Sunday: Hili dialogue

November 21, 2021 • 6:30 am

Welcome to Sunday, November 21, 2021: National Cranberry Day. Cranberries have two uses: in cranberry sauce at Thanksgiving and Christmas, and, most often, in cranberry juice drinks. Whoever came up with the latter idea did the industry a great favor, as otherwise the demand for cranberries would be small and seasonal.

It’s also Pumpkin Pie Day, National Stuffing Day (HuffPost says don’t eat stuffing because of calories)  Mother Goose Parade Day, an annual event in San Diego County, National Gingerbread Day, World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims, and a UN holiday: World Television Day.

Here are two minutes of The Mother Goose parade in 1966; it already looks antique! Mother Goose, who looks more like a duck, appears 41 seconds in:

News of the Day:

* Although Kenosha, Wisconsin was relatively peaceful after Kyle Rittenhouse’s “not guilty” verdict, there were protests and rioting in other towns. From CNN:

In New York, demonstrators shut down the Brooklyn Bridge, and in Portland, Oregon, they forced open a jail gate, prompting the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office to declare a riot.

The crowd, which was described as hostile, launched urine, alcoholic beverages, water bottles and batteries at deputies during the event,” the sheriff’s office said in a press release early Saturday morning.

The Portland Police Bureau said that vandals broke the windows of the city government’s print shop.

Additional vandalism was done to the Justice Center building,” the PPB said. An image released by police showed spray-painted graffiti, including the message, “All Cops Are Kyles.”

As you see, these are mostly people who thought from the outset that Rittenhouse was guilty, and were declaring with their actions that Rittenhouse, the judge, and the jury were racist, although they weren’t in the courtroom. Some of them used violence, inimical to their cause.

*Fortunately, Joe Biden gave the right response by an official:

“I stand by what the jury has concluded. The jury system works and we have to abide by it,” Biden told reporters on the White House lawn.

And unfortunately, Kamala Harris, who seems to have done almost nothing since the election, decided to criticize the jury and verdict in a tweet:

*The whereabouts of Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai are still uncertain, despite the two videos of her in a restaurant and pictures at home appearing on social media sites. After she accused a top government official of sexual assault, she vanished, and her social media presence has been scrubbed. She has not been heard from save the videos, which are undated and dubious, and the tennis world is up in arms.

Peng, in a social media post this month, accused a former top government official of sexually assaulting her. After the allegation, the Chinese government removed almost all references of Peng on social media within the country, and Peng disappeared from public life. Her absence prompted outrage across the world, especially from top officials and stars in tennis.

Here’s one of the videos (below) showing Peng in a restaurant, wearing a white blouse.

From the NYT:

The video clips were posted on the Twitter account of Hu Xijin, the chief editor of The Global Times, an influential Communist Party newspaper, who described them as showing Peng having dinner with her coach and friends on Saturday.

He wrote that he had “acquired” the clips but offered no explanation of how, and the clips appeared staged to establish the date.In the first clip, the man said to be Peng’s coach is discussing plans with her and asks, “Isn’t tomorrow Nov. 20?” A woman sitting next to Peng corrects him and says it will be Nov. 21. He then repeats the date twice.

Here’s the second clip purportedly showing Peng walking into a restaurant:

In the second clip, a woman wearing a mask, presumably Peng, is shown walking into a restaurant. The camera pauses on a sign indicating the date of the last cleaning, a common sight in Chinese buildings since the SARS epidemic. But only the month, November, is visible; the date appears to be obscured.

And the photos:

On Friday, a journalist for another Chinese media entity released pictures said to be of Peng in what appeared to be a bedroom, surrounded by stuffed animals. In those photos, Peng appeared younger than she did in more recent images of her and there was nothing to verify when they had been taken.

This is all deeply suspicious suggesting that Peng may be the victim of foul play: either killed or in prison. People are right to be concerned.

*WOKE QUACKERY ALERT: Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, which advertises itself as “the #2 undergraduate research university in Canada,” just received $1.2 million to study cancer prevention through traditional healing of First Nations People. Get a load of the last sentence (my emphasis; h/t Larry and Jeff).

A Lakehead University professor and her research team in partnership with traditional knowledge holders and Waasegiizhig Nanaandawe’iyewigamig Health Access Centre (WNHAC) are receiving $1.2 million in CIHR funding to explore the efficacy of using traditional healing to prevent cancer.

Dr. Lana Ray, Assistant Professor in Indigenous Learning at Lakehead and the University’s Indigenous Research Chair in Decolonial Futures, will work with WNHAC, traditional knowledge holders, and researchers from Lakehead University, Nipissing University and the University of Toronto to carry out the work over five years.

This project will implement traditional healing activities to address the impacts of colonialism in WNHAC’s service area. It will evaluate the impacts of the intervention through a pre- and post-design that will explore and measure risks and protective factors.

Using an Indigenous mixed methods research approach, this study will privilege Indigenous ways of knowing and doing and tangible outcomes for Indigenous communities through the implementation of medicine camps and traditional health practitioner visits.

Dr. Ray explained the importance of examining cancer prevention using traditional healing methods.

“We need to stop framing prevalent risk factors of cancer as such and start thinking about them as symptoms of colonialism,” Dr. Ray said.

Well, perhaps the money will have been worth it if it shows that “ways of knowing” and “traditional medicine” don’t work. (No, actually people will disregard negative results.) Lord knows the NIH has tested similar nostrums in itsNational Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, and none of them—NONE—have ever worked.  Check out this Wikipedia list of outcomes (including use of “traditional Indian remedies to cure type 2 diabetes”). BUPKES! Defund them! “No results reported” usually means, “we got nothing and didn’t want to write about it.”

*Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 769,643, an increase of 1,115 deaths over yesterday’s figure. The reported world death toll is now 5,165,873, an increase of about 7,400 over yesterday’s total.

Stuff that happened on November 21 includes:

  • 164 BCE – Judas Maccabeus, son of Mattathias of the Hasmonean family, restores the Temple in Jerusalem. This event is commemorated each year by the festival of Hanukkah.

Hanukkah begins a week from today, and Coynezaa is coming up next month.

This was the organizing document of Plymouth Colony, signed by 41 men (no women allowed!) on the Mayflower. Here’s a transcript of the document by William Bradford in 1646; the original has been lost. Bradford was governor of the Colony for three decades.

His method was very clever (read the bio to see), and he calculated the speed of light to be 212,000 km/sec; it’s actually 299,792 km/sec.  Not too shabby!

Here’s Edison photographed with his second phonograph in 1878:

As I wrote before about this paper,

The paper is here (it’s only three pages), and I couldn’t find the equation in that form, but I believe it’s on the page below in the fourth paragraph from the bottom [I’ve highlighted it]: “Gibt ein Körper die Energie L in Form von Strahlung ab, so verkleinert sich seine Masse um L/V².”

My rough German translates this as “If a body gives off the energy L in the form of radiation, then  its mass will be reduced by L/V²”.

Rearranging, if mass is M, then the energy accompanying that loss of mass, where I use “m” to stand for mass, is L = mV².  Clearly Einstein was using “V” instead of “c” to stand for the speed of light, and, as he says, energy is “L.” If you use “E” and “c”, then E = mc². (I probably screwed up something here, but this is the best I can do at 6:00 a.m.)

Michael Collins started it, by planning an IRA assassination of British undercover agents. After that, the British fired into the crowd at a soccer match, killing innocent civilians, and the game was on. Here’s Collins (the eponymous movie about him starting Liam Neeson is very good):

  • 1922 – Rebecca Latimer Felton of Georgia takes the oath of office, becoming the first female United States Senator.

Felton, however, was not elected, but was a temporary appointment that lasted a day. Wikipedia describes this:

In 1922, Governor Thomas W. Hardwick was a candidate for the next general election to the Senate, when Senator Thomas E. Watson died unexpectedly. Seeking an appointee who would not be a competitor in the coming special election to fill the vacant seat and a way to secure the vote of the new women voters alienated by his opposition to the 19th Amendment, Hardwick chose Felton, on October 3, to serve as senator. Congress was not expected to reconvene until after the election, so the chances were slim that Felton would be sworn in. However, Walter F. George won the special election despite Hardwick’s ploy. Rather than take his seat immediately when the Senate reconvened on November 21, George allowed Felton to be sworn in. This was due in part to persuasion by Felton and a supportive campaign launched by the white women of Georgia.

She was 87 when she was sworn in. Here’s Felton is at her desk as Senator for A Day. She was also a diehard white supremacist:

The forged skull was made of a human skull from the medieval era, a 500-year-old lower jaw of an orangutan, and fossil teeth from a chimp. We still don’t know who made it; suspects include Teilhard de Chardin, Charles Dawson and Arthur Conan Doyle.  Creationists gloated for years that biologists had been deceived, but, as the video shows below, the hoax was discovered by scientists:

  • 1985 – United States Navy intelligence analyst Jonathan Pollard is arrested for spying after being caught giving Israel classified information on Arab nations. He is subsequently sentenced to life in prison.
  • 1998 – Finnish satanist Jarno Elg kills a 23-year-old man and performs a ritual-like cutting and eating of body parts in Hyvinkää, Finland.

Elg was paroled in 2014, and the details of the case were sealed for 40 years, so we still don’t know what happened.

  • 2012 – At least 28 are wounded after a bomb is thrown onto a bus in Tel Aviv.
  • 2019 – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is indicted on charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust.

Notables born on this day include:

  • 1694 – Voltaire, French historian, playwright, and philosopher (d. 1778)
  • 1898 – René Magritte, Belgian painter (d. 1967)

Here’s a fine Magritte: “La vocation” (1964):

  • 1902 – Isaac Bashevis Singer, Polish-American novelist and short story writer, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1991)
  • 1904 – Coleman Hawkins, American saxophonist and clarinet player (d. 1969)

Here’s what many regard as Hawkins’s finest work: “Body and Soul” (1939).

  • 1912 – Eleanor Powell, American actress and dancer (d. 1982)
  • 1920 – Stan Musial, American baseball player and manager (d. 2013)

As I wrote before:

Musial, who was the star of the St. Louis Cardinals, is my favorite ballplayer of all time. He was a fantastic player and a gentleman on the field: I’m told he never once questioned an umpire’s call. My father saw him play many times; I saw him play but once, in the twilight of his career. [Below is] a short video about Stan the Man (or “the Donora Greyhound”)—clicking will take you to the YouTube video.

Musial batted .331 over the course of his career and set National League (NL) records for career hits (3,630), runs batted in (1,951), games played (3,026), at bats (10,972), runs scored (1,949) and doubles (725). His 475 career home runs then ranked second in NL history behind Mel Ott’s total of 511. His 6,134 total bases remained a major league record until surpassed by Hank Aaron, and his hit total still ranks fourth all-time, and is the highest by any player who spent his career with only one team. A seven-time batting champion with identical totals of 1,815 hits at home and 1,815 hits on the road, he was named the National League’s (NL) Most Valuable Player (MVP) three times and led St. Louis to three World Series championships. He also shares the major league record for the most All-Star Games played (24) with Hank Aaron and Willie Mays.

Here’s a 5-minute video of Musial’s career highlights (click “Watch on YouTube”:

  • 1945 – Goldie Hawn, American actress, singer, and producer
  • 1965 – Björk, Icelandic singer-songwriter

Björk in her swan dress at the 2001 Oscars:

Those whose lives concluded on November 21 include:

  • 1695 – Henry Purcell, English organist and composer (b. 1659)
  • 1996 – Abdus Salam, Pakistani-English physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1926)
  • 2017 – David Cassidy, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1950)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn: Hili and Szaron are looking out:

Szaron: Do you see what I see?
Hili: And what do you see?
Szaron I see the same as you see.
In Polish:
Szaron: Czy ty widzisz to co ja widzę?
Hili: A co ty widzisz?
Szaron: To co ty widzisz.

A cat-shaming picture from Ginger K.:

From Facebook. It should have been “sine of pi” or sin(π).  Well, they can’t all be gems!

From Pradeep, reminding us of the bad old days:

Kitten pwns d*g:

From Barry: A wild fox stops to listen to banjo music.

A tweet from God Himself (or Theirselves):

From the Auschwitz Memorial, showing how few arrivals at Auschwitz were temporarily spared instead of being immediately gassed. Note that there’s a link to a short lesson on the Holocaust and Dutch Jews:

Tweets from Matthew. First, a groaner:

Art in Portugal made from trash. I think the first one in the first tweet is a fox, not a cat:

I thought badgers were supposed to be mean. This one is bested by a dog otter (i.e., a male otter):

I love this one!

21 thoughts on “Sunday: Hili dialogue”

  1. After that, the British fired into the crowd at a soccer match, …

    Morning pedantry: Gaelic football is not soccer, it’s rather different, more like Aussie Rules football (though that may not be the most helpful comparison for most readers 🙂 ).

    Reply

  2. “BUPKES! Defund them! “No results reported” usually means, “we got nothing and didn’t want to write about it.””

    You know what this means – colonialism and racism itself have developed to such a profound extent that cures for disease cannot be found anymore – we must embrace the “indigenous ways of knowing and doing” to learn how to cure the diseases – and to communicate and share and document them.

    As for the annual Thanksgiving read-a-thon : that in Virginia at an earlier year I believe is well documented, unlike Plymouth, and a dispute has dragged on about which is the True First Thanksgiving – even entailing JFK making a bill or something!

    Of course, the poorly documented thanksgiving is attributed to good moral stuff, while the Virginian one is about getting successful.

    “Source” : Wikipedia Of Course.

    Reply

  3. Cranberry nut bread.
    My sister-in-law’s famous cranberry walnut pie. I’m a pie freak, and it’s in my top five

    Reply

    1. Cranberry muffins. I have a recipe which uses either leftover cranberry sauce or fresh cranberries. I usually do these right after Thanksgiving, and then again before Christmas.

      L

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  5. “Creationists gloated for years that biologists had been deceived…”

    One of my defining characteristics of religion is smugness.

    L

    Reply

  6. I’ve lived in the Pacific Northwest for 25 years, and Portland rioting and unrest have been endemic. The people who rioted and damaged municipal buildings in Portland the other day are not protestors but anarchists. These are the descendants of the anarchists that rioted in Seattle during the WTO event in 1999. It has been a problem in the Portland area for many years, and the city hasn’t been able to put a lid on it.

    Reply

    1. “It has been a problem in the Portland area for many years, and the city hasn’t been able to put a lid on it.”

      Do they even want to? Or is any mayor/city council member who tries going to be committing political career suicide anyway? Not trying to be sarcastic. That’s a genuine question.

      Reply

  8. Harris’s initial comment on the the Rittenhouse trial was measured and judicial, like Biden’s. But then she commented the second time. Biden also commented a second time to the effect that the verdict made him “angry and concerned.”

    CNN weighed in yesterday with a piece about the Angry White Man, but the author was good enough to assure us that:

    I’m not suggesting we start racially profiling White men. The vast majority of White men are no menace to society.

    Thanks, pal! Right back at you. Nice to know there are good people on both sides.

    Reply

  9. I once held the real Piltdown “fossils” in my hands. How anyone could not immediately see they had been modified is beyond me.

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  10. Kamala Harris yet again shows how she’s not presidential material. Even Biden’s statement was a bit off. As Bill Maher suggested, the Dems desperately need a Messaging Czar.

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  11. I’m going to question the authenticity of the Slave Sale advertisement. It uses a typeface called Cheltenham which was first designed in 1896 well before the 1855 date on the advertisement.

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  12. Both CNN and CNN-Brazil report that “missing” Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai made a videoconference call to the IOC assuring that she is well and not in danger. I hope this means the guilty party will be punished even if the Chinese don’t wash their dirty clothes in public. In this neck of the woods, even though much escapes executive privilege and secrets of justice, on high impunity seems to rule.

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  13. “The [Portland] crowd, which was described as hostile, launched urine, alcoholic beverages, water bottles and batteries at deputies during the event,” (my emphasis)

    I think the writer of this sentence is going for the Understatement of the Year Award.

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  14. Talking about the Bad Old Days, I transcribe two advertisements published by the Pennsylvania Gazette (Philadelphia) of 1731/2 and 1743, respectively. The ads were placed by someone a bit more significant than Mr. Carter of Clarksburg, Kentucky.

    “To be sold: A likely Negro wench about fifteen years old and talks English. Inquire of the printer hereof. A breeding Negro woman about twenty years of age. Can do any household work .”

    “A Negro Man twenty-two Years of Age, of uncommon Strength and Activity, . . . and is very faithful in Employment: Any Person that wants such a one, may see him by inquiring of the Printer hereof.”

    The “printer” in these two cases was Benjamin Franklin.

    The term “Picinniny” and its variants are corruptions of the Portuguese word “Pequenininha”, the feminine diminutive of “pequeno”, meaning small: In other words, a young or small girl.

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  15. Re the cringeworthy Lakehead study, your bolded sentence is an example of an ideology that is permeating everything related to Indigenous Health. (I capitalize because it’s a fiefdom in academe now, not just like, say, “feline behaviour”.) If everything is a symptom of colonialism then there is no need for agency among indigenous people because that would be just “victim blaming” (or is it “shaming” now — I forget.) The study is funded by a grant from the Canadian Institute of Health Research, a federal funding agency.

    The obvious contributor to cancer (and heart disease) among indigenous people that is not colonial is of course the high prevalence of heavy tobacco smoking. Yet academic indigenous “allies” criticize conventional smoking cessation programs because they are disrespectful of the traditional ceremonial and economic role of tobacco in indigenous culture. The modern economic role is the sale of wholesale quantities of untaxed cigarettes to non-native middlemen who then sell them on illegally to businesses like corner stores, thus evading the high excise taxes placed on tobacco by several levels of government. On-reserve profits from this enormously lucrative activity are themselves untaxed. Only reserves that are close enough to settler towns, cities, and highways can profit handsomely from it. The tobacco trade finances a variety of really scary illegal activities that we don’t like to talk about.

    But the main academic objection is here:
    [The study] “will evaluate the impacts of the intervention through a pre- and post-design that will explore and measure risks and protective factors. [So historical controls only — and how do you use that design to evaluate a disease with a long latent period? They must be looking only at adoption of various behaviours believed — how? — to be beneficial. If tobacco and alcohol moderation are not on the list, I’m not interested.]

    “Using an Indigenous mixed methods research approach, this study will privilege Indigenous ways of knowing and doing and tangible outcomes for Indigenous communities through the implementation of medicine camps and traditional health practitioner visits.”

    This sentence is essentially hocus pocus (hoc est corpus) but what comes through is that the methods of doing and studying the intervention give preferential weight to a gnostic, shamanistic knowledge system that is knowable only to the custodians of the knowledge. It says that if you don’t believe, your negative energy will prevent the magic from happening, and you certainly won’t be able to replicate our results.

    The sample size available in the catchment area of Lakehead is far too small for a study to pick up meaningful effects of such vague interventions (if they exist) on cancer rates in such a short period of time, which almost guarantees in advance that the study will not find any. If publication results, it will have to discuss such effects as improved subjective self-esteem and well-being among the subjects as a benefit of being paid attention to by the researchers. It is those effects which will be cited as evidence for further academic indigenization efforts, not the actual health outcomes from the interventions. If the study did show, using validated scientific methods, that the interventions reduced smoking and alcohol use, great, but why the need to dress it up in gnosticism?

    I don’t know anything about Dr. Lana Ray. The U of Toronto contribution is in the evaluation of outcomes from the (respected) Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation.

    Reply

  16. Rebecca Latimer Felton was an ultra-racist baddie. Congress would have been better served had another woman been first, even if Felton was there for only one day. The deceased Thomas E. Watson she was appointed to replace was himself a raging anti-Semite and one of he ones who stirred up hate leading the to lynching of Leo Frank. Talk about the bad old days.

    Reply

  17. About the badger & the otter: there is much confusion over the European & the American badger species.
    The species pictured today is the European one.
    The 2 are in different genera.
    The European species — Meles meles — is social, living in communal dens.
    They commonly feed at night, & a main item on their menu is EARTHWORMS!
    The American species — Taxidea taxus — is solitary & eats pert near anything it want to.
    It is active day & night, & does not defer to otters — nor even mountain lions.
    The Dachshund — [“Badger-Hound”]– was bred in Germany to chase the former out of their dens.
    I have found no record or study of Weiner Dogs taking on the American species.
    A very nice 224-page book on the world’s badgers is — “Badger”, by Daniel William Justice.

    Reply
  18. Pingback: Canadian government denies McGill professor grants on the grounds that his mandatory DEI statements describe color-blind hiring based on merit – Why Evolution Is True

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