Why are baby seals white?

I was reading something about jigsaw puzzles that reminded me of a very difficult puzzle I did a long time ago that consisted of a white baby seal on an ice floe. Almost the entire puzzle was shades of white with just the seal’s eyes and nose being black. The image below is not from the puzzle but you can see why such a puzzle would be difficult.

While thinking about it, I was reminded of the cruel practice of killing baby seals, usually by beating their heads in with clubs, because their white fur is valuable.
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Kamala Harris and the Black male voter

There has been some anxiety among Democrats that creepy Donald Trump has made inroads with Black men, resulting in fewer of them supporting Kamala Harris than Joe Biden in 2020. There has been speculation that Black and Hispanic men may be finding that creepy Trump’s aggressive macho posturing, however phony and condescending it may seem to us, may be striking a chord within those two demographics.

Jelani Cobb looks at the data more closely. He says that back in 2016, progressives blamed white women, who might have been expected to be highly enthused about the idea of the first female president, for not voting is sufficient numbers for Hillary Clinton ,and that this time, similar attention is being paid to Black men.

In the traumatic wake of the 2016 contest, progressives blamed white women, more than fifty per cent of whom, initial reports alleged, had voted for Donald Trump, compared with forty-three per cent for Hillary Clinton. (Subsequent analysis revealed the numbers to be closer to forty-seven per cent for Trump and forty-five for Clinton, but it was still a win.) This year, Black men have come under special scrutiny as the potential weak link.

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DeSantis anti-abortion effort gets smacked down by judge

Florida has an important vote on election day, and that is Amendment 4 that seeks to protect the right to abortion. Florida Republicans had pushed through a law banning abortions after six-weeks, which is effectively a total ban. The Amendment seeks to allow abortions until fetal viability, which is around 22-24 weeks. (I have written about this before.)

Supporters of Amendment 4 had put out the following ad.

Florida’s health department issued an order to TV stations not to air the ads because it was false, since they claim that the law does permit abortions in medical emergencies. But doctors are fearful of doing so under almost any circumstances because the law about exceptions is vague. If TV stations aired the ad, they were threatened with a second-degree misdemeanor, “which carries a sentence of up to 60 days imprisoned or a fine of up to $500.”
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Asking creepy Trump the wrong questions

I have mentioned several times that interviewers tend to ask poor questions of politicians. Often they are wordy and vague, allowing the responder to pick a bit that they already have a pat answer for. Another is asking about inferences (which can be obfuscated) instead of questions of fact (which are harder to evade).There are so many clips of people asking creepy Donald Trump questions that he ‘answers’ (actually deflects) by ignoring the question or challenging the premise or attacking the questioner.

This happened recently when he faced off against the editor of Bloomberg News who asked him about import tariffs. Creepy Trump says that he loves tariffs, calling it “the most beautiful word in the dictionary” and insists that they will raise so much money that they will pay for anything and everything that he promises to do, such as tax cuts, the border wall, child care, or whatever. He seems to suggest that this will cause no pain to people because the tariffs would be paid by the exporting country and thus those countries will be paying for his programs. It is ridiculous, like his claim that Mexico would pay for the construction of the border wall which of course never happened.
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Lewis Black has had it with undecided voters

He thinks that if even at this late stage of the election process they still don’t know enough to make a choice, then perhaps they should do us all a favor and not vote at all.

There is a school of thought that says that the number of of truly undecided voters, those who follow politics and the election news and definitely plan to vote but are genuinely conflicted about whom to vote for, is vanishingly small and thus not worth bothering about and so there is point in expending much effort in trying to persuade them. Most of the so-called ‘undecideds’ are actually leaning towards one candidate or another but are not really engaged with the process and what they are undecided about is whether to bother to vote or not.

Nowadays, campaigns can use the public information that is gleaned from the internet to make fairly accurate assessments about the political leanings of pretty much everyone. So the so-called ‘ground game’, the effort to identify those people who likely lean towards your side and get them to the polls on or before election day, is where much of the campaigns’ efforts likely are or at least should be.

Standing desks are now bad for you?


I have written before about how people seeking healthy lifestyle choices can be whipsawed by advice that can veer wildly, with things that are supposed to be good for you one day becoming demonized the next. This happens with diets as well as physical activity.

The latest reversal deals with ‘standing desks’, desks at which you must stand in order to work. These were meant to combat the supposed ill-effects of being seated all day at our desks, something that office workers are prone to do. I know several people who have them in their offices and even in their homes.

Now new research suggest that standing all day may also be bad for you.
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Left-wing populism, right-wing populism, and anti-populism

The term ‘populism’ has had a long and checkered history in politics and is experiencing a resurgence recently, used to describe many political developments. In the past it was adopted as a term of pride, but lately it is used as a pejorative. As a result, its meaning has become so muddled that some scholars suggest abandoning the term altogether.

A common framework for interpreting populism is known as the ideational approach: this defines populism as an ideology that presents “the people” as a morally good force and contrasts them against “the elite”, who are portrayed as corrupt and self-serving. Populists differ in how “the people” are defined, but it can be based along class, ethnic, or national lines. Populists typically present “the elite” as comprising the political, economic, cultural, and media establishment, depicted as a homogeneous entity and accused of placing their own interests, and often the interests of other groups—such as large corporations, foreign countries, or immigrants—above the interests of “the people”.
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Other scholars of the social sciences have defined the term populism differently. According to the popular agency definition used by some historians of United States history, populism refers to popular engagement of the population in political decision-making. An approach associated with the political scientist Ernesto Laclau presents populism as an emancipatory social force through which marginalised groups challenge dominant power structures.

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The closing of prisons in the Netherlands

Commenter birgerjohansson was kind enough to send me this interesting article about how the Netherlands is reducing its prison population and closing down some of its prisons and converting them to cultural centers.

The Dutch have seen their prison population decrease by more than 40% over the past 20 years. At the other end of the spectrum, Britain has the highest rate of incarceration in western Europe, and is struggling with an unprecedented prisons crisis. Britain’s minister of prisons, James Timpson, calls the Netherlands a source of inspiration.

Part of this is due to the general reduction in violent crime that has been occurring worldwide. While non-violent crime has not decreased, those crimes provide less of an impetus for incarceration, the negative consequences of which are becoming increasingly apparent.
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Israel is turning northern Gaza into a killing cage

In Gaza, Israel seems intent on violating every single provision of the Geneva Conventions governing the rules of war. It is bombing homes, schools, hospitals, refugee camps, and water and electricity infrastructures. It has gone even further and now seems to be pursuing a policy of deliberately starving the population by blocking aid in the form of food and water from entering the region.

Jeremy Scahill and Sharif Abdel Kouddous write in the invaluable site Drop Site News that Israel has turned Gaza into a killing cage, a war of extermination.

With the full support of the Biden administration, Israel is waging a merciless war of extermination against the 400,000 Palestinians remaining in the northern Gaza Strip as the government of Benjamin Netanyahu is reportedly considering a plan to annex the territory. No food, water, or medicine have entered the north since October 1 as Israeli forces have conducted a campaign of intense airstrikes and ground forces have invaded and encircled much of the area. 

As it orders residents to flee the north, Israel has intensified its attacks on Deir Al-Balah, a city in central Gaza that has not suffered the vast scale of destruction unleashed by Israel in other parts of the Strip. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have fled to the city in recent months. In the early morning hours of Monday, Israel bombed a crowded tent encampment for displaced people on the grounds of Al Aqsa hospital, engulfing civilians in a massive ring of fire. Video from the scene showed patients—some of whom appeared to be in beds attached to IV cords—being burned alive as others in the encampment tried desperately to extinguish the fires with small buckets of water. 
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