Welcome to CaturSaturday, April 12, 2025, and shabbos for Jewish cats. It’s also the beginning of Passover, which commences at sunset tonight and ends a week later on Sunday. The meal is dire, but the holiday conforms to the description of all Jewish holidays:
“They tried to kill us;
We won;
Let’s eat!”
The seder meal (shown below). It’s not a gourmet treat but a collection of metaphorical foodstuffs:
The six items on the Seder plate are these (read and learn!)
- Maror: Bitter herbs, which Gamaliel says symbolize the bitterness and harshness of the slavery which the Jews endured in Ancient Egypt. For maror, many people use freshly grated horseradish or whole horseradish root.
- Chazeret is typically romaine lettuce, whose roots are bitter-tasting. In addition to horseradish and romaine lettuce, other forms of bitter lettuce, such as endive, may be eaten in fulfillment of the mitzvah, as well as green onions, dandelion greens, celery leaves, or curly parsley (but parsley and celery are more commonly used as the karpas or vegetable element). Much depends upon whether one’s tradition is Ashkenazic, Sephardic, Mizrahi, Persian, or one of the many other Jewish ethno-cultural traditions.
- Charoset: A sweet, brown, pebbly paste of fruits and nuts, possibly representing the mortar used by the Jewish slaves to build the storehouses of Egypt. The actual recipe depends partly on ethno-cultural tradition and partly on locally available ingredients. Ashkenazi Jews, for example, traditionally make apple-raisin based charoset while Sephardic Jews often make date-based recipes that might feature orange or/and lemon, or even banana. Other Talmudic traditions claim the Charoset “recalls the apple”, apparently referencing a tradition that Jewish women snuck out to apple orchards to conceive in Egypt, and that it is not obligatory but serves to nullify the poison of the maror.
- Karpas: A vegetable other than bitter herbs, sometimes parsley or celery or cooked potato, which is dipped into salt water (Ashkenazi custom), vinegar (Sephardi custom), or charoset (Yemenite Jews) at the beginning of the Seder.
- Zeroa: A roasted lamb or goat bone, symbolizing the korban Pesach (Pesach sacrifice), which was a lamb offered in the Temple in Jerusalem and was then roasted and eaten as part of the meal on Seder night.
- Beitzah: A roast egg – usually a hard-boiled egg that has been roasted in a baking pan with a little oil, or with a lamb shank – symbolizing the korban chagigah (festival sacrifice) that was offered in the Temple in Jerusalem and was then eaten as part of the meal on Seder night.
You call this a meal (photo below)? But there will also be Matzos available, which are good if thickly slathered with butter, although butter won’t be on the table. . .
It’s also International Day of Human Space Flight, National Grilled Cheese Sandwich Day (with tomato soup, of course), Drop Everything and Read Day (I’m reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Benjamin Franklin), National Licorice Day (i prefer the Allsorts), and National Only Child Day.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 12 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*One of Trump’s executive orders (or a general order) was finally overturned by the Supreme Court: the blatantly illegal deportation of a man who was guilty of nothing. Even the administration admitted it made a mistake, but wouldn’t bring the guy back. Now he has to, or violates a Supreme Court decision.
In its brief order Thursday evening, the high court said the judge “properly requires the Government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.”
There were no noted dissents.
After the high court’s ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Paula Xinis ordered the government “to take all available steps to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia to the United States as soon as possible.” She also told the Trump administration to provide an update on its efforts by Friday morning. Xinis scheduled a hearing for Friday afternoon.
Note that the Supreme Court decision was unanimous. It is this route that will get Trump’s orders overturned. Even he, I think, doesn’t have the chutzpah to buck the Supremes. And the lower-court judge, peeved, “ordered the government to submit daily updates in the case of the man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia.”
*According to the NYT, fears of war with the US (and probably Israel, too) helped bring Iran around to nuclear talks.
It was a closely held, urgent meeting.
Iran was pondering a response to President Trump’s letter seeking nuclear negotiations. So the country’s president, as well as the heads of the judiciary and Parliament huddled with Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, last month, according to two senior Iranian officials familiar with the meeting.
Mr. Khamenei had publicly and repeatedly banned engaging with Washington, calling it unwise and idiotic. The senior officials, in an unusual coordinated effort, urged him to change course, said the two officials, who asked not to be named to discuss sensitive issues.
The message to Mr. Khamenei was blunt: Allow Tehran to negotiate with Washington, even directly if necessary, because otherwise the Islamic Republic’s rule could be toppled.
The country was already dealing with an economy in shambles, a currency plunging against the dollar and shortages of gas, electricity and water. The threat of war with the United States and Israel was extremely serious, the officials warned. If Iran refused talks or if the negotiations failed, the officials told Mr. Khamenei, military strikes on Iran’s two main nuclear sites, Natanz and Fordow, would be inevitable.
Iran would then be forced to retaliate, risking a wider war, a scenario that could further damage the economy and spark domestic unrest, including protests and strikes, the officials said. Fighting on two fronts posed an existential threat to the regime, they added.
At the end of the hourslong meeting, Mr. Khamenei relented. He granted his permission for talks, first indirect, through an intermediary, and then, if things proceeded well, for direct talks between U.S. and Iranian negotiators, the two officials said.
My guess is that Israel would help with the fighting, if only to supply information to the U.S. I was under the impression that Iran’s nuke facilities were buried so far under mountains that bombing attacks would be useless. But, given that Iran relented, that doesn’t appear to be the case. I still think that country is hell-bent on getting the bomb so it could destroy Israel, and am dubious about these talks with Trump, but we shall see. . .
*Here’s a clickbait-titled column by David Brooks in the NYT: “Producing something this stupid is the achievement of a lifetime.” (column archived here). WHAT IS IT? What is stupid is the increasing functional illiteracy of the American people.
You might have seen the various data points suggesting that Americans are losing their ability to reason.
The trend starts with the young. The percentage of fourth graders who score below basic in reading skills on the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests is the highest it has been in 20 years. The percentage of eighth graders below basic was the highest in the exam’s three-decade history. A fourth grader who is below basic cannot grasp the sequence of events in a story. An eighth grader can’t grasp the main idea of an essay or identify the different sides of a debate.
Tests by the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies tell a similar story, only for older folks. Adult numeracy and literacy skills across the globe have been declining since 2017. Tests from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development show that test scores in adult literacy have been declining over the past decade.
Andreas Schleicher, the head of education and skills at the O.E.C.D., told The Financial Times, “Thirty percent of Americans read at a level that you would expect from a 10-year-old child.” He continued, “It is actually hard to imagine — that every third person you meet on the street has difficulties reading even simple things.”
Of course Brooks being Brooks, he has to impart a lesson:
There are some obvious contributing factors for this general decline. Covid hurt test scores. America abandoned No Child Left Behind, which put a lot of emphasis on testing and reducing the achievement gap. But these declines started earlier, around 2012, so the main cause is probably screen time. And not just any screen time. Actively initiating a search for information on the web may not weaken your reasoning skills. But passively scrolling TikTok or X weakens everything from your ability to process verbal information to your working memory to your ability to focus. You might as well take a sledgehammer to your skull.
My biggest worry is that behavioral change is leading to cultural change. As we spend time on our screens, we’re abandoning a value that used to be pretty central to our culture — the idea that you should work hard to improve your capacity for wisdom and judgment all the days of your life. That education, including lifelong out-of-school learning, is really valuable.
. . .Producing something this stupid is not the work of a day; it is the achievement of a lifetime — relying on decades of incuriosity, decades of not cracking a book, decades of being impervious to evidence.
Back in Homer’s day, people lived within an oral culture, then humans slowly developed a literate culture. Now we seem to be moving to a screen culture. Civilization was fun while it lasted.
Screen time is as good an explanation as any, and, aside from schools starting to ban cellphones, I can’t see it declining. Fortunately I’ll be dead before the time that all Americans are constantly walking around looking at their screens (I know a few who do it already).
*As usual, I am going to steal a few choice items from Nellie Bowles’s weekly news summary at the Free Press, called this week, “TGIF: Yippy and afraid.”
I’m not sure she’s completely joshing here:
→ Good showers again: Trump this week signed an executive order repealing Biden’s water-flow limits on showerheads. “I like to take a nice shower to take care of my beautiful hair,” Trump explained at the signing ceremony, gracing us all with a look into the Swiss clock that is his mental policy framework. With Biden-showers: “I have to stand under the shower for 15 minutes till it gets wet. It comes out drip, drip, drip. It’s ridiculous.” This is the MAGA I want. This is the MAGA we need. Focused on the things that don’t technically matter at all but make my life better anyway. Focused on repealing the Biden-Harris nanny state. Focused on letting me be a little wild, a little wasteful, a little fun. Letting me buy a diesel-powered leaf blower and then using it every Saturday at 6:00 a.m. while I sip my coffee out of a plastic straw. Letting me buy incandescent light bulbs and then smashing them just because I can. California makes showerheads so low-flow that our showers are actually, legally speaking, steam rooms. The idea is you get in and sweat enough that eventually the water rolls off your body. We don’t use soaps or shampoos, so that’s not relevant. Just a lukewarm steam and off you go, ready for a weekend with your polycule.
→ How could you have presumed me female: Anderson Cooper, leading a town hall with Bernie Sanders, got chastised for using she/her pronouns for a completely normal-looking woman, with a completely normal-woman name of Grace. Called upon by Cooper, she snaps: “I use they/them pronouns actually, thank you,” clearly annoyed, clearly relishing the moment. Then she starts her question, which is about why men aren’t compelled by the Dems anymore, and no, I’m not kidding: “Polling and turnout data indicate that men of all racial demographics are turning away from the Democratic Party. . . ” Yes, it is a great mystery, Grace, they/them. I’m obsessed with Bernie’s face as this is unfolding:
Here is a video of the incident:
→ The majority of Americans are now anti-Israel: More than half of U.S. adults (53 percent) now hold an unfavorable view toward Israel, according to a Pew Research Center poll. Americans’ disfavor toward Israel has increased over 10 percent since 2022, before the October 7, 2023 attacks. And this was ultimately part of Hamas’s strategy with those attacks. This has been the long game for Iran and Qatar. Everyone knew Israel would defeat Hamas. The goal was to make the world hate Israel for doing it. The goal was to torment the Israelis just enough (taking an infant and a toddler hostage, for example) that instead of some little strikes on a few Hamas rocket launchers, they would go to war. And war is horrific. And Jews aren’t supposed to make war. They are inside cats. Anyway, it worked. Americans hate Israel now. Antisemitism is back.
On cue: A black Jewish woman went to a Staples on Wilshire in L.A. to get some postcards printed this week. One card was for her black Zionist group, and another was about “Jewish Joy.” The team at Staples refused to print the cards, with one employee saying Zionism is “racist,” and I guess Jewish Joy is just freaky. Zio-lite. The customer recorded the interaction, so we can all watch as a Staples employee explains that real Judaism doesn’t support Israel. Another guy at the store randomly yells at her too. And this is in Los Angeles, where there are lots of Jews! I converted just in time. I’ve always wanted to be discriminated against in some way. I was born too late for gayness to be a compelling thing to hate me for (Thanks a lot, Ellen). But finally, finally, I’ve got it. Good Shabbos, I say. You can find me at Staples printing my Lesbo-Zio-Merica-Number-One art, waiting to get yelled at.
There’s a new piece on Matt Johnson’s site that mirrors my increasing feeling that the Free Press is becoming more right wing, or, as the author says, “Rather, The Free Press has amassed a huge following by being a more artful and less shrill version of the anti-woke alarmism that permeates the right-wing media ecosystem.
*And a rare Denisovan fossil has been discovered in Taiwan, and identified, by of all things, protein sequences, not DNA sequences:
An ancient jawbone discovered in Taiwan belonged to an enigmatic group of early human ancestors called Denisovans, scientists reported Thursday.
Relatively little is known about Denisovans, an extinct group of human cousins that interacted with Neanderthals and our own species, Homo sapiens.
“ Denisovan fossils are very scarce,” with only a few confirmed finds in East Asia, said study co-author Takumi Tsutaya at the Graduate University for Advanced Studies in Japan.
So far, the only known Denisovan fossils include partial jawbones, a few teeth and part of a finger bone found in caves in Siberia and Tibet. Some scientists believe fossils found in a cave in Laos may also belong to Denisovans.
The probable identification of the jawbone from Taiwan as Denisovan expands the region where scientists know these ancient people once lived, said Tsutaya.
Based on the composition of marine invertebrates found attached to it, the fossil was dated to the Pleistocene era. But exactly which species of early human ancestor it belonged to remained a mystery.
The condition of the fossil made it impossible to study ancient DNA. But recently, scientists in Taiwan, Japan and Denmark were able to extract some protein sequences from the incomplete jawbone.
An analysis showed some protein sequences resembled those contained in the genome of a Denisovan fossil recovered in Siberia. The findings were published in the journal Science.
I haven’t yet read the paper, but click on the title page below and you can:
A map and photo of the mandible from the paper. How did they know it was a male mandible? Because one of the proteins produced resides on the Y chromosome, and others on the sex chromosomes had male-specific variants.
Hili: That peach from Elżbieta had a good stone.A: I wonder whether the tree from that stone will have flowers this year.
Hili: Ta brzoskwinia od Elżbiety miała dobrą pestkę.Ja: Ciekaw jestem, czy drzewo z tej pestki już w tym roku zakwitnie.
*******************
From somewhere on Facebook, I found the best satirical rebuttal of Colossal Biosciences, the de-extinction of the Dire Haggis:
From Things with Faces, parent and offspring:
From My Cat is an Asshole:
No Masih today (I guess she’s taking a break), but here’s a recent tweet by Titania. Some people took her seriously, and so there’s a “Rate Community Notes” list under the tweet I have. (For some reason I’ve been chosen to evaluate these notes.) Many people still think Titania is serious and uber-woke.
Imagine comparing those jobs pic.twitter.com/8vMcHl7Et4
— Just Posting Ls (@MomsPostingLs) March 28, 2025
From Malcolm, a cat referee:
A cat is refereeing a dispute between two mice
— Science girl (@gunsnrosesgirl3) March 30, 2025
From Luana, who says, “They guy is very annoying, but the professor is unhinged. What an embarrassment for Barnard College!”. The professor is identified in the thread as “Prof Jackie Orr. Used to teach at Syracuse and is now an adjunct faculty member at Barnard College.”
I asked an unhinged Barnard faculty member if she condemns the reported assault against a public safety officer on campus, who was hospitalized. Listen to her nonsensical word salad in support of these hateful and reckless anti-Israel protestors. How are these our faculty… pic.twitter.com/l593N15R6k
— David lederer (@Davidlederer6) February 27, 2025
Two from my feed: a great moment for a horse:
This horse waited his whole life for this moment
— Science girl (@gunsnrosesgirl3) April 11, 2025
And Colossal tried to answer me using their cherry-picked definition of “de-extincted”. They didn’t quote the rest of the source, though. I swear, the more they defend themselves, the worse their scientific reputation gets. They are disingenuous:
Here’s how I answered this:
More examples of your attempt to pretend you haven’t implied otherwise. Here’s the part of the report that you don’t mention. I have to say that the more you guys try to defend yourself, the deeper in you get. https://t.co/mLsipxCRpE pic.twitter.com/srF5gTLnte— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) April 11, 2025
One from the Auschwitz Memorial that I reposted:
French Jewish girl gassed to death upon arrival at Auschwitz. Had she lived, she would be 89 today.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-04-12T10:27:07.901Z
And two from Dr. Cobb. This first one is from a much relieved mathematician at University College London:
Our cat came home today! Thin as a rake but whole and purring and hasn't left laps all night.Not sure how she found her way home after four weeks but she did ❤️❤️❤️
— Prof Christina Pagel (@chrischirp.bsky.social) 2025-04-10T22:10:11.087Z
and a VERY lazy moggy:
@critter.charmers 🤗Your support means more than you know. When you shop at our small pet store, you’re not just buying treats or toys—you’re helping us care for pets, follow our passion, and stay part of this amazing community. Thank you for choosing small, choosing love, and choosing us. Shop local. Shop with heart.❤️ #fyp
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
Who are we but the stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves, and believe? -Scott Turow, author and lawyer (b. 12 Apr 1949)
Sounds like the perfect motto for the trans crowd. 🙂
Mmmm… gnostic temptation….
David Brooks op ed is pretty scary. I guess the preachers and the politicians are dancing in the streets: “People who cannot reason? Hallelujah!!”
The article on the Free Press pretty much confirmed all my biases. Their defense if the high school football coach who insisted on praying at mid field after the game was strike one. Their continued regurgitation of religious pablum got them ejected from the game.
And their rejection of science in favor of intelligence agencies regarding covid (and their support for MAHA and bhattacharya) was strike 3 for me. I had been with Bari since they were Common Sense, and appreciated very much her book, “How to Fight Antisemitism”, but unsubscribed from my paid subscription yesterday. Will miss Nelli, but the rest has become anti-science and anti-enlightenment bs.
I think they’ve moved to the crazier end of the right as that’s where the money is.
Centrists don’t pay for culture war chum, conspiracy porn, as much as the nutters. Their shift towards “faith” has left me cold but I’m happy WEIT clips the best bits on Friday for us.
And Bari is a good interviewer on youtube.
D.A.
NYC
BTW – You should invite me to your seders Jim – they sound more delicious than any I’ve been to! (see post below)
Well David, FWIW, I did my small part yesterday by removing fifty bucks per annum from their take and wrote my comments as to why in their unsubscribers’ comment bubble. And sorry, but this year I have only the Seder memories for the first time, as all but one of the crowd of aunts, uncles, and first cousins have died over the past several years, but I will visit him this afternoon and we will talk tonight. I would have loved to host you at one of the raucous, Jewish-left Seders of past years. A number of my cousins were lawyers…it was always interesting.
HAHHA.
No worries. As I have my atheist Seder – courtesy of McDonalds probably (hehe) I’ll say an atheist prayer for you. Umm. S/t like “Jim is a pretty cool chap and I enjoy his comments on the space race and NASA stuff!”
All the best,
D.A.
NYC
I hope you have better luck unsubscribing from them than I did. I had a hell of a time getting them to quit spamming me and taking money from my bank account. Ultimately it required a “stop payment” of sorts through my bank to lose them.
Thanks Debi. I wondered about that. It was not straightforward to even find the unsubscribe link. So I guess I will find out at the end of august. I assume that since bari weiss corporate is no longer a simple family affair, she has contracted out her financials…certainly no phone number or email address to have 1-1 with a human. I found that same dehumanization with lawrence krauss enterprises also. I wanted to send him and prof doudna a short white paper that I wrote to answer a K-12 science question they had on their video interview and while I easily found prof doudna’s and her lab manager’s Berkeley emails, all I could find for krauss was a comment bubble to one of his managing firms. He has other social media I believe, but I only do email. So it goes. Thanks again for the heads up.
Hmm, thanks for this. I too unsubscribed but when I checked my account it said that I was being charged through November (which must have been the month I renewed?) regardless. I don’t feel like fighting the portion of my fee between now and then but if others were having even more problems then maybe I should?
My thoughts for today are usually by persons whose birthdays are this day but I found one for a different date that fits this topic:
Modern Americans behave as if intelligence were some sort of hideous deformity. -Frank Zappa, guitarist, composer, and bandleader (21 Dec 1940-1993)
And their readers are heavily MAGA so the comments are no good either. They’re worse than the conservative WSJ, where there is a non-MAGA contingent.
Just a note for those who have not attended a Seder:
The “let’s eat” part was always important in my extended family. Taking a break from recounting the going out from slavery in Egypt and consuming the traditional symbols on a decorative Seder plate, we leisurely (as directed in tradition) enjoyed courses that always, over more than 70 years now, included hard boiled eggs (either whole or chopped in salty water), gefilte fish with horseradish, chicken soup with matzoh balls (and a traditional debate over whether they should be fluffy or like rocks), brisket, tzimas, mashed potatoes with schmaltz (melted chicken fat because you cannot have dairy butter with meat on a kosher table), roast chicken, and other stuff that I never got to because of the brisket and potatoes! And of course many desserts some of which taste a little funky because of restrictions on ingredients, but still make tasty memories.
Yes. We had the same meal! Sorry I didn’t see your response before writing my own. Let’s eat!
Very nice description of the symbolism of the seder plate but calling this plate a ‘meal’ is sort of like calling a communion wafer a snack. The seder plate is central to a ritual that includes re-telling the story of Passover through the reading of the Haggadah and stories and songs that go back hundreds of years. THEN we eat. I’m not a huge fan of Ashkenazic Passover foods (happily borrow from Sephardic and Mizrahi traditions) but even gefilte fish is delicious when prepared by good cooks — in my family, it’s fresh salmon or white fish hand-chopped with eggs, matzah meal and grated onion, spices, poached and served with a hollandaise-horseradish sauce. It’s absolutely nothing like the god-awful stuff that comes out of a can or jar! Happy Passover to all those who will be celebrating!
A couple of decades ago, my son Aaron and I took part in a community Seder by a curious, modernizing, “Progressive” group. Their rather odd Seder (and mostly vegan meal afterwards) is recounted at: https://krabarchive.com/ralphmag/CC/seder.html
“But these declines started earlier, around 2012, so the main cause is probably screen time”
Where are the screens?
Answer : in schools.
On loathesome “Chromebooks”^*. With Google Classroom. This means books are read as PDFs – until boredom sets in and looky looky at the icon on the toolbar – YouTube! Yes – even junk YouTube offerings. In schools.(chess dot com is blocked – and the students don’t need to learn typing – what a relief /sarcasm).
*Which means both in and out of schools. Hooray, now parents are sysadmin-wardens who can’t turn their backs.
#abolishChromebooks
/rant
Jonathan Haidt is making the best progress in this domain – starting first with phones/etc. A productive, scrupulous approach I hope will break education’s overarching screen dependence.
My daughter has a Chromebook (actually two, don’t ask). I don’t see Chromebooks as the problem. She uses her Chromebook for only for very school related activities. iPad’s are more (much more) the problem. She watches endless videos on her iPad’s. I am inclined to agree with you and Jonathan Haidt. The next generation is (to a degree) post-literate.
Making a plea for accuracy. The issue in the Kilmer Garcia deportation is that ICE was observing a previous judicial order that he not be deported ….until it deported him anyway, apparently by accident. Guilt has nothing to do with deportation. The original order barred him from being deported even if he had been convicted of a crime (respecting his claim to be at risk of being murdered.) So the Administration acted illegally in deporting him and now must attempt to get him back. Not because he was innocent but because he had a personal judicial exemption from being deported.
The Supreme Court decision has no bearing on the legality of any executive order or “general” order. It merely rebukes the Administration for it’s conduct in the case of this one deportee, as it should. If there had been no prior specific judicial order against his deportation, the Administration would have been within its power to deport him, as it has all the others.
Non-American foreign tourists visiting Canada occasionally stray over the border into the U.S., which of course they can do legally in much of Europe. When the U.S. Border Patrol arrests them they are detained to be deported to their home countries. Even if a friendly Border Patrol officer proposed to walk the tourist back into Canada, Canada would refuse to take her because under our law, a person cannot be admitted to Canada if she has entered another country illegally. So back to France or India she goes. The U.S. doesn’t have to put her before a judge first. It can, and does, detain her until it can arrange a flight.
Right you are.
Today is the anniversary of rebel forces firing on Fort Sumter.
And this week marks the 50th anniversary of the Khmer Rouge takeover of Phnom Penh. Thus began Year Zero and “Democratic Kampuchea” for four horrible years.
Most people know The Killing Fields movie which is broadly accurate, but the larger political story is very, very interesting on many levels.
We had a lot of Kampuchean refugees (as kids) in Australia in the 70s and 80s.
D.A.
NYC
I somewhere last night that ICE took down the add which said that they protested the border from ideas.
Good.
I believe the post they originally put out said “Intellectual Property”. The one with “Ideas” was fake, but it’s the one that spread. Either way, prima facie evidence that there is no way to distinguish truth from lies on social media.
And re Brooks “Civilization was fun while it lasted”, there’s a saying to the effect that if someone thinks maths is too complicated then they won’t like the real world. Well, if someone thinks truth and reality are too complicated then they really won’t like the resulting post-truth / postmodern / alternative-facts / opinion-based / gnostic one.
Denisovans in Taiwan would explain why New Guineans have one of the highest admixtures of Denisovan DNA – (my amateur, loudmouth guess from the armchair.)
This is a story worth watching though, fascinating stuff. Follow Razib Khan for more.
D.A.
NYC
I forwarded the link to Razib Khan who I know to a very (very) small extent
I am impressed, even by the small extent. He is one of my intellectual heroes.
D.A.
NYC
Trump’s faux Christian disengenous press secretary stated that “facilitate’ doesn’t mean ‘actuate’ so they can ignore the SCOTUS
The person is in the custody of a foreign country. The Supreme Court can not more order his return than can the Supreme Count change the value of Pi.
Anderson Cooper does not use any pronouns to introduce Grace. The claim that he ‘misgendered’ her/him/them is nonsense. Grace raised the pronoun issue. A very typical TRA obsession.
Incorrect. He did refer to Grace as “she” when introducing “them”. A perfectly reasonable assumption, mind you…
You beat me to it, Adrienne. Cooper said, “She is a local civil rights attorney, she’s a Democrat . . . . ”
And while I find Grace’s need to point out her preferred pronouns to be obnoxious, at least her tone when doing so was not strident.
And PCC(e) clipped off the last part of Nellie’s report:
“Call me old-fashioned, but if you are going to be a they/them, you have to put a little effort into it. You need to shave one side of your head or have a bull-ring piercing in your nose. Your name has to be Ari or Tex or T.J. You cannot just be a normal-looking woman with bangs and a name like Grace and then get mad that Boomer men don’t clock your nonbinary tea.”
Guilty as charged. I missed the ‘she’. Anderson Cooper should resign.
I thought you were going to say, “How did they know the Denisovan mandible was male?. . . It came with its pronouns attached. . . “
This made me LOL for real.
Free Press has always promoted a certain subset of right wing ideas. They always came thiiiiis close to promoting Covid denialism, for instance.
I see more supporters of RFK Jr and his kooky ideas in the comments at The Free Press than any other site I’ve visited.
Bari’s dissing of Fauci and the rest of the Biden public health crew who got us through what could have been a much, much worse pandemic puts her at, not close to covid denialism. Has she forgotten the overwhelmed state of so many hospitals early on? Does she not know that a person who claims a libertarian right to not get a vaccination condemns the elderly, immune compromised, and those who cannot take a shot for medical reasons to possible serious illness or death….and finally those likely to be most adversely affected by following something like Great Barrington too early are the poor and inner urban poor in particular. Maybe the administration was too conservative regarding keeping things closed and social spacing, but given the deadly uncertainties of this disease, conservative is the side I want to err on. There are no simple right answers in the back of the book for real life…and often even the right questions are unclear.
+1. Sometimes it’s worthwhile to roll the dice, but during a novel pandemic is not one of those times.
Jim, some of those arguments don’t apply in Covid vaccination. There is no evidence that Covid vaccination protected medically unvaccinatable elderly and immune-compromised through herd immunity. The concept is compelling only for children who can’t take replicating (“live”) virus vaccines like MMR. Because none of the Covid vaccines replicate, elderly and immune-compromised people can be (and were, and should be!) vaccinated for their own protection. There is no basis in Covid for the collective to enforce a “right” of herd immunity against the individual that would over-ride the right of everyone not to be forced to have medical treatment against his will. (This is not an extreme libertarian position. It’s basic medical ethics rooted in autonomy.) The collective can get itself vaccinated and protect itself that way.
Mandating that employers fire their workers who declined vaccination should have been done under an evidence-based herd-immunity argument, as when schools exclude children who aren’t vaccinated against measles and rubella. The only rationale offered during the Covid pandemic was that vaccination would reduce total number of cases and ease the strain on public resources. This might have been true early on but all the mutant strains were contagious despite vaccination against the Wuhan strain. Probably some infections were prevented entirely but conversely some patients with mild infections thanks to vaccination would be going out and about shedding instead of staying home with a more serious bout. We see this with influenza.
We just don’t know how many severe infections needing ICU were prevented with Covid vaccination. The two randomized trials published at the end of President Trump’s first term were powered to detect reduction in symptomatic infection, not severe illness or death. In I think 50,000 subjects in the two trials there was not a single death in subjects who got placebo (or vaccine.) Nursing home residents were excluded from both trials, as is typical for studies like this. You don’t want subjects who are likely to die of diseases other than the one you are investigating — it messes up the statistics.
(The state does have the power, in extremis to compel treatment for tuberculosis in an individual who refuses. Yet the state did not invoke that power during the pandemic with respect to Covid vaccination.)
What about one’s civic duty to protect hospitals from surges? Americans seem to beat themselves up for having overwhelmed hospitals due to low vaccination uptake. Yet Canada had repeated, broad, prolonged, crippling ICU surges in several provinces through 2021 despite vaccination rates exceeding 89% in adults over 35, rising further with age. Yes vaccination did decrease deaths in nursing home residents but outside nursing homes the case fatality is so low it’s difficult to detect a benefit, other than anecdotes. Our public health authorities persisted with efforts to “flatten the curve” with social and economic restrictions because they could see that vaccination, disappointingly, was not the magic bullet that would solve the ICU crisis. And then Omicron came along and the pandemic evaporated.
It’s blindingly true that most (not all) of the objections to Covid vaccines were based on nonsense. Yet those who refused vaccination on autonomous principle or because of disinformation were not “condemning” anyone else to serious illness or death. The most they were doing was akin to failing to take their pills for high blood pressure.
I have to say I don’t read the Free Press much anymore but if Bari Weiss is making the arguments against vaccine mandates as you describe, she’s not wrong.
“Covid hurt test scores.” Curious virus that must be. I would love to understand the viral pathogenesis underlying that effect.
Such nonsense. Cannot figure whether this is an example of it’s always Covid’s fault or it’s never the student’s or the K-12 system’s fault.
It’s an interesting language construct, removing any sense of human agency and avoiding an assessment of the inevitable trade-offs in how human beings chose to respond to the pandemic. People do something similar when they blame phones or social media for all manner of ailments rather than the conscious choices they make in how to use those phones or social media—or how they let their children use those phones and social media. It’s all a bit like Nixon’s widely caricatured “Mistakes were made.” (Never mind he didn’t say that, but close enough.) It absolves people of facing responsibility and asking whether they could do better.
A general-purpose non-apology, like Khrushchev re Stalin.
The Passover meal in the Maxwell House Haggadah is meager and symbolic, but any Seder worth its salt (and saltwater, and horseradish, etc.) also includes the unstated meal: chicken soup with knaidel, beef brisket, potatoes, wine, green beans, wine, Brussels Sprouts (just kidding), and wine.
My sister can get through the Seder service in about 45 seconds (secularism is a beautiful thing), after which she serves the soup. My late cousin Harold—who lived to be 100–took literally hours to get to the food. He was a former prison of war, so we gave him all the time he needed. But all the children in the family—my sisters and cousins—got hungry and cranky!
Same respect for elders’ age and experiences at our seders through the years. In later years I thought that first half might get shorter as some traditional readings were skipped, but then our host replaced them with some contemporary readings and the timing came out the same! I disliked contemporary stuff and discussions. But as our numbers decreased more, we focussed just on people’s favorite parts, often traditionally read in Hebrew, and eating came faster.
But I guess all in all I would have preferred to keep to our original, traditional haggadah service. I am a non practicing Jew but the traditional words and sounds seemed meaningful to me…just like I enjoy sacred christian music and vespers in old cathedrals.
I’ve been to many a Seder, some traditional (and too long), and some so short that they amounted to someone reading the four questions and calling it done. I love them all. They were (and are) a time to get together with family and friends, old and young. What has the most impact on me is—looking around the table at people from all walks of life—that we all share a collective history. Even those of us at the table who have never met before have a historical kinship. Everyone knows (or knows of) the Passover story. Everyone knows the four questions. And, everyone knows Chad Gadya.
A big +1 Norman!