"Literally mutilating animals. Mutilating animals in demented studies that are like the worst thing you could possibly imagine from a horror show...."

"Some really some psychotic stuff that happens. So yeah, I mean the, I guess the, the, the, the real threat here is to the bureaucracy. So like, you probably saw like, you know, let's say, like, Trump as a threat to our democracy, which is ironic since he was elected with the majority of the, you know, popular vote. They, they started saying I was a threat to democracy. But if you, if you just replace threat to democracy with threat to bureaucracy, it makes total sense. Right. So, I mean, the reality is that our elected officials have very, very little power relative to the bureaucracy until DOGE. So DOGE is a threat to the bureaucracy. It's the first threat to the bureaucracy. Normally the bureaucracy eats revolutions for breakfast. This is the first time that they're not, that the revolution might actually succeed. That we could restore power to the people instead of power to the bureaucracy."

Said Elon Musk, on the Joe Rogan podcast last week.

I was re-listening to that because the part about "mutilating animals" and "the worst thing you can possibly imagine from a horror show" got quoted in this new article at Yahoo News, "Trump said the US spent $8m on transgender mice – he was right."

In his big speech last Tuesday, Trump spoke of "$8 million for making mice transgender," and anti-Trump media called him out, but a fact-check of the fact-check seems to have established that Trump got it right.

"His basement, his garage, and his dorm room were the centers of the action where drugs were available..."

"... and he enjoyed showing off how he put baby chickens and mice in the blender to feed his hawks. It was often a perverse scene of despair and violence.... Bobby preys on the desperation of parents of sick children — vaccinating his own children while building a following by hypocritically discouraging other parents from vaccinating theirs.... Bobby continues to grandstand off my father’s assassination, and that of his own father...."

Wrote Caroline Kennedy, about RFK Jr., quoted in "Caroline Kennedy Urges Senators to Reject Her Cousin’s Nomination/In a harsh letter to lawmakers considering Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination for health secretary, Ms. Kennedy called her cousin unfit for the job and a 'predator' who led family members to addiction" (NYT).

"Commit great poems to heart, starting with those by Gerard Manley Hopkins and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Recite them aloud on solitary walks."

"Recite them aloud on solitary walks. Compose dirty limericks in your head. Read more for pleasure, less for purpose. Read, immediately, Marguerite Yourcenar’s 'Memoirs of Hadrian.' Imitate the writers or artists you most admire; you’ll find your own voice and style in all the ways your imitation falls short. Don’t post self-indulgent glam shots of yourself on Instagram, and please stop photographing your damn meals... Make only enough money so that you don’t have to think about it much.... Never join a cause if you aren’t fully familiar with the argument against it. Heed the words of Rabbi Hillel: 'Where there are no men, be thou a man.' Or woman...."

Says Bret Stephens, recounting what he said in a commencement address, in a conversation with Gail Collins, in the NYT.

Collins reacts: "That’s pretty damn good.... But I’m not going to go so far as to suggest student protesting is a bad or silly idea." Yeah, I guess students are never fully familiar with the argument against their cause.

Strange deviation or the norm?

clean the chili peppers
by u/BigfootDynamite in Wellthatsucks

What do you really know about any of your food?

"Yes, ban the office cakes. Obviously.... I have been campaigning [against obesity] for more than 20 years...."

"And all I have met is anger, abuse and accusations of 'fat-shaming.' From the right, because I seem to be after restricting people’s right to choose how they live; and from the left because, since obesity disproportionately affects the poor, I must be motivated by class hatred and snobbery.... I have moved on from any notion I might once have had about personal culpability and now hold the government and 'big sugar' (which pulled a nefarious con on the public by repositioning sugar as 'energy' when it is, in fact, sloth, weakness and depression) entirely responsible. Which is why I am with [ chairwoman of the Food Standards Agency, Professor Susan Jebb] all the way in calling on people to stop buying this poisonous shite in pretty packaging and forcing it into their ailing colleagues like corn down the diseased gullet of a Perigord goose. An unrelated story in The Times on Wednesday celebrated a new wonder-drug proven to prolong the lives of mice, inspiring the dream... that it might work on humans. But do you know what is also proven to prolong the life of mice? Severe calorie restriction. Cut their intake by a third and they live up to 40 per cent longer. Before we plough billions into yet more drugs, shouldn’t we at least give that a go?"

Writes Giles Coren in "Cake debate is no laughing matter — seriously/Snigger at comparisons with passive smoking if you must, but only if you’re blind to the scale of our obesity crisis" (London Times). 

"The only way [oak trees are] going to move with the shifting temperatures is with the animals... Will personality affect that? Will there be individuals who are more likely to help?"

Said biology student Ivy Yen, quoted in "Meet the Mice Who Make the Forest/Scientists are unearthing a quiet truth about the woods: Where trees grow, or don’t, depends in part on the quirky decisions of small mammals" (NYT).

Although researchers already studied the ways that animals move seeds across landscapes, the possible role of their personalities had gone largely unexamined.

Oh, my! I've got 14 tonight! Let me know which TikTok videos won you over this time.

1. The mouse is going to eat your food, so why not embrace reality and construct a cheeseboard for the little darling.

2. Painting the one who says "I am too ugly to be painted."

3. So you say girls don't have hobbies?

4. The awesome high dive.

5. "Michigan is the Texas of the Midwest," etc.

6. How to deflect passive aggression.

7. The Jesus miracle nobody talks about.

8. The little girl has serious problems with the family dog and the family decor.

9. Sticker review suddenly becomes a phone-camera review.

10. The scar experiment.

11. Stand in awe of your ability to retain fat.

12. When you're in the mood to eat a wicker chair, what should you eat?

13. How exactly did kale become a thing?

14. Instant Karma Karen.

"[R]esearchers... gathered 40 young, healthy, male mice. Then, using electrical stimulation of the animals’ lower legs to contract their calf muscles repeatedly..."

"... they simulated, in effect, a prolonged, exhausting and ultimately muscle-ripping leg day at the gym.... [T]hey gathered muscle samples from some animals immediately after their simulated exertions and then strapped tiny ice packs onto the legs of about half of the mice, while leaving the rest unchilled. The scientists continued to collect muscle samples from members of both groups of mice every few hours and then days after their pseudo-workout, for the next two weeks. Then they microscopically scrutinized all of the tissues, with a particular focus on what might be going on with inflammatory cells.... They... noted, in the tissue that had not been iced, a rapid muster of pro-inflammatory cells. Within hours, these cells began busily removing cellular debris, until, by the third day after the contractions, most of the damaged fibers had been cleared away. At that point, anti-inflammatory cells showed up, together with specialized muscle cells that rebuild tissue, and by the end of two weeks, these muscles appeared fully healed. Not so in the iced muscle, where recovery seemed markedly delayed....."

From "Ice for Sore Muscles? Think Again. Icing muscles after strenuous exercise is not just ineffective, it could be counterproductive, a new study in mice suggests" (NYT).

Lots of the comments over there object to the cruelty to the mice.

"There's a statue in Russia..."

What a great way to show them some respect from r/nextfuckinglevel

“When you think of wildlife photography, do you see mice brawling on a dirty London Underground platform?”

An unusual choice for the win, on view at NPR.

Sunrise at 7:07 (actual sunrise time today, 7:01).

This morning, stepping onto my path, I startled an owl that had perched nearby, about to feast on a mouse (or was it a vole?). He swooped down and flew across my path — with that rodent draped from its beak — and up into the woods — in search, no doubt, of a more private breakfast nook.

At the Fog Mouse Cafe...

... it all seems so hazy.

Democratic Congressman Steve Cohen likens Ilhan Omar (and other colleagues) to cats — saying, "The cats have to understand who provides the water and kibble and cleans the litter."

I'm reading "'Like herding cats': Pelosi struggles to unify Democrats after painful fight over anti-Semitism" (WaPo).

I know Steve Cohen is wielding the old cliché, It's like herding cats, but I thought it was completely unacceptable these days to equate persons of color with animals. (Ask Roseanne.) And look how bad this is:

“Being a speaker — especially on the Democratic side — is like herding cats,” said Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.). “. . . The cats have to understand who provides the water and kibble and cleans the litter. Once the cats understand that, it’ll get better.”

He's emphasizing the physical functions — including excretion — and he's subtly threatening Omar and others. It would be crude to just come out and say, She needs to know her place and not speak so loudly and forcibly, but Cohen goes beyond that. He visualizes her as a cat, and, within that visualization, verbal expression becomes eating and defecating. Omar is brusquely informed that she'll be treated like an animal, disciplined by depriving her of her bodily needs, until she "understands" who's in charge here. That's demeaning. And it's revealing. Is that how you think about power?

"Like herding cats" was once a fresh enough notion to be funny, but it's a corny cliché these days. Its triteness is probably why Cohen felt comfortable calling Omar an animal. But he didn't glide past it. He stopped for the full visualization, complete with water and food bowls and a litter box. He meant to demean and diminish — in an offhanded, folksy-cutesy way.

When was this expression new, I wonder? The (unlinkable) OED traces it to the mid-80s:

transitive. colloquial (orig. and chiefly U.S.). to herd cats: used in similative expressions to suggest the unwieldiness or unfeasibility of an undertaking, esp. a managerial or organizational task, as like herding cats ( as hard as herding cats, etc.): extremely difficult to accomplish; unmanageable, futile.

1986 National Jrnl. 3 May 1062 Yerxa will have to continue to juggle the divergent views of the subcommittee members, a task he said ‘can be like trying to herd cats’.
1988 MIS Q. 12 65 At a recent academic meeting, an academic administrator stated that managing an academic department was akin to herding cats.

I was also curious about how Muslims regard cats. This felt important as I tried to assess the severity of the insult to Omar. Here: Wikipedia has an article, "Islam and cats":

The domestic cat is a revered animal in Islam. Admired for its cleanliness as well as for being loved by the Islamic prophet Muhammad, the cat is considered "the quintessential pet" by Muslims...

One of Muhammad's companions was known as Abu Hurairah (literally: "Father of the Kitten") for his attachment to cats. Abu Hurairah claimed that he had heard Muhammad declare that a woman went to Hell for starving a female kitten and not providing her with any water.... According to legend, Abu Hurairah's cat saved Muhammad from a snake. In gratitude, Muhammad stroked the cat's back and forehead, thus blessing all cats with the righting reflex. The stripes some cats have on their foreheads are believed to mark the touch of Muhammad's fingers.

The American poet and travel author Bayard Taylor (1825–1878) was astonished when he discovered a Syrian hospital where cats roamed freely.... Edward William Lane (1801–1876), a British Orientalist who resided in Cairo, described a cat garden originally endowed by the 13th-century Egyptian sultan Baibars, whose European contemporaries held a very different attitude towards cats, eating them or killing them under papal decrees.... [C]ats were valued by the paper-based Arab-Islamic cultures for preying on mice that destroyed books. For that reason, cats are often depicted in paintings alongside Islamic scholars and bibliophiles. The medieval Egyptian zoologist Al-Damiri (1344–1405) wrote that the first cat was created when God caused a lion to sneeze, after animals on Noah's Ark complained of mice.

Trying to answer the question "How small a hole can a mouse get through?"

"What Happens When a Science Fiction Genius Starts Blogging?"

The New Republic asks (on the occasion of Ursula K. Le Guin's publication of a book collecting selections from her blog):

For Le Guin, imaginative fiction is not “escapist” in the usual, derogatory sense, but in a different, subversive sense: “The direction of escape is toward freedom,” she notes. “So what is ‘escapism’ an accusation of?”

Now, at 87, Le Guin has stopped writing fiction. She continues to blog, and she has found ways to pursue a similar subversive mission in the new medium.

On the blog, Le Guin’s scope is somewhat narrower. A running theme is the life of her cat, Pard. Between each of No Time to Spare’s four topical sections are essays entitled “Annals of Pard.” Devoting such time and interest to the observation of a cat might seem to represent the commonest impulses both of internet culture and old age; but, as always, Le Guin wades into her new genre to deepen and expand it. When Pard brings her a living mouse... and drops it on her bed in the night, her solution is to lock them together in the kitchen until the mouse disappears (whether through elusion or ingestion, she doesn’t know). She reflects on the ethical implications and possible reasons for her resistance to intervention....

“A lot of younger people, seeing the reality of old age as entirely negative, see acceptance of age as negative,” she writes. “Wanting to deal with old people in a positive spirit, they’re led to deny old people their reality. ... ‘You’re only as old as you think you are!’” She scoffs at this attitude and points out its logical and moral problems. Unlike capitalism and patriarchy, the illusion* surrounding old age is that it is an illusion:

Encouragement by denial, however well-meaning, backfires. Fear is seldom wise and never kind. Who is it you’re cheering up, anyhow? Is it really the geezer? To tell me my old age doesn’t exist is to tell me I don’t exist. Erase my age, you erase my life—me.

Age, she insists, makes one a “diminished thing.” Likewise, a blog does not possess the same artistic or persuasive power as a novel; reading about Le Guin’s cat will not change your life, the way that reading about her strange, freer worlds might. Blog posts are short, topical, and often polemical in a narrow way....

But even in a diminished form of writing,** the spirit of Le Guin’s work remains...

Here's the blog No Time to Spare and here's the book "No Time to Spare." (And here is another collection of blog posts, "The Notebooks," by the Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago. Saramago took up blogging when he was in his 80s, and this inspired Le Guin.)
____________________

* Illusion... not to be confused with elusion.

** A diminished form of writing... That makes me feel a little bad, bad enough to play a diminished 7th chord:

"Whenever one wanted to express pain, excitement, anger, or some other strong feeling – there we find, almost exclusively, the diminished seventh chord. So it is in the music of Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Weber, etc. Even in Wagner’s early works it plays the same role. But soon the role was played out. This uncommon, restless, undependable guest, here today, gone tomorrow, settled down, became a citizen, was retired a philistine. The chord had lost that appeal of novelty, hence, it had lost its sharpness, but also its luster. It had nothing more [to] say to a new era. Thus, it fell from the higher sphere of art music to the lower of music for entertainment. There it remains, as a sentimental expression of sentimental concerns. It became banal and effeminate." — Arnold Schoenberg.

"Video captures mouse walking on baby’s crib in Kushner-owned Brooklyn home."

But why is the mouse there? I'm reading all the way to the end of that Daily News article:

Some in the building said video and the complaints stemmed from a rent dispute.

“This is a small group of people who have been here from the beginning and have stopped paying rent,” one resident said. “They haven’t paid rent in about eight months and they don’t want to pay.”

But others say they have complained about many issues, to no avail.

“There have been vermin, and the mouse video is crazy,” said another tenant. “We’re all paying about $4,000 a month — that’s a great deal of money to put up with all of this.”

When we see video, what do we know?

"Dozens of dead owls have been reported by drivers along Interstate-84 in southern Idaho making for an eerie stretch of road."

"It almost looks like they fell from the sky"... but there's "a simple explanation," according to the Idaho Fish and Game spokesman. There are mice along the interstate, the owls go for them, and the cars — going 85 miles an hour — hit the owls.

"But however promising adenosine may be as a treatment, the findings from this research do not prove that acupuncture itself 'works.'"

"For one thing, the researchers did not show that the release of adenosine was specific to acupuncture. Acupuncture needles might cause adenosine to flood the surrounding tissue, but so might a hard pinch, or applied pressure, or any number of other physical insults. In fact, both of the studies found that when adenosine was turned on in mouse tissue by other mechanisms, the pain response was equal to or better than the response generated by acupuncture."

From a Scientific American article currently titled "Research Casts Doubt on the Value of Acupuncture/Scientific studies show that the procedure is full of holes."

(The original title was "The Acupuncture Myth." I'm contemplating why the title was changed and thinking the magazine has some standards about what counts as a "myth" and that if you have utterly disproved something you are not yet in a position to call it a myth.)

ADDED: This article made me wonder how scientists can determine the extent to which a mouse feels pain. It can't point to one of the 10 pain faces on the chart. I found this article in Wired: "Mice Show Pain on Their Faces Just Like Humans":

"As soon as I arrived in Crumb’s small village, I sat at his kitchen table as Aline his wife shoved some rabbit ragout in my plate..."

"... and Crumb sat next to me and started to critique my recent Julian Assange interview in minute, precise detail. Dude, two hours ago I was at the Tate with this delicious blonde Texan girl as she explained to me the fascinating restoration of this Rothko painting that a crazed performance artist had defaced a few years prior. I was sad that she had ditched me to fly back to rat-infested Austin, so disgusted she was that I made her stay at this mice-infested musicians’ drug pen near the subway stop for Turnpike Lane, where the fundamental Islamist terrorists live. 'Boy, you tore this guy a new asshole,' the uptight, pervy, demented cartoonist with the appalling face ravaged by millions of hours of onanism told me as I was putting to my mouth what looked like a tomato-covered rabbit’s anus. My editor at the Observer—yes, there is such a thing as editors, and just because something reads as though it wasn’t subjected to Hearst’s five rumens of copy digestion doesn’t mean it’s 'unedited'—was putting his career on the line sending me, after I had harassed him for weeks, in the land of the Sorrow and the Pity to talk to this has-been. Crumb, of course, like all cranky Primitivist old coots, doesn’t believe in computers so his assistant, a church mouse maid, had properly printed and stapled my piece on Assange for him...."

From "Robert Crumb Is Dead — to Me/Cage match pits legendary cartoonist against enfant terrible profiler" by Jacques Hyzagi, which I'm reading because it's in The New York Observer, where I got shunted from my usual launch point Memeorandum, which ranks news items by the attention they are getting and has as its top item right now the Observer's endorsement of Donald Trump for President. I clicked to see that but had a words-of-one-syllable reaction upon reading the first sentence: "Donald Trump is the father-in-law of the Observer’s publisher." I needed to get somewhere else quick... needed to consume something cleansing and that tomato-covered rabbit’s anus did the trick.

"Mickey Mouse is not a mouse. If you look very closely at him, you can see that he wears gloves."

"Mice do not have the capability, nor the desire, to put gloves on their hands. He also is depicted wearing a pair of shorts with large buttons, which a mouse would be unable to fasten given its mental limitations, not to mention the fact that it has claws without opposable thumbs. Furthermore, the viewer should not be misled into thinking that Mickey is a mouse because he uses the name 'Mouse.' This is merely Mr. Mouse’s surname, and is not intended to confer any mouselike qualities upon him. If you met a man who was named, say, Alan Bird, you would not assume that he was a member of the avian family, even if he happened to have a beak instead of the traditional mouth-and-nose combination seen in most humans, would you? Obviously, Mr. Mouse is simply a man with a loving wife, Mrs. Mouse (a female human), and a normal Homo sapiens existence, just like the rest of us. He even owns a dog called Pluto! How many mice do you know who own dogs?"

Reaction to "Hello Kitty is not a cat..."

ADDED: There! This is the post that pushed me over the line to make a Hello Kitty tag. Going back into the archive to do the necessary retrospective tagging, I find 4 other posts:

1. January 3, 2006: "Cute!" looked at Natalie Angier's "The Cute Factor." She said:

Experts point out that the cuteness craze is particularly acute in Japan, where it goes by the name "kawaii" and has infiltrated the most masculine of redoubts. Truck drivers display Hello Kitty-style figurines on their dashboards....

Behind the kawaii phenomenon, according to Brian J. McVeigh, a scholar of East Asian studies at the University of Arizona, is the strongly hierarchical nature of Japanese culture. "Cuteness is used to soften up the vertical society," he said, "to soften power relations and present authority without being threatening."

Watch out for cute.

2. June 24, 2007: "Is it wrong to tattoo your dog?"

On the positive side: The dog was under anesthesia. On the negative side: It was a tattoo of a cat, and not just any cat -- Hello Kitty.

Yeah, I need to update that, with the news that Hello Kitty is known to be not a cat, but a little girl. Good news for that dog. Also at that old post: links to the Hello Kitty Hell blog and the Hello Kitty text, which I might want to re-take to try to get a better score, i.e., better than self-centered and evil.

(From the anti-Hello Kitty blog, Hello Kitty Hell, found via Metafilter.)

(And take the Hello Kitty test, which is cute and which told me people must think I'm self-centered and evil.)

3. July 17, 2013: "Does anyone in the Bible ever say 'hello'?" Somehow the last paragraph of this post is:

"Heil Hitler" is translated as "Hail Hitler." It's not "Hello Hitler," which seems edgily absurd. You could sing it to the tune of "Hello, Dolly," which has a comma, I might note, unlike Hello Kitty.

By the way, I put my fascism tag on this post after writing about the 2006 post.

4. April 25, 2014: "Avril Lavigne picked a bad week to go all racist." Someone at Vox had written:

"RACIST??? LOLOLOL!!!," Avril tweeted. "I love Japanese culture...." In her defense, this kind of makes sense. Japanese pop does have a pretty camp vein running through it, one that "Hello Kitty" apes.

And I said:

"Hello Kitty" apes? I love those 3 words together, because I can picture "Hello Kitty" Apes... just like I can picture "King Kong" Kitties, but do not market a product called King Kong Kitties. That would be racist.

King Kong is not an ape. He is a... I want to say: He is a little boy. But I google "is King Kong fascist." That turns up a lot, including a book called — I know — "Sartre and Adorno: The Dialectics of Subjectivity," which quotes Theodor Adorno:

"While appearing as a superman, the leader must at the same time work the miracle of appearing as an average person, just as Hitler posed as a composite of King Kong and the suburban barber."

AND: I considered googling "Is Mickey Mouse fascist," but switched to "did Hitler like Mickey Mouse." I found many references to the Art Spiegelman's "Maus," a graphic memoir about his father, a Holocaust survivor, in which the father's memories have the Jewish characters drawn as mice and the Nazis as cats. The second volume of "Maus" begins with a quote from a German newspaper article from the mid-1930s:

Mickey Mouse is the most miserable ideal ever revealed.... Healthy emotions tell every independent young man and every honorable youth that the dirty and filth-covered vermin, the greatest bacteria carrier in the animal kingdom, cannot be the ideal type of animal.... Away with Jewish brutalization of the people! Down with Mickey Mouse! Wear the Swastika Cross!

ALSO: Here's "A Guide For the Purrplexed/How Maimonides explains the Hello Kitty controversy":

“Know that likeness is a certain relation between two things and that in cases where no relation can be supposed to exist between two things, no likeness between them can be represented to oneself,” the old master wrote in his Guide For the Perplexed. “Similarly it behooves those who believe that there are essential attributes that may be predicated of the Creator—namely, that He is existent, living, possessing power, knowing, and willing—to understand that these notions are not ascribed to Him and to us in the same sense. According to what they think, the difference between these attributes and ours lies in the former being greater, more perfect, more permanent, or more durable than ours, so that His existence is more durable than our existence, His life more permanent than our life, His power greater than our power, His knowledge more perfect than our knowledge, and His will more universal than our will.”

And that, of course, is wrong, because God is nothing like man. He hasn’t a face or a temper or anything else we might recognize....

To paraphrase Maimonides, it behooves those who were outraged this week over Sanrio’s revelation and who believe that there are essential attributes that may be predicated of Hello Kitty—namely, that She is existent, living, possessing power, knowing, and willing—to understand that these notions are not ascribed to Her and to us in the same sense.