Month: May 2024

We were in Nuremberg today and I visited the famous Nazi rally grounds, home of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will. However, these are not Nazi geese. Nazis have been gone for a long time. These are just ordinary, innocent, German geese out for an afternoon swim.

This is a golden breasted starling at the LA Zoo. They have a whole cage full of these things, half of them hanging upside down like bats showing off their bright yellow chests.

Quick question: at this point, does anyone truly think Donald Trump doesn't want to get jailed for contempt? He's obviously angling pretty hard for it, and he likely thinks it would be a big campaign boost. He'd be just like Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr.! The MAGA base would swoon over Donald heroically facing off with the Deep State and sticking up for his rights.

Either that or he really is literally unable to keep his yap shut. But I don't think so.

This is a little out of left field, but does anyone know why Jim Jordan is never mentioned as a possible running mate for Donald Trump? The guy is a total attack dog; he's super conservative; he's an election denier and overall Trump sycophant; he's a winner, election-wise; and he looks the part, something we know is important to Trump.

Now, he's also a white man, but so was Mike Pence. Trump doesn't seem to care much about traditional ticket diversity. There's also the longtime question hanging over Jordan of whether he ignored sexual abuse while he was an assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State, but hell, that might be a plus for Trump.

So why isn't he in the picture? What am I missing?

Vox reports that CRISPR gene editing technology is great, but it has a problem:

Most of the available reference genomes are representative of white Europeans. That’s a problem because not everybody’s DNA is identical: Recent sequencing of African genomes shows that they have 10 percent more DNA than the standard reference genome available to researchers.

....So while those studies can help identify genes of importance that could lead to effective treatments for the population whose genes make up the majority of the reference data — i.e., white people — the same treatments may not work as well for other nonwhite populations.

....Although the vast majority of human genomes are the same, a small fraction of the letters making up our genes can differ from person to person and from population to population, with potentially significant medical implications.

The word "black" is never used in this piece—with one exception: to describe how the Tukegee experiment eroded Black trust in the medical system. Despite this careful excision, I'm still a little surprised the article made it through Vox's famously woke editorial gauntlet. After all, everyone understands that "ancestry group" is just another word for race.

In other words, race is a social construct. Except when it's not. Genomes differ more from person to person than from group to group. Except when it matters anyway. It's absurd to believe there are meaningful genetic differences between races population groups. Except when it's not. It all depends on whether it's good or bad for the narrative.

I'm on vacation again, so let's play "Where am I?" again. Where am I on this drizzly, overcast morning?

Negotiations between Israel and Hamas are going great:

This really does seem to be the case. I understand that third party negotiators have to deal with the leaders they have, not the leaders they wish they had. And it's not like Hamas's Yahya Sinwar is any great prize. But for a supposed ally, is there anyone in the world who's more of an asshole and less of a genuine friend than Benjamin Netanyahu?

This is M16, the Eagle Nebula, taken from Palomar Mountain. As usual, I wish I could pick up more colors in my astronomy photos, but the reds usually overwhelm everything else. I'd need to do multiple exposures with four different filters to really pick up all the colors, and that's both expensive and time consuming. Maybe someday.

The second photo is an enlarged (and rotated) view of the center of the nebula. This is the part of the nebula known as the "Pillars of Creation" thanks to a famous Hubble Telescope picture of them. Click the link to see the difference in resolution between the Hubble and my telescope. It's, um, a lot.

The detailed picture also provides a good look at my guiding problem. As you can see, the stars are slightly oblong, which means my telescope isn't following the sky precisely. I'm still not sure why. It's also odd that the stars are so far out of round but the picture itself is fairly sharp. That doesn't make sense to me.

Hamza Abdelrahman and Luiz Edgard Oliveira, the gurus of savings levels, report that excess pandemic savings are finally gone:

I'm not sure how much real-world difference this makes, since excess savings have been nearly zero for awhile outside of the affluent, but it's still a milestone. From this point on, the economy is on its own.

The Wall Street Journal reports that consumers are fed up with rising food prices:

Now, some consumers are hitting their limits. Restaurant chains and some food manufacturers are reporting sliding sales or slowing growth that they attribute to consumers’ inability—or refusal—to pay prices that are in some cases a third higher than prepandemic times.

....U.S. fast-food traffic declined 3.5% in the first three months of this year compared with the same period in 2023, according to market-research firm Revenue Management Solutions. U.S. grocery sales of food and beverages fell 2% by volume for the 52 weeks ended April 20 compared with the year-ago period, according to NielsenIQ.

This might be true—but only for food suppliers who greedily pushed prices up well beyond the pace of inflation. Here's the overall story:

Since the start of the pandemic, food prices have kept pace with blue-collar wage growth almost perfectly. Both groceries and restaurant food have grown about half a percent more than wages.

So there's nothing special to be ticked off about except in the case of multinational chains and food companies that decided to test the limits of consumer patience by raising prices until they finally got pushback. Well guess what? If that's your strategy, then eventually you're going to get pushback. Duh. That was the whole point.

In any case, the food giants who followed this strategy apparently have no plans to do the obvious thing and just lower prices a bit. Instead they intend to continue trying to trick customers into paying more for less:

McDonald’s and Starbucks plan to launch more promotions and communicate them more clearly to consumers.... Van de Put said Mondelez will introduce new, smaller multipacks for Clif Bar, for example, with 10 energy bars instead of 12 inside, to offer the bars at a lower price. Kellanova CEO Steve Cahillane said the company is offering more deals and adjusting their timing throughout the month, promoting large pack sizes at the beginning of the month, when consumers have the most cash on hand, and smaller ones toward the end of the month.

Good luck with that.