Sunday: Hili dialogue

May 28, 2023 • 6:45 am

It’s Sunday, May 28, 2023, and it’s National Tapioca Day.  Did you know that tapioca, including that used to make the pearls in your bubble tea, all comes from starch extracted from the cassava root, a South American shrub (Manihot esculenta)? But it can also be made into bread and cassava chips? It’s also used to starch your shirts. The roots:

It’s also the day that the Indianapolis 500 is run, International Hamburger Day, Downfall of the Derg (Ethiopia), Downfall of the Derg (Ethiopia), International Hamburger Day, Menstrual Hygiene Day, and National Brisket Day.  Texas beef brisket is America’s best barbecue. Here’s a plate of sausage, brisket, and all the trimmings from Black’s in Lockhart, Texas (sweet tea, potato salad, beans, pickles, white bread, and the obligatory banana pudding for dessert):

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the May 28 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

BREAKING NEWS: DEMS AND REPUBLICANS STRIKE A DEAL OVER THE DEBT LIMIT! Well, it’s not finalized yet, and we don’t have all the details. But, as I predicted, they’re going to freeze federal spending:

President Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Saturday reached an agreement in principle to lift the debt limit for two years while cutting and capping some government spending over the same period, a breakthrough after a marathon set of crisis talks that has brought the nation within days of its first default in history.

Congressional passage of the plan before June 5, when the Treasury is projected to exhaust its ability to pay its obligations, is not assured, particularly in the House, which plans to consider it on Wednesday. Republicans hold a narrow majority in the chamber, and right-wing lawmakers who had demanded significantly larger budget cuts in exchange for lifting the borrowing limit were already in revolt.

But the compromise, which would effectively freeze federal spending that had been on track to grow, had the blessing of both the Democratic president and the Republican speaker, raising hopes that it could break the fiscal stalemate that has gripped Washington and the nation for weeks, threatening an economic crisis.

And as I also predicted, there will be some spending cuts to satisfy the GOP (bolding is mine)

. . . In a nighttime news conference outside his Capitol office that lasted just one minute, Mr. McCarthy said the deal contained “historic reductions in spending, consequential reforms that will lift people out of poverty into the work force, rein in government overreach” and would add no new taxes. He declined to answer questions or provide specifics, but said he planned to release legislative text on Sunday.

What the bold part probably means is that they’re not going to give social benefits to the poor unless they get a job, something the GOP insisted on.

*According to the NYT, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen had urged Democrats to raise the debt limit ceiling after November’s elections but before the change of House seats, when it was clear that the GOP would hold the House in January but the Dems were still in the majority and could pass legislation. (The Senate was and still is majority Democratic, but spending bills have to go through the House of Representatives.)

In the days after November’s midterm elections, Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen was feeling upbeat about the fact that Democrats had performed better than expected and maintained control of the Senate.

But as she traveled to the Group of 20 leaders summit in Indonesia that month, she said Republicans taking control of the House posed a new threat to the U.S. economy.

“I always worry about the debt ceiling,” Ms. Yellen told The New York Times in an interview on her flight from New Delhi to Bali, Indonesia, in which she urged Democrats to use their remaining time in control of Washington to lift the debt limit beyond the 2024 elections. “Any way that Congress can find to get it done, I’m all for.”

Democrats did not heed Ms. Yellen’s advice. Instead, the United States has spent most of this year inching toward the brink of default as Republicans refused to raise or suspend the nation’s $31.4 trillion borrowing limit without capping spending and rolling back parts of President Biden’s agenda. Talks between the White House and congressional Republicans on a potential deal to raise the debt ceiling were continuing on Saturday.

Democrats don’t fricking listen! No contingency plans have been broached as the gubmint doesn’t want to scare the bejeezus out of seniors, poor people, or anyone with a 401K plan. Here’s some buzz:

Most market watchers expect that the Treasury Department would opt to make interest and principal payments to bondholders before paying other bills, yet Ms. Yellen would say only that she would face “very tough choices.”

*But of course there’s still no bipartisan deal on the debt ceiling, though the default deadline has now been pushed back to June 5..  Meanwhile, the Democrats are starting to blame Biden for being too generous to the GOP, even though none of us really knows what kind of deals are being broached.

As White House negotiators got closer to a debt-ceiling deal with House Republicans, the griping from congressional Democrats got louder.

For days, Democratic lawmakers have been openly questioning the White House’s approach to a deal that needs some of their votes to pass, given that many Republicans will also oppose it, to head off a default. Among their complaints: that President Biden was giving away too much in the deal, that the White House’s messaging was muddled and that Biden was publicly silent while House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) was chatting to the press around the clock.

“We don’t negotiate with terrorists globally. Why are we going to negotiate with the economic terrorists here?” said Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D., N.Y.), referring to Republicans’ apparent willingness to default rather than pass a clean debt-ceiling increase. When asked if he was worried that Democrats were giving away too much in the negotiations, he said he was very concerned.

Yeah, that’s good bipartisanship: call your opponents “economic terrorists”.

White House aides say that they are fighting for Democratic priorities, such as preserving the climate and healthcare legislation passed last year. People close to the White House said Biden opted to largely stay quiet to give negotiators room to do their jobs.

McCarthy faces his own intraparty puzzle: The final deal will certainly be opposed by some conservative Republicans, who have complained that he has given too much away to Democrats, so he needs to ensure those opponents aren’t so frustrated that they move to oust him from the speakership.

My prediction again: a raise in the debt limit that must be frozen for two years, and enough cuts to satisfy most Democrats and a few Republicans. (But what do I know?) Medicare and Social Security will stay.

*Henry Kissinger turned 100 yesterday, proving that only the good die young. In the WaPo, hiss son David gives his dad’s “guide to longevity”.  I would have thought it would be “always support dictators,” but excuse my snark.

Even the pandemic did not slow him down: Since 2020, he has completed two books and begun work on a third. He returned from the Bilderberg Conference in Lisbon earlier this week just in time to embark on a series of centennial celebrations that will take him from New York to London and finally to his hometown of Fürth, Germany.

My father’s longevity is especially miraculous when one considers the health regimen he has followed throughout his adult life, which includes a diet heavy on bratwurst and Wiener schnitzel, a career of relentlessly stressful decision-making, and a love of sports purely as a spectator, never a participant.

His secrets?

How then to account for his enduring mental and physical vitality? He has an unquenchable curiosity that keeps him dynamically engaged with the world. His mind is a heat-seeking weapon that identifies and grapples with the existential challenges of the day. In the 1950s, the issue was the rise of nuclear weapons and their threat to humanity. About five years ago, as a promising young man of 95, my father became obsessed with the philosophical and practical implications of artificial intelligence.

. . .The other secret to my father’s endurance is his sense of mission. Although he has been caricatured as a cold realist, he is anything but dispassionate. He believes deeply in such arcane concepts as patriotism, loyalty and bipartisanship. It pains him to see the nastiness in today’s public discourse and the seeming collapse of the art of diplomacy.

As a child, I remember the warmth of his friendships with people whose politics might have been different from his, such as Kay Graham, Ted Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. Kennedy loved to play practical jokes that my father thoroughly enjoyed (including inviting Dad to his home office and claiming to have a mongoose hidden in a closet).

These are all post facto rationalizations, of course. I suspect he just had good genes.

Here’s a photo I took of the old git being interviewed onstage by Lesley Stahl; this was at the Kent Presents conference in August of 2018:

*Grifter Elizabeth Holmes reports to prison in two days, beginning an 11+ year prison sentence for wire fraud. The Wall Street Journal, which broke the Theranos scandal years ago, chews over her past in a piece called “As Elizabeth Holmes heads to jail for fraud, many puzzle over her motives.”

The 11-year sentence represents a comeuppance for the wide-eyed woman who broke through “tech bro” culture to become one of Silicon Valley’s most celebrated entrepreneurs, only to be exposed as a fraud. Along the way, Holmes became a symbol of the shameless hyperbole that often saturates startup culture.

But questions still linger about her true intentions — so many that even the federal judge who presided over her trial seemed mystified. And Holmes’ defenders continue to ask whether the punishment fits the crime.

Is this such a puzzle. She wanted to be rich and famous, the female equivalent of Steve Jobs. And who cares what her defenders think?

Her motives are still somewhat mysterious, and some supporters say federal prosecutors targeted her unfairly in their zeal to bring down one of the most prominent practitioners of fake-it-til-you-make-it — the tech sector’s brand of self-promotion that sometimes veers into exaggeration and blatant lies to raise money.

Her many detractors contend she deserves to be in prison for peddling a technology that she repeatedly boasted would quickly scan for hundreds of diseases and other health problems with a few drops of blood taken with a finger prick.

. . .Holmes’ supporters still contend she always had good intentions and was unfairly scapegoated by the Justice Department. They insist she simply deployed the same over-the-top promotion tactics as many other tech executives, including Elon Musk, who has repeatedly made misleading statements about the capabilities of Tesla’s self-driving cars.

That’s not what the jury thought, nor did John Carreyrou, the erstwhile WSJ reporter who broke the scandal and then wrote the definitive book about it.

According to those supporters, Holmes was singled out because she was a woman who briefly eclipsed the men who customarily bask in Silicon Valley’s spotlight, and the trial turned her into a latter-day version of Hester Prynne — the protagonist in the 1850 novel “The Scarlet Letter.”

No, she was probably given a lighter sentence because she was a woman with two kids; her partner in crime, Sunny Balwani, was sentenced to 13 years. Whether or not she has two X chromosomes, if she does the crime, she does the time.

*Anyone who has a cat has, watching it twitch and move its paws around while sleeping, suspected that the cat is dreaming. Now we have even more solid evidence that another animal may dream: the octopus.  A new paper in bioRΧiv, described in the NYT, suggests that Costello, one octopus observed in his tank at Rockefeller University, might have dreams. The data?

Costello the octopus was napping while stuck to the glass of his tank at the Rockefeller University in New York. He snoozed quietly for half an hour, and then entered a more active sleep stage, his skin cycling through colors and textures used for camouflage — typical behavior for a cephalopod.

But soon things became strange.

A minute later, Costello scuttled along the glass toward his tank’s sandy bottom, curling his arms over his body. Then he spun like a writhing cyclone. Finally, Costello swooped down and clouded half of his tank with ink. As the tank’s filtration system cleared the ink, Eric Angel Ramos, a marine scientist, noticed that Costello was grasping a pipe with unusual intensity, “looking like he was trying to kill it,” he said.

“This was not a normal octopus behavior,” said Dr. Ramos, who is now at the University of Vermont. It’s not clear when or if Costello woke up during the episode, Dr. Ramos said. But afterward, Costello returned to normal, eating and later playing with his toys.

“We were completely dumbfounded,” said Marcelo O. Magnasco, a biophysicist at Rockefeller. Perhaps Costello was having a nightmare, he and a team of researchers speculated. They shared this idea and other possible explanations in a study uploaded this month to the bioRxiv website. It has yet to be formally reviewed by other scientists.

Remember, it’s one octopus and one video. I don’t doubt that they’re capable of dreaming, but how do we find out? Put electrodes by their brain while they’re sleeping? And the article does come with a caveat:

There are other explanations for the behavior, such as a seizure or neurological problems, which could be related to Costello having lost parts of two limbs before he was caught. But Dr. Magnasco said he hoped that, by reporting the incident, other scientists would watch out for the behavior, which his group observed by mere chance.

PTSD! (Post tentacle severance disorder!)

Here’s a video (partly animated at the beginning, I think):

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili expects doom:

Hili: Sodom and Gomorrah.
A: What happened?
Hili: A rainbow over the church.
In Polish
Hili: Sodoma i Gomora.
Ja: Co się stało?
Hili: Tęcza nad kościołem.

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From Stash Krod, a Gary Larson Far Side cartoon:

From The Atheist Daily:

From the same site (subscribe; there are only 8,000 subscribers):

From Masih, another Iranian protestor, this one killed by being shot with a teargas canister:

From Malcolm:  refrigerator bandit. How could you be mad at a cat as smart as this?

From Barry. I’ll agree hes living his best life—if he does it again!

A long groaner that I found on Twitter. But bear through the joke to the end:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, an 11-year-old gassed upon arrival:

Tweets from Professor Cobb. First, a stupendous round of doubles badminton—Japan vs. Malaysia.

Not unusual for a cat! But I think this one loses the pens under the rug.

I lecture on this but didn’t know there were color photos. I believe Scott’s team found Glossopteris fossils on the Beardmore Glacier in the second photo—evidence that Antarctica had not only been green, but that the continents had all been joined at one time. The fossils, hauled in a sledge on the return journey, were found with the explorers’ bodies when they died returning from the Pole.

11 thoughts on “Sunday: Hili dialogue”

  1. On this day:
    585 BC – A solar eclipse occurs, as predicted by the Greek philosopher and scientist Thales, while Alyattes is battling Cyaxares in the Battle of the Eclipse, leading to a truce. This is one of the cardinal dates from which other dates can be calculated.

    1588 – The Spanish Armada, with 130 ships and 30,000 men, sets sail from Lisbon, Portugal, heading for the English Channel. (It will take until May 30 for all ships to leave port.)

    1802 – In Guadeloupe, 400 rebellious slaves, led by Louis Delgrès, blow themselves up rather than submit to Napoleon’s troops.

    1830 – U.S. President Andrew Jackson signs the Indian Removal Act which denies Native Americans their land rights and forcibly relocates them.

    1871 – The Paris Commune falls after two months.

    1892 – In San Francisco, John Muir organizes the Sierra Club.

    1907 – The first Isle of Man TT race is held.

    1937 – Volkswagen, the German automobile manufacturer, is founded.

    1940 – World War II: Norwegian, French, Polish and British forces recapture Narvik in Norway. This is the first Allied infantry victory of the War.

    1961 – Peter Benenson’s article The Forgotten Prisoners is published in several internationally read newspapers. This will later be thought of as the founding of the human rights organization Amnesty International.

    1964 – The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) is founded, with Yasser Arafat elected as its first leader.

    1987 – An 18-year-old West German pilot, Mathias Rust, evades Soviet Union air defences and lands a private plane in Red Square in Moscow, Russia.

    1999 – In Milan, Italy, after 22 years of restoration work, Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece The Last Supper is put back on display.

    2002 – The last steel girder is removed from the original World Trade Center site. Cleanup duties officially end with closing ceremonies at Ground Zero in Manhattan, New York City.

    2016 – Harambe, a gorilla, is shot to death after grabbing a three-year-old boy in his enclosure at the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden, resulting in widespread criticism and sparking various internet memes.

    Births:
    1738 – Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, French physician (d. 1814).

    1807 – Louis Agassiz, Swiss-American paleontologist and geologist (d. 1873).

    1858 – Carl Richard Nyberg, Swedish inventor and businessman, developed the blow torch (d. 1939).

    1883 – Clough Williams-Ellis, English-Welsh architect, designed the Portmeirion Village (d. 1978). [Portmeirion was used as an outdoor filming location in the ’60s TV series The Prisoner.]

    1888 – Jim Thorpe, American decathlete, football player, and coach (d. 1953).

    1908 – Ian Fleming, English journalist and author, created James Bond (d. 1964).

    1910 – T-Bone Walker, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 1975).

    1911 – Thora Hird, English actress (d. 2003).

    1939 – Maeve Binchy, Irish novelist (d. 2012).

    1944 – Rudy Giuliani, American lawyer and politician, 107th mayor of New York City.

    1944 – Gladys Knight, American singer-songwriter and actress.

    1945 – Patch Adams, American physician and author, founded the Gesundheit! Institute.

    1945 – John Fogerty, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer.

    1949 – Wendy O. Williams, American singer-songwriter, musician, and actress (d. 1998).

    You’re not going to die, are you sir?’ he said. ‘Of course I am. Everyone is. That’s what being alive is all about.’
    1787 – Leopold Mozart, Austrian violinist, composer, and conductor (b. 1719).

    1805 – Luigi Boccherini, Italian cellist and composer (b. 1743).

    1843 – Noah Webster, American lexicographer (b. 1758).

    1849 – Anne Brontë, English novelist and poet (b. 1820).

    1971 – Audie Murphy, American soldier and actor, Medal of Honor recipient (b. 1925).

    1972 – Edward VIII of the United Kingdom (b. 1894). [Abdicated so that he could marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson.]

    1981 – Mary Lou Williams, American pianist and composer (b. 1910).

    1984 – Eric Morecambe, English actor and comedian (b. 1926).

    2008 – Beryl Cook, English painter and illustrator (b. 1926).

    2014 – Maya Angelou, American memoirist and poet (b. 1928).

    Reply

  2. Iran: I don’t know if you’ll be able to see this compilation of nine female Mascarons (not to be confused with mascarpone) on The world Art Nouveau Facebook page. Mascarons are decorative faces on architectural facades, and I couldn’t help thinking that if the Iranians seized control of the European countries where these mascarons are located, they’d probably blow them off of the buildings.

    Reply

    1. Thank you for the link! Yglesias is one of the most sensible and well-informed pundits around.

      Reply

  4. Norm MacDonald

    is

    ….

    Not for everyone

    …

    …

    And

    ….

    ….

    …

    I’m not even sure if he’s for any of them either

    ….

    Reply

  5. The Federal Debt is out-of-control. The Republicans are correct in using the debt limit to get concessions. Take a look at FRED series GFDGDPA188S (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDGDPA188S). US Federal Debt now exceeds the debt levels reached in WWII. Historically, the US only ran deficits in times of major war (the Revolutionary war, the Civil war, WWI and WWII, etc.). This was a wise and sensible tradition.

    Large peacetime deficits started with Reagan. Contrary to general mythology, Bush (43) and Trump (pre-Covid) were actually debt moderates. By contrast, Obama was a wild spender. Clinton (plus the Republicans in Congress) was a fiscal conservative. Biden (plus the Republicans in Congress) may yet prove to a fiscal moderate.

    The bottom line is that Democrats want to spend money wildly and Republicans (at least elite Republicans) don’t want to pay taxes. The exploding Federal Debt is a consequence. The Democratic mythology is that spending is actually an “investment”. The Republican mythology is called “supply-side economics”. Both are just excuses.

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  6. That badminton rally makes a bit of a mockery of claims that peoples’ brains know what they will do long before they actually do it.

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  7. The joke about the navigation ability of Moses was better played in the Jesus&Mo comics. What was very apparent from the Google maps caption however, that Google maps is not programmed to consider realistic human limitations when calculates long walks. The Cairo – Jerusalem distance by that path is 726 km. Google maps assumes that you can go for six days without sleep or stopping for anything, with the same speed as you would go for one hour. Good luck with that.

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  9. “but excuse my snark” – not necessary. Back in the day we used to call Henry
    “Dr. Strangelove”.

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  10. I understand how David Kissinger might be inclined to celebrate his father’s centennial, but I see no reason to. This is a man who was wrong about so much, and most recently urged us all to abandon Ukraine to Putin – that’s not “realpolitik”, that’s a craven sellout.

    Reply

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