Even long-time readers are dominating threads with too many comments, which reduces intellectual diversity.  Please note this from Da Roolz (the posting guidelines) on the left sidebar:

9.) Try not to dominate threads, particularly in a one-on-one argument. I’ve found that those are rarely informative, and the participants never reach agreement. A good guideline is that if your comments constitute over 10% of the comments on a thread, you’re posting too much.

I am not calling out specific violaters, but asking for self-restraint. Perhaps everyone should refresh their knowledge of Da Roolz.

Thank you.

It was a long flight (4 hours) from Burbank to Chicago, though the trip was made easier by the tiny size of the Burbank Airport, aka Bob Hope airport. It’s infinitely better than LAX and security scanning with PreCheck took about two minutes.  Still, My back was on fire the whole time from my flooding-induced back pull, and on top of that I was sporadically nauseous and thought, for the first time in my life, I would have to use the convenient vomit bag in the seat back. But I am tough and controlled it all. The nausea is now gone but my back—well, if you’ve pulled your back you’ll know how it feels. And there is no cure but time.

I see I am kvetching, but I had a great time in LA despite the nearby fires (I saw no sign of them save a slight haze in the air and a whiff of wood smoke). The weather was sunny and warm, the conference talks were good, and I enjoyed catching up with three pairs of friends after the meeting. Now it is back to the same ol’/same ol’, but in the next week or so I should have three novel things to announce.

In the meantime, Hili dialogues and their usual contents will begin tomorrow, and don’t forget to send any wildlife photos you’d like to contribute.

Since the big kerFFRFle began, there have been a lot of new people posting and, I think, some new readers.  You are all welcome, of course, but I’d like to remind newbies of the commenting rules, otherwise known as “Da Roolz” in Chicago argot. You can find these rules on the left sidebar or click here.  If you are new or haven’t read them in a while, please do so.  I’d like to emphasize three of them:

1. Do not insult your host. Pretend that you’re speaking to me in my living room which is, in a sense, what this website is.
2. Most important, please try to refrain from insulting other posters, no matter how misguided you think they are.  I don’t like name-calling, for it lessens whatever class this site has and certainly doesn’t foster discussion.  I will often warn people about this behavior either on the site, or in a private email. About 70% of those who are warned respond with truculence, either insulting me or saying that their behavior is fully justified. That’s a good way to get blacklisted—almost as good as telling me to stop posting on cats or cowboy boots. If I ask you to apologize to a commenter whom you insulted, please do so.
3. Try not to dominate threads, particularly in a one-on-one argument. I’ve found that those are rarely informative, and the participants never reach agreement. A good guideline is that if your comments constitute over 10% of the comments on a thread, you’re posting too much.

The last comment deserves special emphasis, as there are many people who seem to want to address everyone’s comments in a thread, or who otherwise don’t care about posting 25% of the time or more. Don’t be a comment hog!  You can have your say, too, but don’t keep having it over and over again.

As always, civility rules, and so be polite to everyone, even those whose comments you don’t like.

Thanks!
PCC(E)

I was up at 4 a.m. to get to Midway two hours before my flight to Vegas (yes, I’m compulsively early, but never in my life have I missed a flight, train, or bus).

Thanks to TSA Pre-Check, I breezed through security in two minutes, and, thank Ceiling Cat, did not get groped.  At the first gate I encountered there was a crowd of older men, many in wheelchairs, and all wearing hats and tags around their neck. The gate was also full of men in orange shirt whose duty was to push the men in wheelchairs onto the plane.  On the table to the side were free donuts and coffee (I did not partake).

I asked one of the women shepherding the men what was going on. She replied that this was an “Honor Flight”.  I asked what that meant, and learned that, once a month, Southwest flies a planeload of veterans—most from Vietnam but a few from WWII—to D.C. for a ceremony, presumably at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.  After that, Southwest flies them home. It’s all for free, and there’s a waiting list.

This is why Southwest is my favorite airline, though it plans some changes in 2025. The passengers on the Honor Flight.

To be sure, I felt a bit weird about honoring men fighting and dying in a futile and unjust war (I was a conscientious objector and worked in a hospital instead of going into the srevice), but on the other hand I have the customary respect for people who risk their lives at the behest of their country.

Now I’m cooling my heels at Midway Airport with about an hour until boarding the four-hour Dishonor Flight to Vegas. I have two Dunkin Donuts and a very large coffee, as well as a copy of a book I’m reviewing and a short novel to read on the plane: The Vegetarian, by Han Kang.

I’ll add some news that I read this morning.

*At the NYT, famed election prognosticator Nate Silver gives his gut feeling about who will win the election. I’ll quote a bit (the piece is archived here.) It’s not pretty:

Yet when I deliver this unsatisfying news, I inevitably get a question: “C’mon, Nate, what’s your gut say?”

So OK, I’ll tell you. My gut says Donald Trump. And my guess is that it is true for many anxious Democrats.

But I don’t think you should put any value whatsoever on anyone’s gut — including mine. Instead, you should resign yourself to the fact that a 50-50 forecast really does mean 50-50. And you should be open to the possibility that those forecasts are wrong, and that could be the case equally in the direction of Mr. Trump or Ms. Harris.

Nate’s reasons:

Instead, the likely problem is what pollsters call nonresponse bias. It’s not that Trump voters are lying to pollsters; it’s that in 2016 and 2020, pollsters weren’t reaching enough of them.

Nonresponse bias can be a hard problem to solve. Response rates to even the best telephone polls are in the single digits — in some sense, the people who choose to respond to polls are unusual. Trump supporters often have lower civic engagement and social trust, so they can be less inclined to complete a survey from a news organization. Pollsters are attempting to correct for this problem with increasingly aggressive data-massaging techniques, like weighing by educational attainment (college-educated voters are more likely to respond to surveys) or even by how people say they voted in the past. There’s no guarantee any of this will work.

If Mr. Trump does beat his polling, there will have been at least one clear sign of it: Democrats no longer have a consistent edge in party identification — about as many people now identify as Republicans.

. . . There’s also the fact that Ms. Harris is running to become the first female president and the second Black one. The so-called Bradley effect — named after former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, who underperformed his polls in the 1982 California governor’s race, for the supposed tendency of voters to say they’re undecided rather than admit they won’t vote for a Black candidate — wasn’t a problem for Barack Obama in 2008 or 2012. Still, the only other time a woman was her party’s nominee, undecided voters tilted heavily against her. So perhaps Ms. Harris should have some concerns about a “Hillary effect.”

It’s hard for me to believe that people would take sex and race into account these days (Silver apparently believes that sex is more important than race), but if Harris loses, we’ll never know.  Finally, Silver proffers a spoonful of sugar by theorizing about how Harris could underperform in the polls and win the election. One more prediction, and you can read the whole article at the archived link above:

Here’s another counterintuitive finding: It’s surprisingly likely that the election won’t be a photo finish.

With polling averages so close, even a small systematic polling error like the one the industry experienced in 2016 or 2020 could produce a comfortable Electoral College victory for Ms. Harris or Mr. Trump. According to my model, there’s about a 60 percent chance that one candidate will sweep at least six of seven battleground states.

It’s no secret that I’m not a huge fan of Harris, who I think would not be the candidate if we had longer to vet the Democrats, but I’m even less of a fan of Trump, and would be embarrassed before foreigners to admit that someone who dances for half an hour onstage, boasts about grabbing women’s genitals, is subject to five indictments, and curses badly about Harris (I believe I heard him say, before an office, that she was a “shit Vice President—that such a person could be elected to the highest office in the land.

*And the Free Press reports that a lot of the $90 million donated to Black Lives Matter after George Floyd’s death has been embezzled, and for hedonistic purposes:

The spectacular rise and fall of BLM has surprisingly little in common with earlier civil rights campaigns, other than, perhaps, good intentions. How BLM’s leaders exploited George Floyd’s murder to raise millions that they then put into their own pockets more closely resembles the stories of famous grifters like Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos or Sam Bankman-Fried’s foray into “effective altruism.”

. . . . And BLM four years later? It looks like little more than a hustle.

The latest proof point came earlier this month when Tyree Conyers-Page—a.k.a. Sir Maejor Page, the 35-year-old former leader of the BLM chapter of Greater Atlanta—was sentenced to 42 months in federal prison for money laundering and wire fraud. Pocketing the $450,000 raised from 18,000 donors to “fight for George Floyd” and the “movement,” Page spent lavishly on himself, splurging on tailored suits, nightclub bar tabs, an evening with a prostitute, and, as he texted to a friend, “a big-ass cribo” that he bought in Ohio after he “won the lottery.”

 . . . There are actually two [parent networks of BLM]: BLM Global Network Foundation and BLM Grassroots. The latter was formed in 2019 as an umbrella organization of local chapters of the group and is co-directed by Melina Abdullah. Since then, media reports have accused Abdullah and other chapter leaders of using Grassroots’ coffers to pay for vacations to Jamaica and her own personal expenses. (She hasn’t been charged with a crime.)

Abdullah has denied the allegations, but at least $8.7 million in donations is unaccounted for. The answer to where the money went may come soon. California attorney general Rob Bonta has demanded that Grassroots turn over delinquent tax filings and late fees before Sunday, October 27. If it doesn’t, the organization’s tax-exempt status will be revoked.

And about BLM Global, which was “founded in July 2013 by activists Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi as an online platform in response to the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman in 2012.”

As the national face of BLM, Cullors was suddenly in great demand. She inked a deal with Warner Bros. to create animated kids’ programming, documentaries, dramas, and comedies about structural racism and inequality—none of which were ever made. She and the foundation also spent a big chunk of those donations on an enviable real estate portfolio. They acquired a $6 million Los Angeles mansion, which Cullors used in early 2021 for a Biden inauguration party as well as her son’s birthday party. She and BLM Global paid $6.3 million for a mansion in Canada, which they named “the Wildseed Centre for Arts and Activism” (“a transfeminist, queer affirming space politically aligned with supporting Black liberation work across Canada”). They also dropped $3.2 million on four luxury properties, including a 3.2-acre estate in Georgia that boasted a runway for private aircraft. And BLM Global handed out money to a coterie of Cullors’ friends and relatives, including $778,000 for “services” to an arts group run by Damon Turner, the father of Cullors’ son, and $1.6 million to a security firm owned by her brother Paul. The foundation also cut checks totaling $205,000 to a company run by Cullors and her spouse as well as a $211,000 payout to Asha Bandele, the friend who helped Cullors write her memoir.

There’s more, and this is really depressing:

And yet, a husk of BLM still exists, and is focused on what might be the organization’s final cause: anti-Zionism.

About all of this what can one say but “Oy gewalt!”?

I’m not putting up “Readers’ Wildlife’ today as we have only a few contributions left. Please help out by sending in your good photos.

Yesterday was one of those unpredictable nights when I hardly slept at all. Perhaps it’s because I drank ONE MEASLY GLASS OF WINE before dinner, and wine interacts badly with my new sleeping medication. But sometimes I can have wine with dinner and it doesn’t affect my sleep. It seems unprecictable. I’m going to try weaning myself off sleep medication because life without wine is intolerable. As they say on television, I’ll ASK MY DOCTOR.

Anyway, I slept on and off, but not more than about two hours total. I finally dozed off, having a bizarre dream in which I was with an old girlfriend in Florida, which for some reason was next to the University of Pennsylvania (it was a dream, Jake!). We were staying in a long, pink hotel, but I suddenly got lost and couldn’t find it again. I was unable to find my girlfriend, and discovered that my cellphone was missing as well. I asked a passerby to lend me her cellphone so I could call 911 and perhaps find my girlfriend through a “missing persons” report, but the woman refused to lend me her phone. The dream was so realistic that I woke up in terror, and it took me a minute to realize that it was just a dream. At least I no longer have the Academics’ Dream in which you’re in school but can’t find the room for the final exam, or are taking the exam but haven’t studied all semester.

Anyway, as I tossed and turned and tried not to get more anxious by worrying about staying awake, I had a series of thoughts. I meant to write them down, but you know how hard it is to get up in the middle of the night to write stuff.  I remember three things.

1.) This is something I noticed while watching the NBC Evening News, which of course advertises a lot of drugs for the ailments of the aged (the t.v. news demographic leans OLD).  Nearly all the new drugs they advertise have an “x”, “y” or “z” in them. Examples: Ozempic, Breztri, Keytruda. And none of those drug names are appealing, as they don’t make you optimistic or even suggest what the drug is for.

2.) I regretted that, as I grow older, I learn more about humans and how to deal with their issues.  The regret is because you should be born old and then get younger, so you’d enter the world with a built in stock of learned wisdom. This would save a lot of problems. (I’d stop the “younging” process at about 25.) And here is one thing that I’ve learned (I may have said this before):

When someone calls you in distress, or has a problem they want to talk about, I first try to find out what the person needs. I call these the “three H’s”:

a. Help: a tangible solution to their problem.  Males are more likely to want solutions and to offer them. Often women simply want b):
b.  Hearing:  Someone to simply listen and sympathize. This is often the best thing to do since many problems defy quick solutions, and I’m not a therapist.
c. Hugging:  Sometimes physical contact, like an affectionate hug or a squeeze of the hand, might help. This has to be done in person, and must be used sparingly lest it be mistaken for a romantic gesture.

Before saying anything, I try to ascertain what the person in distress wants.

These thoughts may have been triggered by reading Abigail Shrier’s terrific new book on the maladaptive effects of therapy, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up. I recommend it highly.

3.) Once again I mused on the penchant of Brits (and some Americans) for tea over coffee, especially in the morning. I like the taste of good tea, and enjoy it as part of a conversation or, upon occasion, as a restorative in cold weather. But I can’t fathom why Brits use it to wake up. Perhaps it’s my upbringing, but be aware that a cup of tea has only half the caffeine of an equal-sized cup of coffee.  Tea doesn’t seem to me to be an effective wake-up drink. (Note: I am NOT dissing tea drinkers!).  If you want a non-coffee drink with lots of caffeine, try yerba mate brewed strongly. Brits should weigh in.

I had other thoughts as well, but I can’t remember them. I need a voice recorder by my bed that records only when you speak. Then I’d have a lot to say here!

Of course this is also a prompt for readers to disgorge their own midnight thoughts, or reveal their dreams, particularly recurring ones.