Welcome to the sabbath for goyische cats: Sunday, August 2, 2026 and National Ice Cream Sandwich Day, a treat appearing in its American form (chocolate wafers enclosing a vanilla ice cream sandwich) in the 1890s. But my favorite subspecies is California’s “It’s-It”, devised in 1928. Here the ice cream is sandwiched between two oatmeal cookies dipped in chocolate. There are now many varieties. If you can buy these in your area, feel lucky, for I can’t get ’em!
It’s also Dinosaurs Day, Sisters’ Day, and World Four Leaf Clover Day. Who hasn’t looked for them as a kid? But how rare are they? Well, Wikipedia has an entire article on four-leaf clovers, (and 5- and 6-lear clovers) and says this:
A 2017 survey of approximately 5.7 million clovers in six European countries found the frequency of 4-leaf clovers to be around 5000 to 1 (one 4-leaf clover for every 5076 normal 3-leaf clovers), almost twice the commonly stated probability of 10,000 to 1. According to this survey, the frequency of a 5-leaf clover is 24,390 to 1, and that of a 6-leaf clover is 312,500 to 1.
Here’s a rare six-leaf clover (pressed and dried) of Trifolium repens, the common white clover:
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the August 2 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
UPDATE: Trump has called off the attack on Iran reported right below. The man cannot make up his mind, though this may be a strategy (I think it’s dithering, though):
President Trump called off a new attack on Iran on Saturday night, saying “the perimeters of a deal had been agreed to” that would open the Strait of Hormuz to commercial traffic and end Iran’s nuclear threat.
The abrupt announcement on Truth Social de-escalated the rising tensions between the U.S. and Iran over control of the strait, Iran’s attacks on U.S. troops in recent days, and Trump’s own threats to rain more American bombs and missiles on the Islamic Republic.
He said Iran and other Middle Eastern countries had asked him to pull back on the strikes, which he ordered Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported, to bring Tehran back to the negotiating table.
“Based on this request, I have agreed, for the further benefit of the WORLD and, likewise, the survival of a successful and prosperous Iran, to cancel the attack, subject to being able to rapidly make a DEAL,” Trump said on Truth Social.
DEAL! I don’t buy it.
*The WSJ reports that Trump is once again ready (or says he is ready) to attack Iran big time.
President Trump has ordered the military to launch a fresh attack on Iran that could begin as soon as this weekend and last a few days, U.S. officials said.
Earlier Friday, he told reporters that he planned to resume heavy military strikes to force the regime to come to the negotiating table. He predicted that if the U.S. hit Iran hard enough, the hard-line regime would eventually “peter out.”
“We will be hitting them very hard,” Trump said Friday at a televised cabinet meeting at Camp David. “And you know at some point, they’re going to say, ‘We just can’t take it anymore.’”
Trump authorized the new attack plan presented to him at the presidential retreat, U.S. officials said. But, they noted, any immediate progress on the diplomatic front could convince Trump to halt the planned strikes and return to negotiations. He also could simply change his mind.
“As President Trump said at his cabinet meeting today, the United States will win, and Iran will not have a nuclear weapon under his watch,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said.
Trump’s threats Friday contrasted with his insistence earlier this week that “very friendly negotiations” were under way, enabling a pause on military operations. Since then, Iran launched a surprise attack on troops in Jordan, triggering a U.S. retaliatory attack on Wednesday.
For weeks behind closed doors, Trump has been telling aides that the Iranians are “crazy,” according to U.S. officials. He also has complained to confidants that the interim peace deal was ultimately meaningless, officials said, and that he always knew it wasn’t going to work.
His frustration was on full display during the meeting at Camp David when the president accused Iranian diplomats of being “very dishonorable” to deal with and suggested more violent military strikes were needed to break Tehran’s will.
This just goes back and forth endlessly, with Trump hinting that negotiations are proceeding smoothly, and providing hope for peace, and then he seems to realize that the Iranians are mendacious (surprise!). It may just be a ruse on his part to destabilize Iran, but I don’t see how pausing attacks would destabilize Iran, and we know by now that either attacking or pausing will not affect what that regime does. I still think he should attack Kharg Island heavily.
*Surprise! Trump backtracked on two statements this week. The first was his claim that the Reflecting Pool renovation in Washington, D.C. was sabotaged by vandalism, causing an Olympic athlete to be arrested. The other was that he’d allow Ukraine to make Patriot missiles. He now admits that the Reflecting Pool job was botched by contractors (the accused felon had his charges dropped), and he says he’s reneging on his promise to Zelensky.
Federal prosecutors on Friday said that contractors hired by the Trump administration had botched the renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, leaving behind “widespread damage” in the pool’s new blue lining, and that the Interior Department had then falsely blamed that damage on vandals.
In an extraordinary motion filed Friday evening, the U.S. attorney in Washington, Jeanine Pirro, said she was seeking to dismiss a felony charge against David Hearn, a former Olympic canoeist who was accused of pulling up a piece of the pool’s lining two feet square.
In doing so, Ms. Pirro — a longtime ally of President Trump’s — directly contradicted the president’s repeated claim that the Reflecting Pool’s peeling liner was caused by people slashing its coating with knives. Instead, she said, “the damage was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism.”
Earlier this month, Ms. Pirro herself had echoed the president’s claims, calling a news conference to announce Mr. Hearn’s indictment on July 2. She said that she had “tremendous evidence” that Mr. Hearn had committed a felony, and noted that he faced up to 10 years in prison.
But on Friday, Ms. Pirro said that her prosecutors had been misled by the Interior Department, which had awarded a no-bid contract to a first-time government contractor to repair the iconic landmark.
Someone is asleep at the wheel at the Interior Department. A felony? What was the previous “evidence”? As for those missiles, here are a couple of paragraphs:
President Trump backtracked on Friday from a promise earlier this month to let Ukraine make Patriot missiles, weapons that were sorely needed as a defense interceptor against Russia’s deadly ballistic missile attacks.
On July 8, Mr. Trump had unexpectedly assented to sharing technology behind the missiles to allow Ukraine to build them, saying that “we’ll give them the right to make Patriots” during a meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on the sidelines of the NATO summit meeting in Ankara, Turkey. He added: “We’ll show them how to do it.”
When asked about the agreement during a meeting with his cabinet on Friday, Mr. Trump said “we have not agreed to that,” suggesting that he had changed his mind because “it is a hard thing to give away that kind of technology” and because of the risk that “those people you give the technology, they could someday turn on you.”
Yeah, right; I’m really worried about Ukraine firing missiles at U.S. troops in Europe! How many countries have we already shared that technology with?
*I doubt that many of us read about the invasion of Ceuta by Moroccans without thinking, “This is going to happen all over the West,” though it won’t happen on this scale in many places. Douglas Murray has warned for years about how Western values could be changed for the worse by massive immigration, and he does so this week in The Free Press in a piece called “Europe’s borderless dream becomes a nightmare.”
Eleven years ago, almost to the day, Europe was experiencing a migration wave that threatened to make the continent buckle. In the space of a matter of weeks, more than a million people from Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East made their way into Europe, principally by crossing to the islands of Greece and Italy: “the soft underbelly of Europe.”
As various European countries started to panic, it was German chancellor Angela Merkel who decided to control the day. “Wir schaffen das,” she said in August 2015. “We can do this.” Merkel and some of her counterparts in the EU effectively suspended normal immigration procedures and opened the borders of Europe to anyone who wanted to come.
. . .This week, Ceuta finally did explode—and into a wider global awareness. Footage of migrants pushing by the thousands to get into the territory has caused many people to say that the subject of my 2017 bestseller, The Strange Death of Europe, seems to have been made into a film. In reality, it didn’t need to be. What I wrote about in that book was based on what I had seen with my own eyes. In a way, it is a good thing that the wider world is getting an opportunity to see again what I tried to describe and warn about. By late Friday, Spanish authorities claimed that most of the migrants had either left willingly or been pushed out by security forces. They were much less forthcoming about the many ways their government invited the crisis.
The immediate cause of the crisis in Ceuta is a decision by the Spanish government to normalize the status of migrants who have already broken into Spain illegally. The far-left Spanish government—which receives far less international attention and criticism than it deserves—has been stoking this situation for years. As well as corrupting and politicizing the Spanish justice system, the government of Pedro Sánchez has advertised itself as open to illegal migration. Perhaps Sánchez, like many left- and right-wing leaders in Europe, underestimated the number of people who wanted to come into his country. But by failing to deport illegals and, in fact, normalizing their status, he has done as much as any European leader could have done to increase the draw and thus the flow of people into Spain and therefore the rest of Europe.
. . .As my repeated trips to southern Europe have proved to me, most of the migrants who arrive in Greece, Italy, and Spain will not stay in these countries. They are merely a doorway into Europe. Most of the migrants want to head north for the larger welfare payments. Germany and other northern European countries will therefore be the ones who will end up paying the most for the decisions made by Pedro Sánchez.
The situation is, of course, unsustainable. Like many other European countries, Spain has a national debt that exceeds its annual gross domestic product. It cannot afford to pay to house illegal migrants. The migrants themselves will never put back in taxes what they take out in welfare. The vast majority of those who arrived illegally in the past decade remain a net drain on the state. And that is before you even begin to address the social and civilizational challenges that such movement brings. But Spain—like the rest of Europe—will continue to try to sustain the unsustainable. Something that I have come to realize can go on for a very long time. It has gone on for more than a decade already. Only four days ago in these pages, I described the spate of terrorist attacks conducted in Europe by Islamist migrants. And just as every week’s news includes stories of the worst effects of Europe’s illegal migration, so each week’s news ignores the long-term unsustainability of the economic migration model Europe has put in place.
Pro-migration activists like to talk about figures. Figures which, as I showed in my book, they either invent or actively lie about. But Europeans know that the official figures are baloney. They use their eyes and see what is going on. And they have long come to the conclusion that, in fact, “We can’t do this.” Whether the political leaders in Europe catch up with what the voters can see with their own eyes will decide no less a question than whether the continent of Europe lives or dies.
People will say—and said this about Murray’s book—that he was grossly exaggerating. And immigration itself isn’t inherently bad: it’s been great for the U.S. But unrestrained immigration, particularly from areas where the cultural is refractory to integrating in the West, is not good; and that’s what will degrade Europe. No-go zones, grooming gangs, economic burdens, and so on: these things are already affecting the quality of life in Europe.
*Bari Weiss has inserted her metatarsals into her mouth again: she’s hired conservative op-ed columnist Ross Douthat, formerly of the NYT, as a correspondent for “60 Minutes” (remember that Weiss was hired a chief news editor at CBS).
In media circles, this week’s hire of a prominent New York Times columnist as a correspondent for CBS’s 60 Minutes was greeted with disbelief.
The collective response went something like this: “What?!”
Ross Douthat would not have been high on anyone’s list to replace the likes of Scott Pelley, Cecilia Vega and Sharyn Alfonsi, all experienced reporters who were let go in recent weeks from the venerable news show. Or the likes of Anderson Cooper, who left of his own accord amid the months-long tumult and internal complaints that political bias was being injected into 60 Minutes news reports.
Yes, it seemed downright odd. After all, Douthat has no broadcast television experience and he is – in the journalistic vernacular – an opinion guy, not a news guy. He’s certainly not a practitioner of investigative journalism, the longtime calling card of 60 Minutes.
Douthat is known for his lofty takes on national politics and religion – not for the usual reporting skills of grilling reluctant sources with tough questions and digging out information that somebody important doesn’t want you to have.
His Times boss, the top opinion editor, Katie Kingsbury, had kind words for Douthat in a staff memo, according to a Times article.
As a columnist, Douthat argued for “a religiously serious, intellectually restless conservatism”, Kingsbury wrote. “He was right about things early, wrong about things honestly and never, not once, boring.”
Terrific qualities in an opinion writer, certainly, but not exactly a great fit for a job defined decades ago by the bulldog tenacity of the investigative reporter Mike Wallace.
. . .But at the all-new 60 Minutes, the hire is being positioned as a coup. And, in fact, it lines up surprisingly well with the new leadership.
It all began when CBS News’s new ownership – led by the billionaire scion David Ellison – appointed Bari Weiss as editor in chief last October.
Like Douthat’s hire, it didn’t seem to make much sense on the surface.
She too lacked television experience, and she too had made her name on the opinion side of journalism, where she leaned right. She founded the Free Press, a successful digital media company that concentrates on opinion journalism, especially with an “anti-woke” flavor. Before that, she’d been an opinion editor at the New York Times, where she and Douthat had overlapped. Weiss quit the Times, complaining about its internal culture.
Her conservative profile, and her disagreements with legacy media, was just what Ellison wanted, as he tried to cozy up to Donald Trump and others in the administration. After all, Ellison was trying to get big corporate mergers approved and needed federal approval.
When it came time for Weiss to appoint a new executive producer for 60 Minutes, she chose Nick Bilton – another surprising hire who had no TV news experience and who shared roots at the New York Times.
If broadcast networks are judged by ratings, things aren’t going well so far. They have plummeted at CBS News, including at its evening news show, where Weiss had quickly installed a new anchor, Tony Dokoupil, to great fanfare.
Douthat has neither television experience, nor, perhaps more important, any experience in investigative reporting. Most of the times I’ve discussed him is to criticize his credulous defense of his Christianity. And really, how good can an investigative reporter be (for that’s what “60 Minutes” is about) is they can’t even question a belief in unevidenced superstition. I have taken a wait-and-see attitude towards Weiss at CBS, but right now, in light of Douthat and the lower ratings of CBS News, I’m not optimistic.
*Although I no longer subscribe to Andrew Sullivan’s The Weekly Dish, I still get emails containing an excerpt from his main post. This week it’s on Fauci, and called “Neither Saint nor villain,” with the subtitle, “The all-too-human story of a masterful operator, Tony Fauci.” From the excerpt:
By the looks of him, Tony Fauci is broken. His expression in this week’s hearings was flat, a little haunted, done. The man who once leapt at every chance to testify in public as “Mr Science” suddenly found himself mute, humbled even, leery of “perjury traps.” You’d think a whopping, unprecedented, retroactive pardon might have the benefit of at least liberating the man to tell us everything, good and bad. But nope.
This is life in a broken republic.
Senator Rand Paul bears some of the blame. He’s been engaged in a campaign not just of public accountability but recklessly spittle-flecked demonization. Fauci is not responsible for “probably more deaths than any other individual in the medical world.” Please. There is no context in which any senator should ever be saying “Who the fuck do you think you were?” to a public servant who had been tasked with handling a once-in-a-century plague. And the meretricious leaking of Fauci’s private diary — to add to his public humiliation — is another appalling, gutter low.
But the media and Democratic lionization of Fauci — the near worship of him — may have hurt Fauci more in the end. The diary reveals a truly decadent Washington dynamic: journos and public figures in a mutual “resistance” tongue-bath of dinners and book parties. Yes, it’s fine to maintain contacts, even transactional friendships, with sources. But the chummy to and fro between Fauci and Tapper, for example? Very late republic.
Fauci, on the other hand, seemed to be huffing it:
After being honored at a gala at the National Portrait Gallery (“it was the highest level of AAA list you could imagine in Washington DC”), he writes about hanging out with Venus and Serena Williams, Clive Davis and the celebrity chef Jose Andres. “We were invited to go across the street by Jose to his restaurant Zaytinya for after hours champagne.”
Fauci, for all his academic achievement, was still, beneath it all, an insecure, dorky science nerd from Brooklyn whose life was finally made whole by a call from Barbra Streisand. All too human. The obsession with Hollywood celebrity in DC still amazes me, and the nerd prom, of course, is its apotheosis. But et tu, Fauci? You kind of hope a generationally great scientist would be above that kind of thing. But nah:
A FEW DAYS AGO, Julia Roberts sent me beautiful flower arrangement. mailed her my thanks. Scott Atlas still causing problems with his “herd immunity” issue.
It would have been perfectly ok, for example, if Fauci had simply said from the very beginning, “We don’t know the virus’ origins.” Because we didn’t. In fact, most of the scientists looking at the virus first thought it was “friggin’ likely” engineered. Why? Because it was a bat coronavirus with something called a “furin cleavage site” inserted, and “they were already doing this type of work” at Wuhan, a lab with a woefully inadequate security regimen. Hence one scientist’s dry, subsequent remark to Matt Taibbi:
If someone proposes to insert a furin cleavage site in a bat SARS coronavirus in Wuhan, and then one year later we see a bat SARS coronavirus with a furin cleavage site in Wuhan, that is highly unlikely to be a natural event.
And yet almost immediately, Fauci corralled these same scientists into publishing a paper casting a possible lab leak as definitively debunked and a fringe conspiracy theory. Why that certainty so fast? You might well ask.
Yes, I was somewhat appalled by Fauci’s celebrity worship, but a bit of narcissism isn’t a crime. But his twisting the arm of scientists to support one’s favored hypothesis is unethical. Fauci isn’t a god, but neither is he malicious. He’s human, and he just got called out for his failings. In his case, though, some of his failings affected a lot of people.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili sees “vanity of vanities,” but Andrzej doesn’t know what she’s talking about.
Andrzej: What do you see there?
Hili: Vanity of vanities.
In Polish:
Ja: Co tam widzisz?
Hili: Marność nad marnościami.
*******************
From Kitty Litterposting:
From Cats Doing Cat Stuff:
From The Grammar Police:
Masih criticizes the Spanish Prime Minister for cozying up to Islamists.
How dare you? How dare you, Prime Minister Sanchez?
My address at the Spanish Parliament, calling on @sanchezcastejon to end his cowardice in the face of Islamism! pic.twitter.com/b9gTrFb2fO
— Masih Alinejad (@AlinejadMasih) August 1, 2026
From Luana. Yep, the American Association of University Professors endorsed a “progressive” candidate: Abdul El-Sayed for US Senate in the Michigan Democratic primary. The AAUP has become a complete joke, abandoning all pretense of institutional neutrality.
The best way for academia to persuade the public that its not a partisan institution…is for the American Association of University Professors to break over 100 years of precedent and endorse a progressive Democrat for the Senate. pic.twitter.com/eMcO8bOMKs
— Jake 🇺🇸 (@omni_american) July 31, 2026
From Larry the Cat, who, a Senior Cat at age 19, still has moxie:
This cat’s got claws! https://t.co/2tpSNJBasa
— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) July 31, 2026
Two from my feed. First, reuniting mother and joey. Sound up to hear the baby wail:
After being rescued, the baby kangaroo ran straight to its mother and climbed into her pouch.
So cute! ❤️ pic.twitter.com/ii2FmoX9Kq— The Figen (@TheFigen_) July 31, 2026
And the wonders of evolution:
The Southern Three-Banded Armadillo (Tolypeutes matacus) is one of the two only armadillo species capable of rolling into a completely sealed sphere. pic.twitter.com/Vbl9plhjR1
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) August 1, 2026
And one I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
On this day and the next in 1944, the Nazis gassed about 4300 Roma to death in Auschwitz, including this family: In the picture, the Emmler Sinti family deported to #Auschwitz. From the left: Wally (b. 1936), Elisabeth (b. 1917), Ali (b. 1938) and Oscar (b. 1935) https://t.co/NOYGh3Bbkv
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) August 2, 2026
Two from Professor (retired) Cobb. First, clay feet of one of my evolutionary heroes, Ernst Mayr:
Another example: Ernst Mayr not being happy with sharing the Crafoord Prize with George Williams. Remembered by David Haig.
— Arvid Ågren (@arvidagren.bsky.social) 2026-07-30T18:59:14.642Z
. . . and this is a most excellent tweet:
Finally a toilet for people who just want a quiet place to pet their duck.
— Matthew Highton (@matthighton.bsky.social) 2026-07-29T17:59:53.957Z
The DOJ is dropping the felony charge regarding the Reflecting Pool but Trump stated, “I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro.”. He still insists it was vandalism.
The use of false charges and criminal prosecutions to deflect blame and push Trump’s agenda is an abuse of the justice system. And of course we are seeing a lot blame being thrown around, with the DOJ blaming the Dept. of the Interior. A rushed and botched installation by a Trump crony who got a $14,000,000 no-bid contract. Who is surprised? Trump corrupts everything he touches.
On the other hand, a Grand Jury issued an indictment over the vandalism, so it’s not as if there wasn’t foundation for the charges.
Note that federal judges and legal eagles have criticized actions by Trump’s DOJ prosecutors for allegedly misleading or manipulating grand juries. Note also that had Obama or Biden awarded a $14,000,000 no-bid contract to one of their pals, there would have been a clamor for impeachment.
The retraction filing indicates that the DOJ came with additional evidence indicating it wasn’t caused by vandalism after the grand jury. Sounds like a hasty indictment.
The classic phrase in response to that is that a grand jury will indict a ham sandwich – it hears from only the prosecutor. Of course, a DC grand jury under Pirro failed to indict a protestor who threw a ham sandwich at, IIRC, an ICE agent last year; so maybe the analogy is flawed.
But the DOJ’s record recently with grand juries has been atrocious; prosecutors misrepresenting the law and the facts and effectively ‘testifying’ to the jury to get them to indict. One only has to look at what happened with the Comey and Letitia James indictments in the Eastern District of Virginia under Lindsey Halligan; and Comey is again asking for the grand jury transcript in his ridiculous “86 47” case. Even worse was the case against a group of demonstrators in Chicago, recently dismissed, where the prosecutors, ordered by a judge to produce for her inspection the grand jury transcripts, initially gave the judge a transcript that had been redacted to obscure their legal malfeasance. She got the original transcript, the case promptly went “poof”, and some DOJ attorneys may well end up being disciplined by their State Bars for misconduct.
Given Pirro’s public posturing after the arrest, Hearn’s (the defendant’s) attorneys had already asked for the grand jury transcript for the indictment; and Pirro may well have wanted the case to go away without having to reveal it. And there was also the issue of spoliation of evidence: Hearn’s attorneys had asked for preservation of the assertedly damaged area; but despite that by the time they were allowed to inspect, Trump’s pool guys had already altered it.
It is like the stolen election. Trump keeps saying something happened, but never provides evidence, even when things go to trial. And if pressed for the evidence he gets mad and insults whoever is asking.
The Biden Administration exposed us to four years of what Ceuta experienced and lied about it consistently for the entire term. Dem supporters should be asking their candidates why they seem bent on doing it again should they win in ’28.
Crap all about the AAUP giving any endorsements to any candidate. And I think the only reason El-Sayed is running with the DSA is to try to get the Democratic Party to further distance themselves from Israel.
OMG. Russ Douthat on 60 Minutes? Doh!
I don’t usually watch 60 Minutes, mainly because of ill timing with dinner. But I’ve made a note in my calendar to try to watch it to see if he appears. Out of morbid curiosity.
Most of the beneficial immigration into the US was from Europe. In short it seems that immigration from relatively rich, high-IQ countries is overall beneficial, whereas immigration from poor, low-IQ countries is very harmful (immigration from middling countries, such as Central America, seems about neutral).
Europe’s leaders are currently imposing on it the worst sorts of immigration.
[And it was, of course, entirely America’s own fault, but America is still suffering from the ongoing effects of bringing in a million Africans 200 years ago, creating a demographic that (for example) commits half the homicides, while being only 13% of the population, and which is economically unproductive to the extent of requiring a trillion dollars a year of economic subsidy.]
One of the worst effects is the loss of free speech and the accompanying self-censorship by the media. Europe’s free-speech crisis is largely driven by the authorities not wanting anyone to criticise their immigration policies and the migrants themselves (especially Muslims) not wanting to be criticised.
Is this an argument for The Bell Curve or a better education for those that have ended up without franchise?
Statistics and sources, please.
“High-IQ countries, low-IQ countries” – really?
And it’s arrant nonsense to say that “Most of the beneficial immigration into the US was from Europe”; while most of the immigration into the US in the 19th and early 20th century was from Europe, much of it wasn’t welcomed at the time by those who had arrived earlier. Then there was immigration from China, whose laborers built the California railroads; and later Japan, whose farmers helped make California agriculture productive. Now it’s immigrants from Mexico and Central America, who farm, and build – you have only to drive around California to see largely Latino construction crews, staff restaurants and nursing homes, and staff the factory farms and meat packing plants of the Midwest. And immigrants from India, who help California’s IT industry thrive. Immigrants pay taxes and Social Security and contribute people of working age to an aging workforce.
I’m an immigrant myself (albeit from one of your “relatively rich, high-IQ countries”), and I bitterly resent ill-informed criticism of immigration in the US; it is one of the factors that helps keep the US prosperous.
The issue with immigration is that formerly, the immigrants appreciated American societal values, and wanted to be part of American society. And they came to the US legally.
The main objection to immigration in the US and Western Europe is that the immigrants want to impose the values of the societies from which they come on their destination countries. In Europe, each country has a distinct culture, and wants to keep that culture as the dominant one in the country. In the US, the country is founded on the values set down in the Constitution. If someone is offended by a drawing of a religious figure to the point that he endorses violence, or endorses demands for women to cover up, or uses Western freedoms to attack the host country, then it is understandable that Western countries will not want him.
Formerly, lots of immigrants came to the US because they were poor, not because they “appreciated American societal values.” Then as now, they went where they could make a living. Back then, they could show up at Ellis Island and become a citizen, without jumping through most of the hoops modern immigrants have to go through if they want to migrate legally. They showed up to the border and got in. Then as now, there were complaints that the immigrants were the wrong sort of people: Italian, Eastern Europeans, Russians, Jews, etc. Indeed, racist leglistation ultimately banned immigration from China and Japan, although today Asian Americans are among our richest ethnic groups, despite their often humble origins.
Yes, but my point was that previously, immigrants wanted to fit into the American way of life, and adopted American values, as opposed to demanding that the American population adapt to the immigrant’s values in the name of multiculturalism.
I would suggest that one of the reasons for the success of Asian immigrants as well as Jewish immigrants was the willingness to join the melting pot and adopt American values. Especially in recognizing the value of education. In those days, education was almost a guarantee of raising one’s socioeconomic status.
Immigration has become a ridiculous debate today, at least in the US. It seems that one has to favor completely open borders, or closing the borders entirely (unless one has the money to buy a ticket). Nobody in power seems to be willing to make the effort to come up with a real solution that addresses the needs of the country plus really addressing the humanitarian issue (which does not mean that anyone who wishes to improve their economic prospects must be let in).
China and Japan are high IQ.
Yes, really. Looking across the world it’s a clear fact that the single biggest factor in predicting GDP-per-capita is the mean IQ of the population. (Obviously other things are important also, for example China’s GDP-per-capita is still suffering from the legacy of Mao, though catching up fast.).
Yes, Central American immigrants into the US tend to be hard-working, industrious contributors. I’ve said nothing to denigrate them. I do think that their effect on American GDP-per-capita is roughly neutral.
A lot of that European immigration to the US was from countries and places that at the time were poor and “low IQ”, namely Italy and the various areas in eastern Europe and the Russian empire: all “middling” back in the late 19th/early 20th centuries. And there was the same anti-immigrant prejudice at the time, from WASPS angry at so many Italians and eastern Europeans (especially eastern European Jews) entering the country, since they weren’t “nordic” and didn’t “share our values” and brought crime with them (the mafia, Jewish gangsters like Bugsy Siegel, etc). The complaints were ultimately baseless, and still are: immigrants from latin America have assimilated extremely well into our country.
America isn’t Europe; it’s a society that wouldn’t exist without immigration, still relies on it, and whose immigrants asimilate far faster and better than those in Europe.
All true in a very different past, but in today’s context there are important differences between controlled, orderly, selective, legal immigration to fill skills gaps – which the vast majority of the public supports – vs. uncontrolled, disorderly, unvetted, mass illegal immigration of mostly unskilled people, which drives down wages for low-skilled citizens, increases competition for and costs of housing, strains social services and education, changes communities in various ways, and which the vast majority of the public does not support. One must also ask, at what point are there enough people? The country and its natural environments cannot support infinite population growth.
PS The values issue is more of a concern in Europe due to the largely Islamic cultures of the immigrants, unlike the USA (though there is some of that too – check out some of those DSA candidates and supporters).
Italy was never “low IQ”, this sort of claim is a myth. Or, rather, if you were comparing different European countries plus Russia and similar (and in those days that is indeed what they were comparing), then, yes, there were some relatively minor differences. But in the broader worldwide context all of those populations were pretty similar and high IQ.
With regard to the AAUP—when they started to debate boycotting Israel, I googled them—I had never heard of them, despite being a faculty member at a US university for some years. I didn’t much like what I read, and the articles by the former president, Cary Nelson, were pretty damning.
When they continued to make a few waves, I asked my scientist friends across the US what they thought, and most of them had never heard of the AAUP. Those who had didn’t care: none of my university faculty friends would admit to being a member.
Soooo, okay. Some sort of woke union, irrelevant to academia, irrelevant to scientific thought. And now this: The organization has never made an endorsement for a candidate for national office. Until now, and who do they endorse? A candidate who is about as far from mainstream America as is possible to be. Good job, guys: that will show academic relevance, and convince people that a university education is worth the money.
Ahhh, but that candidate has other qualities. Family connections to terror groups, and hanging out with one of the worst terror-supporting characters on the political landscape. A perfect example of today’s anti-Semite. A guy who disrespects women. A guy so shallow that, when choosing an issue on which to criticize RFK Jr, he chooses the RFK’s workout clothing. A socialist who condemns doctors who do not take Medicare, but whose psychiatrist wife does not take insurance at all—cash on the nail, please.
This is who the AAUP endorses.
“Fauci is not responsible for ‘probably more deaths than any other individual in the medical world.'”
Really? He was head of NAIAD, which provided funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. He quiibbles over whether he knew that gain of function research was going on there, but a lot of that revolves around redefining gain of function.
Is there a smoking gun? No. But there was an awful lot of circling the wagons, and outright dishonesty.
SARS2 almost certainly had a natural origin. You know who is doing millions of genetic coronavirus experiments in each of tens of millions of animals every 30 minutes? Nature. coronavirus Plus, Nature operates at BSL Level 0. SARS1 is known to have been such an animal spillover. Trucks full of wild animals were shipped into all cities of ten million inhabitants. When a virus arrives at a live animal market, it does not have to die of loneliness and can jump to start a human transmission chain. They outlawed animals like civets, etc. But it is a $70 billion illegal industry and it continued. Not surprisingly, the rate of a new deadly beta coronavirus every decade continued.
Reference
Michael Worobey lecture of COVID-2 Origins
For folks with SARS2 cases in Wuhan, he sequenced the viral genomes and used their location and dates to come up with an evolutionary tree of the viral genomes. The market was the epicenter and two independent spillover variants came into the market, Lineages A and B. There was also the proximity of virus-positive environmental samples to live-animal vendors
The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was the early epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic, Science 26 Jul 2022
The book “Breathless” by David Quammen includes interviews with virtually all the people in the Fauci teleconference where he was trying to get a handle on the origins. He basically did not to talk publicly about it until he had more information but they quickly realized a zoonotic spillover was the origin.