Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Welcome to CaturSaturday, November 23, 2024, and National Cashew Day, the finest of all nuts save the macademia.
Here’s a very short (1½-minute) primer on the cashew, and why they must be roasted (for more, see this video):
It’s also Dr. Who Day (the show began on this day in 1963), Eat a Cranberry Day (they are too sour!), Fibonacci Day (11/23 are the first four numbers of the series), and National Espresso Day (note that the second letter is an “s”, not an “x”, a mistake I see often).
*After Matt Gaetz dropped out of contention, Trump nominated a replacement candidate for Attorney General (article archived here). At least this one has some attorney general experience:
President-elect Donald Trump announced that he plans to nominate former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi to become the next U.S. attorney general, hours after former congressman Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) withdrew. Gaetz has been accused of sexual misconduct, allegations he has denied, and faced a narrowing path to confirmation in the Senate before dropping his bid.
Bondi, 59, is a longtime Trump loyalist who served on the defense team during his first impeachment trial. Her selection to be the country’s top law enforcement official follows a presidential campaign in which Trump criticized the justice system as “weaponized” against him and vowed retribution in a second term.
“For too long, the partisan Department of Justice has been weaponized against me and other Republicans – Not anymore,” Trump said in a Truth Social post. “Pam will refocus the DOJ to its intended purpose of fighting Crime, and Making America Safe Again. I have known Pam for many years — She is smart and tough, and is an AMERICA FIRST Fighter, who will do a terrific job as Attorney General!”
. . . . In 2010, Bondi became the first woman to be elected Florida attorney general and served two terms. She serves in leadership roles with the Center for Litigation and the Center for Law and Justice at the America First Policy Institute. Her selection for a Cabinet role reinforces the right-wing think tank’s status as a leading source of political appointees for Trump’s second term. The group helped lay the groundwork for a second Trump term but avoided the type of backlash levied against a similar effort, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.
I know nothing about Bondi, but the fact that she’s a “Trump loyalist” as well as the attorney general of Florida does make one worry!
*As always, I’ll steal three items from the inimitable Nellie Bowles’s weekly news summary at the Free Press, called this week “TGIF: The ten-pound brain administration.”
→ Seth Moulton gets a protest: The other moderate Dem who has been trying to take a victory lap—this time by saying that maybe, just maybe, biological men shouldn’t compete in women’s sports—is now getting protested. A large Neighbors Against Hate rally took place outside his office. Jen Psaki, on MSNBC, said there is no evidence trans athletes “are a threat” to fairness, whatever that means exactly. And as John Oliver, with his signature tone—and this plays so well, guys—of how can you be so dumb not to get this, put it: “Trans kids, like all kids, vary in athletic ability. . . . It is very weird for you to be so focused on this subject.” Right, very weird. A little perverted, even, to be so obsessed with this difference between male and female bodies that you also invented. Anyway, you know my rants here. But what’s interesting now is: This is the hill Dems continue to throw themselves on. So. I just hope Don Jr. is a kind monarch.
→ The police in the UK only look for bad tweets: Cops in the UK are busy. They’re busy looking for tweets. Specifically, the bad ones. Allison Pearson, a writer for The Telegraph, tweeted something deemed offensive. The Essex Police then, I’m not kidding, set up something called a “gold group”—is this an Austin Powers movie?—a crime-fighting unit typically reserved for major crimes and terrorist investigations. A year later, they showed up at Allison Pearson’s door saying she was being questioned about her “hate incident.” They wouldn’t tell her what the offending tweet was but this appears to be it:
That’s the whole thing. That’s the tweet that British cops formed a gold unit and door-knocked over (they announced today they have dropped the case). I keep scanning it worried I’m missing the slur.
In the fallout of all this, others have come forward with their own run-ins with the law.
Winston Marshall, former member of Mumford and Sons, now a smart podcaster, said: “A week ago, my lawyer back home called me up and said ‘two of your tweets are technically illegal. You could be arrested when you return.’ ” And Julie Bindel, stalwart of British feminism, said she, too, got a visit from the cops for a tweet.
And former White House press secretary and current MSNBC host Jen Psaki wants to make social media commentary that she doesn’t like illegal: “Local TV is held to a higher standard of accountability than social media platforms. . . . That is crazy. How does it change? How are people held to account? Laws have to change.” All of this reflects poorly on the state of free speech in the West, but it’s especially worrying for my cyberbullying of small businesses. What’s next, criminalizing my rants on Yelp? Like, sure, I threatened the life of one guy but the salmon filet was overcooked! Prisons are about to be filled with America’s busy moms who tweeted at Southwest Airlines in a blind rage after their flight was canceled.
→ Chicago is falling apart: Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson is trying to fill in the city’s catastrophic budget by adding a $300 million property tax after campaigning on a promise not to raise property taxes. In a rare moment of unity, the entire 50-member Chicago City Council voted it down.
Reminder of some of the $10 billion+ in demands his pals in the teachers union have been demanding and that he’s been seeking to pay out: “9% wage increases for Chicago teachers, a housing program for Chicago teachers, a 100% electric bus fleet and solar panels for Chicago school buildings.” All while spending has almost doubled since 2012, and proficiency has dropped. It’s unclear where Mayor Johnson is going to get the cash, but in response to his whopping loss, Johnson said “Am I aware of the trauma that has existed in city government? Absolutely.” Relevant? Not quite. Relatable? Yes. If there’s one word that describes my relationship with city government, it’s traumatic. I once called 911 because a crazy man with a machete was running toward me on the streets of West Hollywood, and the dispatcher asked me to remain where I was.
. . . and I have no room to give Nellie’s snarky take on the proposed Cabinet. It’s worth subscribing to The Free Press for these Friday columns alone.
*Peter Singer has an op-ed in the NYT saying that Presidents should stop pardoning turkeys on Thanksgiving, but it’s not what you think. Remember that Singer is a vegetarian and animal-rights activist.
The turkey sent to President Truman was killed and eaten, as were turkeys subsequently sent to President Dwight Eisenhower. But in 1963, in one of his last official acts before his assassination, President John F. Kennedy, when face to face with his live turkey, disregarded the sign hung around the bird’s neck that read “Good eating, Mr. President” and said: “Let’s keep him going.” Kennedy didn’t say anything about pardoning the turkey, but media referred to his act as a “pardon” and “reprieve.” President George H.W. Bush was the first to pretend that a turkey was receiving an official pardon.
We pardon people for crimes they have committed. Modern law has long abandoned the view that animals can commit crimes. That makes it impossible to take seriously the idea that turkeys need to be pardoned, no matter what they have done, but the annual presidential pardon is doubly absurd because no one has ever claimed that the turkeys sent to the president have done anything wrong — not even in the sense that your cat does something wrong when she punishes you for going on vacation by using your bed as her litter box.
. . .There are good reasons some people choose not to eat turkey. The turkeys eaten by Americans today are nothing like the wild turkeys supposedly eaten by the early European settlers in Massachusetts at the original Thanksgiving. More than 99 percent of the roughly 250 million turkeys produced in the United States each year are raised on factory farms, according to the Sentience Institute, crowded indoors all their lives in large sheds that almost always contain thousands of birds.
Today’s turkeys are not treated by turkey producers as individual birds capable of enjoying their lives, but as machines that convert cheap crops (which are also often subsidized) to something that can be sold at a higher price. The 46 million turkeys killed and eaten at Thanksgiving are almost all “broad-breasted whites,” selectively bred to have abnormally large breasts, because that is the part that most people prefer to eat. These birds have bodies so misshapen that they usually cannot reproduce on their own. They are the result of artificial insemination, which, especially for the females, is a procedure that they resist, but in vain.
Turkeys are also bred to grow fast, so that they are ready for slaughter at 3 to 5 months old. Their immature leg bones struggle to carry their weight. One study found that 60 percent had foot swelling and 25 percent had arthritis. They are often lame, because they experience pain when walking or standing. Sitting on the litter that covers the floor is not a good option, either, because the litter is full of bird droppings, which, when it comes in contact with moist skin, can cause caustic burns and blisters.
By the time Thanksgiving comes around, Mr. Biden will have less than two months of his term of office remaining. In common parlance, he will be a lame duck president. I suggest that he take that term, with its connotations of ceasing to be important, and give it a twist. He could become a lame turkey president — that is, a president who takes a stand on behalf of lame turkeys, by refusing to take part in the silly tradition of pardoning them.
I was a monthly columnist at Scientific American for nearly 18 years. On hearing this news, I emailed a number of people associated with the magazine to inquire what had transpired there—and more broadly why they think Helmuth and others allowed, or even encouraged, far-left politics to intrude into the pages of that once-storied publication. Very few people responded and those who did not only offered no comment but asked me to not even mention the fact that I had contacted them. What is going on here?
Merely being asked certain questions can put a person at a disadvantage, since one answer might be damaging, the other would be a lie, and a refusal to answer would be a de facto confession that those are the respondent’s two options. Witnesses who exercise their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination by refusing to answer a question often do incriminate themselves in the court of public opinion.
I asked Pinker how this might apply to this specific case. He responded by email:
[C]ommunication takes place on two levels: the content of the message, and the common knowledge that stating the message generates. A source that ratifies what you (and the world) already know—that Helmuth was temperamentally unqualified for the job and damaged the institution, while they went along with it—would be confessing their own lack of integrity and courage, together with their willingness to kick a former colleague while she’s down. On the other hand, they could not deny it without forfeiting all claims to credibility and honesty. And by saying “no comment” they’d be acknowledging (that is, generating common knowledge) that those were their two options.
And of some of the crazy assertions made by Helmuth or her minions, like her tweet that the white-throated sparrow had four sexes (it has two, each with two pattern/color variants), Shermer adds this:
Does anyone actually believe such things? It seems some do and Laura Helmuth appears to be one of them. That is the most charitable assessment I can make of what has happened to the publication that inspired a dozen generations of budding scientists, technologists, engineers, mathematicians, and scholars. As in other science publications, along with mainstream media outlets, some corporations, and nearly all academic institutions, the people promulgating these woke ideas are mostly true believers—and the fervour of their faith only makes them all the more able to convince themselves of the truth of claims that everyone else can see have little-to-no contact with reality. Men do not menstruate and cannot get pregnant; women do not have penises and do not produce sperm; and transwomen—who are men—do not belong in women’s sports, locker rooms, bathrooms, prisons, or any other spaces designated for women only. No amount of ideological wishful thinking will change this.
Perhaps some—or even most—of the staff at Scientific American and other similar institutions do not support these ideological contaminations of science; they just want to go about their lives without being harassed by activists. Some may be virtue signalling without actually believing in any of the nonsense they are spouting, while others may be opportunists, capitalising on pluralistic ignorance: i.e. the fact that each individual is under the illusion that everyone else believes such shibboleths as the idea that human beings have more than two sexes (although, in fact, most people do not).
But the social environment is rapidly changing. Thanks to Donald Trump’s election, together with relentless pushback from political centrists and old-school liberals who are sick of being harangued by overzealous activists who accuse anyone who disagrees with them of bigotry, the pendulum may at long last be starting to swing back towards normalcy. Election postmortems and surveys have consistently identified the fact-free ideological capture of the Democratic party as a major factor in their defeat. The Left is in dire need of a course correction. Will that happen? Given what we know about the power of irrational belief, I am not at all confident that it will. Let’s hope I’m wrong, though—not only for the sake of the future of a once-great magazine, but for the sake of the American nation.
The world’s tallest woman and the world’s shortest woman met for the first time this week, sipping tea from china cups — and bonding over what they have in common while celebrating their differences.
Rumeysa Gelgi, from Turkey, stands at 7 feet and 0.7 inches, while Jyoti Amge, from India, is 2 feet and 0.7 inches.
“You’re so beautiful,” said Gelgi, 27. “Thank you — you too,” replied Amge, 30.
Jyoti Amge, left, and Rumeysa Gelgi meet for the first time. (Guinness World Records Day 2024)
Their meeting, over afternoon tea at London’s Savoy Hotel on Tuesday, came ahead of Guinness World Records Day, which is held annually in November to mark record-breaking achievements and encourage people to attempt records.The pair have been honored as “World Record icons” in the 70th anniversary edition of the Guinness World Records book.
“Meeting Jyoti for the first time was wonderful,” Gelgi said in a release Wednesday. “She’s the most gorgeous lady. I was waiting to meet her for a long time.”
Gelgi said the pair bonded over their love for makeup, jewelry and doing their nails.
Video footage showed them sitting down for tea, cakes and sandwiches stacked next to them, with the London Eye visible from the window.
Amge said in the release that she was “so happy to look up” and see the world’s tallest woman, whom she called “good-natured.” She added that it was difficult at times for the pair to make eye contact “due to our height difference.”
“Guinness World Records is all about celebrating differences,” its editor in chief, Craig Glenday, said in a statement ahead of Guinness World Record Day, which is on Thursday.
“By bringing together these two amazing, iconic women, they can share their perspectives on life with each other and, also, with us,” Glenday said.
Well, why do I feel that I’m putting up this item like it was a circus sideshow? Still, I couldn’t resist. Here’s another video of the pair from YouTube.
*Lagniappe: Here’s British barrister Natasha Hausdorff, legal advisor to UK Lawyers for Israel, discussing the injustice of the International Criminal Court’s indictment of Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Galland for war crimes (h/t Bat)
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili denigrates the intellectual stimulation that is supposed to be found on the Internet (but it’s a nice photo of her):
A: What are you doing here?
Hili: I’m looking for a place for a no-nonsense discussion.
A: On the window sill?
Hili: And where am I supposed to look for it? On the Internet?
From Masih, yet another Iranian woman blinded by the regime just for protesting (it’s not clear to me if she’s totally blind). There are English subtitles:
What would you do if your government shot you in the eyes for peacefully protesting?
Whenever you feel hopeless, listen to my fearless hero, Raheleh Amiri, who was blinded during the “Women, Life, Freedom” uprising.
The world’s most boring machine, retweeted by Elon Musk:
The new tunnel boring machine designed by @boringcompany engineers can immediately start digging a tunnel anywhere with no prior site preparation (this is a really big deal) https://t.co/08zbixZ6Lk
Two tweets from Matthew, whose biography of Francis Crick is in the works. Of this one (in Chicago!) he says, “Kindra is Francis’s granddaughter and an artist.”
Vibrant microscopy-inspired #sciart showing now in Chicago every night after sundown. ‘Veritas Magnus Vis Microscopia’Curated by Shae Nadine#microscopy
If you listen to this BBC show from 08:15 on, you’ll hear a discussion about the new sabre-tooth kitten I wrote about the other day:
My ode to the Badyarikha sabre-tooth kitten, and its very special paw prints🧪🏺🦣😸🐾Thanks to @ellahubber.bsky.social for letting me loose on the airwaveswww.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/…
It’s already the end of the “work” week: Friday, November 22, 2024, and in a week I’ll be in Poland! It’s National Cranberry Relish Day, and I suppose one spoonful per year, ingested at Thanksgiving dinner, won’t hurt you, but the stuff is pretty dire. Jellied cranberries are better. Here’s how they are grown, which requires lots of water:
It was on this day in 1963 that John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. I remember the moment exactly: it was announced over our junior high-school public address system. It was one of those incidents that never lets you forget how you learned about it.
*I reported yesterday (or rather, stole from other people’s reports) about Matt Gaetz’s withdrawal from consideration as Attorney General. Here’s some more information from the NYT:
Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas and a senior member of the Judiciary Committee, said it was “pretty obvious” that Gaetz didn’t have the votes to be confirmed.
. . .Matt Gaetz told people close to him that he concluded after conversations with senators and their staffs that there were at least four Republican senators who were implacably opposed to his nomination: Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and John Curtis of Utah.
Gaetz told confidants he did not want to get in a protracted confirmation battle and delay Trump from getting his attorney general in place immediately at the start of his administration.
. . . . Gaetz’s withdrawal creates a vacuum at the apex of the Justice Department but not necessarily instability, even if his replacement is not confirmed quickly. Trump has already tapped two of his personal lawyers — Todd Blanche and Emil Bove — to top operational posts; both are well-regarded department veterans whose appointments were welcomed by some career department staff.
Here are the candidates who remain, and it’s a pretty sad lot (from the NYT). Noem, Rubio, Kennedy, and Hegseth. . oh my!
Members of President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team were blindsided by the latest details to emerge about a 2017 sexual-assault allegation against Pete Hegseth, increasing their frustration with the man nominated to lead the Pentagon, according to people familiar with the matter.
The transition team, which hadn’t been told about the original allegation before announcing Hegseth, was surprised again late Wednesday night when the Monterey, Calif., city police released a report about the 2017 allegations. The heavily redacted report details a boozy night at a hotel in California, a poolside argument and two conflicting versions of what ultimately took place inside Hegseth’s hotel room.
The Monterey police said a redacted version of the report had been released to Hegseth on March 30, 2021. The transition team wasn’t told that a copy of the police report had been released to Hegseth previously, the people familiar with the discussions said.
“This is another instance of people being blindsided, so I think there’s rising frustration there,” said a person familiar with the transition. While the president-elect is still behind Hegseth for now, “if this continues to be a drumbeat and the press coverage continues to be bad, particularly on TV, then I think there is a real chance that he loses Trump’s confidence.”
Hegseth told reporters on Capitol Hill on Thursday after meetings with senators that “the matter was fully investigated and I was completely cleared.” Through his lawyer, he has acknowledged the sexual encounter but said it was consensual, while the woman who made the allegation hasn’t spoken publicly.
Officially, Trump’s transition team is standing by Hegseth. “This report corroborates what Mr. Hegseth’s attorneys have said all along: the incident was fully investigated, and no charges were filed because police found the allegations to be false,” Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for Trump’s transition team, said in a statement.
The “blindsiding” is either because Hegseth hid stuff from the Trump team or they simply didn’t ask for a full account of every allegation against him. Hegseth admits he paid off one woman, but did so only to protect his career from a damaging lawsuit. Now his career is endangered without a lawsuit. From NPR:
After the woman hired an attorney a couple of years later to consider a lawsuit, both parties reached an agreement. Parlatore noted in his statement to the Post that the MeToo movement was gaining momentum at the time, and he told CBS News that Hegseth would have faced “an immediate horror storm” had he been publicly accused of sexual assault, a quote that Parlatore confirmed to NPR.
My judgment: like Gaetz, he will have to withdraw.
The Senate on Wednesday voted down a measure, led by Sen. Bernie Sanders and a handful of Democrats, that sought to block the sale of some $20 billion in U.S.-made weapons to Israel, in a last-ditch effort to limit the carnage, suffering and destruction caused by its 13-month war in Gaza.
The measure failed, with none of the three resolutions it comprised garnering more than 19 supporting votes. But the effort — the first time Congress has voted on whether to block an arms sale to America’s closest Middle East ally — also served as a bellwether of the dissatisfaction within President Joe Biden’s own party about his handling of the Middle East crisis.
Wednesday’s vote, spurred by Sanders’s filing of rarely invoked joint resolutions of disapproval, follows the Biden administration’s determination a week ago that it would not take punitive action against Israel for failing to surge humanitarian aid into Gaza. The administration in October warned Israel that absent “concrete measures” to surge food, medicine and other basic supplies into the ravaged Palestinian territory within 30 days, it could risk losing some U.S. military assistance.
Biden’s decision not to act — after international aid groups and the United Nations said the crisis in northern Gaza had reached catastrophic levels over the past month — infuriated liberals, who have called on him repeatedly to hold Israel accountable for a war that has killed roughly 2 percent of Gaza’s population, according to local health authorities. The International Criminal Court, meanwhile, has accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of war crimes, charges he strenuously denies.
Sanders, an independent from Vermont who caucuses with Democrats, was slow in the first few months of the war to join other liberals’ calls for a cease-fire in Gaza, even after thousands of Palestinian civilians had been killed under Israeli bombardment. That reticence drew a backlash from his progressive supporters. He has since been amongthe most vocal critics of the administration’s approach to Netanyahu.
As far as I can learn, the “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza is manufactured. While some people may not get enough to eat on some days, nobody is starving to death, though Hamas and the UN pretends that there are. And remember that 100 food trucks going into Gaza the other day were hijacked, and it’s probable that the hijackers were from Hamas (who else would have that power?). Finally, there are 14 field hospitals in Gaza as well as some of the larger hospitals are still working.
Here is the list of Senators who voted against Israeli aid include Elizabeth Warren (expected) but also Dick Durbin, my own Senator. I have written him asking for an explanation.
In a massive legal bombshell, the International Criminal Court on Thursday issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant over the war in Gaza, an unprecedented step that put the two at risk of being detained in much of the world.
The three judges of the ICC’s Pre-Trial Chamber I issued the warrants unanimously on charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes, which the court’s top prosecutor Karim Khan alleges were committed during the ongoing war against the Hamas terror group in Gaza.
The decision marked the first time the ICC has ever issued arrest warrants against leaders of a democratic country.
In a massive legal bombshell, the International Criminal Court on Thursday issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant over the war in Gaza, an unprecedented step that put the two at risk of being detained in much of the world.
The three judges of the ICC’s Pre-Trial Chamber I issued the warrants unanimously on charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes, which the court’s top prosecutor Karim Khan alleges were committed during the ongoing war against the Hamas terror group in Gaza.
The decision marked the first time the ICC has ever issued arrest warrants against leaders of a democratic country.
The court also issued a warrant for Hamas military chief Mohammed Deif, who Israel says was killed by an IDF strike in Gaza in July. Khan had sought arrest warrants for Deif and slain Hamas leaders Ismail Haniyeh and Yahya Sinwar for the terror group’s October 7, 2023, massacre that sparked the ongoing war in Gaza.
Since neither Israel nor the US have accepted the jurisdiction of the ICC, it doesn’t really affect our relationships, but both men are subject to arrest if they set foot in 120 other countries, though other countries often don’t bother to carry out what the ICC wants. Countries who said they would arrest either man include Italy, France, Canada (of course), Jordan, and the UK. The US has rejected the warrants, and Argentina, Hungary, and the Czech Republic.
The United States rejected a decision by the International Criminal Court (ICC) to issue arrest warrants on Thursday for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense chief, a White House National Security Council spokesperson said.
“The United States fundamentally rejects the Court’s decision to issue arrest warrants for senior Israeli officials. We remain deeply concerned by the Prosecutor’s rush to seek arrest warrants and the troubling process errors that led to this decision,” the spokesperson said, adding the US is discussing next steps with its partners.
I don’t know if this case will be argued out before the ICC, or whether Israel will send lawyers to defend Netanyahu and Gallant. Better call Natasha Hausdorff! Here she is on the allegations, speaking yesterday for ten minutes on Radio Times about the charges:
*The Washington Post’s op-ed columnis Jennifer Rubin says that conventional news in papers, social media, and on television is dying, but one venue is burgeoning, and should be a model of how the news is conveyed: ProPublica, a nonprofit funded by philanthropists and foundations. It was the first online news source to win a Pulitzer Prize, and has won several more, as well as other awards.
The plight of the news business has gotten steadily worse over the past decade. Cable TV networks are shedding audience share at an alarming rate. Increasingly, they seemed to have forgotten who their audience even is. The hosts of “Morning Joe” visiting Mar-a-Lago was the sort of move, judging from the backlash, that is likely to increase its progressive audience’s flight from MSNBC. CNN, in its effort to be all things to all people, is also hemorrhaging viewers. Many national newspapers are losing subscribers (and hollowing out their coverage), and local media has been shriveling for years. (The Post’s decision not to endorse a presidential candidate unleashed an exodus of hundreds of thousands of readers who had expected a clarion voice in defense of democracy.)
It is not merely this shrinkage in conventional news consumption that should be alarming. The preponderance of voters who get no news whatsoever suggests the very notion of an “informed electorate” might become a thing of the past.
However, there is a part of the news ecosystem that seems to be growing by leaps and bounds: nonprofit news, especially the juggernaut ProPublica, which has been responsible for buckets of scoops that for-profit media have missed.
I recently spoke with Stephen Engelberg, ProPublica’s editor. He described the extraordinary expansion of an experiment that began in 2008 with a $10 million budget. Since then, its national coverage and staff (now about 150) have boomed, its budget has increased to $50 million, and it has created hubs across the country to fill the gap in regional and state news. It went from 36,000 donors in 2022 to 55,000 today.
Starting with a single hub in Illinois, it has added others in the South, Southwest, Northwest, Midwest, Texas (in collaboration with the Texas Tribune) and New York. It has received seven Pulitzer Prizes, five Peabody Awards, eight Emmy Awards and 15 George Polk Awards in the short time it has operated
Moreover, ProPublica has pioneered an inventive partnership with local papers all over the country. ProPublica provides an enterprising investigative reporter with salary for a year plus the infrastructure necessary to report the story, including editors, research assistance and lawyers.
I have never read this site before, but will start doing so. One problem is that we need more than one nonprofit news site if there’s to be competition, yet grant and foundation dollars are limited, so this can’t completely replace the for-profit news. Further, I don’t know if the site has any biases at all; readers who look at it should weigh in below. Finally, it is an investigative reporting site, and so if you want breaking news you’ll have to look elsewhere.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili thinks the fallen leaves are rubbish (Malgorzata says that, in Poland, Trump is held responsible for everything bad that America does):
Hili: Autumn has made a terrible mess.
Andrzej: It’s all Trump’s fault.
Hili: You have been listening to the BBC again.
In Polish:
Hili: Jesień strasznie naśmieciła.
Ja: Wszystko przez Trumpa.
Hili: Znowu słuchałeś BBC.
*******************
From Jesus of the Day. Ah, the good old days! I never had this female-attracting collar. What an outfit!
I am pretty sure this is for real, but it’s horrible. It’s religion, Jake!
Sorry, but if your religion allows old men to marry young girls like this, maybe it’s time to have a conversation with yourself and realize your religion is not a religion of peace.
Our latest, by Emily Carlisle, Zongjun Yin, Davide Pisani and myself: Ediacaran origin and Ediacaran-Cambrian diversification of Metazoa http://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/…
Welcome to Thursday, November 21, 2024. It’s one week until I fly off to Poland to give two talks at the Silesian Science Festival and, of course, to visit my surrogate parents, Andrzej and Malgorzata, in Dobrzyn. (There will also be three cats to pet: Hili, Szaron, and Kulka.) It’s National Gingerbread Cookie Day, though I prefer the cake. Here are some fancy gingerbread cookies from Wikipedia, glazed with royal icing.
The Biden administration has approved supplying Ukraine with American anti-personnel mines to bolster defenses against Russian attacks as Ukrainian front lines in the country’s east have buckled, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said on Wednesday.
The decision is the latest in a series of moves by Russia and the United States related to the war in Ukraine that have escalated tensions between the two.
The White House recently granted permission to Ukraine to fire longer-range American missiles at targets in Russia, which the Ukrainians did for the first time on Tuesday. Moscow in response formalized a new doctrine lowering the threshold for when it would use nuclear weapons.
Mr. Austin said the U.S. decision was prompted by Russia’s increasing reliance on foot soldiers to lead their assaults, instead of armored vehicles. Mr. Austin, speaking to reporters while traveling in Laos, said the shift in policy follows changing tactics by the Russians. Because of that, Ukraine has “a need for things that can help slow down that effort on the part of the Russians,” Mr. Austin said.
“They’ve asked for these, and so I think it’s a good idea,” Mr. Austin said.
The move is also noteworthy because it is part of a series of late actions taken in the waning weeks of the Biden presidency to bolster Ukraine. President Biden in the past has sought to calibrate American help for Ukraine against his own concern about crossing Russian “red lines” that could lead to direct conflict between Washington and Moscow.
Mines in general have been devastatingly effective in the war in Ukraine, and Russia has made extensive use of them. The mines are planted by hand but can also be scattered remotely with rockets or drones behind opponents’ lines, to catch soldiers as they move to and from positions, a tactic that can assist an offensive.
Land mines, however, have been most effective in defense. A broad belt of dense minefields in southern Ukraine stymied a Ukrainian counteroffensive in the summer of 2023 and gravely wounded a large but undisclosed number of Ukrainian soldiers.
Most anti-personnel mines are small explosives about the size of a hockey puck that are triggered by the pressure of a footstep.
The Biden administration’s decision came despite widespread condemnation of mines by rights groups that cite their toll on civilians, which can stretch for years or decades after conflicts end as the locations of minefields are left unmarked or forgotten. Ukraine is already the most heavily mined country in the world, according to the United Nations.
I’m not so keen on land mines, mainly because they hang around forever if unexploded and can damage civilians. I’m undecided about Biden’s move, but pretty sure that Trump will pressure Ukraine to give up land and end the conflict when he takes office. The missiles may not be flowing from the U.S. any more, but the mines will still be there.
*Several sources, including the Torygraph, the Times of Israel, and the NY Post, report that, in Berlin, there are “no go” areas for Jews and gays, and those are areas where Arabs live.
Jews and gay people should hide their identity in parts of Berlin with large Arab populations, the German capital’s police chief has warned.
“There are areas of the city, we need to be perfectly honest here, where I would advise people who wear a kippah or are openly gay to be more careful,” said Barbara Slowik.
“There are certain neighbourhoods where the majority of people of Arab origin live, who also have sympathies for terrorist groups,” she said, adding that they were often “openly hostile towards Jews”.
She told the Berliner Zeitung newspaper that “violent crimes against Jewish people are few and far between, but every act is one too many”.
A fortnight ago, a youth football team from Makkabi Berlin, a Jewish sports club, reported being “hunted down” by youths carrying sticks and knives after a match in an Arab neighbourhood of the city. The victims, aged 13 to 15, said they were spat at and insulted throughout the match.
Germany has seen a surge in anti-Semitism since the beginning of the war in Gaza, with reported incidents doubling in 2023 compared with previous years.
Since Oct 7 last year, Berlin’s police have opened more than 6,000 investigations connected to anti-Semitism, according to Ms Slowik. Most of these concern online hate speech or graffiti.
Other incidents in Berlin include a football fan being attacked for wearing a scarf with a Star of David on it, a petrol bomb attack on a synagogue shortly after the Oct 7 massacres in southern Israel, and a couple being attacked in a fast-food outlet for speaking Hebrew.
On the day of the Hamas massacres, men handed out sweets in celebration in the Berlin neighbourhood of Neukolln, an incident that shocked Germany and led to deep anxiety over whether the recent waves of migration had made Jewish life less safe.
I wrote to a friend in Berlin about this, and she verified that the “no go” areas are real, though if you don’t let people know you’re gay or Jewish, you can pretty much avoid “incidents”. But what kind of city in the West (especially Berlin, with its WWII history of Nazi leadership) would be unsafe both Jews and for gays. This shows that it’s not just antisemitism at work, but homophobia: in other words, Islamism. And this is why extremist Islam is dangerous not just to Jews, but to the entire democratic West.
*Over at Bluesky, there seems to be some censorship afoot, at least according to Colin Wright:
He adds a second tweet, but since I can’t access Bluesky, readers who can should send me a screenshot of the post.
You have to click a button to reveal what my post says.
I asked Matthew, who is on Bluesky, to send me the whole tweet, so here it is:
Well, yes, that seems unacceptable to me, because the site is hiding biological reality. But not having lived at that site (I’m pondering it), I don’t know if the site is as censorious at Twitter was, though I know that Bluesky is seen as a left wing alternative to Twitter. Matthew certainly likes it. WCBM discusses the censorship issues, saying that Bluesky is inundated with censorship requests.
The left-wing alternative to Elon Musk’s X platform is already running into difficulties with its promise to censor “harmful content.”
Bluesky, which has received millions of sign-ups from angry leftists boycotting Elon Musk’s X platform, has admitted that it cannot keep up with the number of moderation and censorship requests from its progressive user base.
In a post from “Bluesky Safety,” the company announced that it was receiving over 3,000 censorship demands per hour, leading to a backlog in its response times.
They explained:
Bluesky has grown by over 3M people in the last week — welcome! With every wave of growth naturally comes an increase in moderation reports. Here’s a status report on how the Trust & Safety team is handling it:
In the past 24 hours, we have received more than 42,000 reports (an all-time high for one day). We’re receiving about 3,000 reports/hour. To put that into context, in all of 2023, we received 360k reports. We’re triaging this large queue so the most harmful content such as CSAM is removed quickly.
With this significant influx of users, we’ve also seen increased spam, scam, and trolling activity — you may have seen some of this yourself. Our team is reviewing these accounts, and you can help us by reporting them by clicking the three-dot menu on each post/account.
We appreciate your patience as we dial our moderation team up to max capacity and bring on new team members to support this load. Your safety is our highest priority, and we’re glad to welcome you to Bluesky!
Bluesky has grown by over 3M people in the last week — welcome!
With every wave of growth naturally comes an increase in moderation reports. Here’s a status report on how the Trust & Safety team is handling it:
Bluesky was originally established in 2019 by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. However, he has since stepped down from its board and encouraged users to stay active on X.
The platform claims to offer users more control over their online experience, though its real appeal for its users lies in its promise to censor content at breakneck speed.
That is nearly one request for censorship per second! I hadn’t thought, when pondering joining Bluesky, that because it’s populated with disaffected leftists who left X after Trump was elected with the help of Twitter (“X”) owner Elon Musk, it might be subject to pervasive censorship, the purview of “progressives”. And I still don’t know if that’s the case, so I’m still thinking about joining. For one thing, you can embed Bluesky posts directly into this site from the URLs, while you have to go through a more complicated process for “X” tweets. Readers from Bluesky are welcome to give their opinions and advice.
*Reihan Salan, the son on Bangladeshi immigrant, gives recommendations for the incoming Trump administration at the Free Press. His piece is called, “Immigration is a mess. Here’s how to fix it.” First Salan lays out the problem, which you know well, and then gives ten suggestions about how to fix it. He wrote a book on the issue; as he says, “In 2018, I published Melting Pot or Civil War?, a short book on immigration. Despite its provocative title, the book offered a cautious, careful, almost hilariously mild case for immigration restriction.
Within 100 days of his inauguration, President Joe Biden took 94 executive actions on immigration, according to the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute. Taken together, these actions represented a repudiation not only of Trump’s approach, but of long-standing immigration limits that had been embraced by the Clinton and Obama administrations. Spurred on by the activist left, the Biden White House tamped down interior enforcement, rolled back travel and visa restrictions, greatly expanded humanitarian protections, and suspended the highly successful Remain in Mexico program.
By April 2021, it was already clear that something was going badly wrong at the U.S.-Mexico border. At the same time administration officials were loudly insisting that unauthorized border crossers would be expelled, a large majority of border-crossing families were allowed in, which meant that smugglers could still make a compelling pitch to potential migrants—not to mention enormous profits.
Predictably, irregular migration surged. Once the word got out that even the weakest asylum claim would allow you to live in the U.S. for years before you’d get a hearing in immigration court, migrants from around the world decided to try their luck.
I’ll give three of his ten recommendations, but read the archived version to see them all. They seem sensible and not at all Trump-ian:
1. On deportations, take steps that build credibility and support, like expelling criminals and recent immigration-law violators. Those protesting such moves reveal their own extremism, rather than rallying the public to their side. Conversely, deporting people who’ve been living in the U.S. peacefully and productively for over a decade is guaranteed to spark damaging headlines, especially if they have citizen spouses or children, as many of them do. Remember, this isn’t about being sentimental—it’s about maintaining the support the administration will need to bring the border back under control.
2. Under current law, those who seek asylum and can show a “credible fear” of persecution in their home country cannot be summarily deported. To deter weak or fraudulent asylum claims, move quickly to detain all individuals who cross the border illegally and ensure everyone is vetted and passes a credible fear interview before they are released. Work with Mexico and the Department of Defense under a national emergency declaration to build detention capacity. And if these efforts don’t succeed in curbing irregular migration, the administration should work with Congress to further tighten asylum rules.
5. For legal immigration, enact an improved version of the first Trump administration’s “public charge” rule, which bars the immigration of those unable to support themselves. This will help ensure that new legal immigrants can support themselves and their families, which in turn will help restore faith in our immigration system. Immigration agents need more guidance than the previous rule provided; the improved version should require consideration of earnings, education, and age, and explicitly define the weight assigned to each factor.
The last suggestion involves explaining to Americans how immigration, handled properly, can be a good thing. All in all, this seems like a sensible set of suggestions.
A Spanish court has upheld a ruling that a supermarket worker was unlawfully fired for having eaten a croquette that was going to be thrown away after not having been sold from the store’s deli section.
The worker was fired in July 2023 after he had snarfed down the fried snack, which was destined for the trash after the store had closed for the day.
In a verdict that The Associated Press saw on Wednesday, the Superior Court of Castilla-La Mancha recently rejected an appeal by the supermarket chain Mercadona of a decision by a lower court in May 2024 in favor of the worker.
The company’s policy is that workers are prohibited from consuming any product found in the store without having paid for it previously.
But the superior court found that it was common practice for workers to snack on “ready to eat” food products that were going to be thrown away after closing hours. In its ruling, it also insisted in “the important detail that the worker didn’t eat an entire package of croquettes, but instead one single croquette” that was “not going to be put back on sale the following day.”
The lower court ruling in May determined that the worker be reinstated to his job and that the supermarket chain pay him 39,700 euros ($41,800) in lost wages. The higher court has now added that Mercadona also must pay the worker 600 euros ($633) for his legal fees.
Mercadona did not immediately respond to an email from the AP asking for comment on the case.
The court documents didn’t indicate the flavor of the croquette, which in Spain is a popular food typically made from ham, chicken or cod.
What’s right is right, and the supermarket was simply WRONG. How dare they prohibit a worker from eating something that was going to be thrown out, and on his own time. If he gets sick from eating bad food, it’s on him, but otherwise the worker did nothing wrong.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is really anxious about the onset of winter, when she has to stay inside. She goes through this every year.
Hili: Do you really think that there will be a spring again one day?
A: It’s a sure thing.
In Polish:
Hili: Czy naprawdę sądzisz, że kiedyś znowu będzie wiosna?
Ja: Z całą pewnością.
And a photo of Baby Kulka:
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Three cat memes today. From Facebook, a wonderful child’s poem:
From Masih. This woman (identified by Masih) doesn’t say anything, for she is under government investigation—for not wearing her headscarf.
Her name is Roshank Molaei—a woman who dared to defend herself against sexual assault in public. But guess what? In the twisted logic of this regime, it’s not the assault that’s the crime; it’s the fact that her hair was showing while she did it.
From the Auschwitz Memorial, a tweet that I reposted:
A Polish girl gassed to death upon arrival at Auschwitz. She was thirteen. 90% of the Jews in that transport were murdered along with her. https://t.co/AM1O9yHGZz
Two posts by Professor Cobb. First, a beautiful vignette of foxes playing at Oxford:
I ripped this video from Eleonora Svanberg on X (she’s not on 🦋)She wrote: “I'm a PhD student at @UniofOxford and I think I'm living in a fairytale :-)Foxes playing around in the snow at Magdalen College this morning — absolutely magical!”
A new cat to me: the Chinese mountain cat. More on Caturday!
Have you ever heard of the Chinese mountain cat?I hadn't until I read Ruth Kamnitzer's piece on this small cat that was only photographed for the first time in the wild in 2007.news.mongabay.com/2024/11/easy…
Welcome to a Hump Day (“Dives e Hump-esqo” in Romani): Wednesday, November 20, 2024, and National Peanut Butter Fudge Day. I would prefer what’s below: peanut butter and maple fudge, with the maple syrup adding translucence to the confection. (Maple improves everything; try dark maple syrup drizzled over good vanilla ice cream.)
Veganbaking.net, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Here I am feeding one of the Pond squirrels yesterday. They get plenty of walnuts and are sleek and fat. This is a young one who has not yet learned to climb up my leg to get nuts; he/she is at the stage at which they stand up close to you on their hind legs (showing their adorable white, furry tummies) and take a nut from your hand. Note that I am holding the bag of walnuts behind me because if I do not do that, they will scurry up my the back of my leg and try to make off with the whole bag! Photo by Marie.
Breaking nooz: Another ridiculous Trump appointment: Dr. Mehmet Oz, who has pushed pseudoscience on television (remember the coffee-bean pills) has been named by Trump to oversee Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare. He has no experience running a large operation of any kind, and I consider him, like most of Trump’s other nominees, manifestly unqualified. The American people will see that they got what they voted for. Such is democracy, but we have to hold our noses and accept it. But now Dr. Oz????? And RFK Jr.? From the NYT:
In a statement announcing his choice, Mr. Trump said Dr. Oz would “work closely with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to take on the illness industrial complex, and all the horrible chronic diseases left in its wake.” Mr. Trump noted that Dr. Oz had “won nine Daytime Emmy Awards hosting ‘The Dr. Oz Show,’ where he taught millions of Americans how to make healthier lifestyle choices.”
Linda McMahon, the former head of the Small Business Administration and co-founder of World Wrestling Entertainment, has been nominated by President-elect Donald Trump to run the Education Department, an agency he has threatened to do away with.
*Trump has affirmed one of his earlier campaign pledges: upon taking office, he said, he would use the U.S. military to deport immigrant who entered the country illegally. (See archived article here.)
President-elect Donald J. Trump confirmed on Monday that he intended to declare a national emergency and use the U.S. military in some form to assist in his plans for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.
On his social media platform, Truth Social, Mr. Trump responded overnight to a post made earlier this month by Tom Fitton, who runs the conservative group Judicial Watch, and who wrote that Mr. Trump’s administration would “declare a national emergency and will use military assets” to address illegal immigration “through a mass deportation program.”
At around 4 a.m., Mr. Trump reposted Mr. Fitton’s post with the comment, “TRUE!!!”
Congress has granted presidents broad power to declare national emergencies at their discretion, unlocking standby powers that include redirecting funds lawmakers had appropriated for other purposes. During his first term, for example, Mr. Trump invoked this power to spend more on a border wall than Congress had been willing to authorize.
In interviews with The New York Times during the Republican primary campaign, described in an article published in November 2023, Mr. Trump’s top immigration policy adviser, Stephen Miller, said that military funds would be used to build “vast holding facilities that would function as staging centers” for immigrants as their cases progressed and they waited to be flown to other countries.
The Homeland Security Department would run the facilities, he said.
One major impediment to the vast deportation operation that the Trump team has promised in his second term is that Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, lacks the space to hold a significantly larger number of detainees than it currently does.
The news last night said that Trump would first concentrate on apprehending criminals, though I presume he means criminals convicted in their home country, not in the U.S., for why else would they be roaming around free? At any rate, I have no objection to that, but using the Army? That is not good optics nor is it good politics, and the Army is better used for war fighting. Better to tighten the border than send the Army after immigrants.
*Apparently the U.S. has given Turkey a warning after it agreed to take in the senior leaders of Hamas previously housed in Qatar but now expelled. And remember that Turkey, as a member of NATO, is a U.S. ally. It should not be giving refuge to terrorists, some of whom are even indicted in the U.S. Two articles from the ToI:
Senior members of Hamas’s abroad leadership left Qatar last week for Turkey, an Arab diplomat told The Times of Israel on Sunday, after Doha said it was walking away from efforts to mediate an end to the war in Gaza.
The Arab diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity, downplayed the significance of the move for the terror group, stressing that Hamas’s leadership abroad already spends much of its time in Turkey when they are not holding meetings in Qatar.
The departure of Hamas’s senior politburo from Doha was first reported by Israel’s Kan public broadcaster.
On November 8, the US revealed that it had asked Qatar to oust Hamas officials from Doha, which has hosted an office for the terror group since 2012, reportedly at Washington’s urging. The US said it made the request after Hamas rejected repeated hostage deal proposals and executed six captives, including an American citizen.
The next day, Qatar said it had halted its mediation efforts and a diplomat familiar with the matter told The Times of Israel that Doha had asked Hamas leaders in late October to leave the country, though no timeline was mentioned.
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The US warns Turkey against hosting Hamas leaders, after an Arab diplomat told The Times of Israel over the weekend that the terror group’s senior officials based in Doha fled last week to Ankara.
Turkey has not denied that Hamas officials are now in the country, but has insisted that it is not opening an office for them.
The US says it asked Qatar to oust Hamas leaders, arguing that the terror group has refused to substantively engage in negotiations for months.
Qatar has denied taking this step due to US pressure, but has admitted to halting its mediating role.
Asked during a press briefing about The Times of Israel’s reporting on Hamas officials moving to Turkey, US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller says Washington does not “believe the leaders of a vicious terrorist organization should be living comfortably anywhere,” including NATO allies such as Turkey.
Miller notes that some Hamas officials, such as Khaled Meshaal, are under US indictment and should be turned over to the United States.
Again, my feeling is that Turkey (secretly sympathetic to Hamas) should expel the terrorists and let them find some other place to live. Nobody will want them!
A woman testified to the House Ethics Committee that former congressman Matt Gaetz paid her for sex and that she witnessed President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general having sex with a 17-year-old at a party, her lawyer said over the weekend.
Florida attorney Joel Leppard said in an interview with The Washington Post that one of his clients witnessed Gaetz having sex with the minor at a drug-fueled party in July 2017 — and that Gaetz was unaware of her age at the time but subsequently was told she was underage. ABC News first reported the news.
This woman and a second woman, also represented by Leppard, testified that they were paid by Gaetz to have sex with him and other individuals who attended these “sex parties.” They were paid through Venmo or other conduits — including the PayPal of Nestor Galban, whom Gaetz has referred to as his “adopted son.”
Gaetz never pressured Leppard’s clients to do drugs at these parties, one of his clients testified, but she said that the use of drugs, such as ecstasy, was widespread and expected. When they were asked by House investigators if Gaetz showed signs of being on drugs, the women answered affirmatively, according to the lawyer’s account.
I will assume for the time being that Gaetz is innocent until proven guilty, but of course I oppose him because of his political background and his lack of credentials, as well as the likelihood that he’ll use the DoJ to exact revenge. Even Trump admitted that Gaetz may not be confirmed by the Senate:
In his private conversations over the past few days, President-elect Donald J. Trump has admitted that his besieged choice for attorney general, Matt Gaetz, has less than even odds of being confirmed by the Senate.
But Mr. Trump has shown no sign of withdrawing the nomination, which speaks volumes about his mind-set as he staffs his second administration. He is making calls on Mr. Gaetz’s behalf, and he remains confident that even if Mr. Gaetz does not make it, the standard for an acceptable candidate will have shifted so much that the Senate may simply approve his other nominees who have appalled much of Washington.
Oh dear Ceiling Cat, shoot me now! The bar has been lowered so much that even an earthworm couldn’t limbo under it.
*Pollster Nate Silver tells us, in a NYT op-ed (archived here), that we shouldn’t blame poor polling for the distressing victory of Donald Trump on November 20. And he exculpates himself. . .
The polls just can’t win in the court of public opinion — the very thing they’re designed to study.
They are either maddening in finding a race too close to call (in the final month before the presidential election, nearly 80 percent of swing-state polls showed a lead of no more than two and a half percentage points) or they break from the pack, only to be wrong. In her final Iowa poll Ann Selzer, a name synonymous with the gold standard in polling, had Kamala Harris up by three points, a shocking result that titillated Democrats. Ms. Selzer has had a long history of defying the conventional wisdom and being right, but Ms. Harris lost Iowa by 13 points.
It may even feel as though we’re Ping-Ponging between radically different futures, never quite certain what lies around the bend. Yet on the whole in 2024, polling did not experience much of a miss and had a reasonable year. Ms. Harris led by only one point in my final national polling average. And Donald Trump led in five of seven key states, albeit incredibly narrowly. The final polling averages were correct in 48 of 50 states.
So why did polling still feel so unsatisfying? In a world where the parties are remarkably efficient at corralling voters and competing to a 50-50 split each time, polls aren’t going to provide the certainty we crave. We’d better get used to it: This is now the fourth election in a row in which the popular vote margin was within five points, something that has happened only once before in the country’s history, for six elections between 1876 through 1896.
The problems with polls are the same problems that plague politics. Polling has become a mirror that reflects the frustrating, even infuriating, nature of politics in America in 2024. Our politics are messy, and that is not something polls can fix. We’d better get used to that, too.
But Silver still finds an advantage to polls:
Polls still provide important hints, leads and hypotheses. They were basically right that Democrats’ dominance among minority groups was waning, overestimating the swing among Black voters but understating it among Hispanic voters. Asian Americans, Native Americans and the oft forgotten group of voters who identify their race as “other” also shifted toward Mr. Trump.
They were right that Democrats would experience a significant erosion among younger voters. Ms. Harris won voters ages 18 to 29 by just four points, according to the A.P. VoteCast survey — down from Joe Biden’s 25 points in 2020. But the shifts were much bigger among young voters who didn’t attend college, especially men.
*Over at the Reason website, Jesse Singal describes “How Scientific American‘s departing editor helped degrade science,” (subtitle: “When magazines like Scientific American are run by ideologues producing biased dreck, it only makes it more difficult to defend the institution of science itself”). I’d suggest that John Horgan read this, but of course he would never do that (h/t reader Darryl R.).
Whether or not Helmuth’s resignation was voluntary, it should go without saying that a few bad social media posts should not end someone’s job. If that were the whole story here—an otherwise well-performing editor was ousted over a few bad posts—this would arguably be a case of “cancel culture,” or whatever we’re calling it these days.
But Helmuth’s posts were symptoms of a much larger problem with her reign as editor. They accurately reflected the political agenda she brought with her when she came on as EiC at SciAm—a political agenda that has turned the once-respected magazine into a frequent laughingstock.
Sometimes, yes, SciAm still acts like the leading popular science magazine it used to be—a magazine, I should add, that I received in print form every month during my childhood.
But increasingly, during Helmuth’s tenure, SciAm seemed a bit more like a marketing firm dedicated to churning out borderline-unreadable press releases for the day’s social justice cause du jour. In the process, SciAm played a small but important role in the self-immolation of scientific authority—a terrible event whose fallout we’ll be living with for a long time.
When Scientific American was bad under Helmuth, it was really bad. For example, did you know that “Denial of Evolution Is a Form of White Supremacy“? Or that the normal distribution—a vital and basic statistical concept—is inherently suspect? No, really: Three days after the legendary biologist and author E.O. Wilson died, SciAm published a surreal hit piece about him in which the author lamented “his dangerous ideas on what factors influence human behavior.” That author also explained that “the so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against.” But the normal distribution doesn’t make any such value judgments, and only someone lacking in basic education about stats—someone who definitely shouldn’t be writing about the subject for a top magazine—could make such a claim.
Some of the magazine’s Helmuth-era output made the posthumous drive-by against Wilson look Pulitzer-worthy by comparison. Perhaps the most infamous entry in this oeuvre came in September 2021: “Why the Term ‘JEDI’ Is Problematic for Describing Programs That Promote Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.” That article sternly informed readers that an acronym many of them had likely never heard of in the first place—JEDI, standing for “justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion”—ought to be avoided on social justice grounds. You see, in the Star Wars franchise, the Jedi “are a religious order of intergalactic police-monks, prone to (white) saviorism and toxically masculine approaches to conflict resolution (violent duels with phallic lightsabers, gaslighting by means of “Jedi mind tricks,” etc.)”
You probably think I’m trolling or being trolled. There’s no way that actual sentence got published in Scientific American, right? No, it’s very real.
Singal has been especially concerned with gender issues, and he takes the magazine to task for treatment of that. Again, I call this to the attention of Dr. Horgan:
This was a chronic problem at Scientific American. One article, to which I wrote a rebuttal for my newsletter, contained countless errors and misinterpretations: Most importantly, it falsely claimed that there is solid evidence youth gender medicine ameliorates adolescent suicidality, when we absolutely do not know that to any degree of certainty. As far as I can tell, every article SciAm published on this subject during Helmuth’s tenure followed the exact same playbook of reciting activist claims — often long after they’d been debunked.
Some of these articles might have done serious damage to the public’s understanding of this issue. For example, SciAmran a response to the Cass Review written by a pair of writers who were somehow able to issue a searing critique of the review despite having clearly never read it.
But of course you knew all this stuff before other folks thanks to your ever-attentive and science-protective host. I’m just putting this up to fill out the record on the journal, and to add the links about Singal’s rebuttals and the magazine’s attack on the Cass Review, which I don’t believe I ever saw.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Malgorzata explains today’s Hili Dialogue: “Lately we often have to hastily translate new articles that have to be posted immediately, and they push out already-translated articles that are not so time sensitive. Hili, as Editor-in-Chief, doesn’t like these constant changes in planned publication of articles.”
Hili: Planning publication is very risky.
A: Why do you think so?
Hili: Something constantly happens.
In Polish:
Hili: Planowanie publikacji jest bardzo ryzykowne.
Ja: Czemu tak sądzisz?
Hili: Ciągle coś się dzieje.
Remember, as Listy shows, Hili is Editor-in-Chief:
I am grateful that Canadian law enforcement authorities foiled an attempt by the Islamic Republic to harm Irwin Cotler.
As far as these Islamic republic is in power none of us who dare to criticize the terrorist nature of this regime will be safe. https://t.co/NvlNAafNHE
From Luana: graduate-student unions have gotten so pricey that some graduate programs are being suspended. These are not trivial programs, either!
Boston University has suspended admissions to 12 PhD programs in the humanities and social sciences.
The reason appears to be “increased costs associated with the union contract that graduate student workers won after their historic, nearly seven-month strike ended in October.” pic.twitter.com/nmgHgWsH2I
I’d give a lot to see one of these EVOLVED creatures (kudos to the poster):
The #platypus gods have been most kind – this little lady showed up within a minute of me arriving at her creek outside #Hobart today. Literally the greatest species that has ever evolved.#MammalWatching #WildOz #platypuses #Tasmania
Welcome to The Cruelest Day: Tuesday, November 19, 2024, and National Carbonated Beverage With Caffeine Day (to me that means Coca-Cola). But the Coke company says the caffeine is less than we think—less than a quarter of the caffeine in coffee. Best stick to coffee for a wake-up aid!
*Gail Collins and Bret Stephens have their weekly discussion in the op-ed columns of the NYT, this time considering Trump’s execrable cabinet nominations. Stephens, you may recall, is a conservative who voted for Harris:
Gail Collins: OK, Bret. Who’s your pick for the worst Trump nomination? I know there’s a lot to choose from — but I’ve got dibs on Matt Gaetz.
Bret Stephens: None. I love them all. #MAGA.
Gail: Very funny.
Bret: I’m pulling your leg. But I wonder if the choice of people like Gaetz for attorney general or Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for secretary of health and human services or Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence or Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense amounts to a Big Trump Troll — “troll” in the sense of a deliberate effort to elicit a furious reaction. And the worst response to being trolled by Trump is to react the way he wants us to: by rending our garments and gnashing our teeth.
So my attitude toward these people is: Great! Brilliant choices, Mr. President-elect! Now, some staffer in Congress: Please leak the Ethics Committee report on Gaetz, and let’s replay the clips of Gabbard cozying up to Bashar al-Assad, the genocidal Syrian dictator. Is that the wrong response?
Gail: Well, there’s a pretty good chance that House Ethics report will be leaked. Or some other witnesses will volunteer info on Gaetz’s … behavior.
Bret: In a normal political era that would make Gaetz unconfirmable in the Senate after he’s resigned from the House — which would be a win for everyone. But this isn’t a normal presidency, and Trump is talking about bypassing the Senate entirely by installing his people through recess appointments. Which really would put us on the road to a constitutional crisis, if the incoming Republican Senate majority leader, John Thune, rolls over for that one.
Gail: I’m kinda wondering if Trump threw Gaetz out there to distract us from his other dreadful picks. You know, the Senate Republicans probably can’t revolt more than once. Actually, is there anybody that you like on his list so far?
Bret: Sure. Marco Rubio is a reasonable Republican pick as secretary of state. Mike Waltz is fine as national security adviser. Doug Burgum at the Department of the Interior and Lee Zeldin at the Environmental Protection Agency? OK. And if Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk can sensibly cut the size and reach of the federal government — a much harder task than either of them probably imagines — it could make the United States more competitive, efficient and financially solvent. I’m also looking forward to watching Elise Stefanik take a hammer to the Organization of Antisemites and Other Useless People, generally known as the United Nations.
But the rest go from bad to worse in my book. Who worries you most?
Gail: Gonna refrain from arguing with you about Elise Stefanik and the U.N. Really, we’ve got years.
My Scariest Pick goes to Pete Hegseth, who would, I believe, become the first secretary of defense whose major work experience was as a Fox News host. Yes, he’s a veteran, but we are talking about a job managing a few million people who have their hands on tons of killer weaponry. And a man who believes women shouldn’t qualify for combat jobs. Who bragged that he hadn’t washed his hands in years. I could go on.
Gaetz seems to me the most unqualified, but RFK Jr. the one most likely to reduce the well being of Americans. I hope the Senate has enough sense not to confirm them or DoD Secretary Hegseth. All we need is a couple more leaks, and for people to realize that RFK Jr. could wind up, though his misguided beliefs, causing the deaths of many Americans.
*The WaPo reports that Pope Francis, God’s choice for Pontiff, has called for an investigation of whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
Pope Francis has said that Israel’s attacks in Gaza should be investigated to determine if they meet the legal definition of genocide, according to excerpts from a forthcoming book based on interviews with the pontiff.
Francis has privately used the word “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions, according to people who have interacted with him, The Washington Post has reported. But his comments to the journalist Hernán Reyes Alcaide, excerpted Sunday in the Italian newspaper La Stampa, are the first time he has publicly called for an investigation.
The pope spoke to his fellow Argentine for “Hope Never Disappoints: Pilgrims Toward a Better World,” a book to be released in Italy on Tuesday to mark the 2025 jubilee, when millions of Catholics are expected to visit Rome.
“According to some experts, what is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide,” Francis said. “We should investigate carefully to determine whether it fits into the technical definition formulated by jurists and international bodies.”
Yaron Sideman, the designated Israeli ambassador to the Vatican, rejected the charge. “There was a genocidal massacre on 7 October 2023 of Israeli citizens, and since then, Israel has exercised its right of self-defense against attempts from seven different fronts to kill its citizens,” he wrote on X in response, referencing Hamas’s attack on Israel over a year ago that killed at least 1,200 people.’
. . . Prior to his comments last year in St. Peter’s Square, Francis met separately with groups of Palestinians and family members of Israeli hostages. During his session with the Palestinians, an attendee said the pope used the word “genocide” to describe Israel’s response. At the time, a Vatican spokesman had said he did not think the pope had used the word, though he could not categorically rule it out.
The Pope, who apparently has a pipeline to God, simply needs a good dictionary before he starts throwing out the word “genocide”. Here’s the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition:
The deliberate and systematic killing or persecution of people from a particular group identified as having a shared ethnicity, nationality, etc., with the intention of partially or wholly destroying that group,
There is no evidence that the IDF is out to exterminate all Palestinians; in fact, it avoids killing as many civilians as it can and still fulfill its military mission. It’s curious that the Pope (and others who toss that word around) don’t ever seem to apply it to Hamas or Hezbollah, whose avowed mission is the genocide of the Jews. So it goes. The accusation that Israel is committing genocide is one of the Big Lies of the war, and the ignoring of the actual genocide of Islamist terrorists bespeaks moral obtuseness.
*A while back I floated a rumor that Qatar was going to kick Hamas out of their country. But both Qatar and Hamas denied this, so I never took it seriously. Now, however, it seems to be true. The Times of Israel the Jewish News Service, and Jihad Watch, report that senior Hamas leaders, previously living in Doha, Qatar, are hightailing it to Turkey. From the ToI:
Senior members of Hamas’s abroad leadership left Qatar last week for Turkey, an Arab diplomat told The Times of Israel on Sunday, after Doha said it was walking away from efforts to mediate an end to the war in Gaza.
The Arab diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity, downplayed the significance of the move for the terror group, stressing that Hamas’s leadership abroad already spends much of its time in Turkey when they are not holding meetings in Qatar.
The departure of Hamas’s senior politburo from Doha was first reported by Israel’s Kan public broadcaster.
On November 8, the US revealed that it had asked Qatar to oust Hamas officials from Doha, which has hosted an office for the terror group since 2012, reportedly at Washington’s urging. The US said it made the request after Hamas rejected repeated hostage deal proposals and executed six captives, including an American citizen.
The next day, Qatar said it had halted its mediation efforts and a diplomat familiar with the matter told The Times of Israel that Doha had asked Hamas leaders in late October to leave the country, though no timeline was mentioned.
Doha stressed at the time that its decision wasn’t necessarily permanent and that it would be prepared to resume mediation efforts if the sides were willing to negotiate in good faith toward a Gaza ceasefire and hostage release agreement.
According to the diplomat who spoke at the time, Qatar decided to push out Hamas’s senior leaders on its own after determining that neither side had been willing to engage seriously in negotiations.
Now Turkey is a member of NATO, which makes it an ally of the U.S., and yet they’re hosting a gang of terrorists who are fighting an ally of the U.S. This cannot end well, and Erdogan had best roust those thugs out of his country. Let them wander the world, like the fabled Wandering Jew, until they find someone to take them in. Good luck! I’d try Iran. . .
A tweet:
Terrorists who massacred 1,000 people and hold 101 hostages move from major non-NATO ally to NATO ally?…isn’t it odd how this group feels most comfortable and safe in allies of the West after committing the largest massacre of Jews since the Shoah and one of the worst single day… https://t.co/BjFQHSDfWT
Officials in Columbus, Ohio, and across the nation condemned a small group of people who marched through a part of the city on Saturday carrying Nazi flags and shouting racial slurs and expressions of white power.
The marchers appeared to number only about a dozen people, but the invective they yelled and the large swastika symbols they bore seemed to achieve their goal of rattling not just people in Columbus, but a wider audience online.
Videos of the neo-Nazi marchers in the Short North neighborhood, known for its arts district of restaurants and galleries, spread quickly on social media, and drew swift denunciations from city and state officials and the White House.
“Neo-Nazis — their faces hidden behind red masks — roamed streets in Columbus today, carrying Nazi flags and spewing vile and racist speech against people of color and Jews,” Gov. Mike DeWine, Republican of Ohio, said in a statement posted on social media. “There is no place in this state for hate, bigotry, antisemitism or violence, and we must denounce it wherever we see it.”
The Anti-Defamation League said that the Columbus event fit a recent pattern of white supremacist incidents, hundreds of which have taken place across the country over the past 18 months.
The marches tend to be small, unannounced so as to avoid attracting counterprotesters, and tailor-made for social media, said Oren Segal, vice president of the Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism.
“At the end of day, they want to create fear and anxiety in communities and get a photo op,” Mr. Segal said in an interview on Sunday.
Well, the proper response to this kind of mishigass is to ignore it completely, so that the goose-stepping loons are stymied and frustrated. Don’t people know enough to not pay attention. After all, it was only about a dozen performers, and if nobody even mentions them they will probably stop these demonstrations. And yes, you could say that those reacting with horror were determined to do so by the laws of physics, but I’m saying that our own input to their brains, which I’ve done in this item, may rewire them so that they ignore Nazis.
*The Guardian reports that the culprit in multiple instances of Japanese shoe theft has finally been tracked down. It was a mustelid! (h/t Jez)
Police and staff were initially flummoxed when shoes started disappearing from a kindergarten in south-west Japan, not least because the “thefts” were of single shoes, not pairs.
Unable to get to the bottom of two incidents reported earlier this month, police installed three security cameras in the hope the thief would strike again, according to the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper.
Then, when a single shoe went missing from Gosho Kodomo-en kindergarten in Koga, Fukuoka prefecture, on the night of 11 November, investigators sifted through camera footage, believing they had finally caught their footwear-filching suspect in the act.
The culprit, however, turned out to have four legs, a coat of orangey-brown fur and sharp claws.
Camera footage revealed that a weasel had appeared from behind a wall the previous evening before approaching cubbyholes storing children’s indoor shoes and making off with a single white shoe in its mouth – all in the space of about 10 seconds.
But WHY? Here’s one theory:
The newspaper quoted a local police officer as saying that, to his knowledge, the mystery of the missing shoes was the first of its kind.
Prof Hiroshi Sasaki at Chikushi Jogakuen University said the shoe-stealing weasel had probably just given birth and, given the animal’s sensitivity to the cold, was using the shoes to line its nest for the winter.
The shoes’ whereabouts remain unknown, however, and the childcare centre is hoping to prevent a repeat of the incidents by covering the cubbyholes with nets at night in what it described as a “crime prevention measure”.
Matthew sent me this link, and I told him that if they covered the shoes, they were obligated to put out some nice nesting material for the weasel.
Here’s a video of the thieving mustelid:
Oh, and there’s one bit of Japanese argot.
Japanese-language references to the weasel have similarly negative connotations to those found in English. According to the late Japan-based naturalist CW Nicol, the musky scent of the Japanese weasel gave rise to the saying itachi no saigo-pei. That literally translates as “the weasel’s final fart”, but is used to refer to the last word or act of an unpopular or dislikable person.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili senses a coming dearth of food:
Hili: We have to buy more groceries.
A: Why?
Hili: Winter is coming.
In Polish:
Hili: Musimy kupić więcej żywności.
Ja: Dlaczego?
Hili: Zima idzie.
*******************
From Susan:
From a friend:
And from FB. Cats will be cats!
Lagniappe from Meow:
An Iranian activist sewed his lips shut to protest “the dictatorship and tyranny of the regime.” He was arrested nonetheless
Iranian activist and former political prisoner @HosseinRonaghi was arrested by the security forces after he started his sit-in with sewn-shut lips in a crowded district of Tehran on Monday, his Telegram channel announced citing eyewitnesses. He had earlier sewn his lips shut in… https://t.co/nMHshzlg4Ipic.twitter.com/aY1ehwsUFK
Rifts among the Democrats? AOC, whom I’ve always maintained is antisemitic, calls AIPAC, a pro-Israel lobbery group, a “special interest group pushing a wildly unpopular agenda that pushes voters away from Democrats. . ” Yeah, we pushy Jews are alienating Democratic voters!
BREAKING: Democrat Congressman Dean Phillips calls out AOC and her antisemitism. pic.twitter.com/pHOIGVWq6r
Titania makes a rare tweet pointing out the insanity of the British approach to free speech and the law:
“Over 13,000 non-crime hate incidents have been recorded by UK police in the last year and a half. It is genuinely shocking that so many citizens have been not breaking the law and getting away with it.”
Rowling on John Oliver’s missteps. She liked the guy, too.
Nothing about this feels good, because John Oliver generously gave his time for my charity Lumos and I liked him very much when I met him, but God knows, if you ever need an example of motivated reasoning and confirmation bias, this video’s for you. An undoubtedly intelligent… https://t.co/3IS4onzXq0
Welcome to the start of the “work” week: it’s Monday, November 18, 2024, and National Vichysoisse Day. It’s okay, but after all it’s just a soup, and a bland-looking one at that:
Here, have something more colorful; fall leaves that I photographed yesterday:
It’s also Apple Cider Day (I am letting a gallon ferment so I can have the hard stuff), Push Button Phone Day,William Tell Day (he supposedly shot the apple off his son’s head on this day in 1307), and Mickey Mouse Day celebrating the animated rodent who made his screen debut in the Disney cartoon “Steamboat Willie” on this day in 1928.
Here’s “Steamboat Willie,” a great cartoon and one that, unlike today’s pap, doesn’t try to carry a moral lesson. Mickey first appears 31 seconds in, holding the wheel, and the Bluto, who has a chaw of tobacco. Minnie shows up, too, and there’s a cat and a a singing duck. They don’t make ’em like this any more! (Well, Ghibli Studios does.)
*I worry a lot about Ukraine and whether the U.S. will simply abandon it when Trump takes office. What seems certain, and which also seems grossly unfair, is that Ukraine will lose; that is, it will have to give up some of its territory to Russia. And that will simply embolden the dictatorial and odious Putin. But now, in the waning days of the Biden administration, the U.S. has made a bold move, allowing U.S.-made long-range missiles to be fired from Ukraine to Russia.
President Biden has authorized the first use of U.S.-supplied long-range missiles by Ukraine for strikes inside Russia, U.S. officials said.
The weapons are likely to be initially employed against Russian and North Korean troops in defense of Ukrainian forces in the Kursk region of western Russia, the officials said.
Mr. Biden’s decision is a major change in U.S. policy. The choice has divided his advisers, and his shift comes two months before President-elect Donald J. Trump takes office, having vowed to limit further support for Ukraine.
Allowing the Ukrainians to use the long-range missiles, known as the Army Tactical Missile Systems, or ATACMS, came in response to Russia’s surprise decision to bring North Korean troops into the fight, officials said.
Mr. Biden began to ease restrictions on the use of U.S.-supplied weapons on Russian soil after Russia launched a cross-border assault in May in the direction of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city.
To help the Ukrainians defend Kharkiv, Mr. Biden allowed them to use the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS, which have a range of about 50 miles, against Russian forces directly across the border. But Mr. Biden did not allow the Ukrainians to use longer-range ATACMS, which have a range of about 190 miles, in defense of Kharkiv.
While the officials said they do not expect the shift to fundamentally alter the course of the war, one of the goals of the policy change, they said, is to send a message to the North Koreans that their forces are vulnerable and that they should not send more of them.
Of course now I have to worry as well whether this response will start World War III. If North Korea had nukes and a long-distance delivery system, which it doesn’t yet, I would really be worried.
*Every week in The Free Press Douglas Murray has a short piece called “Things Worth Remembering”—usually a literary or political quote (the man is well read, I tell you). But this week Murray remembers the last words of Russian martyr Alexei Navalny, a man I much admire. And Murray appends a long and fascinating Navalny-produce movie about the corruption of Putin that I will embed below.
Navalny continued to campaign for reform, while pursuing legitimate paths to power. The Kremlin, meanwhile, intensified its efforts to silence him. In 2019, Navalny was serving a 30-day sentence for allegedly planning a protest in Moscow, when he found himself in the hospital. The Russian media said it was an allergic reaction; Navalny, then 43, said, “I have never had an allergy.”
The 2020 Novichok poisoning was more brazen, still. Like the murder of Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006, and the Salisbury, England, poisonings in 2018, it had Putin’s fingerprints all over it. Indeed, Putin clearly wanted his fingerprints to be detected. But if the president had thought this would silence Navalny, he had not understood Navalny.
In 2021, he released the documentary Putin’s Palace on YouTube, which exposed the vast wealth that Putin and his cronies had accumulated for themselves. I remember watching it at the time and being stunned by one thing in particular: The fact that Navalny was so openly and flagrantly hitting Putin where he knew it would hurt. Among Putin’s critics abroad, it had been received wisdom for a long time that Putin had drawn certain lines. Some criticism of himself and the system could be tolerated—just. But any claims that came directly for him, and the vast resources he had accumulated, were a no-go.
Navalny not only went there, but went as far as it was possible to go.
The documentary was precise, specific, and devastating. It had soon been viewed millions of times. Inside Russia, people were horrified by some of the revelations, such as the fact that a building on one of Putin’s properties had a guest bathroom with a golden lavatory brush that alone cost more than the average Russian worker earns in a year. Of course, Putin and his people cracked down on what internal dissent began in the wake of the documentary’s release. People were arrested for even sitting on a park bench in areas where pro-Navalny protests were expected; any demonstrations that started were swiftly crushed.
In another eponymous documentary about Navalny, the director asked Alexei if he had a message for Russia, in the event of his death. (He was of course killed off in a gulag when he made a final return to Russia.)
“Listen, I’ve got something very obvious to tell you. You’re not allowed to give up. If they decide to kill me, it means that we are incredibly strong.
“We need to utilize this power to not give up, to remember we are a huge power that is being oppressed by these bad dudes. We don’t realize how strong we actually are. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good people to do nothing. So don’t be inactive.”
And here’s the (long) movie, which has English subtitles. You’ll be amazed at the secret palace that Putin built himself with ill-gotten gains:
*Brandon Johnson has been a horrible mayor for Chicago. He refused, for example to send the Chicago cops to the University of Chicago campus to help take down the Encampment, which had to be dismantled by University police. But he did send the Chicago cops to get rid of an encampment at the Art Institute. Now, according to a WSJ op-ed, he’s in big trouble. He had proposed a big property-tax hike that was universally opposed here, and the city council rejected it—unanimously! That never happens! The piece is called “America’s worst mayor keeps losing.” (He may not be America’s worst mayor overall, but I don’t know of a worse mayor of a major city.)
Mayor Brandon Johnson is taking his city on a progressive kamikaze course, and Chicago’s Democratic political establishment may be tiring of the spectacle.
On Thursday the City Council met in special session to block the mayor’s plan to use a $300 million property tax increase to balance the city’s budget. The vote was unanimous, 50-0, so is Mr. Johnson getting the message yet?
With the public rebuke looming, Mr. Johnson equivocated Tuesday, claiming his proposal was merely to “get people’s attention.” “As a public school teacher,” Mr. Johnson said, “sometimes we do things to get people’s attention. And so now that we have the attention of everyone, I’ve said from the very beginning, this is a proposal. . . . I’m a collaborative mayor.”
Chicago’s 50 adult aldermen may be less amused at being compared to children. The mayor backed off the property tax because he knew he was going to lose, and he’s losing often these days.
In March voters rejected a Johnson-supported referendum to increase the city’s real-estate transfer tax on properties valued at more than $1 million. Mr. Johnson’s plan to use a high-interest loan to fund excessive contract demands from his benefactors at the Chicago Teachers Union led to the mass resignation of the Chicago school board.
. . .While pushing for the property tax, the mayor’s office threatened voters with false choices. Without the tax, the office suggested, the alternative would be “workforce reductions,” including slashing 2,500 police and 600 fire department jobs and subjecting residents to an army of rats. Voters would have to accept less frequent garbage collection, reductions in tree trimming and fewer “rat abatement services.”
Eek, but please. In 2023 the Chicago budget was about $17 billion, up from some $11 billion in 2019. From 2019 to 2024, the Chicago Public Schools added almost 7,000 employees while CPS enrollment declined by more than 30,000 students. The Covid boom in federal money was meant as temporary relief but has become entrenched in higher spending benchmarks.
He’s been mayor for about a year and a half and, if I don’t miss my guess, he’s gonna be a one-term mayor.
*For some reason that eludes me, the world is now excoriating Israel for attacking Hezbollah in Lebanon, after a whole year when Hezbollah was lobbing missiles at Israel and Israel didn’t retaliate. Finally it did, and now, of course, everybody’s on Israel for doing so, even though the UNIFIL troops there are supposed to stop Hezbollah. But then there was Beepergate and now Israel is striking at Hezbollah officials, and just took out Hezbollah’s media chief.
An Israeli airstrike on a building in a central neighborhood of the Lebanese capital Beirut on Sunday reportedly killed the top spokesman for the Hezbollah terror group.
Two Lebanese security sources told Reuters that Hezbollah’s media relations chief Mohammed Afif was killed in the strike on the Ras al-Naba’a neighborhood. A Hezbollah official, speaking anonymously, confirmed this to The Associated Press.
The Israel Defense Forces did not immediately issue a comment on the strike.
Unlike dozens of other Israeli attacks carried out in Beirut this past week, the strike killing Afif was not carried out in the southern suburbs of Beirut, a Hezbollah stronghold known as Dahiyeh.
The building where Afif was targeted housed the offices of the Syrian Ba’ath Party, Lebanese media reported. The IDF did not issue any evacuation warning before the strike, as it was an assassination and did not target Hezbollah’s infrastructure.
Afif had been especially visible after Israel’s military escalation in September and following the assassination of longtime Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who was also killed in an Israeli airstrike.
This was a targeted strike; the only person who was killed was Afif and no civilians were injured.
The remains of an Army aviator recovered last year from the wreckage of his submerged bomber have been officially identified as those of 2nd Lt. Thomas V. Kelly Jr. of Livermore, California, the Defense Department said.
The Friday announcement came a year and a half after the Navy conducted a dramatic, high-tech descent to the Pacific Ocean crash site in a diving bell, recovering human remains, several dog tags and Kelly’s Army Air Forces ring.
It was Kelly’s family that 11 years ago launched a project to investigate the story of the B-24 bomber nicknamed Heaven Can Wait, produced a detailed report and helped pinpoint the crash site.
“It’s hard to believe,” said Scott Althaus, a first cousin once removed and a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who led the family’s efforts. “It’s such an impossible story.”
Heaven Can Wait was shot down by Japanese antiaircraft gunners off the coast of the Pacific island of New Guinea on March 11, 1944, taking Kelly and 10 others to their deaths. Kelly was 21.
. . . . In the spring of 2023, a team of elite Navy divers and archaeologists from the DPAA conducted a five-week search near Hansa Bay on the northeast coast of New Guinea for Heaven Can Wait.
It was the deepest underwater recovery mission for the DPAA, the government agency that seeks to account for service members missing in action from past wars.
The crash site was in about 200 feet of water about 10 miles from an active volcano.
It was the first time the Navy’s SAT FADS — Saturation Fly-Away Diving System — had been used in such a role, the Navy said.
The diving apparatus, somewhat like a space station, included a pressurized habitat where the divers lived aboard the ship, and a pressurized diving bell, which they used to reach the bottom.
The system allowed them to work in the pressure of deep water for long periods without having to decompress after each dive, the Navy said. They only needed to decompress at the end of the project.
Once on the bottom, the divers exited the diving bell and gathered material from the crash site into big baskets that were hauled up to the ship to be sifted for artifacts.
Kelly’s remains were identified by dental records and DNA analysis. And they found his ring in the plane, the same one he was wearing in the photo at the top of the article. Here it is:
From Claire, presumably on FB. Our friends in the north are beavering away on their wall:
And I must reproduce again this great classic meme, put on Ulrike’s FB page:
Six Iranian men sentenced to hang for protesting the killing of Mahsa Amini for wearing her hijab wrong. How many people are going to die for an erratic headscarf?
“I am ready to be executed. If the regime in Iran is going to execute these six innocent protesters, they can execute me too.”
From the Auschwitz Memorial, their reason for saving all relics of those who passed through the camp (and died there):
Every object represents one life and one name. This is why we must preserve all authentic items, even the smallest ones. They also tell the story of Auschwitz.
Auschwitz I. Block 5. Main exhibition.
Two posts from Bluesky sent in by Dr. Cobb. First, a symphony from nature:
This blew me away on the day: a singing cow gate! Geophony (strong wind) meets antrophony (cow gate), with a sprinkle of biophony (passing jackdaws and a late bumblebee!). I was taken aback at how musical this sounded as the wind flowed through the nooks & crannies. Just beautiful
Welcome to the Sabbath for goyische cats: Sunday, November 17, 2024, and National Baklava Day, celebrating the world’s very best pastry. Here’s a portion of baklava and related Turkish pastries I had in Istanbul in 2008. Yes, I ate it all; this is a famous baklava place, and I had to try everything. Oink!
Days ahead of Joe Biden’s 2021 inauguration, National Guard Master Sgt. DeRicko Gaither received what he describes as a disturbing email about then-Maj. Pete Hegseth, who was about to help provide security at the event.
The email, dated Jan. 14 and sent from a former Washington, D.C., Guard member, included an attachment showing a shirtless Hegseth with a tattoo on his bicep inscribed, “Deus Vult.” [JAC: you can see a picture of the tattoo below.] A quick google search told Gaither the Latin phrase means “God wills it,” which served as a battle cry for Christians during the Crusades and has become associated with white extremist groups, he told The Wall Street Journal. The pictures also showed that Hegseth has a large Jerusalem cross tattoo. Gaither said he was not concerned about the cross—it was the “Deus Vult” that worried him.
The same phrase had been brandished on banners by the Jan. 6 rioters a few days earlier.
Hegseth, a former National Guardsman and Fox News commentator who was nominated Tuesday by President-elect Trump to be defense secretary, was pulled from inauguration service. Hegseth later wrote that he saw the incident as a rejection by the military.
“The feeling was mutual—I didn’t want this Army anymore either,” Hegseth said, recounting the episode in his book “The War on Warriors,” published earlier this year. “Twenty years, and the military I loved, I fought for, I revered spit me out.”
. . . For critics of his nomination, this incident—as well as Hegseth’s strident dismissal of the U.S. military’s efforts to screen service members for ties to extremist or white supremacist groups or ideologies—highlights questions about Trump’s unconventional Pentagon pick. Over a 10-year career at Fox, he scoffed at accusations of racism in the ranks, called for firing generals involved in programs to increase diversity in the military, declared that women should not serve in combat roles, criticized military vaccine mandates and lobbied for pardons of soldiers accused of war crimes.
. . . .Many of his controversial views endeared him to Trump. But in the days after the announcement, new allegations have surfaced that call into doubt how thoroughly he was vetted by Trump’s transition team.
Hegseth was investigated by local police for alleged sexual assault at a hotel in Monterey, Calif., in 2017. The incident was reported four days later, and the victim presented “contusions to the right thigh,” according to a statement by city authorities. A spokesperson for the Trump campaign said Hegseth has denied the allegations and no charges were filed.
Well, an allegation is just that–an allegation, and Hegseth should be regarded as innocent until proven otherwise. About his other attitudes I have mixed feelings. If women (or minorities) pass an unbiased but necessary bar for combat readiness, then they should be allowed to fight. But I’m not sure about screening potential soldiers for “ties to extremist or white supremacist groups or ideologies.” Merit, not ideology, should be the sole criterion for membership in a military unit. If the soldier then makes trouble, give him/her the boot.
Here’s a video that shows the tattoo and summarizes the story:
Still Hegseth, the most powerful military official below the Commander in Chief (Trump) seems dangerous to me, and is one of the three Cabinet nominees I’m most worried about (the other two are, of course, RFK Jr. and Matt Gaetz). Given that even many in the military don’t think Hegseth qualified to the the DoD, I’m hoping that his nomination will run into trouble, along with the other two. But of course Trump has also threatened “recess appointments”.
*Conservative never-Trumper Andrew Sullivan does his postmortem on the election in his latest post, “Yes, the Democrats live on campus now.” And, like many others I’ve written about, he blames the Dem’s loss on their wokeness, infused into the party’s image by the “progressive” left. And it’s that moiety of the left, which is the loudest and most censorious, that seems to run the show.
It was a trivial incident in the grand scheme of things. At one point in the campaign, Kamala Harris had to decide whether to go on Joe Rogan — a show with 18 million subscribers on YouTube alone. Here’s why she didn’t: “There was a backlash with some of our progressive staff that didn’t want her to be on it, and how there would be a backlash,” Jennifer Palmieri, an aide to Doug Emhoff, explained. (Palmieri later implausibly tried to walk that back, citing a scheduling conflict.)
There you have the core dynamic that has crippled the Democrats for the last decade. A tiny faction of usually young, well-educated, very-online social justice activists have been using the classic campus tactics of the far left to capture the interest groups and nonprofits that dominate Democratic policy-making. The weapon the activists use: classic internal accusations of racism/sexism/transphobia, empowered by staff revolts, Twitter mobs, and other social media. And then the Democrats, believing these groups represent actual public opinion, especially among minorities, take positions far outside the mainstream with scarcely any public debate — and become paralyzed when challenged.
The groups do not represent anyone but the clique of well-financed, super-rich donors and activists caught up in the elite cult of social justice. The LatinX groups don’t represent most Latinos (that is now blindingly obvious); BLM hostility to the police is a distortion of far more nuanced views among African-Americans; the transqueer groups have very different — and far more radical — priorities than most normie gay men and lesbians, who just want to live their lives in peace. And yet all these groups have long nailed Democratic elites to the cross of left-extremism, never more fatally than this year.
And obviously this is partly why Trump won: Harris had no way to distance herself from the crazies. I’m not apologizing for airing the trans issue as Exhibit A in this respect — because I was proven right in this election to an extent even I didn’t fully grok. Not only did Trump’s ads on the trans issue shift viewers 2.7 percent toward Trump in the states they ran in (more than his margin of victory), the issue was particularly potent for swing voters.
When swing voters were given 25 possible reasons for why they didn’t vote for Harris, the statement that she “focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues than helping the middle class” was the most-cited reason by those who chose Trump. Number One. I repeat: more swing voters voted for Trump on that issue than on inflation or immigration. In a focus group conducted by the NYT, a 25-year-old woman in DC said:
One more sign of Democratic sickness that Bill Maher mentioned in the video I posted yesterday afternoon:
If that’s a Gen Z woman in DC, imagine the impact in a swing state. Now look at the Democrats’ public response to this self-inflicted wound. One blue-state congressman, Seth Moulton, tried to learn a lesson after Election Day. While he reiterated his support for trans civil rights in general, he drew a line at biological boys competing with girls in high school sports:
I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.
Moulton’s view is shared by 69 percent of the public, and a slight 48-47 majority of Democrats. There are very few issues with public support as broad and bipartisan as this. But as soon as he opened his mouth, the backlash was instant and extreme:
The Massachusetts Democratic Party said Moulton’s comments “do not represent the broad view of our party.” In Moulton’s hometown, Salem City Councilor Kyle Davis called on Moulton to resign, and state Rep. Manny Cruz of Salem said he was “deeply disappointed in my congressman who has been doubling down on his transphobic views.” … Moulton’s campaign manager and director of his “Serve America’’ political committee, resigned.
Such is the power of gender activism, which has suppressed a debate about something bearing critically on fairness to women. Moulton should be applauded for his honesty.
The right-wing media sphere flew into a frenzy on Thursday when several users on social media pointed out that U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York had removed her pronouns from her bio on X, formerly Twitter.
The overarching sentiment was that Ocasio-Cortez’s decision to remove her pronouns from her bio underscored President-elect Donald Trump‘s decisive victory in the 2024 election, and was an inflection point in “woke” ideology—a derisive term that many conservatives use to describe identity politics and progressive values.
“JUST IN: AOC removed her pronouns from her bio,” read a post from the popular far-right Libs of TikTok X account.
Riley Gaines, the swimmer and political activist who is opposed to transgender athletes competing in women’s sports, wrote on X: “They’ll pretend they never embraced (or even celebrated) the insanity.
“Don’t forget who the compliant, virtue-signaling sheep were.”
The account EndWokeness, which says it is “Fighting, exposing, and mocking wokeness” and has more than 3 million followers, posted: “2 years ago, AOC posted an apology for forgetting to put pronouns in her bio. She just removed them on X.”
Gaines also responded to that video, writing: “We’re winning and its glorious.”
But this didn’t happen just because of the election; the removal preceded it, but clearly there was some reason, and I can think of only one, the one that Gaines singles out.
Here are the before and after; I’ve put a red box around the original incarnation. Somebody should ask her why she did this. Her response would be hilarious, I think.
*Adam Jentleson, the former chief of staff of renegade Senator John Fetterman, had a NYT op-ed that I couldn’t resist, even though it says what everyone else is saying. I’m a sucker for titles like “When will Democrats learn to say no?“(archived here). So what is the “no” about. Divisive issues and identity politics, of course.
. . . . Unless Democrats want to be consigned to minority status and be locked out of the Senate for the foreseeable future, they need to counter by building a supermajority of their own.
That starts with picking an ambitious electoral goal — say, the 365 electoral votes Barack Obama won in 2008 — and thinking clearly about what Democrats need to do to achieve it.
Democrats cannot do this as long as they remain crippled by a fetish for putting coalition management over a real desire for power. Whereas Mr. Trump has crafted an image as a different kind of Republican by routinely making claims that break with the party line on issues ranging from protecting Social Security and Medicare to mandating insurance coverage of in vitro fertilization, Democrats remain stuck trying to please all of their interest groups while watching voters of all races desert them over the very stances that these groups impose on the party.
Achieving a supermajority means declaring independence from liberal and progressive interest groups that prevent Democrats from thinking clearly about how to win. Collectively, these groups impose the rigid mores and vocabulary of college-educated elites, placing a hard ceiling on Democrats’ appeal and fatally wounding them in the places they need to win not just to take back the White House, but to have a prayer in the Senate.
. . .To cite a few examples, when Kamala Harris was running for the Democratic nomination in 2019, the A.C.L.U. pushed her to articulate a position on surgeries for transgender prisoners, needlessly elevating an obscure issue into the public debate as a purity test, despite the fact that current law already gave prisoners access to gender-affirming care. This became a major line of attack for Mr. Trump in the closing weeks of this year’s election. Now, with the G.O.P.’s ascent to dominance, transgender Americans are unquestionably going to be worse off.
The same year, a coalition of groups including the Sunrise Movement and the Working Families Party demanded that all Democrats running for president embrace decriminalizing border crossings. When candidates were asked at a debate if they would do so, every candidate on the stage that night raised a hand (except Michael Bennet). Groups like Justice Democrats pushed Democrats to defund the police and abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Positions taken a few years ago are fair game in campaigns, and by feeding into Republican attacks these efforts helped Mr. Trump and left the people and causes they claim to fight for under threat.
Ruthlessly prioritizing winning will make the groups mad, and that’s OK — in fact, it will be good for them. Groups have become too accustomed to enjoying access without holding themselves accountable; the question “is this tactic more likely to trigger backlash than to advance our goals?” is the single most important one, yet it seems to be rarely asked by many of the groups’ leaders or funders.
There have been enough analysts saying this that we should probably listen to them and at least try their remedy: lay off the identity politics, and lay off the wokeness! We can at least test this in the midterms two years from now.
Jentleson gives several recommendations about how to free ourselves from the shackles of identity politics. Democrats, unite! We have nothing to lose except our status as also-rans.
The Pentagon’s latest report on UFOs has revealed hundreds of new reports of unidentified and unexplained aerial phenomena but no indications suggesting an extraterrestrial origin.
The review includes hundreds of cases of misidentified balloons, birds and satellites as well as some that defy easy explanation, such as a near-miss between a commercial airliner and a mysterious object off the coast of New York.
While it isn’t likely to settle any debates over the existence of alien life, the report reflects heightened public interest in the topic and the government’s efforts to provide some answers. Its publication comes a day after House lawmakers called for greater government transparency during a hearing on unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs — the government’s term for UFOs.
Federal efforts to study and identify UAPs have focused on potential threats to national security or air safety and not their science fiction aspects. Officials at the Pentagon office created in 2022 to track UAPs, known as the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, have said there’s no indication any of the cases they looked into have unearthly origins.
“It is important to underscore that, to date, AARO has discovered no evidence of extraterrestrial beings, activity, or technology,” the authors of the report wrote.
The great majority of the reported incidents occurred in airspace, but 49 occurred at altitudes estimated to be at least 100 kilometers (62 miles), which is considered space. None occurred underwater. Reporting witnesses included commercial and military pilots as well as ground-based observers.
Investigators found explanations for nearly 300 of the incidents. In many cases, the unknown objects were found to be balloons, birds, aircraft, drones or satellites. According to the report, Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite system is one increasingly common source as people mistake chains of satellites for UFOs.
Hundreds of other cases remain unexplained, though the report’s authors stressed that is often because there isn’t enough information to draw firm conclusions.
Just like the Intelligent Design people cry “God” when they don’t understand how a trait evolved, so the UFO-philes cry “aliens” when they don’t have a solid explanation for an observation. As for me, I don’t buy them, as where would they come from? Why haven’t we heard from them if they have such great technology?
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Kulka is coming down the manufactured stairs to the second-floor flat, and Hili doesn’t like it at all!:
Hili: Some like to peep into the neighbour’s window.
From Masih; a tweet about the new “clinic” that Iran is setting up to treat women who don’t wear the hijab, and are supposedly mentally ill because of that.
Google translation of the Persian:
“It will not be a clinic… it will be a prison” The Guardian’s report about the government’s decision to establish a “clinic for the ‘treatment’ of hijab” I told the newspaper #گاردین#بریتانیا “It’s a shame… the idea of setting up a clinic to ‘treat’ veiled women is terrible, it will be a place where people are separated from society simply because they don’t follow the government’s ideology.” Thanks to @DeepaParent
«کلینیک نخواهد بود.. زندان خواهد بود»
گزارش گاردین درباره تصمیم حکومت در ایجاد «کلینیک ‘درمان’ بیحجابی»
به روزنامه #گاردین#بریتانیا گفتم: «شرمآور است.. ایده تأسیس کلینیک برای ‘درمان’ زنان بیحجاب وحشتناک است، جایی خواهد بود که مردم صرفاً به دلیل پیروی نکردن از ایدئولوژی… https://t.co/XX0AoLk1GI
From Malgorzata; the MSM acting reprehensibly, ignoring a story, and a documented one, that does not fit their narrative. It simply cannot be true that Hamas tortures Gazan civilians, right?
It has been almost a week since Israel published CCTV footage of Hamas torturing Palestinian civilians.
I can’t find one article on CNN, Reuters, NBC News, the AP, WaPo, or NYT covering it.
From Luana, and about time this appeared! The article is here, and archived here.
Washington Post editorial board:
“But the realities of human biology raise legitimate questions about any notion that trans women should always and everywhere be treated exactly like cisgender women.”
A tweet and a followup from Simon. (Matthew says it looks as if the cats swapped mustaches.)
Throwback to the time we sat our cats down and told them we were adopting a dog. I cannot stress enough that this is the ACTUAL picture from that conversation 🤣
This is an absolutely fantastic photo of wood ducks (Aix sponsa):
Show me your favorite duck photos! This one is definitely mine. These 6 wood ducks at my local park posed nearly perfectly in line on a log. I held my breath when I saw them, and the photo turned out great#birds #photography #wildlife 🌿
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is wary:
