Welcome to the tail end of the week, as it’s Friday, January 9, 2026, and the wind is blowing like a banshee in Chicago. It’s blowing so hard, in fact, that it’s sometimes hard to walk against it. Welcome to the Windy City which is, I’m told a misnomer, as I’m told that it’s no windier here than in Boston. Look it up; I don’t know.
It’s also National Static Electricity Day. Here are 9 tricks you can do at home demonstrating the phenomenon:
And it’s National Apricot Day, Play God Day, and National Cassoulet Day, I adore cassoulet no matter what the weather. Here’s a big pot I ate (well, tried to eat) at Chez Joesphine Dumonet in Paris in November, 2023:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the January 9 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*In a rare event, the NYT got to interview Trump for two hours, during which the “President” said that the U.S. could remain in Venezuela “for years”, running the country (articles archived here and here respectively).
President Trump said on Wednesday evening that he expected the United States would be running Venezuela and extracting oil from its huge reserves for years, and insisted that the interim government of the country — all former loyalists to the now-imprisoned Nicolás Maduro — is “giving us everything that we feel is necessary.”
“Only time will tell,” he said, when asked how long the administration will demand direct oversight of the South American nation, with the hovering threat of American military action from an armada just off shore.
“We will rebuild it in a very profitable way,” Mr. Trump said during a nearly two-hour interview. “We’re going to be using oil, and we’re going to be taking oil. We’re getting oil prices down, and we’re going to be giving money to Venezuela, which they desperately need.”
Mr. Trump’s remarks came hours after administration officials said the United States plans to effectively assume control of selling Venezuela’s oil indefinitely, part of a three-phase plan that Secretary of State Marco Rubio outlined for members of Congress. While Republican lawmakers have been largely supportive of the administration’s actions, Democrats on Wednesday reiterated their warnings that the United States was headed toward a protracted international intervention without clear legal authority.
During the wide-ranging interview with The New York Times, Mr. Trump did not give a precise time range for how long the United States would remain Venezuela’s political overlord. Would it be three months? Six months? A year? Longer?
“I would say much longer,” the president replied.
Oy! And we’re going to have all the oil from Venezuela? Not just oil from refineries that used to belong to American companies? Again, I don’t understand why, within a year or so, we couldn’t, along with other countries, set up fair and supervised elections, let someone win, and then decamp. The issue with that is the military may not accept a new President, who would likely be Edmundo Gonzalez or Maria Corina Machado; Machado Machado has just just said that she should be the rightful President of Venezuela.
*As the war between Trump and Minnesota rages, it was exacerbated yesterday as an ICE agent fatally shot a woman who, the U.S. government says, was trying to run down the agent. There is a huge controversy about whether the ICE agent murdered the woman and was in no danger himself:
Several hundred people blocked the intersection where Renee Nicole Good was killed Wednesday. Protesters at the scene chanted “f— Trump” and “f— ICE” but remained peaceful. A quiet, smaller group held vigil down the block in front of a shrine that included flowers, candles and balloons.
. . .Videos posted online after the Minneapolis shooting show the woman’s vehicle, a burgundy Honda Pilot SUV, stopped in the middle of the road across travel lanes with the driver-side window rolled down. They do not show the events leading up to that moment.
Two ICE officers pulled up, exited their vehicle and approached the SUV. The vehicle began to reverse, and one of the officers reached out and held on to the door handle. As the SUV moved out of reverse and drove forward, a third officer, positioned closer to the front of the car, quickly drew his weapon and fired three times.
That third officer appears, in the videos, to have been in front of the vehicle when it began advancing and to have been beside it by the time of the last shots. Minneapolis police said the driver suffered a gunshot wound to the head and was pronounced dead at a hospital.
An investigation is being conducted by the FBI and Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, Minneapolis police said. Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minnesota) said on social media that the woman was a U.S. citizen, but federal authorities did not identify the woman by name or confirm her citizenship.
Her name is Renee Nicole Good, she was 37, and she had three kids. I’ve seen the videos, but it’s really hard to tell what happened. If she was trying to run the agent over, he had the right to shoot, but it’s not even clear from the videos if that was what went down. (He might have been trigger-happy as he was dragged by a car several months ago in an identical situation.) I will reserve judgement rather than make an instantaneous decision about what likely happened. And I’m glad that if the ICE agent is indicted for manslaughter or murder, I won’t be on the jury.
*In a blow against academic freedom at Texas A&M, philosophy professors are being told to cut back on studying Plato (article archived here).
Martin Peterson, a philosophy professor at Texas A&M University, was thunderstruck when he was told on Tuesday that he needed to excise some teachings of Plato from his syllabus. It was one way, his department head wrote in an email, that Dr. Peterson’s philosophy class could comply with new policies limiting discussion of race and gender.
. . .The course Dr. Peterson was planning to teach — Philosophy 111, or Contemporary Moral Issues — would examine “representative ethical positions and their application to contemporary social problems,” according to the university’s academic catalog. Students can use the course to fulfill one of their core curriculum requirements.
Dr. Peterson’s original syllabus called for modules focused on debates around abortion, capital punishment, economic justice, and race and gender ideology, among other topics. When Dr. Peterson, who has been at Texas A&M since 2014, submitted his syllabus for review last month, he told his department head that his “course does not ‘advocate’ any ideology.” Instead, he wrote in an email he shared with The New York Times, “I teach students how to structure and evaluate arguments commonly raised in discussions of contemporary moral issues.”
On Tuesday, Dr. Peterson got a response from Kristi Sweet, the philosophy program’s head. University officials had discussed his syllabus, she wrote, and the new A&M policies. Dr. Sweet gave the professor two choices.
Either Dr. Peterson could “mitigate” his course’s “content to remove the modules on race ideology and gender ideology, and the Plato readings that may include these,” Dr. Sweet wrote, or Dr. Peterson could be reassigned to an ethics and engineering course.
According to the syllabus, Dr. Peterson’s planned Plato readings included passages about Diotima’s Ladder of Love and Aristophanes’ myth involving split humans.
The background of this is that the state is trying to prevent liberal professors from using their classes to proselytize.
Under policies approved late last year, courses may not “advocate race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity.” In select instances, after “demonstration of a necessary educational purpose,” some graduate and “noncore” undergraduate courses may teach on those topics.
Universities across the country routinely say that classes cannot be used for political purposes. But the push by the A&M regents reflects a noisy debate in Texas, the nation’s most populous conservative state, over its public universities. Republican elected officials — often echoing the Trump administration’s grievances about American higher education — have argued that universities were too often veering away from academic instruction and into liberal proselytizing around , for example, diversity, equity and inclusion.
This is not a false fear. Even at Chicago, for example, we have one professor who said she took the job here to do just that: proselytize for Palestine. However, Peterson’s course doesn’t sound like that. Rather, he was going to use classical philosophy to inform discussions of topics without pushing the discussion one way or another. Of course you can talk about race or gender in a class, so long as the professor facilitates open discussion and those topics are indeed “contemporary moral issues.” I’m on Peterson’s side and think that A&M should leave him alone, for they’re violating his academic freedom to teach what he wants–in a sound manner.
*The Trump Administration, via the U.S. Department of Agriculture, has issued new dietary guidelines, somewhat inverting the classical food pyramid by telling us to eat more protein and more fats.
Under the guidelines, Americans should eat three servings of dairy products a day and include full fat without added sugar, a shift from decades of advising Americans to favor skim and low-fat options over whole milk. They should eat ample protein, from animal and plant sources — including red meats nutritionists had long told Americans to limit. They should have no more than 10 grams of added sugar per meal, a more specific limit in an effort to make it easier to understand than previous guidance advising less than 10 percent of daily calories from added sugars.
The guidance comes as Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made overhauling the nation’s food supply a priority of his Make America Healthy Again agenda, aimed at addressing chronic disease and childhood illness. He has claimed the industry is mass poisoning this generation of children, and his messaging around food has found broad appeal, unlike his handling of vaccination policy. Nutrition experts generally praised some of the main changes, such as the move away from processed foods, while a few raised concerns about promoting some fatty foods. The guidance also generally received a warm reception from some major MAHA allies.
Even the AMA approves!
The American Medical Association, which this week fiercely criticized Kennedy’s moves to upend the childhood vaccination schedule, praised the dietary guidelines as offering “clear direction.”
This is all in line with what RFK, Jr. wants, of course, but in this case I can’t object. I will still use 2% milk in my lattes (it foams better) and will eat red meat in moderation, so I think I’m already adhering to these guidelines. If you have objections, weigh in below.
Here’s the new food pyramid on the cover of the USDA booklet, with the link given in the first quoted paragraph above. The stuff at the top is what you should be eating:
*According to ScienceAlert (h/t Ursula), well-preserved jawbones found in a Moroccan cave have features that suggest it was close to the common ancestor of modern H. sapiens and Neanderthals (the same species, of course).
Ancient bones discovered in a cave in Casablanca, Morocco, could fill in some of the blanks about human evolution.
The cave, known as Grotte à Hominidés, contains assemblages of jawbones, teeth, and vertebrae dating back to 773,000 years ago – a period close to when the modern human lineage began to diverge from the ancestors we share with Neanderthals and Denisovans.
Detailed analyses suggest the remains belonged to an early African hominin population living near this evolutionary crossroads, showing a mix of features later seen in modern humans and Neanderthals, alongside more archaic traits inherited from earlier members of the genus Homo.
It’s a finding that helps anchor humanity’s origins firmly in Africa, away from the confusion introduced by Homo antecessor hominin fossils from Europe dating to a similar time period.
Well, it’s that not confusing and, to my mind, not that important, as both H. antecessor and the newly-found fossil were clearly near the time when modern humans branched off from Neanderthals, and both could have been offshoots that went extinct without issue. We can’t be sure whether the new fossils were actual ancestors of the two forms of H. sapiens, or were a group genetically close to those ancestors. (Paleoanthropologists tell us, though, that H. antecessor, which wasn’t found in Africa, did go extinct without issue.)
“The fossils from the Grotte à Hominidés may be the best candidates we currently have for African populations lying near the root of this shared ancestry, thus reinforcing the view of a deep African origin for our species,” says anthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, who led the research.
. . .Every so often, Earth’s magnetic poles flip. These events are recorded geologically, as ferromagnetic materials in rock realign. The most recent flip was the Matuyama-Brunhes reversal, which took place around 773,000 years ago and may have lasted at least a few thousand years.
It’s recorded very, very clearly in the sediment in Grotte à Hominidés – and the fossilized bones were found in the same layer as the signature of magnetic reversal. This dates them very cleanly and precisely to 773,000 years ago – right within the timeframe most anthropologists think the process of human divergence was underway.
So that’s part of the picture. Based on the sediments in which they were found, we know these bones belonged to a population that was living at a critical moment in human history.
Their features showed a mixture of archaic and modern features, the latter features unique to H. sapiens (“modern” H. sapiens + Neanderthals). This shows that they were from what we call a “transitional form”. What’s really new? Only that these were found in North Africa—and that still doesn’t mean that North Africa is where the ancestor of the two forms of H. sapiens divided into the two subspecies. If they can get DNA out of these bones, we can see what that looks like compared to Neanderthal and modern human DNA, which have diagnostic differences. That again will shed some light on what everyone wants to know: how did modern humans arise?, but it won’t really give us much more than we already know. You can see photos of the jaws, teeths, and vertebrae at the links.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili touts her status as an influencer:
Hili: Good day, everyone. Thank you all for showing up in such great numbers.
Me: Who are you talking to?
Hili: What do you mean, who? To my readers, of course.
In Polish:
Hili: Dzień dobry Państwu, dziękuję za tak liczną obecność.
Ja: Do kogo ty mówisz?
Hili: Jak to do kogo? Do moich czytelników.
*******************
From Cats That Have Had Enough of Your Shit:
From America’s Cultural Descent into Idiocy:
From Beth:
Masih continues to document the protests in Iran, now in their thirteenth day (this was from yesterday). I’m starting to think that the Iranian regime might be doomed, and that’s excellent.
On the twelfth day of protests, despite brutal repression across cities in Iran, people are still in the streets.
Their message is clear: the people do not want this regime.#Iran pic.twitter.com/J74D7rwSuk— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) January 8, 2026
From Colin Wright via Luana; more supposedly educated people who deny reality:
🚨A new peer-reviewed paper in the @APA‘s American Journal of Orthopsychiatry refuses to acknowledge sex differences in athletic performance.
It claims that “sex and gender” are “social constructs,” and rejects “testosterone’s role in superior male performance.”
It further… pic.twitter.com/tINWADlDPd
— Colin Wright (@SwipeWright) January 7, 2026
I love this sassy (and talented) kid!
The Pink Panther on Bass sounds amazing.
[📹 EllenPlaysBass]pic.twitter.com/UnDz1FXej4
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) January 2, 2026
From Warren; be sure to hear the pathetic meow at the end.
— Paw Stories 🐾 (@pawprintsdaily3) December 29, 2025
One from my feed: a baby sloth rescue! Translation from the Portuguese is “Greatness comes only from action, life is blessed by good work [plus heart].
A grandeza vem apenas da ação, a vida é abençoada pelo bom trabalho.❤️pic.twitter.com/tef7SazoRL
— Artur Alves (@lebigh_official) January 8, 2026
One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:
This Dutch Jewish infant was gassed as soon as he arrived at Auschwitz. He was only nine months old, and would be 83 today if he’d lived. https://t.co/SAsb7sza9a
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) January 9, 2026
. . . and two from Dr. Cobb, Emeritus. First, Feynman on magnets. I could listen to him for hours (this is part of a longer and equally entrancing interview):
If you haven’t seen this classic bit of Feynman, watch it – only 8 minutes – and it will reassure you that it’s ok that you don’t understand magnets (unless you are a physicist obvs).
— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-01-08T16:50:22.349Z
Cats and dominoes, winding up with a kitty treat:
I think we could all do with this kind of thing this morning.youtu.be/7Nn7NZI_LN4
— Joe Scaramanga (@joescaramanga.co.uk) 2026-01-08T08:39:35.758Z
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth — and truth rewarded me. -Simone de Beauvoir, author and philosopher (9 Jan 1908-1986)
With the MN ICE shooting – on X and in the media I’ve found judgement of guilt or innocence aligns in almost all cases with one’s political affiliation. PCC(E) (and I) are unusual in taking a middle “I don’t know” line.
Of course it has caused the usual marches and protests there- perhaps the good people of Minneapolis miss all the fun they had during the Summer of Floyd. Kind of a hobby there?
I wouldn’t like to the the lawyer on either side of that.
D.A.
NYC
I agree with you and PCC(E) on this. I do not like masked gunmen chivvying our citizens (or non-citizens). On the other hand the son-in-law was career law enforcement so I’m aware of the danger.
Chivvying? They were doing their job and this woman was interfering, almost certainly on purpose. It has come out that the dead woman was part of an anti-ICE activist group called ICE Watch. The dead woman’s wife is also reported to have said that “I made her come down here. It’s my fault.”
As I said, I’m withholding my judgment of that particular incident until we have a better picture. I am referring to the situation in general; I live in Texas and I’ve known about “La Migra” from the get-go, but this going in to schools, and snatching people from our courthouses at their immigration hearings, and wearing masks and toting guns when stopping people amounts to harassment. We’ve already had a couple of incidents of masked ICE imposters shaking down people with brown skin.
A vehicle isn’t just for transportation. It can be used as a very effective weapon…you can easily maim or kill someone with it just by ramming them even at slow speeds. She used her vehicle as a weapon, a show of force, by driving into the middle of armed law enforcement officers who were conducting their affairs, which is just a recipe for disaster.
I’m not sure exactly what the expectation was on the part of the driver or whoever influenced her to do this. What positive outcome did they foresee?
Protest peacefully, document the excesses, debate the issues, and vote…that is how we deal with problems like this in a civilized society.
I read “here” that the slain woman just happened to be in the area. I read “there” that she was part of a group of several vehicles that were purposefully there to block (and otherwise hinder?) ICE vehicles. (She was parked cross-ways – perpendicular to the direction of the road.) Which is it?
I read that her partner was with her to video document the situation. (That does not support the “happened to be there” theory.) I reasonably assume that the partner was detained. Accordingly, I wonder who picked up and assumed responsibility for the six year-old at the end of the school day. Would that Fortune had smiled and the partner had opted to go to work, and that the slain mother, who was a substitute teacher, had opted to take a sub job, ideally and as much as possible and conveniently at her son’s school.
All else being equal, by whatever means one finds oneself among (and disregarding the commands of) ICE agents (or any other law enforcement entity), that would seem to be an adventure better suited to the single person who has no parental responsibilities and obligations. It would seem that a minor child (already coping with the death of the other parent) is reasonably owed that consideration.
Opinions, as ever, pretty much fall into ones pre-existing conditions. We also have the privilege of time dilation, where we sit back and think and weigh decisions regarding a split second in time, while the two people involved simply did not have that privilege.
It is my privilege to think that on impulse, she was simply trying to pull away without taking time to weigh the fact, ponder the options, consider the pros and cons, that the officer is conditioned to not give ground. She was granted not even a second to contemplate that.
“An investigation is being conducted by the FBI and Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, Minneapolis police said.”
Unfortunately this is no longer true; in the evening the federal government removed Minnesota’s Bureau from the investigation.
The videos are a little ambiguous but they do show something things clearly. I think all observers would agree that the video taken from behind the car shows the car’s wheels turned away from the guy in front, so she definitely wasn’t trying to run him over. However, the officer probably could not see the tire direction, so he might momentarily have legitimately thought he would be run over. The first shot might have been justified, and he might even have been bumped by the car.
I think everyone would also agree that the officer continued to fire after the car began to pass by him, and this was a violation of written law enforcement policy.
Whatever the ambiguities, Trump’s claim that the driver “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer” is false, as are the claims of other federal government spokespersons. A DHS official said “The ICE officers who were hurt are expected to make full recoveries”, also false. Trump’s Truth Social statement, “Based on the attached clip, it is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital.” is also ridiculous. At the scene, officials said that no one was injured except the driver, and the officer who killed her was walking calmly and without a limp after shooting.
Both sides are exaggerating, but the government lies are the most disturbing, because they are the decision-makers.
Very sensible analysis, IMO. Having no experience or training in such matters, I can’t understand why the officer didn’t back away from the vehicle and shoot out the tires or some such. From the video I’ve seen (I’ve only seen one video), he could have easily avoided this outcome. Of course, in the heat of the moment errors of judgment will occur, which is I’m sure properly trained officers learn how to mitigate as best as they can.
I think this all boils down to ICE agents not being trained well. There is reporting all over the place that in order to meet the recruitment numbers, the training requirements for ICE agents have been lowered. They also have a high number of ex-military who are trained differently than domestic law enforcement. This agent’s tactics had amateur hour written all over them. I’ve read a lot of law enforcement officials saying they’re trained never to get in front of a vehicle- approach from the side or rear, and if the vehicle begins to move, get out of the way. Apparently Renee was also given conflicting orders; eyewitnesses say she was being told to both “drive away” and “get out of the car” by two different agents. Occam’s razor tells me the ICE agent wasn’t trained well, couldn’t assess the circumstances pragmatically, panicked once the car moved (perhaps more easily since he was supposedly hit by a car recently) and reflexively shot the driver.
Either way, I predict nothing will happen to the ICE agent now that only Trump’s FBI/DOJ is doing the investigation. Does anyone think any of Trump’s precious ICE agents (that he seems to consider his own private police force) will face any kind of punishment for anything? If an ICE agent was convicted, I would bet big money a Trump pardon would soon follow.
I’ve been thinking about Trump’s lie about the officer being run over. It is such an odd baldfaced lie that I am beginning to think he may have simply misunderstood an aide telling him about the officer’s past experience of being dragged by a car.
What could be better this cold, blustery morning than Hili and Andrzej followed by Cats and Domino? Perfection.
Important questions to guide thought through destabilizing and disturbing matters as of late :
Can principles be observed or noticed, such as :
• Lead with a sympathetic character
• Play to the audience that isn’t there
• Put your target in a decision dilemma
• The real action is your target’s reaction
These principles and many more detailed here :
https://beautifultrouble.org/toolbox/principle
A modern take on the guiding principle of Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky, (1971):
Your target’s reaction is your real action.
Organizations that keep track of ICE can be expected to “train” and “teach” them – as the Beautiful Trouble website explains. It is also a printed book :
Beautiful Trouble – A Toolbox for Revolution
474
2012
OR Books
Re: Iran– There are two letters in this week’s Science
1) the depletion and contamination of the Karun river- A primary water source and the only real navigable river continues to worsen
2) the ongoing destruction of and fires in the Hyrcanian forests
Directly related to the ongoing protests? I would be unsurprised if the first is, as it has been an issue growing for several decades. The second is just deeply saddening
“…a new President, who would likely be Edmundo Gonzalez or Maria Corina Machado; Machado has just just said that she should be the rightful President of Venezuela.”
I think that it is really hard to predict who would be elected president in a free and fair election. Gonzalez won, I suspect not because people loved him but because they wanted to vote against Maduro. If the conditions are right, people may well elect someone that we outside of Venezuela haven’t even heard of. I really hope that a free and fair election can be organized soon (i.e. within the year).
Thanks for The Pink Panther and the sloth and Feynman!
Me too. Thanks, for always having these fun, interesting bits. The ICE killing is very, very dangerous (Trump and the activists will run with it and it’s terrifying) so it’s nice to have something positive to read.
I recall being told that the “Windy City” nickname was originally a comment on all the blowhard politicians to be found in Chicago.
The new and improved food pyramid is undoubtedly very good for us, but I still adhere to the recommendation of my youth–the four basic food groups, which I interpreted to mean ‘bags, boxes, bottles & cans.’
One of the all time favorite TShirts designs I produced back in the day was The Four Food Groups of Texas: Chicken Fried Steak, Chili, Brisket, Beer. The shirts showed four different Texans enjoying these four food groups.
The Center for Science in the Public Interest has published alternative guidelines at:
https://www.cspi.org/sites/default/files/2026-01/20260107_CSPI_uncompromisedDGA_report_4_FINAL.pdf
Thanks for the bass video. I sent it to my brother in law who plays, along with a couple of other videos of hers I found on youtube. He said he has already heard of her and that she’s “freakishly good”. He said “if she sticks with it she’ll be pretty much a top world session player if she so chooses”.
She plays different types of music in different videos, she’s great.
I am not au fait with the music scene, but is that all she can aspire too, to be almost anonymous? No chance to be the Paganini of the bass guitar? Not a Joe Bonamassa, not a B.B. Queen?
And speaking of Joe Bonamassa .. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyXFHr5jylI
Haha, he didn’t mean that as an insult, from him it’s acknowledgement of how great she is. He rates musicianship over popularity.
It would be great to see her as BB Queen, and I’m sure she can develop her talent to that level, but there are few bass playing BBs and Rolling Stones. Most bands come and go, but great session musicians are always in demand. Many of them have far better skills than people who play in bands. My b-i-l has appeared without credit on some albums, but session musicians aren’t as anonymous as you might think they are, especially within the industry. He likes to use his music skills without the pressure of tours and publicity etc, but he does both.
Great Joe Bonamassa vid, ta.
With all the arguments about whether or not men should play women’s sports, many people miss the most fundamental issue.
If women want to organise themselves to play sport together, then they should. No one has the right to tell them that they can’t, regardless of whether men are faster or not.
This is a basic right for any group in society. Why should a cricket club have to cater to people who want to play football? Or a crochet club cater for
knitters?
It’s more complicated than that, as are most discussions of rights. Voluntary associations (“private clubs”) were used in the past (and present?) to maintain racial segregation. They don’t have any particular legal standing as a basic right.
I get what you are saying, and agree it’s not easy to balance everyone’s rights, especially when one group insists their rights must override the rights of others.
I think there needs to be more legal clarification where rights conflict. Thankfully, the UK Supreme Court has taken a step forward on that. A recent Employment Tribunal judgement stated that there is no ‘hierarchy of rights’ but decided that a man’s right to undress in front of women overruled a woman’s right to privacy. I suspect that that will be reversed on appeal as the judgement was factually incorrect in many areas.
We have something similar developing here with the Men’s Sheds movement. Women are trying to get in. My first instinct was that of course women should be allowed, but then I realised that the sheds are also a male support group, so I hope they will decide to have sheds by sex and also mixed sheds.
In the case of sport, men cannot literally become women, no matter how slowly they run, and banning men from women’s sports isn’t banning them from sport completely.
Two issues: discrimination by sex, and can men be women?
An association that is publicly visible, like a sporting club or a crochet circle that allows members of the public to apply (not just private friends of one another), is not free to choose whom it accepts and whom it excludes. You can exclude an applicant because she doesn’t want to do the activity the club supports or refuses to follow the rules of the game, or that she’s not sufficiently talented. But you can’t exclude on the basis of one of the list of prohibited criteria set down in civil/human rights laws. These vary by country. They nearly always include race, sex, and religion but can be much more numerous (as in Canada, no surprise.)
Strictly, your cricket club can’t admit only women and exclude all men who apply. But men let that slide in sport — none of us sues for sex discrimination — because of noblesse oblige:
1) Men would consider it unchivalrous to demand to join a women’s team. They would be rebuked and humiliated…by other men.
2) Men agree that segregated competition is the only way that women will ever win anything and this incentive is necessary to encourage girls to even try.
But now enter the trans activists. If transwomen are women, as they are under many countries’ human rights laws, then you have to let them join your women’s cricket club just as you have to admit South Asian and Presbyterian women, because exclusion on the basis of gender identity is also prohibited.* You (and we men) can say men shouldn’t be allowed to play women’s sport, sure, but the “transwoman” says, “That’s OK. The law says I’m a woman, so I’m good. Now piss off.” You have to drive a stake into the heart of the nonsense idea that men can ever be called women. Only then can you exclude men and make it stick.
(* In some countries, “sex” is interpreted to include sexual orientation and gender identity. In others, the two are explicitly listed separately.)
Hilarious to see a cell phone integrated into the table-settings of the sophisticated. Love it!
Food: I will continue to eat it. Almost no red meat. (Turkey, chicken—fat and skin removed—are fine.) Little saturated fat. (Olive oil is great, sometimes a bit of butter for flavor.) Lots and lots of vegetables, especially cruciferous ones. (Yes, even Brussels Sprouts.) Oatmeal, Cream of Wheat, sometimes eggs for breakfast. Apple, Orange, and salad for lunch. Sometimes a piece of candy from See’s. I will change little under the new guidelines, as I have been largely following them—sans the red meat and extra fats.
Minnesota. As I mentioned yesterday, I am very concerned that violence will break out widely in the streets of our big cities. In Minneapolis, the Mayor and Governor are criticizing ICE and telling the federal government to get out: “Get the f*ck out,” in the words of the Mayor. This kind of us-vs.-them rhetoric is encouraging the protestors to resist the feds. Emotions are running high. The risk is that protestors will organize all across the country and create nationwide chaos.
Maybe. But cold winters are not favourable for “long hot summer” mass actions.
Indeed, they were so humiliated by the “Quality Learing Center” scandal that they and their supporters are now losing the plot.
Like Jerry, I am withholding judgment on the ICE shooting. That said, if an outside observer must watch slow-motion video repeatedly from different angles to make a firm judgment, then I see no way that a jury would convict a law enforcement officer who must make a split-second decision. One caveat: I’m curious whether he also fired through the open side window and, if so, any legal implications for doing so.
Re: Windy City. Mitch4’s explanation about blowhard politicians and boastful city supporters is the way it was explained to me as a child growing up in the Chicago area. It was apparently a derogatory term used by people elsewhere, and the city adopted it.
Did he fire through the side window, too? I know there was at least one bullet hole through the windshield. Firing through the side windows might be construed as (pardon the term) overkill, but this was all done in a second or so. It’s a mess, and I’m glad I don’t have to judge it.
It seems that he did. ABC did a nice timeline. They calculated 399 milliseconds between the first two shots and 299 milliseconds before the third. Once an officer engages his weapon to neutralize a target, I don’t know how rapidly his brain can reorient, reassess, and withhold additional fire. As you say, a mess. The phrase I heard from one former cop was “lawful but awful.”
https://abcnews.go.com/US/minneapolis-ice-shooting-minute-minute-timeline-renee-nicole/story?id=129021809
“Lawful but awful” is also how the shooting of Jacob Blake was characterized by police use-of-force experts.
https://www.blockedandreported.org/p/episode-93-its-crazy-we-have-to-do
I have seen several posts, including one by a lawyer on Facebook where he cited relevant case law, which suggest that the officer’s self-defense defense may not hold if he had positioned himself in front of the vehicle. So maybe the legally-relevant decision is not the split second one he made to fire his gun but the early one to approach the vehicle from the front – if, indeed, that is how he approached the vehicle.
There are probably going to be a number of factors, many of which internet commentators are not going to know or which they are going to be ill-informed about (me included). One thing is clear: if this ever goes to trial, half the country is going to be outraged at the verdict, whatever it may be.
The calm smiling woman driving the car in this video had parked in the middle of the road while her wife taunted ICE officers. The driver was directed by a readily identifiable ICE officer to get out of her vehicle. I think it was reasonable for the second officer who made the video to assume that the driver would do that, and would not instead gun the car toward him and try to escape. She showed no indication she intended to flee – she and her wife seem to have deliberately chosen to be there and to engage the officers. That she did try to flee, and he reacted to the sudden threat this posed to himself, other officers, and bystanders, seems awful for everyone involved (especially the woman who was killed, and her wife and kids). IANAL so whether the shooting was also unlawful isn’t clear to me.
https://x.com/CarlHigbie/status/2009689196529889593
I have a question for the wisdom of the group, tangentially concerning the Morocco bones. I’ve recently realized that I should at least know the general outline of the human migration out of Africa into the rest of the world. I asked Gemini to recommend a book–I specified “not overly technical” and “non-politicized”–and (eliminating its explanations), got this list:
Here are a few well-regarded, accessible, non-politicized, and non-technical books about the “Out of Africa” migration(s) that are suitable for a general reader:
The World Before Us: The New Science Behind Our Human Origins by Tom Higham.
A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes by Adam Rutherford.
The Incredible Human Journey by Alice Roberts.
The Great Human Diasporas: The First Migrations and Settlements of Non-European Peoples by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari.
If I were to read only one of these, which one should it be? (If two are absolutely essential to understanding, please don’t hesitate to recommend both). Thanks!