Welcome to Thursday, August 7, 2025 and National Raspberries ‘n’ Cream Day. I had a simulacrum yesterday: a decent portion of raspberries with a dollop of 2% milk (that was my lunch). I had no cream, but you can imagine it in the photo below:
It is also National Lighthouse Day and Purple Heart Day, marking the day in 1782 when George Washington established the honor and awarded it to three men. But after that the honor vanished, only to reappear in 1932 as a medal for those wounded or killed in battle. To wit (George’s image is on it):
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the August 7 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Crikey! Trump has now boosted the tariffs on goods coming from India to a whopping 50%. As far as I know, that’s the highest tariff he’s imposed on anybody.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday imposing an additional 25 percent in tariffs on India over the country’s purchases of Russian oil, following through on his threat to ramp up pressure on Moscow to end the war in Ukraine.
The tariffs are set to go into force within 21 days, according to the executive order, and will go on top of the 25 percent penalty Trump unveiled on India this month.
The order came hours after a roughly three-hour meeting between Russian and U.S. officials, which did not produce a breakthrough. It came days before the White House’s deadline for Russia to reach a peace deal with Ukraine or face major economic penalties.
Trump has threatened to impose “secondary tariffs” of up to 100 percent on countries that buy goods — primarily energy — from Russia if President Vladimir Putin doesn’t quickly cease hostilities in Ukraine.
But he has also singled out India, one of several countries that purchase Russian oil, as trade talks between the two countries have sputtered over the past month.
Russia produced about 12 percent of the world’s crude oil supply in 2024, giving it significant market power. Despite Western sanctions, including a price cap on Russian oil exports, it has amassed a vast “shadow fleet” of tankers that allow it to continue shipping oil.
The Indian government decried the executive order as “unfair, unjustified and unreasonable.”
“Our imports are based on market factors and done with the overall objective of ensuring the energy security of 1.4 billion people of India,” a government spokesperson said in a statement. “It is therefore extremely unfortunate that the US should choose to impose additional tariffs on India for actions that several other countries are also taking in their own national interest.”
“India will take all actions necessary to protect its national interests,” New Delhi added.
Trump apparently wants to run the world using tariffs; they’re clearly not just about trade, but about forcing countries to do what he wants. I think it unlikely that Putin will give in here; instead, we’re hurting an ally and the world’s largest democracy (despite PM Modi’s bad behavior).
*The AP has joined the ranks of Israel-hating MSM, publishing a photo essay on the victims of Israel’s “Operation Grim Beeper” involving exploding beepers and walkie talkies targeting Hezbollah operatives. The admirable aspect of that this operation is that it specifically targeted Hezbollah and avoided civilians as much as possible, despite the amazingly intricate machinations necessary to set up this scheme. Nevertheless, the AP goes after Israel, including pictures of some wounded civilians. (It is of course impossible to prevent all civilian injuries in such a scheme, but remember how it was set up):
At that moment on Sept. 17, 2024, thousands of pagers distributed to the Hezbollah group were blowing up in homes, offices, shops and on frontlines across Lebanon, remotely detonated by Israel. Hezbollah had been firing rockets into Israel almost daily for nearly a year in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza.
After years of planning, Israel had infiltrated the supply chain of Hezbollah, the most powerful of Iran’s armed proxies in the Middle East. It used shell companies to sell the rigged devices to commercial associates of Hezbollah in an operation aimed at disrupting the Iran-backed group’s communication networks and harming and disorienting its members.
The pager attack was stunning in its scope. It wounded more than 3,000 people and killed 12, including two children.
Israel boasts of it as a show of its technological and intelligence prowess. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently presented U.S. President Donald Trump with a golden pager as a gift.
Human rights and United Nations reports, however, say the attack may have violated international law, calling it indiscriminate.
INDISCRIMINATE? How can you get any more discriminating? But wait! There’s more!
Hezbollah, also a major Shiite political party with a wide network of social institutions, has acknowledged that most of those wounded and killed were its fighters or personnel. The simultaneous explosions in populated areas, however, also wounded many civilians like Jaffal, who was one of four women along with 71 men who received medical treatment in Iran. Hezbollah won’t say how many civilians were hurt, but says most were relatives of the group’s personnel or workers in Hezbollah-linked institutions, including hospitals.
Ten months later, survivors are on a slow, painful path to recovery. They are easily identifiable, with missing eyes, faces laced with scars, hands with missing fingers — signs of the moment when they checked the buzzing devices. The scars also mark them as a likely Hezbollah member or a dependent.
. . .A representative of Hezbollah’s Association of Wounded did share with AP the contacts of eight people who had expressed readiness to share their stories. The AP independently contacted them, and six agreed to be interviewed. They included Jaffal and another woman, two 12-year-old children and two men, one a preacher, the other a fighter.
All are Hezbollah officials or fighters or members of their families. All lost fingers. Shrapnel lodged under their skin. The men were blinded. The women and children each lost one eye, with the other damaged.
Yes, and there’s not a word of approbation for Israel’s attempt to limit damage to Hezbollah. Of course there would be some civilians injured, but if ever an attack was targeted, it was this one. They even show pictures of Hezbollah members who were wounded (no, not killed). Remember, those are terrorists: Israel’s enemies. This journalistic slant is disgustingly biased. As the reader who sent me this link wrote, “A major work of art by the AP, demonizing Israel for eliminating Hezbollah terrorists. They must have put their entire creative staff on this., telling you just how much they hate Israel.”
Here’s a former AP writer admitting the bias of that organization against Israel: it’s been going a long time:
🚨BOOM. Share this everywhere. An ex reporter for the @AP reveals how they are completely compromised and possibly complicit in the Hamas PR Jihad warfare
pic.twitter.com/8qhC4e7t7W
>— Gal G., Adv 🇮🇱 (@ICK_GalG) August 6, 2025
Read this article that Friedman wrote for The Atlantic in 2014 about the AP’s (and other organizations’) bias against Israel. (I given an archived link.)
*The Washington Post reports that the Catholic Church is now using AI to answer questions from the faithful: “Catholic AI promises answers from the faithful. Can it succeed?” (h/t Barry)
Longbeard founder Matthew Harvey Sanders — himself a believer in both AI and Catholicism — says Magisterium AI and other Catholic AI bots give people a new avenue to understand the faith’s basics and its more arcane principles. But others argue that the cold technology of AI ruins what they view as the beautiful wrestling match of meaning-making, either in a community or inwardly. And some ethicists worry that an AI platform dedicated to a single religion further fragments an already divided world.
Pope Leo XIV has emphasized in his early papacy that artificial intelligence, specifically generative AI — which creates text, images and video from nothing — could harm human dignity.
. , . . More general AI interfaces, like ChatGPT, already existed. But Sanders said those bots sometimes offered incorrect answers on the Catholic faith.
“Leading one person astray is not acceptable,” he said.
The company trained the AI on church canon and what it considers to be seminal Catholic texts,including “Confessions” by Augustine of Hippo, “Summa Theologica” by Thomas Aquinas and “The Writings of Justin Martyr.” The library that makes up the knowledge base grows almost daily asdevelopers update it with new church writings and recently uploaded older texts.
“It’s the popes from the past and the popes of today speaking through the AI,” Sanders said.
Well, I guess I don’t care much about the Q&A since the whole shebang is based on fiction, revelation, and authority. If the Catholics want an AI based solely on Catholic doctrine. by all means let them have it. It’s even a bit humorous. Since it’s based on AI, I would ask it some questions about angels, a favorite of Augustine. Or I’d say, “AI, why does God allow innocent little children to suffer and die from leukemia?”
*In October of 2022 I reviewed the book Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell, and gave it two enthusiastic thumbs up. It’s about Shakespeare’s only son (one of a pair of twins), who died at 11 of unknown causes (O’Farrell’s fictionalized and magical-realism account supposes the plague). It’s a terrific book, one in which the playwright is largely absent and the main character is his wife Anne Hathaway, who has a revelation at the end of the book that I won’t reveal. I highly recommend that you read it if you like fiction. At any rate, the book has been made into an eponymous movie, and the NYT praises the movie (directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal and Chloé Zhao), but devotes most of today’s article to the actress playing Hathaway, Jessie Buckley. (I hadn’t heard of her.) The piece is called “Jessie Buckley goes where few actresses dare“, and of course we need to find out where that is. (The article’s archived here.) The books was made into a play a few years ago; there are scenes from that in the video below.
In “Hamnet,” when Agnes realizes that, despite all her efforts, her son is no longer breathing, she releases a wrenching, full-bodied scream, filmed from the side so that we can see the sound erupting from her mouth, then dissolving into silence, her lips still straining, as if her grief is ultimately unutterable. Buckley’s performance of loss, here and in the rest of the film, seems to draw from some dark place where every parent’s worst nightmare has pooled. Her scream is both unfathomable and instantly recognizable, a reminder of the potential for tragedy that lies just beneath the surface of life.
More than any other quality, it’s this ability — to peel back that veneer and enter the places we’d rather not go — that has earned Buckley a reputation for playing complicated roles with devastating power. Chloé Zhao, the director of “Hamnet,” says that as soon as she read the book, which she adapted with O’Farrell, she knew the role had to be Buckley’s. Few other actresses of her generation can gain access to such a wide spectrum of emotions, or seem as willing to risk being disliked for exploring the tougher ones. “She has no fear in terms of how she’s perceived,” says Paul Mescal, 29, who plays Shakespeare in the film. “She’s never trying to hide or draw lines.” In “Hamnet,” she is part earth mother, tending bees with muddy fingernails and giving birth in the roots of a tree, and part practical parent and partner, revealing with barely perceptible gestures — a searching stare, a terse response — the tug between her own mourning, the small daily tasks of child rearing and her anger at her husband’s seeming absence after their son’s death.
Buckley, who’s 35, connected with the character partly through dreams. Before shooting began in England, first in rural Hereford, near Wales, and then at a studio north of London, she introduced Zhao, 43, to Kim Gillingham, a coach with whom she’s begun considering the ways her dreams might impact her artistry. Zhao, best known for her films “The Rider” (2017) and “Nomadland” (2020), is herself interested in what she calls “subconscious work that’s not linear” and became fascinated by Gillingham’s process, a kind of loose, collaborative exploration that draws on the ideas of Carl Jung. During the two-week rehearsal period for the film, Zhao would gather the cast and key crew members to discuss their dreams and how, if at all, they related to themes in the story. “It’s about ritualistically showing up every day and doing the work and trusting that the seed is being planted,” says the director. By the time Buckley would come to set, Zhao says, “the water in her was flowing. I just needed to make sure it didn’t break the bank.”
That fluidity has allowed Buckley to take on every kind of role: Judy Garland’s compassionate wrangler in “Judy” (2019); a slightly depressive pixie dream girl in Charlie Kaufman’s “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” (2020); a riotous but poignant Sally Bowles in the 2021 West End production of “Cabaret,” a performance for which she won the Olivier Award for best actress in a musical. But the characters to which she seems best suited, and for which she’s become best known, are conflicted women.
*Also in the NYT is this headline which is clickbait to a scientist, “Fraudulent scientific papers are rapidly increasing, study finds” (article archived here). The causes are increasing competition as well as a rise in the number of scientific papers, which reduces the attention that reviewers can pay to submitted papers as well as to the care with which scientists read published papers:
For years, whistle-blowers have warned that fake results are sneaking into the scientific literature at an increasing pace. A new statistical analysis backs up the concern.
A team of researchers found evidence of shady organizations churning out fake or low-quality studies on an industrial scale. And their output is rising fast, threatening the integrity of many fields.
“If these trends are not stopped, science is going to be destroyed,” said Luís A. Nunes Amaral, a data scientist at Northwestern University and an author of the study, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday.
Science has made huge advances over the past few centuries only because new generations of scientists could read about the accomplishments of previous ones. Each time a new paper is published, other scientists can explore the findings and think about how to make their own discoveries.
“Science relies on trusting what others did, so you do not have to repeat everything,” Dr. Amaral said.
By the 2010s, journal editors and watchdog organizations were warning that this trust was under threat. They flagged a growing number of papers with fabricated data and doctored images. In the years that followed, the factors driving this increase grew more intense.
As more graduate students were trained in labs, the competition for a limited number of research jobs sharpened. High-profile papers became essential for success, not just for landing a job, but also for getting promotions and grants.
Academic publishers have responded to the demand by opening thousands of new scientific journals every year. “All of the incentives are for publishers to publish more and more,” said Dr. Ivan Oransky, the executive director of the Center for Scientific Integrity.
Some of the fraud is coordinated, as mentioned in the PNAS article’s abstract:
Science is characterized by collaboration and cooperation, but also by uncertainty, competition, and inequality. While there has always been some concern that these pressures may compel some to defect from the scientific research ethos—i.e., fail to make genuine contributions to the production of knowledge or to the training of an expert workforce—the focus has largely been on the actions of lone individuals.Recently, however, reports of coordinated scientific fraud activities have increased. Some suggest that the ease of communication provided by the internet and open-access publishing have created the conditions for the emergence of entities—paper mills (i.e., sellers of mass-produced low quality and fabricated research), brokers (i.e., conduits between producers and publishers of fraudulent research), predatory journals, who donot conduct any quality controls on submissions—that facilitate systematic scientific fraud. Here, we demonstrate through case studies that i) individuals have cooperated to publish papers that were eventually retracted in a number of journals, ii) brokers have enabled publication in targeted journals at scale, and iii), within a field of science, not all subfields are equally targeted for scientific fraud. Our results reveal some of the strategies that enable the entities promoting scientific fraud to evade interventions. Our final analysis suggests that this ability to evade interventions is enabling the number of fraudulent publications to grow at a rate far outpacing that of legitimate science
It’s times like these that I’m glad I’m retired, for it’s simply impossible to keep up with all the literature while doing your own research. This is another reason why we have so many multiauthored papers (which make fraud harder to detect), and why those papers often include a “senior author” who doesn’t really do any science. (This is a pet peeve of mine.)
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej tells Hili his summer plans, which include writing a book (Andrzej’s autobiography, I assume):
Hili: Have you completely given up on the idea of a summer break?
Andrzej: No, I felt compelled to speak up, but until the end of August I’ll be dealing with various bureaucratic matters and writing my book.
In Polish:
Hili: Czy całkowicie porzuciłeś pomysł z wakacyjną przerwą?
Ja: Nie, poczułem się zmuszony do zabrania głosu, ale do końca sierpnia będę załatwiał różne biurokratyczne sprawy i pisał moją ksiązkę.
*******************
From CinEmma:
From Cat Memes:
From Annie; “no soup for you!”
From Masih, who talks for a minute and a half with Garry Kasparov. You can see the full 53-minute conversation here.
Interesting conversation here between these democracy and freedom advocates: Masih Alinejad (@AlinejadMasih) and Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63).#FreeRussia #FreeIran#FightForDemocracy https://t.co/vDiX4Kocym
— Pablo Hernandez Borges (@PabloHernandezB) July 28, 2025
A FB video sent in by Merilee. Keebler is very talkative!
From Malcolm, who says he’s detected a pattern in the weather announcers of the world:
Weather announcers of the worldpic.twitter.com/sBuIdWfphe
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) August 4, 2025
From Bryan, who says he can do this:
The trick is to cross your eyes and have both images superposed, like looking at a stereogram.
The differences then become obvious as they seem to “pop” out.
You’re welcome. 😏— Andrei Țuculescu (@AndreiTuculescu) August 5, 2025
From my feed, and I love this one:
A giant ice bed for red panda on a hot day
pic.twitter.com/fx4lUgz0Zt— Science girl (@gunsnrosesgirl3) August 6, 2025
One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:
A four-year-old Dutch Jewish boy was gassed to death immediately upon arriving at Auschwitz. He would be 87 today had he lived. https://t.co/ElWk5JNDsp
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) August 7, 2025
Two posts from Dr. Cobb. First, a beautiful deep-sea squid, probably a new species:
🦑 Squid squad alert! This may be a type of whiplash squid from the family Mastigoteuthidae. Filmed during the #MarDelPlataCanyon in Argentina, where an international science team is exploring the diversity & distribution of seafloor communities in one of the country’s largest deep-sea canyons. 🇦🇷 .
— Schmidt Ocean Institute (@schmidtocean.bsky.social) 2025-08-05T22:28:05.730Z
Listen to these ducks!!!!!
I laughed at this video for like 2 minutes straight last night and now you get to
— Woe, a Doe (@doefulwoeful.bsky.social) 2025-07-25T14:36:51.249Z
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
No amount of belief makes something a fact. -James Randi, magician and skeptic (7 Aug 1928-2020)
Has anyone considered that the proliferation of scientific fraud is actually a form of political propaganda, pushing particular views of on subjects of interest to the Progressives? Why should the academic media be immune from the pressures on and proclivities of the mainstream media? Similarly, at the end of the day, the actual discrediting of Science is a neo-Marxist goal.
“Scientific method seeks to understand things as they are, while alchemy seeks to bring about a desired state of affairs. To put it another way, the primary objective of science is truth — that of alchemy, operational success.”
-George Soros
The Alchemy of Finance
P.311
1987, 1994,2003
Wiley
… note as well, Soros’ method of reflexivity…
(Finally secured a copy to verify the quote!)
The most liked reader comment on the article:
“These papers disproportionately originate in specific countries… that this is unmentioned is doing a disservice to reporting on this issue. India and China alone comprise a wildly disproportionate number of documented retractions and incidents of fraud. The US – and specifically US origin researchers – are simply not the issue here and to ignore this is to fundamentally misinform readers about why this is happening.”
Note: I have no personal knowledge of this matter.
I was one of the authors of an influential publication that was subsequently copied verbatim by a team of doctors affiliated with a hospital in Egypt and published in another journal. When this came to light, we contacted the latter journal and they removed the paper that had copied our work. So its not just India and China.
I would not want to be a patient in the hospital those thieves were affiliated with.
That’s awful. I’m sure it’s not just India and China but due population size they may be playing a big role.
I would not be surprised at all by that.
Jessie Buckley is great at playing strong and unconventional women. The article is right about her ability to portray deep emotion. She can have you laughing one minute then breaking your heart in the next.
She was great in……
Wild Rose
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mR3SM29DzCc&pp=0gcJCfwAo7VqN5tD
Wicked Little Letters
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fgqQvmbP-UU
I first saw her in Beast in 2018.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ud2EJ6JyGPk
I recommend her films, although Beast is quite dark and harrowing and not for everyone.
“Hezbollah had been firing rockets into Israel almost daily for nearly a year in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza.”
“Human rights and United Nations reports, however, say the attack [Israel’s pager attack] may have violated international law, calling it indiscriminate.”
These two sentences are in the very same story. The first refers rather casually to the fact that Israel has been dealing with rockets lobbed into it’s territory for years. Notice that there is no real criticism of these actions…it’s just stated as if this just something that happens to Israel, like the weather.
But without these rockets being lobbed into Israel…THERE WOULD BE NO NEED FOR ISRAEL TO ATTACK HEZBOLLAH. Why is the country that is being attacked the one that is criticized, rather than the attacker???
And, with apparently zero sense of irony, the writers try to describe Israel’s precise pager attack as “indiscriminate”…RATHER THAN THE CLEARY INDISCRIMINATE LOBBING OF ROCKETS BY HEZBOLLAH. Does the UN have a comment about the indiscriminate nature of the rocket attacks that the AP could print?
The mind boggles. I don’t have the psychological training to understand how a journalist could write a self-refuting article like this and think that it is a convincing case against Israel.
Nice comment!
Hear hear!
I think the clue is the writer’s use of the phrase, “in solidarity with”. Solidarity justifies everything. Well, everything Leftist-coded, anyway. It’s not just the weather.
Outstanding observation, Jeff.
I wonder whether the sheer volume of junk and the relative lack of replication studies in the academic literature is a greater threat to the enterprise than is fraud. Trivial studies, uninteresting questions, politicized assumptions, data fishing, one worthwhile paper split into three. I’m sure others can add many more. I imagine it is difficult, at best, to keep up with the credible and worthwhile literature in many subfields. Trying to then weed through the untrustworthy and trivial would seem to make the task nearly impossible.
I have been told that in many disciplines a newly-minted PhD needs a publication record comparable to what earlier generations submitted for tenure. Others I know must submit annual reports of their “productivity.” Still others need to stay on the publish-or-perish treadmill late in their careers rather than taking an off-ramp, should they desire, into more teaching. The professional incentives seem perverse, the drive to “tell me some new thing” counterproductive. Then you have the cultural expectations developed in grad school and the resulting R1 envy that drives schools which should predominantly be in the business of educating undergraduates to insist they are all researchers and demand publications of their faculty—anything, anywhere—on top of a 4/3 teaching load. Can someone make it make sense to this nonacademic? Or is this a humanity-old example of the corrupting effects of the quest for money and prestige?
I’m so glad that I’m out of it. It was difficult enough when I was in academia (1980’s and 1990’s). I can’t imagine having to compete—for a job, for grants, for tenure—in today’s climate. I became a professor and researcher because I loved science and wanted to live the life of the mind. I wonder what motivates young scientists today?
I think your last question is answered “yes”. I would only add that the real mendacity (industrial-scale fraud, paper mills, fake authorships) is mainly in the life sciences where it can do real harm especially by biasing the kinds of meta-analysis on which medical advice is based. The mindless churn (“trivial studies, uninteresting questions”, etc.) is widespread but I think less harmful.
In another thread a couple weeks ago I asked why science funding agencies like NIH don’t cut out the middleman and set up their own journals to publish research by the scientists they fund. Commenters said this was a terrible idea but didn’t explain why. So I guess I’m asking again: why not destroy the privately-owned commercial science publishers (who facilitate all of this fraud and waste) by replacing them with publicly-funded journals?
Regarding the X post of weather reporters around the world: Could it be climate change?
Clearly global warming is responsible for the weatherpersons’ wardrobes (all but the last.)
How might global warming increase milk production? I don’t get it.
I miss Rube Hornstein from CBHT Halifax all during my formative years. A weatherman more in the mould of the last guy.
https://cmos.ca/site/activities/biography_rube_hornstein
I follow the Ukraine war nearly as closely as Israel vs Evil, this is one of the best pieces I’ve read in a long time about Putin’s motivations and clicks into place very well given what I know. Wish I’d written it myself.
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/trump-offered-putin-victory-in-ukraine-why-did-putin-refuse/
I also keep abreast of developments with the excellent Perun podcast on youtube every week by an Aussie defense expert, and anything by Stephen Kotkin and Nial Ferguson.
D.A.
DavidAnderson_JD_NYC
@DavidandersonJd
Thanks for the article, he makes a good case for Putin’s motivations.
I saw this headline today in the NYT (I don’t subscribe, so I get their headlines but can’t delve any deeper).
“Trump intends to meet in person with Vladimir Putin as soon as next week and plans to follow up shortly after with a meeting of Putin, Volodymyr Zelensky and himself.”
Should be interesting…or might not even happen, who knows?
I wonder whether the undersea photographers used bright lights that affected the behavior of the squid.
Re “Magisterium AI”, has no one involved ever read or seen His Dark Materials? (It’s no surprise that much of the censorship directed at the book then the film then the TV series involved a certain organisation.)
And “Leading one person astray is not acceptable” is obviously true. Their business model requires leading many people astray.
Regarding ‘Hamnet’, I can’t agree more with your praise for the book. It is a stunning examination of grief – overt in Anne Hathaway, rather more subtle in Shakespeare himself. It is also a great portrayal of their relationship and family dynamics. It is beautifully written throughout. I’ll look forward to the film.
Jessie Buckley was the lead in “‘Chernobyl’ and also starred in the recent films “Men” and “Women Talking.” She is sensational and I seek out any film she is in.