Monday: Hili dialogue

February 13, 2023 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Monday, February 13, 2023, and National Italian Food Day. Some spaghetti carbonara, perhaps?

It’s also National Cheddar Day (make mine Keen’s Farmhouse Cheddar from England, aged enough so there’s a touch of mold), Kiss Day (anticipating tomorrow’s Valentine’s Day), Oatmeal Monday, National Tortellini Day, National Crab Rangoon Day, Madly in Love with Me Day (??), World Radio Day, National Football Hangover Day, and, of course, another consequence of overindulging yesterday, National Poop Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the February 13 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

* Last night I watched the first half of the Superbowl (the one football game I watch each year), but turned it off at halftime, when I believe the score was tied at 14 all. I see from the NYT today that Kansas City wrapped up the game in the second half. It was an exciting game with lots of touchdowns.

On Thursday night, Patrick Mahomes of the Kansas City Chiefs won his second N.F.L. Most Valuable Player Award, cementing him as the most accomplished passer of a new crop of young quarterbacks dominating the league. Three days later, he added the second Super Bowl victory of his career, throwing for 182 yards and three touchdowns to beat the Philadelphia Eagles, 38-35.

Ye know in America, and all ye need to know.  Oh, and there were lots of commercials about Jesus, part of the “Jesus gets us” campaign, fostering mass delusion on an audience that is largely “nones”, and also includes Jews and Muslims who don’t “get” Jesus.  Here’s a summary of the commercial’s purpose, along with part of one:

*It’s happened AGAIN: another unidentified object was shot down over the U.S., this time over Lake Huron.  A short report from the Washington Post:

The U.S. military shot down a fourth aerial “object,” this time over Lake Huron on Sunday, according to two members of Congress who said they were briefed by Defense Department officials on the military action.

Rep. Jack Bergman (D-Mich.) said in a tweet that he had been in contact with Defense Department officials “regarding operations across the Great Lakes region” on Sunday.

“I appreciate the decisive action by our fighter pilots,” he wrote. “The American people deserve far more answers than we have.”

Separately, Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) said the object was “downed” by pilots from the U.S. Air Force and National Guard. Slotkin learned about the latest object from the Defense Department and said in a tweet, “be assured that all parties have been laser-focused on it from the moment it traversed our waters.”

A Defense Department spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The announcement of the takedown of a fourth mysterious airborne object came as members of Congress on Sunday pressed for more information from the Biden administration about the objects shot down over North America in recent days.

I can’t wait to hear what these objects are; the one shot down on Alaskan sea ice should be recovered soon. Both Democrats and Republicans are starting to grouse about the lack of information from the administration, although it’s hard to recover these things and they have to be analyzed. The article above suggests that the Alaska and Canada objects were both balloons:

When asked on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Sunday characterized the two objects shot over Alaska and Canada as “balloons.” U.S. and Canadian officials said the latest objects were much smaller than the Chinese airship that was shot down off the coast of South Carolina on Feb. 4 after traversing the continental United States.

*The death toll from last week’s earthquake in Turkey and Syria has now exceeded 33,000, and the evil Syrian President (you remember Assad using chemical weapons against his own people) is actively hindering rescue and  relief efforts:

. . . . It took workers hours to reach the man in question, cutting rebar away from his large body frame.

Then they rolled him into a black body bag.

It was a scene repeated across southern Turkey and northwestern Syria on Sunday, where the death toll from the quakes eclipsed 33,000 people, as hopes waned that more survivors might be pulled from the rubble and the United Nations said aid efforts had “failed” the people of northwest Syria.

Nearly a week after the Feb. 6 temblors, rescue efforts in several areas shifted to recovery missions. More than 1.1 million people were displaced in Turkey. An untold number lay buried under the rubble. In Syria, a scarcity of excavators left people desperately digging for loved ones on their own.

Across quake-destroyed areas, the enormity of the needs was hard to comprehend.

“We have not seen suffering and devastation of this scale in over a decade,” Johan Mooij, the response director for World Vision Syria, said in a statement. “The impact is so enormous … it could take a generation for survivors to recover.”

More than 29,600 people in Turkey and 3,400 in Syria have been killed in the quakes, officials in the countries said. The numbers, they warned, would almost certainly rise.

. . .Amid the devastation, anger continued to mount over the gulf in aid between Turkey, where tons of relief has poured in, and rebel-held northwest Syria, where the response has lagged and people — many already displaced by a brutal civil war — have been mostly left to manage the crisis alone.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has restricted access to the northwest, which is under the control of armed opposition groups. With the backing of allies such as Russia and China at the U.N. Security Council, he has periodically blocked the delivery of humanitarian aid there in the past.

This man needs to go. And, by the way, so does Turkish President Erdogan, who, I hope, will be defeated in the upcoming election. He is to Turkey what Modi is to India.

*The NYT’s editorial board has a joint op-ed called “India’s proud tradition of a free press is at risk.” Not surprising given that India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, is somewhat of an autocrat as well as a Hinducentric theocrat, and is cracking down on protests.

Since Mr. Modi took office in 2014, journalists have increasingly risked their careers, and their lives, to report what the government doesn’t want them to.

India ranks 11th in the “global impunity index” of the Committee to Protect Journalists, a tally of reporters whose deaths remain unsolved, and in the annual press freedom index published by the organization Reporters Without Borders, India fell to 150 in 2022, its lowest-ever rank out of 180 countries. The United States is 42; Russia is just below India at 155, China 175.

As a result, self-censorship has spread, along with a shrill Hindu nationalism in news reports that echoes the government line.

The latest manifestation of the government intolerance for critical reporting was its invocation of emergency laws last month to block a BBC documentary titled “The Modi Question.” The documentary revived damning questions about Mr. Modi’s role, when he led the government of the Indian state of Gujarat, in a horrific episode of violence in 2002, in which more than 1,000 people — most of them Muslims — were slaughtered over several weeks.

The BBC held Modi responsible for the environment that led to the slaughter, just like Trump bears responsibility for the political climate that led to January 6 (fortunately, with far less violence and death). His censorship of criticism of his behavior created a “Streisand effect”:

The two-part BBC documentary challenged all that. Though there had been no plans to air it in India, key portions promptly began circulating on social media. The government reacted with what has become its signature fury. The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting blocked videos and links sharing the documentary, calling it “hostile propaganda and anti-India garbage,” with a “colonial mind-set.” It added that YouTube and Twitter had complied with the order.

BBC said in a statement that the documentary was “rigorously researched according to highest editorial standards.”

Preventing circulation of even snippets of the film had the predictable effect of creating far more interest in it than there had been.

. . . As Mr. Modi’s own party knows firsthand — the B.J.P. [Modi’s party] was suppressed and many of its leaders jailed in the dark days of emergency rule from 1975 to 1977 — when populist leaders invoke emergency laws to block dissent, democracy is in peril.

On my last visit to India, I’d already noticed that the newspapers, even the liberal ones, had become less critical of Modi, and was told that they were fearful of criticizing the government.  Poor India—the world’s largest democracy, run like an autocracy.

*Only in America Dept: The AP reports a high school walkout over a urinal ban!

Dozens of students walked out of their New Hampshire school after the district banned urinals in a compromise to a proposal that would have blocked children from using facilities based on their gender identity.

The school board decided a few days before the Friday walkout to prohibit students at Milford Middle School and Milford High School from using urinals or shared spaces in locker rooms.

The ban in a town of about 15,000 people roughly 35 miles (56 kilometers) from Concord, New Hampshire’s capital, was the culmination of a long debate about district rules about bathroom use and gender identity. District procedures say students can access the bathroom that “corresponds to their gender identity consistently asserted at school.”

That procedure still applies. But a proposal that came before the school board called for no longer allowing students to use school bathrooms and locker rooms based on their gender identity. Board member Noah Boudreault said he proposed new restrictions on bathroom use as part of a compromise.

. . . Under the new policy, the maximum occupancy for each bathroom and locker room will be capped at the number of stalls it contains. It also prevents students from using shared changing areas.

I’m not sure what’s going on here. Students can now use bathrooms that correspond to their gender identity (I presume this means that self-declared transsexual students can use the bathroom of the sex to which they’ve transitioned, because otherwise there’s no need for a “proposal”.) The men’s restroom will now allow trans men, who are biological women, most of them (since this is secondary school) having to sit down to pee.

But if they use a stall, why can’t they tolerate biological men using the urinal? (This isn’t necessary for trans women, since they will use the women’s restroom and those have only stalls.) Changing rooms are of course a more fraught issue, but I’m still not quite clear why boys are banned from using urinals in the boy’s room. That would just create a huge line at breaks between classes. (Every woman knows why there are long lines outside women’s rooms and no lines outside men’s rooms.) Will there be urinal police to ensure no standing, or will they simply remove or somehow block the urinals. I’m deeply confused.

*Yes, it’s the New York Post, but I’ve read about North Korean defector Yeonmi Park before, and her comparison of indoctrination by North Korean government vs by the woke wouldn’t be palatable to the MSM.  new book coming out on Valentine’s Day, While Time Remains (h/t Luana)

The 29-year-old defected from North Korea as a young teen, only to be human-trafficked in China. In 2014, she became one of just 200 North Koreans to live in the United States — and, as of last year, is an American citizen.

Now, three years after she graduated from Columbia with a degree in human rights, Park is raising alarm bells about America’s cancel culture and woke ideology.

In her book “While Time Remains,” out February 14, Park writes how she made it all the way to the United States only to find some of the same encroachments on freedom that she thought she left behind in North Korea — from identity politics and victim mentality to elite hypocrisy.

Park went to Columbia University, and while you may think it’s a stretch to compare it to North Korea, but she doesn’t:

In an interview this week with The Post, Park recalled what it was like to be a North Korean defector who escaped tyranny and oppression only to meet college students intent on claiming victim status and earning oppression points. She dubbed her alma mater a “pure indoctrination camp” and said many of her classmates at New York City’s most elite school were “brainwashed like North Korean students are.

“I never understood that not having a problem can be a problem,” Park said. “They need to make injustice out of thin air or a problem out of nowhere, because they haven’t experienced anything like what other people are facing in the world.”

Park is an activist publicizing the dangers of North Korea and has a Youtube channel called “Voice of North Korea“. Here’s one of her productions, explaining the five things North Koreans must do to survive (it’s pretty grim, especially the part about everyone having a feces quote to give up as fertilizer):

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s hungry again (that’s not news):

A: Are you coming to the kitchen?
Hili: What’s on the menu?
In Polish:
Ja: Idziesz do kuchni?
Hili: A co jest w menu?

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

From Jesus of the Day:

From Bruce and from Linda, a Wiley Miller cartoon:

From Monty Python Fans via Merilee:

Well, God has apparently stopped posting on Mastodon, which might be a sign of the End Times. The good news is that Titania has started posting again, perhaps because Andrew Doyle (her puppeteer) has issued his book, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World. (It’s worth a read.)

Why is she much blacker than King? Because she accepts the CRT view that you MUST judge people by the color of their skin. An excerpt from her Critic Magazine piece:

Again and again, I find that so many of the heroes of the civil rights movements fail to live up to my standards. Consider Martin Luther King and his famous “dream” that future generations would be judged not “by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character”. Here’s what he should have said: 

I have a dream that little children will one day live in a nation where they will be judged not by the content of their character, but the colour of their skin — in order to fulfil diversity quotas and deconstruct the inherent toxicity of whiteness.

I have also surpassed Mahatma Gandhi. He might have brought the British empire to its knees, but did he ever chuck a tin of soup over a Van Gogh in the National Gallery? No, he was too busy mincing around in flip-flops and collecting salt.

That last paragraph is hilarious.

A tweet from Masih showing a walkout at a UN meeting in Geneva when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke in 2009, attacking Israel.  That walkout wouldn’t happen now.

She’s calling for similar behavior now when the Foreign Minister speaks at the end of February.  Sound up:

Translation of the Farsi:

Dear people of Iran!

Now is the time for all of us to ask the representatives of Western countries to leave the hall during the presence of Amir Abdullahian, the representative of the most anti-women government in the world on February 27, 2023, and not sit at the speeches of those who have enslaved Iranian women for four decades

As they did at the United Nations Conference on Racism, during the speech of Mohammad Ahmadinejad on April 10, 2009, and the representatives of the countries that believe in democracy left the hall en masse.

The message of protest against the Islamic Republic by countries that believe in women’s rights should be sent everywhere and firmly and consistently.

From Barry.  A cat on a diet is not a pleasant thing to watch:

From Simon, who says that “McDonald’s has no sense of humor”:

From the Auschwitz Memorial: a French girl gassed at eleven:

Tweets from Matthew. How many ducks? (There’s a weird bird I can’t identify in there. There’s also music.)

A scorpion with a doubled metasoma (the posterior part of arthropods whose bodies comprise three parts). Two stings in one! (This is, of course, an accident of development.) It’s a female, and there’s a video in the second tweet:

Japanese translation of below: “Last night, I gave Pink-necked Kirigisu ‘Kusadango’. After all, it seems that solids cannot be swallowed, and only the juice is sucked. Maybe next time I’ll give him something like “high protein jelly”.  “Kusadango” is a dumpling made of mugwort, a Japanese sweet. I think this is a mutant pink katydid, which are not all that rare in Japan.

23 thoughts on “Monday: Hili dialogue”

  1. On this day:
    1322 – The central tower of Ely Cathedral falls on the night of 12th–13th.

    1633 – Galileo Galilei arrives in Rome for his trial before the Inquisition.

    1642 – The Clergy Act becomes law, excluding bishops of the Church of England from serving in the House of Lords. [They’re back now, though, thanks (!) to the 1661 Clergy Act.]

    1935 – A jury in Flemington, New Jersey finds Bruno Hauptmann guilty of the 1932 kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby, the son of Charles Lindbergh.

    1945 – World War II: Royal Air Force bombers are dispatched to Dresden, Germany to attack the city with a massive aerial bombardment.

    1960 – With the success of a nuclear test codenamed “Gerboise Bleue”, France becomes the fourth country to possess nuclear weapons.

    1960 – Black college students stage the first of the Nashville sit-ins at three lunch counters in Nashville, Tennessee.

    2004 – The Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announces the discovery of the universe’s largest known diamond, white dwarf star BPM 37093. Astronomers named this star “Lucy” after The Beatles’ song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”.

    2008 – Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd makes a historic apology to the Indigenous Australians and the Stolen Generations.

    2017 – Kim Jong-nam, brother of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, is assassinated at Kuala Lumpur International Airport.

    2021 – Former U.S. President Donald Trump is acquitted in his second impeachment trial.

    Births:
    1923 – Chuck Yeager, American general and pilot; first test pilot to break the sound barrier (d. 2020).

    1933 – Kim Novak, American actress.

    1934 – George Segal, American actor (d. 2021).

    1938 – Oliver Reed, English actor (d. 1999).

    1942 – Peter Tork, American singer-songwriter, bass player, and actor (d. 2019).

    1950 – Peter Gabriel, English singer-songwriter and musician.

    1956 – Peter Hook, English singer, songwriter, bass player, multi-instrumentalist, and record producer.

    1974 – Robbie Williams, English singer-songwriter.

    Became living-impaired:
    1542 – Catherine Howard, English wife of Henry VIII of England (executed, b. 1521).

    1883 – Richard Wagner, German composer (b. 1813).

    1952 – Josephine Tey, Scottish author and playwright (b. 1896).

    1958 – Christabel Pankhurst, English activist, co-founded the Women’s Social and Political Union (b. 1880).

    1980 – David Janssen, American actor (b. 1931).

    2002 – Waylon Jennings, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1937).

    2016 – Antonin Scalia, American lawyer and judge, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (b. 1936).

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  2. 1. There are a few Turks in my club at work, luckily their people are all safe, but Zafer’s home town doesn’t exist any more and they’re all just reeling from the shock (and of course all of their friends who’ve had less good luck).

    2. Put urinals in a stall and you’re fine. Quite a few places here in NL have non-gendered bathrooms; some leave the urinals out in the open which I’m not too comfortable with, but others have them in their own stalls. Seems a good solution to me.

    3. I hear there was some OTHER television show on last night than the premier episode of Het Nieuwe Vermeer, starring (ok, co-starring) Abbie Vandivere as Vermeer expert, coach, and jury member! The idea is to get a group of amateur and two professional artists to try to recreate six of Vermeer’s missing paintings. Sorry, gotta be proud of my wife for a bit. Unfortunately, it’s all in Dutch but if the episodes turn up on YouTube you can always change them. They are putting some extra content on YouTube, as here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vExVJqGMSKM&t=1399s

    4. A question for y’all: what authentication method do you use to post? Twitter seems to be the only one that works for me (I’ve tried just entering email address, and using a WordPress ID), but it doesn’t support notification of new posts….

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    2. 4. A question for y’all: what authentication method do you use to post?

      I’ve only ever used the email method, and I get all of the “new post” notifications. I don’t have a Facebook account, and I’ve never for one second considered connecting my Twitter account to any other website (though I do get PCCE’s updates there too. Since the Muskocracy started, I’m even less inclined to use their authentication anywhere other than on their own website.
      Every so often I get a new browser version and the “details” boxes below forget my details until I re-confirm the ” Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.” tickbox. The same sort of thing happens over the same period on dozens of other websites.
      As far as I recall, the first time you post here with an email notification, you get sent a “do you really control this email address message containing a “confirm” link. Did you get that? Or did it route directly to “Spam”?
      What I don’t get (which I used to get) is notification of a reply to one of my comments. That hasn’t worked since … Jan 23, 2022, and I don’t know why. (Just trying “something different” on that now.)

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  3. The embargo on urinals at the New Hampshire school was done to limit the occupancy of all bathrooms to the number of stalls that either sex can use. According to a news story in a right-wing rag that comes over my MSN feed, this is an interim compromise intended to suck up to the trans activists, who don’t see any need for urinals, toward making it possible to convert all bathrooms to unisex or gender-neutral or whatever. We are already seeing this in the conference-room levels of hotels where the bathrooms that serve suites of small meeting rooms are only a roomful of fully enclosed stalls with their own contained sinks. The peeing capacity per square foot of these arrangements is of course far less than traditional arrangements and would be rapidly swamped at large events where bathrooms can be used only at intermissions.

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    1. I was led to understand that urinals have long been installed, but are now covered. The only sense it makes to me is if the goal is to make wait times equitable, and accomplishing this by lowering the capacity of the boy’s.
      That does seem to fit with the spirit of the times.

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  4. If the stalls are floor to ceiling there’s a risk that someone who collapses inside (for example, as a result of epilepsy) won’t be spotted. And if there are gaps above and below the stalls walls and doors there’s a risk of voyeurism and secret filming. In addition, I believe two girls have been raped in school bathrooms in Georgia alone:

    https://www.womenarehuman.com/2nd-girl-raped-in-school-restroom-by-transgender-fellow-student-furious-dad-arrested/

    Most people, male and female, are uncomfortable using mixed-sex bathrooms – and the state of men’s public toilets are generally much less sanitary, which is another reason why women don’t want shared facilities.

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    2. Fitting a door floor-to-ceiling requires a much higher level of finish and maintenance – and therefore fitting cost – than hanging a door with several inches of space at top and bottom. Fitting the door right down to the floor and it will get soaked every time the attendant mops the area out, leading to the wood warping, then jamming on a short order.
      You may not notice it at home, but your bathroom doors probably don’t get washed every hour or so, 14 hours a day, which is the sort of level people demand for public rest rooms. (Look at the “this space was checked by” initial sheets in such rooms.

      You can insist on floor-to-ceiling fitting if you want. But be prepared to pay for it, initially and repeatedly.

      I’ll grant that I’m not a professional door fitter – I’ve only done about 10 doors in various properties that I’ve owned, and am far from efficient about the job. (I still use chisels, not a router!) But there are still a lot more steps in fitting a door to a frame than to hanging a door on 2 hinges with plenty of space all around. But that’s probably about 9 doors more than most people. (My time is cheap when I’m not on an oil rig.)

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      1. Loo doors in public conveniences are surely often the cheap stuff they use in kitchen cupboards? The gap must be for hygiene purposes.

        I am not bothered by whether the lav is communal or not. I cannot think that secret filming is that common – is there any evidence of that one way or another?

        Of course we could all go around naked as Nature intended! 😉

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    3. above and below the stalls walls and doors there’s a risk of voyeurism and secret filming. In addition, I believe two girls have been raped in school bathrooms

      Just to check which apple you’re comparing to which orange, were the rapes in the stall and in the bathroom, or in the bathroom but not in the stall? In one case, the details of the stall construction might be relevant, in the other case, not.

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    4. There were unisex toilets in my secondary school and in many of the smaller university buildings I where I studied and most of my workplaces. (Some of the buildings were converted private houses.) It never even occurred to me that I should be uncomfortable there. I have had more than my share of dangerous encounters with male strangers, but none of them happened in a shared bathroom. It all depends on the context and the venue, I guess

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    5. Collapse is statistically more likely to be due to drug overdose. Imagine the surprise on opening a persistently locked floor-to-ceiling self-contained bathroom door to find someone had died in it three days ago.

      Not so sure about men’s toilets being worse. A self-contained unisex bathroom between my humble office and the adjacent nursing ward was used at least 90:10 by women. It was common to find yards and yards of soaking wet toilet paper discarded on the floor, sometimes still draped over the toilet seat. Some women apparently squat with their feet on the seat instead of sitting on it. If you think men have poor aim…

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  5. From Simon, who says that “McDonald’s has no sense of humor”:
    The humour here is in imagining that McDonald’s control where their adverts go to that level. These “adverts on a belt” machines, where the displayed poster is changed several times a minute, don’t vary which adverts are displayed under any control of either the roll-changing person, or the people buying the advert-eyeball-seconds.
    It’s the level of foolishness I’d expect from the Daily Fail.

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    1. Contra Jerry, I just said “no sense of humor” I meant (but didn’t specify) those who objected.The perils of ambiguity!
      Had I thought MickyDs had done it deliberately I’d have been more amused.

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  6. You folks are having a shockingly difficult time understanding the urinal story. Currently transgender students use the bathroom according to their gender: ‘District procedures say students can access the bathroom that “corresponds to their gender identity consistently asserted at school.” … That procedure still applies.’

    Somebody had a problem with that: “But a proposal that came before the school board called for no longer allowing students to use school bathrooms and locker rooms based on their gender identity”. The proposed compromise is to have only stalls in restrooms.

    Trans students have been using restrooms corresponding to their gender and there’s no indication in the article that this has caused any problems. That’s the status quo. The only reason a change is being proposed is because some people who are very concerned about children’s genitals are upset by that status quo. Trans men don’t care if cis men use urinals.

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    1. I guess we’re not as savvy as you are. Please knock off stuff like the first sentence, in which you say you’re shocked by how dense we are, and be more civil, please. The rest of the post is fine.

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  7. Just a guess about the urinal issue: perhaps someone is anticipating that the next TRA demand will be installation of urinals in women’s bathrooms to accommodate girls with penises who prefer standing. Abolishing urinals for everyone could be a proactive measure.

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  9. After years of training the fighter pilots going after balloons (I get it that it not as easy at it sounds) must wonder what is happening. Marking the outside of the cockpit with their kill of BALLOONS!
    In watching a vid of one first of these kills I could hear someone yelling something like “fuck yeah America” that got a grin on.

    https://youtu.be/DFaynXyAKQU

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