Joe Biden withdraws from the race

He announced today that he will no longer seek the Democratic nomination for the presidency.

Although his decision is being described as a ‘shock’, this did not come to me as a surprise. Ever since his poor debate performance created doubts about his cognitive abilities, there has been an increasing number of calls from his supporters that for the good of the party and the country, he should quit. The whole process became a sort of sad deathwatch, knowing that the inevitable was near but not knowing when. I felt that Biden was going through some of the Kubler Ross five stages of grief, namely denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, and that he would at some point bow to the inevitable.

It would not have been easy for Biden to reach the acceptance stage. He is a lifelong politician whose ambition to become president was thwarted multiple times before achieving it late in life. He also had a pretty successful presidency, and must have wanted to continue it. But his tenure was marred by several bad moves, the biggest of which was his support for Israel’s horrendous treatment of the people of Gaza. That clearly angered many young people who can see injustice much more clearly than adults can and are less willing to compromise and make excuses for it.

So now the process of finding a successor begins.

I have never seen a presidential race like this one. On the Republican side you have an absolutely awful liar and narcissist grifter who has somehow managed to captivate a large number of supporters and bully his entire party leadership into groveling before him. On the Democratic side, you have a process in which they have less than four months to find a new nominee and rally support for them. The experience of other countries that do not have such an insanely long election process suggests that this timetable is feasible, though for Americans it will be novel.

The right to access a toilet

Indoor plumbing that directs human waste into channels where it can be properly treated and disposed of has been one of the biggest contributions to public health. So it is a little surprising that there isn’t a more concerted effort to have more plentiful and easily accessible public toilets because the need for one can arise when one is away from home. But Guido Corradi says that the opposite is happening, that public toilets are getting increasingly scarce.

Toilets were one of the biggest steps forward for humanity: they allowed us to create cleaner spaces, reducing death and improving health. By the 19th century, in Western countries, bathrooms with toilets were increasingly included in home design, catering to essential human needs, such as urination, defecation and personal cleaning.
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And yet, the vast majority of public restrooms have not yet embraced this aspect of wellbeing. On the contrary, the poor state of them often elicits disgust and repulsion. In severe situations, for some people, these adverse psychological responses can escalate to pathological levels, including incontinence, urinary problems, anxiety, and significant alterations to their normal social life.

For many people, most of the time, the state of restrooms is something they think about only when they fail, if they are unusable or unavailable, or there simply aren’t any. Yet toilets often fail when you need them the most. And it’s in such moments you realise that these invisible parts of our cities are fundamental. So, why are restrooms typically tucked away at the back of establishments, hidden both literally and metaphorically? We all must keep in mind that the use of public bathrooms is inevitable, and that making them accessible and appropriate is a matter of human dignity.
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Political maneuvering in France

The recent French elections for the National Assembly resulted in the far-right National Rally party being pushed into third place but with no clear winner. The New Popular Front (NFP), a broad alliance of left-wing parties, won the most seats but not enough to form a majority and the center-right parties refused to form an alliance with them, fearing that their leader would become prime minister.

But then two days ago, a last-minute alliance of all the center right parties and a few unaffiliated members resulted in one of their candidates Yaël Braun-Pivet being re-elected head of the National Assembly, opening the door to president Emmanuel Macron appointing a prime minister from his own party.
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Bob Newhart (1929-2024)

The comedian died yesterday at the age of 94.

A former accountant who began moonlighting in comedy venues, Newhart first rose to fame in the 1960s for his observational humor and droll delivery. His breakthrough album, The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, recorded over several days in Houston before Newhart had any stand-up experience, netted him Grammys for best new artist and album of the year in 1961.

“In 1959, I gave myself a year to make it in comedy; it was back to accounting if comedy didn’t work out,” he once said, according to Digney’s statement. Newhart was 30 years old and years into a career as a Chicago accountant when the album went No 1 on the sales charts, the first comedy album to do so.

The comic went on to dominate the sitcom landscape for nearly two decades with two beloved TV shows, first with The Bob Newhart Show, which aired on CBS from 1972 until 1978. The show, in which Newhart starred as a befuddled psychologist in Chicago, became one of the most popular sitcoms of all time.
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Born on 5 September 1929 in Oak Park, Illinois, George Robert Newhart ushered in a new style of comedy in the 1960s, breaking from the mold of vaudeville and Borscht Belt routines for bits based in observation and psychology. His performance style incorporated stammering, deadpan delivery and quietly subversive material that appealed widely.

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What are these people afraid of?

Elon Musk made an announcement that he is moving the headquarters of Space X from California to Texas. Fine. It’s his company and he can do what he damn well likes with it, although uprooting the lives of the many employees because of his personal pique about some public policy is the action of an entitled jerk.

But what struck me was the reason he gave for the move.

He called a new law signed Monday by California Gov. Gavin Newsom that bars school districts from requiring staff to notify parents of their child’s gender identification change the “final straw.”

“I did make it clear to Governor Newsom about a year ago that laws of this nature would force families and companies to leave California to protect their children,” Musk wrote.

What exactly are these people protecting their children from? If children are identifying their gender differently in school but not telling their parents about it, that says to me that the problem lies at home, not at school, that their children are afraid of what their parents might do. Experiencing doubt and uncertainty about one’s gender identity must undoubtedly be very difficult for children to deal with and if they feel the need to seek a school teacher or counselor to discuss this, then requiring schools to inform parents will only result in the children not talking to counselors and instead seeking someone who may be a lot less responsible or qualified.
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The challenge of lab grown meat

Commenter birgerjohansson was kind enough to send me this link about how the UK has become the first country in the EU to approve the use of lab grown meat as pet food.

Lab-grown pet food is to hit UK shelves as Britain becomes the first country in Europe to approve cultivated meat.

The Animal and Plant Health Agency and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs have approved the product from the company Meatly.

It is thought there will be demand for cultivated pet food, as animal lovers face a dilemma about feeding their pets meat from slaughtered livestock.

Research suggests the pet food industry has a climate impact similar to that of the Philippines, the 13th most populous country in the world. A study by the University of Winchester found that 50% of surveyed pet owners would feed their pets cultivated meat, while 32% would eat it themselves.

The Meatly product is cultivated chicken. It is made by taking a small sample from a chicken egg, cultivating it with vitamins and amino acids in a lab, then growing cells in a container similar to those in which beer is fermented. The result is a paté-like paste.

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Murder among the upper middle class

If you are like me and enjoy watching murder mystery thrillers, and recently there have been a spate of limited-series TV shows in this genre, you can be excused for thinking that most murders occur in the homes and families of the well-to-do, either upper middle class or very wealthy. In most of them, people live in fancy homes, some even in massive quasi-castles with servants and large landscaped gardens, and drive expensive cars. Even if not that elaborate, the homes that the characters live in seem to be quite expensive and their interiors all spotless and the product of interior designers. These shows seem to be a form of real-estate porn.
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