"We’ve shown for the first time that the front of the brain arises from a totally different progenitor cell than the back of the brain."

"Our discovery means that we can now grow neurons from the back of the brain, the hindbrain, in a petri dish and study their functions."

Said professor of developmental biology Kyle Loh, quoted in "Brain made up of two distinct organs evolving independently/Scientists have discovered the brain is made of separate systems, solving a longstanding riddle and aiding research into conditions like motor neurone disease" (London Times).

It's so convenient I feel skeptical. What wouldn't be ethical becomes ethical. 

"And a few women describe the experience of 'leg hair harassment' or a term coined online as 'sunehara,' referring to the discomfort of being forced to see their colleague's leg hair."

From "Tokyo urges men to wear shorts to work, but some women say it's 'leg hair harassment'" (BBC).

Akifumi Funatsu, the director of Gorilla Clinic, says he has noticed more clients coming to the clinic not just for cosmetic reasons, but as a matter of "social etiquette when wearing shorts." He thinks women believe that "men should have less leg hair," which has prompted them to seek laser hair removal so as not to offend those around them.

Gorilla Clinic — I get it. A man is a gorilla if he's hairy. The BBC is reporting on a survey taken by this men's hair-removal business. Who came up with this idea that it's "harassment" to have to see a man's hairy legs in the office? I'm skeptical. It's just aesthetics. 

Anyway, as long as I'm talking about men in shorts, here's some video from the AC/DC concert last Sunday at Camp Randall, the UW football stadium a few blocks from our house. It was kind of funny to be lying in bed, falling asleep and hearing the live performance, which was pretty quiet by the time it reached our house:

A phrase I didn't think I'd ever heard used as a slur turns out to have been slung as slur in the most important movie in the history of this blog.

Remember the post from a few days ago about the lawsuit involving a woman who allegedly bared her chest and said "I bet your little Asian, fish head wife doesn’t have these cannons." I didn't believe anyone would say that, in part because I didn't recognize "fish head" as a standard slur.

But now I see that I had heard it before, because I'd seen the movie "Gran Torino." Twice. In fact, "Gran Torino" is the most important movie in the history of this blog. Click the tag — "Gran Torino" — and start at the bottom, the earliest post, to relive the movie's interweaving with my life story. 

I've updated the old post now, based on this email from a reader: "In the Clint Eastwood Movie Gran Torino, there is a scene where he is invited to party by the girl he has befriended. The party is next door and everyone (except Eastwood) is Hmong. Eastwood makes a reference to them as 'Fish Heads.'"

Here's the scene:

"[Melinda] French Gates has said she met Epstein once and found him so repugnant that she had nightmares afterwards."

"I ask what had so chilled her. Her demeanour changes rapidly. She looks as if she is about to cry. It is upsetting to witness a woman of such unusual self-possession suddenly lose her poise. She turns away, to look at the lake outside her window, and I can see her attempt to compose herself."

I'm reading "'Have you ever been around someone you just know is evil?' Melinda French Gates on meeting Jeffrey Epstein, giving away billions, and her post-divorce peace," by Sophie McBain in The Guardian and my incredulity is sky high.

You can see her attempt to compose herself? I'm not looking at her. I'm just reading your words. But what I see is some phony-baloney acting. And silly writing. Which continues:

“My heart is racing,” she says after a moment, fluttering her hand over her chest.

Fluttering her hand over her chest? Really? This sounds like a comical drag performance of femininity. I'd like to turn away and look at a lake, but I keep reading:

"[A]n army of fans [are] now competing to produce the catchiest and most outrageous videos supporting [Spencer Pratt's] campaign."

"They share and cross-promote a seemingly endless stream of computer-generated clips boosting Mr. Pratt and bashing his opponents with depictions of Los Angeles as a dirty, dangerous wasteland. One released on Sunday depicts women at a fitness studio confiding to one another that they secretly plan to vote for Mr. Pratt.... [T]he A.I. videos often venture into offensive territory. In the Batman clip boosting Mr. Pratt, Mr. Newsom’s likeness makes a crude sexual remark, and the phony Ms. Harris drinks out of a bottle of cheap liquor...."

From "A.I. Videos Help Reality TV Antagonist Break Through in L.A. Mayor’s Race/Supporters have created A.I. videos to boost the mayoral campaign of Spencer Pratt, the former MTV star. Some videos have gone viral, but it’s not clear whether they will yield votes" (NYT).

The phrase "the phony Ms. Harris" genuinely confused me. For a second there, I thought the NYT was calling Kamala Harris — the real Kamala Harris — phony. No, they were using the word "phony" to mean A.I.-generated.

"It turns out that the United States and Israel went into the conflict with a particular and very surprising someone in mind: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad..."

So it says here in "Early War Goal Was to Install Hard-Line Former President as Iran’s Leader/An Israeli strike designed to free Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from house arrest in Tehran, U.S. officials said, was part of an effort to bring about regime change and put him in power" (NYT)(gift link).

To say that Mr. Ahmadinejad was an unusual choice would be a vast understatement. While he had increasingly clashed with the regime’s leaders and had been placed under close watch by the Iranian authorities, he was known during his term as president, from 2005 to 2013, for his calls to “wipe Israel off the map.” He was a strong supporter of Iran’s nuclear program, a fierce critic of the United States and known for violently cracking down on internal dissent.

It seems incredible. And, we're told, it "quickly went awry."

Mr. Ahmadinejad was injured on the war’s first day by an Israeli strike at his home in Tehran that had been designed to free him from house arrest, the American officials and an associate of Mr. Ahmadinejad said. He survived the strike, they said, but after the near miss he became disillusioned with the regime change plan. He has not been seen publicly since then and his current whereabouts and condition are unknown.

Why are we hearing about this now? Is this disinformation?

Did Epstein write that "suicide note"?

You can read the text at the NYT article, "Purported Epstein Suicide Note Is Released/A federal judge released the note, which Jeffrey Epstein’s former cellmate said he found in a graphic novel. The New York Times has not authenticated that Mr. Epstein wrote it."

"They investigated me for month — FOUND NOTHING!!!” the note begins, adding that the result was charges going back many years.

“It is a treat to be able to choose one’s time to say goodbye,” the note continued.

“Watcha want me to do — Bust out cryin!!” the note reads.

“NO FUN," it concludes, with those words underlined. “NOT WORTH IT!!”

My initial take, on that text alone, was that doesn't sound like what he would write, but then what do I know about the writing style of Jeffrey Epstein? I haven't been reading his emails, and the NYT points to a 2016 email of his that says "whtchoo want me todo -- bust out cryin" — and what can I say? Do you want to talk about the "Watcha"/"whtchoo" discrepancy? Are you struck by the word-for-word repetition of a 7 or 8 word phrase? But which way are you struck? Are you thinking, yes, that's Jeffrey or somebody swiped a phrase to make it look like Jeffrey? But who?

ADDED: Why can't we be told which graphic novel Jeffrey Epstein had there in his cell to read? I invited Grok to guess — remember, it was the summer of 2019 — and this is what I got:

"The sense that the Dream is dying was reflected throughout the poll."

The London Times explains, in "The American Dream is dying, Times poll reveals."

Perhaps this graph will make the concept more concrete for you:

In case you're having trouble discerning the year when that peak of excellence occurred, the text pinpoints it at 1976. Perhaps you remember. It was 50 years ago. The Bicentennial. Jimmy Carter defeated Gerald Ford. Karen Ann Quinlan was disconnected from her ventilator. A school bus full of children was buried in the ground but the kids dug themselves free, in 16 hours. Jenner won the Decathlon. Apple and Microsoft sprang into being. How could you not feel that happy days were here again?

"Lauren Sánchez Bezos... and [Jeff] Bezos do everything together. On a typical day, the newlyweds wake up around 6 in their new, roughly $230 million compound on Indian Creek..."

"... an exclusive private island in Miami.... They don’t touch their phones. Instead, they begin each day by listing 10 things they’re grateful for — and they can’t repeat what they named the day before. From there, the couple drink their morning coffee in a sunroom and watch the sun rise: hers from a mug that reads 'Woke Up Sexy as Hell Again,' his from one she got him that spells HUNK in symbols from the periodic table. They play pickleball. Six days a week, they work out for an hour with a private trainer. 'He looks good, doesn’t he?' Mrs. Sánchez Bezos said of her new husband, in an interview in Miami in January. She slow-nodded, repeating, 'He looks good.'"

For some reason the NYT has a long article about Lauren Sánchez Bezos. It's called, inanely, "Someone Has to Be Happy. Why Not Lauren Sánchez Bezos? As half of an unfathomably powerful couple, Mrs. Sánchez Bezos seems to have influenced the uber-rich to stop apologizing, and start enjoying themselves."

I skimmed most of the article, but I'm blogging it because I can't imagine someone with all the money drinking coffee from a mug that says "Woke Up Sexy as Hell Again" and making her husband drink from a cup marked "HUNK." And, sorry, I just don't believe "they begin each day by listing 10 things they’re grateful for" — whether they allow themselves to repeat items or not. Supposedly, you wake up sexy, and then you do the 10-things list, which is more like a New Age religion substitute, and just not sexy at all, even if you're listing things like I'm thankful I'm so sexy, I'm thankful my husband is sexy, I'm thankful I wake up sexy, I'm thankful I know how to derive multiple thankfulness items from the concept that I am sexy, I'm thankful for the sexiness with which I woke up yesterday, I'm thankful for pickleball, I'm thankful my husband is the third richest man in the world, I'm thankful for the New York Times, I'm thankful for our unfathomable power, and I'm thankful to have reached #10 on our daily thankfulness list.

"Did this really happen?"

I asked Grok about this, a sentimental story about a stolen mail-truck getting reconfigured into a library and parked permanently in the forest.

Grok was all: "Yes, this story really happened—it's based on a genuine (and pretty wholesome) incident in Montana.... This matches real-world reports of the event.... It's the kind of charming, low-key tale that spreads because it's quirky and heartwarming...."

I said, "I was going to call bullshit on that. What does that say about me?"

Grok: "It says you're a healthy skeptic..." etc. etc.

Me: "How do you know I'm not a diseased skeptic?"

I didn't read Grok's long answer. I said: "Blah blah blah. You should have just said I'm such a healthy skeptic I'm even healthily skeptical about whether I'm a healthy skeptic."

IN THE COMMENTS: tim maguire wants to know, "Do we stop caring about the theft because it has books in it?" I say, "I'll ask Grok to write a murder mystery where the murderer hollows out the torso and installs a couple shelves and lines up some classic novels — murder mysteries. When the body is discovered, it's deemed so damned sweet that the death is chalked up as natural causes."

Grok complies:

"Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop truck 1. Stop."

How does this happen?

"Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there."

"But the distances between solar systems are so great that the chances we’ve been visited by aliens is low, and I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!"

I'm reading "Aliens are ‘real,’ Obama says, as Washington shrugs/The former president appeared to confirm decades-old conspiracy theories, but then he walked back his podcast comments" (WaPo).

And so I feel vindicated in putting "Obama and the aliens" on yesterday's "5 things I've been finding unbloggable."

I'm blogging it now because the new news confirms the unbloggability of the original story, which was that Obama had said “They’re real, but I haven’t seen them." That sounded, to some people, as though he might have information that we don't have. But he didn't. He was just doing that utterly banal thing of deducing that there must be aliens because the universe is so darned huge. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I'm not impressed by that reasoning: "I don’t even believe there are aliens out there anywhere."

Anyway, here's Obama, getting people who are not me excited and then making it clear that he was just bullshitting in the universe-huge-must-be-aliens-somewhere way that just about everyone else does:

Why is Gallup suddenly giving up on presidential-approval polling?

I'm reading "Gallup to stop tracking presidential approval ratings after 88 years/Public opinion polling agency says decision 'solely based on Gallup’s research goals and priorities'" (The Guardian).

The company said on Wednesday that it would stop measuring the favorability rating of individual political figures, which “reflects an evolution in how Gallup focuses its public research and thought leadership,” after 88 years. “Our commitment is to long-term, methodologically sound research on issues and conditions that shape people’s lives”....

Do we believe that? I should take a poll, but my polls are not methodologically sound research. Are Gallup's? I can't help suspecting that Gallup has been trying to undermine Trump and it's worried about being called to account.

As The Guardian notes, Trump is litigious. Just last month he wrote: "The Times Siena Poll, which is always tremendously negative to me, especially just before the Election of 2024, where I won in a Landslide, will be added to my lawsuit against The Failing New York Times."

The threat of litigation alone may have cowed Gallup, but the threat is particularly scary if you really have been rigging the polls. To quit your long practice — 88 years! — of polling on presidential popularity makes you look as though you don't believe in the soundness of your own methods. Another possibility is that you're finding sound methods impossible, perhaps because people who like Trump don't talk to pollsters too much anymore.

"Tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson — he of the 'don’t die' motto — is particularly obsessed with the ways his penis might help him live forever."

"The data Johnson collects on his johnson includes ejaculate volume (just over a half teaspoon, apparently double the norm), sperm count and motility, and nighttime erection quality, which he then compares with his teenage son. His regimen to keep his penis in tip-top shape includes shockwave therapy and Botox injections. He’s not alone. Dave Asprey, the self-proclaimed father of the biohacking movement and the founder of Bulletproof Coffee, plans to live to 180. He treats his penis to injections of stem cells and acoustic wave therapy. For the latter, he helpfully suggests a DIY version: 'Grab the cock and slap it against your leg on the left 67 times,' he said on his podcast, The Human Upgrade. 'And then on the right… And you lightly slap the balls…The shock waves stimulate the cells. All of those are good for testosterone and good for enhancing what’s called male energy.'"

From "Longevity Science’s Penis Fixation Has an Extensive, Strange History/Biohackers like Bryan Johnson and Dave Asprey can’t stop talking about their genitalia—and neither could these 20th-century pseudoscientists" (Vanity Fair).

"Unlike anything ever done or seen before!"

Link.

"Of all the genres of unsatisfying nonfiction, books by Supreme Court Justices may be at the top of the heap."

"One subset is the memoir that focusses on the Justice’s early life, ending before confirmation. Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s 'My Beloved World,' Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s 'Lovely One,' and Justice Clarence Thomas’s 'My Grandfather’s Son' are examples. These can be gripping narratives and helpful to understanding a Justice’s formative years, but by definition they omit what readers most want to know: what the Justice did on the Court and why she did it. Another category is the learned disquisition on the law, as in Justice Neil Gorsuch’s 'A Republic, If You Can Keep It' and Justice Stephen Breyer’s 'Reading the Constitution.' These, too, fall short of readers’ hopes, for the simple reason that the authors resist any temptation to rule and tell. They write about their understanding of the law and the judicial process, but when it comes to their dealings with colleagues they remain resolutely circumspect. Barrett’s book is a mashup of the two forms: memoir and personal reflection are interlaced with explanations of legal doctrine. (Her grandmother’s unwritten recipe for shrimp remoulade provides a jumping-off point for discussing the benefits of a written constitution: 'Unwritten constitutions, like unwritten recipes, can be hard to pin down.')"

Writes Ruth Marcus, in "How the Supreme Court Defines Liberty/Recent memoirs by the Justices reveal how a new vision of restraint has led to radical outcomes" (The New Yorker).

This definitely gets my "unread books" tag (though I did read, a blog about, "My Grandfather's Son"). 

Marcus gives the Justices credit for writing "about their understanding of the law," but do they? How could they really?

Here's my old post "What I really think about the Clarence Thomas book" (from October 2007). I sort of "live-blogged" my reading of that book, and along the way, I was "accused both of fawning over him and of obsessively hating him," but, I said:

The Epstein Files Transparency Act "requires the Department of Justice (DOJ) to publish (in a searchable and downloadable format) all unclassified records, documents, communications..."

"... and investigative materials in DOJ's possession that relate to the investigation and prosecution of Jeffrey Epstein. This includes (1) materials that relate to Ghislaine Maxwell, (2) flight logs and travel records, and (3) individuals named or referenced (including government officials) in connection with the investigation and prosecution of Jeffrey Epstein. DOJ is permitted to withhold certain information such as the personal information of victims and materials that would jeopardize an active federal investigation."

Says the summary of the bill the House passed today, 427-1.

I'm skeptical about statements like this (from the NYT): "The House on Tuesday approved a bill directing the Justice Department to release all files related to its investigation into the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, in a near-unanimous vote that was a stunning turn for an effort that Republicans had worked for months to kill."

All files?

"It remained unclear how soon any concrete steps to end the conflict might be taken, however."

Key line in "Israel Says It Will Work With Trump Gaza Plan; Hamas Says It Will Release Hostages/Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel was ready to work with the White House to end the war, but questions remain about Hamas’s future in Gaza and whether it will agree to disarm" (NYT).

Trump delivered an ultimatum. The response was we don't want it to be an ultimatum. 

Facebook keeps pushing this meme at me — a quote from Willie Nelson, supposedly referencing Charlie Kirk.

"If you want people to have kind words when you pass, you should say kind words when you’re alive." And then, it says "After facing backlash, Willie Nelson added: 'And I’ll stand behind this. Be kind, now more than ever."

That didn't sound right. Do most people just believe these stories that are stuck in between posts from actual friends and family? My basic reaction is to scroll quickly past anything that has a celebrity commenting about another celebrity, but for this one, because Facebook kept serving it to me, I went to Grok for a fact check. Was this quote in any actual news sources?

"Those who own land would be offered a digital token by the trust in exchange for rights to redevelop their property, to be used to finance a new life elsewhere..."

"... or eventually redeemed for an apartment in one of six to eight new 'AI-powered, smart cities' to be built in Gaza. Each Palestinian who chooses to leave would be given a $5,000 cash payment and subsidies to cover four years of rent elsewhere, as well as a year of food. The plan estimates that every individual departure from Gaza would save the trust $23,000, compared with the cost of temporary housing and what it calls 'life support' services in the secure zones for those who stay.... [T]he trust plan 'does not rely on donations,' the prospectus says. Instead, it would be financed by public and private-sector investment in what it calls 'mega-projects,' from electric vehicle plants and data centers to beach resorts and high-rise apartments. Calculations included in the plan envision a nearly fourfold return on a $100 billion investment after 10 years, with ongoing 'self-generating' revenue streams...."

From "Gaza postwar plan envisions ‘voluntary’ relocation of entire population/The Trump administration and international partners are discussing proposals to build a 'Riviera of the Middle East' on the rubble of Gaza. One would establish U.S. control and pay Palestinians to leave" (WaPo).

What is the token worth? The plan says when the rebuilding is done, the token may be exchanged for a new 1,800-square-foot apartments worth $75,000 — right in this alien, gleaming place, rebuilt in the style of your enemy. Will the returnees gratefully toil in the new restaurants and hotels or will they see an opportunity for a glorious new era of destruction?