Friday: Hili dialogue

September 29, 2023 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Friday, September 29, 2023, and It’s also National Coffee Day. What if coffee had never evolved? We’d be walking around every morning like zombies, not knowing that there was a hypothetical plant that could restore us! We wouldn’t even be able to imagine coffee!

Here’s my Joe this morning: a large latte with three shots of espresso, as I’m tired. I made it on my office espresso machine: There’s a sprinkling of cinnamon on top.

It’s also Goose Day, Save the Koala Day, National Biscotti Day, German Butterbrot Day (celebrating bread and butter, but also sandwiches made with butter), National Mocha Day, World Heart Day. and yes, the start of another Jewish holiday, the weeklong Sukkot. Lots of noms, as all Jewish holidays, as I said, can be characterized this way: “They tried to kill us; we survived; let’s eat.”
Today’s Google Doodle (below; click to go to sites) celebrates the 89th birthday (he died in 2021) of “Dr. Flow,” Mihaly Robert Csikszentmihalyi.  He worked here as head of the Department of Psychology.  The Doodle, for once, is actually attractive. 

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the September 29 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Trump’s efforts to delay his civil fraud trial for inflating the value of his real estate has failed (the judge has already found him guilty; only the fine is at stake. The trial for damages could start next week.

Donald J. Trump’s civil fraud trial over accusations that he inflated the value of his properties by billions of dollars could begin as soon as Monday after a New York appeals court rejected the former president’s attempt to delay it.

The appeals court, in a terse two-page order Thursday, effectively turned aside for now a lawsuit Mr. Trump filed against the trial judge, Arthur F. Engoron. The lawsuit had sought to delay the trial, and ultimately throw out many of the accusations against the former president.

Thursday’s ruling came two days after Justice Engoron issued an order that struck a major blow to Mr. Trump, finding him liable for having committed fraud by persistently overvaluing his assets and stripping him of control over his New York properties.

Justice Engoron sided with the New York attorney general, Letitia James, who last year sued Mr. Trump, accusing him of inflating his net worth to obtain favorable loan terms from banks.

Mr. Trump is not entirely out of options in blocking the trial from moving forward. He can still appeal Justice Engoron’s Tuesday order, but it is unclear whether the appeals court would consider that.

Again, the most Trump would have to pay in this trial (which is before the judge) is $250 million—chump change (or Trump change). And it’s a civil trial, so he’ll suffer virtually no reputational damage among his supporters no matter how much he’s fined. After all, he’s already been found culpable, and his ratings haven’t plummeted.

*If you don’t think that the immigration problem needs fixing, read this WSJ article (not an op-ed) about thousands of migrants being simply let loose on the streets of San Diego.

SAN DIEGO—An unmarked white bus pulled up to a park here Monday morning, where it dropped off about 50 recently arrived migrants with little idea where they were and no place to sleep that night.

It wasn’t part of a nefarious operation. The bus was driven by the U.S. government, which is dropping off thousands of migrants in communities along the border as a new wave of illegal immigration strains the resources of the Border Patrol.

Local shelters are hitting capacity, including the roughly 950 beds in San Diego that are typically adequate for recently arrived migrants who need a place to sleep for a night or two. As a result, immigration agents are dropping people off on the streets, at bus stops and in train stations, angering local officials and worrying aid groups.

In San Diego, an estimated 7,800 migrants have been released in the past two weeks, according to county officials, who on Tuesday declared the situation to be a humanitarian crisis.

. . . “We see people being released to the streets with in some cases a little more than the clothes on their back,” said Lindsay Toczylowski, executive director for the Immigrant Defenders Law Center. Her organization set up a makeshift aid center for migrants at the park, and the Border Patrol has been dropping off people there.

. . . Federal border agents have released migrants onto the streets of communities during past surges in illegal immigration, but San Diego officials say the numbers now are among the highest ever. Record numbers of people are fleeing poverty, corruption and crime in countries such as Venezuela to seek asylum in the U.S. Many are traveling as families, which makes it harder for authorities to detain and deport them because of legal limits on how long children can be held.

Most of these migrants are not only entering illegally, but are doing so not because of fear of persecution, but to seek economic benefits in America, which is not a legal rationale for immigration.  Biden could stop this if he wanted to (or so I think), but he doesn’t seem to want to. And it’s going to count against him in next year’s election.

*As I said earlier today, I bailed on the GOP Presidential debate, but Frank Bruni of the NYT didn’t, and wrote a column called “The only shot those seven Republicans have to stop Trump.”  Now what shot could that be? This one, which is only a “shot” if you’re talking about a cap gun:

The point is that Trump has zero respect for democracy and has aspirations for autocracy. The point is that he keeps scaling new pinnacles of unhinged. The point is that he needs to win the presidency so that he doesn’t have to worry about living out his days where he belongs: behind bars.

And perhaps the only shot that any of those seven candidates have to stop him and prevent the irreversible damage he’d do to the United States with four more years is to call a tyrant a tyrant, a liar a liar, an arsonist an arsonist. None of them did.

They’re too frightened of his and his followers’ wrath. So forgive me if I chortled every time they talked about leadership, which they talked about often on Wednesday night. They’re not leaders. They’re opportunists who are letting an opportunity slip away from them.

. . .Instead of taking Trump sufficiently to task, instead of explaining in full why just about any one of them would be preferable to the madman of Mar-a-Loco, Nikki Haley and Tim Scott quarreled about drapes. Yes, drapes. He said she squandered $50,000 of federal money on them when she was the United Nations ambassador, she said she didn’t, and they both grew very exercised about it. Where was that passion on the subject of Trump?

Instead of savaging him, the seven candidates tore into one another, seemingly vying not to catch up to Trump but to be declared the No. 1 alternative, like a beauty pageant runner-up poised to fulfill the winner’s duties and wear the winner’s tiara should the need arise.

Well, I suppose Bruni has a point, but his advice isn’t going to make a dent in Trump’s lead. You can call him a criminal, an insurrectionist, a rapist, or all the other things he might be convicted of, but all it will do is hurt the standing of the critic. That’s why they didn’t do it. Let’s face it: none of them can make the slight dent in Trump’s chance of being the GOP nominee.

*The “books” section of the WaPo has a piece by Tyler Austin Harper (not a book review) called “Ibram X. Kendi’s fall is a cautionary tale—so was his rise.”  I knew Kendi’s antiracism institute at Boston University had lost employees and was plagued by allegations of mismanagement, but I wasn’t aware he’d “fallen.” So I read on.

Perhaps the leading figure of the contemporary “anti-racism” movement, Kendi has faced new scrutiny after he recently laid off more than half of the staff at his Center for Antiracist Research. Boston University, where the center is housed, has now opened an inquiry into how it was run. Allegations include poor pay, employee exploitation, the failure to produce any significant research and the mismanagement of $43 million in donations.

As one of a number of left-wing commentators who have been critical of mainstream anti-racism — and who believe the movement is little more than self-help for White people that runs interference for corporations and wealthy universities — I’ve watched the Kendi crisis unfold with a touch of schadenfreude. Yet though this public reckoning feels long overdue, I can’t help but also have a smidgen of empathy for the embattled anti-racism guru. Kendi was transformed from a respected historian — winner of the National Book Award for his 2016 tome, “Stamped From the Beginning,” but hardly a household name — to the head sage of a global progressive movement in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. No longer a mere ambassador for academic anti-racism, Kendi became a brand.

The prospect of Kendi’s unraveling is not — or at least, is not only — the story of a huckster who was happy to cash in on America’s racial trauma, slapping his name on strange children’s books, including “Antiracist Baby” and “Goodnight Racism,” while raking in hundreds of dollars a minute to give short talks at American universities. Instead, the Kendi affair is yet another example of an age-old truism: White American elites on both sides of the political spectrum — academics, publishers, members of the media, corporate leaders — are always waiting in the wings to turn a shiny new Black intellectual into a mouthpiece for their political agenda.

Kendi’s work has always courted acclaim and controversy in equal measure. “Stamped,” a more-than-500-page doorstop that charts a conceptual history of American racism, published during the halcyon final year of the Obama presidency, has a provocative and even ingenious thesis: Racist ideas don’t generate racist policies; instead, racist policies — defined as policies that produce disparities — give birth to racist ideas that serve to explain those inequalities after the fact. “Time and again, racist ideas have not been cooked up from the boiling pot of ignorance and hate,” Kendi declares. “Time and again, powerful and brilliant men and women have produced racist ideas in order to justify the racist policies of their era, in order to redirect the blame for their era’s racial disparities away from those policies and onto Black people.”

By reversing the causal flow of racial inequality — insisting that the bad laws come first, the bigoted ideas later — Kendi mounted a frontal assault on the anemic liberal moralizing at the heart of mainstream American race discourse. He set out to dismantle the comforting assumption that racism is a problem of individual mental attitudes — the thoughtcrimes of mustache-twirling scoundrels who live in red states and rural places — and instead emphasized that racism is a systemic problem baked into our public and private institutions.

Harper then criticizes Kendi’s huge bestseller, the flawed and curiously incoherent How to be an Antiracist, but here’s his money accusation:

Once reserved for the gravest of racial trespasses, thanks to the influence of Kendi and other charlatans like Robin DiAngelo, “racism” is now routinely employed to describe anything from workplace microaggressions to terrorist attacks. The march on Charlottesville was white supremacy, but so too is asking Black people to show up to Zoom meetings on time. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss called such terms “floating signifiers”: bits of phraseology that are “void of meaning and thus apt to receive any meaning.” The mainstreaming of Kendi’s brand of anti-racism has made “racism” into a word so plastic as to have lost all descriptive power — and with it all moral magnitude. At a moment when actual white supremacy is on the rise, the loss of “racist” as a condemnation with real ethical and political power is of grave consequence and may ironically be Kendi’s most significant contribution to American politics.

And this, says the author, is Kendi’s grift (yes, he calls him a “grifter”). I do have a feeling that Kendi’s best days are behind him, but I can’t say for sure.

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*Reader David tells us that, according to the Guardian, the world’s most valuable wine collection is on sale, and its estimate is (wait for it) £41 million!

These are no ordinary tipples. When the largest and most valuable collection of rare wines ever sold comes to market, aficionados are going to need deep pockets: some could go for almost $200,000 (£165,000) apiece.

The 25,000 bottles of wine, including many mythical vintages and names, are just part of the collection of Taiwanese billionaire Pierre Chen. They are expected to be fetch up to $50m (£41m) at separate auctions in Paris, London, New York, Hong Kong and Beaune, considered the Burgundy region’s wine capital.

“This is the ultimate wine collection, which comes to the market at a time when global interest in fine wine has arguably never been greater,” said Nick Pegna, the global head of wine and spirits at Sotheby’s, which is organising the sale. “This is a cellar in which every bottle has a story, and in which every wine is the best you could wish to own and enjoy.”

The auction house said Chen’s collection, acquired over 40 years, was “the most broad-ranging, valuable cellar ever formed”.

Here are some of the highlights, and my mouth is watering as I post this!

Among the highlights are two six-litre Methuselahs of Domaine de la Romaneé-Conti La Tâche 1985 estimated at up to $190,000 (£156,000) each, one from 1999 ($130,000), and a three-litre 1971 Jeroboam of the same “iconic” red burgundy ($140,000).

Two magnums of 1985 Domaine Armand Rousseau Chambertin are expected to go for up to $32,000 each, and six magnums of 2001 Vosne-Romanée Cros Parantoux 1er Cru produced by Henri Jayer, known as the “Godfather of burgundy”, for up to $70,000 each.

Among the white burgundies, 12 bottles of 2014 Bâtard-Montrachet are estimated at up to $22,000 each, while the red Bordeaux on offer include a 1959 Château Lafite Rothschild, a 1961 Château Latour and the “seminal” 1947 Château Cheval Blanc.

But this is the one I’d want:

A single, exceptionally rare six-litre imperial of 1982 Pétrus, widely considered one of the greatest of all Bordeaux wines, is set to go for up to $65,000 . . .

1982 was a great year for Bordeaux in general and Petrus in particular. And I could have afforded at least a few 750-ml bottles on future had I dug deep back then.  As David said, “I’d have to sell my house to afford just a single bottle!”

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Szaron have taken over the staff’s workspace during an absence:

Szaron: They will be back soon.
Hili: They will not move me.
In Polish:
Szaron: Oni zaraz tu wrócą.
Hili: Mnie nie ruszą.
And here are the stairs that Paulina and Mariusz and had built so Kulka and the other cats (Hili is getting too old to climb vines to the veranda) could get to the second floor (Hili is getting too old and plump to climb vines to the veranda) :

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

From Divy:

From Seth Andrews, who says, “Guess the country.”  Them’s bullets, Jed!

From The Absurd Sign Project 2.0:

From Masih; protestors mutilating pages showing Khomeini.  This would have been a capital crime in Russia if the picture was Stalin, and is likely a serious crime in Iran:

From gravelinspector, who calls this “The luckiest (and stupidest) pigeon in the world.”  Indeed! And I guess it did survive!

This cat was obviously pissed off that its kitten had strayed:

David Bowie writes a song about a depressed Ricky Gervais:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a girl gassed upon arrival. She was 12.

Tweets from Professor Cobb. First, a lovely woman saving a stuck skunk! And she didn’t even get squirted.

I can’t get my head around this one:

Puppy and ducks:

23 thoughts on “Friday: Hili dialogue”

  2. Thanks for calling our attention to the Tyler Austin Harper piece on Kendi. I had missed it. Your description of “How to be an Anti-racist” as “flawed and curiously incoherent” was my strong feeling as I read it two years ago, and again as I tried to give it additional chances on re-reading parts since then. It just goes against my education and training as a scientist and engineer. Harper’s final paragraph in your write-up is what is most damning about Kendi and friends and enablers in that their use of racism to cover so much takes the sting and hard meaning out of the word.

  5. Why not start your day with the mystifying spectacle of Marie Osmond reciting Hugo Ball’s Dadaist poem “Karawane”, first performed at Cabaret Voltaire in 1916.

    Makes me recall the time in the ’70s when I popped on the tube only to be met by the spectacle of Donnie & Marie singing a duet of The Dan’s “Reeling in the Years.”

    Seems no one actually thought through the lyrics, since Donnie was just turning to Marie at that moment to sing the third verse:

    I spent a lot of money
    And I spent a lot of time
    The trip we made to Hollywood
    Is etched upon my mind
    After all the things we’ve done and seen
    You find another man
    The things you think are useless
    I can’t understand

    Guess the weekends at the college didn’t turn out like they planned.

      1. Sorry about the misspelling of Donny’s name. And of course I know they are siblings; that’s what gave their duet of “Reelin’ in the Years” its icky irony, since the song’s narrator is plainly singing about an ex-lover.

        The pair was clearly out of their element covering a Dan tune. At least Marie’s recitation of Hugo Ball’s Dadaist poetry qualifies as camp.

          1. Other famous musical siblings: the Everly Brothers, the Corrs, the Carpenters, the Lennons Sisters, the Andrews Sisters (but neither the Walker Brothers nor the Doobie Brothers).

        2. OK. Then again, they’re Mormons. (I’ll get me coat.)

          Other famous musical siblings: the Everly Brothers, the Corrs, the Carpenters, the Lennons Sisters, the Andrews Sisters (but neither the Walker Brothers nor the Doobie Brothers).

  7. On this day:
    1714 – The Cossacks of the Russian Empire kill about 800 people overnight in Hailuoto during the Great Wrath.

    1789 – The United States Department of War first establishes a regular army with a strength of several hundred men.

    1829 – The Metropolitan Police of London, later also known as the Met, is founded.

    1885 – The first practical public electric tramway in the world is opened in Blackpool, England.

    1918 – The Hindenburg Line is broken by an Allied attack in World War I. Germany’s Supreme Army Command tells Kaiser Wilhelm II and Imperial Chancellor Georg Michaelis to open negotiations for an armistice to end the war.

    1923 – The Mandate for Palestine takes effect, creating Mandatory Palestine. The Mandate for Syria and Lebanon also takes effect.

    1923 – The First American Track and Field championships for women are held. [A century later, many sports claim to not know what a woman is.]

    1940 – Two Avro Ansons collide in mid-air over New South Wales, Australia, remain locked together, then land safely.

    1941 – During World War II, German forces, with the aid of local Ukrainian collaborators, begin the two-day Babi Yar massacre.

    1954 – The convention establishing CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) is signed.

    1957 – The Kyshtym disaster is the third-worst nuclear accident ever recorded.

    1972 – Japan establishes diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China after breaking official ties with the Republic of China [that is, Taiwan].

    1975 – WGPR becomes the first black-owned-and-operated television station in the US.

    1988 – NASA launches STS-26, the first Space Shuttle mission since the Challenger disaster.

    1990 – Construction of the Cathedral Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul (better known as Washington National Cathedral) is completed in Washington, D.C. [The cornerstone was also laid in this day in 1907.]

    2004 – The asteroid 4179 Toutatis passes within four lunar distances of Earth.

    2004 – Burt Rutan’s Ansari SpaceShipOne performs a successful spaceflight, the first of two required to win the Ansari X Prize.

    2005 – John Roberts is confirmed as Chief Justice of the United States.

    2006 – A Boeing 737 and an Embraer 600 collide in mid-air, killing 154 people and triggering a Brazilian aviation crisis.

    2007 – Calder Hall, the world’s first commercial nuclear power station, is demolished in a controlled explosion.

    2008 – The stock market crashes after the first United States House of Representatives vote on the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act fails, leading to the Great Recession.

    2011 – The special court in India convicted all 269 accused officials for atrocity on Dalits and 17 for rape in the Vachathi case.

    Births:
    1547 – Miguel de Cervantes, Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright (d. 1616).

    1725 – Robert Clive, English general and politician, Lord Lieutenant of Montgomeryshire (d. 1774). [AKA “Clive of India”.]

    1758 – Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson, English admiral (d. 1805).

    1810 – Elizabeth Gaskell, English author (d. 1865).

    1895 – Clarence Ashley, American singer, guitarist, and banjo player (d. 1967).

    1898 – Trofim Lysenko, Ukrainian-Russian biologist and agronomist (d. 1976). [An object lesson in why science and ideology don’t mix.]

    1899 – László Bíró, Hungarian-Argentinian journalist and inventor, invented the ballpoint pen (d. 1985).

    1899 – Billy Butlin, South African-English businessman, founded Butlins (d. 1980).

    1901 – Enrico Fermi, Italian-American physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1954).

    1904 – Greer Garson, English-American actress (d. 1996).

    1907 – Gene Autry, American singer, actor, and businessman (d. 1998).

    1913 – Trevor Howard, English actor (d. 1988).

    1913 – Stanley Kramer, American director and producer (d. 2001).

    1930 – Colin Dexter, English author and educator (d. 2017).

    1931 – Anita Ekberg, Swedish-Italian model and actress (d. 2015).

    1935 – Jerry Lee Lewis, American singer-songwriter and pianist (d. 2022).

    1936 – Silvio Berlusconi, Italian businessman and politician, Prime Minister of Italy (d. 2023).

    1943 – Lech Wałęsa, Polish electrician and politician, 2nd President of Poland, Nobel Prize laureate.

    1946 – Patricia Hodge, English actress.

    1956 – Sebastian Coe, English sprinter and politician. [And current President of World Athletics.]

    1961 – Julia Gillard, Welsh-Australian lawyer and politician, Prime Minister of Australia. [Despite giving a blistering denunciation of misogyny in Australian politics she now can’t say what a woman is. So disappointing.]

    1970 – Emily Lloyd, English actress.

    1971 – Mackenzie Crook, English actor and screenwriter.

    1972 – Robert Webb, English comedian, actor and writer.

    Do not fear death so much but rather the inadequate life:
    1225 – Arnaud Amalric, Papal legate who allegedly promoted mass murder.

    1902 – William McGonagall, Scottish poet and actor (b. 1825). [Gained notoriety as an extremely bad poet who exhibited no recognition of, or concern for, his peers’ opinions of his work.]

    1902 – Émile Zola, French journalist, author, and playwright (b. 1840).

    1913 – Rudolf Diesel, German engineer, invented the diesel engine (b. 1858).

    1973 – W. H. Auden, English-American poet, playwright, and critic (b. 1907).

    1980 – Harold Alexander Abramson, American physician (b. 1889. [Remembered as an early advocate of therapeutic LSD. He played a significant role in the CIA’s MKULTRA program to investigate the possible applications for LSD.]

    1988 – Charles Addams, American cartoonist (b. 1912).

    1992 – Don West, American writer, poet, educator, trade union organizer and civil-rights activist (b. 1906).

    1997 – Roy Lichtenstein, American painter and sculptor (b. 1923).

    2010 – Tony Curtis, American actor (b. 1925).

    2015 – Phil Woods, American saxophonist, composer, and bandleader (b. 1931).

    2018 – Otis Rush, American blues guitarist and singer (b. 1934).

    2020 – Helen Reddy, Australian-American singer, actress, and activist (b. 1941).

    2022 – Kathleen Booth, British computer scientist and mathematician (b. 1922).

    1. Gently throwing this out there: Today Roy Lichtenstein would also be considered a plagiarist.

    2. Julia Gillard opened up the Yes campaign in London with a drag queen singing John Farnham’s the Voice song.

      It is pretty offensive and has gone down like a lead balloon. She sure is lacking the common touch and many Australian woman are more than disappointed with her.

  8. I have a performance artist friend in Warsaw who told me he was influenced by Dadaism. But my main takeaway from that clip is the reminder that I’ve had a lifelong crush on Marie Osmond. It started around age six when I realized that her cuteness surpassed her – and her brother’s – interminable corniness.

  10. The news from Boston University calls to mind another inquiry into the operations of an earlier academic entrepreneur. The current case: “Boston University has launched an inquiry into the management culture of the University’s Center for Antiracist Research, as well as its management of grant funds, after a round of layoffs at the center prompted complaints about Ibram X. Kendi’s leadership there.” The earlier one: “Sakharov and his colleagues pushed for an investigation into the management practices of Lysenko’s experimental farm in the Lenin Hills (Gorki Leninskie) outside Moscow. The results were catastrophic for Lysenko: there was evidence of fabrication of data to cover up the ruinous results of his projects.” The investigating commission’s conclusions were made public, funding of Lysenko’s experimental farm was terminated, and that was the death-knell for Lysenko’s influence in Soviet science and biology education.

      1. And we managed to skip the birthday two days ago of Lysenko’s philosopher buddy I. I. Prezent. Before he latched onto Lysenko, Prezent made his mark in higher thought by proclaiming that those Soviet biologists who tended toward conservationism were
        “agents of the world bourgeoisie”, like the “wreckers” who were increasingly drawing the attention of the NKVD. Allying himself closely with Trofim L. was a natural move for this philosopher of Marxist science, recipient of the Order of the Red Banner (1943).

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