Tuesday: Hili dialogue

September 29, 2020 • 6:30 am

Good morning on Tuesday, the Crueliest Day. It’s Sept. 29, 2020, and National Mocha Day. To go with that coffee, it’s also National Biscotti Day, as well as Goose Day and World Heart Day.

News of the Day: Forbes reports that Trump’s tax returns may show him guilty of tax fraud, which carries at least a five-year sentence (Ivanka could also be guilty). And neither he nor Pence can pardon himself, as it could be a state crime prosecuted in state courts.

The death toll from the coronavirus worldwide has now passed one million in the ten months since records have been kept. The U.S. toll is the highest in the world (see below), with Brazil second at over 140,000 deaths.

Don’t forget that the Trump/Biden debate is tonight. It will have little light (at least compared to what we already know), but perhaps some heat and some amusement as Trump has to deal with some uncomfortable questions.  Let’s hope Biden doesn’t babble too much. There will be two more debates, on October 15 and October 22.

The skinny from NPR:

When? Tuesday, Sept. 29, from 9 to 10:30 p.m. ET. (You can listen to the debate on NPR, and we’ll have a livestream video online.)

Where? Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Clinic, in Cleveland. (The University of Notre Dame was originally supposed to host but cited the coronavirus pandemic in withdrawing.)

Who’s moderating? Chris Wallace, anchor, Fox News Sunday

And where to watch it (from the Village Voice):

Broadcast networks ABC, NBC, CBS and FOX will air the Trump-Biden debate, as will major cable news networks FOX News, MSNBC and CNN. Those options to watch are available with cable or live-TV streaming service subscriptions.

Networks with streaming capabilities or affiliated apps will also stream the debate, making it accessible to those with Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, Roku, and similar streaming devices. ABC news, CBS, and The Washington Post have already announced they will stream it, and more are expected to make similar announcements ahead of Tuesday night.

C-SPAN will stream the debate live online at C-SPAN.org and the audio-only feed on the C-SPAN radio app. Viewers can also watch Biden and Trump discuss the issues on  C-SPAN’s YouTube account.

One of the most reprehensible aspects of the new revelations about Trump’s tax returns is his financial nepotism, particularly the fees he paid his daughter for both private AND public service. As the Washington Post reports:

 Ivanka Trump, who along with her husband works as a senior adviser in the White House, appears to have received massive “consulting fees” from the Trump Organization while simultaneously being paid nearly half a million dollars each year as a senior executive of the family business.

Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 204,941, an increase of about 350 deaths over yesterday’s report. The world death toll is now listed only as “1.0 million +.”

Speaking of which, here’s a gif:

Stuff that happened on September 29 includes:

  • 1717 – An earthquake strikes Antigua Guatemala, destroying much of the city’s architecture.
  • 1885 – The first practical public electric tramway in the world is opened in Blackpool, England.
  • 1923 – The British Mandate for Palestine takes effect, creating Mandatory Palestine.
  • 1941 – World War II: German forces, with the aid of local Ukrainian collaborators, begin the two-day Babi Yar massacre.

This occurred when the Germans decided to kill all the Jews in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv. The shot them on the edge of a ravine nearby, with the corpses piling up in the ditch. That was 34,000 Jews, but the Germans also murdered Soviet prisoners of war, communists, Ukrainian nationalists and Roma (“Gypsies”). From Wikipedia:

Estimates of the total number killed at Babi Yar during the Nazi occupation vary. In 1946, Soviet prosecutor L. N. Smirnov at the Nuremberg trials claimed there were approximately 100,000 corpses lying in Babi Yar, using materials of the Extraordinary State Commission set out by the Soviets to investigate Nazi crimes after the liberation of Kyiv in 1943. According to testimonies of workers forced to burn the bodies, the numbers range from 70,000 to 120,000.

The aftermath:

Soviet investigators (at left) view an opened mass grave at Babi Yar. Kiev, Soviet Union, 1944. Source: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

Here’s a seven-minute Encyclopedia Brittanica video about the massacre:

  • 1954 – The convention establishing CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) is signed.
  • 1975 – WGPR becomes the first black-owned-and-operated television station in the US. [It is in Detroit, Michigan]
  • 2013 – Over 42 people are killed by members of Boko Haram at the College of Agriculture in Nigeria.

Notables born on this day include:

  • 106 BC – Pompey, Roman general and politician (d. 48 BC)
  • 1547 – Miguel de Cervantes, Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright (d. 1616)
  • 1758 – Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson, English admiral (d. 1805)
  • 1898 – Trofim Lysenko, Ukrainian-Russian biologist and agronomist (d. 1976)

Lysenko is the paradigmatic example of what happens when ideology forces science to promulgate false results. Millions died from famine resulting from the implementation of Lysenko’s phony theory of crop “vernalization” and other nonsense approved by Stalin. Here’s the old charlatan in his heyday (1938):

  • 1904 – Greer Garson, English-American actress (d. 1996)

Garson, a great actress, won a Best Actress Oscar for her performance in the film Mrs. Miniver, made about wartime in wartime (1942). Here’s a scene with Walter Pidgeon during a German bombing:

  • 1907 – Gene Autry, American singer, actor, and businessman (d. 1998)
  • 1912 – Michelangelo Antonioni, Italian director and screenwriter (d. 2007)
  • 1935 – Jerry Lee Lewis, American singer-songwriter and pianist

Here’s The Killer in 1954, performing his most famous song (it also contains the word “chicken”). By the way, Jerry Lee is still alive at 85.  Can you name another rock or pop song containing the world “chicken”? I can think of at least two.

  • 1943 – Lech Wałęsa, Polish electrician and politician, 2nd President of Poland, Nobel Prize laureate
  • 1956 – Suzzy Roche, American singer-songwriter and actress

Those who shuffled off on September 29 include:

  • 1902 – Émile Zola, French journalist, author, and playwright (b. 1840)
  • 1967 – Carson McCullers, American novelist, playwright, essayist, and poet (b. 1917)

If you haven’t read McCullers’s two masterpieces, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and Member of the Wedding, do so now! She died at just 50 from heart disease:

Carson McCullers (Source)
  • 1973 – W. H. Auden, English-American poet, playwright, and critic (b. 1907)
  • 1975 – Casey Stengel, American baseball player and manager (b. 1890)
  • 2010 – Tony Curtis, American actor (b. 1925)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is upset. As Malgorzata explained, ” Hili follows news and she can see conflicts between humans everywhere so she wonders why they cannot agree with each other.”

Hili: Why it’s so difficult for people to come to an agreement?
A: They are hissing too much and talk too little.
In Polish:
Hili: Dlaczego ludziom tak trudno się ze sobą dogadać?
Ja: Za dużo syczą na siebie, za mało rozmawiają.
And here’s Kulka, who can barely be described as a “kitten” any longer. She’s healthy, lively, and feisty: a miniature Hili:

From Jesus of the Day:

From Stephen Muth (note the lens caps):

From Meanwhile in Canada:

Once again life imitates satire from Titania. The passage from her book is on the right:

From Ken. Another “WTF moment” brought to you by the President of the United States:

A clever video sent in by Simon:

Tweets from Matthew, who provided one with a 21-minute investigatory video. Matthew explains: “Weaponisation of Facebook” by Trump 2016 targeting black voters in swing states – new.”

Who cares about this “discovery”? According to New Scientist, species don’t exist!

You think that’s a polydactylous cat? Now this is a polydactylous cat!

Six minutes of clever video tricks:

And here’s one of my favorite examples of crypsis: a planthopper (true bug) with a fake head on its rear end and the real head inconspicuous to the left. Be sure to watch the video. The fake head has fake antennae and fake eyespots. Be sure to play the video.

50 thoughts on “Tuesday: Hili dialogue”

  1. I never seem to hit the “day”. Usually do biscotti on Wednesdays. WITHOUT anise. I hate that stuff, and judging from how many we sell, my customers like theirs without, as well.

    I use my grandmother’s recipe. Cultural appropriation? Who cares? She didn’t like anise, either.

    Another song mentioning chickens? Egg Suckin’ Dog, by Johnny Cash.

    L

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  2. Awww. I’m sure I’m woefully out of touch with the Uberkultur, but why is Tuesday “the cruelest day”? Why not Sunday, when the working folk realize that their momentary liberty from shuttle and lathe is just that – momentary, due to be crushed like a mussel between the walrus’s molars on the morrow? Or Election Day, when in “democracies” the populace decides into which drooling maw its imagined liberties are to be cast? Why Tuesday?

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  4. The congress couldn’t get the taxes. The Mueller group couldn’t get the taxes. New York State still working on getting them. No worry, the New York Times has it all. Would this country know anything without newspapers and journalism? Maybe we should eliminate government and make newspapers the government.

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    1. Yes. Freedom of the press is the most important component of freedom of speech, if for no other reason that papers such as the NYT have the resources to do in-depth investigative journalism. Just think back to the Watergate investigations of Woodward and Bernstein, the publication of the Pentagon Papers, and now this. As long as freedom of the press exists in this country, democracy will stand a chance to survive. It should surprise no one that Trump continually attacks the press.

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    2. Not for nuthin’ is it known as the “Fourth Estate.” (I think in the original formulation of the term, it was used to distinguish the press from the “three realms” of the nobility, the clergy, and the commoners. But now, it’s usually taken to afford the press a status comparable to the three branches of government.)

      If I had to venture a guess as to the source of Trump’s tax returns, mine would be that they were leaked to The Times out of the Manhattan DA’s office, which subpoenaed Trump’s financial records from his accounting firm, Mazar’s USA. But that’s just a guess.

      Or maybe it got the returns from someone at Mazar’s directly. The Times has made clear that there’s something about the returns in its possession that would reveal the source of the leak, which is why it’s publishing only summaries, rather than copies of the returns themselves.

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      1. The Times has been working on this issue a long time. I think they also got some of the info from Mary Trump as she talked about in her book. Also, Mary is going to court claiming Trump screwed her out of millions of her father’s money. So much for the one big happy family in Trump world.

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      1. The Times‘ introductory editor’s note says they’ve examined Trump’s “personal and corporate tax records,” but are only releasing an analysis of the date to protect their sources.

        The NYT language leaves some ambiguity, I suppose, as to whether it has copies of the actual returns, but, if not, it’s still somehow able to cite chapter and verse as to what’s been entered on specific lines of Trump’s forms and schedules.

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        1. I heard someone address the question directly but I don’t remember who it was. They claimed that “tax data” was something that financial institutions routinely received about people they do business with but that it wasn’t the actual returns.

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  5. One Vision by Queen
    Chicken soup with rice Carole King

    Chicken Talk, Ritchie Kavanagh of the focal song fame

    The chicken song by spitting image

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      1. “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” by Charlie Daniels [“Chicken in the bread-pan pickin’ out dough.”]

        “Chicken Noodle Soup [and a Soda on the Side]” by j-hope.

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    3. Do these count as pop?
      Just the Sunday smell of someone frying chicken. (Sunday morning coming down)
      Do the funky chicken.

      Either my hearing or brain is deteriorating: just for a moment I thought JLL sang, ‘There’s a whole lot of chicken going on.’

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  6. Thank you for the ‘Mrs Miniver’ clip, I found it very moving. I well remember sleeping with my mum and dad in the Anderson shelter buried in our back garden during the London Blitz. You didn’t tell us about the cat!

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  8. Can you name another rock or pop song containing the world “chicken”?

    Rufus Thomas’s “Do the Funky Chicken” recorded for Stax Records in 1969. Here’s Mr. Thomas performing it live:

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    1. Chickenman was great! Listened to it on the radio during breakfast, and my (faulty) recollection tells me it was always bracketed by two hit songs, one being ‘Something In The Air’ by Thunderclap Newman, and the other being ‘Albatross’ by Fleetwood Mac.

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  10. Lots of chicken songs. I’ll nominate “Robot Chicken Theme Song” by Primus founder Les Claypool.

    Which brings to mind another one of Claypool’s projects, one of the most interesting “supergroups” ever, Colonel Claypool’s Bucket of Bernie Brains. How could anyone resist the urge to check out a group with a name like that, and composed of . . .

    Les Claypool, founder of Primus (often referred to as Funk Metal but I’m not so sure about that)

    Bucket Head, one of the weirdest musicians around, primarily a solo act though he has done many collaborations. Plays many instruments but is famous as a guitarist of note. Plays a wide range of genres including progressive metal, funk, blues, bluegrass, ambient, and avant-garde.

    Bryan Kei “Brain” Mantia, drummer of note who has played with numerous groups from Primus to Tom Waits.

    And, get this, George Bernard Worrell, Jr., The “Wizard of Woo” himself, founding member of Parliament-Funkadelic! He also famously performed and recorded with the Talking Heads throughout the ’80s, among other things.

    Claypool described the bands 2004 tour as, “a traveling, oversized sock-puppet show spawned by the characters of a Tobe Hooper film and scored by Danny Elfman on bad acid.”

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      1. Huh, that was an interesting read. I’d never heard of Lord Buckethead.

        Here’s a bit about how Buckethead, the guitarist, was inspired to create his Buckethead character.


        “The Buckethead persona came to be when Carroll saw the 1988 horror movie Halloween 4 and was inspired by the film. He went out right after seeing it and bought a Michael Myers-like white mask. The bucket idea came later that night while eating chicken:[12]

        “I was eating it, and I put the mask on and then the bucket on my head. I went to the mirror. I just said, ‘Buckethead. That’s Buckethead right there.’ It was just one of those things. After that, I wanted to be that thing all the time.

        — Buckethead, 1996, Guitar Player Magazine [3]”

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        1. Love me some Buckethead. Thanks for the origin story, had never read that. Seems like a quirky dude; I guess that’s not a surprise.

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          1. My daughter, who plays guitar, introduced me to Buckethead a few years ago. I’d been missing out. That guy can play.

  11. Don’t think I can bear to watch the debate tonight. Trump’s lies will make me want to throw things at the TV, and with Biden I’ll be on edge waiting for him to make some gaffe.

    I’m of a very pessimistic mind about people’s expectations for the debate: IMO Trump will not be expected to say anything meaningful or true, so he can’t ‘lose’ anything from the event no matter how badly he does. Meanwhile, Biden will be expected to give a strong case, so he can’t ‘win’ anything from the event no matter how well he does. Someone please, convince me otherwise.

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    1. And of course, all tRump’s fans will declare him a winner, no matter what happens. He’ll be loud and demonstrative and stupid. Biden will be quite and intelligent. No brainer.

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      2. Maybe but both Trump and Biden have been known to get angry in a confrontation. There could definitely be some fireworks. I also think Trump is going to be seriously amped up for this. All his comments about Biden taking drugs tells us that he’s probably the one taking drugs. Trump is going to be desperate, a caged animal. This is one of his last chances to make a difference to his re-election chances.

        There are always October surprises but they will likely tip toward Biden this time around. I suspect there are all kinds of people with juicy Trump stories waiting for the right time to release them. It’s unlikely there’s much waiting for Biden that we haven’t heard already.

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        1. I think there were a few issues he was against before he was for them. But, these are pretty easy to answer. I hope you’re right about October surprises.

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    4. I’m with you. The bar for Trump is much lower than Biden‘s. Everyone except his cultists know Trump is a pathological liar; I wish there was some kind of fact checker ticker tape along the bottom. Too many lies to check though. I’m not really nervous about Biden tonight; he does a lot better in debates with only one opponent. He also did very well during his town-hall meeting. As Paul said above, Trump will be like a caged animal, so Biden just has to be himself and he’ll look sane by comparison. I’ll be watching the highlights though.

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  12. Facebook’s targeting of Hillary voters was done through the now defunct British “data collecting” firm Cambridge Analytica, which itself was a subsidiary of the SCL Group. Here is some of what Wikipedia says about the latter (references removed):

    “SCL Group (formerly Strategic Communication Laboratories) was a private British behavioural research and strategic communication company. It was founded in 1990 by Nigel Oakes, who served as its CEO. SCL began targeting elections in developing countries in the early 1990s*, and has engaged in psychological warfare in military contexts as a contractor for the American and British militaries during the Afghanistan War and the Iraq War. In 2013 it established the subsidiary Cambridge Analytica that helped Leave.EU with its Brexit campaign and worked on Ted Cruz and Donald Trump campaigns during the 2016 US presidential election.** It performed data mining and data analysis on its audience. Based on results, communications would then be specifically targeted to key audience groups to modify behaviour in accordance with the goal of SCL’s client. The company described itself as a “global election management agency”. The company’s leaders and owners had close ties to the Conservative Party (UK), the British royal family and the British military, and its investors included some of the largest donors to the Conservative Party.”

    *with the aim of electing corrupt politicians willing to sell off their country’s riches to multinational corporations?
    **intermediated by Steve Bannon and multi-billionaire US hedge fund manager Robert Mercer.

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  14. That Covid gif is nonsense. It would be equivalent to showing the deaths in California vs. North Dakota. A US vs. the EU would be an interesting one. Scaling for population is a necessity for accurate information.

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    1. I agree with the principle but this graph is still meaningful. For one, the other countries curves have leveled off but the US one keeps going up. While the US has a bigger population, it is not so much more that this graph is completely wrong.

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      1. Actually, if you look at the last two months, the daily cases in the US have been dropping (-25%) while France (500%), Germany (300%), Italy (800%), Spain (400%) and the UK (600%) are rising. Two months ago, the US case rate was by far the highest but now it is below France and Spain.
        https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus

        It seems possible that in populous countries with lots of travel there will be tons of cases regardless of what we do. Having young people getting sick in the summer may reduce the deaths in the long run. Or not.

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        1. You can measure it all kinds of ways but the fact remains that the total number of deaths in the US due to COVID is by far the highest relative to population size. That’s not going to change.

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  15. It is unclear whether a state court can indict a sitting president and, even if a state jailed a president, it would not mean he ceased being president. That requires impeachment and a subsequent conviction.

    Some people read McCulloch v. Maryland as preventing this because it would allow a state to arrest the power of the federal government.

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    1. It is an unsettled issue of US law whether a sitting president can be indicted. A memorandum by the US Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel is considered by the US DoJ to be binding on it, prohibiting the feds from indicting a sitting president.

      A state prosecutor’s office is not bound by that memo and would be free to create a test case by charging a sitting president. I don’t expect the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office (or the Office of the New York Attorney General) to do so, however. But then, I don’t expect Donald Trump to be the sitting president after January 20, 2021.

      If Trump were to be reelected, I still don’t think the NY authorities would actually charge him while he’s in office. OTOH, I do think those authorities might well seek a sealed indictment against Trump during his second term on any charges for which the statute of limitations would run before his term in office expires.

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  16. I have not seen speculation about a question of interest to me. Who supplied the tax data legally? It seems to me that this would include a small group of people. Melania? Their son? Accountants can’t supply this sort of information legally.

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    1. What I understand the NYT to be saying is that its source had possession of the documents legally — not that the source’s disclosing them to The Times was legal. Indeed, The Times editor’s note suggests that the source may have broken the law by having done so, since the note said the source turned them over “at great personal risk.”

      That it may have been illegal for the source to leak the documents does not mean that The Times can’t use the information or publish the documents itself, of course. That’s precisely what the Pentagon Papers case stands for. It’s also why WikiLeaks was able to publish emails stolen from the DNC and John Podesta in 2016 (even though the individuals and entities that stole them were later indicted for doing so).

      Trump’s accounting firm has legal possession of his tax records, as would the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, if the records were supplied to it pursuant to subpoena. Other individuals and entities may have had legal possession of the records as well.

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  18. Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens (preferably by Louis Jordan) and A Chicken Ain’t Nothin But A Bird (I like Nellie Lutcher’s version).

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