Sunday: Hili dialogue

August 21, 2022 • 6:30 am

Good morning on Sunday, August 21, 2022: and National Spumoni Day, celebrating a molded Italian gelato comprising three flavors, usually cherry, pistachio, and either chocolate or vanilla. I’m not keen on this mixture, but any spumoni is better than no spumoni. A photo:

It’s also Poet’s Day, National Brazilian Blowout Day (a hairstyle), and, according to Wikipedia, World Senior Citizen’s Day. Note the placement of the apostrophe, implying that only ONE senior citizen is being celebrated. I decided that I’m the one!

Stuff that happened on August 21 includes:

There were six more debates after this, centered largely on slavery. Lincoln was a Republican aspirant for a Senate seat from Illinois, while Stephen Douglas, a Democrat, held that seat. Lincoln published his arguments in a book, and that helped him secure the Republican Presidential nomination in 1860.  Here are the men around the time of the debate:

Lincoln, 1860:

Douglas, 1859:

Here’s part of the patent. Burroughs, of course, was the grandfather of writer William S. Burroughs, beat writer and author of Naked Lunch.  Burroughs also killed his wife, Joan Vollmer, by playing “William Tell” in Mexico, trying to shoot a glass off the top of her head in Mexico City, He missed, shot her in the head, and she died.

The return in 1913.  Peruggia got only a short sentence in prison: seven months.

PARIS – JANUARY 4: People gather around the Mona Lisa painting on January 4, 1914 in Paris France, after it was stolen from the mus?e du Louvre by Vincenzo Peruggia in 1911. (Photo by Roger-Viollet/Getty Images)

This “demon core” killed two physicists (Louis Slotin was the other) in accidents that made the core go critical, producing a burst of radiation and a slow death to the two physicists who mishandled the Demon. Here’s a 14-minute documentation about this piece of plutonium:

Here’s a short video about the victory, which involved a three-hole, nail-biting playoff against Bob May.

Da Nooz:

*A large group of immigrants and refugees has been bused to New York City, a “sanctuary city.” But New Yorkers aren’t as happy about it as they expected, given that Texas Governor Greg Abbott decided on the gesture to harass Democrats on their inaction on border policy, and the city’s services can’t handle the influx.

The delivery of 129 migrants to the Port Authority Bus Terminal on Wednesday was the biggest one-day total so far in Mr. Abbott’s campaign. But it was just part of the larger migration of thousands: According to the city, the shelter system now houses 4,900 asylum seekers.

They are the chief reason, the city says, that the population of the main homeless shelter system has jumped by 13 percent since May, to 51,000. There is much debate about how much of that increase is attributable to the migrants and how much to local factors like the end of an eviction moratorium and seasonal fluctuations. But whatever the reason, the situation is dire.

Shelters for families make up more than half of the city system, and in early June, their vacancy rate, which is supposed to be maintained at 3 percent, fell below 1 percent, according to the Legal Aid Society, which monitors conditions at the shelters. On Thursday, the society said, the vacancy figure was 0.18 percent, or 19 available rooms in the entire system, which holds more than 10,000 families.

The city’s early response to the influx of migrants was marked by weeks of flailing and missteps, deeply at odds with the give-me-your-huddled-masses rhetoric of Mayor Eric Adams. Some families slept at an intake office in the Bronx, in violation of the law. Some were separated by bureaucratic snafus. And advocates said the city often failed to provide basics like food, diapers and medical attention.

*A bit of a puzzling headline at the Associated Press: “Pro-Trump wins in blue states threaten GOP hopes in November.” What? Well, it’s because the article sees moderate Republicans as more electable than those who endorse Trump and his politices.

Republicans have found success in Democratic strongholds like Maryland and Massachusetts when they have fielded moderate candidates who could appeal to voters in both parties. With Democrats facing headwinds this year, Republicans had hoped that strategy could pay off yet again.

But Republican voters have nominated loyalists of former President Donald Trump in several Democratic states, including Maryland and Connecticut, making the GOP’s odds of winning those general election races even longer. Massachusetts will face its own test next month as GOP voters decide between a Trump-backed conservative and a more moderate Republican for the party’s gubernatorial nominee.

“It can’t continue,” said former Connecticut U.S. Rep. Christopher Shays, a moderate Republican and Trump critic, referring to the GOP choosing pro-Trump candidates. “One of the things that will happen is that a lot of the Trump candidates who won the primary will lose the general election. And there are a lot of unhappy Republicans who hold office now who believe that the Senate now is in jeopardy of staying Democratic.”

*First New Zealand declared that, according to the will of the native Māori a river was given the status of a person to protect it:

In 2017, New Zealand passed a groundbreaking law granting personhood status to the Whanganui River. The law declares that the river is a living whole, from the mountains to the sea, incorporating all its physical and metaphysical elements.

The law was part of a settlement with the Whanganui Iwi, comprising Māori from a number of tribes who have long viewed the river as a living force. The novel legal approach set a precedent that has been followed by some other countries including Bangladesh, which in 2019 granted all its rivers the same rights as people.

Now, according to the AP, the indigenous people of Chile are trying to save several rivers by declaring that they have a spirit, and are therefore off limits:

In the worldview of the Mapuche, Chile’s largest Indigenous group and more than 10% of its population, a pristine river is home to a spiritual force to revere, not a natural resource to exploit.

That has led many Mapuche across Chile’s water-rich south to fight hydroelectric plants and other projects they see as desecrating nature and depriving Indigenous communities of essential energies that keep them from getting sick.

“Being part of nature, we cannot destroy part of ourselves,” said Lientur Ayenao, a machi or healer and spiritual guide who draws water from the Truful Truful for his ceremonies. “You have to keep the balance, and this is broken when one intervenes in natural spaces for a selfish purpose.”

I’m torn by this for obvious reasons. Yes, we need to save rivers, but to do so by declaring that they have spirits, or are “people”, is a lie. Is it a necessary lie? Can people be motivated to save rivers for the right reasons? It’s doubtful, which is why I’m torn. But reader Steve, who sent me the story, objected to the spiritual aspects of conservation, saying:

“Another story about a river as a living being. I’m sympathetic to the preservation of the wild against the ravages of avaricious businesses, but the claim that the river has a spirit is not a reason to protect it. And again politics is cowed by religion.”

It is okay to invoke the numinous to save the environment? I guess so, for what’s the alternative. But I also value the truth, which doesn’t seem to be sufficient for conservation.

*I can’t resist “list” articles, including the WaPo’s latest, “The top 10 Republican presidential candidates for 2024, ranked.” And here’s the ranking, with the top-ranked candidates at the top:

  1. Ron DeSantis
  2. Donald Trump
  3. Mike Pence
  4. Tim Scott
  5. Glenn Youngkin
  6. Ted Cruz
  7. Nikki Haley
  8. Rick Scott
  9. Mike Pompeo
  10. Donald Trump, Jr. (!)

What  rogues’ gallery of conservatives and miscreants!  But why does DeSantis nose out The Donald? The post says this:

This is a long game. And the legal jeopardy Trump faces could well reinforce some of the reasons DeSantis appears to have gained on him in earlier surveys. Namely: Trump’s uncertain electability and the political baggage he totes along with him.

Those factors endangered Trump’s stranglehold on the party well before the Mar-a-Lago search. Two states likely to hold important early primaries — Michigan and New Hampshire — featured polls showing Trump and DeSantis running neck and neck. In this year’s primaries, Trump-aligned candidates almost always win, but that’s in large part because the party has overwhelmingly aligned with Trump’s values. In contested primaries, the candidates Trump himself actually endorsed have often been stuck around 30 percent of the vote.

Indeed, those primaries suggest people might be willing to go with Trumpism, and to go without Trump. And DeSantis provides that in spades. He’s constantly pushing the envelope by opening new fronts in the culture wars and pushing actual legislation or executive actions to back that up. But more than that, he does so with the kind of actual attention to detail and policy that Trump has long eschewed.

Fox News’s Laura Ingraham recently wagered that Republicans might become so “exhausted by the battle — the constant battle — that they may believe that, well, maybe it’s time to turn the page if we can get someone who has all Trump’s policies, who’s not Trump.”

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is meowing in fright:

A: What do you see over there?
Hili: A huge spider.
In Polish:
Ja: Co tam widzisz?
Hili: Wielkiego pająka.

. . . and a photo of Szaron:

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

From Merilee (I don’t know the cartoonist):

From Bruce: a diagram of the song “Hey Jude”:

A children’s book from Jesus of The Day:

God speaks truth to all of us. But if he’s out there tweeting, why isn’t there an afterlife?

From reader Ken, who notes, “Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene are gonna hafta up their game. There’s a new bull-goose loony on her way to Washington. Has no one told Harriet Hageman — Liz Cheney’s soon-to-be replacement — that this nation had chattel slavery for the first four score and seven years of its existence?

From Malcolm: “A dog works out how to carry four tires at once.”

From Merilee: A teacher explains the difference between liberals and conservatives.

From the Auschwitz Memorial:

Tweets from Professor Cobb. First, a pet call duck that likes to take showers and will drink ice water only if it comes from the drive-through at Dunkin Donuts. This duck isn’t fooled by home tap water served in a Dunkin cup!

I don’t recognize any of these, and I should. I am not even sure if the indicated guy is Vavilov.  But where is Thomas Hunt Morgan?

A friend of Matthew’s tries Andouillette (tripe sausage). He does not like it. I can’t stand it, either. I’ve tried tripe several times, and can never stomach the stuff. Matthew notes, “Neil is a pal and a chef and an historian of cuisine… I entirely agree with him.”

And a lovely video to finish off:

33 thoughts on “Sunday: Hili dialogue”

  1. “But I also value the truth, which doesn’t seem to be sufficient for conservation.”

    The truth doesn’t seem to be sufficient for any number of things.

    L

  2. That was a lovely video indeed, clearly over a few months. I’m struck how large these mooses are compared to, say, the grizzly.

    1. I’m no great specialist, but I don’t think there were any grizzlies, just “black bears”, which of course can also be brown. One also wouldn’t expect a grizzly in Voyageurs in Minnesota, as far as I know.

  3. That Hageman track puts her indeed with MTG and Boebert in the stark raving loony category. How to these loons get elected?
    Was it Trump that conjured up these bugs out of the woodwork? Or were they there and rode the same infestation that gave us Trump?

    1. The main reason these loons get elected is the primary system, which determines who the nominees are for the various positions in each party. It was conceived in the early 20th century as a means to promote democracy. Rather than party bosses picking nominees in smoke filled rooms, the “people” would make the choice. Despite this noble goal, recent decades have shown how this system can undermine democracy. In an era of extreme partisanship, social discontent flamed by social media and right-wing news, and the fact that primary turnout is usually low where the voters are mostly on the extreme fringe, a perfect storm has emerged that nominates extremist candidates.

      Yet, this situation does not necessarily work to the political benefit of right-wing extremist candidates. In districts that are decidedly red, the extremist candidate will win the general election. However in purple districts, the nomination of an extremist can hurt the Republicans. That is, a sliver of the electorate that would usually vote Republican are turned off by the extremist and will vote Democratic. At least, this is what the pundits have been saying lately. I hope they are right.

  4. Andouille is a great kind of spicy pork sausage, full of garlic. I quite like it (yes, I love garlic), the constituent parts are not really ground, more like chopped. I fail to understand why that guy wants to eat more garlic.
    It is also a semi-tender injunction for stupidity or confusion in French: “andouille!”, like “idiot!’, but not as harsh.

        1. I once had a very enjoyable lunch of Andouillette in a mild mustard sauce at a restaurant in Chartres.

          My father was fond of tripe, which here in England at least, is just cow’s stomach. I couldn’t stand the stuff myself. Rubbery and flavourless. Yuck.

          1. I’m absolutely with you on that, David. And it’s hard to think of tripe without bringing to mind George Orwell’s experiences of the stuff as told in the early part of The Road to Wigan Pier.

      2. That was an andouille, made of tripes and nicely spiced. An andouillette is somewhat smaller, with the same ingredients. At least in France. (Maybe in the ‘Cajun Cuisine’ they are different sausages though, I’d not be surprised). I think a cured chorizo comes closest. Delicious, all of them.

  5. Question for anyone: in the History Teacher’s twitter rant, last line, what was the third to the last word? He looks down briefly when he says it, and I’ve listened many times, but still can’t make it out.

    “And when the water gets sold out from underneath you, and you can’t afford medical care, and you voted Republican, have the _______ you deserve.”

    2. I think it might be “day” you deserve. Btw, our own former reader Michael Fisher investigated this guy’s claims about the Saudis and the Arizona water, and it turns out this “historian” doesn’t have all his facts straight, but I still think his basic point about greed vs. people stands.
      And that German Shepherd is the best!

      1. That is not a ‘German’ Shepherd (Aka. ‘Alsatian’), but a ‘Mechelaar’ or ‘Malinois’, one of the four Belgian Shepherds. They are reputed for their nervous temperament and high intelligence.
        But yes, the best!

        1. Belgian Malinois even better🐾🐾🥰 My Meximutt, Lucy Goosey, is apparently a mix of whippet and Malinois (whippet body, Malinois head). She’s pretty smart.

    3. The ‘dame’ you deserve, I hear. A dame is a ‘high class’ lady you have to pay fealty to. He is a history teacher, after all.
      (In Japanese ‘dame’ means ‘not good’, but it sounds different.)
      Maybe I heard wrong, but ‘dame’ makes some sense.

    4. Although the Carlin quote that conservatives believe in property rights and liberals in helping people may in broad strokes be true, it will have no impact on Trump supporters and the rest of the right wing rank and file. This is because they believe that liberals want to help the wrong people, minorities, not them, good God fearing white people, the “real” Americans. Thus, they do not care or do not know that the people they elect will support the corporate interests that will screw them. In other words, they perceive liberals as attacking their sense of dignity and self-worth. These anxieties far outweigh the precariousness of their economic condition that many experience.

      1. The science/medicine part of the teacher’s tweet reminds me of what Marie Curie said when she was asked if she will patent radium. No, she said (paraphrased), it belongs to the whole world.

        Imagine Kary Mullis saying that.

        When I was in 8th grade at Catholic school, my history teacher told us one thing that remains with me to this day. People vote two things, he said, their fear and their pocketbook. Exploit one of these and you will be elected.

  6. I haven’t seen Spumoni in a restaurant in twenty years. Probably not since I last at at Papa Milano, which used to be on the corner of Walton and Rush. Italian restaurants these days suck,

  7. I was hoping that that teacher was going to give a thoughtful definition of conservative and liberal. For me, as a conservative, I see conservatism as being the belief that all government action is a diminution of personal freedom and choice and to be avoided wherever practical (and yes, I am against outlawing abortion), as well as being frequently ineffective in producing the goals intended. I see American liberalism as believing that government action is always salutary and is the preferred, if not the only, method for doing things. I think it cares more about labels than results.

    I think it one of the tragedies of conservatism today is that most conservatives do not have an active definition of what they believe and why. It has been seduced by liberalism into believing that government is a tool for arranging outcomes and remodeling society.

    1. “I see American liberalism as believing that government action is always salutary and is the preferred, if not the only, method for doing things. I think it cares more about labels than results.”

      Why don’t you come out and say what you mean – that liberals are socialists, if not communists? Your definition of liberalism is not what almost all liberals mean. They believe in capitalism, but not the lunatic libertarian version. Free market competition is good and desirable, but there must be boundaries on what businesses can do. Businesses cannot destroy the environment, deny workers decent working conditions or engage in unfair competitive practices. Liberals believe that all citizens deserve a livable wage including decent medical care and that they cannot be discriminated against because of race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc. So, yes, government action is necessary when people cannot accomplish important things by themselves. This creed has been in place and evolved since the New Deal with elements of it going as far back as the Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson administrations. As FDR put it: “The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but cannot do for themselves, in their separate and individual capacities.”

      Fortunately, the majority of the American people do not buy your bogus argument. They realize that conservatism, which for you is synonymous with libertarianism as you envision it, would create a national hell.

      1. Historian, a serious question. How do you view the $30 trillion national debt? How does it get paid off? What is the end game? What level of debt is sustainable?

        As far as I can tell, the only ones who worry about the debt are small government types like the folks at Reason. Neither Democrats nor Republicans seem interested in talking about the national debt anymore.

    2. He was not going to give a “thoughtful definition”, but a definition in the “simplest way”. In other words, a definition that even a double digit IQ person would be able to understand. And I think he did a reasonably good job there. Better than I could have done.
      Government is indeed a tool for ‘remodeling’ society, but it is not, and should not be, the only tool. More like an adjuvant. I like the way it is done in Western and Northern Europe.

  9. One problem with “Intl Genetics Conf” in Cambridge c1913 is how international it would have been. A candidate for the woman on the left would be TineTammes (Groningen, Netherlands), and for the woman in the middle Kristine Bonnevie (Norway).
    “In 1911 (TienTammes) published an article that would prove to be an important contribution to Mendelian genetics. In it she showed that the heredity of continuous characters could be explained with- in the Mendelian framework with the help of the so-called multiple-factor hypothesis. In the reception of this article we see the Matilda effect, because Tammes’s work was insufficiently recognized by her contemporaries and even less so by later historians.” I.H. Stamhuis, Journal of the History of Biology 28 (1995) 495-531.
    The reference about the heredity of continuous charactersis to: Tine Tammes, “Das Verhalten Fluktuierend Variierender Merkmale bei der Bastardierung,” Recueil Trav. Bot. Neerl., 8 (1911), 201-288, reprinted in Genetica, 22 (1941), 25-88

  10. How frightening is the simple idea of someone considering an archetypal nincompoop like Donald jr as a possible president? That really challenges the idea that nobody can be worse than tRump sr. Really end of days scenario

  11. I suppose I would be willing, though grudgingly, to stomach a fiction like granting a river the status of a person if it really would be a successful instrument for strict conservation and environmental policy.

    The main problem I see is that the “rights” and needs of a person and of a river (or any other ecosystem) are so completely different that the fiction doesn’t really help in deciding what one can/should and can/should not do with respect to the river. So it might sound all warm and fuzzy to refer to a river’s spirit or personhood, but other than a vague and general “we should be good to it,” it’s not really helpful.

    A further problem I see is that there are quite a number of rivers around the world that are considered holy (or similar) by the cultures through which they flow, and they are often treated just as poorly as any other river. One need mention only the Ganges, one of the holiest as well as one of the filthiest rivers in the world.

    1. I find it easier to imagine a river as a person than a corporation. It also does a lot less harm.

      1. Deeming a corporation to be a person is a social construct that allows it, according to its bylaws, to borrow money, enter into contracts, pay taxes, and go broke, just like a real person can, without risking ruining the real persons who have invested money in the venture (which is why corporations exist.). Being a person, a corporation can, appealingly, be convicted of a crime when it breaks any law that begins, “Every person who does X is guilty of an indictable offence punishable on conviction by Y penalty.” If corporations as persons did not exist, we would have to invent them to get anything economic done beyond market farm stalls, especially if we wanted their business activities to live on after the deaths of individual proprietors. Would the world be a better place if the Ford Motor Company had simply ceased to do business once Henry Ford himself was no longer alive to oversee the assembly line and sign the paycheques for his workers?

        It requires a blinkered, partisan view of life to see harm in the very idea of the existence of the legal personhood of corporations.

  12. They key point is that as the river is recognised as a legal person its interests can be represented and argued and must be taken into account in court and other legal proceedings etc. This is of course done via trustees but they will have obligations to act for the benefit of the river.

  13. The history teacher reports selectively. Dr. Banting was a practising surgeon who believed that having taken the Hippocratic Oath he couldn’t commercialize his and Best’s discovery to benefit himself. (Best was still a medical student.) But neither he nor the University of Toronto had the resources themselves to produce insulin on an industrial scale for the world’s diabetics. So who, in the (American-use) liberal world view, ought to have been compelled to donate their capital and labour to making billions of doses of insulin for them at cost, or even for free?

    Insulin today is a groups of substances very different from what Banting and Best extracted from dogs a century ago. A lot of biotech went into it. Biotech workers and investors expect to enjoy their successes.

    It’s praiseworthy to donate a scientific discovery to the good of humanity, as Jonas Salk also did, and not demand a personal royalty that would make you fabulously wealthy. People who have an income stream from salary or professional practice can afford to do this. But someone else still has to tool up a factory to make it at scale. And no one is going to do that unless he can hope for a profit. Tell me, how many of you joining the history teacher in sneering at Eli Lilly would have put up your own money to extract insulin from cows and pigs (instead of stray dogs) if you were told your profit would be limited by the whim of government but your losses, if the venture failed, would be every cent you had invested? Whether the manufacturer pays a penny per dose to the inventor is irrelevant to the price the patient pays. Yes, if I had diabetes, I would wish that insulin was cheaper. Of course.

    All drugs, whether miracles, meh’s, or wastes of money are manufactured by investor-owned Pharma companies. They are absolutely chasing profit. If you want drugs so cheap they don’t repay the cost of capital, what you will find instead is that you won’t have any.

  14. Did Leon Trotsky ever dabble in genetics? I’m asking because he appears to be standing on the back row of that photo, 4th from the left!

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