Greenland sharks live 400 years

The New Neo Posted on by

Yes, you read that right: 400 years.

If you call that “living.”

We actually don’t know all that much about shark behavior. But here’s my first introduction to it, courtesy of Herman Melville in a Moby Dick passage that made a deep impression on me as a teenager:

But sometimes, especially upon the Line in the Pacific, this plan will not answer at all; because such incalculable hosts of sharks gather round the moored carcase [of the whale], that were he left so for six hours, say, on a stretch, little more than the skeleton would be visible by morning. In most other parts of the ocean, however, where these fish do not so largely abound, their wondrous voracity can be at times considerably diminished, by vigorously stirring them up with sharp whaling-spades, a procedure notwithstanding, which, in some instances, only seems to tickle them into still greater activity. But it was not thus in the present case with the Pequod’s sharks; though, to be sure, any man unaccustomed to such sights, to have looked over her side that night, would have almost thought the whole round sea was one huge cheese, and those sharks the maggots in it.

Nevertheless, upon Stubb setting the anchor-watch after his supper was concluded; and when, accordingly Queequeg and a forecastle seaman came on deck, no small excitement was created among the sharks; for immediately suspending the cutting stages over the side, and lowering three lanterns, so that they cast long gleams of light over the turbid sea, these two mariners, darting their long whaling-spades, kept up an incessant murdering of the sharks, by striking the keen steel deep into their skulls, seemingly their only vital part. But in the foamy confusion of their mixed and struggling hosts, the marksmen could not always hit their mark; and this brought about new revelations of the incredible ferocity of the foe. They viciously snapped, not only at each other’s disembowelments, but like flexible bows, bent round, and bit their own; till those entrails seemed swallowed over and over again by the same mouth, to be oppositely voided by the gaping wound. Nor was this all. It was unsafe to meddle with the corpses and ghosts of these creatures. A sort of generic or Pantheistic vitality seemed to lurk in their very joints and bones, after what might be called the individual life had departed. Killed and hoisted on deck for the sake of his skin, one of these sharks almost took poor Queequeg’s hand off, when he tried to shut down the dead lid of his murderous jaw.

“Queequeg no care what god made him shark,” said the savage, agonizingly lifting his hand up and down; “wedder Fejee god or Nantucket god; but de god wat made shark must be one dam Ingin.”

Hillary’s loose lips?

The New Neo Posted on by

If you’ve had some difficulty following the details of Iranian nuclear scientist Shahram Amiri’s execution and how it might or might not have been connected to the Hillary Clinton email scandal, that’s because—as Austin Bay’s article on the subject suggests—the story is murky from start to finish and it’s difficult to know what actually happened:

Amiri’s execution intersects with the 2016 U.S. political elections. As the linked article notes, two emails transmitted in 2010 through Hillary Clinton’s off-the-books and unauthorized server appear to refer to Amiri. Clinton senior adviser Jake Sullivan was involved in both emails: one he forwarded on July 5, 2010 (10 days before Amiri returned to Iran) and another (one he sent) dated July 12. The July 5 email said, “Our friend must be given a way out.”

For many good reasons senior official-level traffic is “born classified.” Access to a SecState’s unprotected email traffic provides enemy intelligence services with clues and indications regarding U.S. foreign and defense policy. In some cases, it may provide confirmation of suspected U.S. operations or, perhaps, U.S. intelligence assets and sources. Assets include human spies.

The title of my post contains a WWII phrase that Bay refers to in his article. You may be familiar with it from this sort of thing:

looselips

The IRS and the right

The New Neo Posted on by

The IRS —up to its old tricks again:

The Washington, D.C., Circuit Court, overturning a June lower-court decision, let the suit go forward because, as LSU law professor Philip Hackney noted in the Surly Subgroup blog, “it found that the IRS had not voluntarily ceased its unlawful actions.”

In other words, the IRS is still doing what it was accused of in the first place and was supposed to halt.

In particular, the court reinstated two specific complaints made by True The Vote and other Tea Party groups that claimed the IRS had acted in a biased way toward conservative organizations that applied for tax-exempt status.

The two complaints were that the IRS had violated the group’s First Amendment rights, and that it had also violated the Administrative Procedures Act ”” both serious complaints that could land people in jail.

I am not feeling optimistic about these lawsuits, though. There has been too much false hope on this so far.

Would a Trump defeat have a marked down-ballot effect?

The New Neo Posted on by

Paul Mirengoff tackles the question, and his answer is maybe not, but it depends how huge the defeat is.

Personally, I’ve never quite understood down-ballot effects, although I acknowledge that they most definitely exist. I have no problem splitting my vote, or going to the polls whether or not I care about the biggest races or even whether there’s a big race at all. But I also am aware I’m not exactly typical of much of anybody, and that psychologically speaking it makes sense to be more motivated to vote when there’s enthusiasm for the top of the ticket.

Mirengoff writes (citing an article on the subject by Charlie Cook):

First, there aren’t that many competitive races for House seats. Second, voter doubts about Hillary Clinton and the desire to check her power as president will, in Cook’s view, likely rein in a down ballot effect. The Democrats may well win the Senate, but probably not because of Donald Trump.

There’s a third reason why a Trump defeat might not spill over. As Cook suggests, traditional Republican voters who don’t support Trump are likely to turn out in large numbers to try to make sure Hillary has to deal with a Republican Congress. They might also be joined by folks who usually don’t vote but are inspired to by Trump.

Sounds plausible, but (as Mirengoff later adds) it may depend on the size of the Trump defeat. The bigger the defeat, the worse it will be for the other GOP candidates.

I suppose that’s true. But to me it still seems possible that a big defeat will cause even more people to come out and elect more Republicans to Congress in an effort to thwart Hillary’s power as president. Maybe that’s just wishful thinking on my part, but it’s a possibility that has some logic to it.

Why are we talking about a big Trump defeat? Because that’s the way it looks (and has looked to me for quite some time), and there are now only three months to go till the election. In fact, one of the reasons (not the only one, but perhaps the biggest one) I spent the primaries arguing so desperately against a Trump nomination was that I have always seen him as a sure loser in the general.

That wasn’t just based on a hunch, either, although that was indeed what my gut told me. It was based on evidence in the polls that not only was Trump unlikely to win, but that he would be the worst of all the GOP candidates against Hillary, and that anyone who said otherwise was hopefully spinning the evidence (see this for one of many posts of mine on the subject).

Now, I don’t usually make such bold predictions about election outcomes, but as early as August of 2015 I saw Trump as a very possible GOP nomination winner. See for example this post, which I wrote on August 22, 2015:

From the start of Trump’s rise in the polls I’ve taken him very seriously as a phenomenon. I haven’t understood those who casually asserted “He’s never going to win the nomination.” I’ve long thought he could…

So already, only about two months into the process, I had “long thought” Trump could win the nomination. But I never thought he could win the general, and that was a source of great turmoil for me as I watched him gain ground and I began to realize he was the almost inevitable nominee and the almost inevitable loser to Hillary Clinton.

That’s why during the primaries I saw every vote for the abominable Trump—however well-intentioned the voter might be—as a vote enabling the abominable Hillary. And now, when I am told by Trump supporters that not voting for the abominable Trump is a vote for the abominable Hillary, I confess I sometimes feel like telling those who voted for Trump long ago, when there were other excellent GOP choices available in the primaries: you should have thought of that earlier.

Yes, yes, it’s all water over the dam, don’t look back, we must deal with the situation as it is now. But that situation seems a tragic one, and I keep thinking it didn’t have to be this way.

The closest I ever came to revising my prediction that Trump’s loss to Hillary was inevitable was during a brief period post-RNC when Trump was doing well in the polls, and I revised Trump’s chances of winning to 1 in 3 (unfortunately, I can’t find the link to that post or comment, but that’s my recollection of the figure I picked at that point). Now I’d say I’m back to maybe 1 in 20, and that’s being kind to him.

For a Republican to become president, some combination of the following things must happen, preferably all of them but absolutely at least one:

(1) hold the base and get the vast majority of the Republican votes, preferably above 90%
(2) get a majority of Independents’ votes
(3) get some Democrats’ votes, more than 10%

I see no evidence that Trump has done any of these things, according to the polls I’ve read. Nor was he doing them consistently earlier.

Wishful thinking has driven the Trump voters from the start—both as to his chances, and about who he is and what he’s about. So I’ll add some wishful thinking of my own: I hope I’m wrong on both scores. I hope he beats Hillary and (this is an all-important part) that he’s a far far better man, and president, than I think he is or would be.

Monkeys on a plane (and in life, music, and movies)

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: Instapundit.]

Apparently there was some disturbance on a Frontier Airlines flight last Tuesday involving a monkey. But not to worry; it was a monkey with a job:

The monkey that reportedly got “loose” on a Las Vegas-bound Frontier Airlines flight from Ohio late Tuesday was a certified service animal, airline officials said.

Melissa Nunnery, a spokeswoman for McCarran International Airport, initially said a Frontier staff member reported to McCarran “that the monkey was loose, or got loose” briefly during the flight, but couldn’t clarify what “loose” meant.

Early Wednesday, the airline clarified that the monkey was in the main cabin, but never broke free during the flight.

“The monkey was never loose in the cabin,” Frontier spokesman Richard Oliver said Wednesday. “It was always with the passenger it was traveling with.”

Now, lest you think this is absurd on the face of it, understand that monkeys can indeed be bona fide service animals for people who have lost some or all of the use of their hands. Monkeys (particularly capuchins) have a lot of manual dexterity and of course are very smart and nimble. For example, since 1979:

[Monkey Helpers has been] a non-profit organization that helps adults with spinal cord injuries and other mobility impairments live more independent and engaged lives. We do this by providing them, free of charge, with a unique service animal: a highly trained capuchin monkey to help with their daily tasks. The only organization of our kind, we raise and train these special service animals, carefully match them with appropriate recipients across the nation, and provide active support and care for the duration of each placement.

I had heard of this service many years ago, but I’d never watched any of the YouTube videos, which are moving in human terms and fascinating in terms of animal behavior. There are many many videos on YouTube about this, but here are a few typical ones:

It seems like a very worthwhile charity.

But let’s get back to that plane. The article failed to clarify whether the monkey on the plane was an animal owned by a person with a hand mobility problem, which would have made the entire episode understandable. But that doesn’t appear to be the case; this monkey was described as an “emotional support animal”:

It’s unclear what type of monkey it was, but Nunnery said the monkey was an emotional support animal, adding that “the passenger had all the proper paperwork to have the monkey on the plane with him.”

I’m all for emotional support. But how about the tried-and-true stuffed animal for that? Because to a certain extent I think this “emotional support animal” bit can sometimes be a scam by a person who just likes to take his/her animal everywhere and manages to get a doctor to sign off on it.

Which reminds me (I couldn’t find a video of the original version):

And now that I’ve paid my sincere respects to the actual monkeys that help the actual disabled, I cannot resist posting this classic comedy bit from “The Pink Panther.” And no, a chimpanzee is neither a monkey nor a minkee. But boy, Peter Sellers was a genius, wasn’t he?:

The mer-mutts commercial

The New Neo Posted on by

This one certainly grabbed my attention. Have you seen it?:

So here’s the question—how is it done? Is it some sort of trick, or are the dogs actually trained to do synchronized swimming?

Apparently the incident of a claim for house flooding because a dog turned on a tap was a real one.

Trump and the “Second Amendment people”

The New Neo Posted on by

So Donald Trump has done it again—this time he’s handed the opposition ammunition (pun intended) to accuse him of the basest of political dog whistles: encouraging the assassination of Hillary Clinton.

I’m going to get this out of the way first: I think Trump was joking. I don’t think he sat down and thought “I’m going to say something to encourage people to shoot Clinton, and I’ll cloak it in an offhand aside.” I think he just thought he was being cute.

Trump’s tendency to give lengthy extemporaneous speeches (and/or to add many ad-libs to his rarer set speeches) is something he’s been doing all year. And so we’ve gotten used to it, perhaps forgetting what an odd phenomenon it is for a politician in this day and age, when they tend to be tightly scripted and tightly controlled. After all, the MSM is gunning for them (pun intended)—particularly the Republicans, that is—and a politician can’t be too careful.

Trump is the opposite of too careful. That’s one of the things his followers love about him. He’s like a jazz musician, riffing on his favorite themes. He draws energy from the laughter and appreciation of the adoring crowds who regularly turn out for him, and you can see his delight in their delight at an especially bold improv.

So maybe this remark was that. Maybe it was a bad joke about assassination. Or maybe it was actually more innocuous than that. But one thing I do know is that Trump’s method of political address sets him up for such ambiguous, easily misunderstood, poorly-constructed and/or impulsive and controversial statements.

Here’s the actual quote. In it, Trump was talking about what would happen if Hillary Clinton got to choose SCOTUS justices:

“Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish, the Second Amendment,” he said as an aside while smiling. “By the way, and if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know. But I’ll tell you what, that will be a horrible day.”

The interpretation of what he meant rides on what you think about those last two sentences and what they refer to. “Second Amendment people” is pretty clear; it has to refer to those who support gun rights. “Maybe there is, I don’t know” has to mean that perhaps there’s something those people (gun rights people) can do about Hillary getting to pick her judges—assassination, lobbying or other political pressure from the NRA, voting for Trump as president, what? And the next sentence, “that will be a horrible day,” could certainly be interpreted as referring to the “horrible day” of her assassination by those “Second Amendment people.” Or it could be interpreted as referring to the “horrible day” that Hillary’s hand-picked judges “abolish the Second Amendment” if those “Second Amendment people” don’t elect Trump.

Trump and his aides say he meant the latter. And it’s possible that’s even true:

The Trump campaign rejected the notion that Trump was inciting violence against Clinton or anyone else with his aside at the Wilmington rally. Instead, the campaign said the Manhattan billionaire was simply appealing to the collective political muscle Second Amendment supporters possess.

“It’s called the power of unification ”“ 2nd Amendment people have amazing spirit and are tremendously unified, which gives them great political power,” Trump’s senior communications adviser Jason Miller said in a statement emailed to POLITICO. “And this year, they will be voting in record numbers, and it won’t be for Hillary Clinton, it will be for Donald Trump.”

With any other candidate, it would be obvious that he or she didn’t mean assassination, but meant political pressure instead. The MSM would still try to spin it otherwise if it was said by the GOP candidate, whoever it might be. But people probably would be less likely to buy that interpretation than they are with Donald Trump doing the talking. Trouble is, Trump has said so many impulsive and almost reckless things that the accusation becomes far more plausible when it’s about something he says.

His ad-lib speaking style makes Trump popular with a lot of people because it gives him an uncanned and spontaneous quality, which people interpret as telling it like it is. He’s rarely boring. His style guarantees coverage, too, and that’s part of how he won the primaries. But the downside for Trump—and it’s a big one—is that he is impulsive and extreme and also sometimes disjointed in what he says and how he says it, and it makes him especially vulnerable to charges that he’s said something even worse than what he may have actually intended, and we often don’t know what he actually intended. What’s more, his personality is such that people believe the worst of him.

Everyone here knows how much I detest Trump. But I always try to be fair in looking at what he says (or what anyone says, for that matter). I can’t read his mind; I don’t know what he meant. No one else, does, either, and his words were ambiguous. and so Trump (in the words of our current president, writing a while back about himself) “serves as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”

[NOTE: Speaking of what our current president said during his campaign, remember bringing the gun to the knife fight? It didn’t matter with Obama, because his surface demeanor is such that people were inclined to give the most benign and metaphoric interpretation to what he said.]

Do you know any early Trump supporters?

The New Neo Posted on by

Today commenter “DNW” asked the following question:

Does anyone here actually know, in the sense of knowing the character, the likes and the personality of any Trump first supporters? You know, first name basis ”¦ longtime friend, in-law, cousin or something?

Remember, that is a Trump firster ”¦ someone who preferred him to say, Cruz on some ideological grounds.

I have never met one.

I’ll take that up: yes, I do. But not many.

However, I don’t know all that many people on the right to begin with. Yes, I know all of you, but most of us have never met except in the virtual world. Also, most of the Trump supporters here were not first supporters; they initially preferred other candidates more. But there were a few here who were first-supporters.

In my regular (non-computer) life, the vast majority of people I know are liberals—with a sprinkling of leftists. Most people I know are fairly apolitical fairly moderate garden-variety liberals, both men and women. One of the great tragedies of this election year is (as I see it, anyway) that a great many of them do not like Hillary, and quite a few of them had independently approached me earlier in the primary season to tell me they were thinking of voting for a Republican and asked if I could tell them my opinion of this one or that one. Most often it was Rubio who piqued their interest and whom they professed to liking and perhaps being willing to vote for. Sometimes it was Kasich (never Bush) and sometimes Fiorina or Christie. There may have been others, but those are the ones I remember).

All of these people professed a detestation of Trump and said that if he were the nominee they would be voting for Clinton, whom they disliked. This was one of the reasons I was convinced early in the game that although Trump might be the GOP nominee, he could not win the election, because he was already alienating a lot of Republicans and Independents, as well as these moderate Democrats who might have crossed over for some of the other Republican candidates.

By the way, they disliked Cruz, too, although usually not as much as they disliked Trump.

But I do know some people on the right, and I can think of a couple of them who liked Trump from the start. For two he was their early front-runner, and they both shared the following characteristics: politically active changers, college graduates but self-employed in businesses rather than the professions, intelligent and aware, angry at the Obama administration and at the GOP. I also know two other people for whom Trump was not number one but for whom he was a very well-tolerated number two, and those people were also politically-aware college graduates and changers, both self-employed in creative fields.

Of course, I may just have described the characteristics of the majority of the people on the right whom I know, whether they be Trump-supporters or not: changers, college-educated, self-employed. I know others of that description who do not like Trump, sometimes to the point of refusing to vote for him (one is not a changer but was always a conservative). I also know someone on the right who is not college-educated but I’m not sure whether he’s a Trump-supporter, although I suspect it (he didn’t like Romney for class reasons). He’s quite cynical and somewhat libertarian.

There are other people I know on the right who I thought would be Trump supporters—one in particular who’s a pretty tough and angry guy who has always been a conservative. But it turns out that he can’t stand Trump. So go figure.

And you?

Alzheimer’s treatment: devoutly to be wished

The New Neo Posted on by

Alzheimer’s is a scourge that’s so common that most of us know at least one person who has had it, and often considerably more than one. It’s a tragedy and a trial both for the afflicted and for those who love them and care for them. I don’t have to describe what it does; you all almost certainly know quite a bit about it from bitter personal experience, or from reading articles or watching documentaries and movies.

That’s why this is very heartening news. There have been reports of effective treatments before that haven’t panned out, but this one seems a bit more promising.

Remember when AIDS was an absolute death sentence? It cut a swath through the arts—I was especially aware of its effects in the dance world—that was horrific, and felled mostly the young. Now it’s not exactly a nothing—it’s still very much a something, and a something to avoid and fear—but its automatic-death-sentence aspects have been attenuated through the discovery of an effective although difficult treatment regimen.

A treatment for Alzheimer’s that actually arrests that disease would be a tremendous blessing. It would help patients, their families, and everyone who knows them, and it would also save on the costs of treating so many people who need such constant care.

Until I read the linked article, I hadn’t realized that PET scans had become so very good at diagnosing Alzheimer’s. I knew they were somewhat able to do it, but if the article is correct they are now accurate and can even predict people who will get it many many years before they have symptoms. Without a treatment, though, that’s a mixed blessing. I don’t think most people would want to know, the news is so devastating and the remedies presently so non-existent.

A comment on the comments

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s a certain amount of blog work that goes on behind the scenes, particularly in the comments section.

First there’s the cleanup of spam, which initially involves deleting the contents of the spam filter. You’ll understand how important that filter is when I tell you that I delete about 10,000 spam comments a day. Spam must be profitable in gaming the Google algorithm, or whatever the goals are, because it has proliferated in recent years to a point that would be completely overwhelming without the spam filter.

Then there’s my own quick sweep of the comments section to try to weed out the spam that has somehow eluded the net. There are always a few spam comments that get through, so I delete them as best I can.

Then there are the trolls. Trolls are not spam, and although they are even more unpleasant than spam, they are (fortunately) not more numerous. But they are numerous enough. They seem to come in waves, directed perhaps by a certain link to something I’ve written, or by the content of certain posts of mine, or maybe just by the way the wind is blowing on the left (that used to be the main source of trolls) or in Trumpland (the most recent source). I allow some, delete and/or ban the worst, and argue with a few if I happen to feel like it that day.

What remains is the substantive discussion. I know that some blogs have up to a thousand or more comments on thread after thread after thread, and if that were the case here I don’t think I could monitor them. So far it’s quite manageable. Do I read every one? No. I skim them, though, and I respond to some I find especially intriguing, or if there’s a point I want to be sure to make so that other people might notice, or something I particularly want to refute or make a joke about or praise.

Lately I find the comments have been so interesting and substantive that I could just answer comments and skip writing new posts every day, and I’d still have my work cut out for me. But don’t worry; I plan to keep the daily posts coming. Sunday, though, will remain my day off, barring huge Sunday-breaking news stories.