Sep
18
2025

Iowahawk on the LFOD Watch

Apparently the local statists are up to something:

Soon we will have no rights left at all! (But seriously, this is merely at the Legislative Service Request stage.)

Googling reveals a cute story from 2016: Animal rights protest scrapped after "greased pig" dust-up

An international animal advocacy group has withdrawn its protest against a New Hampshire winter carnival event billed as a "Greased Pig on Ice" after learning there's no pig in the act, just a man on skates wearing a pig costume.

Carnival organizer Steve Smith says People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, launched its alert last week despite his reassurances that no pigs would be harmed. Smith says he received about 100 emails from concerned animal lovers.

PETA investigator Daphna Nachminovitch tells the Associated Press that Smith did not clarify what the Saturday event would entail. She says the information is excellent news for pigs.

… but maybe not so good for that guy in the pig costume.

Also of note:

  • He seems seamy to me, but… George Will looks at recent antics from A seamlessly unserious president. (WaPo gifted link)

    Whirlpool, the U.S. appliance maker, still is not happy. Vladimir Putin, however, seems to be. The U.S. president is floundering on several fronts.

    In 2006, Whirlpool paid $1.7 billion to buy its largest competitor (Maytag) and said competition from foreign producers would prevent it from wielding unseemly market power. But U.S. consumers continued to like imported machines’ prices and qualities. So, early in his first term, President Donald Trump imposed tariffs on washing machines to protect Whirlpool from the competition it had said it welcomed. In August 2020, Trump visited a Whirlpool factory where, strangely, he bragged about imposing tariffs on Canadian aluminum, raising Whirlpool’s manufacturing costs.

    Now, the Wall Street Journal reports, Whirlpool says perfidious foreigners are fibbing, paying lower tariffs by claiming low values on appliance imports, valuations not reflected in prices charged to U.S. consumers. Presumably, the government will deftly untangle the mess its protectionism has produced.

    Google points out that Whirlpool stock is down nearly 25% year-to-date.

    GFW's bottom line:

    From Benton Harbor, Michigan (Whirlpool), to Moline, Illinois (John Deere), to the skies where NATO aircraft downed some but not all Russian drones, the world becomes more serious as the president becomes less so. There is an eerie disconnect between events and his flippant “Here we go!”

  • And we still have over three years to go. Plenty of time to get crazier. Joe Lancaster observes that Trump's $15 billion lawsuit against 'The New York Times' is his craziest one yet.

    President Donald Trump is no stranger to filing defamation lawsuits against media companies, with varying degrees of merit. This week, he added to that list, filing a lawsuit more ridiculous and meritless than any of the others so far.

    "Today, I have the Great Honor of bringing a $15 Billion Dollar Defamation and Libel Lawsuit against The New York Times, one of the worst and most degenerate newspapers in the History of our Country," Trump wrote Tuesday on Truth Social. "The 'Times' has engaged in a decades long method of lying about your Favorite President (ME!), my family, business, the America First Movement, MAGA, and our Nation as a whole. I am PROUD to hold this once respected 'rag' responsible."

    The complaint nominally lists claims about Trump, made during the 2024 campaign in Times articles and the book Lucky Loser, that have caused him "reputational and economic harm"—for example, that he inherited and squandered his father's fortune, and that he only rehabilitated his image as a successful businessman by hosting the reality show The Apprentice.

    But rather than straightforwardly listing the facts of the case, the complaint spends dozens of pages histrionically detailing how great Trump is and how terrible The New York Times is. It reads less like a formal legal document than one of Trump's social media posts, calling the Times a "full-throated mouthpiece of the Democrat Party" engaging in "wrong and partisan criticism."

    Someone needs to tell Trump, using their best Jack Nicholson impression: "Sell crazy someplace else. We're all stocked up here."

  • The science is settled. Barbara Oakley reports the latest news: Censorship Hurts Our Brains—Literally. (WSJ gifted link)

    The assassination of Charlie Kirk on the campus of Utah Valley University is a human tragedy first: Two young children lost their father; a wife lost her husband. But it is also a cultural tragedy, revealing corrosion at the heart of our civic life. Violence against speech is the final symptom of a disease that begins much earlier—in our failure to teach the value of hearing other voices early on, in schools.

    Our brains are built to form habits. The basal ganglia—deep learning circuits that automate whatever we repeat—don’t absorb only tennis serves or piano scales. They also wire in patterns of thought. If the only messages we hear are one-sided, the brain’s habit circuits carve them into grooves of thought that resist change.

    So do your basal ganglia a favor and consume some media outside your comfort zone every so often.

  • And on the artificial photosynthesis watch… There's good news for people who want to turn down the global thermostat, as reported at Ars Technica: New pathway engineered into plants lets them suck up more CO₂.

    Lots of people are excited about the idea of using plants to help us draw down some of the excess carbon dioxide we've been pumping into the atmosphere. It would be nice to think that we could reforest our way out of the mess we're creating, but recent studies have indicated there's simply not enough productive land for this to work out.

    One alternative might be to get plants to take up carbon dioxide more efficiently. Unfortunately, the enzyme that incorporates carbon dioxide into photosynthesis, called RUBISCO, is remarkably inefficient. So, a team of researchers in Taiwan decided to try something new—literally. They put together a set of enzymes that added a new-to-nature biochemical cycle to plants that let it incorporate carbon far more efficiently. The resulting plants grew larger and incorporated more carbon.

    This is great news! But the report is unnecessarily negative. If smart people figure out the chemistry involved, why would we need actual plants embedded in "productive land" to carry out enhanced super-photosynthetic reactions?

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