Welcome to CaturSaturday, April 19, 2025 and National Garlic Day. What would we do without that particular bulb? There’s a yearly festival in Gilroy, California (in a big garlic-growing area), though the festival has been on hold since 2019 because of covid. It’s resuming this year. Here are scenes from the festival of a previous year. They even sell garlic ice cream!
It’s also Bicycle Day, Holy Saturday (tomorrow’s Easter), National Chicken Parmesan Day, and Rice Ball Day. Since it’s Caturday, you can make rice balls that are cat-shaped, like these from Grape Japan:
Da Nooz:
*Everybody’s excited about scientists finding “signs of life” on a planet 120 light-years away from Earth. Carl Zimmer writes about it in the NYT:
Now a team of researchers is offering what it contends is the strongest indication yet of extraterrestrial life, not in our solar system but on a massive planet, known as K2-18b, that orbits a star 120 light-years from Earth. A repeated analysis of the exoplanet’s atmosphere suggests an abundance of a molecule that on Earth has only one known source: living organisms such as marine algae.
“It is in no one’s interest to claim prematurely that we have detected life,” said Nikku Madhusudhan, an astronomer at the University of Cambridge and an author of the new study, at a news conference on Tuesday. Still, he said, the best explanation for his group’s observations is that K2-18b is covered with a warm ocean, brimming with life.
“This is a revolutionary moment,” Dr. Madhusudhan said. “It’s the first time humanity has seen potential biosignatures on a habitable planet.”
The study was published Wednesday in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. Other researchers called it an exciting, thought-provoking first step to making sense of what’s on K2-18b. But they were reluctant to draw grand conclusions.
“It’s not nothing,” said Stephen Schmidt, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University. “It’s a hint. But we cannot conclude it’s habitable yet.”
I find it amazing how scientists can detect what’s in the atmosphere of a planet so far away. But they can!
These planets, known as sub-Neptunes, are much bigger than the rocky planets in our inner solar system, but smaller than Neptune and other gas-dominated planets of the outer solar system.
In 2021, Dr. Madhusudhan and his colleagues proposed that sub-Neptunes were covered with warm oceans of water and wrapped in atmospheres containing hydrogen, methane and other carbon compounds. To describe these strange planets, they coined a new term, “Hycean,” from a combination of the words “hydrogen” and “ocean.”
The launch of the James Webb Space Telescope in December 2021 allowed astronomers a closer look at sub-Neptunes and other distant planets.
As an exoplanet passes in front of its host star, its atmosphere, if it has one, is illuminated. Its gases change the color of the starlight that reaches the Webb telescope. By analyzing these changing wavelengths, scientists can infer the chemical composition of the atmosphere.
While inspecting K2-18b, Dr. Madhusudhan and his colleagues discovered it had many of the molecules they had predicted a Hycean planet would possess. In 2023, they reported they had also detected faint hints of another molecule, and one of huge potential importance: dimethyl sulfide, which is made of sulfur, carbon, and hydrogen.
On Earth, the only known source of dimethyl sulfide is life.
. . .No matter how the scientists revisited their readings, the signal stayed strong. They concluded that K2-18b may in fact harbor a tremendous supply of dimethyl sulfide in its atmosphere, thousands of times higher than the level found on Earth. This would suggest that its Hycean seas are brimming with life.
Other researchers emphasized that much research remained to be done. One question yet to be resolved is whether K2-18b is in fact a habitable, Hycean world as Dr. Madhusudhan’s team claims.
In a paper posted online Sunday, Dr. Glein and his colleagues argued that K2-18b could instead be a massive hunk of rock with a magma ocean and a thick, scorching hydrogen atmosphere — hardly conducive to life as we know it.
This is a very good article, with all the proper caveats and interviews with critics. Zimmer remains one of our very best science journalists.
*Bigwigs in Hezbollah terrorists are fleeing Lebanon and heading to South America like rats on a sinking ship.
The Saudi Al-Hadath channel reports that 400 field commanders from Hezbollah recently left Lebanon along with their families and relocated to South American countries such as Venezuela, Ecuador, Colombia, and Brazil, citing a source at the Argentine embassy in Lebanon.
This move is due to concerns about being monitored as part of the dismantling of Hezbollah’s military infrastructure following the ceasefire agreement with Israel in November.
There is no official confirmation of the report from any official Lebanese source or Hezbollah.
Hezbollah has ties in South America with criminal organizations, particularly around drug trafficking, which constitutes part of the organization’s income.
This may well be end for Hezbollah. First of all, somebody had to order these commanders out of Lebanon. Second, although there are many more foot soldiers in Hezbollah than 400, these are commanders. Third, they could be scared, as every day Israel takes out one or a few Hezbollah commanders, so they may have fled seeing that the end was coming. Finally, the other day the Lebanese government took down every sign or flag of Hezbollah in Beirut. This is all unprecedented, and very good news. Perhaps Lebanon can return to the lovely country it once was.
*The U.S. has (sort of) been trying to broken a peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia, but those efforts may well stop very soon. Remember that Trump said he’d end that war on DAY ONE of his new administration. Well, it’s DAY 89 and we have bupkes. If the war goes on, I fear Ukraine will be swallowed by Putin:
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the U.S. would pause its efforts to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine if progress isn’t made in the coming days, in an attempt to put pressure on Kyiv and Moscow to compromise.
“So we need to determine very quickly now, and I’m talking about a matter of days, whether or not this is doable in the next few weeks,” Rubio said after talks Thursday with European and Ukrainian officials. “If it is, we’re in. If it’s not, then we have other priorities to focus on.”
Rubio said the U.S. has presented a framework for a deal to the two sides and to Europeans on how the war might be ended, including a cease-fire, but hasn’t said publicly what it entails. Separately late Thursday, Ukraine and the U.S. took a step toward a broader economic agreement that has proved a major source of contention in relations by signing a memorandum.
Rubio’s warning comes as France has announced a meeting to be held in London next week with U.S., Ukrainian and European officials to try to advance the talks. Rubio said he was open to attending that session if it was clear that headway could be made.
Asked about Rubio’s comments, President Trump said Friday that his patience with the stalled diplomatic process could end “very shortly.”
“If for some reason, one of the two parties makes it very difficult, we’re just going to say ‘You’re foolish, you’re fools, you’re horrible people,’ and we’re going to just take a pass, but hopefully we won’t have to do that,” he said in the Oval Office.
. . . . Ukraine said that it is prepared to impose a comprehensive cease-fire if Russia also agrees. The Kremlin has balked at accepting a cease-fire and has insisted that the “root causes” of the conflict be addressed.
The “root causes” of the conflict are that Russia wants Lebensraum. And Trump’s claim that Ukraine started the war is one of the stupidest things he’s ever said (and that’s among a whole lot of stupid things). I feel sorry for Ukraine, its inhabitats, and Zelensky, who don’t want no stinking Russian takeover.
*As always, I’ll steal three items from the Free Press’s weekly news summar. The bad news is that it’s coauthored today by Sean Fischer AND Nellie Bowles, and isn’t nearly as good as if Nellie did it herself. Go read “TGIF: Homegrown Criminals” and see for yourself. “TGIF” has become the main reason I subscribe to the Free Press, and if Nellie starts coauthoring the column with others, or even leaving it, I’ll unsubscribe. Here are three, and these are among the best ones I found. They pretty much suck.
→ A nonviolent child sacrifice altar: Archeologists found an alarming new child sacrifice altar in Guatemala—and the remains of young children from at least 1,500 years ago were ceremonially placed around it. Many cultures practiced child sacrifice, so I’m certainly not going to single out Guatemala here, but people cannot grok that non-white cultures might be legitimately violent. Like, of course Vikings did bad things, but we’re supposed to accept that ancient Guatemalans all lived in peace, in a gentle land of songs and tradition. It is so important for the narrative that all violence in the Americas came from Christopher Columbus. And so we must explain away the baby killing. Here is the expert CBS News called last week to explain this gnarly discovery: “It was a practice; it’s not that they were violent, it was their way of connecting with the celestial bodies.”
Not violent. Just their way of connecting with the celestial bodies.
→ Trump’s not-at-all-strange annual physical: Trump’s physician declared the president is “fully fit” for office, citing his “frequent victories” on the golf course as evidence of his vitality. The doctor’s memorandum, however, misspelled a conspicuous word: scarring. Trump’s doctor made sure to note the bullet wound and scarring around Trump’s ear: “Examination of the head, ears, nose, and throat revealed no significant abnormalities with the exception of scaring [sic] on the right ear from a gunshot wound.”
After the physical, Trump told reporters on Air Force One how well it went. “I felt I was in very good health, I was in very good shape. Good heart, a good soul,” he said. I assume he misheard “scoliosis?”
→ We are all Elon’s children: The Wall Street Journal ran a piece this week detailing Musk’s paternity strategy and, well, it’s as creepy as you probably imagined. Tactics reportedly involve recruiting potential mothers on social media and offering millions in exchange for silence, with Musk saying the quiet part out loud: He wants to build a “legion” of offspring. WSJ reported texts Musk sent to conservative influencer and baby mama Ashley St. Clair, in which he wrote: “To reach legion-level before the apocalypse, we will need to use surrogates.” One day in the future, some centuries from now, we’ll find out that 1 in 10 adults are descended from Elon Musk. He’s our modern-day Genghis Khan, generously spilling his seed all across the West. Part of me is sad that our descendants will have his original hairline. But these are the sacrifices we must make for civilization.
Well, yes, there’s news there, but the treatment is not funny–not Nellie-like at all. If she’s not back soon, I’m canceling my subscription (seriously).
And are lots of critical comments demanding that Nellie return to the whole thing (I even left a comment). Here are three:
*The American interloper who visited a remote but inhabited Indian island, trying to make contact with its reclusive and hostile inhabitants, remains in custody after he was arrested more than two weeks ago:
A 24-year-old American YouTuber who was arrested after visiting an off-limits island in the Indian Ocean with hopes of establishing contact with a reclusive tribe was further detained in custody on Thursday.
Mykhailo Viktorovych Polyakov will next appear before a local court in Port Blair — the capital of India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands — on April 29, police said.
Polyakov, from Scottsdale, Arizona, was arrested on March 31, two days after he set foot on the restricted territory of North Sentinel Island in a bid to meet people from the reclusive Sentinelese tribe.
He left a can of Diet Coke and a coconut as offering for the tribe this time after he failed to contact the Sentinelese. He shot a video of the island on his camera and collected some sand samples before returning to his boat.
“It may be claimed to be an adventure trip, but the fact is that there has been a violation of Indian laws. Outsiders meeting Sentinelese could endanger the tribe’s survival,” said a senior police officer, requesting anonymity as he isn’t authorized to speak about the case under investigation.
Polyakov is suspected of violating Indian laws that carry a possible sentence of up to five years in prison and a fine.
The Island is North Sentinel Island, and is quite dangerous to visit. This is from 2018:
For thousands of years, the people of North Sentinel Island have been isolated from the rest of the world.
They use spears and bows and arrows to hunt the animals that roam the small, heavily forested island, and gather plants to eat and to fashion into homes. Their closest neighbors live more than 50 kilometers (30 miles) away. Deeply suspicious of outsiders, they attack anyone who comes through the surf and onto their beaches.
Police say that is what happened last week when a young American, John Allen Chau, was killed by islanders after paying fishermen to take him to the island.
“The Sentinelese want to be left alone,” said the anthropologist Anup Kapur.
Here’s North Sentinel Island below a Wikipedia description of it:
North Sentinel Island is one of the Andaman Islands, an Indian archipelago in the Bay of Bengal which also includes South Sentinel Island.[8] The island is a protected area of India. It is home to the Sentinelese, an indigenous tribe in voluntary isolation who have defended, often by force, their protected isolation from the outside world. The island is about eight kilometres (five miles) long and seven kilometres (4+1⁄2 miles) wide, and its area is approximately 60 square kilometres (23 sq mi).
The Andaman and Nicobar Islands Protection of Aboriginal Tribes Regulation 1956 prohibits travel to the island and any approach closer than five nautical miles (nine kilometres), in order to protect the remaining tribal community from “mainland” infectious diseases against which they likely have no acquired immunity. The area is patrolled by the Indian Navy.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is becoming a feline Proust. Look how pensive she is!
Hili: Where does past time disappear?A: In the abyss of ephemeral memory.
Hili: Gdzie znika czas przeszły?Ja: W otchłani ulotnej pamięci.
*******************
From Now That’s Wild:
From America’s Cultural Decline Into Idiocy:
From Animal Antics: another painter who can’t do cats:
Masih has gone quiet, but here’s a tweet posted by J. K. Rowling:
“Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual is not hate speech.”
“Yes, it is.”
And there you have it. Just park your car with a rainbow LGB sticker in Bernal Heights, a San Francisco neighborhood of “Be Kind,” and watch the homophobia come roaring out.
🧵 The Sticker Wars of Bernal Heights pic.twitter.com/nULdVByG9W
— WomenAreReal (@WomenAreReals) April 18, 2025
From Malcolm: a cat doing a graceful back flip while trying to catch a toy (there’s music):
Cat doing backflip 😱 pic.twitter.com/LqmeZoLG1Q
— No Context Cats (@nocontextscats) April 8, 2025
From Luana: a policy change after the recent UK Supreme Court ruling on sex:
🚨BREAKING: British Transport Police announce that trans officers will no longer be allowed to strip search members of the opposite sex following Supreme Court ruling.
THE WORLD IS HEALING.
THIS SHOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN ALLOWED. pic.twitter.com/r3ozyvEycU
— Hazel Appleyard (@HazelAppleyard_) April 17, 2025
Two from my feed, First, LOOK AT THESE BABY CHEETAHS! And turn the sound on to hear their noises (and Mom’s):
Cheetah introduces a photographer to her little Cheetos pic.twitter.com/q5R7ok6hUH
— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) April 17, 2025
This makes me tear up. I hope that that lion is able to run free somewhere. Sound up:
Rescued Lioness steps on grass for the first time. pic.twitter.com/mJzLb6zgwd
— The Figen (@TheFigen_) April 17, 2025
From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted.
A 27-year-old Czech Jew. He probably died on an evacuation "death march" not long before liberation.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-04-19T09:50:31.885Z
Two posts from Dr. Cobb. Yesterday was the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere’s Ride, and they’ve projected slogans on the Old North Church, where, in 1775, lanterns were used to warn of the approach of British troops.
— NorthEnd.page (@northendpage.bsky.social) 2025-04-18T02:16:43.794Z
Amazing bionic hands! Watch the ten-minute video below to see how the movements of her prosthetic hands are controlled by her woman’s brain—by thinking—which send signals to some of the muscles in her arms.
HOLY SHIT! This might be the coolest thing ever.
— Alex Kanaris-Sotiriou (@kanaratron.bsky.social) 2025-04-17T08:10:39.510Z
Here’s the full video:
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. -Fred Brooks, computer scientist (19 Apr 1931-2022)
Two comments:
I cancelled my paid subscription to TFP last week based on the MAGA drift I have seen it take. As pointed out here this morning even Nellie is contracting out TGIF and it sucks. Comments by TGIF readers are right on target, but I do not think that Bari Inc really cares. Another meteor that shined bright for awhile and brought us some light, but is no more.
As a heads up to space geeks…U.S. astronaut Don Pettit and two Russian cosmonauts are scheduled to return from the ISS to Earth today. Undocking their Russian Soyuz capsule from a port on the Russian module at 5:57pm edt and landing on Steppes in Kazakhstan about 3.5 hours later (9:20pm EDT). Though still April 19 in the US, It will be April 20 at 6:20 am local time when Don lands which is his 70th birthday. He can then celebrate again a few hours later when his Nasa transport lands him back home in the U.S. and it is april 20 here! Happy birthday Don! It should be daylight at landing site and it is always interesting to watch how the Russian recovery crews extract and reacclimatize long duration space mission returnees on big barcaloungers. Full coverage and info should be at space.com at url https://www.space.com/space-exploration/international-space-station/watch-nasa-astronaut-don-pettit-and-2-cosmonauts-return-to-earth-today
Thanks for the updates, Jim, always interesting. You’re our resident “Starman”*
D.A.
NYC
*See David Bowie song of the same name, mid 1970s.
I rather wonder if living/nonliving is really a clear binary. You certainly can’t get biologists to agree about whether viruses should be regarded as alive. I go for Racanielo’s view that a virion is not alive, but it kind of springs to life after it invades a cell and starts doing its thing. What about prions? I’m not aware that any biologists regard prions as living, but they do replicate in that they catalyze normal proteins to assume their shape.
Perhaps life is a bit like pornography. I.e. I can’t say what it is, but I know it when I see it.
I always had a fantasy that in the distant future people would travel to planets orbiting distant stars. On some such planet scientists would discover extremely complex organic chemistry with interesting energetic and entropic properties and molecules replicating. The scientists would scratch their heads and say, “What the hell is that? It’s sort of alive, but not really, what the hell is it?
We suffer from the old problem of categories. We need categories to organize our thinking and our knowledge, or what we think is knowledge, of the world. But then we feel impelled to shoehorn phenomena into our preestablished categories in ways that are not helpful to understand the reality.
I have not heard of a biologist who would conclude that viruses are alive, but they readily admit that they have life-like properties. The broader subject of ‘what is life?’ is something of great interest to me. A pretty common approach is to describe the several attributes of life, such as having the ability to assimilate environmental energy and materials to self-assemble a body, reproduction, having a ‘replicator’ (like DNA), and there are several other items. These attributes then become a definition of life, although the definition then becomes pretty cumbersome.
The interesting part comes by pointing out that many non-living things have some of the properties of life. Fire and growing crystals, for example, are life-like in several respects, but they don’t have a replicator. Viruses are also life-like in that they have self-assembly and they do reproduce thru a replicator. But none of these have all of the attributes of life and so they are not quite alive.
But isn’t it interesting that these and many other things come close to being alive? So life itself is one of many things that are life-like, and so life is not entirely unique.
Fire can certainly replicate, which is why we have firemen.
If there were a clear-cut divide between “life” and “non-life” then that would make abiogenesis very difficult, having to leap across a canyon, so perhaps our presence owes to there not being any sharp divide.
Maybe life as we think of it doesn’t actually exist?
And just like that, we’ve got the justification for the remake of The Crawling Hand.
I immediately thought of “Thing” in The Addams Family.
I am finding the discovery of significant levels of dimethyl sulfide on a distant planet to be pretty exciting as a possible indicator of life. What little I know is that it is a by-product of some photosynthetic bacteria. Photosynthesis looks to have evolved multiple times here. I don’t have a sense for how unlikely it would be to make without life, but the high levels does weigh in its favor for being from life. Even if made a-biotically, how could one explain the high levels?
What would really bring me over the top would be the finding of high levels of oxygen gas (O2). That is a product of oxygenic photosynthesis, and O2 is not stable in most situations so elevated levels, like here on earth, can only come from life.
Me too, Mark.
Are there any modern (post-primordial) abiotic processes that would consume new oxygen and prevent its rising to detectable concentrations? Even what dissolves in water is in equilibrium with the gas phase adjacent. All the iron and other metals created at the Big Bang would have long since oxidized into the mineral ores we find today, so perhaps it would be effectively stable, lacking fresh substrate for rusting, until aerobic life evolved. The sad part would be if oxidative stress from rising oxygen concentrations killed off the struggling photosynthetic organisms before later life forms had discovered the trick of oxidative phosphorylation and a way to purge oxygen free-radicals.
In any event, finding gaseous oxygen on an exoplanet would be the most stunning discovery since Galileo saw the first four moons of Jupiter or, since this is a biology website, since Leeuwenhoek discovered small motile gametes.
It would be exciting to discover extraterrestrial life, but I’m not getting my hopes up until we have more information. Remember the Martian tube worms?
Just a quibble that the Big Bang only produced hydrogen, helium and a few traces of other light isotopes. Iron and similar metals are created in the cores of massive stars.
Humble thanks to you for that.
I note that not all metals can be produced by stars going nova. Recent thought has it that gold and other heavy metals can only be produced during the collision of neutron stars.
Here is what google gemini has to say about it.
Now I’m glad I made a mistake there. I would have never had reason to stumble on this otherwise. I did have some vague idea that elements heavier than iron were different from iron and lighter.
Thanks, too.
I note that not all metals can be produced by stars going nova. Recent thought has it that gold and other heavy metals can only be produced during the collision of neutron stars.
Here is what google gemini has to say about it.
P.S. Sorry if this is a double post. I claim/blame medically induced brain-fog.
I think you meant light elements, not light isotopes. I presume you are referring to the Alpher–Bethe–Gamow paper.
I lost all confidence that life exists anywhere in the observable universe outside of the Earth when I read this paper by a respected molecular biologist:
https://biologydirect.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1745-6150-2-15
This paper does the math and shows that the odds of life originating even once in the observable universe are beyond minuscule.*
So, looking at the relative probabilities, the probability that this signature is abiotic in origin is oodles of orders of magnitude greater than the probability that life ever evolved on the planet. And since that will be equally true for every planet with a potential biosignature, such discoveries will never raise my hopes, no matter how many there are – and I say that as somebody who would die and go to heaven if proof of alien life was ever found.
*I feel like I have to pre-emptively defend the author by saying that he is emphatically not a creationist. In fact, he wrote the paper to show that even though the probability of OoL in the observable universe is smaller than small, its probability rises to near certainty in the inflationary universe that is theorized to exist by cosmologists today. In other words, the paper provides a possible explanation for how OoL is possible that completely obviates the supposed need to resort to a deity. (As an aside, I really wish that more scientists in the field or OoL would be like Koonin and acknowledge that OoL is incredibly improbable, instead of dishonestly minimizing or denying the problem out of fear of bolstering the claims of creationists.)
I’m always rather sceptical when any one speaks or writes concerning the probability of life arising on earth or elsewhere in the universe, whether they are optimistic or pessimistic. And this for the simple reason that we still have practically no bloody idea of how life got started in our own little puddle, so that calculating the odds is a somewhat futile exercise.
Life on Earth did not have to start from scratch, however. The following “building blocks” of life have been found off-planet and in meteorites.
aminio acid glycine
adenine
guanine
cytosine
uracil
ribose
water
Of course.
Now try to calculate the probability of life arising, even just here on earth. Since we have no idea how these organic and inorganic materials made the huge leap from non-living to self-replicating, energy using/producing organisms, there is no way to sensibly calculate its likelihood.
In other words, given let’s say one billion early earths and one billion years run time, how many times will life have arisen? Once? 100 times? A billion times? We have essentially not the slightest clue.
(Need I mention that I am not a creationist and that I do not believe in any gods, ghosts, ghouls, goblins, djinns, gnomes or genies?)
ISTM the prior probability P that abiotic processes in general might produce some life is absolutely irrelevant for any P>0. That is, it should not surprise us that even a teeny-weeny chance would suffice, without needing any speculative crutches such as creators or multiverses. We’re here, it’s clear; and if we weren’t there would be no-one to be surprised or disappointed about that. This is the Weak Anthropic Principle, which applies to all sorts of “fine-tuning” style arguments.
The relevant surprise for very low P would be how did we get so lucky? That one’s well above my pay grade.
Re the paper claiming that K2-18b having atmospheric dimethyl sulfide thousands of times higher than the level found on Earth would suggest that its seas are brimming with life: this smells like hype (maybe like the foul smell of concentrated DMS). DMS reacts strongly, even explosively, with O₂; so the “thousands of times” should be viewed as K2-18b having some measurable DMS and Earth having very much less.
Still, very impressive observational work. And I too am holding out for O₂ or O₃ or some other unstable reactant.
I’m unimpressed by Hezb’s alleged move to South America though it it true there is a HUGE Lebanese population there. They do well there and are peaceful and respected.
There’s also Hezb and that party’s criminal links include some drugs and a large stolen car racket where the cars are resold in West Africa where, until lately, nearly the entire business communities are Lebanese. (Now Chinese and Lebanese).
BUT… even if some Hezb big wigs flee Lebanon like rats: within the Shia population there (the poorest in Lebanon) the party has near 100% support.
And remember if they were more organized they were all ready to invade Nth Israel from Lebanese tunnels on Oct 7. The IDF showed all this to the media last year – terrifying. After that discovery they whacked Nasrallah.
——-
On the ever fascinating Nicobar Island, I’d read that Google.maps cut up and rearrange their pics of the island to confuse would be trespassers (don’t know if this is true but it seems like a good idea).
D.A.
NYC
This could indeed be it! Life somewhere other than Earth. This is exactly how we would expect to discover extraterrestrial life. It won’t be little green men landing on Earth. It won’t be unidentified flying objects that we can’t explain. It won’t be a radio communication from a distant galaxy. It will be the chemical signature of an atmosphere demonstrating the chemistry of life, most likely simple life. As I say, this could be it!
On to the earthly war in Ukraine. I find it very interesting that Trump is talking about walking away from the negotiating table. It seems to me that we’ve seen similar things before—where Trump loses patience or loses interest and then walks away or backs down. He lacks follow-through. I wonder if this sort of impatience is a manifestation of his disordered personality. We’ll see if Marco Rubio can convince Trump to stay at the table. (Or maybe Rubio thinks we should walk away, too.)
I expect President Trump to continue to initiate actions, but then lose interest and move on to the next shiny object. His short attention span my be a good thing in the long run as it may limit the damage he can cause.
Musk’s creepy parental strategy reminds me of the idea in the movie “The boys from Rio”, wherein Gregory Peck played the villain Dr Mengele. The story revolved around a plan to implant Hitler’s semen into women in all sorts of countries, all of whom would then bear baby Adolphs. That’s creepy!
The Boys from Brazil, starring Gregory Peck, Laurence Olivier, and James Mason. Very creepy indeed. I think I’ll watch it again soon.
Based on the novel by the late, great Ira Levin!
No Caturday today?
The Battles of Lexington and Concord, which started the American Revolution, were 250 years ago today.
Think about this before deciding whether viruses are alive or not: you are to be injected with a vial of rabies virus – would you prefer it first be heavily irradiated?
I also hope Lebanon returns to its former stability. At one time, part of my family lived in Lebanon. My cousin was even a stewardess for MEA at one time. Sadly, Lebanon has been beset with woes in recent years. One of the largest explosions in history was in Lebanon and it wasn’t terrorism.
Not sure where to put this, but here’s my favorite Jewish joke:
A man came up to a Jew on the street and shouted “SWINE”! the Jew bowed and replied “Goldberg”.