Saturday: Hili dialogue

March 18, 2023 • 6:45 am

It’s Saturday, March 18, 2023, Cat Sabbath, a Caturday, and National Sloppy Joe Day. We used to get them as school lunch, and sometimes my mom would make them, but I haven’t had one in decades.  One is pictured below (they’re good):

Why the name? Here are two suggestions from Wikipedia:

One theory of the sandwich’s origin is that in 1917, Havana, Cuba, bar owner José “Sloppy Joe” Abeal y Otero created “a simple sandwich filled with ground beef stewed in tomatoes.”  This was possibly his interpretation of ropa vieja. His bar was reportedly frequented by Americans and Britons, including Errol Flynn, Ernest Hemingway, and Graham Greene.[10] Circa 1937, Hemingway convinced Joe Russell, a bar owner in Key West, Florida, to rename his Silver Slipper bar Sloppy Joe’s.

Marilyn Brown, director of the consumer test kitchen at H.J. Heinz in Pittsburgh, says their research at the Carnegie Library suggests that the sloppy joe’s origins lie with the “loose meat sandwiches” sold in Sioux City, Iowa, in the 1930s and were the creation of a cook named Joe.

They’re similar to the “loosemeats” burgers that you can get in the Midwestern U.S.

It’s also National Lacy Oatmeal Cookie Day, Maple Syrup Saturday (remember, get the darkest grade you can), National Corndog Day, International Sports Car Racing Day, Gallipoli Memorial Day in Turkey, where it wasn’t a disaster, and Sheelah’s Day in Ireland, Canada, Australia, a day of Irish cultural heritage traditionally following St. Patrick’s Day. 

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the March 18 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Good news for Ukraine, and those of us who support its struggle for freedom: both Poland and Slovakia have pledged to send MiG-figher jets to the beleaguered country (h/t Nicole). Although Zelensky wants these badly, they’re hardly in good repair:

Slovakia on Friday became the second of Ukraine’s allies to provide MIG-29 fighter jets which Kyiv believes are crucial to repel Russia’s year-long invasion.

Slovakia joined Poland, which announced its delivery of the planes on Thursday. Both the NATO members neighbour Ukraine.

Its fleet of 11 MiG-29 planes was retired last summer and most of them are not in operational condition. It will send those that are operational and the rest will go for spare parts.

NATO allies in the former communist east such as Poland and Slovakia have been particularly vocal supporters of Kyiv since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022.

On Thursday, Poland announced it would send Ukraine four MiG-29 fighter jets in coming days, making it the first of Kyiv’s allies to provide such aircraft.

Western countries that have provided Ukraine with arms have so far declined to send fighter jets.

Slovakia ordered F-16 fighter jets from the United States in 2018 to replace the ageing [sic] MiG-29 planes. The first U.S.-made planes are expected to arrive in 2024 after a delay.

There is of course good reason for former Communist-occupied countries in Eastern Europe to be more generous than other countries in lending arms, as they know what it’s like to be under Russian domination. But why can’t the other NATO allies ante up some jets? F-16s are better than beaten-up MiGs in their dotage, but delivery in 2024? Too long, but of course it takes a long time to train pilots. In the meantime, the BBC reports that Russia has sworn to destroy any jets given to Ukraine by Slovakia and Poland. America prefers the ground game given the missile defenses on both sides, and, in truth, Russia’s air force isn’t that great, also consisting of old MiGs and Su-27s.

*Meanwhile, the International Criminal Court in the Hague has issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin:

The International Criminal Court on Friday issued an arrest warrant for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia for war crimes, saying he bore criminal responsibility for the abduction and deportation of Ukrainian children.

Ukrainian officials and human-rights groups hailed the warrant as an important step in holding Moscow to account for abuses during its yearlong war. The country’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, said the warrant represented the beginning of “historical responsibility.”

The likelihood of a trial while Mr. Putin remains in power appears slim because the court cannot try defendants in absentia and Russia has said it will not surrender its own officials. Still, the warrant deepens Mr. Putin’s isolation from the West and could limit his travel overseas.

The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, noted that Russia does not recognize the court and called its decision to issue a warrant “null and void.”

Given that Russia, like the U.S. has not signed onto the jurisdiction of the ICC, there’s no way in the world that the court will get its hands on Putin unless somehow his adversaries capture him, detain him, and send him to the Hague. That’s unlikely. Still, the charge—kidnapping and deporting Ukrainian children—is a new moral blot on a man who’s behave immorally in other ways.

*Although it’s not clear how much these plots reflect a nationwide form of ant-Semitism, there was a plot afoot to murder Jews in the Michigan state government, and one of those targeted was its attorney general, Dana Nessel. As CNN and several other sources report, the man was arrested. He had guns, too.

A Michigan man allegedly threatened on social media to kill Jewish members of the Michigan government, the FBI said, and state Attorney General Dana Nessel says she was among those targeted.

The incident adds to recent concerns about threats against public officials as well as reports of increasing antisemitic incidents across the country. It also evokes the plot to kidnap Democratic Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer as well as the at-times threatening demonstrations against Covid-19 protocols in the state.

As far as I know, Whitmer is a Christian and so can’t figure in any anti-Semitic plot.

On February 18, the FBI National Threat Operations Center told the Detroit FBI office that a person on Twitter by the handle of “tempered_reason” said he was heading to Michigan and “threatening to carry out the punishment of death to anyone that is Jewish in the Michigan govt.” Any attempt to “subdue” him would “be met with deadly force in self-defense,” the user said.

Authorities traced the Twitter handle to a man named Jack Eugene Carpenter III, who had a protection order against him and had previously been arrested by state police, according to the complaint filed in US District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan.

Carpenter had three 9mm handguns registered in Michigan’s Law Enforcement Information Network (LEIN), the complaint said. One of the guns in his possession Carpenter had “stolen” from his girlfriends, according to the complaint.

Authorities said Carpenter violated an interstate communication law, according to the complaint. He was arrested on February 18 in Texas, a law enforcement source familiar with the investigation told CNN.

I wouldn’t go calling this part of a larger plot against Jews, but most sources say anti-Semitism is rising. Another Michigan official, state representative Samantha Steckloff, says she receives death threats “on a daily basis, and the article adds this:

The threat against Nessel and other member of Michigan’s state government is the latest of several high-profile threats and violence against Jews in America. According to the Anti-Defamation League, antisemitic attacks reached a record high in the US in 2021 – up 34% from 2020.

Last month, a man was charged by federal prosecutors with hate crimes after he allegedly shot two different Jewish men in Los Angeles. In January, police said a man threw a Molotov cocktail at a New Jersey synagogue in an arson attempt, and in December, a 63-year-old man was assaulted in New York’s Central Park in what police called an antisemitic attack.

*The hottest legal news from reader Ken:

Yesterday, the very conservative federal Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit (comprising Alabama, Georgia, and Florida) declined to lift the stay imposed by district court judge Mark Walker on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s ill-begotten “Stop-WOKE” Act.

Judge Walker issued his injunction last November and,here’s a copy of the order. It’s a well-written and entertaining order that starts out quoting the opening line from Mr. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Here’s the end of the judges analysis before he ends the 39-page document by giving his decision. It is indeed well written, and very strongly argued:

Striking at the heart of “open-mindedness and critical inquiry,” the State of Florida has taken over the “marketplace of ideas” to suppress disfavored viewpoints and limit where professors may shine their light on eight specific ideas. And Defendants’ argument permits zero restraint on the State of Florida’s power to expand its limitation on viewpoints to any idea it chooses.

One thing is crystal clear—both robust intellectual inquiry and democracy require light to thrive. Our professors are critical to a healthy democracy,70 and the State of Florida’s decision to choose which viewpoints are worthy of illumination and which must remain in the shadows has implications for us all. If our “priests of democracy” are not allowed to shed light on challenging ideas, then democracy will die in darkness. 71 But the First Amendment does not permit the State of Florida to muzzle its university professors, impose its own orthodoxy of viewpoints, and cast us all into the dark.

Here’s a report from Politico regarding the Eleventh Circuit’s refusal to lift the stay on the “Stop-WOKE” Act. The underlying lawsuit was brought on behalf of a Florida student and university professor by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. And there’s a statement issued by FIRE when Judge Walker issued his initial injunction.

Here’s a bit of the statement:

In contrast to other lawsuits challenging the act filed by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the American Civil Liberties Union, FIRE’s suit is limited to higher education and does not take a position on the truth of the prohibited concepts of race and sex. Rather, FIRE takes the viewpoint-neutral approach that faculty retain the right to give an opinion — whether that opinion supports or opposes the prohibited concepts in the Stop WOKE Act.

But of course what happens when this is appealed to the Supreme Court?

*Andrew Sullivan’s new column, “The Biden-DeSantis Re-Balancing Act,” is a paean to both Biden and DeSantis for taking more reasonable stands on Ukraine/Russia and on immigration than some Democratic hawks and progressives want. I’m not so sure I want us to back away from supporting Ukraine, but it’s time that the Democrats stopped their wink-wink-nod-nod support of open borders, Just two paras from Sullivan:

But [Biden’s] immigration adjustment is the most remarkable. Last month, Biden effectively conceded the core point so many of us have been making for years: that the asylum system is being gamed to enable mass economic migration. The only way to stop this is to presume that migrants entering illegally are not eligible for asylum, and to send them back. Ditto the possible return of family detentions — as some kind of stopgap to cope with the sheer numbers. . .

This was obvious to anyone who knew what was going on at the border, and everybody knew it but ignored it. Now they can’t any longer:

. . . But it has slowly sunk in to mainstream Democrats that Americans want immigration safe, legal and, if not rare exactly, then at least in line with our choices, and not others’.

Biden has straddled this, of course, but I always wondered how he’d move if unchallenged in his own party for re-election — and it’s to the right. More to the point, he hasn’t actually been blasted for it. The op-ed pages of the major papers have been eerily quiet — especially given the collective hysteria over Trump’s previous, similar moves. (You could hear similar left responses to Biden’s executive order permitting new drilling on federal lands in Alaska: sincere but muted.)

A bit of humor: the guys hired by Jussie Smollet to beat him up tell how it went down:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn,  Hili has patrolled her beat:

Hili: I’ve checked out everything.
A: And?
I’m going back to the kitchen, there is a full bowl in there.
In Polish:
Hili: Wszystko już sprawdziłam.
Ja: I co?
Hili: Wracam do kuchni, tam jest pełna miska.

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

A meme from Facebook:

And another (other members of Team Duck find this ghoulish:

A duck meme from Nicole:

God and Titania may be lax tweeters, but Masih, helping spur a revolution on Iran, keeps on tweeting, for that’s one of the main ways she communicates with Iranians.

Translation of the Farsi from below (sound on):

Today, Friday the 26th of Esfand, once again the noisy people of #Zahedan came to the streets like every week and chanted against the Islamic Republic. With the slogans “we fight, we die, we don’t accept humiliation” and “an Iranian with the zeal to support support”, they once again showed that repression and arrest and the security environment do not affect their will to be in the street. This week is the twenty-fourth week of the revolution #Zen Zandagi Azdi after the bloody Friday of Zahedan, when dozens of Baloch citizens were killed by the oppressors of the Islamic Republic. #MehsaAmini

From Barry, I hope this little rescue penguin makes it:

From Malcolm, Laundry with cats:

From Simon, who says, “Love the ‘please take your time’ from the host at the end of the video.”  This poor woman, a conservative columnist, tries to define the word (see yesterday’s post):

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a thread worth reading. I’ve put in all four tweets. She didn’t even make it to the camp.

Tweets from Matthew. He says this about the first one: “This emphasises why AI is utterly stupid.”

I love this wooly jumper, and had no idea that sheep could jump this high.

Spot the squirrel! (This one isn’t hard.)

18 thoughts on “Saturday: Hili dialogue”

  1. Thanks Ken. Your expert opinions and commentary on the various courts, their opinions, and their commentary always add value to my understanding of the legal discussions on this site.

    Reply

  2. On this day:
    1834 – Six farm labourers from Tolpuddle, Dorset, England are sentenced to be transported to Australia for forming a trade union.

    1899 – Phoebe, a satellite of Saturn, becomes the first to be discovered with photographs, taken in August 1898, by William Henry Pickering.

    1922 – In India, Mohandas Gandhi is sentenced to six years in prison for civil disobedience, of which he serves only two.

    1940 – World War II: Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini meet at the Brenner Pass in the Alps and agree to form an alliance against France and the United Kingdom.

    1965 – Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, leaving his spacecraft Voskhod 2 for 12 minutes, becomes the first person to walk in space.

    1967 – The supertanker Torrey Canyon runs aground off the Cornish coast.

    1990 – In the largest art theft in US history, 12 paintings, collectively worth around $500 million, are stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.

    2014 – The parliaments of Russia and Crimea sign an accession treaty.

    Births:
    1690 – Christian Goldbach, Prussian-German mathematician and academic (d. 1764).

    1844 – Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Russian composer and academic (d. 1908).

    1845 – Kicking Bear, Native American tribal leader (d. 1904).

    1869 – Neville Chamberlain, English businessman and politician, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (d. 1940).

    1893 – Wilfred Owen, English soldier and poet (d. 1918).

    1932 – John Updike, American novelist, short story writer, and critic (d. 2009).

    1941 – Wilson Pickett, American singer-songwriter (d. 2006).

    1952 – Bernie Tormé, Irish singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 2019).

    1966 – Jerry Cantrell, American singer-songwriter and guitarist.

    1970 – Queen Latifah, American rapper, producer, and actress.

    Started a worm farm:
    1845 – Johnny Appleseed, American gardener and missionary (b. 1774).

    1871 – Augustus De Morgan, Indian-English mathematician and academic (b. 1806).

    2009 – Natasha Richardson, English-American actress (b. 1963).

    2016 – Barry Hines, English author and screenwriter (b. 1939).

    2017 – Chuck Berry, American guitarist, singer and songwriter (b. 1926).

    2020 – Alfred Worden, American test pilot, engineer and astronaut (b. 1932).

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      1. Did a side-by-side with a grocery store house brand.

        The concept of “appetizing” immediately came to mind.

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  6. I was delighted to learn about the arrest warrant on Putin. Perhaps this will be one of those things that triggers internal machinations in Russia that leads to his down-fall.
    Meanwhile, over here there are indications of a similar thing developing around our former president.

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    1. I suspect it will be seen as more of the conspiracy against Russia, and serve to increase his support. I know people are getting knocked for using the p-word, but there has to be peace at some point, and doing things like this make it harder for Putin to back out of this war.

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  8. Ron DeSantis believes that the road to the White House is through the culture wars and an isolationist foreign policy. Regarding the latter, he, Trump, and the likes of Tucker Carlson are adopting the strategy of Charles Lindbergh and the America First movement during the years immediately preceding the country’s entry into World War II. Archly isolationist, they assert that Putin represents no threat to the country and thus antagonizing him by providing aid to Ukraine is counterproductive. Lindbergh characterized Hitler as such. The fact that both dictators threatened democracy and represented a threat to European democracies should be of no concern to Americans.

    This stick one’s head in the sand approach to foreign policy is mimicked on the domestic side by the STOP WOKE act. The legislation is more than an assault on academic freedom. It is an attempt by the reactionary wing of the Republican Party to falsify history by downplaying the significance of slavery and race in American history. The NYT reports how conservative groups in Florida are scouring social studies textbooks for objectionable material. For the purpose of sales, at least one textbook is willing to accommodate conservative demands. What has gotten a lot of attention in the media recently is that one publisher has rewritten the Rosa Parks incident to eliminate any mention of race or segregation!

    For DeSantis, if the Woke didn’t exist, he would have invented it. Positing a nationwide conspiracy of leftist radicals that want to destroy the “real” America (including, of course, the dominance of Christianity), he hopes to put together a coalition of scared Americans that fear that the America they know (or in their minds they think they know) is slipping away. For them, democracy is not really America’s story. The fantasy history that he hopes to impose on Florida and perhaps the country is part of his plan to win the White House. Of course, DeSantis has to overcome Trump, who has a similar approach, which will not be easy. But, no matter who is the Republican candidate in 2024, isolationism and the culture wars (in all its facets, including abortion) will be that person’s campaign strategy.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/16/us/florida-textbooks-african-american-history.html

    Reply

  9. President Biden is to be applauded for his little-remarked-on temporary rule barring illegal border crossers from making asylum claims. Instead they will be deported upon apprehension to their country of citizenship. It should be straightforward to get that country to accept its obligation to take its citizens back, dependent as they are on American foreign aid generosity.

    Canada’s asylum process is being similarly gamed by economic migrants crossing our border unofficially*, most of whom are of little use to us. Most lately are the surge of migrants sent to New York City and then given bus tickets by the mayor to head for the well-known (and well-worn) unofficial footpath crossing in northern New York State.

    Canada needs to adopt the same rule: illegal crossers cannot claim asylum and will be arrested and deported immediately to their home countries. Measures to reform the asylum process have been resisted by our usual suspects on the Left as “something Trump would do” (an all-purpose discussion-stopper in Canada). With a Democratic President now doing it, perhaps there is room for our Prime Minister to take instruction from President Biden when they meet later this month. People have been sneaking into the U.S.from Canada, too. Biden has an incentive to tell Trudeau to harden the border.
    —————-
    * Technically, it is not illegal to enter Canada by crossing the border through the woods or being shipwrecked on a beach. The law says you have to present yourself to a border post without delay where your admissibility can be determined (or, if you are a Canadian citizen, you can be asked, “Anything to declare?”). Asylum seekers cross unofficially (or illegally) because international conventions on asylum require the persecuted to make their claims in the first safe country they reach, but this restriction has historically applied only at border posts. If you sneak in, you can claim, which is perverse.
    Canada already admits 400,000 immigrants a year, >1% of our population, whom we hope will sustain our economy. We don’t need more beggars and neither do you.

    Reply

    1. Assuming that you accept that at least some of the people who wish to claim asylum are genuinely at risk of persecution it is surely unethical to simply send them back to their country of origin without considering their claims. On arrival back in the home country they will be at the mercy of the persecutors they were fleeing and risk torture or worse.

      Reply

      1. A person fleeing persecution can make an asylum claim by presenting himself legally at a border-crossing post of the first safe country—the UN keeps a list— that he reaches. If that country is Canada, we will hear his claim, as will the U.S. and the U.K. Someone facing persecution will not be returned. That’s the whole point of asylum. The reason they sneak in is to hide the fact that they have crossed a safe country that they also may have entered illegally—in our case that’s the U.S. because we have no other land border—before they reached us. The international convention on asylum does not require sanctuary countries to entertain asylum-shopping where a migrant wanders around until he finds a country that offers the best accommodation. You must make your claim in the first safe country you reach in your flight from persecution.

        Ethics have nothing to do with it. There is an international law on asylum that economic migrants are exploiting loopholes in so as to enter countries that they would not be allowed to immigrate into.

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        1. I don’t think ethics can be dismissed so casually. Irrespective of whether migrants are following the correct legal procedure (they possibly did not have access to professional legal advice before setting out on their journey!) they may have various reasons for doing so other than gaming the system and may have a genuine fear of persecution in their country of origin. As far as the UK is concerned, many people who have arrived by boat across the channel have eventually been granted asylum, indicating that the authorities have recognised their need for protection even if they have arrived via safe third countries. If their case is heard and found to be without merit they can be repatriated at that point but simply sending people back to face potential persecution and torture is – to my mind – to be complicit in that persecution.

          Reply

  10. I’m sure Professor Ceiling Cat knows, but for those who don’t, jumper is British for sweater, so “wooly jumper” is a pun.

    Reply

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