Today may be a short dialogue as yesterday I had to go to the dentist, eliminating the afternoon time I devote to the next day’s Hili. (Note: I succeeded in producing a normal Hili!)
But anyway, welcome to a hump day (“Húfudagur” in Icelandic): Wednesday, July 30, 2025, with one more day to go until the dreaded month of August. However, today is National Cheesecake Day. Here’s how Junior’s serves it (when she was alive, my mom would send me an entire Junior’s Cheesecake on my birthday.) This lucky woman tried them all!
It’s also World Snorkeling Day, Paperback Book Day, and Father-in-Law Day.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the July 30 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Breaking news: A tsunami caused by one of the biggest earthquakes known to humans is about to reach the U.S. Fortunately, no catastrophic damage is foreseen.
Tsunami waves began to reach the U.S. West Coast early Wednesday morning as the effects of an 8.8-magnitude earthquake, one of the largest ever recorded, were felt in nations on both sides of the Pacific. Waves as high as 5.7 feet above normal washed onto Hawaii, though officials said the threat of widespread destruction there had passed.
The tsunami was moving down the California coast, where just before 2 a.m. Pacific a surge of 3.6 feet was detected in Crescent City, a low-lying northern community near the Oregon state line. Authorities closed some of California’s beaches, docks and harbors, warning of strong and dangerous currents.
There were no immediate reports of major casualties, but forecasters warned that the first waves to arrive may not be the largest, and that higher waters could return several times in the next 24 hours.
Experts said the earthquake, which struck off Russia’s Far East early Wednesday, could be the sixth largest on record. It prompted tsunami warnings and evacuations in Hawaii, Alaska, California, Russia and Japan, leaving millions anxiously awaiting waves that forecasters said could approach 10 feet in places. In Hawaii and Russia, however, the worst fears did not appear to be realized.
*In an incident rare in NYC, a gunman in killed four people before turning the gun on himself. The shooter was apparently targeting the National Football League, but also had a brain disease:
Investigators on Tuesday were focusing on whether a gunman had been targeting the headquarters of the National Football League when he burst into an office tower in Midtown Manhattan and killed four people, including a police officer, in a rare episode of deadly mass violence in the city.
Mayor Eric Adams said on Tuesday morning that the authorities “have reason to believe that he was focused on the N.F.L.,” which has offices at the tower, 345 Park Avenue. A three-page note found on the gunman mentioned the league, as well as claims that the man had suffered from the degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., from playing football, the police said. It asks that his brain be examined for signs of C.T.E. and accuses the league of concealing the dangers of the game.
An employee of the N.F.L. was “seriously injured” in the shooting on Monday evening and was in stable condition, according to a statement from Roger Goodell, the league’s commissioner.
Mr. Adams said that investigators believe the gunman entered an elevator bank at 345 Park Avenue that did not have access to the N.FL.’s offices, so he instead traveled to offices of Rudin Management, which owns the tower. The man was later found dead there, on the 33rd floor.
The New York City police officer, Didarul Islam, 36, who was working off duty as a security guard, was the first person shot by the gunman when he entered the lobby of the building at 6:28 p.m., according to Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch. A woman killed in the shooting was identified on Tuesday as Wesley LePatner, an executive at the investment firm Blackstone, which also has offices in the tower. The authorities have not identified the other victims.
Ms. Tisch identified the gunman as Shane Devon Tamura, 27, of Las Vegas. In recent days, he drove from Nevada to Manhattan, where he abandoned his car moments before entering the building, Ms. Tisch said.
One issue, which is now moot, is what kind of charges Tamura would have faced had he lived, given that his brain was injured. That may have been the motive, but it also implies that, perhaps like the Texas shooter Charles Whitman, Tisch woule be found “not guilty by reason of insanity”. (He would have of course been confined in a mental hospital.) However, this is true of all crimes: our brains made them do the crimes, and they had no choice. This realization should inform our justice system.
*The WSJ describes how the advent of AI is wrecking an already precarious job market for recent college grads:
What do you hire a 22-year-old college graduate for these days?
For a growing number of bosses, the answer is not much—AI can do the work instead.
At Chicago recruiting firm Hirewell, marketing agency clients have all but stopped requesting entry-level staff—young grads once in high demand but whose work is now a “home run” for AI, the firm’s chief growth officer said. Dating app Grindr is hiring more seasoned engineers, forgoing some junior coders straight out of school, and CEO George Arison said companies are “going to need less and less people at the bottom.”
Bill Balderaz, CEO of Columbus-based consulting firm Futurety, said he decided not to hire a summer intern this year, opting to run social-media copy through ChatGPT instead.
Balderaz has urged his own kids to focus on jobs that require people skills and can’t easily be automated. One is becoming a police officer.
Having a good job “guaranteed” after college, he said, “I don’t think that’s an absolute truth today any more.”
For the Class of 2023, participation in the labor force declined in the first year after graduation, a deviation from typical patterns.
There’s long been an unwritten covenant between companies and new graduates: Entry-level employees, young and hungry, are willing to work hard for lower pay. Employers, in turn, provide training and experience to give young professionals a foothold in the job market, seeding the workforce of tomorrow.
A yearslong white-collar hiring slump and recession worries have weakened that contract. Artificial intelligence now threatens to break it completely.
That is ominous for college graduates looking for starter jobs, but also potentially a fundamental realignment in how the workforce is structured. As companies hire and train fewer young people, they may also be shrinking the pool of workers that will be ready to take on more responsibility in five or 10 years. Companies say they are already rethinking how to develop the next generation of talent.
*Shades of the First Amendment! Reader Barry contributed a link to a new WaPo article, “Trump administration urges federal employees to talk religion at work” (archived here).
“Allowing religious discrimination in the Federal workplace violates the law,” Kupor said in the memo. “It also threatens to adversely impact recruitment and retention of highly-qualified employees of faith.”
Although the core of OPM’s guidance on religious expression differs little from past administrations, it “presents a substantial shift in that it encourages employees to express their religious beliefs in the workplace,” said Stefanie Camfield, associate general counsel and director of human resource services at Engage PEO.
Historically, Camfield said, employers have been advised to keep religious conversation at work to a minimum, noting that “the more religion is allowed into the workplace, the more likely it is that differences of opinion are raised.”
“In the current political environment, these types of differences have a way of turning into arguments,” Camfield said. “In some cases, it leads to outright hostility, which makes it more likely that an emplo
If it causes divisiveness, Trump’s for it. As the article notes, this stuff was already legal, but now it’s encouraged. And I’m wondering if this isn’t really a violation of the First Amendment, because religious chitchat is not related to the job, but there is no encouragement of nonreligious chitchat. Further, there’s no encouragement for people to talk about atheism at work, and atheism sort of fits in there with religion, as it’s a form of nonbelief. Regardless, this is an attempt by the government to increase religiosity.
*This comes from Greg Mayer, and I quote his submission in full:
So, irony of ironies, it turns out that the NY Times’ February puff piece on Felisa Wolfe-Simon is what drove Science to retract the paper. [JAC: The NYT puff piece on the “arsenic life” paper is here, and I wrote about it here.]
Money quote:
Then last year, Science’s stance shifted. A reporter contacted Science for a New York Times article about the legacy of the #arseniclife affair.
That inquiry “convinced us that this saga wasn’t over, that unless we wanted to keep talking about it forever, we probably ought to do some things to try to wind it down,” said Holden Thorp, editor in chief of Science since 2019. “And so that’s when I started talking to the authors about retracting.”
The “reporter” in the quote is almost certainly Sarah Scholes, the author of both the February puff piece and the article quoted above on retraction, referring to herself in the third person. (No other Times reporter is credited with additional reporting in either article.)
So, instead of rehabilitating Wolfe-Simon, the reporter got the paper retracted and her name dragged through the mud again.
*As one of the solutions to the problem of transgender people wanting to participate in sports, I suggested that while trans-identified men should be prohibited from competing in women’s sports (and they largely have now), I also suggested that trans-identified women, or others not fitting the “biological woman” category, should compete in men’s sports. But I forgot a very important issue, and one that Colin Wright discusses in a new piece on his Substack, “Keep men out of women’s sports—and women out of men’s.” It’s the issue of biological women who identify as men having a higher susceptibility to injury when playing in a men’s league. A quote:
Despite its name, Nebraska’s Stand With Women Act, signed into law on June 4, 2025, does not actually establish sex-based categories for sports. While the Act bans males from participating in women’s school and university athletics, it does not prohibit female students from joining male teams.
For an interscholastic athletic team or sport sponsored by a public school, a private school whose students or teams compete against a public school in an interscholastic sport, or a private school that is a member of an athletic association…a team or sport designated for females, women, or girls shall not be open to a male student…a team or sport designated for males, men, or boys shall not be open to a female student unless there is no female team offered or available for such sport for such female student. [italics added]
My aim here is to highlight the problems with the asymmetrical structure of Nebraska’s Stand With Women Act.
A few issues:
Inconsistent philosophy on injury risk:
A commonly cited justification for excluding men from women’s sports is the increased risk of injury to female athletes. However, Nebraska’s Stand With Women Act permits girls and women to participate in boys’ and men’s sports. This creates a logical inconsistency. If the presence of a male athlete in a women’s event raises safety concerns, why wouldn’t a female athlete competing against a full team of male athletes pose an even greater risk to herself? All else equal, a woman is more likely to be injured competing against a team of males than against a team of females that includes just one male participant.
. . . Male spaces
Even if girls and women have no natural performance advantages over boys and men, that would still not justify allowing females to compete in the male category of sport. Boys and men ought to be entitled to male-only spaces for the same ethical and social reasons that girls and women ought to be entitled to female-only spaces.
Yet the Stand With Women Act is oddly inconsistent on this point. On the one hand, it asserts a principle of sex-based exclusivity: “a team or sport designated for males, men, or boys shall not be open to a female student.” This language implies that there was some absolute ethical principle guiding the decision to preserve male-only categories. But the Act immediately undermines this principle by including a carveout: a female student may join a boys’ or men’s team if no equivalent female team is available. In other words, the right of males to their own spaces is conditional, while the right of females to theirs is absolute.
. . . . Preferential treatment and its consequences
Another important concern with allowing girls and women to participate in boys’ and men’s sports is the issue of differential treatment—particularly the burden it places on male athletes to alter their playing behaviors to accommodate female athletes. This is not just a matter of etiquette; it introduces ethical, psychological, and practical conflicts on and off the field.
In a recent conversation I had with Dan Romand from Men Need to Be Heard, he shared a story from his high school football days that illustrates the problem well (story begins at 27:25). Dan’s team included a girl on the roster. Dan played offensive lineman and the girl played linebacker. Dan recalled a play in practice where he was the lead blocker for the running back. His assigned blocking target was the linebacker (i.e., the girl). Dan knew that he would have “erased her” if he hit her with his full capacity. So instead, he held back to avoid injuring her.
Why should Dan—or any other male athlete—be put in that position? Why should a male athlete be forced to choose between his natural instincts—to protect, respect, and compete for women—versus hitting and competing against women?
Policymakers, including those in Nebraska’s legislature, put players like Dan in no-win situations when they allow such scenarios to exist. If Dan goes easy on the girl, he compromises his integrity as a player. He’s practicing in a way that contradicts both his instincts and the way he’s been trained to play.
Now there may be some sports (equestrian ones? Archery?) in which there may be no sex segregation since there are no dressing rooms and possibly no physical advantages of men (I’m just guessing here), but the likelihood of injury to trans-identified women is a serious issue in some sports. World Rugby, for example, has a policy stating this:
- Transgender men must confirm they understand any increased risk to themselves
- An experienced independent medical practitioner must provide confirmation that the player is physically capable of playing men’s rugby
This is an asymmetry in treatment, but I can live with it so long as the criteria are satisfied, for trans-identified women (“trans men”) have no inherent athletic advantage on average over biological men. There is no unfairness to men here, but there is still that physical risk, and World Rugby found a way to dealt with it. Now whether a trans-idenfied woman would really want to play this very rough sport is another issue. But if they want to play, this is one way to accommodate them.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili recites what, from her observations, Andrzej (“The Administrator”) is up to. It’s a bit hard to get, but I think that “Memoirs Found in an Old Head ” refers to an autobiography that Andrzej is writing.
Hili: This is all very suspicious. The Administrator is taking care of it. The car is insured, the information about where to print the album is obtained and secured. The hallway is turning into a museum for “Nawojki” and more. Mariusz is installing a ping-pong table in the basement. The biggest sensation is Danka, the editor of “Memoirs Found in an Old Head .” They don’t just like each other—they’re conspiring, and I don’t know what to think. I wanted to listen and share it, the Administrator patted me, but they were cautious. Anyway, he said he’d never seen an editor like her before.Interesting phenomenon—he stopped swearing. We’ll see, maybe he’ll be more normal, but is that a good thing or a bad thing?
In Polish:
Hili: To wszystko jest bardzo podejrzane. Administrator załatwia. Samochód ubezpieczony, informacja, gdzie wydrukować album, zdobyta i zabezpieczona. Korytarz zmienia się w muzeum „Nawojki” i nie tylko. Mariusz instaluje stół pingpongowy w piwnicy. Największą sensacją jest Danka, czyli redaktorka Pamiętników znalezionych w starym łbie. Oni sobie nie tylko przypadli do gustu — oni spiskują, i sama nie wiem, co o tym myśleć. Chciałam posłuchać i udostępnić, Administrator pogłaskał mnie, ale byli ostrożni. Tak czy inaczej, on powiedział, że takiej redaktorki jeszcze nie widział.
Interesujące zjawisko — przestał kląć. Zobaczymy, może będzie bardziej normalny, ale czy to dobrze, czy źle?
*******************
From Cats That Have Had Enough of Your Shit:
From In Other News:
From Stacy:
From Masih: Kurds in Iran honor those who died saving burning forests that the government ignored.
This is what happens when a regime funds missiles instead of firefighters!
Iran’s forests are burning. The regime sends no planes. No equipment. So in Kurdistan, civilians ran toward the flames and paid with their lives because they know that government spends billions on… pic.twitter.com/HFtEkvOgOp— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) July 29, 2025
From Luana: Just two neuropeptides appear to be responsible for caste differentiation in behavior (and those are big differences) in leafcutter ants:
In the latest issue! Neuropeptides specify and reprogram division of labor in the leafcutter ant Atta cephalotes https://t.co/8CYaL7mr1a pic.twitter.com/qdFotAJ252
— Cell (@CellCellPress) July 27, 2025
From Barry, a “beautiful catfish”:
Take your time to admire this beautiful catfish…. 🥰🐈⬛
— Pets Against Trump… (@petsunited.bsky.social) 2025-07-21T13:17:29.288Z
From Malcolm, one contented moggy:
It must felt so good pic.twitter.com/lmChuX2EhH
— No Context Cats (@nocontextscats) July 19, 2025
From my feed. Keanu is the BEST!
Celebrities acting like average Joes, a wholesome thread 🧵
1. The fact that a random couple ran into Keanu Reeves in a hotel lobby, invited him to their wedding, and he put on a suit and joined is proof he really is The One. ❤️ pic.twitter.com/F5Ql6Xdm3H
— Wholesome Side of 𝕏 (@itsme_urstruly) January 11, 2025
One that I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:
This Polish Jew lived about a month after arriving in Auschwitz. His expression shows that he's terrified, and rightly so.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-07-30T10:27:52.918Z
Two posts from Dr. Cobb. First, a free link to a great obituary in the WaPo for Tom Lehrer:
The Washington Post has a wonderful obit of Tom Lehrer. I laughed out loud many times. Here's a gift link, and here's this piece (or its traffic) will convince whoever is running that place to replenish and respect the obit section. 1/2 🎁https://wapo.st/3J6GVeA
— Jill Lawrence (@jilldlawrence.bsky.social) 2025-07-27T20:08:51.021Z
This is a really weird letter from Albert Einstein to Marie Curie, but I assume it’s real:
einstein sent this to curie in 1911 when she was being harassed by tabloids. it contains everything you’d want in such a letter:(1) your haters are trash(2) you’re a baller, a true queen(3) i have determined the statistical law of motion of the diatomic molecule in planck’s radiation field 🧪⚛️
— Microplastics Sommelier (@leastactionhero.bsky.social) 2024-06-27T14:17:23.246Z
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
The man who is denied the opportunity of taking decisions of importance begins to regard as important the decisions he is allowed to take. -C. Northcote Parkinson, author and historian (30 Jul 1909-1993)
As well as his iconic Parkinson’s Law¹, I much later came across his sequel The Law and the Profits, which IMO is similarly both entertaining and wise.
. . . .
¹ which was gathering dust on my parents’ bookshelves.
Wonderful books I read as a teenager in Polish language translation. Thanks for helping me remember the author’s name!
Laura Dahlmeier, former biathlete, two-time Olympic champion, and multiple world champion, was killed during a rockfall while mounteering in the Karakorum Mountains. 🙁
https://www.olympics.com/en/news/double-olympic-champion-laura-dahlmeier-passes-away
A very sad accident. I have to commend her for this though:
“According to a statement from Dahlmeier’s management on Wednesday, the biathlete specifically asked that no one should risk their life to rescue her or recover her body in the event of an accident.”
Encouraging religion discussions in the federal workplace is an awful idea. Religion is nothing more than the basis of an “us” and “them” dynamic or the “othering” of many fellow employees. I am a retired federal employee who watched what appeared to be a quiet coup at my workplace engineered by a bevy of born again christians – recognizable because many of them would take the initiative as identifying as such during introductions at meetings. With the appointment of one of them to be laboratory director, over thenext two years all supervisors had to reapply for their jobs. At the end of the process there seemed to be a surfeit of self-identifying christians in these senior positions in general and, interestingly, zero Jews in Senior Executive Service positions. Coincidence? Maybe. Obnoxious? Certainly.
Agreed. It will be annoying to have to deal with those who are proselytizing at work. There were a few incidents when I was working, but they could easily be rebuffed because they weren’t sanctioned by the government (or by the workplace).
They were already obnoxious and distracting enough, but now with an official U.S. Gov hechsher! Oy!
This surely will be self-defeating when the Pastafarians or Moonies¹ or Salafists (etc.) start speaking up. The “welcoming” is clearly only meant for Good religion. And maybe the Church of Satan¹ will also intentionally troll it.
. . . . .
¹ Are they still a thing?
They have probably converted to Islam by now.
You may be thinking of The Satanic Temple. They are still around.
https://thesatanictemple.com/
Well I find Colin Wright’s piece wholly unconvincing and a tad misogynistic.
My aim here is to highlight the problems with the asymmetrical structure of Nebraska’s Stand With Women Act.
A few issues:
Inconsistent philosophy on injury risk:
A commonly cited justification for excluding men from women’s sports is the increased risk of injury to female athletes. However, Nebraska’s Stand With Women Act permits girls and women to participate in boys’ and men’s sports. This creates a logical inconsistency. If the presence of a male athlete in a women’s event raises safety concerns, why wouldn’t a female athlete competing against a full team of male athletes pose an even greater risk to herself?
. . . Male spaces
Even if girls and women have no natural performance advantages over boys and men, that would still not justify allowing females to compete in the male category of sport. Boys and men ought to be entitled to male-only spaces for the same ethical and social reasons that girls and women ought to be entitled to female-only spaces.
Yet the Stand With Women Act is oddly inconsistent on this point. On the one hand, it asserts a principle of sex-based exclusivity: “a team or sport designated for males, men, or boys shall not be open to a female student.” This language implies that there was some absolute ethical principle guiding the decision to preserve male-only categories. But the Act immediately undermines this principle by including a carveout: a female student may join a boys’ or men’s team if no equivalent female team is available. In other words, the right of males to their own spaces is conditional, while the right of females to theirs is absolute.
. . . . Preferential treatment and its consequences
Another important concern with allowing girls and women to participate in boys’ and men’s sports is the issue of differential treatment—particularly the burden it places on male athletes to alter their playing behaviors to accommodate female athletes. This is not just a matter of etiquette; it introduces ethical, psychological, and practical conflicts on and off the field.
In a recent conversation I had with Dan Romand from Men Need to Be Heard, he shared a story from his high school football days that illustrates the problem well (story begins at 27:25). Dan’s team included a girl on the roster. Dan played offensive lineman and the girl played linebacker. Dan recalled a play in practice where he was the lead blocker for the running back. His assigned blocking target was the linebacker (i.e., the girl). Dan knew that he would have “erased her” if he hit her with his full capacity. So instead, he held back to avoid injuring her.
Why should Dan—or any other male athlete—be put in that position? Why should a male athlete be forced to choose between his natural instincts—to protect, respect, and compete for women—versus hitting and competing against women?
The last comment you made is rude and uncalled for. Please lay off stuff like “the world’s smallest violin award”. Thanks.
Well said, Mike. (Pace the Roolz reminder I have omitted my intended comment that used “diddums”.)
While I agree on the difference between accepting a risk for yourself and being a risk for others, I have to disagree on point #2 and #4.
The segregated space is obviously the locker rooms where the team would change and shower together. I don’t think for a minute, that a trans athlete determined enough to accept risks of injury will accept going to the girls shower alone. Do you believe that male changing rooms should be open to females?
The dilemma of not putting girls/women at risk vs. giving 100 percent in a competition is real. Would you prefer the cultural protection of girls and women to be eroded? Or would you prefer competition to be toned down?
I regard both options as worse than avoiding the dilemma to emerge by segregating the sexes.
All quiet on the tsunami front here in Victoria, BC.
Appalling that Iran isn’t fighting fires, while pouring efforts on into atom bombs.
Wildfires have increased in many places, including Canada. The fires pour yet more CO2 into the atmosphere.
The Canadian fires result in continental-wise smoke pollution, unavoidable in the US Midwest and East Coast. I’ve been to visit my old home Wisconsin — smokey days where people are advised to stay inside or wear masks. Fire season in Oregon & CA starts earlier and is more severe. More CO2 — global warming positive feedback, as predicted, etc.
Not really. Almost all the forest in Canada is second (or tenth!) growth after logging or natural fires. The cellulose and lignin in the trees that are burning was taken out of the atmosphere by photosynthesis in human times. It’s not “fossil” carbon, all of which was laid down in a few moments of geologic time 100-300 million years ago and doesn’t cycle through the atmosphere until we burn it. Had those trees died and decayed in their own time, the carbon would have gone back into the atmosphere as CO2 and methane, just as it does now as they burn. And that CO2 will be re-reduced into cellulose and glucose as the trees regrow or as a wheat field ripens in Saskatchewan or Ukraine, and then back into CO2 when chemotrophs like us eat the wheat or burn the wood in “green” power plants.
Trees are a short-term CO2 sink only if they are cut down and turned into something that doesn’t rot (or get eaten by insects) for centuries, like houses and furniture and medieval church carvings, but even they in the fullness of geologic time will all become CO2 again. Wildfires do make the idea of curing climate change by planting a billion spruce trees look a little silly, though.
Global warming might well be aggravating the wildfire season in Canada, sure, but the fires aren’t adding net CO2 to the atmosphere in the long run. It’s not a positive feedback loop. (An alternative explanation for more and bigger fires is that Canada doesn’t make efforts to suppress boreal fires in our vast unpopulated areas because with the decline of newspapers there is just less value in the potential newsprint, which of course decays too.) Whatever, our American friends would be advised to get used to the smoke. We aren’t going to do any more about it than King Canute did about those darn tides.
Leslie it is very hard to make the kinds of good arguments you make above, and similar to what Bjorn Lomberg makes in various domains.
Just as it is hard to oppose child mutilation in the trans cult and “a gendered soul” without being a “twansfobe!”
Or arguing that the mainstream media, particularly the left side, get MOST of the Palestine-Israel horror utterly wrong and upside down. “You in FAVOR of genociding babies and puppies?”
(sigh)
Or maybe hard where I live in bougie Manhattan but I think it is bigger than that?
D.A.
NYC
DavidAnderson_JD_NYC
@DavidandersonJd
I’ve been following this global warming question since ~1972, since taking a course: Biophysical Ecology. Bjorn Lomberg’s original position was to deny global warming (see also Reid Bryson, influential for a while) but Lumberg did have the grace and sense to accept the accumulating evidence and argument for “climate change” and became all about mitigation. So I’m not sure where he comes up in this question.
Tom I don’t think many people deny the climate is warming, nor that the industrial revolution etc was in part causative.
Which is where most activists stop and go on a march: “Whitey wrecking the earth, destroying the browns and poors for profit”. See any young Swedish high school dropout scolding us. (ahem)
The question is how big a problem is it and what to do about it?
Lomberg focuses on the first part – that it isn’t apocalyptic and I agree (thought I’m no expert).
My interest is in the Greens – now full communist – and their love of apocalypticism as a beloved moral panic. You see… if you’re not religious (like me and many here) we are all just minor parts in an evolutionary string of reproduction going back 4 billion years.
But if the END IS NIGH! – via 2nd coming of Jay-sus-ah!, the victory of Islam, or climate “boiling” extinction.. or any other nonsense… Well then THAT gives the activists REAL meaning. Instantly they become the Last Generation, the World Savers, the swan song and Last Act of humanity.
Much more meaningful than just another clump of human shaped cells reproducing another clump of cells on and on way beyond our forgotten selves into the future. Which is how it is, how reality is.
Why… if you pretend to stop progress and SAVE US from the end of the world, if you take on the end times as your friend, you can be heroes, just for one day. Or for life and your whole identity if you so desire. You’ll even find a date!
And THAT is how you get climate apocalypticism. The imagined or exaggerated threat provides cover for climate “heroes”.
D.A.
NYC
Your comments as well as Mr
Macmillan’s are just a bunch of justifications to avoid responsibility and behavioral change – as usual.
Climate change could be tackled, but it requires increasingly meaningful cuts to resource consumption – especially from the wealthy. It could have been much easier if measures had been taken decades ago, but that opportunity was sold for the chance to consume more.
Both of you seem to resent this and hide behind various issues with climate activism. I get it – you are both old enough to die before the feces hits the rotor and to have profited from not doing something 30 years ago.
I wonder though: do you not have descendants that you care about?
We boomers are starting to die off, Mr. Kober. Our descendants plus immigrants now outnumber us, although we craftily postponed that reckoning by not leaving very many descendants to outvote us. Having children went out of fashion for us after ZPG, “pollution”, Earth Day 1970, nuclear Armageddon, and Limits to Growth. Yes, we had our youthful fads, too. Then we started earning money and wanted to spend it. But “having it all” was another excuse not to have children. A silent epidemic of chlamydia sealed the deal. Of course, next to dying very young — too late for that for us — not having children is the single best thing someone in a rich country can do to reduce emissions of greenhouse gasses. I think at 1.3 fertility rate we’ve done our bit there.
So be of good cheer. There will soon be nothing to stop your generation from inflicting all the behaviour modification on yourselves, and what’s left of us as our carbon footprint declines, you are willing to tolerate. Nothing except you yourselves. Good luck. Stay the course no matter what. The planet is depending on you to succeed where we selfishly failed to give a shit.
Just remember that in democracy the government can’t always scold the people into changing their wicked ways. The people can change their government instead.
You make a cogent point about fossil carbon, but there may some overstatements as well. Have boreal forests that are currently burning ever been logged? And for newsprint? What is the logging rotation that gives you a tenth growth? For wood products (timber = lumber), rotation is typically a minimum of 30 years, and I think that’s a recent development, longer rotations being common. For wood pulp, of course, it may be a shorter rotation, depending on the species. So, for example, in the Oregon Coast Range there would be forest stands logged upon settlement (1880 to ~ 1900) and then which gives us with 30 year rotations maybe 4 loggings, but that’s not been the practice — from what I’ve seen out here a lot of industrial timber logging trees that are second or 3rd growth from the original stands. The question of short vs. long-term carbon storage is intriguing, but the release of carbon by decay is certainly more slow than by burning and there is, in undisturbed forests, a long buildup of duff that goes to soil. Otherwise we’d just be on bedrock and mineral sand. The decay turnover is slow on a human scale, and the current CO2 rise is rapid on a human scale and nearly instantaneous geologically. I would still argue that massive forest burning does inject a significant CO2 pulse. I don’t recall saying anything about tides and I don’t expect anybody to do anything about this.
Indeed Tom, don’t get me wrong – there is absolutely an increase in temps and the industrial revolution has consequences, many negative.
My point was more the psychology of the activists, a separate issue, rather then the changing climate.
But in the race to “SAVE US FROM ARMAGEDDON!” real local problems like you mention, boreal forests, etc. get lost in the mix.
best,
D.A.
NYC
Uncle Google disagrees.
I entered “Do forest fires increase CO2?” and it says they do.
Note that the trees were a CO2 sink while alive. True it’s not fossil CO2 but so what? Presumably something will grow back but it won’t be the same size for years.
All well and good. All burning of carbonaceous fuel emits CO2. Fossil fuels represent CO2 that life forms removed from the atmosphere many millions of years ago and, but for us, would never return to it. That’s the so-what, according to the UN’s IPCC.
The IPCC’s pathways to Net Zero (Gross Zero, in truth) to limit warming to 1.5 C above pre-industrial times focus entirely on the elimination of burning fossil fuels and the curtailment of industrial processes like cement-making that release long-ago-mineralized CO2 into the atmosphere. They embrace burning of biomass and biofuels because trees (for wood pellets) and corn (for ethanol) cycle carbon dioxide in and out of the atmosphere so there is no net change of atmospheric CO2 (over sufficiently long time scales) as they grow and when they burn. This is true even though wood and ethanol are rather poor fuels with less heat value per mole of carbon, so you have to burn more of it (= more CO2) to get the desired quantity of heat. (There are other knocks against growing corn for ethanol.) All else being equal it would be better for short-term — 50-100 years — carbon sinking not to have forest fires or burn any biomass at all, but Nature, arsonists, and electricity customers have other ideas. Fire does renew the forests. If burning tree plantations of wood pellets for electricity is considered “carbon-neutral”, so must a forest fire. Should the world’s biomass power projects cut back their burning to compensate for the CO2 prematurely released into the atmosphere from Canada’s fires?
The CO2 respired out by people, other animals, fungi, and green plants at night also don’t figure in the world’s tallied CO2 emissions, again because they, with green plants, are cycling CO2 in and out of the atmosphere in short-term scales that scientists consider not relevant for global warming.
Believe me I have this argument with climate skeptics who ask why burning coal and oil is bad but burning wood pellets and breathing heavily while riding one’s bicycle to work are good. The foregoing is what I tell them.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter. We can’t do anything about forest fires (except blame China) whether they are carbon-neutral or not. King Canute took his throne down to the beach not because he thought he could stop the tide but to show his nobles that he couldn’t: royal power was limited.
I’m more optimistic than you. The Chinese are investing a lot in solar, wind, hydro.
They’re not stupid.
Granted they’re completely going by what’s good for them. As usual.
Making cement releases CO2, but concrete re-absorbs CO2 as it cures.
More: “New NASA Study Tallies Carbon Emissions From Massive Canadian Fires”
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/new-nasa-study-tallies-carbon-emissions-from-massive-canadian-fires/
Much of the Canadian boreal forest, particularly in the north, is still old-growth, although its extent is steadily decreasing.
This WaPo piece on religion feels like a less egregious repeat of the NYT article the other day that misrepresented a Trump EO. I would ask others to read the memo from the Office of Personnel Management and help me find where, according to the WaPo article, expressions of religious faith are now “encouraged,” let alone “urged.”
Instead, I find this: “Employees must be allowed to engage in private religious expression in work areas to the same extent that they may engage in nonreligious private expression. Agencies may, however, reasonably regulate the time, place and manner of all employee speech, provided such regulations do not discriminate based on content or viewpoint (including religious viewpoints).”
Unless I have missed something, everything in the memo is consistent with that. If a person is not interested in discussing religion with a coworker, that person can simply tell the coworker such and, as the memo directs, the coworker should honor that request. If, as the WaPo interviewee claims, some previous Administrations were directing employees to minimize lawful religious speech and practice, then removing that constraint is simply restoring free exercise of a constitutional right to expression—not “urging” people to exercise it.
Next thing you know, Red Sox fans will debate Yankees fans in the workplace. The horror of the divisiveness! How did so many adults reach the point at which they cannot stand hearing or seeing anything in the workplace or on campus with which they disagree? My preference is to leave talk about religion, sex, and politics out of the workplace, but I see no reason why others should abide by my preference.
+1!
This is where all their constant cute attempts to insult atheists by saying “well, atheism is a religion too, ya know” could come back to bite them in the butt.
“Bob, I’d like to take a minute here to tell you about the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”
“So glad you brought that up, because I’d like to share the top 7 reasons scholars think an historical Jesus may not have existed.”
“Or maybe we could just get back to working on next month’s report…”
Most countries treat religion as absolute truth vital for the good of society. Thus governments adopt official religions. In the United States religion is treated as mere opinion. Believe in one God, three Gods, a thousand Gods, no God? That’s not government’s concern.
Atheists have no religion in a practical sense. But they do have opinions about the issues raised by religion. Thus the courts treat atheists like they have a religion, even though they don’t. Believers who try to insult atheists with taunts of “atheism is a religion” display ignorance of the difference between the United States and theocracies.
I don’t have the stats, but expect that “most” countries is a vast overreach. And many (most?) countries which do have a state religion also have religious toleration. (State cults-of-personality are of course a different matter.)
I think it would be fair to say that for a thousand years before the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) every country in Europe had an official religion. The Enlightenment sought a different relationship between government and religion: keep them separate. Did any country treat religion as mere opinion before the USA? Not that I recall. Matters are better today, but there is much room for improvement. The efforts of believers to tear down barriers between religion and government never seem to end.
By the way, religious toleration and religious tolerance are not the same. Toleration means the favored religion won’t persecute similar religions but it’s open season on dissimilar ones.
My response would be “And I’d like to tell you about this wonderful chubby man who flies through the sky on a sled pulled by flying reindeers and who comes down our chimneys once a year to give us all sorts of goodies.” And then talk endlessly about the Tooth Fairy.
Too much latitude given to personal choice. A woman can choose to pick a fight with six brawny guys in a bar, knowing she could get beaten to a pulp. But the guys don’t have the right to hit her hard enough to seriously injure her, even if she was using fighting words, or probably at all unless she was clearly somehow capable of doing them serious harm. Then one might hit her once, carefully, to adjust her attitude, or more likely just pin her arms by grabbing her from behind. The police would then have to figure out if any law was broken.
In a football game, someone else is taking responsibility for deliberate and accidental hits. If the woman just decided to join, uninvited, six guys scrimmaging three on three with hitting in a vacant lot, they’d tell her to get lost. They don’t care about her personal choice. They don’t want to have to choose between playing a no-hitting game just for her and being responsible if she gets hurt. (“What were you doing tackling a woman?”) In an organized league, the league becomes responsible for the consequences of someone’s personal choice to play, if the league accepts that person. If, to cover its own butt, the league says male linemen can’t hit female linebackers with their usual gusto, or if the male linemen hold back out of a sense of chivalry, that does make a travesty of the game either way. It’s a perfectly reasonable concern for a male athlete. That it might be alien to someone who had never played contact sports doesn’t make it any less real for those who do.
Asking a physician to sign off on a professional opinion about a woman’s fitness to play men’s rugby ought to be a non-starter. It just transfers liability from the league to the doctor. If the woman got her neck broken she would surely sue the doctor for incompetence and malpractice. If she signed a valid waiver with the league, she would have to come after the doctor as her only source of payout. A patient never signs away her right to sue her doctor or complain to his licensing regulator, and it is ethically improper to try to inveigle her into doing so.
So personal autonomy is not relevant to a choice that implicates others in the choice. If the human-rights campaigners force a league to let women play hitting positions against men, the league should fold rather than comply. Failing that, the girl’s parents should refuse to let her play. Whether they want a dead son or a dead daughter isn’t relevant here.
Good points. No men in women’s sports AND no women in men’s sports.
If you ever have to host me in your basement in Canada while I’m on the lamb from my inadvisable loudmouth opinions here in the USA, don’t take me to your local bar, Leslie. With all the women fights it sounds dreadful!
Hahah. Seriously though… civilized men have a DEEP aversion to physical violence against a woman. It’s like not hitting animals… one shouldn’t do it at all.
Recent “Human Rights” developments which are regressive put violence against women back on the table as an option, at least in a cultural sense. THIS is NOT equality or even civilization: it is the weirdo instincts of a deeply deranged cult trapped in a bizarro purity spiral of madness.
best,
D.A.
DavidAnderson_JD_NYC
@DavidandersonJd
You got it, Leslie.
Tom Lehrer, yes. The conversation continues, a bit.
I was raised on the originals on the 1950’s and ’60’s. The lyrics committed to memory are reactivated. Mom realized that things had changed when her sons were understating what the lyrics meant and some of them didn’t seem so funny to her as in “Dope Peddler” and, say, in “Be Prepared” (that’s the Boy Scouts marching song)
Be prepared…and be clean in word and deed — don’t solicit for your sister (that’s not nice!) — unless you get a good percentage of her price
Be prepared — be sure to keep your reefer where you’re sure it won’t be found, and be careful not to smoke it when the scoutmaster’s around — for he only will insist that it be shared
If you’re looking for adventure of a new and different kind, and you come across a Girl Scout who is similarly inclined — don’t be nervous, don’t be flustered, don’t be scared — Be Prepared —
There’s a lot more of the OG Tom L. in me , but this is Quant Suff.
On AI and new hires of kids – or lack thereof. Young grads today are going to have to be quite creative to get on the ladder. But there ARE other ways (twitter, etc) to prove one’s utility and intel than the old days.
I’m 55 and retired but nearly all the work I did in my career, from temp to stockbroker to VC analyst, to options trader to lawyer… and (now) hobby columnist and loudmouth, most of each job has been munched up by tech progress. I felt like somebody running a few feet ahead of threshing/mulching machine chasing me as it ate every job I had five minutes ago. I’m sooo glad I survived.
But if I were 20 now I’d have 2020s skills that I clearly don’t have at 55 so I’m kinda optimistic about the future though, like with every advancement, it causes unpredictable changes and loss. And possibly with AI, ruin risk. Which is to be avoided.
Here’s my new twitter/x account – so I’m TRYING to move with the times, if only to promote my own column in “old media”.
DavidAnderson_JD_NYC
@DavidandersonJd
D.A.
NYC
einstein letter real, here link with footnotes https://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/vol8-trans/34
But what was the comical witticism? ”I have a truly comical witticism which this margin is too narrow to contain.”
Sorry, but don’t want to violate the rules by posting too much.
Perhaps less so in archery, but sex differences are still real, since archery is a strength activity. Even in the modern era when lighter bows are used than by the mediaevals, it’s still the case. Male Olympians typically pull about 40-50 lbs, women a good 10lbs less. This is why the “blue riband” events for men are the 90m version of the WA1440 round or the York round (100yds longest distance) but for women the 70m WA1440 or Hereford (80yds longest distance) – men are measurably stronger than women and so can pull the stronger bow needed for these longer distances. It is unfair to allow males to compete in women’s competition for this reason; allowing it means that there is a men’s event and a mixed event and women do not have anything to themselves with a level playing field.
At least now that Tamura is dead, we can investigate whether he should have faced reduced charges: Mayo Clinic writes “There is no way to definitively diagnose chronic traumatic encephalopathy, also known as CTE, during life.”
A biological female identifying as a male who wishes to participate in a male rugby match has suicidal tendencies.
Even where suicide is legal, it is still socially irresponsible when it damages other people, e.g. the locomotive driver who sees you lying down on the tracks in front of him. Promoting this sort of irresponsibility would IMO be equally irresponsible.
I had read an article recently the Tom Leher was the inventor of Jell-O shots.
“However, this is true of all crimes: our brains made them do the crimes, and they had no choice. This realization should inform our justice system.”
Doesn’t that also mean that judges’ brains make them hand out death penalties/life sentences for murderers because they, too, have no choice?
Now that’s a gotcha if there ever was one!
One must somehow learn to thread the needle between Determinism and Nihilism. It’s not simple.
I’ve found the backstory to Einstein’s letter to Curie–
“While crossing a busy Parisian street on a rainy night, Pierre slipped, fell under a horse-drawn cart, and was killed instantly. Curie grieved for years. In 1910, she found solace in Pierre’s protégé — a young physics professor named Paul Langevin, married to but separated from a woman who physically abused him. They became lovers. Enraged, Langevin’s wife hired someone to break into the apartment where the two met and steal their love letters, which she promptly leaked to the so-called press. The press eviscerated Curie and portrayed her as ‘a foreign Jewish homewrecker.'”
https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/04/19/einstein-curie-letter/
And the Nobel Committee had already awarded Sklodowska Curie her second Nobel, but once this scandal broke, they asked her not to show up to receive it. Sklodowska Curie replied that her personal life is irrelevant to her science. She received her Nobel in person. Good for her!
Also, the King of Sweden was later busted for having his own affair with a married man.
PCCE wrote: “I suggested that while trans-identified men should be prohibited from competing in women’s sports (and they largely have now).”
Actually, more men are competing in women’s sports than ever. See https://womenssportspolicy.substack.com/p/part-1-myth-vs-fact-men-in-womens?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=5202344&post_id=169403836&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=109fk&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
And https://hecheated.org/
And https://iconswomen.com/
And https://fairplayforwomen.com/campaigns/sports-campaign/
Just today, PA Governor Josh Shapiro, a Democrat and potential presidential candidate in 2028 (recall that he wasn’t selected as Kamala Harris’s running mate in 2024, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise) denounced anyone opposing men in women’s sports as an “extremist” and insisted that trans-identifying males must be allowed in women’s sports. A PA Senate bill to mandate single-sex sports passed the PA Senate on a bipartisan vote. So Shapiro is calling members of his own party “extremists.”
Way to throw women under the bus, Josh.