Saturday: Hili dialogue

June 11, 2022 • 6:30 am

Welcome to the Cat Sabbath: Saturday, June 11, 2022. It’s National German Chocolate Cake Day, but not a case of cultural appropriation. The name “German” comes from the recipe on the German’s Chocolate Cake Box, a company now owned by Better Crocker. It’s GOOD! The recipe for the cake is here, but you’ll also need the filling and frosting recipe, which you can find here.

 

It’s also King Kamehameha Day in Hawaii.

Stuff that happened on June 11 includes:

  • 1509 – Henry VIII of England marries Catherine of Aragon.
  • 1748 – Denmark adopts the characteristic Nordic Cross flag later taken up by all other Scandinavian countries.

Here are all the Nordic flags with the Wikipedia caption:

Nordic flags, from left to right: Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark

Here are all the Nordic flags

  • 1770 – British explorer Captain James Cook runs aground on the Great Barrier Reef.
  • 1837 – The Broad Street Riot occurs in Boston, fueled by ethnic tensions between Yankees and Irish.
  • 1895 – Paris–Bordeaux–Paris, sometimes called the first automobile race in history or the “first motor race”, takes place.

This is a bit misleading, at least where the term “race” is involved. Wikipedia notes:

The Paris–Bordeaux–Paris Trail race of June 1895 is sometimes called the “first motor race”, although it did not fit modern competition where the fastest is the winner. It was a win for Émile Levassor, who came first after completing the 1,178km race in 48 hours, almost six hours before second place. However, the official winner was Paul Koechlin, who finished third in his Peugeot, exactly 11 hours slower than Levassor, but the official race regulations had been established for four-seater cars, while Levassor and runner-up Louis Rigoulot were driving two-seater cars

Here’s Sir Barton, who lived to be 21 (the jockey is Johnny Loftus, the venue is the Preakness:

  • 1920 – During the U.S. Republican National Convention in Chicago, U.S. Republican Party leaders gathered in a room at the Blackstone Hotel to come to a consensus on their candidate for the U.S. presidential election, leading the Associated Press to coin the political phrase “smoke-filled room”.

The Blackstone is still operating as a hotel, and is downtown on Michigan Avenue. Here’s a photo (from Wikipedia):

You can still visit the USS MIssouri in Pearl Harbor. Here’s a photo of the original surrender and my own photo from 2018 of the spot where the war officially ended:

  • 1955 – Eighty-three spectators are killed and at least 100 are injured after an Austin-Healey and a Mercedes-Benz collide at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the deadliest ever accident in motorsports.

Here’s a video account of the accident, which you may not want to watch, as it’s grim (accident footage begins at 3:27):

Here’s Wallace standing in the door, a door that you can still see. It was a symbolic segregationist gesture, as the Feds shortly thereafter forced him to move. Here he’s encountering Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach:

  • 1963 – Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức burns himself with gasoline in a busy Saigon intersection to protest the lack of religious freedom in South Vietnam.

The story of the burning monk, and again, bits are disturbing, so be warned:

  • 1963 – John F. Kennedy addresses Americans from the Oval Office proposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which would revolutionize American society by guaranteeing equal access to public facilities, ending segregation in education, and guaranteeing federal protection for voting rights.

Here’s JFK’s speech committing his government to a civil right act, which begins with a reference to the black students who, on that same day, finally registered at the University of Alabama:

Hayes is first, then Hoisington

  • 2001 – Timothy McVeigh is executed for his role in the Oklahoma City bombing.
  • 2010 – The first African FIFA World Cup kicks off in South Africa.

Here’s the official song of the 2010 World Cup, which I show because I love Shakira and, especially, this catchy song, even though though it’s taken from a Cameroon marching song, “Zamina Waka Waka” (below):

Note that the group, Zangalewa, is partly in whiteface:

Da Nooz:

*Fasten your seat belts; it’s gonna be a bumpy economic ride. The Washington Post reports (along with many other venues) that inflation has risen again this month, giving us a yearly rate of 8.6%: a 42-year high.

Compared to April, May prices rose 1 percent, according to the latest snapshot issued by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and known as the consumer price index. The brutal report surprised economists and brings into sharp relief just how inescapable inflation has become for millions of American households, dealing with higher rent, bigger gas bills, and rising grocery costs.

“Whatever Washington has done to try to fix the cost of living crisis in America, it isn’t working,” Chris Rupkey, the chief economist at the research firm FWDBONDS LLC, said in an analyst note. “This isn’t just Russia and Ukraine anymore.”

. . .Gas and other energy prices were not the sole drivers of May’s bleak inflation report. Categories for shelter, airfare, used cars and trucks and new vehicles were among the largest contributors. The cost of medical care, household furnishings and clothing also rose.

The food index increased 10.1 percent for the 12 months ending in May, the first double-digit increase since 1981.

Here’s a timeline of yearly inflation rate, showing that the most recent year that outstripped this one was 1981:

*Anti-Semitism rears its ugly head in Boston, but I’ll let Nellie Bowles describe it infrom Bari Weiss’s Substack column). This has been reported in several other places, like the Jerusalem Post, but I haven’t found a mention of this in the liberal mainstream media like the Washington Post, New York Times. or even The Boston Globe.

 Anti-Zionists are now just mapping Boston’s Jewish population: The Boston Boycott Divest and Sanction movement is circulating a map of Zionist “entities.” The elaborate map —which looks like something a crazy person makes in a movie—has pins with lines drawn between places like . . . a brewery, the JewishBoston publication, county jails, and the Jewish Teen Foundation of Greater Boston. All of whom are somehow “responsible for the colonization of Palestine.”

Here’s what the “Mapping Project” creators have to say: “Our goal in pursuing this collective mapping was to reveal the local entities and networks that enact devastation, so we can dismantle them. Every entity has an address, every network can be disrupted.”

Nothing antisemitic to see here.

*AOC, in one of her less sapient moments, has gone on what she called a “mini-rant” about the use of the term “Latinx” to refer to Hispanics. (She favors the term, though most Hispanics ignore and abhor it). Her words as reported at The Hill:

“I also have a mini-rant about this because there are some politicians, including Democratic politicians, that rail against the term ‘Latinx.’ And they’re like, ‘This is so bad, this is so bad for the party,’ like blah blah blah.

“And like it’s almost like it hasn’t struck some of these folks that another person’s identity is not about your re-election prospects,” Ocasio-Cortez said during a video message posted to her Instagram account.

“Gender is fluid, language is fluid, and I think people right now are using the ‘e’ term as gender-neutral [JAC: I assume she means “Latine”] in order to be as inclusive as possible. Don’t have to make drama over it.”

As NBC News reported last December:

. . . a new survey of 800 registered voters of Latin American descent showed that only 2 percent described themselves as Latinx. The poll, conducted in November by Bendixen and Amandi International, a Miami-based Democratic firm, also showed that 68 percent prefer Hispanic and 21 percent favor Latino. A whopping 40 percent found the word Latinx offensive.

In fact, AOC is using a term spurned by Hispanics precisely to flaunt her virtue to white people and thereby increase her reelection prospects.

*But good news: be aware that as Sunday morning, you will no longer need a negative covid test to board a flight to the U.S.

On Friday, a senior official for the Biden administration said that it had decided to lift the requirement on Sunday at 12:01 a.m., after Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials determined that the widespread adoption of vaccines and treatments for Covid-19 no longer make it necessary.

The decision was met with joy in the travel industry, which for months has been lobbying the administration hard to get rid of the testing rule.

These tests were the bane of many trips, including my two recent ones, for the test had to be read within 24 hours of boarding your first flight to the U.S. Returning from Santiago, Chile after having taken a PCR test, we all got very nervous until the results came when we were about to walk two blocks to the departure airport. The same late results made us equally anxious in Lisbon. This is a great mitzvah!

*Andrew Sullivan’s column of yesterday, “The vibes they are a-shiftin’“, not only details some missteps of the Woke Left, but suggests that maybe the pushback is beginning—even in the liberal media.

And many people have now experienced firsthand what happens to a workplace when crusades for “social justice” trump every other value. The Washington Post this week was convulsed by public infighting — initiated by a reporter, Felicia Sonmez, whose crusade to dismantle the “oppressive systems” she endures at the WaPo went on for a week of public name-calling, vitriol, and victim-mongering. As a professed victim of sexism, Sonmez felt fully justified in destroying any shred of civility or decorum — because she assumed she couldn’t be punished. The same applies to the unethical journalism of Taylor Lorenz, another social justice warrior at the WaPo.

And yet even in this wokest of woke newspapers, the editor finally had enough. Sonmez was fired yesterday for “misconduct that includes insubordination, maligning your co-workers online and violating The Post’s standards on workplace collegiality and inclusivity.” Today, Erik Wemple casts a skeptical eye at the countless corrections required to sustain the career of Lorenz. That strikes me as another vibe shift. Not so long ago, a brilliant young editor, Bari Weiss, was forced out of the NYT by a relentless campaign of bullying, Twitter-mobbing and Slack vileness. Now, a purveyor of exactly those kinds of tactics is the one who had to go.

Sullivan sounds as if he wants the Democrats to win, and I’m sure he does, so long as they’re not “progressive” (i.e., woke) ones:

Can the Democrats de-toxify and regroup? I’m not sure they have time before November; but even if they did, I doubt at this point that Biden can do it. He doesn’t seem to understand the legitimate criticisms of the cultural left he has yoked himself to during his first two years. And in a very rare interview this week — Jimmy Kimmel’s — he seemed to blame the press for his inability to get his voice above the din. This is not the kind of thing a successful president says.

There’s an opening here for a future Democratic presidential candidate. Be your generation’s Bill Clinton. Be the person who finally takes on woke intolerance and leftist delusion. Focus on crime, income inequality, affordable healthcare, getting inflation under control, and beefing up the border. These issues should not be conceded to the GOP — as Clinton and Obama showed. The consequences of staying on the current course are more fatal now than they were when Clinton and Obama dragged the Dems to the center, and won over conservatives like me. The result could be the re-election of Donald Trump. If that doesn’t merit a shake-up, what would?

But who’s our candidate? Where is an electable Democrat?

*And there’s more good news tonight, or there was in 2017, when this was reported in the New Zealand Herald. There’s a nice movie at the site, too, where you can see the Star the Duck quaffing a good pint. Click to read; this headline is clickbait if ever there was such a thing:

The whole story (note that the d*g started it!):

A duck wearing a bow tie suffered injuries following a brawl with a dog in a pub in Chulmleigh, Devon, UK.

The dapper duck, named Star, was enjoying a pint with his owner Barrie Hayman when Hayman’s dog Meggie reportedly started the fight.

Star’s beak was injured in the brawl, which took place at The Old Courthouse Inn.

“Star pushed his luck too far and Meggie snapped – splitting Star’s bottom beak right down the middle,” Hayman told the Cheddar Valley Gazette.

“He gave her a stare, then promptly stood on her back. It was not pretty and not nice. We were so scared we would lose Star.

“He had to be rushed to the vets and go under anaesthetic, which is always risky and could go either way with ducks and other small animals.

“Thankfully our Star is a tough cookie and it looks like he came out okay.”

Here’s the indomitable Star and his staff:

Star the duck and his owner Barry Hayman with a pint of ale at The Old Courthouse Inn in Chulmleigh, North Devon. Star has developed a taste for Ale and he is often seen drinking at the pub. Photo / SWNS/Mega

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Szaron and Hili have displaces Andrzej from the couch:

A: Is there a place for me?
Hili: Yes, but you have to chase Szaron away.
In Polish:
Ja: Czy jest tu miejsce dla mnie?
Hili: Tak, ale musisz wygonić Szarona.

And Paulina’s photo of Baby Kulka:

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

From Facebook:

From The Cat House on the Kings:

. . . and a True Fact from Amazing Things:

A tweet from Titania about her latest article.

A quote from that article:

At a recent “comedy” show in Los Angeles, a brave audience member peacefully attacked comedian Dave Chappelle in self-defence against his violent jokes. Some reports have suggested that the assailant wasn’t a social justice activist at all, but a victim of mental illness. But the two are by no means mutually exclusive. Many of my best friends are clinically insane. 

I probably posted this before, but it’s worth seeing again. There’s even a Wikipeda article on Tombili, a name often given to a chubby pet. The Turks do love their kitties!

From the Auschwitz Memorial:

Tweets from Matthew. This photo is from Chicago, and notice the even spacing!

A lovely transit of Greenland:

If you don’t know what this doctor is talking about, go here.

A wonderful dive:

There is nothing, no matter how bizarre, that you cannot find on the Internet:

24 thoughts on “Saturday: Hili dialogue”

  2. If you go to Google Translate, and translate the English “non-binary” to Spanish, it provides masculine and feminine versions.

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  3. IRT Sully’s article, IMO, Pete Buttigieg is the next Clinton-Obama type. The Dems need to prepare him to run for president now, but I think Kamala Harris is the putative presidential candidate now, a kind of primogeniture, so the Dems are on track to lose the White House in 2024.

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    1. Unfortunately, it is now apparent that Joe Biden is another Jimmy Carter. Both men won the presidency against Republicans with glaring weaknesses (Donald Trump and Gerald Ford, respectively). Once in office, they became almost non-entities, often out-of-mind. Both were weighed down by high inflation. Both lacked any sense of charisma. They were incapable of rallying the nation behind their causes. Although the political situation in the nation during Carter’s administration was very different from the current one, the commonality, as is always the case, is the nation’s desire for leadership. Neither could provide that. As with Carter, Biden appears to be headed towards a one term presidency. Carter was succeeded by Ronald Reagan, which was bad enough, but whether Trump or some far right-winger assumes office in 2025, the future of the country is dire, indeed. Of course, things can change. Perhaps Biden will not run again and a more charismatic Democrat will take his place. It is not an impossibility that the Republican Party will self-destruct as it has been taken over by loons. Democrats need to hope for a political miracle. The future of democracy may depend on that happening.

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    2. I think Al Franken would be a good candidate, I’d think he’s done his penitence. Zelensky has shown us that comedians should not be underestimated!

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      2. Al Franken never had anything to repent for in the first place and, if he did, it was something so minuscule that it should have been easily handled with an apology in private from one adult individual to another. What happened to him was a travesty, and we lost one of the last truly good, truly honest, truly dedicated politicians at the federal level.

        (Not that I’m suggesting you necessarily believe he had to repent for anything. I just deeply lament what happened, especially because it happened to him)

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    1. Is it wise? I guess it consumes quite a bit of energy.
      On the other hand, throwing your dirty laundry in a laundry basket is, admittedly, a Herculean task.

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      1. We just throw our dirty clothes over the upstairs railing…
        As for the ER doc’s warning, my ex worked emerg before setting up his private practice, and he had a guy come in in the middle of the night still attached to his vacuum cleaner🙀 Another, female, patient came in with a pizza cutter “up” her. She was trying to chase away the devil. She had her evangelical preacher with her. You can’t make theae things up. The first guy said he was vacuuming naked and the hose just grabbed him…

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  5. I learned today, reading the news in Spanish, that the city of Buenos Aires made it illegal to use inclusive language in schools, same as Uruguay, and France.

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  6. I would somehow have been surprised if the tiger skin underneath would not have been striped. I’m sure the leopard’s spots* and tabby’s stripes do too (I suspect the latter would be the easier one to find out, although we should never underestimate an unwilling tabby).

    *Even the melanistic black panther has recognisable spots.

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    1. I always believed that zebra fur was black stripes on white, not the reverse. It just seemed so obvious. Now it is clear that it is always black on white. Glad to have proof. Reverse makes no sense at all when you think about it. You start out with colorless skin and develop the melanin/color in the appropriate manner and location.

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      1. In the cute animanted film, Madagascar, Chris Rock as the zebra (complete with gap in front teeth) ponders whether he’s white with black stripes or vice versa.

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  7. Watching that 6/11/63 speech by JFK, I’m reminded again that Lee Harvey Oswald not only put a round from a 6.5×52mm Mannlicher-Carcano rifle through president Kennedy’s skull; he also plunged a knife into the heart of the American Dream.

    Plus, great head of hair on Jack, huh?

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    1. This is a genuine question: why do so many people think JFK was a great president? I understand that he was charismatic, and that the memory of his assassination looms large in the most populous generation in this country, but his handling of both domestic and foreign issues was mediocre at best and disastrous-bordering-on-nuclear-annihilation at worst.

      EDIT: It occurs to me that I should rephrase my question as “why do people from your generation, who lived through JFK’s presidency, think he was a great president?” I understand how people after your generation almost must conclude that from what they’ve been taught by school and media.

      Reply

      1. Well, I was only 10 when JFK got croaked in Dealy Plaza, but I’ll give it a go: whether one adjudges JFK himself mediocre or great (and my personal view is that he had unrealized greatness within him), the 48-hour period in which the president was felled by an assassin’s bullet and his assassin was then assassinated himself, live on tv while in police custody, fundamentally altered the way US citizens relate to their government.

        I know it made it hard for me to go back and study 5th-grade civics in the same way again.

        There is a through line altering the shape of American history from that weekend till today. The events of 1968 — from the Tet Offensive, to LBJ’s decision not to seek a second term, to the assassinations of MLK and RFK within two months of each other, to the Chicago police riots during the DNC, to the election of Richard Milhous Nixon — turbocharged these changes.

        There is, of course, a lot more to it. But that, my son, is the hard nut of the 1960s in the USA, at least for those among us with a diminished attention span. 🙂

        I’ll leave the rest of the story to some future Edward Gibbon.

        Reply

        1. Ah, OK. I was mistaken in thinking that when you said that the American Dream died with him, you meant that he was somehow going to bestow it upon the country. Working off of what he did while he was President, it’s hard to conclude that he would have been anything more than mediocre, and quite a bit of evidence to suggest that he may have been disastrous (especially with regard to the Soviets). I also have often wondered if he would have created the first presidential dynasty, and what that would have meant for increasing the power — both lawful and unlawful — of the executive branch. Both he and his kin were certainly more than happy to work outside the law and use their power to further their own political and personal interests, and his collusion with RFK on unlawful matters is, I’m sure, known to you. He and his bro also had a great interest in pursuing policies of consolidating presidential power (to be wielded by them, naturally).

          So, I guess nobody can say whether he would have found that greatness for which you think he possessed the capacity. I can see how he could have accomplished a lot with his charisma and the changing culture of the nation, but I don’t see a lot of evidence that he would have. And I can certainly see how, through the eyes of someone who lived through the tumultuous following years, the US seemed to be falling apart in slow motion. At the same time, we also passed the Civil Rights Act just a few years later; saw the rise of the larger left-wing anti-war and hard pro-free speech movements; increasing consciousness with regard to environmental issues; a generally progressive swing in the judicial branch, including with regard to free speech and abortion; a whole lot of great music…

          The 1960s and 70s were crazy, but a whole lot of good happened. I think it’s a mistake to look at the period through such a negative lens as the one you laid out above.

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          1. As for JFK and the Soviets, the Bay of Pigs invasion was totally botched — but that was a situation Jack had thrust onto his lap by Eisenhower and the CIA. Kennedy came through with flying colors a year and a half later in the Cuban Missile Crisis. (Whether that was due to deft démarche or stumbling into dumb luck is a matter on which reasonable minds might disagree, I understand).

            And as for viewing the Sixties through a negative lens, that’s not entirely the way I see it. A lot of good came out of that era. And it was a helluva an interesting and exciting ride for a guy like me. (Though there’s no doubt America lost its innocence by partaking of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil — which itself isn’t an entirely bad thing, either.)

            Plus, I take it you agree with me about JFK’s hair? 🙂

  8. AOC is right that language is fluid, but wrong in thinking that change can be imposed from top-down by the cultural elite. Just because some academics and ivy league-bred members of the press have decided to use “Latinx” doesn’t mean millions of Latinos from every walk of life will. There will never be an American version of the Académie Française, no matter how badly the woke want one. Nor does AOC represent America’s Latinos en masse. She represents parts of the Bronx and Queens and has made the mistake of thinking the rest of America is like her district.

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    1. A lot of AOC’s district is not like “the rest of her district” as well. Bx and Qns are left but less woke than her minority of fanatics (in my NYC experience). Her appeal and fame is larger in wokestan than NYC. Older Faux Noos watching “low information” MAGAs can hate her WHILE being physically attracted to her – a fine and dangerous mix.
      D.A.
      NYC (Manhattan)

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  9. AOC was never what I’d call middle of the road but when first elected her remit was basically a better life for workers, the lower SESs and human rights broadly. I quite liked her mostly.

    Subsequently though she went hyper woke, REAL extreme like, in the past 4 years. Partisanship, power and mixing with the “Squad” as well as confirmation bias will do that to a girl I suppose.

    She came out as pro-psychedelics a few years ago and I thought: “Nooooo! She’s the LAST person that good cause needs!”
    The Squad is nakedly anti-Semitic.
    D.A.
    NYC

    Reply

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