Friday, July 11th, 2025

Time	Event
2:37p	Siddhartha Gautama's burial gems The government if India demands the handover of ancient jewels excavated from a stupa along with (reportedly) some of the ashes from the cremation of the Buddha. We know what the Buddha would say about this, if he were alive today. Such attachment to material objects, such as jewels, or what remains of a person's dead body, will only cause suffering. I advise you to stop venerating me, and focus the wisdom I passed on to you: meditate on the impermanence of human life. According to my nonreligious ideas of right and wrong, I think that the Government of India made a reasonable and ethical deal with Pappé: to keep the bulk of the jewels, demonstrating the range they span, in a museum as it should be, and letting Pappé have 1/5 that were not special. There are no grounds to reopen that deal. Stupas, like other ancient sites, are heritage of humanity for the knowledge that can be learned from them, and should only be excavated by skilled archeologists who can learn from them the most possible knowledge about ancient times. But that was not an option in the 1870s. (Comment on this)
2:37p	NYT scandal attacking Zohran Mamdani Zohran Mamdani attacked with a dishonest political hatchet job. Zohran Mamdani was born in Uganda. Hie parents are of Indian ancestry, and his father was a Ugandan of Indian ancestry. So when he applied to Columbia University, he checked the boxes for Indian and African. So far, so reasonable, but various political enemies (starting with the New York Times) are trying to spin this as a serious scandal. What they are actually proving is how untrustworthy they are. (Comment on this)
2:37p	Heat wave, Central Europe A heat wave in central Europe is hindering shipping on the Rhine and Danube. This has happened before. Sometimes shipping nearly came to a halt. The problem is a consequence of global heating and it is getting generally worse. (Comment on this)
2:37p	Israeli-run concentration camp, Gaza Israel has openly announced a plan to force all Palestinians out of Gaza, confirming the intention that many have suspected. The first step in the plan is to concentrate the population of Gaza in one camp on the ruins of the border city of Rafah. Even worse, it is explicit that this is part of a plan whose goal is to expel them. If the world does not quash this plan, it will be rip up the restraints that still partly discourage crimes against humanity around the world. Other states are likely to follow this example, expelling populations much bigger than Gaza's, perhaps into deserts where they will die. In the probable age of hunger, a few decades from now, tens or hundreds of millions may be eliminated in bulk by a single command. Israel labels each act or tool of cruelty with the word "humanitarian". This appears to be a campaign to inure people to hypocrisy, aiming to poison that word and make it hard to describe actual humanitarian actions. (Comment on this)
2:37p	Ethnic-cleansing plan, Gaza Israel's Orwellian language for many aspects of the bombardment and siege of Gaza. (Comment on this)
2:37p	National Weather Service, TX floods Rebecca Solnit: *Did National Weather Service cuts lead to the Texas flood disaster? We don’t know.* It is clear that the wrecker's cuts to science, and in particular NOAA including the NWS, will do harm again and again. But we can't take it as certain that they was responsible for how bad the damage was this time. On the other hand, we know that the planet roasters' resistance to decarbonization caused this flood to be worse. We also know that their current resistance will lead to more and worse floods, as well as to more and worse fires, and to inundation of many coastal cities, large and small, around the world. (Comment on this)
2:37p	New pun: fly tipping Why are the British so concerned about fly-tipping? Does an upside-down fly have difficulty getting back on its feet? Are flies now delivering food to diners' tables? (Comment on this)
2:37p	Switching sides in war on poverty, UK, US 20 years ago, the economic powers started working together to "make poverty history" around the world. Since then, governments have abandoned that goal. Now they are adopting policies to increase poverty in their own countries. (Comment on this)
2:37p	Adapting to heatwaves, UK Adapting to dangerously hotter summers can fit in with reducing greenhouse emissions, funded by taxes. The author speaks of taxing the worst polluters, but drivers in aggregate are among the worst and the less wealthy of them can't afford to pay more tax. However, subsidizing fossil fuel for them undermines decarbonization. A solution which avoids undermining it is to give poor people a payment they can use as they wish. They can all use it, and it preserve for each of the incentive to switch away from fossil fuels. (Comment on this)
2:37p	United Nations itself, in peril *The UN is our best defense against a third world war. As [the wrecker] wields the axe, who will fight to save it?* (Comment on this)
2:37p	Deportation boondoggle A Canadian woman has been living in the US since childhood, with her husband and their children, without official authorization. Her husband voted for the persecutor, and now that his wife has been targeted for persecution, he says he regrets his vote. (Comment on this)
2:37p	US weapons for Ukraine The US suspended weapons shipments to Ukraine, claiming that its stockpiles of weapons were running low. However, there is no evidence that such a thing is happening — that justification seems to be just bullshit. (Comment on this)

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