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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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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The menace of plastics

I try to be conscientious about recycling. I carefully separate out plastics according to the number embossed on the bottom, putting only those numbers that are wanted by the recycler in the appropriate receptacle. I also recycle aluminum and other metal cans. My building also recently started accepting organic waste for composting, so now food waste goes into a separate container that is periodically emptied into a common bin outside that is collected by the waster disposal company to be composted.

At least I hope it is.

While I do all these things in an effort to contribute in some small away to protecting the planet and reducing greenhouse gases, I sometimes wonder if all this is mere theater, to divert our attention from the real menace to the planet, and that is the manufacturers who churn out plastics and other forms of packaging in massive amounts without thought for the consequences, and to the fossil fuel industries that are responsible for most of the greenhouse gases.
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The ratio of mindless speculation to actual news goes through the roof

There is no question that the shooting at the Trump rally is big news. But it is also a good rule of thumb that in the immediate aftermath of unexpected events like a shooting, the amount of actual factual information available is very small and yet the media feel the need to spend vast amounts of time on it. The inevitable result is that you get huge amounts of mindless blathering as news media try to fill the time without having anything to say.

So you will get reactions from politicians who were nowhere near the scene, from people who were at the scene but did not really see anything, and also the inevitable discussion about what this means for the election, again accompanied by speculations from politicians, political pundits, and ordinary people, none of whom really know anything.

Much of the chatter will be about the possible motives of the shooter, whom the FBI identified as a 20-year old man Thomas Matthew Crooks. They have released his name so people have immediately scoured the internet to find out information using that name, in order to seek a motive that will bolster their preferred narrative. But this is dangerous because few names are unique, though in this case having three names narrows things down, assuming that it is correct. I have often been surprised when searching for someone on the internet to find out how many people have the same name. In addition, inferring motive from biographical data is a practice that has dubious value.

I find it helpful at these times to just tune out the news and occasionally check the headlines to see if anything new has been discovered. It is best to wait until firm information is unearthed before forming any conclusions. In the words of Sherlock Holmes, “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”

The modern corporate university

The horrendous behavior by the Israeli government and military in Gaza, where the Palestinian people have been subjected to bombing on a massive scale as well as being attacked by ground troops, and are the targets of an embargo on aid that has resulted widespread famine and starvation, has led to a spate of protests on university campuses. In some of those campuses, university authorities have responded harshly, with presidents calling in riot police, breaking up encampments, and attacking and arresting protestors, even though in almost all cases the protests were peaceful. As a result, there have been a flurry of no-confidence votes brought by faculty against university presidents.

Ostensibly, university presidents are supposed to represent the interests of members of the university community, namely. faculty, students, and staff. If significant segments of those populations are opposed to them and their actions, whom do they represent?
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Macron’s gamble pays off, sort of

Going into the second round of the elections for the French National Assembly, the right wing National Rally (RN) party led by Marine Le Pen was anticipating coming in first and even gaining an absolute majority of at least 289 seats in the 577-seat body. This was based on their showing in the first round last week when they obtained the most votes and won 38 seats of the 78 that were won outright.

The second round was for the remaining 499 seats in which no candidate obtained the required 50%. But there was a hastily cobbled together agreement between the left wing coalition of the New Popular Front (NFP), consisting of the France Unbowed (LFI) party, the Greens and the Socialists, and the center-right Ensemble coalition led by president Emmanuel Macron, where one of their candidates agree to drop out in three- or more-way races in order to not split the anti-NR vote. That strategy seems to have worked. The final results have the NR and its allies pushed into third place with just 143 seats while the NFP came out on top with 182 and Ensemble came second with 163. Other parties got 89.

There will have to be some kind of coalition to get to 289 seats but Macron is in a bind. While there was a pre-election alliance between the NFP and Ensemble, forming a coalition between two coalitions is going to be hard because despite uniting against the NR, the two coalitions have little in common and outgoing prime minister Gabriel Attal, who is a member of Macron’s coalition, has already said that he will not serve under the premiership of Jean-Luc Melenchon, the head of LFI, the largest party in the NPF.
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