Something else I found mildly amusing was the brouhaha over the Surgeon-General’s remarks on alcohol consumption. Sarah D. Wire reports at USA Today:

U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy’s new Advisory on Alcohol and Cancer Risk outlining a direct link between drinking alcohol and increased risk of developing seven types of cancer was released Friday amid a review of federal guidelines for alcohol consumption.

The move drew praise from Dr. Michael B. Siegel, professor of public health and community medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine, who said it is likely not a coincidence Murthy’s advisory came as the fight over how much alcohol the U.S. should deem safe as part of a healthy diet is being debated.

The secretaries of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Department of Agriculture are conducting an every-five-year review of dietary guidelines, including for alcohol consumption, which is due to be released later this year. With just over two weeks left before the Biden administration ends, this could be one of Murthy’s last chances to influence the outcome. Murthy didn’t directly call for changing the dietary guidelines in his advisory, however.

“My sense is that he probably got fed up, and he basically has had enough of the alcohol industry influence, and is basically just saying, that’s it. We’re gonna have science decide this, not politics. So he came out with this definitive statement, unequivocally saying that alcohol is a carcinogen and that moderate drinking is a risk factor for cancer,” Siegel said.

The dietary guidelines provide advice on what Americans should eat and drink to meet nutrition needs, promote health, and prevent disease. They are used by doctors to suggest lifestyle changes and by the federal government to determine how food assistance can be spent.

That was followed by a call to place warning labels on all alcoholic beverage containers, something the industry, obviously enough, vehemently opposes.

Why amusing? Anyone who’s read How to Lie with Statistics should have the same reaction. I’d be willing to wager that the same logic as is being used about alcoholic beverages could be applied to placing warning labels on the offices of every physician in the country. I would be willing to wager that the morbidity and mortality due to medical error exceeds that due to light alcohol consumption by a significant margin. I am agnostic on the risks of moderate alcohol consumption.

Furthermore, I would claim that an effective ban on all food and drink would reduce morbidity and mortality to zero. We’d all die of thirst and/or starvation.

The editors of the Chicago Tribune, cited here via Yahoo, have some New Years Resolutions for Illinois Gov. Pritzker, Chicago Mayor Johnson, and the Chicago Teachers Union. I will only quote their advice to the CTU:

Back off; read the room.

I think they’re whistling past a graveyard. Neither Pritzker nor Johnson need to worry about standing for re-election in the near future and, as long as their creature, Mayor Johnson, remains in line the CTU has nothing to worry about.

There is something of a kerfuffle over political cartoonist Ann Telnaes’s resignation from the Washington Post. Here’s her account:

I’ve worked for the Washington Post since 2008 as an editorial cartoonist. I have had editorial feedback and productive conversations—and some differences—about cartoons I have submitted for publication, but in all that time I’ve never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at. Until now.

The cartoon that was killed criticizes the billionaire tech and media chief executives who have been doing their best to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump. There have been multiple articles recently about these men with lucrative government contracts and an interest in eliminating regulations making their way to Mar-a-lago. The group in the cartoon included Mark Zuckerberg/Facebook & Meta founder and CEO, Sam Altman/AI CEO, Patrick Soon-Shiong/LA Times publisher, the Walt Disney Company/ABC News, and Jeff Bezos/Washington Post owner.

While it isn’t uncommon for editorial page editors to object to visual metaphors within a cartoon if it strikes that editor as unclear or isn’t correctly conveying the message intended by the cartoonist, such editorial criticism was not the case regarding this cartoon. To be clear, there have been instances where sketches have been rejected or revisions requested, but never because of the point of view inherent in the cartoon’s commentary. That’s a game changer…and dangerous for a free press.

Her post includes the cartoon in question. David Shipley, the editor who killed the cartoon, saw it differently. He says he killed it because it was boring and repetitive.

My bet would be that, if the cartoon had not included a caricature of Jeff Bezos, the cartoon would not have been killed, the message being don’t bite the hand that feeds you.

Back in high school you might have been taught that Galileo was imprisoned because he taught that the earth revolved around the sun and not the other way around as the Church taught but that’s not exactly what happened. What actually happened was that Galileo wrote a book, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. The book included a character lampooning the present pope, Urban VIII, as a fool supporting the geocentric model. Urban had earlier expressed openness on the subject as long as Galileo steered clear of biblical interpretation but being made a fool of by his pal Galileo was a bridge too far. So Galileo was imprisoned.

Once again the moral is don’t bite the hand that feeds you.

The most astonishing thing I heard on the “talking heads” programs yesterday was a reaction any Congressional move to secure the border to the effect that Democrats should oppose securing the border other than in the context of “comprehensive immigration reform”. I was reminded of nothing so much as Marechal Foch’s famous quote: “My centre is giving way, my right is retreating, excellent situation, I am attacking.”

I say “astonishing” because the individual has, apparently, not been paying attention. I’ll just use Chicago as an example. For the first time in decades the Republican presidential candidate carried one of Chicago’s wards in the presidential election. The wards that should be Mayor Johnson’s base of support are in an uproar over the hundreds of millions the city has spent on migrants. The mayor’s approval rating has plummeted to the mid-teens.

I materially agree with Steven Greenhut’s observation at Reason.com that we have entered a period of kakistocracy:

Being a writer, I’m fairly confident in the extent of my vocabulary. I was nevertheless surprised to learn a new word in 2024—and to realize that, according to more than a few pundits, it defined the entire year. The herd of political onlookers might actually be onto something.

The word is so arcane my Word document flags it as a misspelling. Whereas an “idiocracy” is a society governed by morons, a “kakistocracy” is one “governed by its least suitable or competent citizens.” In this case, our nation’s overlords aren’t dummies, but might be defined by cunning, self-interest, venality, delusion, vanity or mental decline.

They most definitely do not adhere to Thomas Jefferson’s observation that, “Power is not alluring to pure minds.” By contrast, a kakistocracy is a government run by impure folks who crave little more than power. Such a system more closely resembles Benjamin Franklin’s observation: “In rivers and bad governments the lightest things swim at top.”

Not only that but things are likely to remain that way unless we identify the reasons why this has happened.

My first claim would be that we have been relentlessly pushing towards kakistocracy for a very long time. Open media have just made it more obvious.

My second claim is that the farther the government is from ordinary citizens and the less constrained by law, the will of the people, and even right and wrong the worse things will become.

My third claim is that partisanship allows us to ignore the obvious faults of our fellow partisans.

My last claim is that the more money and power there is in government the worse things will become.

Beyond that I have few ideas of how to make things better.

I found this post at Politico, listing some “black swan” events that might happen next, interesting:

So we asked an array of thinkers — futurists, scientists, foreign policy analysts and others — to lay out some of the possible “Black Swan” events that could await us in the new year: What are the unpredictable, unlikely episodes that aren’t yet on the radar but would completely upend American life as we know it?

Our experts floated all sorts of catastrophes, from the threat of AI to deadly epidemics, but they also raised the notion of progress, including in some surprising global hotspots.

The following scenarios may or may not take place in 2025, but they shouldn’t immediately be dismissed. When we undertook this exercise last year, a number of predictions proved eerily prescient.

Among the “non-predictions” in the list are:

• The Largest Cyberattack in History
• A Secret Deal to Stop Iran From Developing Nuclear Weapons
• Secessionists Are on the March
• A Trump and Xi Alliance Will Emerge
• A Two-State Solution

Some on the list are more likely than others. Some are frighteningly likely. Some appear to be happening already.

I mentioned before that my favorite Christmas present this year was some ornaments my wife had made from ribbons that Kara won. They are pictured above. A good use for those ribbons, don’t you think?

I honestly don’t know what to make of the two incidents on New Years Day, one in New Orleans and the other in Las Vegas.

As of this writing the New Orleans incident in which a driver driving a rented truck deliberately mowed down people celebrating in Bourbon Street appears to be a case of radicalization. The Las Vegas incident in which a guy apparently killed himself in a rented Tesla truck before the fireworks and explosives he’d filled its bed with exploded is even more baffling.

So, what’s going on?

Update

My interpretation of President-Elect Trump’s comments trying to tie the incident to illegal immigration is that it’s an instance of Maslow’s Hammer (when the only tool you have is a hammer every problem looks like a nail). Illegal immigration is his issue so he relates everything to it.

Here are the things that the team at Vox.com thinks are likely to happen (> 50% probability) in 2025:

• The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s preliminary estimates of US car crash deaths for 2024 will be lower than 40,000 (70 percent)
• Benjamin Netanyahu is still Israel’s PM at the end of November 2025 (75 percent)
• There will be a ceasefire in Ukraine (75 percent)
• EVs will make up more than 10 percent of new car sales in the US by the end of Q3 2025 (65 percent)
• Bitcoin’s price will at some point in 2025 breach $200,000 (70 percent)
• Elon Musk is still the richest person in the world (55 percent)
• Antibiotic sales for use in livestock production will have increased by at least 0.5 percent in 2024 (55 percent)
• Bird flu results in the deaths of at least 30 million farmed birds by the end of 2025 (60 percent)
• California’s animal agriculture law Proposition 12 will not be overturned by Congress (65 percent)
• At least one additional state bans lab-grown meat in 2025 (80 percent)
• Max Verstappen wins the Formula 1 World Drivers’ Championship (60 percent)
• Charli XCX wins a Grammy for Brat (90 percent)

while here are Karl Rove’s predictions for 2025 from the Wall Street Journal:

Congress approves two reconciliation packages, one for immigration and another to extend Mr. Trump’s tax cuts. Immigration passes first. Tax cuts take time. Mr. Trump doesn’t get more than one of his promised new tax cuts on tips, overtime pay and Social Security.

Mr. Trump’s deportation of violent criminal aliens will be popular, though not easy as progressive state and local governments throw up roadblocks. Attempting to deport illegal immigrants who have otherwise kept their noses clean will be highly unpopular. The courts sustain birthright citizenship.

At least one of the incoming president’s controversial nominees—Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Kash Patel—doesn’t make it. Speaker Mike Johnson is re-elected, though it’s ugly. Twenty-five or more House Republicans oppose raising the debt ceiling, forcing Mr. Trump and GOP congressional leaders to negotiate with Democrats this spring.

While a useful exercise, the Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy Department of Government Efficiency doesn’t come up with anything close to $2 trillion in spending cuts. The three amigos—Don, Elon and Vivek—fall out.

There’s a U.S. Supreme Court vacancy. The GOP wins either the Wisconsin or Pennsylvania supreme court contest this spring, but not both.

Mr. Trump presides over a groundbreaking Israel-Saudi Arabia peace deal. It isn’t enough to save Mr. Netanyahu, whose unstable coalition government finally collapses. There’s no immediate cease-fire in Ukraine as Vladimir Putin stalls for time. Friedrich Merz becomes Germany’s next chancellor. Canadian Conservatives under Pierre Poilievre oust Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

The president-elect’s imperial dreams aren’t realized: Canada doesn’t become a state, Denmark won’t sell Greenland and Panama declines to return the canal.

Inflation slows further. U.S. economic growth is less than 2024’s forecast 2.7%. The S&P rises less than a third of what it did the year before. Rather than levying tariffs, Mr. Trump uses them mostly rhetorically to get concessions on trade, immigration and defense spending. Tariffs made up 1.57% of federal revenue in fiscal 2024; they won’t be more than 2.5% in 2025.

Artificial intelligence poses risks, but in 2025 we’ll see how it will transform medicine. NASA launches a space observatory that creates a comprehensive map of the universe.

Josh Allen is NFL MVP, Jayden Daniels wins Offensive Rookie of the Year, Aaron Rodgers doesn’t return to the Jets, and the Chiefs fail to win their third consecutive Super Bowl. “Wicked” is best picture, Ralph Fiennes best actor, and Denzel Washington best supporting actor.

If I find any other interesting predictions I’ll update this post with them.