Friday: Hili dialogue

September 5, 2025 • 6:45 am

Well, we made it through the first week in September: it’s Friday, September 5, 2025, and it’s National Cheese Pizza Day. In Chicago it’s often served “tavern style”, always cut into small squares.  As AI tells us,

Tavern-style pizza is an ultra-thin, cracker-like crust pizza originating from Chicago’s South Side taverns in the 1930s, known for its crispy texture, toppings that reach the edges, and signature square-cut portioning for easy sharing. The style was developed to be a simple, shareable, and less filling snack to encourage more drink sales at bars and is characterized by its deep-baked, flaky, and often buttery crust, frequently featuring a cornmeal dusting for added flavor and texture.

Unlike the guy below, I prefer Chicago’s deep-dish and stuffed pizzas, but here’s the tavern style:

It’s also National Chianti Day, best served with fava beans and human liver, and World Samosa Day (sort of the Indian equivalent of tavern-style pizza, but thicker, smaller, and filled with spuds).

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the September 5 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*President Trump is planning to rename the Department of Defense as the “Department of War”:

President Trump will sign an executive order on Friday to give the Department of Defense a new name: the Department of War.

The change would return the department to a name that it carried for much of its history, until it became the Department of Defense in the wake of World War II. The executive order was confirmed to NPR by a White House official who was not authorized to discuss the matter.

A White House fact sheet explains that under the executive order, the name “Department of War” will serve as a “secondary title” for the Department of Defense.

Well, at least they can use the newer name if they so choose. (I prefer “Department of Defense”.)

*The arm of government being most clearly destroyed by its leader, and perhaps the one most potentially injurious to all Americans, is health and human services. The appointment of RFK Jr. as Secretary of HHS was among the dumbest appointments Trump has made, given the man’s history and dubious stands on many issues, including vaccines.  Today, however, he’s being grilled by a Senate Committee, with both Democrates and Republicans giving him flak, and perhaps when I post this tomorrow I’ll have some juicy video.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is facing a withering barrage of questioning from a Senate committee on his vaccine policy and his record as President Trump’s health secretary, responding at times with clear disdain for the senators and with dismissals of public health data.

Appearing before the Senate Finance Committee on Thursday, Mr. Kennedy blamed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for the number of American deaths during the Covid-19 pandemic, and said he did not trust the data that showed vaccines saved millions of lives in the United States and elsewhere during the pandemic. Mr. Kennedy also falsely asserted that were no cuts to Medicaid in President Trump’s domestic policy bill.

Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana and a physician who voted to confirm Mr. Kennedy on the condition he wouldn’t disrupt access to vaccines, said that Mr. Kennedy was in fact doing so through his actions as health secretary.

“We’re denying people vaccines,” Mr. Cassidy said as he concluded his line of questioning.

Mr. Kennedy responded: “You’re wrong.”

The hearing was heavily focused on vaccine policy, with members of both parties grilling Mr. Kennedy on whether he misled them in his confirmation hearings.

When Mr. Kennedy appeared before the committee in January, he repeatedly promised to “do nothing as H.H.S. secretary that makes it difficult or discourages people from taking” vaccines. Since then, he has installed skeptics to guide vaccine policy, restricted access to Covid-19 vaccines, canceled grants and contracts for vaccine development and given a tepid endorsement of the measles vaccine.

Though Mr. Kennedy has been facing pointed questions from both parties on Thursday, he found himself in especially combative exchanges with Democrats. After Senator Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire accused him of reducing transparency around health data and limiting access to vaccines, he claimed that she was “just making stuff up.”

Ms. Hassan responded: “Sometimes when you make an accusation, it’s kind of a confession, Mr. Kennedy.”

Here’s a taste of that atmosphere at the hearing (you can hear the full hearing here).

Money quote: “Sir, you’re a charlatan.” From Sen. Cantwell (a screenshot):

Even Republicans want their kids vaccinated, so this is understandable. Most of us know the tests of the efficacy of vaccines, even if some of the CDC guidelines for masking and social distancing during the pandemic proved useless. But vaccines? No, they were definitely useful, saving hundreds of thousands of lives. Believe me, regardless of what RFK Jr. says, Republicans will get their kids vaccinated for school. And they will get their own flu and covid shots.

This guy has to go. Unfortunately, Trump has to okay his firing, and I don’t see that happening.

*And it has to be connected to RFK Jr. that the state of Florida has just done something very dangerous: eliminated all requirements for schoolchildren to have been vaccinated:

Florida’s surgeon general on Wednesday announced plans to end all state vaccine mandates, including for children to attend schools, which would make it the first state to completely withdraw from a practice credited with boosting vaccination rates and controlling the spread of infectious diseases.

Speaking at a news conference outside Tampa with Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), Surgeon General Joseph A. Ladapo said that every vaccine mandate “is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery” and called the rollback “the right thing to do.” Ladapo’s stances on vaccines and other measures intended to protect Floridians have drawn criticism from public health experts and advocates.

“Who am I as a man standing here now to tell you what you should put in your body?” Ladapo said Wednesday.

DeSantis, who at the news conference endorsed Ladapo’s measures, acknowledged ending certain vaccine requirements would “require changes from the legislature.”

Florida law mandates students must be vaccinated against polio, diphtheria, rubeola, rubella, pertussis, mumps and tetanus, while allowing exemptions for religious and medical reasons. Getting rid of those would require lawmaker approval. The Florida Department of Health could more immediately target four vaccines mandated under its own rules: chicken pox, hepatitis B, Hemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) and the pneumococcal vaccine PCV 15/20.

The Trump administration and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the founder of an anti-vaccine organization, have been pushing to upend U.S. vaccine policy. Florida’s move underscores the deepening political fault lines over vaccines, a divide certain to polarize parents, communities, lawmakers and health providers across red and blue states.

Of course almost every state allows religious and medical exemptions, though the religious ones shouldn’t be allowed (if you don’t get your kid vaccinated, have him homeschooled or go to a religious school). There are even states that allow philosophical exemptions, a dangerous thing to do. Most important, I think, are polio, MMR (measles, mumps, rubella), and DTaP (diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis), which are the most dangerous and for which it’s essential to establish “herd immunity.”  When I was a kid there were still polio epidemics, and I remember the horrendous sight of children encased in iron lungs, doomed to stay there for life.

This all comes from the atmosphere that RFK, Jr. has created. The charlatan has to go.

*The Free Press, which is starting to slant its news ideologically, has THREE–count them, three–pieces on the front page discussing the dangers of electing Democrat Zohran Mamdani mayor of New York City (he’s the clear front-runner).  Here they are, and I wouldn’t say this is “objective” news coverage, even though I don’t like Mamdani

The first one reports that people, including Trump, are urging Mayor Eric Adams to get out of the primary running, as Mamdani could clearly beat him, while the race against Democrat Andrew Cuomo, surprisingly, polls as a Cuomo victory.

Over a platter of tuna rolls on Wednesday night near Grand Central Terminal, a top New York executive’s phone wouldn’t stop ringing.

“Have you heard the same rumor that I’ve heard about Adams?” he asked another power broker.

The rumor was that incumbent New York City mayor Eric Adams is about to quit a reelection campaign that he cannot possibly win, but has repeatedly insisted he will stay in no matter what. Whispers that Adams was going to drop out began to swirl on Tuesday. By Wednesday evening, the city’s one percent—some of the most prominent CEOs, real-estate developers, and politicians in the country—were wondering if the race they had written off as Zohran Mamdani’s to lose was suddenly back in play.

What changed? The executive I joined for dinner, along with five other people including a billionaire, a real-estate titan, and a cabinet member in the Adams administration, told me that Adams had finally seen the writing on the wall. When I asked why Adams, who is running as an independent, would quit now, the executive lowered his chopsticks with a confused glare.

“’Cause he can’t win,” the executive said. “He needs a job. And if he wants to do public service, maybe there will be a public service job for him. Oh—and he has no money.”

. . . The real reason [Adams] was in Florida, several people I spoke to suspected, was to field an offer from President Donald Trump for a role in the administration that would tighten the race against Mamdani.

The possibilities reportedly include an ambassadorship or other appointed job for Adams, who vowed early in Trump’s second presidency not to criticize Trump publicly and whose indictment on bribery and fraud charges was dropped by the Justice Department in February. The talks also have apparently included a possible landing spot for Republican mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa.

. . . The obvious beneficiary if Adams abandons his reelection campaign is former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who suffered a bruising primary defeat to Mamdani in June and is now running as an independent. A longtime Cuomo associate told me that he was suddenly fielding calls from donors who wanted to know how they could aid the pressure campaign on Adams.

. . . The associate predicted that if Adams drops out, Cuomo would pick up his voters, giving the campaign a much-needed infusion of momentum. A poll released last month by the Cuomo-friendly New York Apartment Association showed that in a head-to-head matchup between Mamdani and Cuomo, the former governor would defeat Mamdani by 52 percent to 41 percent.

Remember, though, that Cuomo, who was governor of New York State for ten years, was forced to resign after multiple accusations of sexual harassment, and was also involved in several other scandals. I’m glad I don’t live in New York, for, as a Democrat, I’d have to choose between a sexual harasser and an anti-Israel kneejerk socialist.

By the way, there have been several reports (here’s one) that Paramount is interested in buying Bari Weiss’s Free Press and making her a CBS News executive with considerable control over news reporting. That’s what I call rising to the top rapidly. I wonder if she’ll bite.

*An article in Nature (click below to read) gives us something absolutely stunning about nature and published in Nature: a single ant queen (mother) can give birth to males of two different species, as well as hybrid and pure-species females.  Click below to read the article or read a shorter News & Views here.

You may remember that in Hymenoptera, fertile diploid queens produce two types of offspring (besides the occasional rare extra queen who is a worker that gets fed extra stuff, and is often killed in battles iwht an existing queen). The other types are males—haploid “drones” produced by unfertilized eggs—and workers, who are sterile females coming from fertilized eggs and do all the heavy lifting around the hive or nest. In this case, a queen female of species A mates with males from species B because for some reason she’s unable to produce offspring after mating with males of her own species.

Although producing unfertilized eggs usually requires meiosis, queens of species A have genetic trickery to produce eggs containing only chromosomes of species B.  This results in hybrid A/B females (all this is verified using DNA) but male offspring have all the genes from species B.  Queens of species A have perfected a way of cloning males of species B, even though the species are separated by 5 million years of evolutionary divergence! (There are also some colonies of pure-species A ants.) But what is weirder is that you get these cross-species cloned males of species B in areas where species B is not even found! This means that when the nuptial flight takes place, the time when the queen flies off to mate, the queen of species A has some species-B males around to mate with, because her colony, and others like it, produce those males. Apparently species-A females have parasitized the males of species B to help them stock their nests with hybrid workers. But the evolutionary process that resulted in this system remains mysterious.

*More biology, yay!  You may know that snails whose shells coil in opposite directions are unable to mate with each other. This has become a severe problem for a New Zealand snail named Ned.

Ned is a perfectly nice snail. If he had a dating profile, it might read: good listener, stable home, likes broccoli, seeks love.

But he’s already exhausted his local options and it’s not because he’s picky or unappealing. Instead, he’s a common garden snail with an uncommon anatomical problem that’s ruining his love life.

Ned’s shell coils to the left, not the right, making him the 1 in 40,000 snails whose sex organs don’t line up with those of the rest of their species. Unless another lefty snail is found, the young gastropod faces a lifetime of unintentional celibacy.

That dire prospect prompted a New Zealand nature lover who found the snail in her garden in August to launch a campaign to find his perfect match. But Ned’s quest for true love, perhaps predictably, is slow.

Giselle Clarkson was weeding her home vegetable patch in Wairarapa on the North Island when a snail tumbling out of the leafy greens caught her eye. Clarkson, the author and illustrator of a nature book, “The Observologist,” has an affection for snails and had long been on the lookout for a sinistral, or left-coiled shell.

“I knew immediately that I couldn’t just toss the snail back into the weeds with the others,” she said. Instead, she sent a photo of the snail, pictured alongside a right-coiled gastropod as proof, to her colleagues at New Zealand Geographic.

The magazine launched a nationwide campaign to find a mate for Ned, named for the left-handed character Ned Flanders in “The Simpsons,” who once opened a store called The Leftorium. That explains the male pronouns some use for Ned, although snails are hermaphrodites with sex organs on their necks and the capacity for both eggs and sperm.

“When you have a right-coiling snail and a left-coiling snail, they can’t slide up and get their pieces meeting in the right position,” Clarkson said. “So a lefty can only mate with another lefty.”

The fact that romantic hopefuls need not be a sex match should have boosted Ned’s prospects. But his inbox has remained empty except for photos of “optimistically misidentified right-coiling snails,” Clarkson said.

“We’ve had lots of enthusiasm and encouragement for Ned, a lot of people who can relate and really want the best for them, as a symbol of hope for everyone who’s looking for love,” she said. “But as yet, no lefties have been forthcoming.”

Ned’s relatable romantic woes have attracted global news coverage, but New Zealand’s strict biosecurity controls mean long-distance love probably isn’t on the cards. Other left-coiled snails have gotten lucky through public campaigns to find mates before, however, so Clarkson remains optimistic.

They can’t import snails of the same species who have the right coiling because of New Zealand’s strict biocontrol measures, but I have faith in my beloved Kiwis to find the right (and by that I mean “left’) snail (they’re hermaphrodites, so sex doesn’t matter). And good for Ms. Clarkston to spot the reverse coiling of a snail in her garden. I doubt that most people wouldn’t even notice it; I know I wouldn’t.

Fingers crossed for Ned!  Here’s a video report:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili shows a rare moment of empathy:

Hili: I owe you an apology.
Andrzej: For what?
Hili: For scratching your back last night. I just wanted you to move over.

In Polish:

Hili: Muszę cię przeprosić.
Ja: Za co?
Hili: Za to, że ci podrapałam w nocy plecy, ale chciałam, żebyś się przesunął.

*******************

I found this on Facebook, and it’s more or less my philosophy:

From Things with Faces; a spud to brighten your day:

From The Dodo Pet:

Damn! Masih has stopped tweeting and I wonder if she’ll ever resume to let us know about women in Iran. But we always have her pinch-hitter.  The tweet to which JKR is responding, by the way, has been taken down:

Luana found one from Pinkah decrying the insistence on woke language:

From Malcolm. Poor plant, but cats>> plants:

One that I HAD to retweet (Joyce reads my tweets):

And one from my feed; a kid who knows what to do with a cat:

One that I retweeted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

x

Two posts from Dr. Cobb. First, Ziya Tong, beloved of both me and Matthew, has returned:

Friends, I’ve missed sharing our fellow Earthlings with you, and happy to share that I have a new podcast coming out called This Is Wild! All about the amazing creatures we share our planet with and how we are protecting them! 🐼✊🏽💗https://youtu.be/EsOrlNaCfc8?feature=shared

— Earthling (@ziyatong.bsky.social) 2025-09-03T15:26:38.932Z

. . . and a great caption for a true story:

another sad case of a good kid gone bad

— Uncle Duke (@uncleduke1969.bsky.social) 2025-09-02T16:49:48.592Z

49 thoughts on “Friday: Hili dialogue”

  1. Re FL anti vaccines for school kids edict, I recommend Vince’s microbe tv office hours video, this week with Dr Dan Wilson (debunked the funk). First 15-20 minutes is on the FL business including the surgeon general. Url should be
    https://www.youtube.com/live/CByia5qblzc

    I really worry that other trumpish governors will mimic this performative and dangerous nonsense to pick up the loud don’t tread on me vote and local school boards will not have the political will to oppose it.

    1. And Dan Wilson takes issue with Ladapo comparing mandates with slavery and points out that yeah, it is exactly in the job description of a physician to tell you what to put in your body and what not.
      (Ok i’m done)

    2. I rarely hear about Congenital Rubella Syndrome but it is a good example of vaccines protecting more than the person vaccinated. From the Cleveland Clinic:

      “Congenital rubella syndrome (CRS) affects newborns and can cause several health problems, like congenital heart disease and intellectual disability. It can affect your baby if you get rubella during pregnancy. CRS is preventable with rubella vaccination before pregnancy.”

    3. Just as an aside, in a TWiV a good while ago Vincent said that he’s quite OK with Vinny but hates to be called Vince.

      1. Whoops, my mistake. I remember that twiv. Thanks for the reminder. (Hope this courtesy reply thank you does not count against my da roolz limit)

    4. Me, too. This anti-vax virus could spread to other states as their GOP governors compete to keep up.

  2. A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
    I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones. -John Cage, composer (5 Sep 1912-1992)

  3. “This all comes from the atmosphere that rfk jr has created…”. No, this all comes from the atmosphere that the American people created by the national vote last year. The project 2025 atmosphere will continue to condense out junior kennedy types until trump is replaced….and that will not happen until dems run some people who are electable in the eyes of more than the activists on the local democratic committee.

    1. Project 2025 isn’t quite as bad as Kennedy. It only proposed not paying for vaccines, not doing away with them altogether.

      P2025 also doesn’t mention tariffs or allying the country with Russia.

      I’m not defending it (it’s full of awful stuff) but I was surprised to learn this.

      Trumpism is a weird combo of awful ideas from various sources!

  4. I don’t know what to make of RFK, Jr. His remit is an area I’ve never worried about much. However, his assertion that many Senators and much of the Federal healthcare bureaucracy is in the hands of Big Pharma, I think is likely true. It seems that our government is shot through with corruption, so I support his efforts to end that, to the extent he can. Here is different take on yesterday’s hearings.

    1. His remit is health and human services, and if he has his way, all states will follow Florida and make vaccines optional for schools. You don’t care if there are polio and measles epidemics because of his stupid ideas. Further, he opposes mRNA vaccines, all the while praising Trump’s “warp speed” initiative that disseminated those vaccines widely.

      The man is an incompetent boob who doesn’t deserve to be head of HHS, much less a dogcatcher. Do you support EVERYTHING he does?

      1. Re when we were kids there were still polio epidemics, and the horrendous images of children encased in iron lungs — the anti-vax mania stirs up a lot of that up for me. Remember the March of Dimes campaigns, which collected 10¢-at-a-time donations for research against the scourge of infantile paralysis as it was then called? My parents were so happy when the Salk vaccine came out, and I clearly remember the jabs (in a dark-blue hypo). The later oral Sabin vaccine was easier, a pink liquid in a small paper cup.

        And a few years ago my next door neighbour told me about her time as a nurse in the polio ward.

        The vaccines were, and were widely seen to be, a secular miracle. I am deeply outraged that some entitled mendacious political f***wits would now desecrate all this.

    2. He’s a Woke activist – of the right.

      Woke Right.

      It’s exactly what Leftists do – agitate over some ostensibly reasonable concern – be it vaccine side-effects or what to do if transvestites need to use a public bathroom – amp up the political conflict (dialectically pulling on the Left and Right), all to claim and wield power to transform the system that imprisons us all, according to the gnosis of (here, for RFK,Jr.) what “healthy” means and how to achieve it (spoiler – it’s up to the individual – it won’t work a lot of the time – and it changes beyond one’s own power).

    3. Charitably, Junior Kennedy is a Gadfly. He has no credentials in the healthcare arena and has astonishingly stated that the polio vaccine has caused more deaths than polio, just as one example. He doesn’t believe that bacteria can cause disease – rather, it’s bad air. He’s a miasmist, and he profits from peddling falsehoods – he pulls in something in the range of $1M annually via his Children’s Health Defense.

      That this guy heads HHS is an absurdity, but that’s what we get from this Bellicose Bozo administration.

      1. One can very much hope that he will resign or that Trump will fire him, and a glimmer of that hope appears with the grilling that included Republican senators. But I don’t think Trump will fire him unless he is found to be disloyal. Loyalty is all that matters to Trump.

  5. In other news, The Nation is asking if DC Mayor Muriel Bowser is Vichy? I laughed out loud. I bet 95% of the ‘Trump is Fascist’ crowd doesn’t even understand the reference. I’ll give credit to the author, though. He doesn’t bother explain it. I think in all likelihood that Bowser is trying to avoid a push to end Home Rule.

  7. Ahhh, a refreshing Hili Dialogue (and specifically Hili’s too) … I think it’s mostly because of the lively scientific news …

    one day it just sort of occurred to me to pay attention to the symmetry of shells, and boom! One of the coolest new-to-me facts ever!.. (or, of course, someone told me of I read it and plum forgot..)

  8. When it comes to NYC politics – the problem with Cuomo isn’t the sexual harassment. Or as a female friend said: “We don’t care about the p***y, its the nursing homes thing we hate.”(deaths during Covid).

    There is nothing Cuomo or Adams (whom I quite like) can do that could be worse than comrade Zohran. You’d have to find an Ilhan Omar or maybe AOC to top the horrors of Mandami.

    D.A.
    NYC
    ps On the trans debate yesterday – in many years of being deep into this, the ONLY time I’ve heard religious of Christian values used as an opposition to the “Affirmation Model” it has been by being used as a straw man by trans activists.

    I have honestly never EVER heard a religious opposition to Affirmation proffered seriously by (my) anti-hormones/surgery side: GENSPECT etc. I’m sure some churches might object but they are not part of the debate on mental health or medicine. The “Christian” trope is all a TR activist straw man.

    This whole argument is not “gay” and I get frustrated with people thinking it has anything to do with that subject or era (again, the TRA’s conflations).

    Further, Gender Dysmorphic Disorder was in the DSM, occurring at a rate of around one per 50-100,000 live births. A little more common than men who want to cut off their legs. So ….not a rate equal to 20% of incoming freshmen at prestige unis.

    1. Over on X (I know) there are a lot of conservative Christians in comments saying that being concerned with gender ideology was their idea, coming right out of righteous Christian thinking. Same for being against Woke. It’s all part of the Western Christian cultural heritage.

      When it’s pointed out that these issues are bipartisan and involve secular arguments, turns out us non Christian allies are just using our background in Christian cultural heritage to think like Christians. Christianity lead to the United States and all the Enlightenment values, too.

      So same old, same old. Trans Rights Activists just jump on board and agree where it suits them.

  9. One of my favourite statements about vaccines is that you don’t need to vaccinate all your children, just the ones you want to keep.

  10. The choice between Cuomo and Mamdani reminds me of the 1991 gubernatorial election in Louisiana between David Duke and thrice-indicted Edwin Edwards. There were bumper stickers that said “Defeat the Nazi; vote for the crook!”

  11. The article about Ned the snail took me right back to the 1960s and the English songwriting duo of Michael Flanders and Donald Swann. Their song ‘Misalliance’ tells the sad story of the right-handed honeysuckle and the left-handed bindweed, whose love affair was destined to be unrequited because of their inability to intertwine. They ended by pulling up their roots and shrivelling away; as the song says,

    “Deprived of that freedom for which we must fight
    To veer to the left or to veer to the right!”

  12. “It’s also National Chianti Day, best served with fava beans and human liver.” Hmmm. I’ve never tried human liver. Was this quip a test to see if we’re still reading your posts? I am.

    Indeed. The Kennedy testimony was a disaster—for Kennedy. One might say that the pushback against him was a good omen for the country. There remains at least some sanity in Congress. Senator Cantwell is my Senator from Washington State. I cringed when I heard her call Kennedy a “charlatan” at the hearing despite her (valid) disagreement. She’s usually very sober and constrained. Even Trump seems to be lukewarm about Kennedy, judging from a clip I saw of Trump yesterday. Kennedy may eventually have to go. When he does, it won’t be soon enough.

    It’s crazy about that bee! Natural selection will do whatever it takes. (Consider that an attempt at a literary flourish. I don’t mean literally that selection has a mind of its own.)

    And on to the poor snail, Ned. The great majority of snails are dextral (right-handed coil), but a few are sinistral (sinister, with a left-handed coil). Mostly it’s species-specific, with all individuals of a species being one-handed or the other. This mismatch mishagass has been going on for 500 million years. Poor Ned. Maybe they need to resort to IVF if it’ll make him feel better.

    1. “It’s also National Chianti Day, best served with fava beans and human liver.” Hmmm. I’ve never tried human liver. Was this quip a test to see if we’re still reading your posts?

      I was wondering that too.

    2. It’s something Hannibal Lecter said to Clarice in Silence of the Lambs. Jerry’s good sense of humor at work.

      Edit: I just googled (AI’d it) and came up with this added information: All of these foods interfere with MAOI antidepressants, which are used to treat various personality disorders as well. In other words, Hannibal wasn’t taking his meds.

      I wonder if the writer of the script actually knew about Chianti/liver/fava beans interfering with MAOI drugs…

      1. They don’t interfere with the drugs, rather they interact with the drugs in a dangerous way. They contain tyramine which is not broken down by the gut and liver when on an MAOI. Tyramine then gets absorbed into the bloodstream and causes a potentially fatal hypertensive crisis due to it triggering massive release of norepinephrine from sympathetic nerves. This is why dietary restrictions are required if taking an MAOI, and why such drugs are rarely prescribed these days.

  13. Joyce Carol Oates is a prolific tweeter averaging ~13k times per year. There is a funny rightwing corner of twitter that pokes more-or-less-gentle fun at what the RWers think of as her obtuse liberal pieties tweeted from inside her comfy ideological bubble.

    https://x.com/jarvis_best/status/1959267986747142317

    The Triceratops tweet is a classic in the genre.

  14. 1) The smiling potato cheered me up, majorly.
    2) So did the knowledge that Joyce Carol Oates is still alive.
    3) The benefits, power, and necessity of herd immunity to the childhood diseases we routinely vaccinate against should not be overstated. For all of those conditions, protection comes almost entirely from being vaccinated oneself, regardless of what others do.
    -For tetanus and polio (for different reasons), herd immunity plays no role at all. You will be protected if you are immunized, not at all if you aren’t. (Oral live Sabin polio vaccine, which does produce herd immunity, is not used in developed countries.)
    -For diphtheria and pertussis (again for different reasons), high levels of immunization prevent outbreaks among the susceptible and thus provide an extra layer of protection to the immunized. But everyone who is immunized will still enjoy solid protection from severe disease, even if no one else is.
    -The best way to protect one’s child from measles and mumps, and to protect her someday fetus from rubella, is to vaccinate her with MMR. Don’t rely on herd immunity. For measles, herd immunity works to protect the unvaccinated only if vaccination exceeds 95%. This is not difficult to do except politically now. The only reason to value herd immunity is that some immune-deficient children can’t receive these live attenuated vaccines safely. (Others can receive them but won’t mount an immune response to them or to other vaccines. This is a complex topic. The short answer is that there are other ways to protect these fragile children if they have inadvertent contact with an infectious case. Great parental vigilance is necessary in a world where people like RFK Jr don’t care about your kid. Laws excluding unvaccinated children from school are still wise, even if they are invoked only during outbreaks, but are not essential to the general public health of others.
    https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/publications/healthy-living/canadian-immunization-guide-part-3-vaccination-specific-populations/page-8-immunization-immunocompromised-persons.html)

    But for all the rest of us with healthy children, we don’t really have to worry that herd immunity is waning from antivax. Just vaccinate your kids with everything going and they’ll be protected no matter what everyone else does. It should be difficult to enrol an unvaccinated child in daycare or public school, but this is primarily to protect that child from her own parental nonchalance or paranoia.

  15. “Believe me, regardless of what RFK Jr. says, Republicans will get their kids vaccinated for school. And they will get their own flu and covid shots.”

    We have data for the 2023-2024 COVID booster season. Barely half of seniors over 75 got the booster. Only one-third of health care workers chose to do so. And fewer than 10% of children under twelve were boosted.

    And that’s okay. Many of our European partners recognized long ago that the vaccine is not necessary for healthy children. It is time the United States followed suit, with or without RFK Jr. A disease with a nearly 1,000-fold disparity in death between young and old does not invite one-size-fits-all medical treatment. Even uneducated people can reach that realization. And, quite predictably, they then start wondering what other nonsense they are being directed to follow and some of them start tossing the MMR baby out with the COVID bathwater.

    I wish my friends on both sides of the aisle would recognize that views on vaccines are not binary. Alas, the “good people versus bad people” contagion is not vaccine preventable. And we have an epidemic of it in this country.

    1. “Many of our European partners recognized long ago that the vaccine is not necessary for healthy children.”

      As of 2022, ~ 8700 children (up to age 14 or 19) have died from COVID globally. ~90+ percent of them were unvaccinated. As many as 35% of those deaths may have been in children with no existing comorbidities. That is 3000 children.

      According to Perplexity AI: “Based on data from the CDC and recent scientific reviews, no deaths have been directly attributed to COVID-19 vaccination in children…”

      I guess my definition of “necessary” differs from “our European partners”.

  16. There is a drearily predictable mix of angst, anger, concern, alarm, and jubilation over the recent Florida decision to rescind childhood vaccine mandates. Let’s try to divorce this from the US political mood. For any readers in the UK, Ireland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark: Could you tell us what vaccines are mandatory rather than simply recommended for schoolchildren in your country? For those who live in Germany: Could you tell us the same about vaccines other than the MMR?

    1. For one thing, you can do a google. Also, citizens in the countries you cite don’t have to pay for vaccines.

      Either way, in a country where healthcare is a privilege and extremely expensive, getting rid of vaccine mandates is really bad news for poor people that want/need vaccinations. Once a mandate is lifted, insurance companies no longer have to pay for vaccines. It’s a great boon for big pharma, and I presume that’s a top reason why the mandates were lifted. Maybe they’ll be compassionate and charge $1 for standard childhood vaccines. Oh, wait, in Florida? I LOL out loud!

      1. I wouldn’t call healthcare a privilege anywhere, Mark, nor is it a right anywhere. It’s just an economic transaction where these days most bills are either paid by third parties or written off as bad debts. Like everywhere, it is the product of a free person’s labour. Usually the labourer expects to be paid for it, somehow, by someone. Since no one has the right to compel another to labour for him for free, free vaccination can’t be a right, any more than free bus tickets can be a right. This is true in countries with free socialized healthcare, too. The state has to decide how much free care (or free bus rides) it will provide from taxes, just as much as an insurance company does from premiums. If it says, “We won’t pay for this; we won’t even let you buy it for cash because it’ll bid up the price we have to pay,” there goes your right.

        Healthcare systems in all countries where most people don’t pay for what they consume all work under the same constraints. Demand for free care is unlimited but resources are constrained and everyone wants to be comfortably compensated. The money holder, not the patient and not the doctor, decides what form and amount of care he will pay for out of the money he can raise. It seems reasonable for the payor to decide on evidence that the aggregate benefit from giving COVID vaccination to healthy children and young adults is not good value for money, compared to other goods that could be achieved with the same money spent or invested elsewhere. This is explicitly what countries such as Canada did in no longer recommending COVID vaccination for routine immunization of healthy free-living people under 65 (unless they are “equity-denied”, but that’s just how we talk now.) Provincial single payers then don’t have to cover the vaccine as an insured benefit, but parents who want the very best for their children are free to pay for it out of pocket. (Hardly anyone does. We generally value healthcare only if it’s free.)

        Unlike American insurance companies, our provincial single payers don’t have to pay for any pharmaceuticals outside hospitals at all, except as they see fit. All do cover recommended routine immunizations in children but not, say, shingles vaccine in adults under 65. These are decisions made by provincial health ministry bureaucrats based on value for money, not different in principle from what insurance companies do. “If we don’t cover it, it’s because you don’t need it,” is really how all third-party payment schemes have to operate. No one can have an unlimited claim on someone else’s resources. Either you buy what you want with your own cash or you submit to being told what you can have for free.

        American insurance companies would have legitimate reasons to lobby the U.S. Government that they shouldn’t have to provide free COVID shots to everyone in the country when many enlightened progressive countries, such as Canada, now target them to old people, high-risk younger folks, and very few children. If this helps their bottom line, so what? It seems perverse to argue that insurance companies should be made to pay for care of low value when socialized systems excuse themselves from doing so on the same facts.

  18. It seems to me that a lot of this crazy anti-vax trend came from what happened with the covid vaccines. Biden pronounced that if you get the vaccine you won’t get covid. Then just about everyone who got the covid vaccine got covid (I got it a few weeks after my second booster). Plus the mRNA vaccines had a side effect of heart inflammation in some people (including a few I know personally who had to be hospitalized). Add to that the anecdotal evidence of unvaccinated people getting only mild cases of covid (I know a few of those too) and voila – vaccine scepticism. I am certainly not a vaccine skeptic myself but I can imagine why some people would become skeptical regarding the covid vaccines.

    1. Andrew Wakfield and Jenny McCarthy preceded COVID, and WAY before that I was astonished to learn not all that long ago that there were antivaxxers when the smallpox vaccine first appeared (why? It was meddling with God’s Plan.)

      With myocarditis, it is also a complication of COVID and it’s more severe when coupled with the viral infection, but I suppose with all the other inflammatory reactions it isn’t noticed as much. And vaccine-induced myocarditis was apparently mainly transient, resolving in 24h. Plus, it was an issue just with the initial shot. Now that most everyone has either been vaccinated or has had COVID, it’s not seen anymore.

      But as to weighing personal experiences over scientific consensus, you might think that people would dwell on those they’ve known who died from COVID. I hardly think that my own tally is anything other than ordinary. I’ve known five people who are no longer here because of COVID. Two died before any vaccines were available, two were smartasses who knew more than anyone else and were not vaccinated, and the last, who was also the last of the five to die, had gotten her first but never got any boosters. She was a nice old lady who was quite spry the last time I saw her, probably the day before her Jehovah’s Witness friends carted her off to church, where she picked up the virus. About ten days later, she was gone.

      I don’t know anyone who was hospitalized from the vaccination, but I do know someone in Sweden who had a weird swelling reaction in focused places on her extremeties, the basis of which is probably that she has a genetic disorder (Ehlers-Danlos, IIRC). BUT, after that first experience, which subsided, she went back for the second one. Why? She had also worked in a COVID unit.

      1. Wow. I don’t personally know of anyone in my extended circle who died of covid. Perhaps by the time the mutated virus reached the land of Oz, it was a much milder strain than the one that struck down your acquaintances.

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