Friday: Hili dialogue

May 27, 2022 • 6:30 am

Welcome to the beginning of a long weekend: the Memorial Day Holiday. (Everybody is going home early today.) It’s May 27, 2022, and National Grape Popsicle Day (I prefer cherry or orange). It’s also Cellophane Tape Day, a product patented on this day in 1930.  Here’s part of the application, though it doesn’t say much:

 

Stuff that happened on May 27 includes:

  • 1199 – John is crowned King of England.
  • 1703 – Tsar Peter the Great founds the city of Saint Petersburg.

Here’s Peter’s summer palace outside the city, which I visited in July, 2011:

Here’s the cartoon, with the famous song starting at 4:25:

Here’s Opening Day: toll for pedestrians was 25¢. Second most beautiful bridge in the world:

You could make a good case that Heydrich, who was a high-ranking official in the SS, one of the architects of the “Final Solution”, and creator of the deadly Einsatzgruppen, was just as evil as Hitler. I don’t mourn his assassination, as there was no alternative for stopping the man. But the Nazis exercised exteme reprisals, including wiping out the Czech towns of Lidice and Ležáky and killing nearly all the inhabitants of both. Here’s the malefactor in 1940, and oy, does he look nasty!

  • 2016 – Barack Obama is the first president of United States to visit Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and meet Hibakusha.

DA NOOZ:

*Turkey, a member of NATO, has threatened to deep-six the new applications of Finland and Sweden. But the way Erdogan has been acting, I think Turkey should simply be kicked out. Look what they did:

In April, as the world was occupied with Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, a NATO member launched an attack on two of its neighboring territories. In a bombing campaign, Turkey targeted the camps of Kurdish militants in Iraq and Syria, inflicting damage on shelters, ammunition depots and bases.

The irony went largely unnoticed. That’s hardly a surprise: For a long time, the Western world has turned a blind eye to Turkey’s heavy-handed treatment of the Kurds. Across decades, the Turkish state has persecuted the Kurdish minority — about 18 percent of the population — with devastating zeal. Thousands have perished and around a million have been displaced in a campaign of severe internal repression. But Western nations, except for a brief spell when Kurdish resistance was holding back an ascendant Islamic State, have rarely seemed to care.

. . . For the [NATO] alliance itself, the impasse brings to light facts currently obscured by its makeover as a purely defensive organization. NATO, which has long acquiesced in the persecution of the Kurds, is far from a force for peace. And Turkey, a member since 1952, proves it.

*The complaints are mounting about the lax response of the police to the Uvalde, Texas school shooting. Accusations, some of which are summarized by the Wall Street Journal, include the fact that the shooter (the late Slvador Ramos) stood outside the school firing for 12 minutes before walking into the unlocked school, locking himself into a classroom, and creating immense carnage. [I just heard on the NBC evening news that four classrooms were involved, not just one as previously reported. Other claims by law enforcement have also changed rapidly.]

[Victor. Escalon of the Texas Department of Public Safety] said he couldn’t say why no one stopped Ramos from entering the school during that time Tuesday. Most of the shots Ramos fired came during the first several minutes after he entered the school, Mr. Escalon said.

People who arrived at the school while Ramos locked himself in a classroom, or saw videos of police waiting outside, were furious.

“The police were doing nothing,” said Angeli Rose Gomez, who after learning about the shooting drove 40 miles to Robb Elementary, where her children are in second and third grade. “They were just standing outside the fence. They weren’t going in there or running anywhere.”

DPS officials previously said an armed school officer confronted Ramos as he arrived at the school. Mr. Escalon said Thursday that information was incorrect and no one encountered Ramos as he arrived at the school. “There was not an officer readily available and armed,” Mr. Escalon said.

It also took a Border Patrol team an hour to get into the classroom after the gunman locked the door, while cops beat back parents urging them to do something (reports are that the cops had to get the keys to the classroom from a school official)

Videos circulated on social media Wednesday and Thursday of frantic family members trying to get access to Robb Elementary as the attack was unfolding, some of them yelling at police who blocked them from entering.

“Shoot him or something!” a woman’s voice can be heard yelling on a video, before a man is heard saying about the officers, “They’re all just [expletive] parked outside, dude. They need to go in there.”

Parents can be heard yelling to each other that their kids were inside the school and that they needed to get in. A woman can be heard yelling at a police officer, “He’s one person! Take him out!”

You can see one of these heartbreaking videos at below (from CNN), and only time will tell if “first responders” failed to do their job in a timely way.

*Here’s an interaction between a Sky News reporter and Ted Cruz, with the reporter asking Cruz why mass shootings are so prevalent in America. Cruz waffles, implying that the reporter is generally criticizing “American exceptionalism” (the reporter meant only in the frequency of shootings).

*The actor Kevin Spacey has been charged with several counts of sexual assault in Britain. He was also charged multiple times in the U.S. with sexual assault on young men (Spacey is gay), but he was not tried on any of the charges, though his career is on the skids. Now the charges come from another country, though again he seems to be at little risk:

British prosecutors authorized charges against actor Kevin Spacey on Thursday, with several counts of sexual assault stemming from incidents alleged to have taken place in London and Gloucestershire between March 2005 and April 2013.

Rosemary Ainslie, head of the Crown Prosecution Service’s Special Crime Division, stated in a news release that the CPS authorized criminal charges for four counts of sexual assault against three men, as well as another count of “causing a person to engage in penetrative sexual activity without consent.” The charges facing Spacey, 62, follow an investigation conducted by the Metropolitan Police. Spacey can be formally charged only upon arrest in England or Wales. A CPS spokesperson did not respond to The Washington Post’s request for comment on whether the actor would be extradited.

*According to Vanity Fair, actor Ray Liotta died in his sleep yesterday at only 67; he was on the set of a movie, and no cause of death has been disclosed.   A memorial from Lorraine Bracco:

Remember this scene with Joe Pesci and Ray Liotta in “Goodfellas”?

And, according to Nellie Bowles, the word “chief”, whose origins are misunderstood, goes down the tubes:

The name of the game is name games: With gun control and abortion rights debates roiling, the American left continues to fight the good fights. Like: San Francisco’s School District this week dropped the word “chief” from all job titles so as to avoid any implication that they are referring to Native American chieftains. No matter that the word comes from the French chef that comes from the Latin caput.

***************

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is having her nap:

A: Do you have a moment?
Hili: How can I know? It depends on what you are going to offer me.
In Polish:
Ja: Czy masz chwilę czasu?
Hili: Skąd mogę wiedzieć, to zależy od tego, co mi zaproponujesz.
Szaron at the window:

From Bruce: I bet this chill cat is going to play some Barry White:

Why do people DO this?

 

From Not Another Science Cat Page:

A tweet from Barry. Is Cat #2’s expression one of puzzlement or jealousy?

 

A road sign from Jez. For what “Cats’ eyes” are in Britain, see here.

God speaks (and flogs His book):

From the Auschwitz Memorial. Photograph of the separation; nearly all these people were gassed within an hour, and brutally separated from their families. If you go to the site, you can stand on the platform, where one original “cattle car” remains.

Tweets from Matthew. Can you guess the missing factor?

The March of the Eiders:

Sound up. Everybody wants a free ride!

More than you want to know?

What is this hamster doing?

22 thoughts on “Friday: Hili dialogue”

      1. Cool – its like taking the pill in The Matrix.

        remember the rule :

        ABCD

        Here, we have 1199

        A=1
        B=1
        C=9
        D=9

        A+C=10
        B+D=10
        10-10=0

        .. or, get the sum of every other number, and the other every other number. Compute the difference. The difference here is 0. Therefore 1199 is divisible by 11.

        Great place to find such products of 11 :

        license plates!

        You’ll never be the same.

        Confession : I had to write out 11/1199 to compute the quotient with a …[… hmmm…] … the symbol which shall not be named :

        “The symbol separating the dividend from the divisor in [..] long division […] seems to have no established name of its own. It can therefore simply be termed the “long division symbol,” or sometimes the division bracket.”

        https://mathworld.wolfram.com/LongDivisionSymbol.html

        … homework : what other difference (in addition to 0) will be a result of a number divisible by 11?

        BTW it is 10:01 AM right now. Somewhere.

        Reply

  2. Yes, the poor Kurds have it tough. Through no fault their own, their homeland straddles the borders of modern day Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Armenia. The British RAF bombed them in the 1930s on behalf of the puppet regime we had installed and were propping up in Iraq, so we’re to blame too. (We also helped draw up some of those borders in the Middle East, too, of course.)

    Reply

  3. They asked Ted Cruz the wrong question.

    Instead, they need to ask how the United States public schools are so exceptionally good at preventing and stopping in-school mass murder by sporks. Or mass drownings by school glue. Or mass murder by airplane. Or seat belt. Or life preserver.

    Reply

  6. I would never recommend kicking Turkey out of NATO. If you think Erdogan is an authoritarian dictator now, that would probably unleash even worse impulses than we’ve seen so far. He’d run to Russia and the entire free world would basically lose access to the Black Sea. Bulgaria, Romania, and Georgia would have their access to sea trade be at the whim of a new Russian/Turkey alliance. And any hope (small as it may be) of Syria democratizing or even just becoming more western-inclined after Assad dies would be gone. Frankly, if it happened right now, I wouldn’t even rule out Turkey declaring war on Ukraine within the next month.

    Reply

    2. Let’s call Erdoğan’s bluff. He either withdraws his threatened blackball veto of NATO membership for Finland and Sweden or walks away himself.

      I doubt Erdoğan or the Turkish people really want to throw their lot in with Putin over the West. It’d be a bad bet in the long run.

      Reply

  7. In re school shooter tweet, I’m guessing the missing part implied by the reply is ‘give him a gun’ – as if all those issues in the boy’s upbringing would come to naught as long as guns are banned.

    But in a related, happier note, I always loved the verse in O’Hara’s Give A Man A Horse He Can Ride:

    Give a man a pipe he can smoke,
    Give a man a book he can read,
    And his home is bright with a calm delight,
    Tho’ the room be poor indeed.

    Reply

    1. There are plenty of boys with that sort of upbringing in other wealthy countries, yet those countries don’t have recurring problems with school shootings.

      Reply

  10. Heydrich was inevitably played by Anton Diffring in the movie Operation Daybreak: I always found it ironic that many actors escaped Nazi Germany only to end up playing the very people they despised on film. Diffring was the best of them.

    Reply

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