Welcome to a Hump Day (” يوم الحدبة” in Arabic ): Wednesday, April 2, 2025. It’s National Peanut Butter and Jelly Day, celebrating the item I most often eat for lunch. I’m sure it’s America’s favorite sandwich (it has its own Wikipedia page), especially in the version below, labeled “A peanut butter and jelly sandwich, made with Skippy peanut butter and Welch’s grape jelly on white bread.” That’s exactly how I have it, and the bread must be cheap white sliced bread. The first mention of such a sandwich was in 1901.
It’s also International Children’s Book Day (when will someone publish my children’s book?) and National Ferret Day. Please enjoy five minutes of baby ferrets playing: But I do not recommend getting one as a pet. They are troublesome, demanding, and they BITE! (They are cute, though.)
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the March 21 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*I believe it was Christopher Hitchens who said that the key to kick-starting a developing nation was empowering the women by enabling them to control their reproduction, and that makes a lot of sense. However, the Trump administration has decided to withhold aid for contraception that it used to give to poorer countries, and you know what that entails. (article archived here)
The United States is ending its financial support for family planning programs in developing countries, cutting nearly 50 million women off from access to contraception.
This policy change has attracted little attention amid the wholesale dismantling of American foreign aid, but it stands to have enormous implications, including more maternal deaths and an overall increase in poverty. It derails an effort that had brought long-acting contraceptives to women in some of the poorest and most isolated parts of the world in recent years.
The United States provided about 40 percent of the funding governments contributed to family planning programs in 31 developing countries, some $600 million, in 2023, the last year for which data is available, according to KFF, a health research organization.
That American funding provided contraceptive devices and the medical services to deliver them to more than 47 million women and couples, which is estimated to have averted 17.1 million unintended pregnancies and 5.2 million unsafe abortions, according to an analysis by the Guttmacher Institute, a sexual health research organization. Without this annual contribution, 34,000 women could die from preventable maternal deaths each year, the Guttmacher calculation concluded.
“The magnitude of the impact is mind-boggling,” said Marie Ba, who leads the coordination team for the Ouagadougou Partnership, an initiative to accelerate investments and access to family planning in nine West African countries.
The funding has been terminated as part of the Trump administration’s disassembling of the United States Agency for International Development. The State Department, into which the skeletal remains of U.S.A.I.D. was absorbed on Friday, did not reply to a request for comment on the decision to stop funding family planning. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has described the terminated aid projects as wasteful and not aligned with American strategic interest.
. . . Among the countries that will be significantly affected by the decision are Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Yemen and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
As the paper says, “Demand for contraception has been rising steadily,” and clinics in these countries are already running out of products since the distribution has ground to a halt. Is there anybody Trump isn’t punishing these days? And why is the money for family planning “wasteful”? It seems to me that the waste in such a program would be minimal.
*Luigi Mangione, accused of assassinating UnitedHealth executive Brian Thompson in Manhattan, will be facing the death penalty. And the evidence against him is strong, leading most people to think he is guilty (however, some miscreants think that Mangione did a good thing).
Attorney General Pam Bondi on Tuesday directed federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty against Luigi Mangione, the accused killer of a UnitedHealth executive, calling the slaying a “premeditated, cold-blooded assassination that shocked America.”
“After careful consideration, I have directed federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty in this case as we carry out President Trump’s agenda to stop violent crime and Make America Safe Again,” Bondi said in a statement.
Mangione, 26 years old, faces state and federal charges in the murder of UnitedHealthcare Chief Executive Brian Thompson last year. Prosecutors have accused Mangione of waiting outside a Midtown Manhattan hotel where the executive was set to attend an investor meeting. Mangione shot Thompson with a 3D-printed ghost gun, prosecutors said, then fled the scene on an e-bike. Following a nearly weeklong manhunt, he was arrested after being spotted at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania.
Federal prosecutors in December charged Mangione with offenses including using a firearm to commit murder, which made him eligible for the death penalty if convicted. The New York state case against Mangione is expected to proceed to trial before the federal one.
After taking the helm at the Justice Department as attorney general, Bondi pledged to revive the death penalty and lift a federal moratorium on capital punishment ordered under the Biden administration in 2021. The first Trump administration had reactivated the federal death penalty after a 17-year hiatus and put 13 inmates to death in its final months.
Of course I’m opposed to the death penalty for anyone, as it’s not a deterrent, it costs more than life without parole, and there’s always the possibility that a guilty verdict was wrong. If you kill someone and he’s subsequently vindicated, you can’t bring him back. What made this case so notable was not only that it was a cold-blooded assassination, but that so many people then (and some even now) think it was okay for Mangione shoot a guy who was supposedly denying valid health claims (I don’t think he had a role in that). One of the miscreants who seemed to favor shooting executives was our old friend at Pharyngula (click on screenshot below), who, soon after posting this, began backing off of his stand when he realized that he had advocated murder. To wit:
*“Better to let a hundred guilty men walk free than to jail one innocent man,” the saying goes. You may not agree with that calculus, but it does make some sense. And it might well be happening with the Trump administration’s deportation of people who say things the administration doesn’t think should be said, like “From the river to the sea. . . “. The fear was always that somebody who wasn’t guilty at all would be deported. One would think they could be returned to the U.S. when the mistake was discovered, but that doesn’t seem to have happened in at least one case:
Officials deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who is Salvadoran, on March 15 as part of a surprise airlift of purported gang members to the Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador, where they were surrounded by armed soldiers and hooded police who shaved their heads and locked them inside high-walled cells. His removal came six years after an immigration judge found that Abrego had testified credibly that he could be harmed or killed by gang members in that country.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers acknowledged in court records that they were aware of internal forms forbidding them from sending Abrego to El Salvador, and called his removal an “oversight.”
“On March 15, although ICE was aware of his protection from removal to El Salvador, Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error,” the government wrote in a declaration, first reported by the Atlantic.
Abrego’s lawyers filed an emergency lawsuit last month saying the rapid removal violated federal and international law, and warning that Abrego is being “subjected to torture and an imminent risk of death.” His lawyers urged a federal judge to order the U.S. government to negotiate with El Salvador for his release and return to his family in the United States.
But the Justice Department, even as it acknowledged the mistake, said it could not use diplomacy or financial pressures to free Abrego because it would threaten U.S. foreign policy and its relationship with an ally in the fight against gangs.
Umm. . . that last paragraph basically says this: “Better to let one innocent man spend the rest of his life in a horrific prison than to endanger U.S. foreign policy.” Seriously, how does it endanger U.S. policy to return an innocent man to America, where he lived? And what’s wrong with El Salvador that they won’t cooperate? And how many more are there like Garcia? Finally, have you seen an El Salvadoran prison? Have a look; this one, used to house deportees from America, is supposed to be one of the most horrible prisons in the world (also see this video).
*I’ve pointed out the many problems Disney had with the remake of “Snow White,” including criticism of both Rachel Zegler (Snow White had made pro-Palestinian comments), and Gal Gadot (the Wicked Witch was Israeli and was in the IDF), as well as the pervasive wokeness of removing real dwarfs and replacing them with computer-generated images (dwarfs beefed that they were cut out of acting jobs). I think Zegler’s unwise comments about how backward the original movie was contributed to the movie’s awful performance on both the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) and Rotten Tomatoes. Forbes notes that the IMDB has even flagged the movie because there were so many low ratings by contributors.
Every time the idea that a movie or show is being review-bombed comes up, there is always a contingent of people who say that no, this thing really is that bad, everyone rating it saw it, and this is all perfectly legitimate.
Well, in the case of Snow White, IMDB would seem to disagree.
Snow White has 284,000 reviews come in, with 91% of them being one star, which makes its final total a 1.5/10. That is not just the lowest for any major blockbuster in history, but looking at IMDB’s all-time bottom films, it’s almost one of the worst-rated period.
The obvious illegitimacy of this has caused IMDB to put up an actual warning on the ratings page, saying that its “rating mechanism has detected unusual voting activity on this title.” That’s a note you do not see often unless something incredibly extreme is happening. I’m reminded of the instance of when Captain Marvel was bombed so badly by supposed viewers (again, due to comments its actress had made) that Rotten Tomatoes had to invent its “verified audience” metric where users have to prove on some level they’d watched the film. Using that metric, incidentally, the RT audience score for Snow White is a perfectly fine 74%. IMDB has no such system in place.
It’s been review-bombed:
Forbes’s explanation:
There are hundreds if not thousands of movie with 40% critic scores. They are not review-bombed into being one of the worst-rated movies in history, a distinct honor for Snow White alone. The movie has as many reviews in less than two weeks as the most-popular live-action Disney film, The Lion King, has gotten in its entire lifespan. That is not normal.
Again, this entire thing is happening mainly due to a campaign against Rachel Zegler, deemed enemy #1 for a certain crowd. This has happened from the start, her race deemed not appropriate to play Snow White, her suggestion that the source material (90 years old) was not relevant enough in its current form for present day, and her tweets supporting Palestine in the current conflict. But in the wake of this, other actors have offered support to her, including most recently the busiest man in Hollywood, Pedro Pascal, who called her an “icon” on Instagram.
“Certain crowd”? Who would they be? Well, it can’t be pro-Israelis, so it must be woke people offended by Zegler’s dissing of the earlier movie, including calling the Prince a “stalker” and saying that the movie was not a love story, but aimed to empower Snow White as a leader. But I believe anybody who loved the earlier movie would find Zegler’s comments cringeworthy, and she seems unable to shut up or apologize. She’ll never work for Disney again.
Here are the Rotten Tomato ratings. They’re abysmal for the critics, but the audience liked it better than the IMDB reviewers. The moral: don’t try to wokeify a beloved and classic movie, or, if you do, don’t mouth off about your wonderful, virtuous actions:
*Finally, the reliable AP’s “oddities” section describes some notable April Fools’ pranks of the past.
In 2021, then-first lady Jill Biden pretended to be a flight attendant on an airplane traveling from California to Washington. She wore a “Jasmine” nametag and passed out Dove ice cream bars while wearing a black mask, black pantsuit and wig. A few minutes later, “Jasmine” reemerged without the wig — revealing herself to be Jill Biden, laughing and proclaiming, “April Fools!”
Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin became known for announcing outlandish ideas every April Fools’ Day soon after starting their company more than a quarter century ago. One year, Google posted a job opening for a Copernicus research center on the moon. Another year, the company said it planned to roll out a “scratch and sniff” feature on its search engine.
In 1992, NPR ‘s “Talk of the Nation” program announced that former-President Richard Nixon, who resigned in 1974, would be running for president, according to the Museum of Hoaxes. A comedian had impersonated Nixon to say, “I never did anything wrong, and I won’t do it again.”
Outside of the U.S., one of the most notable pranks involved the BBC World Service in 1980 declaring that Big Ben would become a digital clock and renamed Digital Dave, according to the UK Parliament.
And similar days in other lands:
In Scotland, April Fools’ has a history of being a two-day event. April 1 is known as “Gowkie Day” or “Hunt the Gowk,” explained Encyclopedia Britannica. Gowk is a term used to describe a fool. On April 2, the celebration may become more physical, with children attaching “kick me” signs to people’s backs.
The day is also celebrated in Iceland, with the aim being to get people to “hlaupa apríl,” or “make an April run.” In other words, to trick someone in a way that makes them travel to a different location. News agencies have also been known to participate in pranking people. In 2014, for example, Iceland Review ran a story with the headline, “Google Signs Deal with Iceland,” saying the fake news was part of “a long-standing tradition of the Icelandic media.”
Let us know in the comments if you pulled a prank or were the victim of one.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili mourns the inaccessibility of birds:
Hili: It’s a tragedy.A: What happened?Hili: The starlings are building nests in inaccessible places.
Hili: To jest tragedia.Ja: Co się stało?Hili: Szpaki budują gniazda w niedostępnych miejscach.
And a photo of Szaron and Baby Kulka:
*******************
From Stacy:
From Jesus of the Day. This is definitely me!
From America’s Cultural Decline Into Idiocy:
From Masih, yet another brave Iranian woman doffing her hijab and getting arrested for it–and forced to say that Masih coerced her into removing the headscarf!
Remember this viral video of a brave Iranian woman filming the hijab police? Now she reveals how they forced her into a false confession against me.
My ‘crime’? Leading #WhiteWednesdays & #MyCameraIsMyWeapon, amplifying fearless women like Sepideh Rashnu.
To those who normalize… https://t.co/m9YwtCEs8C pic.twitter.com/UOe3CvYndX
— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) April 1, 2025
From Simon, Larry the Cat plays an April Fools’ joke:
I actually think Twitter's better since Elon Musk took it over.
— Larry the Cat (@number10cat.bsky.social) 2025-04-01T07:39:18.069Z
From Malcolm: an adorable video of dolphins playing ball with a girl:
From my feed. Christopher Walken was 82 yesterday:
Happy 82nd birthday to the brilliant Christopher Walken.
You may or may not know that he is a trained dancer.
And also…a Lion Tamer. pic.twitter.com/6VOP74OU2S
— Danny Deraney (@DannyDeraney) March 31, 2025
They got their drummer and bass guitarist:
Bro, you don’t look like one of us, but we accept you into the band. pic.twitter.com/nShDHPLU2D
— The Figen (@TheFigen_) March 30, 2025
From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted:
This Hungarian woman died in Auschwitz at about age 36.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-04-02T10:04:18.868Z
Two posts from Doctor Cobb. I’ve seen this first movie, and it is indeed very good. This was posted by Matthew himself, whose biography of Crick will be out this fall:
If you haven’t seen Life Story, the 1987 BBC version of the discovery of the double helix, it’s available on iPlayer. It’s a terrific account, in particular the portrayals of Franklin and Wilkins (Jeff Goldblum as Watson not so good). Wilkins was the main advisor. H/t @syntenicman.bsky.social 1/n
— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-04-01T17:45:06.124Z
Dead man’s fingers and live man’s fingers. But the terrestrial fungus of the same name looks more realistic (see here).
Dead man’s fingers & live man’s fingers. This seaweed is rad because it is “coenocytic;” the entire individual is one, single, multinucleate cell. #Codium #Seaweed #MarineLife 🦑🌊
— Matt Bracken (@brackenlab.bsky.social) 2025-03-11T04:57:11.569Z
A friendly correction to your comment:
…that last paragraph basically says this: “Better to let one guilty man spend the rest of his life in a horrific prison than to endanger U.S. foreign policy.”
I think you meant “Better to let one innocent man…..”
Oy! I’ll fix it thanks.
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
How far should one accept the rules of the society in which one lives? To put it another way: at what point does conformity become corruption? Only by answering such questions does the conscience truly define itself. -Kenneth Tynan, theater critic and author (2 Apr 1927-1980)
We’ve previously discussed the flawed study that claimed to show that black babies were more likely to die if assigned white doctors (the authors had failed to control for low birth weight, and the effect was entirely attributable to sicker babies being more likely to be assigned to white doctors).
Now, a FOI request has revealed that a draft of the paper contained the finding that white babies were more likely to die if assigned black doctors (and the effect was large, 22%). This was then removed from the paper with the lead author saying: “I’d rather not focus on this. If we’re telling the story from the perspective of saving black infants this undermines the narrative”.
Also revealled by the FOI request is that the authors regarded as reduction in the supposed effect (black babies being more likely to die) as “bad news”. An email said: “Good news – I caught my obligatory coding error, updated results are attached. Bad news- results are not as strong. ”
It’s clear that the authors were partisan, trying to produce results that fitted their narrative.
Link to article. Link to detailed Twitter thread.
Many such cases, Coel. It appears the entire “anti-racist” agenda is built on very shaky ground. It also contradicts a whole heap of metrics about actual black flourishing.
But there are no Kendi style grants or DeAngelo scale books in pointing that out.
D.A.
NYC
Agree on PB&J; it is my lunch default sandwich, with the variation of JIF because my wife insists on it, Little Scarlet strawberry preserves because I love them, and good, substantial whole wheat bread for the extra bit of fiber…and because I like it!
My suggestion for the old guy with the balky plastic bag would have been to simply lick his fingers, but fearing surface-residing germs since Covid, I always carry the damp cleansing tissue offered at the market entrance in the cart or the damp ice in the vegetable bins to dampen my finger tips. This wetting always seems to work for me.
PB&J for breakfast for me, with whole wheat bread. I need to try that brand of strawberry jelly. But I also like orange marmalade instead.
Somewhat helpful in opening those produce bags, in recent years many have started having “Open this end ==>>” printed prominently. Yes, there’s still the issue of grip and slippage, but at least you don’t waste time trying the wrong end.
The Dems keep trying to find a poster-child for unwarranted deportations, but Garcia ain’t it. I assume that the Washington Post, in classic fashion, didn’t even bother to mention Garcia’s membership in MS-13 or his involvement in human trafficking?
It really is a matter of due process, and not violating the orders of federal judges.
If this was a democratic admin. doing this crap, Y’all would be hollering bloody murder.
From the article:
The Trump administration is defending the arrest of a migrant who was shipped off to El Salvador’s hellhole mega prison by mistake — alleging that he is an MS-13 gang member with a history of human trafficking.
Note the word “alleging.” In other words no proof. Nothing new here.
Once again,
Deportation is an administrative procedure carried out by the executive state only against nationals of foreign countries who are not citizens of the deporting country. It is not a criminal penalty, which can be imposed only judicially where guilt has been proved beyond reasonable doubt, either by trial or by plea. Like any administrative state procedure, the process has to meet standards of fairness as laid down in that country’s immigration law, but nowhere is there a requirement to prove a person guilty of anything before he can be deported. All that needs to be shown is that he is not a citizen and the country no longer wants him on the premises.
To put this in an understandable Canadian context, you no doubt know that there are scores of thousands of foreigners in Canada whom we did not invite here who have made asylum claims when they arrived on their own initiative. Most of these these claims will be found baseless, eventually after the appeal process, and the failed claimants will be deported. They aren’t guilty of any crime and haven’t done anything wrong. (Gaming our dysfunctional asylum system is not illegal.) But they still have to go back where they came from (if we can find them and put them on a plane.)
The only miscarriage of process in this system would be if a Canadian citizen was, through clerical error, mistakenly thought to be an alien and deported. Unlike in a criminal proceeding, there is no other sense in which an alien can be said to be “unjustly” deported.
They were not deported (which would have been fine). They were sent to a brutal prison in El Salvador. Big difference.
They were deported. What the receiving country does with them is its business. I realize not all the ones going to El Salvador are citizens of that country, because the country they are citizens of won’t accept them. El Salvador won’t accept them to run around loose, but will accept them for cash. It’s complicated.
What do you think happens to the aliens Canada deports? Do you know for a fact they are welcomed back into the loving arms of their birth countries where they are another bunch of mouths to feed? Do you care enough to say Canada should make sure the receiving country isn’t going to charge them with abandoning their country to evade taxes or the draft or something? Do you know anything about the justice system in Congo?
American citizens can do little about America’s immigration policy except by lobbying their Congressional representatives to rein in the Executive. Foreigners like us can do even less….except maybe piss off the Americans and put our current visa-free travel privileges to the U.S. in peril. “If you dislike our immigration policy that much, maybe you shouldn’t come here at all.” Something to think about in these perilous times, along with the Line 5 Pipeline.
Frau – if you visited The Tombs — the big Manhattan jail here – or any jail – you’ll find some innocent suspects (not many, but they do exist).
El Salvador’s hell hole jail is well publicized. It is incredibly strict for sure but places that DON’T show off their prisons are more worrying I think.
your friend,
D.A.
NYC
Yes, Leslie. Administrative crime has a different shape to what we think of as a crime. And again…. there’s that bright line between cit. and non-cit. in terms of whether people get to stay here.
And you Canadians seem to have utterly lost control of your borders. Surely this is alarming to some of you, right?
D.A.
NYC
There was an interesting article in the Financial Times, arguing that Trump’s tariffs are not fundamentally economic, but it’s now paywalled. :-/
Can you summarize?
Maybe this? Found by a Google search, no paywall.
https://www.ft.com/content/60bf5b3d-5e2b-44b8-a119-ffbd6dd6ba92
Susan’s link didn’t work for me, but there’s an archived copy here: https://archive.is/fOrNB
Yours worked, JezGroove, thanks.
I think most people in Canada understand this. The conventional wisdom here is that President Trump wants to bring steel and aluminum production home for reasons of national security and pride. He doesn’t care that the United States doesn’t have the abundant near-zero-cost hydroelectricity to smelt aluminum cheaply. I suspect he knows that in the short term American industry will have to continue to buy it from us and pay the tariff. Unavoidable tariffs are good for the Treasury, right?
Fortunately for American consumers, the cost of aluminum is such a tiny portion of the retail price of, say a six-pack of canned beer, or even an airline ticket that the tariffs won’t hurt your consumers much. We’re more likely to shoot ourselves in our own feet with retaliatory tariffs. Steel is different. I don’t know if Canadian steel production will be viable in the face of tariffs. President Trump presumably doesn’t want it to be because you do make steel, and have lots of coal in the Alleghenies to do it with. Our (Liberal) Prime Minister doesn’t like steel mills anyway and his party is leading in the pre-election polls so maybe we’ll just surrender that business to you.
For context interest, I found this video taken two months ago by a local railfan of a trainload of aluminum ingots made in northern Québec being shunted into a transfer point at Brockville, Ontario, for trucking to fabrication mills in the United States. The loaded flat cars become visible in the snowstorm about 3:15. Each ingot weighs about 15 tons. “Solid electricity.”
Pretty cool. The work gets done, doesn’t it?
Not to mention dumb arse in some cases.
From RNZ
“Norfolk Island was among dozens of tiny territories which appeared on the same list as China and the European Union as recipients of Trump’s highly anticipated tariff regime, even though they do not have a real manufacturing or export industry.”
“According to US government data, the US has recorded trade deficits with Norfolk Island for the past three years. The island exported US$300,000 worth of goods to the US in 2022, US$700,000 in 2023 and US$200,000 in 2024. Its imports from the US stayed at US$100,000 in those years.
Norfolk Island’s imports from the U.S. peaked at US$11.7 million in 2020, when no exports were recorded. The data did not specify what goods were traded.”
That will show them!
Re April Fool’s pranks, years ago I worked in a large consulting firm. We arranged for a radio interview for our lead partner, using a radio host friend of one of the team and pulling in our PR guy, who “scheduled” the call with the partner, ostensibly to talk about the firm’s technology practice. Meanwhile I wrote up several gotcha questions (why are there no women partners in the firm, etc.) The interview time comes, the partner takes it in his office, and the interviewer in question starts right in, saying they’re live, and nails the partner with one question after another, catching him completely off-guard. (We were secretly recording the whole thing.) The PR guy wisely left the building, knowing the eruption to come. That evening the team was going out for planned drinks, and the partner was describing the awful interview disaster that he experienced that afternoon. We let him go on for a bit before pulling out the recording and telling him it was a joke. He was obviously stunned. The other partners and the firm’s major corporate clients all thought it was the best April Fool’s prank they’d heard of, and mentioned it for years.
(This might have been 1980s or 90s) . The CS Dept Techstaff would send out alert emails telling all users that it was the annual event of refreshing the ether in the Ethernet in the building. Please do not unplug your workstation, to avoid leakage.
There’s a couple pranks on eXtwitter I’ll note :
• a duck – mallard hen! – on the engine hood of a passenger plane flight. It was very convincing, I thought.
• Peter Boghossian announcing that he will restart his professor role at Portland State University.
• William Shatner announced he’s going to Mars with Elon Musk
• [not from eXtwitter ] : they will not be making yard sticks any longer.
NYT : “… the Guttmacher Institute, a sexual health research organization.”
I just get a kick out of that sublation. “Sexual health” – like they know secret, profound knowledge about the sum total experience of sex nobody else could understand.
Hitchens indeed stated, rightly, with indelible effect : “empowerment of women“.
This just in from CERN:
https://home.cern/news/news/cern/cern-scientists-find-evidence-quantum-entanglement-sheep
Scientists at CERN have found evidence of quantum entanglement in sheep. Using sophisticated modelling techniques and specialised trackers, the findings show that the brains of individual sheep in a flock are quantum-entangled in such a way that the sheep can move and vocalise simultaneously, no matter how far apart they are. The evidence has several ramifications for ovine research and has set the baa for a new branch of quantum physics.
This made me LOL for real. Thanks for sharing!
One memorable April Fool’s joke (for me, anyway) was George Plimpton’s article on Sidd Finch in Sports Illustrated, back when it was a quality sports magazine. It’s the story of an English child, orphaned in Nepal and brought up by monks, but who could throw a 165 MPH fastball, always pitching while one bare foot and the other with a hiking boot. Obviously, a pitcher who can throw a ball that fast would be unhittable so, according to Plimpton, the Mets signed him. He was to meet the press at Shea stadium on a particular day (guess which one).
A surprising number of Mets fans and media fell for it. Plimpton later expanded the joke article into a novel.
+1 Great fun.
I will never forget the SI Sidd Finch story – a classic!
I was one of the surprising number, to my eternal shame.
Yes, those thin plastic-film bags in the produce section are a huge pain to open! Here’s the fix. Before trying to open a bag, wet your fingers slightly. No. Don’t lick them! Go to the broccoli display and pick up a floret of broccoli to moisten your fingers.* Now the bag will open easily. Problem solved.
*If you are a broccoli lover like me, don’t return the floret to the bin. Put it into the bag and then put the bag into your grocery cart.
Why do you need a plastic bag at all? Why not just place the produce in the trolley as it is? It won’t come to any harm if you do it carefully.
That would be fine in theory, but at the supermarkets we use, the carts (trolleys) are often filthy. Another problem is how to deal with Brussels Sprouts (a vegetable loathed by our host). Having dozens of little balls rolling about isn’t practical. Whole cabbages and squash? No bag needed.
Can also hold the bag between your (or my) palms and slide your (or, rather, my) palms in circles with the bag in between.
Works every time 80% of the time a bag is 50% necessary. 😁
Lately my stance on Khalil (“Throw the bum out”) has gotten me into some brawls.
Particularly as somebody who has practiced immigration law.
Here’s the skinny as I see it: there’s a bright line between citizen and non-citizen (includes tourists, students and green card holders – all as one).
NON-citizens are basically here at sufferance and the whim of the government.
It is like the difference between a guest in your house you can throw out or at worst, call the cops and have them booked for trespassing, verses a family member or renter.
Khalil is a guest at sufferance and we’ve no obligation to suffer him further.
Back to Algeria Khalil, you should have naturalized (or at least not lied on your visa application). Appeals from his knocked up wife or his pets whatever piss me off.
D.A.
NYC
I’ve been reading the back and forth on this here at WEIT, elsewhere on the intertubes, as well as in the “meat” world. This really is one of those issues in which everyone is right and everyone is wrong. I hear you, loud and clear. Your arguments makes sense and I agree with them. But I also agree with our host, Andrew Sullivan, and others here that there is an essential element of what our nation is supposed to be about that is at stake. And that we are on a precipice.
I dunno…I feel that at the very least – bare minimum- due process should always be followed.
I think over at the Free Press last week there was an article about this. The gist being that there are no correct answers to the question; “is this idiot’s deportation legal”?
It occurred to me this guy is being funded to deliberately push these buttons. I do not think this is conspiratorial, it’s just operational strategy. Get a guy to carefully destabilize and agitate such that specific legal protections for citizens are followed very carefully. I believe he has a substantial legal team.
Now the real action : force the heads of State to get on “TV” and assert sovereign authority to eject him from the “arena” (i.e. the U.S.) and bring down all sorts of moral compunction on the State to drive further destabilization.
What you’re saying doesn’t sound “conspiratorial” to me. I smell it, too.
I side very strongly with you on this, David. Anyone lucky enough to live in another country should be grateful for the privilege and should repay their host with respect and consideration. Can you imagine moving abroad, immediately causing trouble, and engaging in civil disobedience and political agitation? It wouldn’t enter the head of a reasonable person. It’s the height of arrogance and disrespect. We see our share of this in the UK, and it drives me around the bend.
How dare they accept the hospitality of another country and immediately do their best to be a burden? And a divisive one at that! Although it lacks sophistication, my opinion is straightforward: “If you don’t like it, f**k off”.
However, I also understand concerns about due process, and there’s no doubt Trump and pals are doing their best to demolish the civil and legal norms that hold society together. Due process is like free speech: you can’t deny it to others and expect it yourself. This leaves me a little torn on how best to deal with these people. Still, welcome and goodwill should be extended to those who want to contribute and withdrawn from those who don’t.
When money is sent to other countries, there is indeed opportunity for waste, with less oversight than charitable groups have here. Beyond the waste issue, why is it our job as taxpayers in the US to fund contraception (or any other social program) in other countries? If an individual is for a certain cause, then he/she can donate to organizations that support that cause directly as well as do research to ensure that those organizations are using the funds effectively and that they do so using an evidence-based approach.
Regarding the horse electrolyte post (which sounds like a joke), if the chemicals are the same as in other “human” electrolyte drink mixes, then I’d assume it’d be the same in terms of efficacy. Reminds me of the ivermectin “horse wormer” issue during COVID. I mentioned to a friend that I was using ivermectin cream and was accused of being an ignorant Trumpie. Even after I explained that I had been prescribed it two years prior by a dermatologist as a topical ointment and that it effectively controlled my rosacea, she still thought I was applying horse wormer paste on my face as a COVID cure!
Years ago I started toasting my bread for PB&J and enjoy that much more than untoasted bread, especially when buttering before the PB&J is applied.
Sports drinks — I won’t mention any trade names — are not particularly good for electrolyte replacement. Maybe the original college football team formulations “replaced sweat” but the commercial ones not so much. They are just sugar-filled flavoured water without the fizz of cola. The label of one even says, “Suitable for salt-restricted diets.” And remember that a heat-acclimated athlete’s sweat is almost pure water anyway. Sweat glands are like tiny kidneys and with a little practice—two longish scrimmages in the heat will do it—they can excrete nearly salt-free fluid, just as the kidneys can. Your skin tastes salty during exercise because litres of water insensibly evaporate off it, concentrating the small amount of salt left behind. You should take anything a Canadian says about heat with a grain of salt, but water is fine for most athletes most of the time, with maybe a pinch of salt on snacks if you’re out more than a couple of hours. Over-hydrating with plain water is dangerous but in the right setting you can get water intoxication even from salted water: the kidneys can desalinate it through reverse osmosis and excrete the salt. Some cyclists swear by pickle juice. I must look up what’s in horse electrolyte mix. I had never heard of it. I can’t imagine it gives a buzz, unless specially formulated for race horses run by crooked trainers.
Contrary to what medical interns learn by osmosis from senior trainees — i.e., one year ahead — sports drinks are wholly unsuited by themselves for volume replacement in diarrhea, which does contain salt. There glucose (but not sucrose, so ordinary corn syrup, not table sugar) is helpful because it aids in salt absorption from the damaged gut mucosa. Oral rehydration therapy with glucose and sodium chloride has probably saved more infant lives around the world than anything else we’ve ever discovered.
Professional cyclists totally agree Leslie, and after finding that Gatorade and other products were detrimental to their performance, Dr. Allen Lim found a better path. From the skratchlabs.com web page: “While working as a sport scientist and coach for a professional cycling team, Dr. Allen Lim started making his own training food and sports drinks from scratch for the cyclists because too many of the pre-packaged sports bars and drinks that were marketed or given to them were laden with artificial ingredients and literally making them sick to their stomach.” And thus Skratch Labs was born and is now a very successful international business.
Truth In Information – Skratch CEO Ian MacGregor is a friend 🙂
That’s good information, Leslie. I just recently discovered I was drinking too much water which was depleting my sodium levels and elevating my already high blood pressure. This blew my mind.
Re. your first paragraph.
If we or any other country can do something about controlling human population growth, then by all means, we should. There are far too many humans inhabiting this planet already. There are other good arguments as well which Hitchens summed up nicely. It is also a simple way to ease suffering, both financial and physical. If we can, why not? It costs a pittance. Do you actually believe your well being and/or bank account will show great improvement by dismantling USAID?
Also, if you happen to be the richest nation in the history of the planet, and you’re a world-leader you’ll need to spend a lot of money to keep that status. We didn’t get to this position through isolationist policies, austerity and fevered nationalism. But if you want to give up the mantle of world-leader, do what Trump is doing. Maybe there’s a good argument for giving up the title, but it doesn’t seem very exceptional to me.
Well stated, Mark. I understand and appreciate your points.
And I do not believe that my well-being or bank account will suffer as a result of dismantling USAID. On the other hand, I do believe that we need to limit the activities that we choose to fund both inside and outside the US, and that maybe by enforcing some fiscal discipline that we can maybe someday reduce the overall national debt (yes, I know the primary drivers of it, and I know that USAID is a tiny portion of it). To me, it’s more like broken windows policing in economic policy – enforce discipline in the small items and hope it follows through in larger policy.
But I have zero faith whatsoever that Trump and Congress will do anything to reduce the debt, and I foresee nothing but trouble for the economy as a result of his stupid tariff policies. Plus I don’t trust him to not enrich his friends at the expense of the rest of us by growing portions of his favored programs, DOGE notwithstanding.
My stance is more of what the government is actually tasked with doing and not what we would like it to do, ala Davy Crockett’s “Not Yours To Give” speech https://www.cato.org/blog/davy-crocketts-lesson-congress.
Thanks, though, for the thoughtful disagreement.
Crockett would be horrified today, that’s for sure! The government is US, so we decide what it’s tasked with (or should in theory), and obviously opinions abound. It’s a messy business, but I believe government can function for the public good, can and should protect the commons and working for “the people” should not be a career focused on personal or party power that ultimately leads to riches. It should be a calling, but that’s a quaint opinion.
Thanks for the reply, I appreciate your candor.
And toasted bread does improve a PB&J.
Christopher Walken shows off his great dancing skills in the critically acclaimed video for Fatboy Slim’s song “Weapon Of Choice”. It is hard to believe that the song and video are 24 years old.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapon_of_Choice_(song)
For your book, try Auctus Publishers. Run by an authentic Indian guy.
Here are two April Fool’s ideas that I had years ago that would probably not have passed Apple’s App Store qualification process.
After the first iPhone was released many apps of questionable utility became available on the App Store. The iPhone and its touch screen was new to many people who didn’t truly understand its functionality or limitations.
My first App idea was a scale. A person launches the app, enters their height then stands on the iPhone to measure their weight.
My second app was an at-home pregnancy tests.
Funny but thought-provoking:
Re: opening bags. Man, just touch a wet lettuce leaf and you are free.
Re: Human Connor. The ONE THING that ended my Middle School Drama was when I learned to see such situations as funny even when they refer to me. I wonder how many people never gain this freedom. It’s called “seeing oneself from an outside perspective”.
The laughable thing about the eejit over at the Cesspit (Pharyngula) and all his tough talk about “resisting” (he’s had about three articles in recent weeks about how he’s gonna be resisting stuff!!!), is that he and his horde are the last people on the planet who would resist anybody. They are the types who demand “safe spaces” because they don’t “feel safe”. The only thing the peeps over at Pharyngula resist is deodorants and soap.
Another argument against the death penalty is that the executioner is in effect a hired assasin. Should a hired assasin not be given the death penalty?
On yesterday’s Judith Butler piece here at WEIT: why do people give this Butler chap, an unconvincing female impersonator, the time of day still? Isn’t there a used by date for idiotic academics and if not why not?
Of COURSE she uses Fausto-Sterling’s magic numbers on trans – b/c Butler is an ill informed intellectual fraud.
On top of her bad arguments – and obnoxious, impossible writing style, which are manifold and decade spanning – she is ground zero – the Tsara Bomba of the harmful genderwang menace.
It is like seriously analyzing the positions of Mike Lindel of MyPillow fame: best just ignored. (Except Lindel to his credit doesn’t intentionally bamboozle with “thicc” language).
D.A.
NYC
Back in the days when I read PZ, I remember a post of his declaiming that the death penalty is wrong because everybody leaves behind people who loved him, and the fabric of humanity is torn…something like that. I forget exactly how he put it, but I remember it as rather flowery. And I remember thinking at the time, Really? Lawrence Bittaker and everybody?
But to be fair, PZ was presumably talking about psychopathic murderers. Not, you know, rich guys.
There is this weird contradiction on some parts of the regressive left/tankie left, where they loudly claim that they are anti-death penalty, but will then start demanding that the guillotine be brought back…
Similar to how they claim to be opposed to fascists and Nazis, but will then defend Hamas and the Houthi militias, for example.