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The New Yorker has an interesting article by Manvir Singh about fad diets, with a focus on all-animal diet as ostensibly the diet best suited to our species. A character who brands himself “The Liver King” specifically endorses grassfed beef liver. The paleo diet industry insists that humans evolved to kill animals and devour their tissues and organs, eating plant matter in desperate circumstances. In reality, the best research we have suggests that humans evolved as omnivores, eating both animal (vertebrate and invertebrate) and plant tissues: • the tooth wear patterns on fossilized Australopithecus and Neanderthals indicated a diet that contained substantial fibrous plants; • by comparing diets among 58 foraging societies from around the world, anthropologist Richard Lee found that half got the majority of their calories from plant foods and only eleven relied on hunting for their primary means of subsistence, all but one in the highest or lowest latitudes, far from our African orig...

  I missed Glenn Gould's birthday four days ago. If you look up the word "eccentric" in the dictionary, you'll see Glenn's picture. He was certainly a contrarian in classical performance practice, to the point that I sometimes wondered if he was just having us on. His virtuoso recordings of the Goldberg Variations still stand as a monument to interpretive art. He left us way too young.

Over at TPM, Josh Marshall cuts through the media BS on the GOP shutdown: "Here’s the real power dynamic to focus on: There is bipartisan support for a budget deal in the Senate and there are enough votes in the House for such a deal, but the holdup (or the stickup, to be more accurate) is that the Freedom Caucus is threatening Kevin McCarthy’s speakership so he won’t bring bipartisan deals to the floor. That is the rub here. Full stop. "Anything you read about the dynamic being Biden v. McCarthy or Senate v. House is simply wrong. It’s not even quite right to frame it as far-right House GOP v. rest of the House GOP. McCarthy is being extorted by the far-right and caving to the pressure by refusing to bring to the floor budget vehicles that would pass right now … today … in a heartbeat."

Hmm. Maybe Trump *does* have a point about the lying press after all. Here's the Reuters headline: "Biden, Trump to woo union workers in Michigan as auto strikes grow" So where are Trump and Biden going to woo union workers? "Former President Donald Trump is scheduled to visit a Macomb County automotive supplier of engine and transmission parts Wednesday, the day after President Joe Biden is set to visit a United Auto Workers picket line in Wayne County." Wait, tell me about this Macomb county automotive supplier that has striking union workers. "Trump is going to speak to non-union non-striking workers, at the invitation of their management, with support from the organization pushing Right To Work (anti-union) laws." Ah, *those* striking union workers. Feh. https://www.eschatonblog.com/2023/09/journalism_01025908971.html

Let’s hand the microphone to Kevin Drum over at jabberwocking.com: “There are lots of people who think Donald Trump is a boor* but plan to vote for him anyway. I'm not talking here about the dead-enders who worship Trump, but the center-right voters who really don't like him but will hold their noses and mark their ballot for him even so. Why? Because the alternative is voting for a Democrat. “You may wonder what's so scary about that. The answer is pretty simple: they don't like Democratic policies. They think we let in too many illegal immigrants. They think we spend too much money and run up the deficit. They think we're too soft on criminals. They think we're too willing to raise taxes in order to spend it on the poor. They think we're sexual libertines. They think we care more about saving a few fish than we do about jobs. They think we're pro-abortion. They think we want religion gone from public life. They think we've been hijacked by identity...

Apparently, there's a lot of head-scratching as to why McCarthy and the "moderate Republicans" in the House don't simply negotiate an agreement with Democrats and end this unamerican hostage taking. There's no mystery here. Any House Republican who reaches across the aisle will be primaried out of their job next year. It doesn't matter that the right-wing nutjob who beats them in the primary goes on to lose the seat to a Democrat in the general election, the extremist right only cares about vengeance.

I started listening to KDHX, the St. Louis community radio station, shortly after it went on the air in 1987. I was a devoted listener and contributor since then, and even continued a $15 monthly automatic contribution after we moved to RI. But then the firings started, and I stopped my contributions. Now, apparently, it's gotten much worse. And all the DJs fired are volunteers, so no money is being saved. KDHX had musical diversity (OK, no classical) and there are many LPs and CDs that I own because of something I heard on KDHX. There were also no commercials. KDHX was something unique and good in St. Louis, and now the management is in the process of destroying it. Shame. https://www.stltoday.com/life-entertainment/local/music/st-louis-radio-station-kdhx-fires-10-more-volunteer-djs/article_d3bb9ff8-597a-11ee-b5f0-8759176f961f.html

"Project Veritas, the conservative organization founded by James O’Keefe, suspended all operations on Wednesday after another round of layoffs, Mediaite has learned. "According to a letter titled “Reduction in Force” that was sent to Project Veritas staffers by HR director Jennifer Kiyak on Wednesday, the organization is putting all operations on pause amidst severe financial woes." Heh. https://www.mediaite.com/news/new-project-veritas-suspends-all-operations-amid-devastating-layoffs-and-fundraising-struggles/

A few years back, my chairman was a big enthusiast of NFTs (nonfungible tokens). In one conversation I recall, I pointed to a picture of the founding chair of the department and suggested he could digitize it and sell it to alumni as an NFT. He said he thought that was a good idea. When I laughed, he said "I'm not joking." I replied: "That's what I'm afraid of." NFTs have always been an example of The Greater Fool Theory of investing, which holds that investors can achieve positive returns by buying an asset without concern for valuation fundamentals and other important factors because someone else will buy it at a higher price. In the case of the NFT boom, many of the transactions were carried out using cryptocurrency (bitcoin, dogecoin, etherium), itself a bit of a scam. Peak NFT was in August 2021. What happened since then? "Of the 73,257 NFT collections we identified, an eye-watering 69,795 of them have a market cap of 0 Ether (ETH). "This ...

Timothy Snyder is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University, a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna and an expert on Russian and Eastern European history. Yesterday, he narrated an essay on his subscription-only Substack site “Thinking about . . . “ on the occasion of Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s visit to the US and expression of gratitude for UN support. Snyder believes that we should be thanking Ukranians. Here, I summarize his ten reasons: 1. Security in Europe: Ukraine has been the victim of a long-anticipated Russian military attack, the first such attack since NATO was established, and Ukraine is fulfilling the NATO mission of European security singlehandedly on the strength of 3% of the US defense budget; 2. Audit, in practice, of the US defense budget: using US military technology* and equipment, Ukraine has won back half the territory it lost to Russia in 2022 and has thereby shown us what a portion of the US defense budget can do in the f...

Based on a recent article in New York Review of Books, I read the novel “Independent People” by the Icelandic writer Halldór Laxness. The book was originally published in two volumes in 1934 and 1935. Laxness won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1955, in part on the strength of this book. Like Moby-Dick, I approached this novel as an obligation. I put it down once, after a few pages, in exasperation with its rambling faux-Norse folklore beginnings, but took it up again when it was the only reading on hand while I spent five hours in the local hospital emergency department. The story is set in late 19th-early 20th century Iceland, which was at the time a province of Denmark. The novel’s protagonist is Guðbjartur Jónsson, who has rechristened himself “Bjartur of Summerhouses.” After 18 years in the service of the town Bailiff, he is now a tenant crofter on rugged pastureland where he raises sheep and, eventually, a family. Bjartur is a hardy, opinionated, belligerent man who is embraces ...

"Speaking Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Trump repeatedly declined to say whether he would support a federal ban on abortion. He said he could “live with” the procedure being banned by individual states or nationwide through federal action, though he said “from a legal standpoint, I think it’s probably better” to be handled at the state level. "Regarding the bill signed by DeSantis, which bans abortions before many women know they are pregnant, Trump said, “I think what he did is a terrible thing and a terrible mistake.”" A new and unfamiliar definition of "pro-life." Heh. https://apnews.com/article/trump-desantis-abortion-ban-republican-primary-5bdbba55f9c2f328d49b5fbe9727677e

The 2024 presidential election will be between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Of that we can be certain. We can also be certain that the vote will be very close, and there are geopolitical players who will put their thumbs on the scale. “The Saudi Kingdom’s de facto rule Mohammad bin Salman’s coziness with the Trump family is notorious. Meanwhile, if Trump defeats Biden next year that would allow Vladimir Putin to escape the most monumental mistake of his two plus decades in power. We don’t even have to assume a new Trump administration would immediately switch sides or cut off support to Ukraine. Opposition from Congress would probably (maybe?) prevent anything quite so sudden and drastic. But both Ukraine and Russia would know that the clock was ticking on US support for Ukraine. That would greatly increase the odds of some stalemated, frozen conflict like the ones we see around the former Soviet periphery and indeed saw in Ukraine itself from 2014 to 2022.” https://talkingpointsmemo.co...

Either (a) Donald Trump honestly believes he won the 2020 election against overwhelming evidence to the contrary, which is clear evidence for dementia; or (b) Donald Trump knew he'd lost but engaged in a seditious conspiracy to reverse the peaceful transition of power at the core of our democracy. Neither one is grounds for re-election.

The current meme about Joe Biden is that he's too old. Well, yes, he is old. But he seems to be functioning as an active president just fine. And the only other choice at this point is the GOP candidate for the Democratic nomination, RFK Jr. Before we throw away the incumbent advantage, we need to have a strong alternative. There is none. Trump is old, too. He's only three years younger, which is statistically insignificant. And while Joe walks or bikes, Trump rides a golf cart. Joe is trim, Trump is obese. And Trump has over 90 indictments, while after >40 years in elective office, Joe has none. Trump will be spending much of the GOP campaign season in court, although the Trumpenproletariat will still make him the nominee. Joe will fight this election based on his vision for the future. Trump will fight the election based on his vision for revenge for 2020. I'll be thinking of my child and grandchild. YMMV.

It's obvious that the Biden impeachment "inquiry" in the House is phony. It's purely a fishing expedition. Apart from red meat for the Freedom Caucus and the Trumpenproletariat voters, its only other purpose is to allow Trump to claim that Biden is going to be impeached and so distract from the fact that he's the only twice-impeached former president running. "Now that McCarthy has directed House committees to open an inquiry, Politico is reporting that Trump has not exactly been on the sidelines here. The former president has reportedly been in private talks about a Biden impeachment with a few House Republicans, including loyalist Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), as recently as Sunday. He’s also been talking to House GOP Conference Chair Elise Stefanik (R-NY) today." Modern Republicans aren't interested in good government. Indeed, they believe that government *is* the problem and that their job is to prove it by rendering it permanently dysfunct...

"Over at National Review, Charles Cooke approvingly cites this passage from a recent David Ignatius column about Joe Biden: "He should have stopped his son Hunter from joining the board of a Ukrainian gas company and representing companies in China — and he certainly should have resisted Hunter’s attempts to impress clients by getting Dad on the phone." To which Kevin Drum responds: "This stuff is getting completely ridiculous. Do conservatives seriously think Biden should be impeached for not doing something six years before he became president? Come on. This is inane." https://jabberwocking.com/high-crimes-and-misdemeanors/

  Just a reminder, when Trump was impeached each time, it was based on evidence already available and well-known at the start: • for the first impeachment, he pressured a foreign government to manufacture a political scandal to help his reelection; • for the second impeachment, he conspired to interfere with the peaceful transfer of power after he lost the 2020 election. Here are the claims I've seen against Biden: • The homes that the Bidens own can't be afforded on a congressional or Senate salary; • It's not normal for family members to receive millions of dollars from overseas interests; • We have the vice president on record saying that he had a Ukranian prosecutor fired. Reality check: • In 1974, Biden bought a home in Greenville for $185,000. Monthly payments on that were maybe a little high for a Senate salary of $44,000, but well within normal. In 1996 he sold the house for $1.2 million and used the money to buy a smaller house in Greenville that was, at the time, ...

Today, several folks have posted 9/11 remembrances on FB. I’m fine with that. We should remember the people who died as a result of the plane crashes, as well as their families and friends. But don’t stop there. Also remember how this tragedy was cynically exploited for political purposes by folks like Rudy Giuliani and George Bush. How it was dishonestly used to justify the US invasion and military occupation of Iraq*, the torture and abuse of innocent Afghanis, and the continued incarceration without trials of men at the US military base in Guantanamo. Americans are rightly outraged by the 9/11 terrorism. But we should also be outraged at the atrocities committed by America in the name of the victims of 9/11. We should work to make sure another 9/11 never happens, and we should work to make sure our emotions are never again hijacked for political and financial profit. *15 of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, a US ally. Zero were from Iraq. Thousands of Americans were killed o...

"Dudley Brown, founder and president of the Colorado-based gun-rights group, called the governor’s action unconstitutional. “She needs to be held accountable for stripping the God-given rights of millions away with the stroke of a pen,” he said in a statement announcing the lawsuit and request for a restraining order." "God-given rights" to carry firearms in public? America is a theocracy? Who knew? https://www.huffpost.com/entry/albuquerque-guns-new-mexico_n_64fd382fe4b043f73bc10a3e

As a geneticist, I’m pretty familiar with the evidence for the hypothesis that all life on earth is related by descent with modification, or evolution. There is no evidence for the “intelligent design” hypothesis, which is just creationism with a transparent veneer of pseudo-scientific jargon. But it’s worse than that. On casual inspection, it is obvious that if there was a designer, s/he was pretty unintelligent. The human body is actually pretty poorly designed. Nature isn’t an engineer, it’s a tinkerer working with the parts it already has on hand. Nathan Lents is a Professor at CUNY and a PhD graduate of Saint Louis University School of Medicine. He’s written a book called “Human Errors” that highlights some of the problematic features of human anatomy. Here’s link to his blog that features some videos on the topic in which he is a feature guest. Enjoy. https://thehumanevolutionblog.com/2023/09/09/some-interviews-on-our-poorly-designed-bodies/

 Wait, I thought it was "more guns, less crime." Could the NRA and it's ammosexual acolytes be wrong? "New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham on Friday issued an emergency public health order that suspends the open and permitted concealed carry of firearms in Albuquerque for 30 days in the midst of a spate of gun violence. "The Democratic governor said she is expecting legal challenges but felt compelled to act in response to gun deaths, including the fatal shooting of an 11-year-old boy outside a minor league baseball stadium this week." https://www.huffpost.com/entry/albuquerque-new-mexico-gun-ban_n_64fbb4d9e4b02beef75cdce9

AI is getting a lot of attention these days, and rightfully so. ChatGPT looks to take lots of jobs and to become the plagiarist’s tool of choice. Will AI replace artists, composers and novelists? Time will tell, but to look at what passes for “art” today in the mass consumer market, my money’s on AI. Another technology that is pushing the envelope is CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing. The New Yorker has a nice piece summarizing the state of play. The tl;dr take is that the genie is out of the bottle on human germline editing and there’s no way to stop it. I read the New Yorker article with the eye of someone who has written on the topic myself. It is very good and accurate, although it accepts at face value the claim that germline editing is “therapy.” It isn’t. There are ways for couples who carry disease-related mutations to have children without germline editing (e.g., zygote selection, adoption). But the march of technology will not be denied. My thoughts on the ethics of genome editi...

The Yale historian Timothy Snyder first came to my attention in a footnote of an article in The New York Review of Books. The footnote gave a link to a series of 23 online lectures on the history of Ukraine, which I binge-watched over a period of about five days. I also read his books “Bloodlands” and “Black Earth.” Snyder also has a subscription-only Substack blog to which I subscribe. Snyder travels frequently to Ukraine these days, and his latest Substack article is posted from Kyiv. As the war grinds on, Snyder argues that we in the US must be patient and continue to support Ukraine. He is convinced that Russia will lose and must lose in order to stabilize democracy in the world. Since the article is paywalled, I won’t post a link and I’ll just quote a couple of the money grafs as fair use: “The Ukrainians are defending the legal order established after the Second World War. They have performed the entire NATO mission of absorbing and reversing an attack by Russia with a tiny per...

 Gym Jordan is pretending to lead a Congressional investigation of Fani Willis. She tells him to stick it where the sun don't shine. “Its obvious purpose is to obstruct a Georgia criminal proceeding and to advance outrageous misrepresentations,” Willis wrote of Jordan’s letter. “As I make clear below, there is no justification in the Constitution for Congress to interfere with a state criminal matter, as you attempt to do.” "And in a biting retort, Willis polished off the nine-page letter with a list of all of the things that Jordan could be doing with his time as a congressman complete with oversight authority instead of gaining headlines pen-palling with prosecutors. “I do have some suggestions on how you can engage in productive legislative activity,” she wrote." Heh! https://talkingpointsmemo.com/where-things-stand/fani-willis-responds-to-jim-jordans-demands-with-list-of-things-he-could-be-doing-with-his-time-instead

I'm opposed to the death penalty. I believe it is immoral to kill an unarmed person who poses no threat. It looks like GOP presidential candidates are going to try to distract from the political mess created by the Dobbs decision by braying about how pro-death they can be. Setting aside the issue of morality, the death penalty wastes taxpayer money and has no deterrent effect. " Studies from across the country have shown that the death penalty is highly expensive for taxpayers, even compared to prison sentences of life without parole. There are additional expenses even before an execution, related to legal costs, pretrial costs, jury selection, trial, incarceration and appeals. As to the actual execution, the American Civil Liberties Union reported that the Federal Bureau of Prisons spent close to $1 million on each execution carried out in the summer of 2020 ― more than it costs to incarcerate a federal prisoner for 25 years. "Further, data shows that the death penalty d...

There has been some head-scratching about the recent COVID variant, BA.2.86, which has 34 amino acid changes in the spike protein compared to its closest reference sequence. A commenter over on angrybear.com blog asks: “how can one virus suddenly wake up one morning and find it had mutated 30 times overnight? And that all 30 of its mutations were viable? ..it’s difficult for me to understand how such a major change could have possibly occurred as part of what should naturally be a slow-moving evolutionary process…” Let’s unpack this comment, since I think doing so can clarify virus population biology, how variants arise and what they mean. First of all, we’re not talking about “one virus” acquiring 34 mutations “overnight.” It is estimated each infected person carries 10^9–10^11 SARS-CoV-2 virions* during peak infection and that the genetic diversity of virions in an infected host covers all possible single nucleotide substitutions. So the BA.2.86 variant emerged from an immense, evol...

"Here's the actual data for the past 12 months: "Real GDP: Up 2.5% Inflation: CPI down from 8.4% to 3.3% Jobs: Up 3 million Stock Market: S&P 500 up 10% Housing: Median home price down 7% "In fairness, I'd probably agree that things were getting worse if I spent all day marinating in Fox News, Donald Trump, right-wing Twitter, talk radio, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page." https://jabberwocking.com/republicans-refuse-to-believe-the-economy-has-improved/

There's an upsurge in COVID. What to do? Vaccinate and social distance is my advice. Masking? I'm fine with masking, but my views haven't changed for unfitted cloth masks. Their value is: • they protect others from you if you're infected and coughing or sneezing; * the prevent you from touching your nose and mouth, two routes of infection; * they remind others to social distance. https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2023/09/02/anthony-fauci-masks-donald-trump-smerconish-vpx.cnn

As far as I can tell, the right-extremists bleating about the "deep state" are referring to democratically instituted and regulated institutional structures that make state actors answerable to laws and regulations. What they propose in place of this "deep state" appears to be autocratic rule by a cult of personality that doesn't answer to a majority of the people or their consent. That's what we rejected in the American revolution. Re-branding the legitimate institutions of a constitutional democracy as "deep state" is just an attempt to delegitimize a government that our forebears fought and died for. This isn't dissent, this is Leninism. As for their "fake news," that sounded better in the original German: lügenpresse. That didn't go well.

Between high school and college, I worked at the Pizza Inn in Oak Ridge as a cook. There was a Jimmy Buffett 45 on the juke box. I can't recall what was on the A side, but the B side was "Why don't we get drunk and screw." That's the side that got played, sometimes several times in a row. Jimmy played for 50 cents at "The Good Woman" pub at Vanderbilt when I was a freshman there. By the time I finished college, I could play and sing a handful of his songs. I can still play and sing a couple of them now. Our last year in Chapel Hill, we went to see an outdoor performance of Othello. Jimmy Buffett was performing at the football stadium nearby. During a quiet moment in the play, we heard "Margaritaville" drifting over the air. I have one of Buffett's greatest hits CDs. I'll get that out and play it in his memory. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ot3JJ0wv2G0

"High school students looking for free rides on the T usually just hop the fare gates. But four students at Medford Vocational Technical High School did it the hard way. Seniors Matty Harris, Noah Gibson, and Zack Bertocchi, and junior Scott Campbell found a way to boost the cash value of any CharlieCard without paying a dime, using either a homemade electronic “vending machine” or a custom app running on a standard Android smartphone. “We’re able to copy cards infinitely,” said Harris. The typical Android phone contains a chip that transmits a low-power radio signal that allows Android owners to pay for coffee, snacks, gasoline, and other goods with their phone via the Google Pay service. After two years of research, the students found they could use that same chip to rewrite the data on a CharlieCard, adding up to $300 of credit to a card purchased for just 25 cents. *snip* "But instead of abusing their new-found power, the students reached out to MBTA cybersecurity officia...