for thought to President Trump to decide carefully if annexing Canada gives the United States anything you don’t already have. We’re already willing to sell you anything you need. If you annexed us, your corporations would still have pay us to cut down trees and dig rocks out of the ground for you. Why make Quebec and aboriginal demands your problem? Just leave them for us to struggle with, to make us more motivated to sell you stuff. And if we’re not willing to join our own army to defend our own country we’re sure not going to join yours.
A friend of mine, when she was in college, was disappointed when she and her girl cousin were unable to light a match with their farts. They had heard references, but their experiment failed as they didn’t realize the match had to be struck.
Pretty sure these two lived a sheltered life, and didn’t have any brothers.
It’s very disappointing that spineless Republicans are approving these dreadful Trump picks like RFK Jr (I agree he’s the worst).
It’s scarcely believable.
I’ve found a cure JFK jr can push.
We’ll drink a drink, a drink
To Lily the Pink, the Pink, the Pink
The saviour of the human race
For she invented, medicinal compound
Most efficacious in every case
“Lily the Pink” The Scaffold
If you need a giggle here are the lyrics
https://www.google.com/search?q=lily%20the%20pink%20lyrics&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b-m#ebo=2
I like the idea of a lot of pissed angels.
“But I wonder what her husband’s tee shirts have to do with this issue (watch the commercial embedded in it)”
The video was sponsored by XX XY Athletics, an apparel company founded by former Levi’s executive and national gymnastics champion Jennifer Sey. Sey is quite active in the fight against men invading women’s spaces. I assume Rowling’s husband bought four of Sey’s tee shirts, a popular one saying “Save Women’s Sports,” while others broadcast their message with the company logo of “XX XY Athletics.”
https://www.xx-xyathletics.com/collections/mens