Welcome to shabbos for goyische cats: Sunday, April 6, 2025, and National Carbonara Day, a wonderful pasta dish. Here’s a photo of Spaghetti alla carbonara, made with “fatty cured pork, hard cheese, eggs, salt, and black pepper.” Not great for the arteries, but wonderful for the taste buds.
Posting may be a bit scant again because I’m writing this on Saturday before we take off for the Holocaust Museum. The news will undoubtedly change by this morning. . .
It’s also Geologists Day, National Siamese Cat Day, National Açai Bowl Day (meh), National Caramel Popcorn Day, National Tartan Day, Fresh Tomato Day, and National Twinkie Day.
Many Siamese cats get really upset and meow loudly when their staff takes a shower. Here’s a video that demonstrates it well. TRIGGER WARNING: your cats may go nuts when they hear this:
Posting may be light today and I have to make reservations for my July trip to the Arctic. But enjoy this picture of Esther and Mordecai. It was chilly yesterday and also is today, and the weather will be cold in Chicago until the end of the week. But our pair of mallards is doing well, and she’ll soon be nesting. Here Esther sits on a rock while Mordecai, the faithful husband, watches over her:
And there’s a Google Doodle today, celebrating NCAA Women’s Basketball’s March Madness. Click on the photo to go to the page:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 6 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*At The Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan excoriates Joe Biden and his family for not announcing early that he’d withdraw from last November’s election. The piece is called “The man who brought us here,” (subtitle: “How Joe Biden’s pride, insularity, and stubbornness led us into this nightmare”), and it reveals details from a new book on the end of Biden’s presidency.
By April of last year, the health of the president had clearly declined. As with many older men in their eighties, this didn’t happen in a slow, predictable glide-path down — but in swift, turbulent declines. Suddenly he took a while to get out of his limo, and then would emerge “with a blank look in his face,” according to the new campaign book, Fight, by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes. By early summer, Biden was suddenly freezing up in public, staring motionless into the air. At a fundraiser in Los Angeles, Obama had to jump in to answer some questions, and then had to guide Biden off the stage by hand. We had already seen Joe wander weirdly off the set of MSNBC and during a Medal of Honor ceremony. His memory lapses mounted.
. . . Do we learn anything new in this book and another one, Uncharted, by Chris Whipple out next week? Not really. We know, in fact, that everything I guessed happened did actually happen. Among the unsurprising confirmations: Obama was so aloof he didn’t even watch the fateful June debate live; he and Pelosi then wanted an open primary and did all they could to get one. (“He goes. She goes” was their mantra.) Hillary Clinton defended Biden — not because she knew his health was fine, but because her health had once been questioned by the press too. Biden’s closest advisers were his wife and, yes, his son Hunter, and they routinely put their clan’s interests well before the country’s. His inner circle — Mike Donilon especially — were so blindly loyal and informationally siloed they couldn’t absorb what was staring them in the face.
The Democrats, even as late as July, could have found a fresh candidate capable of taking on what they said was a vital moment for democracy’s survival. We might have avoided our current abyss:
“It would have been very cheap. It would have been quick. A rocket ship for your career and no loss,” said one Democratic former governor. “If this had been a year earlier, twenty people would have gotten in,” said one governor who had kicked the tires on a 2024 bid.
Why didn’t they? That is a question that will reverberate through history. Wokeness was a factor. The only reason the embarrassingly mid Harris was made veep in the first place was to fill a slot Biden had already marked for a woman, and, in the wake of the Floyd murder, a black woman seemed the only option. Everyone, particularly Pelosi and Obama, knew Harris was a disaster about to happen, and her vice-presidency had the lowest approval ratings in history. Obama told friends directly that he thought she couldn’t win. The night after the epicdebate, Pelosi gritted her teeth: “Oh my God. It’s going to be her.”
So yes, identity before merit was a principle the Dems clung to even at the expense of marching off an electoral cliff. “If you want to break the Democratic coalition, try to skip over the first African-American vice president,” Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin argued at one point. “I watched the black-white stuff start on Thursday night [after the debate],” said another lawmaker. Donna Brazile assembled a team of black women operatives who called themselves “the colored girls” to ensure Harris became the nominee. Jim Clyburn was also a critical supporter: “I’m going all in with Kamala. I don’t want to look back and y’all ain’t there,” he told the DNC.
Sullivan dares to say what is true, but it’s stuff no liberal will repeat. Harris was, in my view, unqualified and even embarrassing as a candidate, but she had the proper ethnicity. Sullivan goes on to indict Biden’s wife and family for supporting a man going downhill fast. The result is depressing for all of us, and bad for America:
That is the kind of blind loyalty that can kill a presidency. But this time, it killed a lot more than that: a chance to keep Trump from power. By his words, Joe Biden told us that was the most important thing. By his actions, Biden told us that his own vanity was more important. By their actions, Donilon, Reed, Klain, Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, and Dr Jill told us the same. The Democratic Party has a strange habit of never holding the architects of electoral failures accountable. That should end after this.
But in the end, the story of 2024 is painfully, excruciatingly human. Biden’s prickly pride and long-nurtured insecurity, the insularity of his too-loyal circle, and the entitlement that comes from decades of public life at the top all led to collective tragedy. We are now living in the wake of this man’s fallibility and stubbornness. It’s a story we all know well in our private capacities: the tale of trying to get grandpa to give up his car keys before he drives into a ditch and hurts someone.
Well, welcome to the ditch. And the casualties are mounting.
I remember when Democrats were expressing great JOY about Harris, assuring us she would win. Those people were so glad to get any replacement for Biden that they overlooked Harris’s palpable and substantial flaws as a candidate. Now I don’t know if the Dems could have come up with a winning candidate had the process started earlier, but they could have found one that could at least have given an intelligible answer to questions.
*The Economist has a short but good piece: “Donald Trump is attacking what made American universities great“, which is archived here. (Subtitle: “More than Middle East Studies is in trouble” [h/t: Pyers].
Princeton was not among the ten universities listed for review by Mr Trump’s task force on antisemitism, the main reason the administration has given so far for its crackdown. But Mr Eisgruber has been unusual among college presidents in speaking up to defend higher education. In mid-March, in an essay in the Atlantic, he called the administration’s cancellation of $400m in grants to Columbia University “the greatest threat to American universities since the Red Scare of the 1950s”. He is also chairman of the board of the Association of American Universities, which on March 31st issued a statement warning that “the withdrawal of research funding for reasons unrelated to research sets a dangerous and counter-productive precedent”.
Universities are so vulnerable to Mr Trump for a reason they, and America, are so strong. After the second world war, the government hit upon the idea that America could lead the world in innovation by sponsoring university research, an investment that has yielded countless breakthroughs and the best research universities in the world. The partnership was premised on the principles of academic freedom developed in the first half of the century and endorsed in 1957 by the Supreme Court, which found that “to impose any straitjacket upon the intellectual leaders in our colleges and universities would imperil the future of our Nation.”
Mr Trump sees no need to honour the terms of that partnership. Thus Harvard risks losing up to $9bn in federal grants and contracts because the administration accuses it of not protecting Jewish students and of “promoting divisive ideologies”. Hoping to head off Mr Trump, Harvard had taken such steps as pushing out two leaders of its Centre for Middle Eastern Studies, but he was not mollified. The administration has also suspended $175m in grants to the University of Pennsylvania because, three years ago, it allowed a transgender woman to compete on its women’s team, in compliance with intercollegiate regulations.
The administration does not appear to have the law on its side. By statute, the government is supposed to hold a hearing and then submit a written report to Congress of a legal violation before cutting off funds—and even then it can cut off money only to the specific noncompliant programme. But Mr Trump certainly has politics on his side. He knows how to pick his culture battles. Elite universities, which have become engines of inequality in American life, would not have been sympathetic targets even before their campuses were swept by identitarian politics and then protests over the war in Gaza. Now Harvard’s own president says he has been the victim of antisemitism on the job. Baiting Democrats into a defence of fancy colleges would further pigeonhole them as the party of the wealthy and credentialed. The failure of university presidents to speak up for one another—with such honourable exceptions as Mr Eisgruber—is making each more vulnerable.
Biology 101
But Mr Trump seems unlikely to stop with the Ivy League, and who knows how extreme his demands may become. His executive order of March 27th demanding an overhaul of the Smithsonian Institution may offer hints. Mr Trump singled out a sculpture exhibition for representing America, along with other societies, as having “used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement”. Which, of course, it did. Even more shocking, he condemned the exhibition for promoting the idea that race “is not a biological reality but a social construct”. To promote the idea that race is a biological reality is to nurture the feedstock of racism. It would be a dark day indeed if America’s great research universities were ever tasked with that project.
Well, given that this appears to be a violation of the law, one might hope that Trump would follow the rules, especially the part about cutting off only “specific noncompliant programs” (science, which is probably compliant, is the area that will suffer the most). But I have to add that if universities didn’t gouge the taxpayer by agreeing to getting huge amounts of overhead (taxpayer funds added to grants by the government to support “infrastructure”), there would not be such big threats as there would not be so much government money to withhold. But in the end this kind of carrot-and-stick approach is simply wrong. As Eisgruber said, ““the withdrawal of research funding for reasons unrelated to research sets a dangerous and counter-productive precedent”
*I have reached the pinnacle of success, having been cited by Dr. Phil, even though the article is in The Daily Fail. and the video mentioned cuts off before I’m mentioned. Further, I was apparently cited wrongly. An excerpt (bolding is mine)
A transgender activist snapped at Dr. Phil after he presented statistics that suggested male athletes have an advantage over female ones.
Blossom, a transgender female, told Dr. Phil in an episode that aired on March 31 that he needed to take ‘several seats’ after she accused him of insinuating that transgender females were men.
‘Respectfully Dr. Phil, I’m gonna need you to have several seats. Let’s be clear, trans-women, again, are women,’ she snapped on Dr. Phil Primetime. ‘What you’re showing me are male statistics and trans-women are not males.
‘I would inquire you to do research on what you’re saying, because again it’s almost like you’re trying to call trans-women men and that is not what trans-women are.’
The heated moment came after Dr. Phil cited statistics claiming biological men have physical advantages over biological women in grip, quad and arm strengths, punch power, and more.
Dr. Phil, who does not hold a medical degree, cited Biologist Jerry Coyne’s blog as his source. Coyne has written books on evolution and often writes about politics and wildlife on his blog.
DailyMail.com could not independently verify the statistics that Dr. Phil cites. [See below; I give the references.]
Phil, who has a PhD in psychology, also cited a Center on Sport Policy and Conduct study that showed that biological men outperform biological women by 10 to 60 percent, depending on the sport.
The study found that men had up to a 13 percent advantage in sports like rowing and swimming and up to a 34 percent advantage in activities such as weightlifting and serving a volleyball against biological women.
However, Blossom didn’t care, citing that transgender females are not male and cannot be compared to male statistics.
Indeed, Blossom is correct: comparing natal men with natal women says little beyond the conclusion that “men and women should not compete against each other, but should be in separate competitions.” But Dr. Phil’s concern is in the question that Blossom asks: “should trans-identified men (aka trans women) compete against biological women?” And we do have data on that–data that Dr. Phil apparently didn’t know (he compares men with women at 21:54 in the video below).
The article continues.
‘It sounds like conservative propaganda, and I think you have drunk the Kool-Aid and have gotten lost in the sauce,’ Blossom said.
‘Trans-women work just as hard as women to compete.’
She went on to say that some cis-gendered women are stronger and faster than transgender women.
‘It is a case-by-case basis,’ Blossom lamented.
‘I don’t know why you’re trying to group a group of trans-people into one ideology that is false,’ she said. ‘I think the statistics that you’ve shown me prove nothing when it comes to trans-women.
‘Get up there and show me specifically with trans-women and cis-women and then we can revisit this conversation.’
Here’s the video. Blossom shows up at 16:25, but they apparently cut off my name. That’s fine with me!
As I said, Dr. Phil neglects the fact that there are data on the athletic performance of trans-identified post-puberty men (aka transgender women) who have suppressed their testosterone levels (data I’ve cited, and there are more data here and here). The suppression of testosterone in a post-puberty man does not come close to eliminating the athletic advantage of such men, even after 14 years. I am embarrassed that Dr. Phil used my name to support the wrong argument. But Blossom should know the data, too, but she’d probably say, as she does above, that there are too few trans-identified males for it to constitute a problem for women’s sports.
*The IDF says that it has killed the Hamas operative who kidnapped the Bibas family on October 7, 2023, and likely was involved in the murder of Sheri Bibas and her two young sons, Ariel and Kfir.
The Israel Defense Forces and Shin Bet on Friday said a terror operative who oversaw the kidnapping and likely was also involved in the murder of Shiri Bibas and her two young sons, Ariel and Kfir, was killed in an airstrike in Gaza.
The military and security agency also announced the killings of a Hamas propagandist involved in the production of hostage videos and an official central to funneling money to the terror group’s armed wing.
The IDF and Shin Bet on Friday said Muhammad Hassan Muhammad Awad, a senior member of the Mujahideen Brigades, a relatively small terror group in the Strip, had been targeted and killed in an airstrike in northern Gaza earlier that day.
In a joint statement, the IDF and Shin Bet said that Awad had invaded Kibbutz Nir Oz during the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, onslaught and led the abduction of Shiri, Ariel and Kfir Bibas.
The IDF said Awad was “likely involved in their murder” during the early weeks of the war.
According to assessments by Israeli officials issued after her body had been identified, Shiri Bibas was “brutally” murdered by her captors in November 2023, alongside her sons, who were killed with “bare hands.” The assessments after a forensic investigation were contrary to Hamas’s claims that the three were killed in an Israeli airstrike.
. . .The IDF and Shin Bet said Awad was also responsible for the abduction of US-Israeli nationals Gadi Haggai and Judih Weinstein, who were both killed amid the onslaught in Nir Oz, along with several Thai nationals taken hostage from the kibbutz, the military said.
An undated photo of Judih Weinstein and Gadi Haggai (Courtesy)The terror group also confirmed Awad’s death, saying he was a senior military commander and head of its intelligence division. The IDF said he was considered close to the leadership of the Mujahideen Brigades.
“Additionally, as part of his role in the terror group, Awad was engaged in recruiting terror operatives in [the West Bank] and Israel [proper], through which they advanced and carried out attacks against Israelis,” the military said.
Even though Awad was a bad actor, a murderer and a kidnapper, I would have preferred that the IDF took him alive so he could spend the rest of his days in an Israeli jail. But there are three problems with that. First, he or his family would have been paid by the Palestinian Authority’s “pay for slay” program while he was incarcerated. Second, if he was captured, the chances are good that he would later be released in one of those swaps in which Israel trades a gazillion Palestinian terrorists for a handful of Jewish hostages. Finally, it probably would have been impossible to capture Awad directly since he was likely in a firefight with the ADF.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili expresses some political revulsion. When I asked Malgorzata why, she said that “wherever there is a Green Party, there is antisemitism.” Witness Greta Thunberg.
Hili: The greenery is starting to gladden the eye.Andrzej: Just do not join the Green Party.
Hili: Zieleń zaczyna cieszyć wzrok.Ja: Tylko nie zapisuj się do Partii Zielonych.
*******************
From America’s Cultural Decline Into Idiocy, KFC Gravy Lip Gloss (is it real?)
From Things With Faces, ebullient popcorn:
From the same site, a photo by Victoria Graziella labeled “I noticed a piece of broccoli on my plate that I thought looked like an opossum face so I used it to make a little food opossum.” Very clever, no?
From Merilee:
From Masih: the shirt of a man killed in anti-regime protests in Iran. The men they kill, the women they just blind.
Zaniyar Aboubakri 2001-2022
Zaniyar Aboubakri, a 22-year-old mechanic, was recently engaged and set to marry on November 16, 2022. He was killed 20 days earlier during #WomenLifeFreedom protests in Mahabad.#MemoriesLeftBehind pic.twitter.com/v3EY4w7H31
— Mahsa Piraei مهسا پیرایی (@mahsa_piraei) April 5, 2025
From Malcolm: a bunch of angry kittens. Sound up:
angy kitten 😹🥰 pic.twitter.com/2E2OLOm54P
— Posts Of Cats (@PostsOfCats) March 27, 2025
From Luana, a misguided man:
Men like USA Fencing Chair Damien Lehfeldt don’t care about women athletes, because even their own daughters can be sacrificed to the Trans Gods:
“One day, my daughter may compete against a transgender woman. She might win. She might lose. I hope (…) that she doesn’t care about… pic.twitter.com/tCup62041I— La Plunking Otter (@PlunkingOtter) April 4, 2025
Two from my feed: First, a very talented d*g:
Man plays beach volleyball with his dog and the dog celebrates after winning pic.twitter.com/QGNoNTG5JO
— Dudes Posting Their W’s (@DudespostingWs) April 3, 2025
A fish gets a lease on life!
His fish friends back home are never going to believe him pic.twitter.com/ZwCu7ZzayF
— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) April 4, 2025
A post from the Auschwitz memorial that I reposted:
5 April 1926 | Czech Jewish girl Eva Raimannová was born in Prague.In Theresienstadt Ghetto from 24 October 1942. Two days later she was deported to #Auschwitz with her parents Viktor & Gisela and her brother Josef.None of them survived.
— Auschwitz Memorial (@auschwitzmemorial.bsky.social) 2025-04-05T11:00:01.340Z
Two posts from Matthew. If you get to Monterey, don’t miss the aquarium, which has a big tank of ctenophores like this:
Ctenophore in Monterey Aquarium. The shimmering colours are produced by the refraction of light on their “combs”, which move rapidly to guide the animal about. They look gorgeous, but they swallow each other…
— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-02-27T15:27:39.060Z
Part of the galley proofs for Matthew’s upcoming bio of Francis Crick. The “reply guy” comprises the people who insist on asking “where is Rosalind Franklin?” whenever Crick is mentioned. Here’s how Matthw handled that in one place?
Proofs are in for CRICK. And because whenever I mention Crick a reply guy says ‘Rosalind Franklin’, here’s the first extract, from 1956, while Crick was in the USA:
— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-04-03T18:32:25.567Z
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
This habit of forming opinions, and acting upon them without evidence, is one of the most immoral habits of the mind. … As our opinions are the fathers of our actions, to be indifferent about the evidence of our opinions is to be indifferent about the consequences of our actions. -James Mill, philosopher (6 Apr 1773-1836)
+1 The very definition of intellectual integrity.
True, Biden should not have run, but let’s place the “original sin” of this mess (Trump’s win) on Mitch McConnell. For Trump’s second impeachment, McConnell chose not to whip up enough votes to get a conviction in the Senate. Had he done so, Trump would’ve been political history.
We can also blame Kevin McCarthy for helping to resurrect Trump. For a few weeks after the attempted coup, Trump was in the doghouse — and then McCarthy decided to make amends with the man whose actions McCarthy was condemning just weeks prior. That visit opened the door to more people visiting Mar-a-Lago to pay respects to the disgraced loser.
Harris’s loss in 2024 had little to do with her—she was a fine candidate: sane, competent, and well-meaning—and more to do with what voters wanted. They knew exactly who Trump was. They knew all about his bigotry, his crudeness, his cruelty, his vulgarity, that he was a threat to democracy and the rule of law — and decided they wanted more. In a sane country ANY Democratic nominee in 2024 would have been preferable to the Orange Lout. In a sane country ANY Democratic nominee should have won in a landslide. But that didn’t happen because of a central, stark truth: the majority of voters WANTED an autocrat in the White House.
There’s also the fact that a huge chunk of American voters are stupid. Exhibit A, your honor: Google Trends noted a spike in the query “Did Joe Biden drop out?” on election day.
George Takei noted shortly after the election that “Half the voters made an insane choice.” ’nuff said.
Harris was a woke airhead who couldn’t be trusted not to let Iran nuke Israel. Yeah, half the voters, including me, voted for an alternative.
So you voted for the sexual abuser and the autocrat. Interesting.
As for “woke,” it’s a nice word and a good word—that is, if you care to look into the history of the word and its original meaning. But then right-wing sh*theads came along and weaponized it to mean something else.
I voted for the candidate who is giving Israel the green light to defeat Hamas, is extirpating DEI from the federal government and federally supported institutions, and is defunding campus antisemitism. As opposed to the alternative, who would have forced Israel to effectively surrender to Hamas, doubled down on DEI, and, I suspect, at best, would have looked the other way about campus antisemitism.
The reality is that both presidential candidates’ offerings were a mixed back. And I find it objectionable to just call other people stupid because they don’t vote the way I did or would. People have different priorities.
For instance, there’s no chance for higher education reform without external pressures from the Republican party. The Dems have shown zero interest in it before Trump’s second victory (and I include the Dems in blue states here). Likewise, with the radical transgender agenda – if you attach sufficiently high importance to foiling that agenda, then Trump is your candidate. You want a re-orientation of US foreign policy towards containing China (which will require Europe to fend for itself, since the US’s resources are not unlimited), then Trump is your candidate …
But then there’s the other stuff: Robert Kennedy as secretary as HHS is scary. Trump’s tariff policy does not seem well thought-out, etc.
But the Dems, a pox on their house too – the wokeness, the inability to actually get stuff done (read Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book Abundance) …
Huzzah.
This reply is meant for “Peter”.
“You want a re-orientation of US foreign policy towards containing China (which will require Europe to fend for itself, since the US’s resources are not unlimited), then Trump is your candidate …”
In my opinion, both parties are increasingly Isolationist, anti-China, and moving towards higher tariffs. This is not meant as praise or criticism of anyone. Let me use an important historical example. Obama declined to send American troops into Syria. I agreed with him. In the UK, Cameron (who favored airstrikes) allowed a free vote in Parliament on the UK joining airstrikes. Parliament voted no.
My general neutrality on this issue does not include Assad, who (in my opinion) was as bad or worse, than everyone claimed him to be.
As for “man” and “woman” they are nice words and good words—that is, if you care to look into the history of the words and their original meanings. And then woke shitheads came along and weaponized them to mean something else.
But, yeah, tell us how it’s all the fault of Trump and the Bubbas.
“Trump and the Bubbas.” Good band name. Would play lots of ZZ Top covers. Cameo appearance as minor bad-guy characters in a “Blues Brothers” remake.
I think if you want to get into the post-mortem for 2024, you have to go back to how Biden got elected in the first place. There were other Democratic candidates in 2020, as there could have been in 2024, but the DNC worked like devils to defame and defund them, and to make sure the DNC had enough at large delegates at the convention to ensure a win. It was clear that Biden’s age issues were there in the 2020 basement campaign. The machine that made Harris a VP made Biden the President, potentially by silencing its own membership. The problem is deeper than skin color. As for the failed impeachments of Trump, if you only strategy is to prevent you opponent from being able to run, then you really need to look at what it is you are offering people.
Dean Phillips could not be reached for comment.
Recipe for losing again in 2028: blame and insult the electorate, it was all their fault; refuse to accept any criticism of the Democratic candidate or policies.
Recipe for winning next time: listen to what the center-ground voters tell you they don’t like about Democratic policies; pick a candidate who will appeal to those center-ground voters.
Selecting candidates for office on the basis of their abilities—both in campaigning and in governance—might also help. Selection of candidates mostly on the basis of their membership in an identity group may not be such a great idea, after all. We know that it is an old story, But Kamala Harris is a classic example, and her unexpectedly decisive loss in 2024 reveals the defects of this selection criterion.
Whether she was a “woke airhead” or a well-meaning but marginally capable
liberal is not relevant to Sullivan’s point about “identity before merit”.
Just to let you know, Barry, there’s someone here who agrees with you. Yes, Biden should have planned on only serving one term. But the Republican party is what gave us Trump. They, the Supreme Court and the pervasive right-wing propaganda machine are to blame.
But you and Barry Lyons are still left blaming the voters. They’re the ones who cast ballots, not the Supreme Court and the right-wing propaganda machine. There has to be a deeply grave reason for an unelected judge to remove a candidate from a democratic election….or shut down that segment of the press that supports him. So it comes down to the voters.
If the voters voted for Donald Trump instead of Kamala Harris because they are insane or stupid, how do you cure them or educate them so they make better choices next time, and exclude the demonstrably indocile from voting? How do you test them to make sure they have responded correctly to your treatment or tutelage so they can be permitted and trusted to vote properly in the next election? You’d better get cracking. It’s only 19 months to the mid-terms.
You do realize that if you require voters (or candidates!) to be vetted (by whom?), when the other side gets back in, as it surely will — assuming your side even does win at all — its revenge on you will be terrifying. This is the reason we don’t censor the press, by the way. If we did, one side would smash the printing presses of the other when it won, and the other would retaliate when it won. The equilibrium solution which conserves printing presses and the muscular effort to smash them after every change of government is for both sides to agree not to censor. But if one side cheats, the deal is off.
Do you not see how fundamentally undemocratic it is to blame the voters for your side’s electoral defeat? Calls to limit the franchise to the deserving are always coming from us aristocrats. Even defining the “deserving” as someone who can scrounge together photo ID causes a meltdown in democratic — small d, I’m trying to be non-partisan — circles. Wait till you see what we would really like to do in our meritocratic Utopia. And we will, if you start restricting the franchise to people likely to vote for you, instead of developing policies that insane and stupid people will vote for.
Leslie, this is why I hesitate commenting here at all. Why you feel the need to expound on my comments every time I do is puzzling. I have NO idea why you went off on us “blaming voters”. I did not blame them, I did not call them “insane and stupid” and NO Democrat is talking about restricting voting.
Leslie, I went back and read Byron’s original comment and I see now where you got the idea of blaming voters. Personally, I do agree with Barry that many voters are ignorant (I wouldn’t use stupid). I don’t know how to fix that as it is pervasive throughout American society. But Trump, Republicans and right-wing media are very good at exploiting that ignorance instead of educating voters. Essentially, they don’t just stretch the truth, they actively lie about it and people who don’t know better believe them. Evidence for this comes from the fact that surveys showed most people knew THEY personally were doing better under Biden, but they believed everyone else was doing terribly. That’s because conservative media kept telling them over and over how awful the country was doing (when every statistic said otherwise). That is the problem.
Back in 2019, she got exactly zero delegates when she ran for President. The Democrats (back then) had a suitably low (very low) opinion of her.
We have a strictly objective measure that shows that Kamala was not qualified. She flunked the CA bar exam in a year that 72.2% of the first-time (like her) test takers passed.
Dr. Coyne wrote: “Even though Awad was a bad actor, a murderer and a kidnapper, I would have preferred that the IDF took him alive…”
Respectfully, I disagree. Hamas is trying to complete its goal of genocide and Awad was a soldier in their campaign to kill Israeli Jews, steal Israeli land, destroy the state of Israel. Everything has its season and, at this moment, it is a time for war. Impossible to celebrate what the IDF must do in this season, but Qoheleth was right about everything having a season.
I agree with Kurt, and disagree with Professor Ceiling Cat.
Yes. Taking a suspected murderer alive, or at least trying to, is mandatory in peacetime where the state apparatus controls the terrain and uses trained civilian police to make the arrest. It can structure the arrest operation in ways that minimize the risk to those civilian police officers, particularly since most civilian murderers don’t surround themselves with fanatical defenders. Typically murderers have no friends at all, and gang bodyguards don’t usually want to shoot at cops as it’s certain death for them. Better to slip out the back and work for the guy who takes over, maybe be that guy……And then having made the arrest the state intends to put the suspect before a trial to test the evidence of guilt, because otherwise it can’t punish him and must release him.
In war, none of those things holds. Attempting to capture an enemy soldier alive in enemy-held territory is inordinately risky and is worth doing only for secret information the soldier is believed to hold, which you hope to torture, intimidate, or bribe out of him, or for the chance of turning him to work for your side if the enemy is unaware that you have taken him and compromised him. Sparing his life just because you are so mad at him that you want to put him on trial, and possibly acquit him, is a military waste. If an IDF soldier had died in the operation, what would you tell his family? Flatten his hideout from the air and be done with it. Yes, a good trade even if civilians were unavoidably killed in the strike.
Guilt beyond reasonable doubt not only doesn’t apply on the battlefield, guilt itself doesn’t even mean anything. An enemy combatant can be killed wherever you find him, even if your country won’t execute criminals, even war criminals. Satisfying to know that he was one specific combatant but it doesn’t change the morality of killing him.
“A time for war” captures all this. I hope I’ve made a principled argument.
Well put, as usual, Dr. MacMillan. I am on Dr PCC(e)’s side about the death penalty, but Awad was an enemy combatant, and a particularly loathsome one at that. I object to the death penalty not because it isn’t a deterrent (it isn’t) or because it costs more (to me that’s not a convincing argument against anyway; it SHOULD cost more) but because justice in the US is aspirational. At best. Such aspirations are too costly in war, as you point out. What do you tell the parents of a soldier killed while trying to capture an enemy combatant? A time for war indeed.
Thanks, Edward. By “principled” I meant I could make those arguments from the abolitionist side of the civilian death penalty question. The situations are that different. Regardless of my own views, I hope abolitionists in general can still use them in good faith. And of course retentionists should be scrupulous to not use battlefield killings to justify judicial executions. Again, the situations are that different.
No, justice in the use is RETRIBUTIVE: people DESERVE to die. Of course that also means that they could never be rehabilitated, something that more civilized countries at least CONSIDER.
Besides Japan, the US is the only modern country in the world to have the death penalty. How does it make us better or more moral than every other modern country?
Aside from Japan, S. Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore all have the death penalty. No executions have been carried out in S. Korea since 1997. The last execution in Taiwan was in January of 2025. The last execution in Singapore was in February of 2025.
Well, suppose he surrendered. Should they have just shot him down anyway. And if he did surrender, do you favor executing him instead of giving him life without parole?
Under what circumstances to you think enemy combatants should be killed even if they surrender (of course Awad didn’t, and so he died in combat, something to which I have no objection).
Combatants should never be killed or injured if they are making a good-faith attempt to surrender and allow themselves to be disarmed in a setting where it is militarily possible to pause the fighting enough to corral and evacuate them. This applies even (and fully) to “unlawful” combatants who aren’t in uniform and are fighting as free-lance insurgents. What the Government does with them later can be controversial but on the battlefield it isn’t. Ordinary enlisted soldiers often have to make split-second decisions here under their rules of engagement, just as police must in facing armed suspects.
If a known war criminal is captured alive, he must be treated under some form of due process tribunal, not summarily executed in revenge by capturing soldiers.
A Canadian veteran of a Black Watch infantry battalion who fought in the military disaster known as Operation Goodwood, part of the protracted and difficult effort to break out of the Normandy beachhead, told this to broadcast historian Anne Medina decades later. He was advancing under fire through a waist-high wheat field —it was July by then — when a German soldier jumped up six feet in front of him with his hands up, presumably a deserter trying to reach Allied lines. Medina asked, “What did you do?”
The elderly veteran replied, “I shot him.” Pause. “Nothing else I could do. We were in a firefight [and were driven back with heavy casualties.] I couldn’t take a prisoner. It was just his bad luck that I almost tripped over him.” (Quoting from memory.)
I agree Kurt et al.
This wasn’t felon in an American city. He was a terrorist at war with Israel. (as PCCE notes).
There is a specific hazard in arresting him in Gaza.
I wouldn’t want to be the messenger who has to go to an IDF family to explain: “Well… we’re sorry about your dead son who was trying to arrest Awad when killed. Of course we could have whacked Awad at a distance and your son would be alive… but we wanted to do things completely by the book. In hostile territory.”
Not a call one would want.
Our enemies have a negative moral value, especially in a war (one they started).
If they can be arrested safely (for the arresting forces) fine, I suppose. But if there’s any doubt… no. Kill him from afar.
Onwards Israeli heroes.
D.A.
NYC
It is clear that more than half of the people in the U.S. feel that the system is not working well for them, and they hired Trump to disrupt things.
Years ago I read an article by Edward Luttwak that argued there was a trade off between economic efficiency and social cohesion. His point was that a GDP maximizing economy does not produce a society that one would want to live in. I think his point is valid, and I also think we have sold too many of our fellow citizens down the river.
Many things need to change, but one place to start is to restore the dignity of work. I remember as a kid receiving the message that “all work is honorable,” and that I shouldn’t think myself too good to get my hands dirty. Now we are told that there are jobs Americans won’t do, and that we need illegal immigrants to do them. What kind of a message is that, really? It is not a good one.
I happen to think that it is a reasonable argument to use data from men in general to support the claim that trans-women have an unfair advantage over bio-women. Using trans-women for data is [I]better[/I], but it is a reasonable argument.
But the moment trans-women data is brought out, the TRA will shift to argue that they should still be allowed because there are so few of them.
Or the trans activists consult their oppression hierarchy and then conclude that the inclusion of trans-identifying males in the sex category of their choice is more important than fairness and safety for female athletes.
USA Fencing Chair Damien Lehfeldt‘s statement on trans inclusion makes this explicit. Even if trans-identified males retain an advantage, natal females need to realize that these “women” with innately fragile coping skills might kill themselves if they’re not allowed to play on the woman’s team. What’s more important — saving a life or winning? Hey, just have a good time.
“If you leave me, I’ll kill myself and it will be your fault.”
The thing about federal money is that it always comes with strings attached. I learned during the pandemic that because my university took federal money, we were considered “federal contractors” and were therefore subject to the federal vaccine mandate even though there was no state mandate. During the Carter administration, states that did not reduce their speed limits to 55 mph would lose highway funding.
There is nothing new about the feds bullying those who sup at the government trough.
And don’t forget how Saint Ronald of Reagan, patron saint off States Rights. forced all states to raise their drinking age to twenty one, and outlawed all adult apartment complexes.
Love the dog volleyball!
My little guy was like that in his day – he’s older than Joe Biden now but he’s a similar breed to the one in the video. Cats can’t do that. 🙂
D.A.
NYC
m’boy: https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/06/10/photos-of-readers-93/
ps Also liked the Penguin Jan 6. Don’t mess with forgotten Aussie islands! hhahaa
Like David, also on to something less serious: as far as the howling Siamese are concerned, only one of my cats reacted–woke up and put her ears back–a sign of supreme annoyance. That was it. The staff of those cats must be immune to loud noises, as I could never live with that. I’ve had “talking” cats who were wonderful, but they were not so persistent and loud. I wonder why they do that???
To Malgorzata: why do you believe Green Peace is anti-Semitic because of Grete Thunberg? I’ve never seen evidence of that in this area (south central PA), though there certainly is anti-Semitism here (but not in the environmental groups I’m familiar with).
Just have a look at the Green Parties in Australia and Ireland. There are many similar “Green Parties” in other countries.
I’m generally opposed to lots of Green Party policies. But to their credit the Greens in Canada immediately and unconditionally condemned the October 7th massacre the day it happened.
https://www.greenparty.ca/en/news/green-party-condemns-horrendous-attacks-by-hamas-calls-for-deescalation
Mike: respectfully, Malgorzata is right here. Every green party I’ve read about is totally in cahoots with Palestine and other wild leftist causes.
Australia, NZ and Canada particularly but also Europe-wide.
I’m unsure of exactly when green parties switched from just not wanting to clear cut forests or kill whales (great goals!)… to crazed anti-capitalist, anti-western terrorist simps like Greta … but it seems to be what happened.
Ideologies can change generationally. Pinker reminds us (in Reason I think) that care for the environment used to be a right wing thing in the 60s.
all the best Mike,
D.A.
NYC
Oh totally agree. The national Greens leader was at one time a queer, nonbinary, pansexual female with a severe haircut
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amita_Kuttner
who became leader after the Greens drove out their previous leader – a black Jewish woman! – for not being sufficiently antisemitic. Currently the deputy leader is a very serious person named Rainbow Eyes (srsly).
greenparty.ca/en/our-team
The severe haircut was the Greens candidate in my federal riding in the 2019 national election, so I had the privilege of not voting for her/them/zir.
Just pointing out that the Greens occasionally have a moment of truth and accuracy. Stopped clocks etc.
I have to defend universities here. If universities are getting huge amounts of overhead – which they are, looked at objectively – the huge sums are also justified, if you look at it objectively.
When universities request that the government gives them, say, 50% more money, on top of whatever amount of funds a scientist has been awarded, universities don’t just pull that percentage out of thin air and the government doesn’t just blindly agree to pay it.
Rather, I am sure that if you talk to anyone in university offices that deal with government funding, you will be told that universities have to justify their overhead requests by preparing itemized accounts of the actual costs they believe they will incur as a result of providing all the facilities, support staff, etc., that the scientists will need in order to do the actual science. The itemized accounts would include, for example, precise dollar amounts for electricity expenditures and salaries of support staff. And they have to furthermore show the basis for those dollar amounts by showing receipts for what they actually pay.
And even after a university submits this detailed justification for why they need a certain % overhead rate, the government reviews the request line by line in order to whittle it down as much as possible, and in order to strike off any unallowed expenses – i.e., any expenses that have no legitimate connection to the science that is being funded.
Here is where I think the misunderstanding about overhead percentages arise: Since it would be insane to require universities to have to go through this involved process in order to justify overhead requests for every single grant proposal that university scientists submit, the university only goes through this process once every few years. At that time, the university and government agree on an overhead percentage that will thereafter be automatically added to the amount of money the government provides for every research proposal it agrees to fund for a certain term of years. But the fact that the overhead is automatically applied to individual grants should not be taken to mean that universities have somehow been given free rein to ask for as much money as they want. The opposite is true.
In sum, because of the process involved in calculating overhead, there is no way that universities could get away with massively inflating their overhead amounts.
For the same reason, the idea that overhead could be slashed from 50+% to 5% (which I think Elon proposed) without either universities or researchers suffering is lunatic. It reduces to the claim that scientific research doesn’t actually need things like electricity or facilities in order to be conducted.
I can only hope the process you outlined is true but I suspect it is more like how a hospital arrives at its fully burdened costs, which we all know is suspect.
Plus, if that process was followed then why do unis accept a 15% overhead rate from private sources such as the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative?
https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-25-068.html
I agree with Jackie here. Take for example the Scripps Research Institute with indirect costs of 90%! Imagine the burden on researchers trying to write grants to support their lab research. How is that even remotely justifiable? Or even Harvard and Yale at ~70%. At least Stanford has it fixed at a maximum of 54%. When does this become absurd?
The argument for insanely high research indirect costs at universities with grotesquely high endowments is analogous to why Musk’s Tesla shouldn’t get billions in federal grants when its CEO has amassed over $200B personally. These schools are supposed to be elite educational institutions with cutting edge research. Then why the financial disincentives from teaching and doing research? They’ve become pathologically capitalistic and lost sight of their mission. Might as well hire more hedge fund managers and useless admin and issue an Ivy League crypto coin to build a $1T endowment to secure the university’s future, right? The ends justify the means, right?
Since Jerry reported on a recent show of Dr. Phil, here’s an older clip of Dr. Phil on Oprah’s show, with him trying to save a troubled marriage:
Oprah: Dr. Phil, Marriage Counselor – SNL (Saturday Night Live)
One of Dr Phil’s lightbulb moments: You don’t want to hide a Mars bar in your sleeping bag, if there’s a bear outside of the tent.
And Oprah declare Dr. Phil to be a modern-day Confucius.
Peter brought up Klein and Thompson’s new book, Abundance. In this interview, Klein uses the Biden administration’s failure over three years to rollout a single broadband network to rural communities. This will never be fixed through the normal channels of gov’t. Start at 15:45.
Meanwhile, Biden’s FCC denied Starlink $885 million in rural broadband subsidies in 2022. The FCC cited SpaceX’s failure to successfully launch its Starship rocket, saying “the uncertain nature of Starship’s future launches could impact Starlink’s ability to meet” its obligations. Starlink’s obligations!! What of the Biden administration’s obligations!
I haven’t read Klein’s book; however, I imagine it shows that Klein is not as naive as he was when he interviewed Professor Jess Jenkins, the brains behind Biden’s $392B green energy portion of the Inflation Reduction Act.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/20/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-jesse-jenkins.html
In that interview, Jenkins tells Klein, “The most cost effective of our net-zero scenarios spans an area that is equal to Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee put together. And the solar farms are an area the size of Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts.” Klein then says, “You write that achieving the required additions by 2030 of utility scale solar and wind capacity means installing 38 to 67 gigawatts a year on average. The U.S. single year record added capacity is 25 gigawatts, which we did in 2020. So we need to on average be somewhere between — be around doubling our best-ever year in solar and wind capacity installation year after year after year after year.” A little later Jenkins himself points out that the West has forgotten “how to build big complicated civil works projects.”
Does Klein point out the infeasibility of Biden’s plan? Of course not.
Monetary incentives distort any market, including education. Government supported research is critical, but universities also inflate costs to maximize their income. And, of course, tuition rises with public funding as well. Perhaps grants should consider the current costs and subsidize those, with a limit on raising costs. I can remember being asked to find things to buy with Grant money so it wouldn’t be cut the following year for non use.
This is true in the discussion of transgender issues as well. Medical intervention was much less frequent before the ACA required insurance companies to cover it. The financial incentive and availability of treatment created a profitable new line of work as well as the ability for lower income people to access it.
While we want to support research and make healthcare more accessible, the distortions in the market from government support néed to be considered and minimized.
“[S]o blindly loyal and informationally siloed they couldn’t absorb what was staring them in the face.”
“Couldn’t absorb” is mind-reading. How could anyone know what they could or couldn’t absorb? It’s at least equally likely that they knew full well, but their self-interest depended on pretending not to know.
Blossom (or the man doing female cosplay) is doing a number of things – this is a distinction with a difference from what and how Dr. Phil is talking about the topic in terms of data, evidence, evaluation, weighting thereof – you know, boring stuff. Here are a few things activists do :
• DARVO (Deny Attack Reverse Victim/Offender)
• Iron Law of Woke Projection
• Dialectical inversion
Those can be looked up – in a nutshell, I call it an epistemological shell game. When the activist scam is revealed, the objective is to bury it strategically.
While it is in fact sophisticated – working truth into pretzels with lies, it IMHO explains how tiresome it is, when the rules can be recognized in action. I think because there is nothing insightful or enlightening, while the activist enjoys a type of self-ingratiation (plus cult approval/credits), as nobody can counter the magic spells … or as Marcuse might put it, sublation (Hegel, Aufheben).