Thursday: Hili dialogue

October 5, 2023 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Thursday, October 5, 2023, and it’s Apple Betty Day (formerly Apple Brown Betty Day, but the name was considered racist as the dessert may have been named after an African American woman. Wikipedia still uses “Brown Betty”). But whatever you call it, it’s good, especially served warm with vanilla ice cream (whipped cream is no substitute.)

It’s also World Teacher’s Day, National Poetry Day, Do Something Nice Day, National Depression Screening Day, National Storytelling Day, Global James Bond Day (it was on this day in 1962 when the first Bond film, “Dr. No,” premiered in London in 1962), International Day of No Prostitution, and Rocky Mountain Oyster Day (those are edible bull testicles), like these:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the October 5 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The Superfluous Article of the Week Dept.: Dan Balz’s analysis in the WaPo arguing that “McCarthy ouster exposes the Republican Party’s destructive tendencies.” Believe me brothers and sisters, friends, and comrades, those destructive tendencies were there long before McCarthy was dumped in the circular file.

Nine months into their reign as the majority party in the House, Republicans have brought the legislative body to a halt and themselves to an inflection point. By ousting Rep. Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) as speaker and exposing anew the destructive tendencies of their most extreme members, Republicans now risk being returned to minority status by voters in next year’s election.

That would be good for passing legislation, though if Trump is re-elected, and I don’t think he’s threatened by this, he could veto anything he didn’t like. It goes on:

From the day they were all sworn in this January, their grip on power was tenuous, far more so than almost anyone was predicting a year ago when talk of a red-wave election was in vogue. They did win the majority in the 2022 midterm elections, but by the narrowest of margins in a surprising under-performance. To succeed as legislators, they needed cohesion, discipline and leadership. Instead, they produced chaos under a speaker who was so weakened after getting the job that he could not lead effectively.

One other factor has brought the House Republicans to this point. That is the person and example of Donald Trump, the former president. Trump put governing by chaos on steroids (if one can call what he did governing) and in doing so produced a group of Mini-Mes, symbolized most by the politician who brought down McCarthy on Tuesday, Rep. Matt Gaetz (Fla.). This is the kind of leadership the party now offers the country.

. . . . Like McCarthy, Pelosi governed with a small majority and faced internal divisions in her caucus. But she was the strongest speaker in modern times, and her ability to exercise power kept Democrats on a path forward. Biden and Pelosi suffered some setbacks, but both, with the experience gained over years in leadership positions, found ways to succeed.

I repeat what I said above.  Finally, Balz’s real beef:

[Gaetz] embodied the worst of performative politics, which have come to typify this era. The rewards — fame, television time and adulation of the base — now go to those who shout the loudest rather than those who do the most good for the country.

So what’s new? Balz’s angry because the loudest rather than the most effective win.  We’ve know that from the success of the Woke movement (a comparison Balz ignores), and Balz offers no solution (nor do I to the problem of Wokeness except to “keep fighting”).

*According to the WSJ, Joe Biden is still desperately trying to cancel student loan debt, even though it may be illegal to do so.

President Biden announced student-debt forgiveness for another tranche of Americans on Wednesday, months after the Supreme Court blocked the administration’s most ambitious borrower-relief plan.

The string of politically advantageous announcements comes thanks to the administration’s use of existing programs that allow the government to waive debt for certain borrowers. The moves are separate from the administration’s troubled attempt to cancel as much as $20,000 in student debt for any borrower who earns less than $125,000 a year. The Supreme Court struck down that executive action in June.

. . .Wednesday’s announcement of $9 billion in student-debt cancellation for 125,000 borrowers, the latest in a string of sizable discharges, helps just a small slice of more than 40 million who hold debt.

The current batch targets borrowers who were enrolled in public-service and income-based loan-repayment programs, and borrowers with disabilities. It follows a decision in July that wiped out the remaining balances for 800,000 lower-income borrowers as part of a one-time adjustment to loan-repayment plans.

, . .Republicans argue that the administration doesn’t have the legal authority to make these broad-based adjustments, akin to what they attempted to do with mass forgiveness.

“This is part of a pattern of the Biden administration illegally acting without congressional approval, costing the American people hundreds of billions of dollars,” said Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, the top Republican on the Senate Health and Education committee.

The piecemeal approach to debt cancellation has added up.

Including Wednesday’s canceled loans, the administration has now wiped out $127 billion in student debt, nearly one-third of the projected cost of the failed mass-cancellation plan.

“Wiping ut the debt,” of course, means that the rest of us are paying for it. It’s not fair to those who paid off their loans, and, though it may sound uncharitable, I’m tired of hearing debtors whine on the evening news how they can’t afford their rent because they have to pay off a few hundred dollars in debt each month.

*At long last, over 140 years after it was started, Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia cathedral is on the verge of completion. Gaudi’s masterpiece is, to me, one of the most striking and original pieces of architecture in the world. Here’s a shot from the Brittanica:

From the article:

More than 140 years after a Spanish bishop laid the cornerstone of Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia basilica, the famously incomplete church is inching toward the finish line, with five of its six central towers now finally fully built as of last week.

But with construction expected to continue, would-be pilgrims to the site — one of Barcelona’s most iconic monuments — should not expect to see Antoni Gaudí’s structurally audacious masterpiece fully realized until 2026 at the very earliest.

The Junta Constructora del Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família, a foundation that oversees the church’s construction, said work had been completed on two of the church’s main towers. Together with two others finished last year, the four symbolize the Evangelists: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, traditionally considered the authors of the canonical Gospels recounting Jesus’ life.

“The four towers of the Evangelists are finished!” the church foundation wrote on the X platform, formerly known as Twitter, last Friday. In a statement last Wednesday, the body announced that a special Mass would be held to celebrate the occasion on Nov. 12.

The Sagrada Familia’s radical design, which incorporates elements of Gothic revival, Art Nouveau and modernism, draws millions of tourists a year and is part of a UNESCO world heritage site comprising seven buildings by Gaudí in Barcelona. It evoked opposite emotions in George Orwell, the British writer, who called the church “one of the most hideous buildings in the world.”

The four completed towers were crowned with sculptures of winged figures associated with the Evangelists: an ox, an eagle, a human and a lion, the church foundation said. The structures stand at about 442 feet, or 135 meters, which will make them the third-tallest towers of the church when it is finished.

I also am drawn to this cathedral because in 1995, falsely accused by two British tourists of stealing their money and passport, I was locked into one of the towers and strip-searched by the Spanish police (see my account of that story here.) Until this happens to someone else, I will claim the distinction of being the only person strip searched for theft in Gaudi’s great cathedral. I never thought it would be completed but I was wrong—and I’m very glad.

*The Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been announced, as well as that in physics (see below for the latter):

Three scientists won the Nobel Prize in chemistry Wednesday for their work on quantum dots — tiny particles just a few nanometers in diameter that can release very bright colored light and whose applications in everyday life include electronics and medical imaging.

Moungi Bawendi of MIT, Louis Brus of Columbia University, and Alexei Ekimov of Nanocrystals Technology Inc., were honored for their work with the tiny particles that “have unique properties and now spread their light from television screens and LED lamps,” according to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which announced the award in Stockholm.

The suspense surrounding the academy’s decision took an unusual turn when Swedish media reported the winners several hours before the prize was announced. The advance notice apparently came from a news release sent out early by mistake.

Quantum dots are tiny inorganic particles that glow a range of colors from red to blue when exposed to light. The color they emit depends upon the size of the particle.

Scientists can engineer the dots from materials that include gold to graphene to cadmium, and create their color by controlling their size. The tiniest particles, in which electrons are most tightly confined, emit blue light. Slightly larger particles, in which electrons bounce around a longer wavelength, emit red light.
Readers who are chemists or physicists: did you see this coming?

*And on to physics, where the prize was awarded to another trio (the maximum allowable number of winners.

Three scientists won the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for giving us the first split-second glimpse into the superfast world of spinning electrons, a field that could one day lead to better electronics or disease diagnoses.

The award went to French-Swedish physicist Anne L’Huillier, French scientist Pierre Agostini and Hungarian-born Ferenc Krausz for their work with the tiny part of each atom that races around the center and is fundamental to virtually everything: chemistry, physics, our bodies and our gadgets.

Electrons move so fast that they have been out of reach of human efforts to isolate them, but by looking at the tiniest fraction of a second possible, scientists now have a “blurry” glimpse of them and that opens up whole new sciences, experts said.

“The electrons are very fast, and the electrons are really the workforce in everywhere,” Nobel Committee member Mats Larsson said. “Once you can control and understand electrons, you have taken a very big step forward.”

This part is amazing:

The scientists, who worked separately, used ever-quicker laser pulses to catch the atomic action that happened at such dizzying speeds — one quintillionth of a second, known as an attosecond — much like the way photographers use fast shutters to capture a hummingbird feeding.

How small is that?

“Let’s take one second, which is the time of a heartbeat,” Nobel Committee chair Eva Olsson said. To get the realm of the attosecond, that would have to be divided by 1,000 six times.

Physicist Mark Pearce, a Nobel Committee member, said “there are as many attoseconds in a second as there are seconds which have passed since the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago.”

But even when scientists “see” the electron, there’s only so much they can view.

“You can see whether it’s on the one side of a molecule or on the other,” said L’Huillier, 65. “It’s still very blurry.”

“The electrons are much more like waves, like water waves, than particles and what we try to measure with our technique is the position of the crest of the waves,” she added.

We should be proud of our species for being able to do stuff like that!

*Finally, here’s John McWhorter noting how he’s been canceled at Columbia in that he’s not invited to give invited seminars, give guest lectures, or to participate on panels, even when the topic involves race. (He says he’s not conservative but just a “cranky moderate.”)  Glenn Loury says that this also happened to him after 2020 when, previously writing liberal stuff, he started being antiwoke.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is excercising her rodentivorous instincts:

Hili: I have to go very cautiously.
A: Why?
Hili: In order not to frighten away mice.
In Polish:
Hili: Muszę iść bardzo ostrożnie.
Ja: Dlaczego?
Hili: Żeby nie płoszyć myszy.

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

From Irena, a cartoon by Leigh Rubin (“Rubes”):

From Facebook:

From BuzzFeed:

The real Bert:

 

From Masih. Look how hard the morality police in Iran come down on a hijabless woman!

“For he loves the Sun and the Sun loves him.” —Christopher Smart. From Malcolm.

From Simon:

I found this on Twitter:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a woman murdered by the Nazis at 31:

Tweets from Herr Doktor Professor Cobb.  Don’t try this first one at home unless the cat jumps on the counter while you’re chopping onions:

Is she tripping or is this the way she is normally? In fact, what she says makes perfect sense.

They missed the biggest prize of all!

15 thoughts on “Thursday: Hili dialogue”

  1. I don’t understand why student loan forgiveness (or debt cancellation) is unfair to you. You don’t have any student debt so it is not a case of cancelling X’s debt and keeping intact your relevantly identical debt. Do you think someone else’s bankruptcy is unfair to you? It is pretty much the same thing. Or is it that you think it is unfair for anyone to get debt relief or cancellation unless everyone gets the same, including retroactively?

    1. Here is a bit of my take on this student debt business. It is easy for us old timers who never had to borrow money to make it to higher education to say, just a bunch of crying kids. Suck it up. You will maybe get it paid off someday? Remember back in 2008/7 when everything went to hell in the financial world. What was one big cause of that. Easy loans on houses. Everyone could go out and buy a nice house with no money down. How much do you actually make, who cares. Who paid for this crash and burn? And how many millions and millions was this one.

      So who decided that the kids could borrow all this money and how were they ever going to pay it off. The damn colleges did not care, just keep feeding them money it’s great for us. And guess what was the big difference from this and every other kind of borrowing by anyone. NO BANKRUPTCY. Hey kids, you don’t get to declare bankruptcy when it becomes impossible for you to ever pay this back. Who allowed this crap. Our federal Government. How about that.

    2. It’s not unfair to me (except that I pay for part of it); it’s unfair to students who borrowed and paid it all back. Yes, everyone should get the same, and should apply for it.

      2. I’m one of those students who paid back all my loans. Took me 20 years to pay off 2 master’s degrees from 2 different universities. The entire time, I felt like my whole life was on hold and I could do nothing until the loans were gone. It was a huge burden on me, and I didn’t borrow anything close to the amounts colleges and universities are asking today for their degrees. Once they were paid off, I spent years paying off the credit card debt I incurred so I could keep my life afloat while paying off the loans. Now I’m nearly 64 years old and can breathe a bit financially. I wouldn’t wish what I went through on anyone. If the government can help lessen the burden on these kids, I say go for it. I truly feel for them and wish them a better experience than I had.

  2. Here in rural Illinois we also refer to the organ meat in question as “prairie oysters.” 🐂

    1. I always thought a prairie oyster was a raw egg in Worcestershire and hot sauce…

  3. Is she tripping or is this the way she is normally?

    Could be she’s a day tripper
    A one-way ticket, yeah

    Gives you a good reason
    For taking the easy way out.

    1. She is tripping balls, and she is mostly not right. But it would be awesome if she were right. 

  4. A very old joke about Brown Betty. I no longer recollect where I heard it, or if it’s supposed to be a true story:

    Man sits down at a distinguished fine restaurant and tells the waiter “I was here over 25 years ago and still remember how marvelous the Brown Betty was. I’ll take a large serving!”

    Waiter replies “Unfortunately, sir, we no longer serve that item. But I will go ask the chef if there’s anything he can do.” He comes back a few minutes later and informs the gentleman that the chef has agreed to make the dessert — but only if other customers will also order it, so that the rest doesn’t go to waste. The man tells the waiter he’ll insure that and proceeds to slowly make his way from table to table, saying “You really must try the Brown Betty here — it’s delicious!”

    When he’s done, he calls the waiter over. “I’ll have some Brown Betty now, my good man.”

    “Sorry, sir — we’re all out.”

  5. A small error in the description: the Sagrada Familia is not a cathedral (it has no bishop, or rather, it doesn’t have the seat (cathedra) of the bishop).

    1. The Sagrada Familia is a basilica, not a cathedral. I have been to it several times. When I first visited, it was predicted that it would be finished somewhere beyond the year 2100. Since then, the number of tourists has soared and the completion date has been moved up. To be honest, I love the place and highly recommend visiting. A cliché comment is that it was designed and built by Elves. The rest of Gaudi’s work is not nearly as impressive. However, the Sagrada Familia really is.

  6. Oops, late today – I was out in Cambridge with the birthday girl (see below) and saw some of Darwin’s fossil collection at the Sedgwick Museum.

    On this day:
    1450 – Louis IX, Duke of Bavaria expels Jews from his jurisdiction.

    1607 – Assassins attempt to kill Venetian statesman and scientist Paolo Sarpi.

    1789 – French Revolution: The Women’s March on Versailles effectively terminates royal authority.

    1900 – Peace congress in Paris condemns British policy in South Africa and asserts Boer Republic’s right to self-determination.

    1905 – The Wright brothers pilot the Wright Flyer III in a new world record flight of 24 miles in 39 minutes.

    1914 – World War I: An aircraft successfully destroys another aircraft with gunfire for the first time.

    1930 – British airship R101 crashes in France en route to India on its maiden voyage killing 48 people.

    1936 – The Jarrow March sets off for London.

    1938 – In Nazi Germany, Jews’ passports are invalidated.

    1943 – Ninety-eight American POWs are executed by Japanese forces on Wake Island.

    1944 – The Provisional Government of the French Republic enfranchises women.

    1945 – A six-month strike by Hollywood set decorators turns into a bloody riot at the gates of the Warner Brothers studio.

    1947 – President Truman makes the first televised Oval Office address.

    1962 – The first of the James Bond film series, based on the novels by Ian Fleming, Dr. No, is released in Britain.

    1962 – The first Beatles single “Love Me Do” is released in Britain.

    1970 – The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is founded.

    1970 – The British Trade Commissioner, James Cross, is kidnapped by members of the Front de libération du Québec, triggering the October Crisis in Canada.

    1974 – Bombs planted by the PIRA in pubs in Guildford kill four British soldiers and one civilian.

    1982 – Tylenol products are recalled after bottles in Chicago laced with cyanide cause seven deaths.

    1984 – Marc Garneau becomes the first Canadian in space.

    1986 – Mordechai Vanunu’s story in The Sunday Times reveals Israel’s secret nuclear weapons.

    1990 – After 150 years The Herald newspaper in Melbourne, Australia, is published for the last time as a separate newspaper.

    1999 – The Ladbroke Grove rail crash in West London kills 31 people.

    2000 – Mass demonstrations in Serbia force the resignation of Slobodan Milošević.

    Births:
    1713 – Denis Diderot, French philosopher and critic (d. 1784).

    1879 – Francis Peyton Rous, American pathologist and virologist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1970).

    1902 – Larry Fine, American comedian (d. 1975).

    1902 – Ray Kroc, American businessman and philanthropist (d. 1984).

    1907 – Mrs. Miller, American novelty singer (d. 1997).

    1919 – Donald Pleasence, English actor (d. 1995).

    1936 – Václav Havel, Czech poet, playwright, and politician, 1st President of the Czech Republic (d. 2011).

    1941 – Stephanie Cole, English actress.

    1943 – Steve Miller, American singer-songwriter and guitarist.

    1943 – Michael Morpurgo, English author, poet, and playwright.

    1947 – Brian Johnson, English singer and songwriter.

    1948 – Russell Mael, American vocalist.

    1949 – Peter Ackroyd, English biographer, novelist and critic.

    1950 – Eddie Clarke, English rock guitarist (d. 2018).

    1951 – Bob Geldof, Irish singer-songwriter and actor.

    1958 – Neil deGrasse Tyson, American astrophysicist, cosmologist, and author. [No comment…]

    1959 – Maya Lin, American architect and sculptor, designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and Civil Rights Memorial.

    1963 – Nick Robinson, English journalist and blogger.

    1966 – Sean M. Carroll, American physicist, cosmologist, and academic.

    1967 – Guy Pearce, English-Australian actor.

    1975 – Kate Winslet, English actress.

    2002 – Ana Claudia Grove. [Yikes, my daughter is 21 today!]

    Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it:
    1802 – Sanité Bélair, Haitian freedom fighter (b. 1781).

    1880 – Jacques Offenbach, German-French cellist and composer (b. 1819).

    1927 – Sam Warner, Polish-American director, producer, and screenwriter, co-founded Warner Bros. (b. 1887).

    1942 – Dorothea Klumpke, American astronomer (b. 1861).

    1983 – Earl Tupper, American inventor and businessman, founded the Tupperware Corporation (b. 1907).

    1985 – Karl Menger, Austrian-American mathematician from the Vienna Circle (b. 1902).

    2004 – Rodney Dangerfield, American comedian, actor, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1921).

    2011 – Bert Jansch, Scottish singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1943).

    2011 – Steve Jobs, American businessman, co-founder of Apple Inc. and Pixar (b. 1955).

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