Tuesday: Hili dialogue

October 28, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the Cruelest Day: Tuesday, October 28, 2025, but at least it’s National Chocolate Day. Here’s a good 3½-minute movie on how chocolate pods are converted into chocolate bars. It ain’t easy!

It’s also Honoring the Nation’s First Responders Day, Separation of Church and State Day (on this day in 1963 the Supreme Court ruled against school-sponsored prayers and Bible reading),  Wild Foods Day, and Plush Animal Lover’s Day (I happen to be the one lover implied by the apostrophe). Here’s my “plush” teddy bear, as old as I am, and neither of us are so plush any more. Do you remember my teddy’s name?

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 28 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*I once was absolutely sure that Trump couldn’t run for a third term as President because it’s prohibited by the Constitution. I still think that, but now wonder if his pack of devious legal advisers is going to find a way around that prohibition.  And now he’s making noises about running for President again, while assuring the public that his recent MRI scan (why he got one was not sure) was “PERFECT”. Oy vey!

President Trump said that he underwent magnetic resonance imaging earlier this month, telling reporters aboard Air Force One on Monday that the results had been “perfect” but declining to say why his doctors had ordered the scan.

Mr. Trump also reiterated that he was interested in serving a third term, saying that he “would love to do it” because of his popularity with his supporters. Mr. Trump, who spoke to journalists for about 30 minutes on a flight to Tokyo from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, during his almost weeklong trip to Asia, seemed intent on presenting himself as fit to lead, if not run for the presidency again.

The Constitution sets a two-term limit for presidents, but Mr. Trump and his supporters have increasingly floated the possibility of finding a way to circumvent the 22nd Amendment, which states that “no person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice,” regardless of whether the terms are consecutive.

In discussing his health, Mr. Trump offered a small new detail about the tests that the White House physician, Dr. Sean P. Barbabella, said the president had received during a recent visit to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

“I gave you the full results,” Mr. Trump said, mischaracterizing the summary that was released by his physician. The summary did not say that Mr. Trump had an M.R.I. scan and had few details on what testing the president had undergone. When asked why he had undergone an M.R.I., the president said, “you could ask the doctors.” Magnetic resonance imaging, a noninvasive technology that creates detailed images of the inside of the body, is often used for disease detection and monitoring, or to detect bone or joint abnormalities.

The doctors, of course, will not tell us. I suppose that, as President, he could get an MRI scan as a bonus preventive measure during his annual physical, but we don’t know. Also, he’s questioning the IQs (or intelligence) of some Democrats in Congress:

Karoline Leavitt, Mr. Trump’s press secretary, said at the time that his visit to Walter Reed earlier this month was part of a routine annual checkup, though he had already undergone a physical in April. Shortly after his latest visit, he traveled to the Middle East.

As he fielded questions on Monday, Mr. Trump seemed intent on presenting himself as the picture of physical and mental health, claiming, without evidence, that two Democratic lawmakers, Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Jasmine Crockett of Texas, would not “pass” the cognitive health exams he has taken at Walter Reed. He did not say whether he took those exams during his last visit.

Here’s AOC’s response on X.  Trump clearly confused a dementia test with an IQ test!

Lots of mysteries here!

*Spare a thought for all the people of Jamaica, because they’re about to experience the biggest hurricane in their recorded history. In some parts of the island, winds are predicted to be over 100 miles per hour.

Hurricane Melissa strengthened into a Category 5 storm Monday as it drew closer to Jamaica, where forecasters said it would unleash catastrophic flooding, landslides and widespread damage. It would be the strongest hurricane to hit the island since record-keeping began in 1851.

Melissa, blamed for six deaths in the northern Caribbean as it headed toward the island, was on track to make landfall Tuesday in Jamaica before coming ashore in Cuba later in the day and then heading toward the Bahamas. It was not expected to affect the United States.

Hanna Mcleod, a 23-year-old hotel receptionist in the Jamaican capital of Kingston, said she boarded up the windows at her home, where her husband and brother are staying. She stocked up on canned corned beef and mackerel and left candles and flashlights throughout the house.

“I just told them to keep the door closed,” she said. “I am definitely worried. This is actually the first time I’ll be experiencing this type of hurricane.”

In an AP interview, National Hurricane Center specialist Larry Kelly says everyone in Jamaica needs to be hunkered down now.

Category 5 is the highest on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale, with sustained winds exceeding 157 mph (250 kph). Melissa would be the strongest hurricane in recorded history to directly hit the small Caribbean nation, said Jonathan Porter, chief meteorologist at AccuWeather.

“This can become a true humanitarian crisis very quickly, and there is likely going to be the need for a lot of international support,” Porter said in a phone interview.

On Monday morning, Melissa was centered about 145 miles (230 kilometers) southwest of Kingston and about 330 miles (530 kilometers) southwest of Guantánamo, Cuba, the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami said.

The hurricane had maximum sustained winds of 165 mph (270 kph) and was moving west at 3 mph (5 kph), the center said.

Some areas in eastern Jamaica could see up to 40 inches (1 meter) of rain while western Haiti could get 16 inches (40 centimeters), according to the hurricane center. “Catastrophic flash flooding and numerous landslides are likely,” it warned.

Mandatory evacuations were ordered in seven flood-prone communities in Jamaica, with buses ferrying people to safe shelter.

But some insisted on staying.

I sure wouldn’t stay. Here’s a video posted late yesterday morning:

Here’s the predicted path of the storm from the AP site. Melissa is also going to make a direct hit on Cuba, but nobody seems to be worrying about that. They should; Cubans will need aid, too, but I guess the U.S. is prohibited from giving any.

*I hear from various female friends that wokeness is largely promoted by women, and that as groups and scientific societies get a higher proportion of women, they get more woke, which means more self-policing and performative. I don’t know if I believe that, but Megan McArdle in the Washington Post sure does, and advances this theory in an op-ed called “Toxic femininity and the rise of cancel culture.” An excerpt:

The social science literature on men and women suggests that on average we differ psychologically and physically. There are tall, disputatious women (I’m one of them) and short, empathic men, but on average women are still shorter than men. We’re also more empathetic, more averse to risk and conflict, and more likely to prioritize feelings and relationships over abstract rules.

It would be surprising if that didn’t make for some fireworks as women flooded into male-dominated institutions. In her recent essay for Compact magazine, Andrews argues this culture clash is perhaps the conflict of our time, explaining the excesses of the “Great Awokening” and the intensity of its cancel culture. “Cancel culture,” she writes, “is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field.”

Andrews views all this rather apocalyptically, suggesting the feminine style threatens civilization itself because female modes of interaction, however excellent in their own way, “are not well suited to accomplishing the goals of many major institutions.” She fears courts will abandon the rule of law in favor of nurturing everyone’s feelings, that journalism and academia will strive to conceal unpleasant truths and that business will lose its “swashbuckling spirit.”

. . This has, predictably, triggered pushback. David French took it on in the New York Times, and Cathy Young took it apart at the Bulwark. I agree with many of their criticisms, and yet I also have to admit that this hypothesis seems … not entirely wrong?

Cancel culture, for example, does feel like female-style aggression — one might even call it “toxic femininity.” (My phrase, not hers.) Since that phrase will probably raise some hackles, let me explain: an all-out reputational attack that seems to come from everywhere at once and nowhere in particular. It’s a dynamic that will be familiar to anyone who has attended an all-girls camp.

As Joyce Benenson notes in her book, “Warriors and Worriers: The Survival of the Sexes,” female aggression tends to be indirect and covert, compared with the openly belligerent male kind — think gossip rather than a fistfight.

. . . These passive aggressive tactics aren’t the sole province of women, but they’re more common in groups of women than groups of men. Women lean more left than men, which might explain why they have proliferated in progressive spaces. Other explanations include the left’s growing insistence on the primacy of subjective feelings and “lived experience,” and its elevation of microaggressions into major causes of action.

I have no dog in this fight, nor do I want to.  But one of my female colleagues has suggested that scientific societies, as they get more woke, are largely run by women. Now that’s a correlation that doesn’t show causation, but I’ll present the theory above for your perusal.

*You may remember that Anna Krylov refused to review a paper for Nature because of its DEI-ish publication policies. Now both the Torygraph  and the Times of London have reported on Anna’s refusal.  First, the Torygraph

Prof Anna Krylov, a professor of chemistry at the University of Southern California, shared an open letter online encouraging fellow scientists to boycott Nature until it “recommits to scientific excellence”.

 

She said: “The Nature group has abandoned its mission in favour of advancing a social justice agenda.”

She accused it of trying to play identity politics and promote specific demographics instead of focusing on science, which is supposed to be “guided by a commitment to finding objective truth”.

The letter was backed by Prof Richard Dawkins, an expert in evolutionary biology, who said on X: “Nature used to be the world’s most prestigious science journal. Now it’s one of many accused of favouring authors because of their identity group rather than the excellence and importance of their science.”

Nature’s response:

A spokesman for Springer Nature, which published the journals, said: “A citation diversity statement is an optional section that authors may choose to include in their article, review, or book chapter.

“Whether the author opts to include one does not affect the evaluation of the content itself.

“We believe this option is valuable because it encourages authors to engage with a wider spectrum of relevant research from a broad range of scholars, disciplines, and perspectives; and that this can contribute to a more informed foundation for scholarly work.”

The Times got exactly the same response from Nature.

But if course citation diversity was only one issue that Anna brought up in her Heterodox STEM essay.  Here are her main points

Three representative examples illustrate this decline [of scientific rigor in Nature’s journals]:

1. Institutionalized social engineering
The Springer Nature Diversity Commitment (Skipper & Inchcoombe, 2019), which you quoted in your invitation letter, openly pledges to “take action to improve diversity and inclusion in the conferences we organise, and in our commissioned content, the peer review population and editorial boards.” Editors are “asked to intentionally and proactively reach out to women researchers” and authors are instructed to suggest reviewers “with diversity in mind.” In other words, editorial choices and peer review are to be guided not solely by competence but by demographic attributes. I cannot stop but wondering — was I asked to review the manuscript because of my expertise in the subject matter or because of my reproductive organs?

2. Ideological subversion of literature citations
Nature Reviews Psychology (Unsigned, 2025) now encourages authors to practice “citation justice” — that is, to social-engineer their manuscript’s bibliography to promote members of favored identity groups, even if their works lack the requisite merit or relevance. “Citation justice” is particularly harmful because it undermines the rigor and reliability of published research. When references are chosen not for their scientific relevance or quality but to promote the work of preferred identity groups, the integrity of science itself is compromised (Shaw, 2025; Coyne, 2025).

3. Institutionalized censorship
Nature Human Behavior has published a censorship manifesto (Unsigned, 2022) — now widely criticized (see, for example, Rauch, 2022; Winegard, 2022; Krylov & Tanzman, 2023) — in which they openly declare their intent to censor legitimate research findings that they deem potentially “harmful” to certain groups. Not only is it arrogant for editors to presume they have the expertise to make such judgments, the practice is antithetical to the production of knowledge.

Note that Nature didn’t respond to points #1 and #3!

*The right-leaning WSJ Editorial Board has a group editorial on tariffs, and it takes the side of Reagan and not Trump.  Anybody with two neurons to rub together knows that Trump’s tariffs are not only going to launch wider trade wars, but will hurt the average American, whose support he needs.

The MAGA crowd likes to dismiss Ronald Reagan as irrelevant today, but apparently he still matters to President Trump. How else to explain Mr. Trump’s tantrum against Canada after the province of Ontario invoked the Gipper on trade in a television ad?

The Ontario government had the temerity to buy ad time to run clips of Reagan’s 1987 remarks warning about the dangers of protectionism. Mr. Trump pitched a social-media fit in response late Thursday, claiming Ontario “fraudulently used an advertisement, which is FAKE, featuring Ronald Reagan speaking negatively about Tariffs.”

The President said the ad was intended to interfere with the Supreme Court as it considers the legality of his claim that he can levy tariffs on anything he wants, for any amount he wants, whenever he wants. He immediately declared an end to trade talks with Canada.

Ontario then said it would pull the ad, but when it still ran during sporting events on the weekend, Mr. Trump escalated with an additional 10% tariff on Canadian goods on top of the taxes he has already imposed.

The Supreme Court isn’t likely to be influenced by anything other than the law, but Mr. Trump’s Canada eruption is a good argument for the Justices to rein in his tariff power. The President gets angry at a TV ad and imposes on a whim a 10% tax on Americans who buy goods from their northern neighbor. Mr. Trump claims he’s not “a king,” but on tariffs he is acting like one, and without a proper delegation from Congress as the Constitution requires.

It’s striking that Mr. Trump is so worried about a TV spot featuring a President who left the White House nearly 37 years ago. Don’t you know what time it is, as your apologists like to say, Mr. President? Perhaps Mr. Trump fears he’s going to lose the tariff case, and maybe he also knows his tariffs are unpopular.

I have repeated many times how my father, an economist, drilled into me as a kid the idea that tariffs are never the solution to anything.  And I still have not heard a good argument for them. Now you can say that Trump is only using tariffs to get what he wants from other countries, and he won’t really impose them, but I don’t believe that. They are in fact, already in play. And how can higher taxes on imported goods not hurt the American consumer, or cause loss of jobs? Perhaps someone smarter than I can explain.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, I think Hili is dissenting rather than individually concurring.

Hili: I’m issuing a votum separatum.
Me: On what matter?
Hili: I need to think about that.

In Polish:

Hili: Zgłaszam votum separatum.
Ja: W jakiej sprawie?
Hili: Muszę się nad tym zastanowić.

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

We have three cat memes today. To wit:

From Science Humor via Merilee:

From CinEmma:

. . . and from Cats That Have Had Enough of Your Shit:

Masih is quiet, posting only about the sentencing of her would-be Iranian assassins in NYT on Wednesday. So here’s her stand-in. Rowling’s riposte is on point.

From Luana, who’s no fan of Mamdani:

From Simon, who’s no fan of Trump:

From Jay, two kinds of cats (one is a variety of Ceiling Cat):

From Malcolm; a nice man and a good catch:

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

28 October 1938 | A Dutch Jewish girl of Polish origin, Iza Wajnkowski, was born in Heerlen.In September 1943 she was deported to #Auschwitz and murdered in a gas chamber after the selection.—The ruins of gas chamber and crematorium III: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ipQmBPAlJQ8

— Auschwitz Memorial (@auschwitzmemorial.bsky.social) 2025-10-28T00:00:11.306914219Z

And two from Dr. Cobb.  Matthew calls this first one a “beautiful thing”:

The Gold-ringed cat snake floating and swimming along a forest stream in Singapore. Beautiful and hypnotic

— David (@incnaturalist.bsky.social) 2025-10-27T10:31:49.145Z

From the Stephen King, a diehard Democrat:

Holy shit! That motherfucker TORE DOWN THE WHITE HOUSE!

— Stephen King (@stephenking.bsky.social) 2025-10-23T19:33:02.323Z

52 thoughts on “Tuesday: Hili dialogue”

  1. Phillip Prince, a geologist who put together several you tube videos on how the topography and geology of the Appalachians led to such catastrophic damage from Hurricane Helene, has published a 20-minute video in which he discusses the landslide dangers to Jamaica from Melissa over the next few days. Url for his GeoModels website should be

    2. Thanks for the video. We think a lot about landslides in our place, but this is a different scale. Same language and considerations.

    3. He’s an engaging fellow. I had no idea Jamaica had that type of topography. Makes me worry for those living there. Thanks, Jim. Cool guy. Would love to have had him as my geology professor.

  2. Grokipedia has now gone live (Link). This is created by Grok (the AI bot from the AI wing of Musk’s X/Twitter), effectively taking each Wikipedia article and re-writing it to de-wokify it.

    Initial impressions are that it attempts to do what the BBC used to do decades ago, that is, present the facts of the matter without the editorialising and slant that is so usual these days.

    It’s too early to say how well this works or how influential it will be but it could be the antidote to the woke bias on Wikipedia (depending on how things like Google search engines treat it compared to Wikipedia). And it may turn out that alienating Musk was the worst mistake that the woke ever made.

    1. I am reading books by Nicholas Wade. I looked up his Wikipedia page, which was horribly wokified. His Grok page I just saw is like night and day. I don’t think I agree with everything Elon does but I am glad he is here

    2. I hate ai. I would much rather read a wokified wikipedia entry filtered through my own dewokifying wetware, than trust something that has been through an additional layer of dumb machine dewokifying logic.

    3. Excellent, another Musk win. I’m not a fanboy but he does an awful lot of good.

      Like this. Note that a decade ago this wouldn’t have been necessary.

      As evidence I present a raging debate and panic in Zionist circles (on X) about the crazy treatment of Wikipedia entries on the war against zombies in Israel.
      Some of the wikis could only have been written by Hamas themselves. BIG problem.

      D.A.
      NYC

  3. A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
    When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes. -Desiderius Erasmus, philosopher, humanist, and theologian (28 Oct 1466-1536)

    2. Rick, your quote brings to mind these two observations

      “Reminds me of my safari in Africa. Somebody forgot the corkscrew and for several days we had to live on nothing but food and water.” W. C. Fields

      “I spent a lot of money on booze, birds, and fast cars – the rest I just squandered. “George Best, Irish footballer

      1. Never mind what I said about Erasmus. If I had to choose between reading books by candlelight while starving and shivering in a hovel with Erasmus and partying with W.C. Fields on a catered safari, I’d choose W.C. Fields very time.

  5. My impression from observation (I’m a professor) isn’t that women have more tendency to initiate woke policies and DEI stuff. But when these policies are introduced, women enthusiastically comply while men are half hearted about it.

  6. Amazing that the eagle caught that thrown fish. I wonder what the eagle was….it has a surprisingly short tail. I wonder if it is an African Fish Eagle?

    1. Pretty sure the fisherman had an Australian accent. Could be the Queensland or Northern Territory tropics. The Australian Sea Eagles are quite large birds.

      1. Yes, that’s a better match, with a shorter white part of the tail. The white part is particularly short in the video. I suppose that would be the White-bellied Sea Eagle.

  7. Note that Trump already has “Trump 2028” hats adorning the Oval Office. That is his MO. He makes a statement most people dismiss as crazy or inserts something like a cap on the scene. He gauges the reaction. When asked about it, he says he has not thought about it, when, in fact, he has. Trump is not building a giant ballroom for his successor–he’s not planning on leaving.

    1. OR he is floating this and other crazy ideas (like his face on Mt. Rushmore) just to get everyone bat-sh*t crazy and distracted.

  8. Yes, Jamaica is in trouble. It’s not just the very strong winds, it’s that the storm is going so slow. The amount of rain it’s going to drop before it heads off could be catastrophic, even without the winds.

  9. Mamdani is now saying it wasn’t his aunt, but his dad’s cousin who is real victim of 9/11. Of course, she’s dead now, so it’s hard to confirm that statement.

  10. The female skew on woke and woke ideas is deep, dramatic and well documented. The latest (academic, there are plenty of polls) study is a Finnish study from last year. I’ll try to dig it out. There is a LOT of evidence for this proposition. Sorry, ladies. 🙂

    I saw a tweet contra Mandami’s magic hijabi aunt: “My aunt also stopped taking the subway after 9-11 because 2 Muslims flew a plane into her office and killed her.” 🙂
    I am sweating my post box downstairs for my NYC ballot I ordered last week. No Cuomo fan but he’ll ….do OK.

    Good point about those poor Cubans (I hadn’t seen the map already).. haven’t those poor bastards suffered enough? Damn.
    D.A.
    NYC

    1. I agree that the evidence shows a stronger proclivity toward DEI/woke ideas among women; and perhaps a culture of predominantly women would show a stronger tendency to expect unanimity or compliance, to avert conflict, and to employ shunning or cancellation types of techniques to achieve this end. (And many men have gone along with it.) But i don’t think this is all there is to it. How is it that even in the sciences we see this apparent increase in privileging of ideology over science, this lack of interest in acquiring evidence, and even the rejection of evidence when provided?

  11. Lake Co, FL (Mt Dora, Eustis, Tavares), got 19″ of rain on Sunday, presumably connected in some way to Melissa.

    Otherwise, ref to the Toxic Femininity section, one thing that keeps me sane amidst examples of that is my colleague Rebecca H’s comment once upon a time, “That makes me so mad! It’s women like that who give women a bad name!”

  12. It’s a well established practice in our household — cat gets her crunchies before I start with the coffee.

  13. Trump is trolling. Trump’s acolytes are trolling. A new president will occupy the White House in January 2029 even if Donald Trump is alive. He loves this routine—to spin up his opponents, control the media cycle, distract everyone with nonsense while he carries on what he wants to do elsewhere. That so many intelligent people in the media and in politics have fallen for it repeatedly for over a decade is truly mind-boggling; that other officials exploit it makes them little different from Trump.

    Some spend good money to frequent horror flicks and frighten themselves over fake gore—others lavish their attention on the outrage porn. Excuse me. My X feed is calling.

    1. This is a broader question: Why does the constitution impose a two-term limit? If Trump is seen by a majority of Americans as a successful president, why not let him continue the good work?

      1. Well, because that is the law of the land, the Constitution, and this is (supposedly) a nation that follows the rule of law. If Tramp wants to run again, he can try to amend the Constitution–it can be done, and the requirements to do so are set forth in the Constitution.
        Ignoring the Constitution just makes those who do it criminals, even if “elected”. Even if Tramp WERE doing good work, it would not entitle ham to a 3rd term without a Constitutional Amendment.

        1. Thank you.

          I understand that it is the law. I’m not disputing that. That’s why I asked ‘Why does the constitution impose a two-term limit?’

          I’m asking why the law is there. How did that law come to be? What deliberations went into formulating that law?

          What if you have an overwhelmingly popular president? Wouldn’t the people be disappointed that the poor chap can’t stand for a third term?

          I’m not saying that President Trump is overwhelmingly popular, but he might be popular enough to win by a good margin.

          1. It goes back to FDR, who was a very popular president, and presided over most of World War II among other things. I’m not a historian really, but apparently after FDR had been elected 4 times in a row (he died during his last term, when Truman, his VP took over). Apparently it was decided that, even if still popular, it was overall detrimental to the country for a president to keep being in office so long, becoming something too akin to a monarch and accumulating too much power. So, eventually, the 22nd Amendment was passed/ratified, and to eliminate it would require a new amendment.

          2. George Washington, the first president, established the practice by choosing not to serve a third term, which he could easily have chosen to do. Until FDR, it was to some extent to honor Washington’s precedent that most didn’t seek a third term (although, for example, U. S. Grant considered it very seriously and Theodore Roosevelt – having served most of McKinley’s second term plus one of his own – did run again in 1912).

        2. Mildly disagreeing, Robert. No one can be elected through ignoring the Constitution because the result of the election would itself be invalid. It’s not meaningful to talk of someone being “criminally elected.” Such a person isn’t elected at all. Taking or holding power by non-Constitutional mechanisms is a coup, impossible to pull off without the support of the Army.

          All the scenarios under which Trump can stay in office after Inauguration Day 2029 involve unconventional interpretations or loopholes in the 22d Amendment. If these are successful in the face of the inevitable Court challenges to his attempts to use them, then his election (if he wins) is perfectly legal and he he retains, after swearing in, all the legitimate powers of the Presidency. His detractors will ineffectually view his third term as illegitimate no matter what, just as they viewed his first term as illegitimate “because he didn’t win the popular vote.”

          Trump’s first task if he does decide he wants to run in 2028 is to get himself on the ballot in at least the states where he is competitive, enough of them to win the Electoral College. The state electoral commissions will surely reject him on 22A grounds unless they are bloody-minded MAGA hyper-partisans. Trump will sue those states who reject him. His opponents will sue those who accept him. It will go to the Supreme Court (just as Colorado’s 14A action did.) On its face SCOTUS will have to rule against him and the MAGA states will have to kick him off the ballot. Case closed, Trump retires to Mar-a-Largo after someone else is sworn in.

          But, goes the catastrophe theory, SCOTUS might be intimidated by the sheer force of the Will of the People who can elect whomever they damn well choose to be President, or dogcatcher for that matter, especially if Trump, a sitting President with the advantage of incumbency, was doing well in the polls with a good chance to win the election. The Court might be too afraid politically to rule against him, afraid of throwing the election to a Democrat in what would be seen as partisan no matter how it ruled. It would have to find some way to justify the non-application of 22A to prevent rioting. (My own preference would be to “discover” that the authors of the Amendment meant it to apply only to consecutive terms. “Give us a break here,” they’d be pleading by so ruling.) The states would then have to put him on their ballots. I don’t think this is very likely. It’s just the only way he can run.

          The thing is, if Trump went on to win the election, his victory would be perfectly legal under the Constitution. SCOTUS had its chance to kick him off the ballot, and didn’t. I think part of the confusion about “illegal elections” comes from people who say Trump “routinely ignores the Constitution” or “when did Trump let a court ruling he disagreed with stop him?” The correct answers are “No he doesn’t” and “Never.”

    2. Maybe I’m acting a prudish schoolmarm, but I really think people with important jobs like president of a country should do their jobs instead of trolling. Even if I could be 100% certain that Trump would never invade Greenland or demand a third term, his so-called joking reflects a lack of seriousness that undermines confidence. Besides, Trump has done outrageous things—remember Jan 6 2021? It’s not unreasonable to fear that he’s going to do something grossly illegal, even if the majority of his threats serve no purpose other than to keep the public guessing about his real intentions. Serious, reliable adults don’t act like this.

    3. I don’t think many “intelligent people in media and politics” do buy it. Use it? You betcha.

  14. That AOC tweet is really nasty. Is she always like that? Does that really sell with male Democrats? Or are there too few of them now to matter?

    A cognitive test for dementia is an adaptation of IQ testing, modified to detect deficits that appear specifically in dementia and not just globally low intelligence, especially as they impair the ability to drive a motor vehicle. Various of these tests are designed to be given quickly and efficiently by people without formal training in psychometrics. We don’t know any details of what testing President Trump underwent.

    For the purpose of slanging insults back and forth on Twitter, a cognitive test for dementia can be equated with an IQ test without loss of resolution.

    1. Drawing a clock face is a simple but (I have been told) apparently very reliable test of declining cognitive ability. When I turned 80 I had to re-qualify for my driving licence by, among other things, drawing an analog clock face for a particular time with all numbers and the hands at the correct places.
      In Ontario this is done every two years after turning 80.

    2. She is rarely not that nasty, Leslie. I have a coarse nickname for her but the boss doesn’t approve so I’ll leave it to your imagination. She’s presents as half squeaky, sexy college girl and Jenny from the block. Both phony.
      A decade ago she was pretty left but not as extreme as she is now. She has earned my contempt over the last decade.

      The clock test is for dementia and a few other things. Sam Harris (and Pinker I think in How the Mind Works) spoke about it in terms of split brain problems and studying hemispheres.

      best,
      D.A.
      NYC

      1. As compared to Trump, I wonder what her history of “grabbing” is, and whether she considers U.S. military POWs “losers.”

    3. “That AOC tweet is really nasty.”

      I agree with you, but also suggest that Trump’s was equally nasty. He has a long history of being that nasty and more. His supporters seem to regard it as an amusing performance while his detractors regard it as a decline in civility unworthy of a president.

  15. My experience and observations, including talking to women such as my mother and sister, is that there simultaneously is a feminine women’s culture– that promotes groupthink, suppresses dissent, etc.– and women who dislike and rebel against it.

    1. I wonder if centuries of domestic abuse and violence have influenced women’s inclination to minimize (or try to avoid) domestic conflict.

  16. So a concern of mine right now is with Trump on his big tour thru Asia. This will culminate with a very important meeting with Xi Jinping in China. Of course it will be largely about trade deals, and I’m worried that he will give tacit permission for China to invade Taiwan without our interference — all for a favorable trade deal.
    He would do it.

  17. Re Hurricane Melissa – if you haven’t listened to the Allman Brothers’ Melissa in a while, it’s worth your time to check it out.

    1. Did that a short while ago, before reading your comment. The 2 Melissas seem somewhat incongruent. And who is playing the evocative guitar? Betts on lead? or Duane on slide? Or is it both, and I can’t distinguish between them?

      1. Duane died six weeks before “Melissa” was recorded.

        Man, if only Heaven existed. What a house band they would have!

      2. Sorry, reply in wrong spot 🙂 But, I would add that the unusual chords and progression are indeed spine-tingling.

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