The great egg heist

This story is a little strange.

Police in Pennsylvania are hunting for thieves who stole 100,000 eggs from the back of a trailer, amid a US-wide spike in the price of eggs that has triggered panic-buying in some shops.

The eggs were lifted from the back of Pete & Gerry’s Organics’ distribution trailer on Saturday at about 8.40pm in Antrim township, according to police. There have been no arrests yet.

“We’re relying on leads from people from the community. So we’re hoping that somebody knows something, and they’ll call us and give us some tips,” Megan Frazer of the Pennsylvania state police told the Associated Press.

“In my career, I’ve never heard of 100,000 eggs being stolen. This is definitely unique,” said Frazer, a 12-year veteran of law enforcement.
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‘Arab Americans for Trump’ change their name

After Trump’s announcement about taking over Gaza and expelling all the people living there, they now want to be called ‘Arab Americans for Peace’.

A group that played a key role in Donald Trump’s voter outreach to the Arab American community alongside his allies is rebranding itself after the president said that the U.S. would “take over” the Gaza Strip.

Bishara Bahbah, chairman of the group formerly known as Arab Americans for Trump, said during a phone interview with The Associated Press on Wednesday that the group would now be called Arab Americans for Peace.

The name change came after Trump held a Tuesday press conference alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House and proposed the U.S. take “ownership” in redeveloping the area into “the Riviera of the Middle East.”

“The talk about what the president wants to do with Gaza, obviously we’re completely opposed to the idea of the transfer of Palestinians from anywhere in Historic Palestine,” Bahbah said. “And so we did not want to be behind the curve in terms of pushing for peace, because that has been our objective from the very beginning.”

Don’t say that you weren’t warned. You may have been for Trump but he was never for you.

David Foster Wallace on luxury cruises

Since moving to Monterey, I have been playing bridge a couple of days a week and the club has some people who love going on cruises and have done so multiple times. Then there are those (like me) who are mystified as to its appeal and would not do so even if the high cost were not a problem.

When I ask the cruisers what the appeal is, they talk of the good food that is constantly available and the variety of entertainment that is offered. But its seems to me that you could eat at good local restaurants and go to good entertainment events where you live at much lower cost and space them out for greater pleasure, rather than cram them all into one week. They also give as an appeal the fact that being on a cruise is like living in a floating hotel that takes you to different locations for sightseeing with you having to unpack only once in your cabin. I can see that constantly packing and unpacking as one goes from hotel to hotel while traveling could become tedious but hardly seems worth being stuck on a boat for a lengthy period where there is the constant risk of seasickness, not to mention epidemics of viruses. Who can forget the horror stories such as the Norovirus and Covid-19 outbreaks on cruise ships from a few years back?

I have been on long ship voyages (three in fact) but that was back in the days when I was a young boy, prior to jet planes, when this was the main mode of transport for long distances from point A to point. B, not for going on a round trip back to the starting point. My trips between Sri Lanka and England were on big ships but they were not luxury liners though they did have things to entertain people so that they did not go bonkers by being constrained for two weeks in a small space. So maybe any desire that I might have had for a long sea voyage has been satiated. Anyway, to each his own, and I figured that if these cruises satisfied the needs of others, that was fine even if I could not fathom their appeal.

But then I came across this essay by David Foster Wallace on luxury cruises that appeared in the January 1996 issue of Harper’s Magazine. Titled Shipping Out, it had two features. It described in acute detail what life on a luxury cruise is like and it also gave me a clue as to what their real appeal might be.
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The danger of breaking the government

There has been a lot to be concerned about the moves by Trump and his cronies with shaking up the government. But perhaps the most disturbing is Elon Musk demanding, and getting access, to the government’s Office of Personnel Management as well as the Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service. These are not policy-making bodies. They are like the Human Relations and Accounting departments of a business. They hold important and confidential information but work in the background and if things are running smoothly, you don’t even know they exist.

As one of the people who works for the federal government writes:

Those of us within the ranks of the federal workforce looked on in horror at all of this. Those outside the federal government might not understand the gravity of this situation. Think of OPM and the Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service as the valet sheds of the federal government. They’re not flashy or big, but they hold all the keys. OPM maintains the private information of federal civil servants—bank codes, addresses, insurance information, retirement accounts, employment records. The Treasury’s system processes every payment to everyone from grandmothers waiting for their Social Security check to cancer researchers working to crack the cure. Now there’s a ham-fisted goon in an ill-fitting valet attendant’s coat rummaging in broad daylight through all of the keys—all of that private information, previously given in trust, handled with care, and regulated by law.

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Is Trump staging a retreat from US empire?

Trying to make sense of the whirlwind of activity that has characterized the last two weeks is not easy. Trying to find any sense or pattern in Trump’s actions that are not due to revenge or self-interest or sheer vindictiveness may be an exercise in futility. But Ryan Grim writes that a French writer Arnaud Bertrand has gained a following by arguing that what we are seeing is a retreat by the US from its global hegemonic ambitions to accepting its status as that of a regional power.

Here is how Bertrand puts it:

Hegemony was going to end sooner or later, and now the U.S. is basically choosing to end it on its own terms. It is the post-American world order – brought to you by America itself. Even the tariffs on allies, viewed under this angle, make sense, as it redefines the concept of ‘allies’: they don’t want—or maybe rather can’t afford—vassals anymore, but rather relationships that evolve based on current interests. You can either view it as decline – because it does unquestionably look like the end of the American empire – or as avoiding further decline: controlled withdrawal from imperial commitments in order to focus resources on core national interests rather than being forced into an even messier retreat at a later stage. In any case it is the end of an era.

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Trump wants all of us to have more lead and TCE in our bodies

As I wrote yesterday, one of the main goals of Trump and his cronies is to cut all the rules and regulations that prevent the wealthy and large corporations from making even more money, even if the moves result in actual harm to people. One of the most disturbing examples of this is the announcement today that they are planning to eliminate the rules that sought to reduce the amount of lead and other toxic elements in water supplies.

Republicans in Congress and the Trump administration are attempting to repeal the Biden administration’s groundbreaking rules that require all the country’s lead pipes to be replaced over the next 13 years and lower the limit on lead in water.

Environmentalists expressed alarm about the moves, which, if successful, would in effect prohibit the government from ever requiring lead line replacement in the future, or lowering lead limits.

The Trump administration is also working to kill a recently implemented ban on TCE, a compound that is among the most toxic and common water pollutants, and particularly a risk on military bases.

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We should not ignore the real Trump agenda

Trump has done many things that have generated a lot of headlines, staging raids on immigrants in a blaze of publicity whose purpose seems to be to cause humiliation and please his xenophobic followers. Then we have his widely publicized actions against any program that promotes diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), the pet target of right-wing ideologues who seek to bring back unquestioned acceptance of the dominance of white heterosexual males in all public life. Anything and everything that goes wrong is being blamed on DEI.

And we have his withdrawal of the US from the WHO and suspension of all aid programs that serve the needs of people in need. He probably would like to also withdraw from the UN (even though that body has often served to provide cover for US aggression around the world and shield it from the atrocities committed) but he may not want to risk them moving the headquarters from the US.

It is my belief that all these moves, extremely harmful as they are to so many people, are largely being used to generate a lot of controversy in order to cover the things that he really wants to do, though there is no question that Trump and his followers enjoy causing suffering to those whom he sees as not sufficiently loyal and subservient to him.
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Dubious diets

Yesterday in the late afternoon, I felt hungry but it was too early for my evening meal and if I eat too early I get hungry in the middle of the night. I decided to have a cup of coffee to keep me going until dinner time. Normally I have just one cup of coffee per day in the morning.

Coffee and cigarettes are known to be appetite suppressants which is why they are commonly used by actors and others who feel the need to be thin. Coffee is socially acceptable but cigarettes are now frowned upon so many of those people smoke in secret.

My having coffee to suppress my hunger reminded me of a fellow physicist that I used to know a long time ago. He told me that he only drank coffee and smoked cigarettes the whole day and ate just once a day, a meal in the evening. In those days, smoking was not banned in offices and public places as they are now in the US so he could always be seen with a cigarette and often with a coffee mug. He and I were both in our mid-thirties then and had the sense that is common among young people that our bodies could withstand anything. But even I, though not hyper-vigilant about healthy living, felt that his habits were not good for his health.

Our paths parted after a couple of years but I sometimes think of him and wonder what happened to him. Given that at that time he had a young child two years of age (the same age as my own daughter then), I wished that he would be a little more sensible about his diet in order that he would be more likely see his child grow up and possibly even see his grandchildren, as I now do. I hope he was able to beat the odds and do so. But I did not feel at the time that it was my place to advise a colleague about how to live and eat.

Blog comments policy

At the beginning of every month, I will repost my comments policy for those who started visiting this site the previous month.

As long time readers know, I used to moderate the comments with a very light hand, assuming that mature adults would know how to behave in a public space. It took outright hate speech targeting marginalized groups to cause me to ban people, and that happened very rarely. But I got increasingly irritated by the tedious and hostile exchanges among a few commenters that tended to fill up the comment thread with repeated posts about petty or off-topic issues. An email sent to me privately by a long-time lurker brought home to me how people might be hesitant to join in the conversation here, even if they have something to say, out of fear that something that they write, however well-intentioned, will be seized upon and responded to in a hostile manner by some of the most egregious offenders.

So here is a rule: No one will be able to make more than three comments in response to any blog post. Violation of that rule will result in banning.

But I also want to address a couple of deeper concerns for which a solution cannot be quantified but will require me to exercise my judgment.

It is well known that the comments sections on the internet can be a cesspool. I had hoped that the people who come to this site would be different, leading to more mature exchanges. But I was clearly too sanguine. We sometimes had absurdly repetitive exchanges seemingly based on the childish belief that having the last word means that you have won the argument or with increasingly angry posts sprinkled with puerile justifications like “They started it!”

The other issue is the hostility that is often expressed, often triggered by the most trivial of things. People should remember that this is a blog, not a journal or magazine. There are no copy editors, proof readers, and fact checkers. In such a casual atmosphere, people (and that includes me) will often inadvertently be less than precise or accurate in what they say. If the error is trivial but the meaning is clear, the error should be ignored. If the meaning is not clear, clarification can be politely asked for. If it is a genuine error, a correction can be politely made. If I think people are being rude or condescending or insulting (and I do not mean just abusive language but also the tone), I will ban the person.

For me, and I suspect for the other bloggers on this network, the rewards of blogging lie in creating space for a community of people to exchange ideas and views on a variety of topics. But that is pleasurable only if people post comments that are polite and respectful towards others, even while disagreeing. Some time ago, I wrote a post that a good philosophy of life is “Don’t be a jerk”. That would be a good rule to keep in mind when posting comments as well. There is absolutely no call for anyone to be rude or sneering or condescending towards others.

Almost all the commenters on this blog contribute positively and it is a pleasure to read their contributions and interact with them. It is a very few who think that a sneering, condescending, or abrasively argumentative tone is appropriate. My patience has been worn thin by some of their comments in the past. If I think, for any reason whatsoever, that someone is behaving like a jerk, I will ban them. I am in no mood to argue about this. I will not make any public announcement about who is banned. They will simply find that they can no longer post comments.

So I would suggest that in future commenters think carefully before they post anything, taking into account what they say and how often they say something. They should try to put themselves in the shoes of the person they are arguing with and think about how they might feel if their comment had been directed at them. They should also think about how their comments might look to others. It surprises me that people do not realize how badly this kind of behavior reflects on themselves.

Readers may have noticed that there are no ads on any of the blogs on this network. Nobody is making any money at all. In fact, it is a money sink and PZ Myers pays for the costs of the servers out of his Patreon account that you can contribute to if you would like to support the network. The bloggers here blog because they want to create spaces for conversations on issues that they care about. ‘Clicks’ have no monetary value. That means that I do not care how many people come to the site.

I realize that these guidelines are somewhat vague. So a good rule of thumb would be: If in doubt as to whether to post something because it might violate these boundaries, that is a good sign to not post it. I will be the sole judge of whether the boundary has been crossed.

I want to make it perfectly clear that I have zero tolerance for people who try to find ways to skirt the guidelines such as, for example, skirting the three comment limit by continuing it on another thread. I also reserve the right to make exceptions to the rules at any time, if I feel it is warranted. These decisions will be solely mine and will be final. There will be no discussion, debate, or appeal. If anyone objects because they think that I am being arbitrary, they are of course free to leave and never return.

Unbelievable cruelty being inflicted across the globe

This article from ProPublica describes the chaos that has fallen upon all the aid groups that were providing life-saving humanitarian services to people around the world as a result of the Trump administration’s executive orders to stop everything at once.

On Friday morning, the staffers at a half dozen U.S.-funded medical facilities in Sudan who care for severely malnourished children had a choice to make: Defy President Donald Trump’s order to immediately stop their operations or let up to 100 babies and toddlers die.

They chose the children.

In spite of the order, they will keep their facilities open for as long as they can, according to three people with direct knowledge of the situation. The people requested anonymity for fear that the administration might target their group for reprisals. Trump’s order also meant they would stop receiving new, previously approved funds to cover salaries, IV bags and other supplies. They said it’s a matter of days, not weeks, before they run out.

American-funded aid organizations around the globe, charged with providing lifesaving care for the most desperate and vulnerable populations imaginable, have for days been forced to completely halt their operations, turn away patients and lay off staff following a series of sudden stop-work demands from the Trump administration. Despite an announcement earlier this week ostensibly allowing lifesaving operations to continue, those earlier orders have not been rescinded.
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