Saturday: Hili dialogue

September 10, 2022 • 6:30 am

Greetings on Cat shabbos: Saturday, September 10, 2022, and National Hot Dog Day! Nobody does dogs better than Chicago, and here’s the iconic Chi-town dog, “dragged through the garden,” as they say. No ketchup! NEVER!

 

It’s also tv Dinner Day (does anybody do this anymore? When I was a kid we had them as rare treats.), German Language Day, Aunt’s Day (which aunt? only one?), National Iguana Awareness Day, National Lacemaking Day, and World Suicide Prevention Day (remember, if you’re feeling suicidal or just very low, in the U.S. you can call 988 for help or someone to talk to).

Stuff that happened on September 10 includes:

  • 1515 – Thomas Wolsey is invested as a Cardinal.
  • 1547 – The Battle of Pinkie, the last full-scale military confrontation between England and Scotland, resulting in a decisive victory for the forces of Edward VI.

“Lord Grey charges the Scottish Calvary”:

Hale’s statement made before he as hanged, known to all Americans (I’ve put it in bold below), may actually have been aprocryphal, as this account is questioned:

“On the morning of his execution,” continued the officer, “my station was near the fatal spot, and I requested the Provost Marshal [William Cunningham] to permit the prisoner to sit in my marquee, while he was making the necessary preparations. Captain Hale entered: he was calm, and bore himself with gentle dignity, in the consciousness of rectitude and high intentions. He asked for writing materials, which I furnished him: he wrote two letters, one to his mother and one to a brother officer. He was shortly after summoned to the gallows. But a few persons were around him, yet his characteristic dying words were remembered. He said, ‘I only regret, that I have but one life to lose for my country.‘”

Here’s the model that Howe submitted with his patent:

  • 1960 – At the Summer Olympics in Rome, Abebe Bikila becomes the first sub-Saharan African to win a gold medal, winning the marathon in bare feet.

Here’s a short video of Bikila winning his barefoot marathon. I wonder if the bottoms of his feet are one big callus.

  • 1967 – The people of Gibraltar vote to remain a British dependency rather than becoming part of Spain.
  • 1977 – Hamida Djandoubi, convicted of torture and murder, is the last person to be executed by guillotine in France.

A short video of Djandoubi with photos of his execution. Warning: not really gory but shows preparations for head-lopping. The photo below is fake.

  • 2001 – During his appearance on the British TV game show Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, contestant Charles Ingram reaches the £1 million top prize, but it was later revealed that he had cheated to the top prize by listening to coughs from his wife and another contestant.

The cheating is bloody obvious; watch the video to see how it went down:

  • 2008 – The Large Hadron Collider at CERN, described as the biggest scientific experiment in history, is powered up in Geneva, Switzerland.

And here’s the first power up:

 

Da Nooz:

*For the next ten days or so, all the Big Nooz will be about Queen Elizabeth’s demise.  Here was the front page of the NYT yesterday afternoon,  with about the most boring headline you can imagine. “Charles vows to carry on Elizabeth’s legacy.” Leaving aside what, exactly, they mean by her “legacy,” this is a “dog bites man” headline. Now if it read, “Charles vows to drastically change the monarchy with a view to ending it,” that would be news.

The Brits, who had her as their ceremonial head of state for seven decades, are mourning all over the place, as Matthew regularly informs me. I found that even Claire Lehmann at Quillette and Andrew Sullivan in his Friday column have words of praise and grief for the late queen. I guess there’s nothing wrong with honoring her dedication and abnegation of a real life to serve Britain, but I can’t get behind the notion of a hereditary aristocracy.  As an American brought up (like Feynman) to not give obeisance to the upper class and to people in uniforms, there’s something about the monarchy that rubs me the wrong way. (See a post later today on American attacks on the Queen.)

What I don’t really understand is the displays of grief in America, a parochial country that doesn’t know squat about British politics or governance. Perhaps it’s just that she was, as I said yesterday (quoting Conan Doyle’s “His Last Bow”), the one fixed point in a changing world: someone who is there for your whole life and suddenly vanished.  But so were many things and people who lasted forever and made substantial contributions, like Bertrand Russell.  Well, so be it. The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on. The bad news is that the caravan is King Charles III, who is already 73 and past retirement age.

*But back in America, we still have a renegade ex-President to deal with. After Trump won a victory in court to get a “special master” (can they find another word?) to look over the papers seized at Mar-a-Lago, vetting them for signs of “executive privilege”, the Department of Justice has been pondering its options. Yesterday they decided to fight. The government has asked Judge Aileen Cannon, the Trump appointee who ruled for the Master, to reconsider her ruling, and have vowed to appeal to a higher court if she doesn’t relent.

The reason, of course, is because the government can’t proceed with its criminal investigation without knowing what evidence it will be able to use, and they won’t until the papers are vetted and approved by the Master. The appeal suggests that the government means SERIOUS BZNS with regard to the investigation, and you can bet that Trump is one of the targets:

Prosecutors asked Judge Cannon to allow investigators to continue to use “classified records — a discrete set of just over 100 documents” and to withhold them from the special master.

The department, in forceful and foreboding language, argued that determining the national security implications of Mr. Trump’s retention of the documents was so intertwined with its criminal investigation that carrying out a separate risk assessment was impossible under the conditions imposed by the court.

Justice Department lawyers complained that the judge’s order was impeding efforts to determine whether there may yet be “additional classified records that are not being properly stored” and noted that the search had recovered empty folders marked as classified whose contents “may have been lost or compromised.”

. . .Department lawyers wrote that “uncertainty regarding the bounds of the court’s order and its implications for the activities of the F.B.I. has caused the intelligence community, in consultation with D.O.J., to pause temporarily this critically important work.”

The government and the public, the department added, “are irreparably injured when a criminal investigation of matters involving risks to national security” is frozen or delayed.

The department did not contest appointing a special master to sift through documents and photographs not marked as classified. Nor did it challenge Judge Cannon’s order preventing investigators from working with those files until they were cleared by the special master, although it said it disagreed with that part of her decision, too.

The fact that they’re looking especially at the classified material suggests that a violation of the Espionage Act is one avenue the government is pursuing.

*I miss Nellie Bowles’s snarky Friday news summary at Bari Weiss’s site, on hold since she gave birth. Here are a few items from this week’s column, “TGIF: God blessed the queen”, written by Noah Blum, chief technology officer for Tablet Magazine.

→ The Bitter Bus Battle: The war of words over Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s decision to bus migrants who cross the border into Texas from Mexico to major cities in blue states escalated this week, with Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot stating that “this is not Christianity” and that Abbott merely “professes to be a Christian” after 50 more migrants arrived in the Windy City, bringing the total number to 103. Abbott responded that Lightfoot should address her concerns to “the real cause of the border crisis: Joe Biden.” Abbott also clashed last month with New York Mayor Eric Adams over the migrants who arrived in the city, which was odd considering that last year Adams called his “City of Immigrants” a place where “people from every nation seek refuge” and that his government “will reflect that.”

→ In Liz We Truss? England’s new prime minister formally took over this week, inheriting an energy crisis, a plunging pound, soaring inflation, a looming general strike (not seen in Britain since 1926), and a war in Ukraine that threatens to go nuclear. Predictably, legacy media outlets in the United States, including NPR and The New York Times, were quick to note some good news that trumped these looming crises: her Cabinet is the most diverse ever. Thank God for that.

There’s more stuff, too, but Blum is too far right for me—every news item disses liberals—and, importantly, he has no sense of humor, completely lacking the snark that characterized Bowles’s take. (Bowles is also more centrist than Blum.) Weiss needs to either get Nellie back in the driver’s seat soon or choose someone else to summarize the weekly news.

*I’m sure that many of you are wondering this: “What’s going to happen to Queen Elizabeth’s corgis?” She loved those little yappers, and had over 30 of them during her 7 decades at the helm. As the Washington Post reports, she treated them like they were royals, too:

Royal chefs prepared their meals. Psychologists treated them, biographers documented their lives. They slept in cushioned wicker baskets. At Christmas, they each got their own stocking.

. . . The many corgis owned by Queen Elizabeth II over her seven-decade reign were furry little monarchs in their own right, as iconic as her flamboyant hats and her wicked sense of humor. In her lifetime, she had more than 30 of the squat herding dogs, with names like Plover, Disco and Mint. A gaggle of them trotted ahead of her wherever she went, in what Princess Diana once described, perhaps not so affectionately, as “a moving carpet.”

But she knew that some of her d*gs would outlive her:

Forseeing her demise, she cut back on the d*gs:

As Elizabeth got older, she seemed troubled by the prospect of her dogs living on without her there to care for them.

At some point, she decided to wind down the decades-long corgi breeding program she oversaw at Windsor Castle, where 14 generations of dogs were raised and trained. The program appeared to have gone quiet by about 2002, following the death of her mother, according to the American Kennel Club.

And now she’s gone. What about the corgis? Well, she didn’t have that many:

When she died this week at 96, Elizabeth reportedly left behind two Pembroke Welsh corgis, a corgi-dachshund mix known as a dorgi, and a cocker spaniel.

It’s not clear what will happen to the queen’s beloved pets. Royal biographer Ingrid Seward said they might go to her children.

“I imagine the dogs would be looked after by the family, probably Andrew [as] he’s the one that gave them to her,” Seward told Newsweek. “They’re quite young, the corgi and the dorgi.”

And of course the queen bailed out Prince Andrew when he was in trouble with a sexual-assault lawsuit, to the tune of several million pounds. (The settlement was reportedly £12 million.) He owes her!

*From the NYT, we have more verification of Coyne’s Fourth Hypothesis: “all ‘healthy’ snacks eventually evolve into unhealthy ones.” Granola bars, originally tasteless rectangles of compressed sawdust and mouse droppings, have evolved into chocolate-covered candy bars; unflavored mineral waters first acquired fruit flavors, and now added a bit of sweetener; and coffee turned into milkshakes, viz. the Starbucks peppermint/mocha/pumpkin frappuccinos. But the debasement of coffee continues on! As the New York Times asks plaintively, “Does anyone drink hot coffee anymore?” Now the frappuccinos are turning into milkshakes, as 60% of Starbucks coffee orders throughout the year are for cold drinks.

. . . Ms. Maute, 23, a full-time content creator in Manhattan who often shares her iced-coffee orders on YouTube, explained why she doesn’t go for hot coffee: It’s usually too hot to drink at first, then it’s drinkable for only a short period before turning lukewarm, at which point the taste is ruined. (“I cannot time it right,” she said. “I always get distracted.”)

According to Ms. Maute, whose current favorite iced drink at Starbucks is a Pumpkin Cream Cold Brew with oat milk and two pumps of chai, the many ways to customize iced drinks make them superior to hot drinks.

“The variety and the newness factor of some of their drinks that they implement makes it fun,” she said. “Iced coffee for me isn’t even about energy, it’s about fun.”

Indeed, iced coffee in 2022 has come to represent much more than the sugary, caffeinated drinks themselves. Affection for it has become a personality trait; memes of people running late to class or work with an iced coffee in tow are a long-running joke on social media. Many use iced coffee to symbolize that they lead very busy lives, ambitiously striving to make every hour of the day count.

But does all the love for iced mean that coffee drinkers have cooled on hot?

Last month Starbucks reported that cold beverages accounted for 75 percent of its drink sales from April through June, which the company attributed in large part to the popularity of iced drinks among its Gen Z customers.

While it might come as no surprise that customers at Starbucks are choosing mostly iced drinks during warmer months, cold beverages have accounted for at least 60 percent of the coffee giant’s beverage sales every quarter — including the winter months — since April of last year.

Iced coffee is also used as an amusing identifier among L.G.B.T.Q. people, with viral videos depicting their cultural claim to the drink.

Wait, what??

As for Ms. Maute, when she’s craving a hot coffee drink, she typically goes for the Toasted White Chocolate Mocha at Starbucks.

“It feels like holiday vibes to me,” she said. “So if I’m going to do something like, maybe I’m shopping for holiday gifts, or I’m getting a Christmas tree, I will drink that to make me feel festive.”

And on a normal winter day? Iced coffee, all the way.

“The New York winters are brutal, with the wind and all, I don’t care,” she said. “I bought gloves specifically so that I could hold my iced coffee.”

To quote REM, it’s the end of the world as we know it. .   

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Kulka wants to make friends with Hili (who doesn’t like her), but Hili will accept only a truce:

Kulka: We can be friends.
Hili: Yes, but not for long.
(Photo: Paulina R.)
In Polish:
Kulka: Możemy być przyjaciółkami.
Hili: Tak, ale nie na długo.
(Zdjęcie: Paulina)

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

From Facebook:

From Animals in Art Through History: my feline Doppelgänger:

From Barry, who says, “Don’t even THINK about it!”

God apparently doesn’t approve of the monarchy:

From Simon: A duck acts like a crow:

Also from Simon: Larry the cat’s tweet:

Reader Nancie isn’t sure this wasn’t staged:

From the Auschwitz Memorial:

Tweets from Matthew. This analogy is dead wrong: Charles WANTED DESPERATELY to be king, but nobody wants to be chair!

Matthew is still inflamed over the lionization of the Royal family, though he didn’t dislike the Queen:

How could they show this first tweet without showing the picture? Well, they eventually did. . .

Matthew says, “Do not try this at home.” Or in the sea, or anywhere. How did the diver know the shark (a great white, note) wouldn’t attack her?

56 thoughts on “Saturday: Hili dialogue”

    1. I can’t remember them all. But #1 is that nobody thinks that they’re a jerk. But there are plenty of jerks in the world, so many people must be wrong. #2, as I recall, is related: Everybody thinks that they have a great sense of humor. Rest similar to #1. #3 I forget.

          1. More likely they think the average is too slow, and too prone to stopping at amber lights instead of accelerating at them.

  2. As far as historical traditions go I wish we in America had something silly like a monarchy dividing the country’s opinion instead of the Civil War.

  3. I read yesterday that Lightfoot was so outraged by the idea of immigrants being bused to other localities that she bused them to the suburb of Burr Ridge.

    1. By many measures, Texas governor Greg Abbott may be the biggest jerk in American politics today (although he gets stiff competition from his Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and his AG Ken Paxton).

      I realize that “trolling the Libs” is the entire raison d’être for today’s rightwing, but to use living, breathing human beings to do it is beyond the pale.

      2. Geographically, Texas is a mighty big state with lots of open spaces. So it has plenty of room for migrants and no need to interfere with the populations of other states. Gov. Abbot sounds like a spiteful ass.

        1. Texas has about the same population as all of Canada which, like Texas, has vast tracts of open spaces, even if you include only the area south of 60 degrees latitude. (The Arctic is sustainable only as a welfare civil-service economy. Trump wanted to buy Greenland. We’d happily sell him Nunavut.) The population density of Texas is 10x that of Ontario (which has more land area than Texas), and roughly the same density as the heavily populated “Southern Ontario” along the shores of the two lower Great Lakes, much of which is still rural. Yet we can’t get anyone, native-born or immigrant, to live in most of that space because there is no way to earn a living. Young people all over the world want to live in cities where the economic opportunities are. Assuming the migrants have skills and work ethic, they will likely do better in Chicago and New York anyway than marooned in a little border town at the mercy of the cartels. If they have neither, they shouldn’t be allowed in in the first place.

  4. Even though I’ve been veggo for over 20 years, I’ve got to put a plug in for the Sonora hotdog. I may be breaking da roolz and get banned for saying so, but it is an excellent southerly equal to the Chicago dog.

    2. That is indeed the case when a monarch still wields genuine power. Parliament and King Charles had not reached the compromise that William and Mary reached with parliament after the Glorious Revolution. But when a monarch is a constitutional one with no real power or partisan background, then he or she have the potential to be a unifying force.

    3. Also The Anarchy and the Wars of the Roses. Scotland probably also had a few civil wars (but my Scottish history is inexcusably bad so I don’t know if they did or not). However those were wars about who should be the monarch.

      Now that the monarchy has no power and pretty explicit rules about the succession, there seems to be little point in civil wars – we can just have an election.

  6. Perhaps I’m continuing to chastise a deceased equine here, but the British constitutional monarchy has worked well for us (and by ‘us’ I mean both the UK and the Commonwealth realms that choose to have the monarch as head of state. I am both a Brit and Canadian.) What people don’t understand is that the monarch is only a figurehead in terms of power. Parliament has all the power, and officially has that power only because the sovereign grants it. The sovereign would never dream of, indeed, would not be able, to withdraw that gift. Royal approval of legislation is a formality, and the Guardian’s beef about consent to proposed legislation is merely the result of the parts of the Bill of Rights that says parliament may not interfere with the monarch’s own household and affairs without consent. Look what happened in Europe in the 18th C – weak or dissolved parliaments led to strong monarchies and eventual revolution. Didn’t happen here. Look what happens when an elected head of state with actual power wants more of it (Hitler, Assad, Xi, Putin, maybe Trump was a near miss). Or you can elect a head of state who has no power and go through a pantomime of pretending to respect the office. Let’s not pretend that our royal family have an easy go of it either. From birth they have no freedom to express themselves. Their life is mapped out in advance, and they don’t get time off for good behaviour, nor can they retire (abdication is frowned upon!) In return they get to live in the rodent infested and leaky Buckingham Palace, enjoying unreliable plumbing, and drafty ill-heated rooms. Furthermore, they pay for the privilege! That’s right – the sovereign’s income is given to parliament, in return for a yearly sovereign grant (was called the ‘civil list’) that is much smaller in size, and is taxed. People talk about the Queen as the world’s wealthiest woman, but what does that mean when all the income from that wealth is given to parliament and not spent by her?
    It is, of course, perfectly alright for our host to dislike the system. Some within the UK and Commonwealth feel the same, and they are allowed to say so out loud and I’m afraid they do keep on at it. But to be rather brutally honest, the American Constitution isn’t such a ground-breaking and unique document—it was written by British subjects, after all, and based upon their experience and education within that system. They hoped to do even better, and I wish them well and trust they succeeded. It’s been a long time since we wanted to impose our ways on other nations (can America say the same?) and there is no need to decry HM The Queen or our new king. We don’t threaten you, we shall not invade (as much as we did rather enjoy 1812!) We shall do our thing and you will do yours, and all will be well.

    1. Interestingly Jordan Peterson observed that the American system has (in principle) a balance of the executive, judicial and legislative branches of government. The constitutional monarchy in the UK adds a fourth – a symbolic branch. Although the symbolic branch has no real power it provides a longer term perspective for the others.

    2. Technically speaking, the American Constitution was written by former British subjects since independence had already been achieved in 1787. Of course, the writers of the Constitution were influenced by British philosophers of government as well as those of other countries, particularly France.

    3. As a Yank, I don’t have a real grasp on the Royals but it has always seemed to me to be a very hard deal they’ve made with the British. What a life, so opulent but so hideously constrained. In spite of that (and considering the huge challenges and changes the Brits went through in her lifetime) Elizabeth always seemed to me to be pleasant, kind and, well, Queenly. The photo from Larry the Cat above and a clip I’ve seen of her surprised and delighted at seeing cows, show a side of her I think many adore and I will remember. My condolences to you and long live the King, but I must say I cannot agree with your final words. I am much too pessimistic about the future of our country.

        1. Who’s gonna get all her hats and other garb? A museum, I assume. The hats would look pretty silly on King Chuckles.

    4. Thanks Christopher. Too right. The only thing I might add is that for many years, many people (myself included) have been all too ready to poke fun at Charles, not least because he sometimes seemed to deserve it. Now that he has succeeded to the position that he has been dreading (his words) for years, I am quite confident that he will do the job perfectly well, and might even surprise one or two people. Long live the King!

    5. Is it a coincidence that many, if not most, of the most democratic countries are constitutional monarchies? Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, (and possibly countries like NZ and Canada), and Spain, Japan and Thailand are too. The latter maybe not that democratic, but still when compared to it’s neighbours.
      I’d agree that bad as it appears on paper, in practice it works pretty well. Odd, but maybe reason to think twice before abandoning it.

      1. Reminds me of what Justice Robert Jackson (perhaps the most graceful writer ever to sit on SCOTUS) said about the common law of evidence in Michelson v. United States (1948):

        We concur in the general opinion of courts, textwriters and the profession that much of this law is archaic, paradoxical and full of compromises and compensations by which an irrational advantage to one side is offset by a poorly reasoned counter-privilege to the other. But somehow it has proved a workable even if clumsy system when moderated by discretionary controls in the hands of a wise and strong trial court. To pull one misshapen stone out of the grotesque structure is more likely simply to upset its present balance between adverse interests than to establish a rational edifice.

  8. World Suicide Prevention Day is just as partisan as World Abortion Prevention Day would be. It is all about body sovereignty. I am glad that more of Europe has embraced the fundamental human right to suicide; my understanding is that some countries even cover it under universal health care. I hope that as the US fights to keep abortion legal, we realize that abortion rights and suicide rights are part of the same ideological platform.

    1. I disagree. There’s a hot line for people to call because many of them don’t WANT to kill themselves, but need someone to talk to. I support voluntary euthanasia, but to diss the suicide hotline, or say that those who want to kill themselves should be allowed to without vetting, is just wrong.

    2. Wanting to commit suicide because of probably remediable desperation is somehow different from euthanasia .
      I mean, wanting to commit suicide because of financial ruin, or a partner that left or an untreated depression is somewhat different from wanting to end it when full of metastases, the latter is basically incurable, and promises a lot of suffering.
      Admittedly, contrary to sex, this might be a real spectrum though.

  9. Concerning the Children of Abraham (also the title of a book by ex-prez Jimmy Carter), I’m reminded that Alan Watts called them, fittingly, a “pestilential bunch.”

    1. My concern has always been less with Abraham, the voices in his head and his willingness to slaughter his own child, as wretched as that may be. What revolts me is that people continue to worship a god who tells his little favorite that he will become the father of a great nation if and only if he slaughters his own son. And people wonder why so many of us question the idea of morality stemming from their despicable god.

      1. God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son”
        Abe say, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on”
        God say, “No, ” Abe say, “What?”
        God say, “You can do what you want Abe, but
        Next time you see me comin’, you better run”
        Abe said, “Where do you want this killin’ done?”
        God said, “Out on Highway 61”

  11. Re the Starbucks statistics: it may be due to fact that Starbucks’ straight black coffee is terrible. Effing MacDonald’s makes a better cuppa. I have never met anyone who actually likes Starbucks staight black.

    2. The one thing I will say in defense–NOT really–of iced coffee, here in Florida at least: It’s almost always just too hot and muggy for hot coffee to be enjoyable, which for me is a real shame. Personally, I just don’t drink it at all anymore, or have iced black coffee if anything (once every several years). All the fancy drinks are just clearly a desserts, not beverages to perk on up and help focus, and that smells wonderful when it’s good.

      I agree with you both about the taste of Starbucks regular coffee. Dunkin Donuts has better, too. And it’s also all stupidly expensive, even at McDonald’s.

  14. … Ocean Ramsey and her team encountered what is possibly the largest great white shark ever recorded …

    Ocean Ramsey (nominative determinism?) and her team have plainly never read the opening passage of Peter Benchley’s novel.

    Jaws isn’t my regular kind of reading material, but I did pick it up one time — even before the movie came out — when I was stuck somewhere with nothing else to read.

  15. Recently, on this website, critics were rightly disdained for not seeing Darwin as set in his own era. Why not give Abraham the same slack? If he existed at all, it was something like 3500 years ago when human sacrifices to gods were widespread, and remained so for Millenia – but not among “the children of Abraham” who seemed to have halted the practice at Abrahams time. Perhaps the Abraham and Isaac story represents a great advance in human morality.

    1. Good point. Regardless of whether Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son, clearly his children weren’t. That’s a founding myth I can live with.
      And as Mad Magazine writer David Berg put it, “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” was a big advance over “a life for an eye.” It’s glib to say an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. But limiting vengeance with a rule is better than making the whole world dead. Progress takes time.

    2. Correction on one point here: In no culture has human sacrifice been “widespread”. In those in which it is attested thus far, it is always a rare and extreme measure in extraordinary circumstances.

      1. I am part way reading through “Slavery and Social Death” by Orlando Patterson and you could not be more wrong; human sacrifice was common throughout history and around the world, if you count slaves as humans.

        Some of the most horrific examples are from the North American and Meso American native peoples. The Aleuts and Tlingit were especially cruel, sometimes throwing their slaves alive into a sacrifical fire or drowning them en masse. Elsewhere vast numbers of slaves were buried, sometimes alive, with their masters in India, China and Japan. Celts, Vikings, Inca and Aztecs had their sacrifice rituals, as did the Margi in Nigeria and the Ashanti of Ghana. In some societies, especially in Africa and Meso America, human sacrifice was key to retaining power among ruling elites.

        No, human sacrifice has a long horrible history around the world. That is not to say that there weren’t cultures and places which didn’t see it (or at least we have no evidence for it), but it simply isn’t true to say that human sacrifice was “..always a rare and extreme measure in extraordinary circumstances”. I

    3. The difference between Darwin and Abraham is that Abraham’s actions are celebrated as an example of ideal morality by millions of people TODAY. They consider it to be something so fundamentally good that it is unconstrained by time or culture. The fact that context is irrelevant is part of the point of the Abraham story. If g*d tells you to do something, you do it. No one views Darwin’s “problematic” social opinions in this way.

  16. By “wide spread” I did not mean “frequent.” Cultures in Europe, Africa, Asia. Oceania, and the the Americas practiced human sacrifice. Within the Aztec culture, it was not “rare and an extreme measure” but actually pretty common.

  17. 10 September 2022: the Ukrainian Defence Forces overrun the Russian forces at Kopiansk and Izyum in a Blitz offensive, marking the turning point of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
    (Well, let’s hope).

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