The horror in Gaza and the media bubble in which Israelis live

Following the attacks by Hamas on October 7th that killed 1,200 Israelis and the massive retaliation by Israel that seeks to level Gaza and make it into a moonscape, currently over 23,000 Palestinians have been killed, 70% of whom are women and children. Furthermore, pretty much all of the entire two million population is now displaced and homeless due to the widespread and incessant bombing, and famine is imminent because Israel refuses to allow in adequate levels of humanitarian aid. The sheer scale of the indiscriminate assault and attacks on refugee camps makes laughable the claims by the Israeli government and military that they are targeting only militants. They are clearly seeking to terrorize the entire population of Gaza, destroy the infrastructure, and make life a living hell for the people there.
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Why the Pentagon pays more for less

With regard to the recent troubles with quality and safety of Boeing aircraft, I linked to an article by Andrew Cockburn titled THE MILITARY- INDUSTRIAL VIRUS: How bloated budgets gut our defenses in the June 2019 issue of Harper’s Magazine, where he said that following the merger of Boeing with McDonnell Douglas where the latter defense company basically took over, the long standing wall that separated Boeing’s civilian aircraft division from its military division was breached and the more lackadaisical practices of the military division seeped into the civilian division, resulting in cost overruns, failures to meet schedules, and poor quality.

But the main point of his article was not about Boeing but about how the poor practices in military contracting was built into the system so that companies could gouge the taxpayer while at the same time not providing anywhere near the amount of hardware that had been promised.
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The threat of fentanyl

While I was generally aware that the drug fentanyl was dangerous and causing many deaths among users, it took one particular statistic for me to realize the great extent of the danger posed by it, that it kills nearly 200 people per day (which works out to about 73,000 annually) and is the leading cause of death for people under the age of 45.

Congress is debating a bill to try and deal with this problem but it has been stymied because it is running into the issue of congresspersons using one bill as leverage to get other bills passed, which can result in a stalemate where nothing gets done.

Colloquially referred to as the Fend Off Fentanyl Act, the measure proposes to implement sanctions and anti-money laundering strategies to curb the flow of the potent synthetic opioid, which generally comes into the US after being manufactured in Mexico using Chinese precursor chemicals.
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The Senate banking, housing and urban affairs committee voted to pass the Fend Off Fentanyl Act in June. But, as ABC News reported, US House member Patrick McHenry blocked it from inclusion in the National Defense Authorization Act as part of an unsuccessful effort by McHenry, a North Carolina Republican, to get his own cryptocurrency measure added to the NDAA.

While one can hope that this bill manages to reduce the impact of this drug by tackling the supply side, the widespread overuse of opioids such as these points to an even greater problem on the demand side, that so many people seem to have become addicted this drug, well beyond therapeutic needs. That could be much more difficult to deal with.

The benefits and risks of DNA testing of ancestry

I know many people who have taken advantage of DNA testing to find out information about their ancestry. I have not been tempted to do so because I am not interested in what percentage of my ancestry comes from various parts of the globe. Since I grew up in an island where my known ancestors also lived, I suspect that one would have o go back quite far to find traces of ancestors from other parts of the world. Even then, and even if there are surprises, I am not sure what I would do with that information. But I can understand why it might appeal to some in the US where people come from all over the world and have ancestors who were fairly recent arrivals, say within the last 200 years, and seem to have great curiosity about their ancestry. Thus they might find interesting tidbits.
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Deja vu all over again?

In a move that did not get too much attention in the news, 13 Republicans members of the hard right caucus voted with 203 Democrats to defeat by 216-203 an effort to ‘pass the rule’ for three Republican bills to be brought to the floor, thus stymying their speaker Mike Johnson. Without the rule being passed, Johnson will need a ⅔ majority. (In a post back in November, I explained what this procedural stuff is all about.)

Why did they do this? Apparently they are unhappy with the deal that Johnson made with the White House and the Democratic leadership over the spending bills for the budget, because it did not contain all the measures they sought. I can understand the frustration of the hard right caucus. As Kevin Drum writes, the framework of the deal that Johnson agreed to is pretty much the same that former speaker Kevin McCarthy agreed to with the White House eight months ago.
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Trump spoke at his trial after all

The lawyer for serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) asked the judge for permission for SSAT to speak for two or three minutes during closing arguments and the judge asked “Do you promise to just comment on the facts and the law?”. But then SSAT immediately started speaking without answering and did his usual rigamarole about this being a persecution by the prosecution and the judge. SSAT spoke for five minutes before the judge cut him off.

I am not sure what the point of this was other than for SSAT to let off steam. After all, there was no jury to convince. All it does is further tick off the judge who is going to make the final determination of the size of the penalty.

Trump’s planned courtroom antics foiled by judge

Yesterday we saw another attempt by serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) to turn the legal system into a circus. All witness testimony in the fraud trial involving his business enterprises that was brought by the attorney general of the state of New York Letitia James, and which is being conducted in a Manhattan courthouse presided over by judge Arthur Engoron, is over and all that remains is the summing up by the two sides. Note that Engoron had already ruled that the documentary evidence had established fraud and this trial was to determine the size of the penalty. James had initially asked for $250 million and then raised it to $370 million.

SSAT said that he wanted to give his side’s closing argument, in addition to his attorneys. I do not think that this was because he thought his attorneys were incompetent, although they apparently forgot to check the box at the beginning that asked for a jury trial and thus this was a bench trial to be judged exclusively by the judge. That did not prevent SSAT from repeatedly whining how he was being deprived of his constitutional right to be tried by a jury even though that right has to be requested and he did not do so. I think that he may have not wanted to have a jury at all, anticipating that he would lose and thinking that it would be easier to argue that the judge was biased against him rather than a jury.
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Covid-19 cases are on the rise again

Covid cases are on the rise again in the US, fueled by a new variant known as JN.1. Since many people now test at home, health officials are using wastewater to get measures of its prevalence.

The variant is linked to about 60% of new cases, according to CDC data. A member of the omicron family, JN.1 is descended from the BA.2.86 variant. Its most notable new mutation changes the spike protein that latches onto cells, enhancing its ability to evade our immunity. But even if JN.1 is more skilled at dodging antibodies from previous infections and vaccinations, it is not entirely resistant to them.

A recent study of disease spread found that length of exposure was the biggest factor in transmission. A team led by University of Oxford researchers found that 82% of cases were acquired from exposures that lasted longer than one hour.

Despite COVID’s omnipresence, the chance of hospitalization and death is unmistakably lower than in previous years. The number of people in California hospitals with COVID grew to about 2,000 by the end of December, half of last winter’s peak, and just a tenth of the record high.

But the nebulous threat of developing what is known as long COVID remains, and millions across the United States have already experienced it.

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Tidy mouse

A man in Wales, UK has found that a mouse tidies up the stuff in his shed every night.

 After regularly discovering that things from the night before had been mysteriously tidied, he set up a night vision camera on his workbench.

It captured a mouse picking up clothes pegs, corks, nuts and bolts.
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The 75-year-old from Builth Wells, Powys, said the tidying ritual had been going on for two months.

“At first I noticed that some food that I was putting out for the birds was ending up in some old shoes I was storing in the shed,” he said.

“Ninety nine times out of 100 the mouse will tidy up throughout the night.

No word on if the mouse is taking on new clients whose sheds need cleaning.

The decline of Boeing

Problems keep mounting for the Boeing aircraft company. In 2019, there were two crashes in quick succession of the new Boeing 737 Max aircraft that killed 346 people and resulted in the entire fleet of that model being grounded from March 2019 to November 2020 for investigations and to fix the problem.

Investigations faulted a Boeing cover-up of a defect and lapses in the FAA’s certification of the aircraft for flight. The accidents and grounding cost Boeing an estimated $20 billion in fines, compensation and legal fees as of 2020, with indirect losses of more than $60 billion from 1,200 cancelled orders. In 2021, Boeing also paid US$2.5 billion in penalties and compensation to settle the DOJ’s fraud conspiracy case against the company. Further investigations also revealed that the FAA and Boeing had colluded on recertification test flights, attempted to cover up important information and that the FAA had retaliated against whistleblowers.

Then last week, a panel of the fuselage ripped out of a brand new 737 Max plane operated by Alaskan Airways just after it took off and was ascending to cruising altitude. Fortunately there were no casualties and the plane landed safely but the fleet was grounded again to see what might be the problem.
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