Friday: Hili dialogue

July 29, 2022 • 6:30 am

Once again we’ve reached the end of the week, and with sundown on this Friday, July 29, comes the beginning of Cat Sabbath. It’s National Lasagna Day, and now I’m craving one.

It’s also National Almond Buttercrunch Day, National Waffle Iron Day (time was that every family had one, but now people buy waffles frozen), Hug Holiday Day (hug someone who could use it), and International Tiger Day. Some day I will pet a baby tiger. . . 

I am still quite depressed about the premature death of one of Audrey’s babies, so posting may be light today. I do my best.

Stuff that happened on July 29 includes:

This marriage didn’t last long; Darnley was killed at in 1567 at age twenty, and we don’t know for sure who murdered him.

  • 1818 – French physicist Augustin Fresnel submits his prizewinning “Memoir on the Diffraction of Light”, precisely accounting for the limited extent to which light spreads into shadows, and thereby demolishing the oldest objection to the wave theory of light.

It was the wave phenomenon that led to the blurring of shadows. Here’s a page from Fresnel’s monograph. He was barely honored in his lifetime, as he died at thirty of tuberculosis:

Here’s the Arc, draped in black, on the occasion of the state funeral of author Victor Hugo on May 31, 1885:

Here’s Baden Powell on Brownsea Island camp in 1907, ready to make s’mores!

  • 1921 – Adolf Hitler becomes leader of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.
  • 1957 – Tonight Starring Jack Paar premieres on NBC with Jack Paar beginning the modern day talk show.

Here are three clips from the show, described on YouTube this way:

Here are three rare clips from the original Jack Paar “Tonight” show (later called the Jack Paar Show, but often referred to as “Tonight”). The first looks like it is from the late fifties. It is with Elsa Maxwell, who was an American gossip columnist and author, songwriter, and professional hostess renowned for her parties for royalty and high society figures of her day. The second clip is with Attorney General Robert Kennedy. This clip had to have been either 1961 or 1962 while Kennedy was Attorney General and Paar was still on late nights. The last clip is Jack famously walking off his show in 1960 the night after one of his jokes that included the word “water closet” was edited out of the program. We see also his return some weeks later. This clip has rarely been seen in it’s [sic] video form as it is here.

  • 1958 – U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower signs into law the National Aeronautics and Space Act, which creates the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
  • 1973 – Greeks vote to abolish the monarchy, beginning the first period of the Metapolitefsi.
  • 1976 – In New York City, David Berkowitz (a.k.a. the “Son of Sam”) kills one person and seriously wounds another in the first of a series of attacks.

His mugshot is below; he shot eight people, several of whom died.

Here’s the end of the first of the several letters that Berkowitz left for the police. He’s now residing in Shawangunk Correctional Facility in New York, and although could be eligible for parole, will never get out (for one thing, he refuses to attend parole hearings.

Here’s part of what they saw.  The pomp is amazing, and look at theat 25-foot train on Diana’s gown! (She arrives at 6:50 into the video.)

In a bit more than three years—on December 1, 1990—the two sides met in the middle of the Channel seabed. Here’s a video of the meeting of the sides. Click “Watch on YouTube”.

Da Nooz:

*Well, glory be! Renegade Democrat Joe Manchin has done a 180 with regard to supporting Biden’s economic bill on climate change and other goodies.

Two weeks after upending talks around his party’s economic agenda, Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) said Thursday he had found renewed cause to change course, having now secured Democratic leaders’ support for fossil fuels along with assurances that their spending package would not contribute to inflation.

Manchin delivered his explanation to reporters as his counterpart in the negotiations, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), set in motion a plan to advance the long-stalled measure as soon as next week.

The deal between Schumer and Manchin aims to lower health-care costs, combat climate change and revise the tax code, fulfilling some of the central elements in President Biden’s economic agenda. As Democrats reviewed the legislation, dubbed the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, Biden said at the White House that it would put the United States on “sounder economic footing.”

“I know it can sometimes seem like nothing gets done in Washington. The work of the government can be slow, frustrating and sometimes even infuriating,” said Biden, acknowledging the painstaking discussions leading up to the deal.

This spending bill must be passable without a filibuster, I guess, as Republicans would never support it. Touting this as a victory, then, means a 50/50 vote in the Senate, a tie that will be broken in favor of the bill by the vote of Kamala Harris. Unfortunately, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema has not said whether or not she’ll support the bill.

*According to the Times of London, the Tavistock Gender Clinic in London is set to close next year. The services it renders won’t go away, but it’s being decentralized, revamped, and repurposed. This comes after a review on the clinic that excoriated it for not providing proper service to adolescents under 18. And that appears to be because of what we all knew: Tavistock was “gender affirming,” putting kids on puberty blockers without proper psychotherapy beforehand, and thus endangering kids through drugs and surgery when they may have wound up being gay instead of transsexual. Proper therapy that is not always “affirming” is necessary before proceeding to puberty blockers and then to transition to another gender. (h/t Christopher).

The paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass, who is leading a review of the service, has today issued a series of recommendations for a radical overhaul of how the NHS treats young people who are questioning their gender identity.

She found that the Tavistock clinic was “not a safe or viable long-term option” and that other mental health issues were “overshadowed” when gender was raised by children referred to the clinic.

Cass, former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, said the current model of a sole provider for gender services should be scrapped as it failed to meet the holistic needs of distressed and vulnerable teenagers.

She said Tavistock should be replaced by regional centres with an “appropriate multi-professional workforce to enable them to provide an integrated model of care that manages the holistic needs of this population”.

Amid concerns that the clinic fails to take into account wider health problems before putting children on puberty blockers, Cass added: “Staff should maintain a broad clinical perspective in order to embed the care of children and young people with gender uncertainty within a broader child and adolescent health context.”

NHS England, which commissioned Cass to review the service in September 2020, say they will implement her recommendations in full and decommission the Tavistock clinic.

*This is a triumph of science that I never thought I’d see in my lifetime. A while back the DeepMind Artificial Intelligence Group came up with the AlphaFold Program to predict the three-dimensionsional structure of a protein from its sequence of amino acids (and that you can get from the DNA sequence). Now DeepMind has both announced and released the three-dimensional structure of basically every protein in the world. This is important because knowing the shape of a protein is important in understanding how it works as well as knowing how to change it to alter its effects. (This would be useful, for example, in making vaccines against the “spike protein” of coronavirus.) The number of proteins whose shape has been deciphered and released is in the millions (h/t Pyers):

Last year, DeepMind published the protein structures for 20 species – including nearly all 20,000 proteins expressed by humans – on an open database. Now it has finished the job, and released predicted structures for more than 200m proteins.

“Essentially, you can think of it as covering the entire protein universe. It includes predictive structures for plants, bacteria, animals, and many other organisms, opening up huge new opportunities for AlphaFold to have an impact on important issues, such as sustainability, food insecurity, and neglected diseases,” said Demis Hassabis, DeepMind’s founder and chief executive.

Scientists are already using some of its earlier predictions to help develop new medicines. In May, researchers led by Prof Matthew Higgins at the University of Oxford announced they had used AlphaFold’s models to help determine the structure of a key malaria parasite protein, and work out where antibodies that could block transmission of the parasite were likely to bind.

“Previously, we’d been using a technique called protein crystallography to work out what this molecule looks like, but because it’s quite dynamic and moves around, we just couldn’t get to grips with it,” Higgins said. “When we took the AlphaFold models and combined them with this experimental evidence, suddenly it all made sense. This insight will now be used to design improved vaccines which induce the most potent transmission-blocking antibodies.”

I still can’t grasp how a program can do this—the problem is incredibly complicated—much less apply it to millions of proteins. From what I hear, AlphaFold predictions are quite good.

The rest of the Nooz (3 items) is brought to you by reader Ken, whose descriptions are indented. Excerpts from the articles he mentions are doubly indented.

*First item:

Andrew Torba, the CEO or right-wing social media platform Gab and a leading supporter of wingnut Pennsylvania Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano, says real Americans like him are done with being told what they can do in their own country by the 2% of US population that’s Jewish.

Excerpt from MediaMatters:

Mastriano stated in a campaign filing for his Pennsylvania gubernatorial campaign that he paid $5,000 to far-right social media platform Gab for “consulting” services on April 28. HuffPost’s Christopher Mathias subsequently reported that the payment seems to be for new followers, as “every new account currently being created on Gab automatically follows Mastriano.” (Torba has denied this while Mastriano has responded by retweeting someone calling the strategy “creative campaigning.”)

In a May interview with Torba, Mastriano told him: “Thank God for what you’ve done.”

Gab caters to far-right extremists, including those who have been banned from other platforms. The site is filled with antisemites, white nationalists, and neo-Nazis. One of its users was the mass shooter who allegedly killed 11 people at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018.

Torba himself is antisemitic and has complained that “pagans, Jews, non-believers, atheists” have too much political power, which has purportedly led to destructive results. He has also explicitly said that he does not want Jews in his movement, stating last week: “We don’t want people who are atheists. We don’t want people who are Jewish. We don’t want people who are, you know, nonbelievers, agnostic, whatever. This is an explicitly Christian movement because this is an explicitly Christian country.”

*Second item:

You saw this piece in The Times setting out the stats on how states that have banned (or are likely to ban) abortion are also the worst states to live for pregnant women, children, and mothers?

Here’s a plot from the NYT showing the difference in outcomes between states hostile to abortion and states that permit it. Click to enlarge it:

 

*Third item:

There’s a very interesting piece by Joan Biskupic (a highly respected reporter who’s long covered the Supreme Court beat) at the CNN website about the maneuvering that went on behind the scenes at the Court regarding the Dobbs decision — including how Justice Alito’s draft opinion was leaked by conservatives to stop Chief Justice Roberts’s efforts to persuade Brett Kavanaugh to join him in upholding Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban without outright overruling Roe v. Wade.

Excerpt from CNN:

It appears unlikely that Roberts’ best prospect — Justice Brett Kavanaugh — was ever close to switching his earlier vote, despite Roberts’ attempts that continued through the final weeks of the session.

Multiple sources told CNN that Roberts’ overtures this spring, particularly to Kavanaugh, raised fears among conservatives and hope among liberals that the chief could change the outcome in the most closely watched case in decades. Once the draft was published by Politico, conservatives pressed their colleagues to try to hasten release of the final decision, lest anything suddenly threaten their majority.

Roberts’ persuasive efforts, difficult even from the start, were thwarted by the sudden public nature of the state of play. He can usually work in private, seeking and offering concessions, without anyone beyond the court knowing how he or other individual justices have voted or what they may be writing.

The final decision flouted the court’s traditional adherence to judicial restraint and precedent. Polls show public approval of the court falling significantly, as the decision has been regarded as a product of politics rather than neutral decision-making.

Roberts’ efforts directed toward Kavanaugh and to a lesser extent newest conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett were anticipated. Some anti-abortion advocates and conservative movement figures had feared that Roberts would sway either Kavanaugh or Barrett from the draft opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito that was an all-out rejection of Roe and women’s privacy rights.

It’s a long article, but an interesting look into the intrigues of the Supremes. It’s clear that conservatives leaked the draaft decision, and they’re still investigating who did it. But they’re investigating aides, and I bet dollars to donuts that one of the Justices themselves ordered the leak or gave a wink and a nudge.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Szaron kvetch about the environment:

Szaron: Too little rain.
Hili: Yes, nature is not balanced.
In Polish:
Szaron: Za mało deszczu.
Hili: Tak, natura nie jest zrównoważona.
. . . and baby Kulka peeking over something:

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

A fully loaded puffin from Unique birds and animals“on FB. Imagine how much skill it takes to catch them one after the other and then arrange them sideways!

From Sara on Facebook: “Joni Mitchell, Self Portrait, ‘Taming the Tiger’ album cover art (1991-97)”.

A Scott Hilburn cartoon from Irena, and if you don’t get this, you’re too young:

The Tweet of God. Unfortunately, he admits that he gave humans free will. The good news is that this is a lie because God doesn’t exist.

From Barry, who says, “I didn’t know that bats could swim.” I had heard that, but never saw it until now.  This one does a mean breaststroke!

From Simon: “That selection thing again.” If this thing isn’t a leaf mimic I’ll eat my hat. The colors aren’t visible when the butterfly (an orange oakleaf from tropical Asia) is at rest. Since males and females have pretty much the same pattern, I suspect the colors indicate selection for either species recognition or show the results of mutual sexual selection.

Here’s one from a butterfly house in Germany:

From Ziya Tong.  Ducks will be ducks: they can’t help themselves!

From the Auschwitz Memorial. She lived but a month in the camp, and who remembers her save this website?

Tweets from Dr. Cobb. Never seen a wasp butt? Well, you’re about to, and it’s a fine one. You get to see the rest of the wasp, too.

This article by Topol recommends getting TWO boosters, especially if you’re over 50.  My doctor disagrees.

A nice way to end: two lovely tails in this tweet:

50 thoughts on “Friday: Hili dialogue”

  1. The second clip is with Attorney General Robert Kennedy. This clip had to have been either 1961 or 1962 while Kennedy was Attorney General and Paar was still on late nights.

    I’m not sure of the date of that clip of Bobby Kennedy on the Parr show. But Jimmy Hoffa sued Kennedy and Parr (and NBC) in May1960, before Bobby’s brother Jack was elected president (and, therefore, before RFK was appointed attorney general), for statements RFK made on Parr’s show when Bobby was chief counsel for US senator John McClellan’s so-called “rackets committee,” which had been investigating Hoffa and the Teamsters Union in the late 1950s.

    Reply

  2. The bat is Yinpterochiroptera a flying fox/megabat – perhaps Yangochiroptera are less good at swimming? My guess is most animals have some ability to swim though, or at least remain bouyant.

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  3. Now maybe mom can explain to ol’ Jimmy how he got that brand new tattoo, the one of the Mexican cutie.

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  4. Sorry to hear you’re depressed about Audrey’s offspring, Jerry. I hope these words may comfort you and perhaps others who still grieve for lost loved ones …

    Turn Again To Life
    ————————
    If I should die and leave you here a while,
    Be not like others sore undone, Who keep long vigil by the silent dust.
    For my sake turn again to life and smile,
    Nerving thy heart and trembling hand to do
    Something to comfort other hearts than thine.
    Complete these dear unfinished tasks of mine
    And I perchance may therein comfort you.
    by Mary Lee Hall

    Reply

  5. Is it just me or are the Dems playing with fire?

    The notion that Trump was the real winner of the 2020 presidential election is hardly Mastriano’s only fringe position. Mastriano has called the separation of church and state “a myth,” and promoted the QAnon conspiracy theory that Democrats run a secret child trafficking ring dozens of times. He wants to make abortion illegal in all cases, even when carrying a pregnancy to term could kill the mother.

    Given Mastriano’s dangerous views, you might be surprised to learn that among his backers is the Pennsylvania Democratic Party, which sent direct mail supporting him. But an even bigger Mastriano supporter was his opponent in the general election, Democratic nominee Josh Shapiro. Shapiro spent $840,000 on pro-Mastriano television advertisements during the primary, more than twice what Mastriano spent himself.

    Pennsylvania Democrats aren’t alone in funding far-right extremists. As the campaign finance website OpenSecrets reported, Democratic Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker, along with the Democratic Governors Association, spent an astonishing $35 million on advertisements supporting far-right Trump endorsee Darren Bailey and attacking a relatively moderate rival in the Republican primary. Similar to Pennsylvania, the Democrats spent far more boosting Bailey than the candidate did himself. And just like in Pennsylvania, it worked; Bailey won.

    Democrats had similar success in Maryland, and they are attempting the same gambit in Arizona. OpenSecrets notes that they also boosted far-right candidates in California and Colorado, though they were unsuccessful in those two states.

    https://jacobin.com/2022/07/democratic-party-establishment-funding-far-right

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  6. Why has no one ever nominated Diana Ross to the Supreme Court. She would be better than a good number of the people on it now…though she probably wouldn’t want to do it.

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    1. I’d vote to confirm Flo Ballard, had she not died so tragically young. Diana had the look, but Flo had the pipes.

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  7. Lasagna is simple to make but takes dome learnin’.

    Guidance for a novice would be, to find s recipe that looks do-able, and consider :

    – “Oven ready” lasagna noodles

    – jar if pre-made red sauce of choice

    – dish : cast iron is best. Dutch oven looks good. The rectangular glass dish – maybe already in-hand? Maybe worth upgrading -> cast iron.

    – ricotta : must mix with egg yolk, and put THAT in the lasagna.

    -mozz : just get a block of whole-milk mozz and grate it fresh. The pre-shredded stuff is treated with cellulose – do not want.

    A recipe that seems simplified and do-able :

    https://lidiasitaly.com/recipes/home-style-lasagna/

    … details matter but if you want a lasagna don’t worry – slap it together, and cook it up – it’s going to taste great, and it’s a skill that gets better every time.

    Good luck.

    Reply

      1. I know – gah.

        Personally, I buy Romas and drain ’em, but I don’t want to scare away beginners from making this killer savory treat in their own kitchen nook. It’s a bit daunting at first.

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        1. Lasagna’s great. As you said, pretty easy to learn the basics. And once you’ve got the basics down you can experiment! Go Greek? Mexican? North African? Indian?

          A family friend, Rick Palladinetti, taught my Mom to make lasagna when I was about 8 years old, and from then on it was a “standard family dinner.” Always made in a giant pan sized to feed about 20. Though there were only 5 of us.

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          1. Yep!

            The recipes I’ve seen out there are all well and good, but a beginner will get scared away. Lidia has a great video but she cooks the noodles from scratch – a beginner can do it, but it is probably scary!

            Layer the stuff – sloppy is good – fill the dish – oh well if not.
            400 deg. F or so, hang out til the cheese is brown on top OR it simply looks good
            It won’t burn like toast
            Worst case, it’s dried out? Dunno.

            … it is forgiving, is what I’m tryin’ to say.

            Try it, I urge anyone who knows That Flavor.

          2. One of my favorite lasagnas is “green” lasagna. Though you have to make your own spinach pasta sheet (not very difficult). It’s layered with Bolognese meat sauce, Bechamel sauce (instead of ricotta) and parmesan. Damn, I need to make a batch soon!

          3. Please enlighten regarding spinach pasta dough – I already know conventional pasta dough. Thanks.

          4. It’s basically a normal pasta recipe (1 1/2 cups all-purpose four / 2 eggs / 1/2 tsp. salt.) You can use frozen spinach (5oz.) or fresh spinach (8oz.). You prepare them differently, but essentially you just need to cook it down and then squeeze all the excess moisture out with your hands and then chop fine. You incorporate the spinach with the eggs, and then just make the pasta like you would yellow pasta…shaping the flour into a mound with a well in the middle, pouring the wet mixture into the well and mixing until incorporated/then knead, etc. Anyway, I’m sure there are a gazillion recipes online. The recipe I use is from Marcella Hazan’s The Classic Italian Cookbook. She’s probably my favorite Italian cookbook writer.

          5. I’ve had 2 or 3 different pasta machines in my cooking “career” but have, despite still being a pretty ambitious cook, decided that “ain’t got time for that” anymore. Can almost always find the fresh or dried pasta that I need, or I do the crêpes. Plus various poochies and kitties tended to get “involved” when I was drying the pasta over chair backs or laundry racks. Animal hair and/or drool doesn’t necessarily add to the finished producg.

          6. There’s a lasagna sheet product – Nonna’s – if you are near a certain food store which is whole, there in there.

            No drying for lasagna – right in!

          8. I agree, this is indeed the queen of lasagna! I even find that if the leftovers become a little dry, adding a little pre-made jar of roasted garlic in cream sauce does the trick.

          9. Bolognese lasagna? Can’t believe I’ve never thought of that or come across it before!

            I have a copy of the official Bolognese recipe of the city of Bologna that I came across on the internet a few years ago. Simple and goooood.

          10. Yeah, a good Bolognese is hard to beat. Scratch that, I don’t think it can be beat!

          11. You beat me to it! I learned how when I studied in Florence many moons ago. Haven’t made it in a while, either. It’s deadly😋 It’s what got us home from our three-day weekends hitchhiking around the country. I like it much better than the tonatoey kind.

      2. Oh and, and –

        If you hate cleaning the damn glass dish – and who doesn’t – I urge you to try cast iron.

        Cast iron is the perfect non stick surface, the best … errmm.., temperature dynamics…. “cleans up well”! America’s Test Kitchen has a book with a lasagna recipe in it where I learned it – a beginner recipe too, I’d say.

        They hand-crush canned plum tomatoes then buzz them.

        Reply

        1. Glass dishes are easy to clean if you first soak them in a solution of warm water and Dawn dish soap.

          Reply

      3. 🙀🙀Mine doesn’t even have any tomato sauce in it; just some tomato paste in the slowly cooked meat sauce. Béchamel with Parmigiano and then slices of mozzarella. I’ve even used home-made spinach crêpes as the pasta if I can’t find the fresh kind.

        Reply

      1. Oh yeah, IMHO eggplant (pre-cooked) is sufficient to bring the dish close to the quintessential lasagna flavor.

        To hit it out of the park, I like to crush oregano and black pepper on top immediately after it comes out of the oven. Maybe too busy to coordinate for beginners, but it is easy.

        Reply

      2. Cool tip from a Chris Kimball book : at the end of cooking, add a bit of raw ingredients to add extra depth of flavor – garlic, olive oil, etc.

        So it heats up just a bit.

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      3. The eggplant idea sounds deelish😋
        And to those wondering about spinach pasta, I’ve bought spinach flour so that you don’t have to squeeze the bejeezus out of fresh or frozen spinach.

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          1. JUST checked. Spinach powder is available from amazon. As I mentioned
            above, spinach crêpes work well for the noodles.

          2. Cool, thanks!

            You know, I don’t think I’ve seen spinach lasagna noodles – what a nifty idea!

          4. And to be honest, when it comes to lasagna, I love conventional dried sheet pasta that gets really crispy on the edges. Fresh pasta is luxurious and tender, but the chewy “boiled pasta” is just as good…and more lasangnany that’s a new adjective. The spinach doesn’t add much flavor, but it’s a beautiful color, esp. against the red Bolognese. When it comes to lasagna with fresh vs. dried pasta, there is a distinction, that’s for sure.

          5. Lasangnany😹Making me hungry! My son whom I’m visiting threw together some pretty fine fish tacos this evening, He also got inspired by The Sopranos to make zitti🤓

          6. Oh yes indeed, the crispy parts … you got me thinking to improve that next time..

            BTW you can fry up cooked pasta sheets and get a sort of pastry taste – sorta eastern Euro flavor – super easy and fast – has a sweet tone … Cast iron is your friend there too – the stick is intense.

  8. “A fully loaded puffin from Unique birds and animals“on FB. Imagine how much skill it takes to catch them one after the other and then arrange them sideways!”

    Indeed. I remember as a child seeing a photo of a puffin with fish neatly arrayed in its mouth and wondering; “how in the world did it do that?” I mean, think about it….they have to catch the fish one at a time, right? And, near as I can tell, they don’t have pockets. So what do they do with a fish they’ve caught when they go for the next one? And the next?

    I’m 62 this October and I still don’t know how they do it.

    Reply

    1. Yes, amazing. They must have some rear pointing needles or projections on their beaks or mouths, pinning the earlier fishes, although I do not see them.
      Apparently (and somewhat expected) they have a raspy tongue and indeed spikes on their palate, pinning the early fishes to their spiked palate with their raspy tongues while fishing for more.
      The record is reputed to be 62 fishes in one beak (I guess they must have been very small).
      Mystery solved, but not the amazement.

      Reply

  11. 1973 – Greeks vote to abolish the monarchy

    I was a Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Athens when this occurred. The “vote” was, in fact, the result of a rigged election, part of Papadopoulos’ desperate effort to make it look like he and his junta had popular support. This effort was dramatically undercut four months later on November 17 when Papadopoulos ordered tanks to break through the gates of the Athens Polytechnic School to disperse a massive student demonstration against the junta. The confrontation ended in bloodshed and the death of some 40 students, including two of mine from the University of Athens.

    Reply

    1. It, the Athens Polytechnic massacre, meant the fall of Papadopoulos who was ousted by the even more hardline Ioannidis. The Turkish invasion of Cyprus soon after, precipitated by Ioannidis’ coup ousting Makarios III, and the complete inability of the Greek military to do much about it, led to the fall of the Junta (July 24, 1974, the metapolitefsi), after seven cruel years (1967 to 1974). However, the Greeks voted in a referendum late in 1974 to not reinstate the monarchy. Greece has been a democratic republic ever since. And Cyprus remains divided, the north being occupied by the Turks.

      Reply

  12. There’s a very interesting piece by Joan Biskupic (a highly respected reporter who’s long covered the Supreme Court beat) at the CNN website about the maneuvering that went on behind the scenes at the Court regarding the Dobbs decision — including how Justice Alito’s draft opinion was leaked.

    I see that Justice Alito has just given an ill-advised speech in Rome: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/29/us-supreme-court-justice-mocks-prince-harry-and-boris-johnsons-criticism-of-roe-v-wade-ruling

    Reply

  15. I feel a need for Feynman :

    “If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t make a difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn’t make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is, if it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it ”

    Source : video of Feynman lecture : https://youtu.be/LIxvQMhttq4

    Also published in The Character of Physical Law (1965)
    Chapter 7, “Seeking New Laws”, p.156

    Reply

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