Wednesday: Hili dialogue

June 7, 2023 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Hump Day (“Düşmə günü” in Azerbaijani): Wednesday, June 7, 2023, and National Chocolate Ice Cream Day. I used to spurn the flavor as uninteresting, until I discovered the delicious quarts of Trader Joe’s Ultra Chocolate Super Premium Ice Cream: the best commercial chocolate I’ve ever had. It’s $3.99 a quart, far cheaper than those overpriced pints of Ben and Jerry’s—and even better. Take my word for it! I have about five tablespoons of it as dessert, and it’s satisfying, not to mention lasting a long time. (This month they also have pints of horchata and purple taro ice cream, both delicious.)

It’s also Boone Day, celebrating the day in 1769 when Daniel Boone first saw the land that would become the state of Kentucky, Global Running Day, June Bug Day (when the bugs are at their most active), and Tourette Syndrome Awareness Day (I’ve never seen the syndrome in action, but it sounds debilitating. 

I have to go downtown to get my half-yearly tooth-cleaning today, so posting will be light, and tomorrow’s Nooz almost nonexistent. As always, I do my best.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the June 7 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*A major dam in southern Ukraine has been blown up, and although it’s under Russian control, each side blames the other. I suspect the Russians did the deed:

A critical dam along the front line in southern Ukraine was destroyed on Tuesday, sending cascades of water pouring through the breach and putting thousands of people downstream at risk. Ukraine and Russia each accused the other of blowing up the dam, which held back a body of water the size of the Great Salt Lake in Utah.

As water levels rose south of the dam, residents in the town of Antonivka, about 40 miles downstream, described watching in horror as roiling floodwaters swept past carrying trees and debris from washed-out houses.

Ukrainian emergency crews rushed to evacuate the most vulnerable on the western side of the river, while conservationists warned that a huge and long-lasting environmental disaster was unfolding.

It was more difficult to assess what was happening on the eastern bank of the river south of the dam, which is under Russian control. But more than 40,000 people could be in the path of the flooding on both Ukrainian- and Russian-controlled territory, the deputy prosecutor general of Ukraine, Viktoriya Lytvynova, said.

It was not immediately clear who was responsible for the destruction of the Kakhovka dam and electric plant, which lies along the Dnipro River and is held by Russian forces. President Volodymyr Zelensky blamed “Russian terrorists,” while the Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said Ukrainian forces carried out a “sabotage” attack.

This happened right when Ukraine was going to begin its spring offensive, and the Wall Street Journal says this:

The destruction of the dam could win Russia time to reconfigure its defenses while at the same time depriving Ukraine of some options for its expected counteroffensive. Crossing the vast Dnipro River along that stretch of the front will now become impossible, said Nico Lange, a former German Defense Ministry official.

Russia could now redeploy resources from the southwest to reinforce other sections of the front, said Lange, now a fellow with the Munich Security Conference, a global security forum.

But the NYT adds this:

Some military analysts struck a cautionary note about trying to assign blame for the destruction of the dam with limited information. “It’s too early to tell whether this is a deliberate act by Russia or the result of negligence and prior damage inflicted to the dam,” said Michael Kofman, the director of Russian studies at CNA, a research institute in Arlington, Va. Mr. Kofman noted the disaster “ultimately benefits nobody.”

I still think it’s the work of Putin and his minions, as he is a bad man.

*Three months before there was a leak in the Nord Stream natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, the U.S. had intelligence that Ukraine was planning to attack the pipeline. Now that is NOT good, because it redounds to the detriment of Ukraine’s NATO allies:

Three months before saboteurs bombed the Nord Stream natural gas pipeline, the Biden administration learned from a close ally that the Ukrainian military had planned a covert attack on the undersea network, using a small team of divers who reported directly to the commander in chief of the Ukrainian armed forces.

Details about the plan, which have not been previously reported, were collected by a European intelligence service and shared with the CIA in June 2022. They provide some of the most specific evidence to date linking the government of Ukraine to the eventual attack in the Baltic Sea, which U.S. and Western officials have called a brazen and dangerous act of sabotage on Europe’s energy infrastructure.

The European intelligence reporting was shared on the chat platform Discord, allegedly by Air National Guard member Jack Teixeira. The WashingtonPost obtained a copy from one of Teixeira’s online friends.

. . . The highly specific details, which include numbers of operatives and methods of attack, show that for nearly a year Western allies had a basis to suspect Kyiv in the sabotage. That assessment has only strengthened in recent months as German law enforcement investigators uncovered evidence about the bombingthat bears striking similarities to what the European service said Ukraine was planning.

. . . On Sept. 26, three underwater explosions caused massive leaks on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines, leaving only one of the four gas links in the network intact. Some Biden administration officials initially suggested that Russia was to blame for what President Biden called “a deliberate act of sabotage,” promising that the United States would work with its allies “to get to the bottom of exactly what … happened.” With winter approaching, it appeared the Kremlin might haveintended to strangle the flow of energy, an act of “blackmail,” some leaders said, designed to intimidate Europeancountries into withdrawing their financial and military support for Ukraine, and refraining from further sanctions.

Neither the CIA nor the Biden administration nor Ukraine would comment. But Ukraine almost certainly did it, and it’s not good “optics.”

*Joining Finland, Sweden, and the UK, Norway has just banned children from “changing sexes” (i.e., becoming transsexual). The banning seems to involve not any form of talk therapy but puberty blockers and other hormones, which the other Europoean countries consider as “experimental” (bolding is the site’s). The site is a Christian one founded by Seventh-Day Adventists, so of course it’s got biases, but the new ban on this kind of treatment is confirmed by other sources (one is here).

Last week, the Norwegian Healthcare Investigation Board announced it would be revising its current guidelines regarding so-called ” gender -affirming care” for minors because it no longer considers them to be evidence-based. The board also acknowledged that the growing number of teenage girls identifying as male post-puberty remains under-studied.

Under the proposed updated guidelines, the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and transition-related surgery would be restricted to research contexts and no longer provided in clinical settings. Norway joins Finland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom in introducing greater safeguarding for children. In the United States, eight states thus far have banned affirmative care for individuals under 18, with Tennessee being the latest to pass such legislation.

This next part is controversial, especially the “social contagion” part, but I think it certainly plays a role in promoting some transitions:

It’s good that more professional organizations are recognizing the experimental nature of this approach in children. An existing body of research shows that most kids with gender dysphoria grow to be comfortable in their bodies upon undergoing puberty and that those wishing to transition suddenly post-puberty may be experiencing a social contagion. These studies have been dismissed because they don’t fit the preferred activist narrative.

That narrative, however, will continue to fall apart. A recent paper in the academic journal Archives of Sexual Behavior discusses how the placebo effect has not been adequately taken into consideration when interpreting newer findings supporting transitioning in children. Although the term “placebo effect” has commonly referred to a patient’s response to an intervention that is ineffective, it can also describe the beneficial psychological and physical effects associated with undergoing treatment, as opposed to the treatment itself.

*A publicly funded religious school? Ridiculous, right? But a school board in Oklahoma has just voted to approve one.  ABC News says this  (h/t Bill):

A state school board in Oklahoma voted Monday to approve what would be the first publicly funded religious school in the nation, despite a warning from the state’s attorney general that the decision was unconstitutional.

The Statewide Virtual Charter School Board voted 3-2 to approve the application by the Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma to establish the St. Isidore of Seville Virtual Charter School. The online public charter school would be open to students across the state in kindergarten through grade 12.

Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond had warned the board that such a decision clearly violated the Oklahoma Constitution.

“The approval of any publicly funded religious school is contrary to Oklahoma law and not in the best interest of taxpayers,” Drummond said in a statement shortly after the board’s vote. “It’s extremely disappointing that board members violated their oath in order to fund religious schools with our tax dollars. In doing so, these members have exposed themselves and the state to potential legal action that could be costly.”

The Archdiocese of Oklahoma said in the “vision and purpose of the organization” section of its application that: “The Catholic school participates in the evangelizing mission of the Church and is the privileged environment in which Christian education is carried out.”

This is an arrant violation of the First Amendment because the charter school gets public funding, thus entangling church and state. It thus violates both the Oklahoma constitution and the federal Bill of Rights. It would be interesting to see how the largely Catholic Supreme Court would handle this one were it to be appealed all the way up.

*Alabama now has an official state cookie., making it the second state to have such an official comestible (see below). From the AP:

Alabama now has an official state cookie: The Yellowhammer Cookie.

Gov. Kay Ivey on Friday signed legislation naming the confection created by a Montgomery fourth-grader as the official state cookie.

Students at Montgomery’s Trinity Presbyterian School came up with the idea of a state cookie. Fourth-grader Mary Claire Cook submitted the winning recipe, which includes pecans, peanut butter and honey, WSFA-TV reported.

Cook brought a batch of the cookies to Ivey for the bill-signing ceremony.

Alabama has a long list of official state emblems and symbols, including a state vegetable, nut, amphibian and spirit.

From NewsNation:

The cookie, which was invented by Montgomery fourth-grader Mary Claire Cook, contains pecans and peanuts — both of which are recognized as crops of “historical and agricultural significance” in Alabama, according to the bill. The peanut is designated as the state legume and pecans, which are native to Alabama, are the official state nut.

If you want to try them, the recipe is here, but be sure to have a quart of Pepto-Bismol on hand (h/t Marie). Here’s what one looks like. It’s the kind of food that, when you see it on someone’s plate, you ask, “Are you gonna eat that, or did you already eat that?”

Do any other states have official cookies? Yes indeed, there are two:

The chocolate chip cookie is an official symbol of Massachusetts (home of the famous Tollhouse chocolate chip cookie). The only other state that recognizes an official cookie symbol is New Mexico (their state cookie is biscochito, an anise-flavored shortbread), but many states have adopted other sweet treats as official state symbols: cakes, pies, muffins, pastry, and ethnic specialties (all state foods).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Szaron have a blurred whiskerwag:

Hili: Something is moving in the grass.
Szaron: I will check it at once.
In Polish:
Hili: Coś się rusza w trawie.
Szaron: Zaraz sprawdzę co to jest.

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

From Jesus of the Day (anybody know the real translation?)

From Barry:

A man after my own heart, from America’s Cultural Decline Into Idiocy:

From Masih, another protestor blinded in one eye:

From Malcolm (I may have posted this before):

I found the next two. Look at this cute quokka (that’s redundant); it even looks like it’s moving its hands:

Another great mystery of the sea:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a 40 year old French woman who died in the camp:

Tweets from Dr. Cobb. The first is a case of morphological and behavioral mimicry:

This one is about the societal effects of cat litter (this article notes that until about 1940, cats had to be let outside to do their business):

This was done yesterday, but is worth highlighting today, too:

30 thoughts on “Wednesday: Hili dialogue”

  1. On this day:
    1099 – First Crusade: The Siege of Jerusalem begins.

    1494 – Spain and Portugal sign the Treaty of Tordesillas which divides the New World between the two countries.

    1692 – Port Royal, Jamaica, is hit by a catastrophic earthquake; in just three minutes, 1,600 people are killed and 3,000 are seriously injured.

    1832 – The Great Reform Act of England and Wales receives royal assent. [The reforms did away with the notorious “rotten boroughs” and granted votes to a wider electorate, but in doing so introduced the first explicit statutory bar to women voting by defining a voter as a male person.]

    1862 – The United States and the United Kingdom agree in the Lyons–Seward Treaty to suppress the African slave trade.

    1892 – Homer Plessy is arrested for refusing to leave his seat in the “whites-only” car of a train; he lost the resulting court case, Plessy v. Ferguson.

    1899 – American Temperance crusader Carrie Nation begins her campaign of vandalizing alcohol-serving establishments by destroying the inventory in a saloon in Kiowa, Kansas.

    1917 – World War I: Battle of Messines: Allied soldiers detonate a series of mines underneath German trenches at Messines Ridge, killing 10,000 German troops.

    1929 – The Lateran Treaty is ratified, bringing Vatican City into existence.

    1938 – Second Sino-Japanese War: The Chinese Nationalist government creates the 1938 Yellow River flood to halt Japanese forces. Five hundred thousand to nine hundred thousand civilians are killed.

    1946 – The United Kingdom’s BBC returns to broadcasting its television service, which has been off air for seven years because of World War II.

    1965 – The Supreme Court of the United States hands down its decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, prohibiting the states from criminalizing the use of contraception by married couples.

    1971 – The United States Supreme Court overturns the conviction of Paul Cohen for disturbing the peace, setting the precedent that vulgar writing is protected under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

    1981 – The Israeli Air Force destroys Iraq’s Osiraq nuclear reactor during Operation Opera.

    1982 – Priscilla Presley opens Graceland to the public; the bathroom where Elvis Presley died five years earlier is kept off-limits.

    1991 – Mount Pinatubo erupts, generating an ash column 7 kilometres (4.3 mi) high.

    Births:
    1848 – Paul Gauguin, French painter and sculptor (d. 1903).

    1868 – Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Scottish painter and architect (d. 1928).

    1917 – Dean Martin, American singer, actor, and producer (d. 1995).

    1928 – James Ivory, American director, producer, and screenwriter.

    1931 – Virginia McKenna, English actress and author.

    1940 – Tom Jones, Welsh singer and actor.

    1944 – Clarence White, American guitarist and singer (d. 1973).

    1952 – Liam Neeson, Irish-American actor.

    1952 – Orhan Pamuk, Turkish-American novelist, screenwriter, and academic, Nobel Prize laureate.

    1958 – Prince, American singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, producer, and actor (d. 2016).

    1959 – Mike Pence, 48th Vice President of the United States, 50th Governor of Indiana.

    1967 – Dave Navarro, American musician.

    1974 – Bear Grylls, English adventurer, author, and television host.

    1993 – George Ezra, English singer-songwriter.

    “When it’s time to stop living, I will certainly make Death my number one choice!”
    1329 – Robert the Bruce, Scottish king (b. 1274).

    1594 – Rodrigo Lopez, physician of Queen Elizabeth (b. 1525). [Served as a physician-in-chief to Queen Elizabeth I of England from 1581 until his death by execution, having been found guilty of plotting to poison her. A Portuguese converso or New Christian of Jewish ancestry, he is the only royal doctor in English history to have been executed, and may have inspired the character of Shylock in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, which was written within four years of his death.]

    1861 – Patrick Brontë, Anglo-Irish priest and author (b. 1777). [Outlived his wife, the former Maria Branwell, by forty years, by which time all of their six children, including Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, had died as well.]

    1866 – Chief Seattle, American tribal chief (b. 1780).

    1879 – William Tilbury Fox, English dermatologist and academic (b. 1836).

    1937 – Jean Harlow, American actress and singer (b. 1911).

    1954 – Alan Turing, English mathematician and computer scientist (b. 1912).

    1967 – Dorothy Parker, American poet, short story writer, critic, and satirist (b. 1893).

    1970 – E. M. Forster, English novelist, short story writer, essayist (b. 1879).

    1980 – Henry Miller, American novelist and essayist (b. 1891).

    2015 – Christopher Lee, English actor (b. 1922).

  2. I think the dolphin is doing it just because he can. I know I would!

  3. The Japanese states that they want you to leave the toilet in a clean state. The literal translation would be something like “thank you for using the toilet cleanly”.

      1. Yes, what a solemn and conscientious act; I had no idea they did this. I also did some math, using the video, I assumed it takes about a minute per headstone. 9388 minutes is 156 hours or 6.5 days. That’s a lot of work!

        1. Oops…my first comment didn’t show so I rewrote it. I like my second comment better. 🙂

    2. It was moving, I had no idea. And I did the math, using the video, I rounded the time to be about a minute per headstone. So 9,388 minutes is 156 hours or 6.5 days. That’s a lot of work!

      1. I often find it funny that although I am by nature an unrepentant atheist committed to a rational-scientific view, rituals like this can be so deeply moving to me. Not surprising, after all I’ve lived with myself my entire life. What amuses me is that many of my fellow citizens are deluded enough that they would not think it possible.

        1. Yeah, the general public, especially the religious, regard atheists as nihilists, lacking morals, integrity and worth. Weird. I’m an atheist with a moral center, I just don’t believe that the essence of good or evil is linked with the supernatural. I believe in “good” and I believe in “evil” I just don’t conflate it with spiritual forces.

  5. June 7 Question: Why do Dolphins do the air spinning thing?
    Answer: Because they can.

  6. Regarding the Oklahoma schools: in looking at their web-based information, it appears that Oklahoma has three separate state boards of education each of its own separate authority: a State Board of Education; a State Career and Technical Education Board of Education; and this Statewide Virtual Charter School Board which was the body that approved the religious school at issue here. It appears that members of all boards are appointed by the Governor. In Virginia, we have a single State Board of Education, members appointed by Governor to four yearterms and all charter school applications and career and technical education programs are overseen by it.

    I have always beeb leery of charter schools, whether or not they are called “public” as they, from their earliest proposals in the 1980’s seemed to be a way to weasel public funding for private, sometimes religious schools. They were originally posed as just charter schools, bringing something innovative to education in the comunity, but then attached the adjective, “public” to their pitch when they were rejected as being simply private schools. They changed nothing about their operating scheme…just their moniker! In any case, they worked their way into the state education offerings after ongoing pushes from conservative governors and state delegates over several years here in Virginia. Over the years since, I have not seen them offer anything of value that the regular public schools do not offer and I have seen a number fail, leaving their students in the cold and theregular public school system on the hook to save them.

    However I must say that this move in Oklahoma is extraordinary…even fior charter schools.

    1. The basic idea is OK, but in practice charter schools in the US are a scam. The majority anyway. The majority are run by a small number of companies and are designed to extract as much profit as possible from the public coffers.

      1. I looked at the Oklahoma state virtual charter schools site…usual scam artists are present and accounted for with their usual vacuous mission statements

  7. Thank you for saying directly “half-yearly” so that we lawful semiannual-ists do not need to brace against a push from the exception-pleading biannual-ists.

  8. Oklahoma funding a Catholic school will produce interesting legal cases.
    “It would be interesting to see how the largely Catholic Supreme Court would handle this one were it to be appealed all the way up.” Yes, and I can hardly wait ’till the Muslims ask for equal financial aid.

    2. If the people are allowed to take up to a specified quantity of public money to send their children to whatever school they prefer (religious or not), would that be consistent with the constitution?

      If the school fees are higher the parents can pay the difference. That way the Zoroastrians can set up private schools to which Zoroastrians parents who want a Zoroastrian education for their Zoroastrian children can send their Zoroastrian children.

    3. I, for one, look forward to the “Combined Council of Muslims and Jews of Oklahoma” launching their lawsuit for reduced taxation, on the grounds of being vocally excluded from “benefiting” from this taxation-funded scam.
      If nothing else, the complications of hypothecating every tax-payer’s yield should have the lawyers of Oklahoma running screaming to stop this proposal.

  9. That piece about cat litter is nice.
    In that same page (but not related to the main story), however, the author makes reference to that Agustín Fuentes piece in SciAm discussed here, and says something along the lines that categorizing anyone by their gametes is “not remotely scientific.”…

    Of course this says nothing about the author, but shows how such misinformation perpetrated by activists such as Fuentes can spread so quickly… When they say “not remotely scientific” I can imagine they are not even aware of the several rebuttals to that piece.

  10. Those who have been blinded in one eye risk Sympathetic Ophthalmia that can leave them blind in the other eye, too. I hope this is taken into account over there, otherwise the action is doubly insidious.

    1. That is what happened to the writer and cartoonist James Thurber. When he was seven, his brother shot James’s eye out with an arrow. He eventually went blind in the other eye as well.

  11. Tourette’s Syndrome can be debilitating. When I was taking my first college biology course, Biology 111, a girl with Tourette’s sat in the front row. She twitched several times per minute and at the same time vocalized loudly—kind of a loud speak that she tried to suppress. The entire class of 300 was, I’m sure, sympathetic. However, during an exam, one student (whom I knew; he eventually became a cardiologist) was so disturbed by the noise that he asked the professor to remove the girl from the room during the exam. The professor refused, telling the student that he would simply have to cope with the disturbance. It’s just part of living in a community of others. I could sympathize with both students—particularly the girl who struggled with Tourette’s Syndrome every day. Forty-five years later, I still think that the professor’s advice was sound.

  12. Interesting that the state cookie of Alabama has the same name as their state bird. “Yellowhammer” is what they call the Yellow-shafted Flicker (Colaptes auratus). A colloquial southern name. Sadly, in my opinion, the sobriquet “yellow-shafted” has been lost since avian systematists decided to lump the formerly recognized species with the formerly Red-shafted Flicker of western North America, resulting in the Northern Flicker. Happily, for me as a bird bander, the bird banding lab wants to keep the data separate, so each flicker I band here in southern Ohio goes into the database as YSFL.

  13. Alabama has a long list of official state emblems and symbols, including a state vegetable, nut, amphibian and spirit.

    And they’re all sitting in the State legislature?

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