Welcome to Sunday, October 12, the Sabbath that was made for (goyische) cats, for cats were not made for the Sabbath. It’s also National Gumbo Day, Here’s the cornball Cajun Justin Wilson telling us how to cook gumbo (well, how to start cooking gumbo). Are you old enough to remember him? I do—I gare-un-tee! I watched Justin regularly when I was a kid. Now I learn from Wikipedia that he not only had no discernible Cajun ancestry, but was also an ardent segregationist.
It’s also World Arthritis Day, National Farmer’s Day (but which farmer?), and Pulled Pork Day.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 12 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Obituaries first: Diane Keaton died at 79.
Diane Keaton, the vibrant, sometimes unconventional, always charmingly self-deprecatingactress who won an Oscar for Woody Allen’s comedy “Annie Hall” and appeared in some 100 movie and television roles, an almost equal balance of them in comedies like “Sleeper” and “The First Wives Club” and dramas like “The Godfather” and “Marvin’s Room,” has died. She was 79.
. . . Ms. Keaton received three other Oscar nominations. One was for the sweeping Oscar-winning drama “Reds” (1981), in which she played Louise Bryant, an intense 1910s writer hanging out with Greenwich Village socialists and Bolshevik revolutionaries, notably the activist journalist Jack Reed (Warren Beatty, who directed).
Another was for “Marvin’s Room” (1996), in which she played the selfless daughter who is taking care of her slowly dying father and her scatterbrained aunt when she receives a diagnosis of leukemia and needs a bone-marrow transplant. Her co-stars included Meryl Streep, Leonardo DiCaprio and Hume Cronyn.
The third was for “Something’s Gotta Give” (2003), a comedy about a successful playwright who turns an extremely tearful breakup into a new hit comedy. She attracts the attentions of a handsome, much younger doctor (Keanu Reeves) and inspires a sexist man in his 60s (Jack Nicholson) to fall in love with a woman his own age.
. . . “Getting older hasn’t made me wiser,” she told People magazine, with a typically self-critical eye, in 2019, insisting cheerfully, “I don’t know anything, and I haven’t learned.”
Her friends are extolling her as a great person: the same person who appeared onscreen. But in truth I never thought Keaton could act: she played herself over and over again, and to say that, as the Hollywood Reported did, that she was “the consummate actress of our generation” is way overstated. Have they ever heard of Meryl Streep?
*The NYT details some of the inimical effects of the government shutdown. (Article archived here.)
Reverberations of the federal government shutdown, now in its second week, are starting to be felt by certain segments of Americans, hinting at problems that could deepen for the public if Congress cannot reach a funding agreement soon.
In some Native American communities, key medical services, such as diabetes monitoring and telehealth sessions, have been curtailed or canceled. Veterans no longer have access to career counseling or regional benefits offices. Taxpayers rushing to meet a Wednesday deadline for extended filing are going to have to wait on hold because fewer Internal Revenue Service customer service agents are working to answer questions.
In addition, many of the country’s fruit and vegetable farmers face hurdles in planning for next year’s crops because there is so much uncertainty about what federal assistance they can expect. Large segments of the federal work force on Friday received what will be their last paycheck until the government reopens.
And the Trump administration said on Friday that more than 4,000 federal employees will be laid off in a new round of mass firings, a maneuver that is already facing a legal challenge.
As the strains deepen, the fallout has so far done little to tip the scales in Washington, where Republicans and Democrats are locked in a standoff over how to extend funding to keep the government open.
President Trump has sought to ramp up the pressure on Democrats by cutting or pausing billions in funding for Democratic jurisdictions and intensifying his threats to overhaul the federal bureaucracy. This week, he publicly mulled denying legally mandated back pay to some federal workers, inserting more anxiety into a work force that has faced stress and uncertainty since he returned to the Oval Office.
“Most of them are going to get back pay, and we’re going to try and make sure of that,” Mr. Trump said on Wednesday. “But some of them are being hurt very badly by the Democrats and they therefore won’t qualify.”
The White House did not respond directly to a question seeking to clarify what the president meant, instead issuing a statement blaming Democrats for the shutdown.
I’m not sure what the President meant in that last sentence, either, but I’m betting that those who are “being hurt very badly by the Democrats” will happen, just by chance, to be people who support the Democrats. And because back pay is legally mandated, denying it is going to bring out more court cases (is anybody keeping a record of how many cases like this there are against the Trump administration?)
*Although I differ from the folks at Science-Based Medicine on the issue of how many biological sexes there are (they think that sex is a spectrum), I do agree with them on the issue of vaccination. And so I fully agree with David Gorski on his latest post, “Robert F. Kennedy Jr. weaponizes an old antivax trope in his quest to eliminate vaccines.” Excerpts are indented:
First, note the amusing thing. RFK Jr. is really peeved by having been dragged by Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Washington) with a chart that showed the enormous impact of vaccination on the burden of vaccine-preventable infectious diseases globally, so much so that he has to brag that he is going to “shred” that chart. Spoiler alert: He doesn’t so much “shred” it as twist it into a straw man he can attack.) For your edification, here is the chart:
More from SBM; the video is below in the tweet:
Let’s take a look at how RFK Jr. demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt in this video that he is, in fact, antivaccine. I will repeat what I’ve been saying for months now: RFK Jr. is definitely coming for your vaccines; he’s coming for all vaccines, in fact. It’s just that he’s strategic enough to know that he can’t do it all at once, which is why he purged the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP) and replace the fired members with antivaxxers and the antivax-adjacent, only one of whom has any significant experience in public health or vaccine policy. Personally, I’ve been saying that the only thing that’s saved us (thus far) is the inexperience and incompetence of RFK Jr.’s ACIP. In the meantime, President Trump has embraced Andrew Wakefield’s old grift about separating the components of the MMR vaccine as somehow being “safer,” even as he talks about adding autism to the list of table injuries for the Vaccine Injury Compensation System, a move that would certainly bankrupt and destroy it.
Yes, things are grim out there.
Through it all, RFK Jr. has been maintaining his old lie (or self-delusion—you be the judge) that he’s “not antivax” and is only interested in making vaccines “safer.” (Never mind that his standard of safety is basically unattainable and vaccines, as a medical intervention, are already incredibly safe and effective. If that were the case, though, you might assume that RFK Jr. would concentrate on the harms of vaccines, both the tiny but real risk of injuries from certain vaccines, and all the other harms that antivaxxers erroneously and/or deceptively attribute to vaccines (e.g., autism). He has certainly done that, but a hallmark of an antivaxxer is that, not only does he fear monger [sic] about the harms vaccines cause, both real and imagined, but he also feels compelled to argue that vaccines don’t work, are ineffective, or at the very least are not nearly as effective as we know they are. The reason, of course, is to produce messaging that shifts the risk-benefit ratio against vaccines as much as possible, even though vaccine scientists, infectious disease doctors, and public health officials know that the risk-benefit ratio is very much in favor of vaccines.
Thus, RFK Jr. has to resurrect the hoary “vaccines didn’t save us” argument that uses straw men arguments and conflates infectious disease incidence with infectious disease mortality to falsely argue that, in the grand scheme of things, vaccines didn’t do that much in the 20th century.
Here’s the video. I can’t embed it, but click on the screenshot and you can hear it.
Gorski goes through a number of mis-citations of the literature by RFK Jr. (and many of these must be deliberate); some of them are embarrassingly stupid. As Gorski concludes:
How do I know RFK Jr. is being insincere? Easy. As soon as he makes his perfunctory statement that the measles vaccine works, he immediately pivots to attacking a straw man about “blind faith in vaccines alone as our only recourse against death by infection” and complaining that it’s “inclined our medical profession to discount the role of therapeutic drugs and vitamins and diet, exercise and other lifestyle changes that might fortify the human immune systems against all kinds of sickness,” referring dismissively to the “idea that health comes from a syringe,” which no one in pubic claims, as something that can distort public health and lead to misallocation of resources. After a brief interval to attack President Joe Biden’s pandemic responseand encouraging of mass vaccination against COVID-19 and to praise President Trump (who, he conveniently forgets, was President during most of the first year of the pandemic), RFK Jr. risibly concludes that he and President Trump will make sure that America has “the best childhood vaccination schedule.” (I kid you not. He said that.) Of course he blathers about “addressing vaccine injuries” and using “gold standard science” (which is a meaningless buzzword).
Seeing this video, I’m more convinced than ever that RFK Jr. is not just coming for your vaccines, he is coming for all vaccines. After all, to his message that vaccines are dangerous, he’s just added the antivax trope that they don’t work very well and are unnecessary if you are sufficiently healthy, well-nourished, and doing the “right” things, and, of course, there’s quack treatments to save you in case that fails.
RFK Jr. may be the Trump appointee whose views lead to the most deaths of Americans. I once thought that Secretary of WAR Pete Hegseth would win that prize, but now I think RFK Jr. is not only misleading and even duplicitous, but dangerous.
*According to Trump via the Times of Israel, Hamas is rounding up the living hostages now, and they should be turned over to Israel by noon their time tomorrow. The bodies, well, they will come later.:
US President Donald Trump on Friday said he expects the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas will hold because “they’re all tired of fighting,” after Israeli forces pulled back in Gaza as part of the first phase of the deal he brokered.
“It’s a great deal for Israel, but it’s a great deal for everybody,” he told reporters in the Oval Office. “I can tell you that I saw Israel dancing in the streets, but they were dancing in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, many, many countries.”
Trump noted the hostages are due to be released on Monday following the IDF’s completion of a partial withdrawal, with Hamas “getting them now” before they are freed from the Gaza Strip.
“They’re in some pretty rough places under earth… Only a few people know where they are… They’re also getting approximately 28 bodies. Some of those bodies are being unearthed.”
Trump confirmed he will meet a “lot of leaders” in Egypt on Monday to discuss the future of devastated Gaza, adding that the meeting would likely be in Cairo. He noted he will also address the Knesset when he visits Israel earlier that same day.
The ToI also has a separate article with a list of all the hostages that are presumed alive and being turned over.
There are currently 48 hostages being held in Gaza, including the body of a soldier killed in 2014.
Israel has determined that at least 25 of the hostages were killed on Oct. 7, 2023, or died while in captivity. There is only one remaining female hostage, whom Israel believes was killed in captivity.
With the start of the ceasefire on Friday, the remaining hostages are expected to be released within 72 hours. Israel is set to release around 2,000 Palestinian prisoners in exchange.
, , , , The ceasefire and hostage release agreement includes the return of 20 living hostages and the bodies of 28 others.
The inclusion of 28 deceased hostages implies the deaths of two hostages over whose fates Israel had previously expressed “grave concern,” but had not pronounced dead.
In May, Israel said it had concerns for the lives of three hostages: Israeli soldier Tamir Nimrodi, Nepali national Bipin Joshi and Thai national Pinta Nattapong. Nattapong’s body was recovered from Gaza in June.
Note that Hamas gets back TWO THOUSAND Palestinian prisoners, many of them almost certainly terrorists, while Israel gets only 20 living people (if they’re lucky) and 28 bodies. Nobody has pointed out the palpable unfairness of this: presumably the Palestinian prisoners are either being held for suspected crimes or have already been convicted. The Israeli prisoners are guilty of nothing. I’m wondering if part of the deal on the U.S./Israeli side was to drastically cut down the number of Palestinian prisoners released. Remember, one of them released in an earlier but even more lopsided deal (1 Israeli solder for 1027 Palestinian prisoners!) was Yahya Sinwar, who planned the October 7 attacks. Israel got one soldier back and lost 1200 others because of that. Yet nobody seems to have learned that lesson.
*In bad economic times, people tend to buy gold (and diamonds), which are supposed to retain their value as stocks tank. Indeed, years ago when I began investing, I had some gold mutual funds in my portfolio, but I realized how volatile that was, dumped my meager holdings, and bought less volatile assets. And now gold is hitting the roof now, with many people competing to buy it. Look at the per ounce price in this WSJ article!:
So many customers flocked to a New York City gold dealer this past week that staff had to ask people to wait outside.
“I’ll go through this all day long,” said Chief Executive Ben Tseytlin, about the people piling into his shop, Bullion Exchanges. Some were there to sell gold, but increasingly people are coming to buy, he said.
. . . . Gold futures settled Wednesday at a record $4,043.30 a troy ounce, the special unit of weight used for precious metals such as gold, silver and platinum that dates to medieval trade markets. A day earlier, the precious metal surpassed $4,000 a troy ounce, a sign investors are rushing to alternative assets in the midst of concern regarding the U.S. economy. On Thursday, prices retreated from records, ending a four-session streak of gains, though futures remained near $4,000.
Bullion has flourished in recent months, boosted by worries about the outlook for inflation and the prospects for major currencies. Those includes the dollar, which has been weakened by concern about President Trump’s upending of the postwar economic order. Geopolitical tension, including the Russia-Ukraine war, are bullish for gold.
Tseytlin spent most of the summer tending to customers who—spurred by gold’s historic run—wanted to turn family heirlooms or coins into cash. More recently, those sellers have turned into buyers, he said.
“That’s not a normal thing,” Tseytlin said. He attributes the boom in bullion buyers to worry about the economy. People are buying gold coins and bars to stash, he said. His storefront is lined with various gold coins—including Krugerrands from South Africa—and 20-ounce bars of silver. There are gold coins wrapped in Diwali packaging for the coming Hindu holiday, and others from places like Canada and Switzerland.
A vintage-jewelry dealer, Jacqueline Mirón, who was in the Diamond District on Friday to buy gold items to sell on her online shop, J.GemJewels, said some of her clients are following a similar strategy. As sellers unload gold jewelry for quick cash, affluent buyers are stockpiling high-end pieces.
“There’s a wealthier clientele that is actually buying up a lot of gold because they see it as investment, and they already have that cash liquid,” she said. “They’re like, yeah, I want that $10,000 gold chain because I know that chain is going to be worth more, maybe even by the end of the year.”
My own opinion: unless you need the money, do not sell gold. And don’t buy it (or gold funds, either), because it’s certain that sooner or later the price will go down. And nobody can time the markets.
*And from the Associated Press’s reliable “oddities” section, we learn that one of the driest places on earth is in bloom: the Atacama Desert in Chile, which has received about 6 cm of rain—a rare event. But enough rain is necessary but not sufficient.
A rare bloom in Chile’s Atacama Desert has briefly transformed one of the world’s driest places into a dazzling carpet of fuchsia-colored wildflowers.
The arid region — considered the driest nonpolar desert on Earth, averaging around 2 millimeters (0.08 inches) of rainfall a year — was a riot of color this week after unusual downpours throughout the Southern Hemisphere’s winter months soaked the desert foothills and highlands.
Experts describe 2025 as among the Atacama’s wettest in recent years, with some high-elevation borderlands receiving up to 60 millimeters of rain (2.3 inches) in July and August.
Seeds from more than 200 flower species sit in the red and rocky soil of the Atacama Desert all year, awaiting the winter rains, said Víctor Ardiles, chief curator of botany at Chile’s National Museum of Natural History.
A three-minute video shows some of the blooms:
Moisture from the Amazon basin arrives to the desert’s eastern fringes as modest rainfall, and from the Pacific Ocean to its coastline as dense fog. Dormant seeds must store up at least 15 millimeters (0.6 inches) of water to germinate.
“When certain moisture thresholds are met, (the seeds) activate, grow and then bloom,” Ardiles said.
Yet even then there’s no guarantee that brightly colored bulbs will explode through the soil.
“There are four key factors that determine whether this process reaches the seed – water, temperature, daylight and humidity,” Ardiles added.
“Not all the seeds will germinate, some will remain waiting … a portion will make it to the next generation, while others will be left behind along life’s path.”
The main threads in the floral carpet are pink and purple. But yellow, red, blue and white strands emerge as well.
Tourists flocked to the northern desert in recent days to marvel at the short-lived flower show. Some even trek from Chile’s capital, Santiago, 800 kilometers (497 miles) south of the Copiapó region.
Here’s a video showing some of the blooming, which is remarkable. Not only do the seeds have to remain dormant, but these rare and sporadic blooms raise a question I’ve never had answered: WHO IS POLLINATING THEM? Presumably at least some of these flowers are insect- rather than wind-pollinated, and that means that insects have to be there. But where do those insects come from? I’ve asked entomologists, but never have had an answer. Perhaps a reader or two will know.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has apparently just polished off some human food:
Hili: What exactly was I supposed to do once the plate was licked?
Me: Remind me that I still need to wash it.
In Polish:
Hili: Co ja miałam zrobić po wylizaniu tego talerza?
Ja: Miałaś mi przypomnieć, żebym go jednak umył.
*******************
From Cat Memes:
From Cats that Have Had Enough of Your Shit:
From Dancing Cats:
Nothing new from Masih, but here’s her stand-in, being wickedly funny, as usual:
To be honest, I didn’t even know Vancouver Parks and Recreations had avowed me, so the disavowal hasn’t been much of a blow. Next time, send me a certificate of avowal, wait until I’ve proudly framed it, hung it over my PC and taken a selfie with it, THEN revoke it. pic.twitter.com/3dpWWCAXsF
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) October 9, 2025
From Luana: New Zealand representatives are having tantrums in Parliament again. Save the hakas for the rugby field! A “community note” says this, though it’s not relevant to the point:
Oriini Kaipara is not the newly elected Prime Minister of New Zealand. She is a newly elected Member of Parliament (MP) for Te Pāti Māori, filling a vacant seat. The Prime Minister of New Zealand is Christopher Luxon, who has been in office since November 2023.
NEW: New Zealand parliament suspended after an unplanned haka broke out following newly elected PM Te Pati Maori’s Oriini Kaipara’s speech.
Kaipara: ✋😵💫
Speaker of the House Gerry Brownlee: “No, not that. The guarantee was that would not be taking place… Unreal.”
Kaipara:… pic.twitter.com/36YMOJUhyH
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) October 9, 2025
From Simon: Another Brent rant, this time on circumcision, which, he says, causes autism (it’s a spoof, of course):
Circumcision Causes Autism?
— Brent Terhune (@brentterhune.bsky.social) 2025-10-10T21:12:41.545Z
From Malcolm. If cats like boxes to protect them from predators, why do tigers, who have no predators, like them too?
I love that cats are just cats no matter the size pic.twitter.com/jtY0lNWgj9
— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) September 12, 2025
One from my feed; my beloved mallards:
Ducks Jumping on Trampoline😄😊 pic.twitter.com/cIgdyG5TGl
— Tweets of Dogs (@TweeetsOfDogs) October 10, 2025
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This German Jewish boy was gassed as soon as he arrived at Auschwitz. He was two years old. Had he lived, he'd be 85 today.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-10-12T10:34:02.413Z
A post from Dr. Cobb, who’s headed to Shanghai tomorrow.
The complex mating rituals of #squid. Pale blue by day, the females turned dark red, while others put on their zebra-stripes and flashed bold colors with the distinct peacocking of a male showing off.#cephalpopd #🦑 #matingsquid #gug #chrisgug #gugunderwater
— Chris Gug (@gugunderwater.bsky.social) 2025-08-29T10:13:01.681Z
. . . and a remarkable PBS video showing the mating ritual and birth (sound up):
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
Someone is Hindu, someone is Muslim, someone is Christian / Everyone is hell-bent on not becoming a human being. -Nida Fazli, poet (12 Oct 1938-2016)
That’s just a trick with words disguised as profundity. It commits a category error, like saying that left-handed women are women and Anabaptist women are women; therefore transgendered women are women. Fasli’s statement could be true only about religions that required adherents to believe that they were not human beings.
Fasli was a poet. Mark Forsyth (The Etymologicon) agrees that poetry is more important than truth. If you doubt this, he counsels, just try using either of the two to get laid. (Or, I would add, start a revolution.)
Perhaps your are correct but I took the quote as a simple complaint against tribalism of any form. The regarding of my tribe, religion, political party or country as the only true one.
Fazli’s observation seems to me perfectly reasonable.
I did a double-take when I saw a piece saying circumcision causes autism. What he said was that, because Tylenol is used for pain relief post-circumcision, there is a link.
If humanity survives, it will look back on the time when circumcision of children was allowed as a time of barbarism.
Though it is highly unlikely humanity (or civilization anyway) will survive much longer, most everything we do today will someday seem barbaric.
Ohh I don’t know, Mr. Helbig. A few years ago I wrote an article in favor of (only male, and only medical not tribal or moyel) circumcision.
To wit:
https://themoderatevoice.com/the-kindest-cut-circumcision/
Strangely, on the way to visit my editor that day in Brooklyn there was an “anti circumcision” demo which featured a lot of men in white pants with red paint on their …fronts. Running about making a proper scene. They made a point, for sure!
best regards,
D.A.
NYC
Obviously I have no objection to circumcision if needed for medical reasons. Some women have their breasts removed due to cancer. That has nothing to do with mastectomies to make women who think they are men look more like men.
Whether preventing disease transmission is a valid reason is another question. My children are all vaccinated against HPV.
And just saw a headline from The Babylon Bee, “Hitler Brings Peace to Israel.”
When I was a trader (equities and options) I’d often trade gold stocks – there were asymmetries in the prices of the stocks and the price of gold (arbitrage).
Gold price is like a heart monitor of anxiety in the markets and uncertainty (tariffs, geopolitics and pretty much everything Trump does) is high.
This, though, has been effected in the last 15 or so years as gold (metal) sellers advertise a LOT on “end off the world!!!” stories on Fox News. Not so bright Fauxnoos boomers rush to buy it… and they have money. This has effected the gold prices during our current era.
(I own no gold and don’t trade now. Thank goodness b/c it is emotionally destructive as a job).
I prefer to be a loudmouth on twitter/x and here. 🙂
D.A.
NYC
I expect Junior Tonhasca would be able to marshall a number of great facts on the subject, but one can expect that pollinators can and will come from afar to pollinate the carpet of flowers in the high altitude desert in Chile. Wind currents lifting up from lower and well vegetated areas will carry them in. Air sampling with nets dragged by planes shows that the sky everywhere, even well out to sea, is laced with bees, wasps, and flies (don’t forget flies as pollinators!). So they will come. The lucky ones will, anyway.
Re entomologists: https://xkcd.com/1012/
Here is a thought: smallpox killed more people in the 20th Century than all the wars of that benighted century combined.
Yes Mr. Symon. Also consider the Spanish Flu killing (more? nearly as many? competitive) than WW1.
And the mass deaths of Hong Kong flu in the late 50s.
I’m with PCC(E) here: nepobaby crank RFK is The Most Dangerous cabinet appointment of our lifetime.
D.A.
NYC https://x.com/DavidandersonJd
And for certain, his Brain Slug does not have our best interests at heart.
”My own opinion: unless you need the money, do not sell gold. And don’t buy it (or gold funds, either), because it’s certain that sooner or later the price will go down. And nobody can time the markets.”
I agree with the second part but not the first. People usually invest in gold when both the stock market and interest rates don’t promise a good yield, but then pull out when they do, bringing down the price. So buying when the price is high, like now, doesn’t make sense, unless you have good reason to believe that it will continue to rise significantly.
But surely if one has already invested in gold, now, when the price is high, would be a good time to sell.
RFK Jr. is clearly wrong on the facts. He cherry-picks contrary articles, often published in obscure places, to make his claims, seemingly unable (or unwilling) to accept the amazingly widespread and longstanding evidence that supports the safety and efficacy of vaccination. Why are people even countenancing Kennedy’s crap in the 21st century?! Millions of lives saved over two centuries are suddenly being dismissed by one angry crank. Even George Washington had his troops vaccinated for smallpox, and Americans—including the President of the United States—is listening to this Kennedy nitwit! The fact that so many people can be swayed by this antivax nonsense is truly scary. In every generation ignorance needs to be conquered anew.
Part of his bias against vaccination is his distrust and disdain for the pharmaceutical industry, believing (or pretending to believe) that they are only in it for the money—seemingly ignoring the reality that pharmaceutical companies wouldn’t be profitable unless their products were overwhelmingly safe and effective. (Yes, some medications turn out to be less than they seem, but that is certainly not the case for vaccines.)
Is Kennedy disingenuous? Probably. But even if he is sincere, he’s a serious risk to our healthcare system and to the reputation of science as an institution. I can only hope that he doesn’t hollow out the HHS before he’s done. He’s a menace to science and a menace to society.
Disingenuous? There are other more pointed terms in a thesaurus: dishonest, deceitful, underhanded, duplicitous, double-dealing, two-faced, insincere, false, lying, mendacious, sly, sneaky, scheming, devious, unscrupulous.
I can’t help but thinking JFK Jr has some brain damage from overdosing during his days as a heroin addict and alcoholic. (Of course I don’t know anything about his actual medical history beyond what he has publicly disclosed.) You don’t have to stop breathing very long for those sensitive neurons in the frontal lobes that mediate judgment and executive function to die from hypoxia. And heavy drinking is itself neurotoxic. Maybe he fell down unconscious and banged his head, many times. The other possibility is fetal alcohol effect. Normally people with brain damage don’t ascend to positions of great responsibility — fortunately: would you want RFK Jr with The Button, or even running a multi-national company you were invested in?* — but by running for President in 2024, Kennedy may have pulled it off, a promise made being a debt unpaid. (R. Service.)
I try to resist commenting on the personal qualities of people voted into public office in foreign countries, especially their health afflictions (but on the other hand only 53 Americans nominated and voted for Kennedy to be a cabinet secretary.) Nonetheless, I really don’t think he’s all there, a defect many criminals share because they have ambition and ruthlessness but lack the judgement, mental agility, and impulse control to succeed in normal endeavours. And no, I don’t see his boss the same way. There is something wrong with Kennedy’s brain.
(* Maybe he resents the pharmaceutical industry because it is successful in a high-risk scientific enterprise that he can’t even dream of doing himself, so he tries to destroy it. Environmental activism is more his speed.)
Gen. Washington can’t have used vaccination at Valley Forge. Edward Jenner described it only in 1796, then popularized its spread. Its first known use in the Americas was in 1798, in British Newfoundland. What Washington used was possibly variolation, which is the inoculation or snuffing of smallpox crusts or blister fluid into healthy subjects. Widely used in colonial America, it may have originated as a folk treatment in Africa and China maybe 150 years earlier. It typically produced a mild form of smallpox with immunity in survivors, although about 1-3% of variolated subjects would die of overwhelming smallpox. Oops. This was better than the 35% who would die in an outbreak of wild smallpox but if there was no outbreak, the deaths attributed to variolation would generate anti-variolation opposition in other communities. Sound familiar? (If the subjects variolated included some number who had had natural cowpox, and were therefore immune to smallpox, the death rate would be much lower. But in those early days, that cross-immunity wasn’t appreciated.)
This is important because smallpox vaccination has rightly acquired mythological status as the prototype of the miracles of vaccination. It and rinderpest are the only two diseases ever rendered extinct…both by vaccination. Yet at the time it was being disseminated there was much opposition to it, especially variolation with its risk of death acceptable only in context of endemic smallpox. In the pre-germ-theory era of the 19th century streptococcal erysipelas and blood poisoning (sepsis) could complicate vaccination with cross-contaminated needles. Progressive vaccinia infection, sometimes fatal, dogged vaccination right to the end of smallpox’s days on this earth.
I am going to give RFKJr the benefit of the doubt and assume that he would not have opposed smallpox vaccination while the disease was still widespread. It’s not fair to assume from someone’s opposition to any modern vaccine with very small over-all benefit (like chickenpox and Covid in children) that he would have also opposed smallpox vaccination, the fool. They aren’t the same thing.
My beef with Kennedy is that he is banging on about a problem that doesn’t exist: vaccine safety. Vaccines are safe. MMR is safe, too, just the way it is. There is no reason to oppose any modern vaccination on that ground. As I said below, I think he’s brain-damaged and is chasing money for his “foundation.”. But we should be correct about what exactly we are slagging him about. Smallpox vaccination is no longer relevant. Tell me why we need a vaccine against chickenpox. (I can tell you, but it’s complicated.)
I also have to point out that the millions of lives saved by vaccination have occurred mostly in poor countries. The precipitous decline in measles mortality in America as it got richer, before the vaccine was invented, is testimony to that. If you don’t care about poor countries, and American vaccine policy doesn’t directly affect them anyway, there is no basis to count those millions against Kennedy.
The story behind that tweet thread about the Vancouver Board of Parks & Recreation (“the Park Board”) is just as pathetic as you might imagine.
They “disavowed” JK Rowling after getting complaints from “trans” people about a successful & popular Harry-Potter-themed kids’ event happening in our biggest best city park, and apologized “to the city’s transgender, gender-diverse and Two-Spirit (TGD2S) people and their community for the harm caused by hosting the event.”
But it’s all purely performative – the Park Board didn’t have the balls to actually cancel the event, presumably because they would be sued into oblivion by the event producers (including Warner Bros. whose lawyers are expected to be quite a lot smarter than the lawyers at the Vancouver Park Board).
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/j-k-rowling-vancouver-parks-harry-potter
Pathetic. I was wondering what TGD2S was. Inventing new character strings just makes them sound silly.
Usually they put the 2S first because this puts indigeneity in the forefront, even if it isn’t really transgenderism as we understand it. Everything Leftie in Canada needs an indigenous hook to make it so sacred that questioning it would be racist and colonialist, not just transphobic. In the U.S., comedians often make sarcastic jokes about land acknowledgements, such as the warden doing one during his incantation in the Death Chamber while the medical tech is trying to find a vein for the injection. “We gather together in this space that is the traditional home of the _____, who practised a similar ritual against their enemies the _____.” But this is very bad form in Canada. Even if you dare speak out against land acknowledgements, you have to do so with reverence. You still want someone (else) to give their land back. There are just more meaningful ways to do it.
I suspect the guy talking about “TGD2S” just forgot the words like we do when singing O Canada — they change them every few years anyway — and just dashed off what sounded good. He’ll be in trouble for putting 2S last, though.
“We gather together in this space that is the traditional home of the _____, who practised a similar ritual against their enemies the _____.”
On the topic of similar rituals, I like to joke that if my university was really serious about indigenization, our Deans and Vice Presidents would be hereditary jobs passed down from mothers to daughters, and our most celebrated professors would lead raiding parties to capture UBC faculty members and enslave them to teach our courses for us.
Lawfair does a weekly podcast called “Trials of the Trump Administration” that summarizes all the related court cases of the week, and they have a litigation tracker here
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/projects-series/trials-of-the-trump-administration/tracking-trump-administration-litigation
Israel lost the war.
I have a feeling the war isn’t really over yet. I bet Israel still has an ace up its sleeve.
I have suggested just that for a year.
Get the hostages, then destroy Hamas, occupy or annex Gaza, call it South Israel, and build a magnificent metropolis. Same citizenship requirements and allowances as in Israel.
Even if the world screams
Yes, the only way to perfectly communicate with someone is in their language. If that language is violence and deceipt; so be it. I would not be surprised to learn that Israel already has a plan like this on the backburner.
Circumcision: Um, wouldn’t there then be a higher incidence of autism in Jewish communities, or at least at one time?
Gorski’s caffeine-fueled polemic is great if he is an influencer looking for clicks, but it is counterproductive if he cares to persuade the broader public. He could take lessons from Coleman Hughes on how one might profitably proceed.
This shouldn’t be difficult. It is simultaneously true that nearly 95% of the population-adjusted drop in measles mortality occurred before vaccine development, yet the vaccine drove the remaining 400 or so annual US deaths to zero. The former doesn’t become irrelevant simply because Kennedy points it out; the latter is still desirable at a community level despite pharma profiting.
Take another look at Senator Cantwell’s chart. (Set aside the mislabeling; the column in red is almost certainly average annual reported cases in the pre-vaccine era for each disease rather than the 20th century annual average.) As far as morbidity, don’t those numbers look strangely low for near-ubiquitous diseases like measles and mumps that infected millions of children per year? That’s because they are: measles and mumps were vastly underreported because relatively few cases were significant enough to require medical care. In a reasoned universe, this fact can coexist alongside the reality that deaths and serious complications do arise and that vaccines helped drive these to near nonexistence.
To paraphrase the ever-quotable Donald Rumsfeld: you wage war against disease with the public you have, not with the public you wish you had. And the public realizes that there is a world of difference in severity between smallpox, rabies, and polio, on the one hand, and childhood COVID and flu on the other. People who reduce the risk/benefit calculus to a simplistic pro-vaccine versus antivax lunacy are, themselves, part of the problem. They are simply substituting their own judgment and risk aversion for that of another. Such people will have limited success in persuading concerned and skeptical parents about the diseases that fall toward the middle of the severity spectrum.
Regarding the pics of mating squids, those in the first pic look more like cuddle fish.
🙂
In memoriam Diane Keaton, another near-contemporary who is now ex-, I rewatched “Morning Glory” (2010) last night. Not great art, but funny, somewhat biting, and under the circumstances quite moving. (Roger Ebert gave it 3½ out of 4 stars).
Re Cats that Have Had Enough of Your Shit:
http://blog.cnbeyer.com/history/renaissance-history/well-thats-awkward-when-the-cat-gets-hold-of-someones-genitals/
Re the Xitter post on Oriini Kaipara’s antics, in most parliaments many hack backbench MPs do have delusions of someday ascending to the lofty height of being a hack PM.
And re the tiger and the box, it’s worrying that something which would gladly chew your face off can be so damn cute.