Welcome to the beginning of the “work” week: February 17, 2025, and National Indian Pudding Day, the absolute best indigenous American dessert. I know of only one place you can now get it in the U.S.: the Union Oyster House in Boston. But here’s an uncredited photo and a good recipe from The View from Great Island. It must be served warm with a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top. If you haven’t tried it, make a batch!
It’s also Random Acts of Kindness Day, National Cabbage Day, President’s Day (a federal holiday), and National Café au Lait Day.
Here’s how to make a cat latte (not really café au lait, but it’ll do). These are common in Japan, as they are kawaii:
@msshiandmrhe Which do you like more, my 3d cat latte 🙋♀️ or Mr He’s 4d choir latte 🙋♂️? See detailed recipe on my byeohh 😘 #latteart #drink #coffee #japanesefood #foodasmr #homecafe #easyrecipe
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the February 17 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Get ready for Elon Musk to stick his snoot into your tax returns. Yep, he’s been given that power:
The Internal Revenue Service is preparing to give a team member working with Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency access to sensitive taxpayer data, people familiar with the matter said.
The systems at the I.R.S. contain the private financial data tied to millions of Americans, including their tax returns, Social Security numbers, addresses, banking details and employment information.
“Waste, fraud and abuse have been deeply entrenched in our broken system for far too long,” Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, said. “It takes direct access to the system to identify and fix it.”
Mr. Fields added: “DOGE will continue to shine a light on the fraud they uncover as the American people deserve to know what their government has been spending their hard-earned tax dollars on.”
No, this is about what hard-working Americans tell the government about their financial situation.
*The WSJ gives five maps and charts and an explanation of why “Russia’s advance in Ukraine is slowing.” First, a headline map showing which parts of Ukraine Russia has taken over (including Crimea), with the dark red areas the gains since July 1 of 2024.
An excerpt:
The Russian army’s advance in Ukraine is slowing, just as President Trump is pressing for talks.
The slowdown comes at a critical time for both sides. Russia wants to trade gains on the battlefield—and the impression that further advances are inevitable—for a favorable deal in peace talks proposed by Trump. Ukraine, meanwhile, wants to show that it can still fend off its giant neighbor.
In the first month of 2025, Russia was taking on average nearly six days to occupy an area the size of Manhattan, according to data from DeepState, a Ukrainian group that monitors the front lines. That is more than twice as long as in November. Gains in February have slowed further.
. . . . The heavy losses for small geographical gains set up the brutal arm-wrestle that will most likely characterize Russia’s war in Ukraine this year: Can the Russians sustain or even accelerate their assaults and gain enough ground to force Ukraine, struggling with a lack of manpower, and its allies to seek an accommodation? Or will the offensives peter out in the face of Ukraine’s dogged resistance?
Russia’s gains accelerated last fall, particularly in areas to the west of the occupied regional capital of Donetsk. But they have slowed over winter, in part because a lack of foliage makes infantry easy to spot and target with aerial drones, but possibly because of growing exhaustion on the Russian side, analysts said.
It took the last half-year for Russian forces to seize Ukrainian territory equivalent to the land area of Rhode Island, at the cost of tens of thousands of troops. Recruitment is getting tougher, and Russia is having to increase payments to attract volunteers, including those from prisons.
In October last year, a senior U.S. defense official said that Russia had suffered some 600,000 casualties since the start of the war in February 2022, and that the accelerated advance was increasing losses. Ukraine’s top military commander, Gen. Oleksandr Syrskiy, said Russia lost as many people last year as in the first two years of the war.
. . . After three years of war, Russia has burned through about half of its vast stocks of mostly Soviet-era tanks and armored vehicles—and many of the rest are older models in poor shape, according to an analysis by a group of open-source intelligence analysts who examine satellite images of Russian stores.
The huge losses show the cost of Russia’s advances, and how difficult they will be to sustain. With stocks of armored vehicles ebbing, Russia has used civilian vehicles and motorbikes in assaults, but mostly is relying on unprotected infantry, which have taken heavy casualties.
Trump doesn’t even seem to care; he’s ready to broker “peace” by giving more of Ukraine to Russia, without even consulting Zelensky, who had to insist that he be part of the negotiations. Nor does Trump want Ukraine to join NATO. Is it too much to insist that, as part of any deal that gives away part of Ukraine to Russia, Ukraine be allowed to join NATO? Only those who sympathize with Russia cry “Don’t let Ukraine join NATO!”
*Middle-school English Tim Donahue argues plaintively in the NYT, “Let students finish the whole book. It could change their lives.” (archived here). He tells us at the outset that students now spend over eight hours a day staring at a screen, and that’s not conducive to reading, even if you favor e-books. And, of course, attention spans are decreasing: “TL;DR” appears more and more often.
The study of English involves more than reading. It includes written expression and the cultivation of an authentic voice. But the comprehension of literature, on which the study of English is based, is rooted in the pleasure of reading. Sometimes there will be a beam of light that falls on a room of students collectively leaning into a story, with only the scuffing sounds of pages, and it’s as though all our heartbeats have slowed. But we have introduced so many antagonists to scrape against this stillness that reading seems to be impractical.
The test scores released at the end of last month by the National Assessment of Educational Progress reveal disturbing trend lines for the future of literacy in our country. Thirty-three percent of eighth graders scored “below basic” on reading skills, meaning they were unable to determine the main idea of a text or identify differing sides of an argument. This was the worst result in the exam’s 32-year history. To make matters worse, or perhaps to explain how we got here, the assessment reported that in 2023 only 14 percent of students said they read for fun almost every day, a drop of 13 percentage points since 2012.
In its attempt to make English more relevant, the National Council of Teachers of English — devoted to the improvement of language arts instruction — announced in 2022 that it would widen its doors to the digital and mediated world. The aim was to retreat from the primacy of the written word and invite more ideas to be represented by images and multimedia. “It behooves our profession, as stewards of the communication arts, to confront and challenge the tacit and implicit ways in which print media is valorized above the full range of literacy competencies students should master,” the council said.
. . . reading, in particular, is an important exercise in inferiority, an insistence on listening to something without imposing your own design on it. It’s a grounding and an ascension. While we still have the institutions of school and class time as well as the books that line our walls, we need to challenge students with language and characters that may not come to them immediately but might with healthy discipline.
The notion that students can master a range of literary competencies is further diluting the already deluded approach to English class. To put the National Council of Teachers of English guidelines in action, teachers are substituting intertextuality and experiential learning for engaging with the actual text. What might have been a full read of “The Great Gatsby” is replaced by students reading the first three chapters, then listening to a TED Talk on the American dream, reading a Claude McKay poem, dressing up like flappers and then writing and delivering a PowerPoint presentation on the Prohibition. They’ll experience Chapters 4 through 8 only through plot summaries and return to their texts for the final chapter.
. . . .When a semester begins, I often give my students a wicked little essay by Virginia Woolf, “How Should One Read a Book?” She advises, “Begin not by sitting on the bench among the judges, but by standing in the dock with the criminal. Be his fellow worker, become his accomplice.” Like this, a classroom allows students to travel along with dockworkers and tycoons, tyrants and liberators. And when they have turned the last page, Woolf invites the reader to “leave the dock and mount the bench. He must cease to be the friend; he must become the judge.”
Is it old-fashioned and curmudgeonly to want to hold a book in your hands. I can’t even read e-books because I like to make notes in the margins or go back and look at things. But worse than this is the habit of avoiding books altogether and looking for the “reading time: less than five minutes” on articles.
*Jonathan Turley reports on how Democrats are resorting to more profanity, apparently out of frustration at their losses.
Teddy Roosevelt once said, “profanity is the parlance of the fool.” Democrats appear to be increasingly finding relief from both reality and sanity in profanity. Democratic members have been complaining that left-wing groups have been targeting them to be more aggressive and “fight harder” in the face of the fast-paced actions of President Donald Trump. Their response appears to be ratcheting up “rage rhetoric” with profanity and violent language. Last week, Rep. Maxine Dexter (D-Ore.) captured the new norm by yelling at a rally that “I don’t swear in public very well, but we have to f**k Trump. Please don’t tell my children that I just did that.”
The key, it appears, is for her constituents to hear it. She is not alone. (Warning: profane language)
Here:
More:
Politicians and pundits have seemingly tried to outdo each other in proving their bona fides to the far left. MSNBC host and former Biden press secretary Jen Psaki pledged on Jon Stewart’s “The Weekly Show” podcast that she has “retired from the world of Democratic messaging” and ” speaking in a manner that was so academic and Ivory Tower.” She promised to drop “the disconnected academic Ivory Tower elite language that is too often used by Democrats, sometimes on cable television.” Instead, Psaki called on the left to “break some s–t.”
This is not a new trend. Law professors and legal pundits have long struggled to maintain a certain decorum and professionalism. However, during the Trump years, there was a similar race to the bottom as figures like Harvard Professor Laurence Tribe regularly engaging in name calling and profanity.
Just last week, a professor was restored to his teaching duties after being suspended for profane attacks on Trump. It is now considered required virtue signaling to use violent or profane language to show that you are no milquetoast moderate.
Many on the far left like former CNN anchor Don Lemon have turned the same profanity of members of the media who are not sufficiently aggressive and open in opposing Trump.
What is most striking about this race to the bottom is that it is a concession to the far left that writes off any effort to appeal to moderate and independent voters who supported Trump. The Democrats found their party captured by the most extreme elements of their base and alienated most of the country. Now, politicians and pundits are rushing to protect themselves by joining the mob.
In some cases, the effort is painfully awkward like Schumer’s effort to become a rabble-rousing populist. Even CNN has been unable to hold back:
I think it’s unseemly—just as unseemly as if I talked to my classes this way. Profanity will only drive more people away from the Left, and doesn’t add anything to the discourse. I have noticed that my Democratic friends seem to be more touchy and grumpy these days. I can’t recall if Republicans are like that after Biden won last time, but I doubt it. Profanity is the new way to be cool. But the real way to be cool is not to curse, but go to the courts.
*Alaskans seem almost unanimous in agreeing to use the indigenous name “Denali” for the mountain that used to be called “McKinley,” even tough that President never set foot in the state. But Trump is insistent in restoring the “colonial” name:
But in this snow-shrouded land where the sun appears for only a few hours daily in winter, he and others say there is no disputing that the name of that mountain — North America’s tallest — is the Indigenous word Denali. Never mind President Donald Trump’s announcement just hours after his inauguration that he was restoring the behemoth peak’s previous titleof Mount McKinley, in honor of a turn-of-the-century president who never set foot in Alaska.
Noel hasn’t heard a single resident express support. “We prefer it to stay Denali,” he said, “and we’re not going to change our name.”
What perplexes many here is why Trump chose to thrust a mountain thousands of miles from Washington into a culture war while disregarding Alaskans’ wishes, their legislature’s pleas and their Republican U.S. senators’ disapproval. As the weeks go by, affront has turned to worry as the implications of more executive orders from afar, particularly those freezing federal grants and imperiling the jobs of “parkies” who help drive the local tourism economy, begin to ripple across the permafrost.
“It was just another instance of someone from Washington putting their big nose in a place that it just doesn’t belong,” said Jeff Yanuchi, an organic farmer who spent years running dogsleds in Denali National Park and Preserve with his wife. The mountain, headded,“cannot be a political pawn. And that’s what they’re trying to make it.”
Others here are even less diplomatic, describing Trump’s move as “infantile,” “laughable” or, as 86-year-old Eliza Jones put it, “dumb.”
“We don’t know who McKinley is,” said Jones, who co-authored the first dictionary for Koyukon Athabascan, the Indigenous language she grew up speaking in a remote river village. “Denali has so much more meaning to it.”
Denali means “the tall one” or “the great one” in some Athabascan languages, and the summit was known as that for thousands of years. Then a prospector in Alaska who admired president-elect William McKinley and his support for the gold standard called it Mount McKinley in a newspaper article in 1897. The name took, and the federal government made it official in 1917, 16 years after McKinley’s assassination.
Denali it must be then. Trump’s boneheaded order reflects a combination of power and bigotry. Here’s a photo I took of the mountain in 2006 when I hopped on a bush plane ferrying two climbers to the mountain. The plane landed on a glacier well below the summit. I got to sit next to the pilot!
*And Valentine’s news: you can pay a minimal fee to have your ex’s name put on a loathsome animal. From the AP:
Animal shelters and zoos around the country are encouraging little cathartic avenues for revenge this holiday — and raising money for a cause — with a slew of darkly funny fundraisers for those missed by Cupid’s arrow.
Options include naming a feral cat after your old flame before it’s neutered — or giving rodents or cockroaches your love bug’s name before feeding them to bigger animals. The Minnesota Zoo’s campaign to name a bug after either a friend or a foe has attracted donors from across the world.
Teri Scott of Poulsbo, Washington, said she was bombarded on social media with the anti-love campaigns, including naming a hissing cockroach after an ex.
“We do this in good fun,” said Laura Atwood, the center’s executive director. The money raised helps the facility pay salaries and care for birds — the nonprofit rehabilitated 580 of them last year. Just over $18,000 had been raised by the time the campaign closed Wednesday. So many rats — more than 130 — were purchased for the campaign, the center ran out of supplies until another batch of frozen rodents arrived Wednesday,
“People are sometimes hurt by a relationship, and this just gives them a little cathartic way to maybe work something out,” Atwood said, adding that they don’t publicize last names.
The videos of raptors like Ghost, a snowy owl that swallows the rat whole, or a peregrine falcon named Breland, which keeps one talon on the rodent and pecks away at it until it’s gone, will be emailed to donors.
There’s also a cheaper option: People can pay $10 to name a mealworm after their ex before it’s fed to a crow or a magpie, and a video will be posted on social media.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is rebuking Andrzej again.
Hili: Did you say something?Amdrzej: I was talking to myself.Hili: Something is wrong with you.
Hili: Mówiłeś coś?Ja: Mówiłem do siebie.Hili: Coś z tobą niedobrze.
*******************
From Jesus of the Day:
From Cat Memes:
From My Cat is an Asshole:
From Masih; the usual in Iran: students protesting, and one student killed:
Angry students in Tehran University are protesting on campus tonight and chanting:
“The blood of the innocent that spilled will never be erased”.
At the Munich Security Conference, I just received devastating news: another innocent student has been killed in Iran, igniting… pic.twitter.com/NSdAz4YwyH
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) February 14, 2025
From Malcolm. I once knew a person who had a white cat and a black cat, named “Null” and “Void” respectively.
The void stares back pic.twitter.com/j1sU4NIRlY
— smol silly cat (@Catsillyness) January 28, 2025
From my BlueSky feed (I had to trawl through a bunch of virtue flaunting before I got to this one):
Kitty Shall Never Starve
— War and Peas 🧿 (@warandpeas.bsky.social) 2025-02-16T16:17:26.783Z
. . . and from my Twitter feed, full o’ cats:
This cat is living the life. Even his legs are crossed pic.twitter.com/W9DCP3dmJi
— Posts Of Cats (@PostsOfCats) February 15, 2025
From my feed. I posted the first one before, but the second one doesn’t explain the trick!
2. this handkerchief trick is crazy 😂pic.twitter.com/DvK7zTOW2i
— 𝐏𝐚𝐝𝐫𝐞 🧸✰ (@ThePadrepr) February 13, 2025
From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted:
A 12-year-old Dutch boy was gassed to death upon arriving at the camp.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-02-17T11:01:29.417Z
Two posts from Professor Cobb. First, a collision between two galaxies, with a link to the original post (with explanation):
Time for, well, not a distraction so much as a palate cleanser: a truly phenomenal shot from Hubble of a galaxy that is rippling like a pond that had a rock tossed in it… because that's what happened! Kinda.And YES you want to grab the hi-res version.badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/incredible…🧪🔭
— Phil Plait (@philplait.bsky.social) 2025-02-11T16:36:25.091Z
History repeats itself. . . . :
Amazing letter sent to schools by ex-Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox in answer to questions as to what lessons Americans should learn from Watergate.
— Tom Shakespeare (@tomshakespeare.bsky.social) 2025-02-11T08:58:34.871Z
I’m guessing that part of the handkerchief trick is that he pulls it inside out, with one color on the outside, and the other on the in-.
Only way I know that it may work. But still…
And the 1/2 kid trick had to be done with a mirror and careful control of camera angles. But still …
“Is it old-fashioned and curmudgeonly to want to hold a book in your hands.”
No and yes and both are accurate!
Written on a bathroom wall in a Fallout NV mod: “Profanity is the linguistic crutch of inarticulate motherf**kers.”
Love it!
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
If we would only give, just once, the same amount of reflection to what we want to get out of life that we give to the question of what to do with a two weeks’ vacation, we would be startled at our false standards and the aimless procession of our busy days. -Dorothy Canfield Fisher, author, reformer, and activist (17 Feb 1879-1958)
I find the hand-wringing about DOGE’s access to confidential information risible and disingenuous. (People seem to forget how many government data breaches their have been in spite of the permanent bureaucracy.) He is not looking at tax returns, he’s looking at systems. This is from a tweet today:
Thanks for the insult, which was unnecessary.
Has congress allocated funds to fix the problem? I suspect the issue with some of these inefficiencies is that congress has not allocated money to fix them. As far as I know the employees can’t just go change the systems at will.
How do you know what DOGE is, and isn’t, looking at?
Maybe Elmo’s boys can find OJ’s returns. But if they do, they probably have orders to destroy them.
And BTW, he wants McKinley because McK was big on tariffs.
I find Musk’s access to the U.S. Treasury and soon-to-be IRS records alarming, illegal, unethical, and dangerous, given his many conflicts of interest and complete lack of integrity. None of this will end well.
Dr. B, if the process is an audit, then I’ll agree with you. And even it it goes deeper, I still agree that the concern is overblown.
Audits by outside companies and individuals are conducted across the country at all levels of government and business, and our personal and payroll information is seen by a lot of people. My wife is a bookkeeper at a large firm and sees the pay of everyone from the CEO to the sweeper, and has access to social security numbers, addresses, and family information. Her firm also hires temp workers to support when things get busy (the company is somewhat seasonal). When doing her job, she only sees numbers and processes those numbers to make sure that they work out as they should. When auditors come, their concern is that the info is handled properly, and they do pull test cases to see how the process works.
My point is that there are a lot of people who already have access to our information, and if the DOGE team is handling the information correctly (and there’s no proof to think otherwise) then there is no more concern than currently exists.
I’d encourage people to go to the doge.com website for more information too.
I hear you, Darryl, but you’re basically saying we have to trust DOGE as we do other auditors. Personally, I do not.
Point taken!
Edward, I understand your point, but keep in mind also that Musk is no stranger to having access to private information. Tesla has access to personal information, including credit cards used to pay for monthly services, credit history and all that entails for purchases, and up-to-the-second information of where vehicles are located via the car’s telematics system (they know where you live and where you go!). The buck stops with Musk as CEO for how this confidential info is handled at Tesla, as well as at his other companies. He also has access to US security info via SpaceX.
The IRS dataset is bigger, but the rules are the same, and he and team should know that.
If he starts publishing individual tax returns as a form of political partisanship, I’ll be the first to admit I’m mistaken.
Okay, DarrylR. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll go to Doge.com. I don’t like it, though. As EdwardM says below, I don’t trust them. I want to know what sort of clearances this team has passed through for starters.
Edit: Do you have an exact website? I just went to doge.com and Go Daddy has that domain up for sale for $10,420,069 US dollars
The Democrats act in increasingly pathetic and ineffectual ways rather than fixing themselves in the wake of the election disaster. Sigh.
I’ve had a Tom Hanks in a MAGA hat clip from the SNL 50th Anniversary show sent to me by my D-party friends as a HILARIOUS takedown of MAGA. My god, it’s cringey. To summarize, Hanks is on Jeopardy with a black host, and has a stereotypical southern accent, and then doesn’t want to shake the black host’s hand because, obviously, he’s a racist, you know. Hahaha.
I enjoy political humor regardless of who it’s pointed at, but this wasn’t even a bit funny. My D friends thought it was, because they still buy into the “MAGA is racist” bit and think this will further their cause. Looks like another loss in 2028 if they keep thinking this way.
I’m also finding the new “resistance” and “speaking truth to power” by the media after keeping quiet during much of the Biden years to be more of an exercise in “speaking opposition to Republicans” which makes them look less trustworthy and more propagandist.
If the Dems think that swearing will helped them win elections then they’re completely out of touch.
It’s appears that examining possible policy failures is completely off the table. Sad.
I don’t put much stock in looks, but many do. That said, based on the Congresswoman’s appearance, I’d say the closest she’ll come to a F*** is her use of the term F***.
This is a vile comment
Insulting a woman’s appearance is a cheap shot…and lazy too.
Agree.
And in this culture women generally are strongly influenced to try to look good, while men generally are less so. How many wives ever ask their husbands for fashion advice, eh?
From the placard, it looks like your flight onto the glacier in 2006 was in a deHavilland DHC-2 “Beaver”, an excellent bush plane. It is a predecessor to the DHC-6 Twin Otter in which I flew with a research team at NASA Glenn Research Center carrying out flight research on aircraft wing and tail icing. It also preceded the ubiquitous commuter twin engine turbo prop “Dash 8” just before they were replaced by the faster and more comfortable “regional jets” (like the crj).
The Beaver was/is a really tough little airplane accustomed to the challenging weather and landing areas of Alaska. For example your aircraft had already had at least two incidents causing some structural damage over the years preceding your flight: one a hard landing with floats on a glassy, featureless surface of a lake and the other taxiing to get into position for take-off from a particularly tricky glacier. Like the old Timex watch commercials said: it takes a lickin’, but keeps on tickin’.
Love the new free samples! I used to be really stubborn about finishing all books I started, but now I’ve decided life’s too short and if I don’t like the book 10% through, I will abandon it with no regrets.
NATO for Ukraine is a non starter unfortunately as ALL members must agree.
Remember even getting Sweden and Finland in was a long headache.
Some other more creative security guarantee is very possible however and can be done quickly. Individual NATO countries aren’t prevented from forming new alliances and treaties outside NATO.
D.A.
NYC
Europe could (and should, IMHO) form its own mutual-defense alliance that doesn’t include the US and Canada. It would overlap with but be independent of NATO.
To me, NATO is dead. The USA, through the mouth of J. D. Vance, promised not to defend European member states when Russia attacks them to grab their land and slaughter their people, as it did in Ukraine.
Ukrainians are now paying with their territory, and tens of thousands of lives, for trusting a creative security guarantee from the USA that turned out bogus – the Budapest Memorandum.
Liz Bradt (a Democrat leader from Salem) called Seth Moulton (D-MA) a ‘Nazi Cooperator’. See, no profanity of any kind. Imagine how much profanity we would get from Republicans if the US adopted Maoism?
I can’t tell if this is supposed to be sarcastic or facetious.
I’d be more offended being called a Nazi Cooperator than a M-F-er, but I’d also consider the person calling me the name to be a complete imbecile in this case.
To me, being called a vulgar swear word is just a word, but being binned with mass murderers is over the line (why I hate the term being thrown around so much about Trump or the Republicans – Nazis? Really?).
In terms of the US adopting Maoism, the closest group to adopting that is the woke left – there’s a lot of similarity to Maoism in their tactics, as they are more Maoist than Marxist, though there are a lot of similarities.
I apologize. I was trying to be sarcastic (about Liz Bradt). I was not trying to sarcastic about Maoism. Chinese immigrants find many similarities between Mao’s cultural revolution and wokeism. I have actually read the books (which are quite good) of Cixin Liu (“The Three-Body Problem”). The books were translated by Ken Liu (no relation) who is a very good translator.
Yes, indeed. Those who escaped such horrors are horrified by wokeism. I consider them to be the canaries in the coal mine.
“I can’t recall if Republicans are like that after Biden won last time, but I doubt it.”
Ummm, January 6?
I wouldn’t call Indian pudding an indigenous dessert. The only ingredient known to the pre-Contact Indians was ground dried corn (meal) and the recipe for the dessert came with the colonists from England. The linked article says corn meal (as a substitute for oats) was known as Indian meal, I think because “corn” was already a generic term for grain in England. What we call “corn” in North America is referred to to this day by British newspapers like The Economist as maize, or “Indian corn.”
So Indian pudding can be enjoyed as a substrate for vanilla ice cream without fear of cultural appropriation. Only for us in Canada would it be cultural appropriation (from New England) because I had never heard of it before reading about it last year, here on WEIT.
Indigenous to North America. That is what I meant.
Of course. 🤦♂️ My mistake.
The word has almost protected status here, often styled with an upper-case I. Our synapses flicker and fire in well-worn ways. We could say the CF-100 fighter jet of the 1950s was indigenous to Canada but these days we never would.
It looks like Trump is following the Neville Chamberlain School of Foreign Policy.
I do wish our Elon overlord would quit reading and quoting ZeroHedge – it seems to be a barely disguised Russian cutout. 🙁
His hot take style and machete rather than scalpel operations are tiresome and dangerous.
D.A.
NYC
Agree. Russia has been as successful as Hamas at gaining followers, albeit mostly in right wing circles. It seems the Trump administration is one group of such followers.
Disappointing given that Trump took a hard line on Hamas.
“Is it old-fashioned and curmudgeonly to want to hold a book in your hands. I can’t even read e-books because I like to make notes in the margins or go back and look at things.”
This is definitely a matter of taste, rather than absolute right and wrong. But I do almost all book-reading now on the Kindle app on my iPad mini. Reasons:
It’s lighter to hold.
If I’m unexpectedly stuck somewhere with nothing to do, I have my library accessible on my phone.
I don’t have to decide in advance which book to take with me; I have them all.
I can blow the text up to be comfortable for aging, late-night eyes.
I can highlight stuff. When I finish a book, I go back and re-read the highlighted sections, and it helps cement them into memory.
I can take notes, basically just like in real books.
I can search the text. E.g., the author is using an abbreviation that he introduced in a previous chapter, but I don’t remember what it is. Text-search it, and in 5 seconds I have the answer.
Relatedly, when I later want to go back and find a passage, text-search gets me to it faster than thumbing through pages.
I can copy and paste extra-good bits into Facebook posts to share with friends.
Kindle books are usually cheaper than real books, and I can start reading one 10 seconds after I decide to buy it.
Free sample downloads make it easy to decide whether to buy, based on a decent chunk of text.
I can look up unfamiliar words just by clicking on them.
Footnotes with hyperlinks? I just click on them. Can’t do that in a book.
For me, these advantages are decisive.
I actually read “The Game of Thrones” twice. First, as e-books and second as hardcopy books. Why did I get actual hardcopy books? Because the e-books didn’t have maps. That limitation may have been resolved.
Agree with you, I read lots on kindle, but also try to get through the many unread books in my house.
Am currently in San Diego, with an almost 5-hr. (so far) delay to fly back to very very snowy Toronto, and am very grateful for my kindle. Just hope I can find plenty of charging stations at the airport🤞
I’m sold on ebooks too. And they do have a note function.
The ability to highlight passages, copy, and paste them into documents on my computer so that I’m ready and able to instantaneously insert them into appropriate internet discussions and arguments is what originally sold me on using a Kindle. Be the fierce warrior.
I love online books. They take up no space, which is great if you don’t have the space for more books. But the Kindle app (for example) is also is very good at allowing you to mark up text and take notes—all of which then remain attached to the book. The app also allows you to select a word or phrase, and instantly look up the meaning—from a dictionary or even from Wikipedia. I do this a lot! With paper books I’m likely to be lazy and rely on context rather than look something up. But with an online book, it’s effortless and helps me get more out of what I’m reading. It takes some time getting used to—perhaps two or three books—but the experience is really excellent.
All that said, I do like the feel and smell of a good paper book. But the online experience—particularly in a purpose-built app like the Kindle app—is excellent if given the chance.
Hey! I just saw Robert Woolley’s comment above. Ditto to that!
What the dems should be saying.
We were fucked over at the polls and now we lick our wounds and come up with better fucking policies that reflect the whole country.
Would that suffice where the “fucked” bit is more of a mutural neutral understanding of how to proceed.
“Is it too much to insist that, as part of any deal that gives away part of Ukraine to Russia, Ukraine be allowed to join NATO? Only those who sympathize with Russia cry ‘Don’t let Ukraine join NATO!’”
There are security arrangements that one could make other than NATO membership and the potential for invocation of Article 5. There is also a very long history of distinguished people of both parties, perhaps more so from the left—diplomats, military officers, cabinet officials, academics—who opposed expansion of NATO. But congratulations to all of those who have more recently picked up the smears reminiscent of the Cold War right wing, the Vietnam-era “my country right or wrong” types, and the Iraq War neocons. The left used to make movies about such people; perhaps a future generation will create new starring roles.
Not to put too blunt of a point on it, but as to those who so strongly advocate having Ukraine join NATO—and who can’t do so without disparaging those who believe it unwise—I have this to offer: nothing is preventing you from putting your life on the line in Ukraine right now. If we get you the funds and weapons, would you like to go? Wave the magic American wand and Russia would be defeated; we would emerge victorious just as we have in every other war since 1945. So, what have you to lose? If you are so intent on volunteering the potential deaths of future American sons, daughters, husbands, wives, brothers, and sisters, then I ask: What is stopping you from setting the example and volunteering not only yourselves, but also your loved ones, to die for a cause that you so fervently believe in? Or is the cost more acceptable when it is other people who die? And the burden of having killed more bearable when it is not borne by you?
Re the cost being more acceptable when it is other people who die, and the burden of having killed more bearable when it is not borne by you: ’twas ever thus.
Then NATO is pointless; for the same argument is equally good for not defending any country against Russia, or another aggressor.
There was a post-WWII order upheld by the USA and its Western allies, which denied an aggressor – even a strong one – the opportunity to invade, grab land and slaughter. It was supposed, from the experience of two world wars, that it is better and cheaper in every respect to nip the aggression in the bud, rather than be a Chamberlain. This view and this order is gone, and I see that some do not miss it. Well, value judgements differ, some want the Jews destroyed, others (or the same people) want the Ukrainians destroyed. I am supposed not to disparage them; fine, I won’t.
Back in 1994, the USA and UK bullied Ukraine into giving up its nuclear weapons, promising to defend it in return (the Budapest Memorandum). It turned a total lie – since then, the USA has fed Ukraine to Russia. At least, in your hypothetical suggestion, you offer the necessary funds and weapons; because from Obama to this day, US administrations have been consistently undersupplying funds and weapons to Ukraine in order to keep Russia happy.
I agree, Maya, that the Budapest Memorandum was a lie. It was also a bad idea. The US wouldn’t want Russia signing treaties in our backyard and we shouldn’t have been dicking around in Eastern Europe. Ukraine has gotten a raw deal. What blows my mind is the complete lack of diplomacy that’s transpired since Russia marched into Ukraine on Biden’s watch. As soon as Trump begins that process, Europe and the Dems are crying about him handing Ukraine to Putin. Come on!
+!
I intended the above (+!) to tag on Doug’s comment (#18).
If you want to do the trick, send me an email and an address, and I will send you — Prof Coyne — what you need. Do not want to reveal the secret online, b/c it’s behind A LOT of magic tricks. For interested others I will link you to a place to buy the inexpensive device.
Profanity is a low graphics resolution way of speaking and is often insufficiently specific to convey a detailed analysis of the matter in question and the negative feelings you have towards a byte of what was done or said and yet people often do guess the gist of what you meant.
It is just too easy to mutter, “You’re crazy” when we really mean “What you did there was crazy” or “What you did was crazy in one respect” or really, “What you did was suboptimal in one respect but due to the nature of trade offs it is often the case that no matter what you do it will be suboptimal in one way depending on your perspective” For example using profanity is easy to say, short and snappy and requires little thought or effort compared with saying something long winded and accurate which is a mouthful and people have got bored and walked away before you finished saying it.
Some people are angry that Trump is taking a sledge hammer to USAID as they think a scalpel would have been more careful and would avoid collateral damage to valuable projects. Elon claims Bill Clinton launched a similar project to DOGE at the start of his presidency in 1990s to make 12% cuts in Federal government spending.
The news today said Pope Francis needs a miracle cure to the bronchitis he is suffering from. I guess he has had no answer to the voice mail he left on God’s answering machine so is pleading with doctors for help. This is where faith counts for little and cash counts for a lot when paying medical bills. Blessed are ye with deep pockets. Well maybe the doctors would treat Pope Francis for free if he fell on hard times.