Monday: Hili dialogue

October 9, 2023 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Monday, October 9, 2023, and National Moldy Cheese Day, not celebrating cheese that has gone off, but deliberately moldy cheeses like Stilton and Roquefort.  Below is an absorbing ten-minute documentary on how real English Stilton is made:

It’s also Columbus Day (once celebrated to mark Columbus’s landing in the Americas on Oct. 12, 1492, and celebrated on the second Monday in October, but not the day is canceled), International Beer and Pizza Day, Nautilus Night (they’re nocturnal), Leif Erikson Day (also celebrated in Iceland and Norway), National Submarine-Hoagie-Hero-Grinder Day (regional variants of a long American sandwich), Native American Day, National Sneakers Day, National Nanotechnology Day, and World Post Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the October 9 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The WaPo notes the material aid that the U.S. is tendering to Israel and adds some distressing news about Hezbollah:

The United States will move an aircraft carrier strike group to the eastern Mediterranean Sea while providing munitions and other equipment to help Israel in its newly declared war against Hamas. President Biden pledged his “full support” to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to White House readout of a Sunday morning call between the leaders, their second in two days. Israel pounded Gaza with strikes, promising retaliation for an unprecedented attack by the militant group that took Israeli security forces by surprise. The death toll has risen to 700 in Israel and thousands have been injured, according to local media, while Palestinian authorities said at least 413 were killed and about 2,300 injured in Gaza. Fears of a regional spillover grew after Lebanese militant group Hezbollah said it attacked Israeli targets near the border “in solidarity” with Hamas and Israel said it struck back.

*And the latest on the war from the NYT:

Israel ordered a “complete siege” of the long-blockaded Gaza Strip on Monday, as it battled to drive Palestinian militants out of southern towns near the border with the tiny enclave, two days after a stunning invasion that has left hundreds dead and provoked furious Israeli retaliatory strikes on Gaza.

“We are still fighting,” Lt. Col. Richard Hecht of the Israel Defense Forces said at a briefing on Monday morning. “We thought by this morning we’d be in a better place.”

Israel’s chief military spokesman later declared that the army had regained control of the border communities but acknowledged that “there may still be terrorists in the area,” as exchanges of fire between soldiers and military were heard in Kfar Azza, an Israeli village near the border.

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said that “no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel” will be allowed into Gaza, which has been under a 16-year blockade, as Israeli airstrikes pounded the coastal strip for a third day.

More than 700 people have been killed in Israel, which has struck hundreds of targets in Gaza, leveling whole buildings that they say are linked to Hamas, the militant group that controls the territory. United Nations and Gazan officials said a mosque, a marketplace, homes and multistory buildings have been hit, adding to a soaring number of civilian casualties. At least 493 Palestinians have been killed, according to authorities in Gaza, and at least 2,751 others have been injured.

My one prediction is that the new Israeli operation intends to take Hamas out of power (and perhaps out of existence) completely. I don’t know how they’ll do this short of a ground operation, and so I predict that as well.

*Muslims in London are celebrating Hamas’s attack on Israel and slaughter of its residents. I’m not of course denigrating all British Muslims by showing the repugnant video below, full of elated genocidal thugs.

My point is twofold: Islam corrupts and inspires hatred, like all religions, but these days it corrupts and inspires hatred more often and more brutally. Second, even living in Britain doesn’t temper the religiously inspired hatreds of some Muslims. Surrounded by infidels, they must be feeling constant HARM.

From World Israel News:

Muslims in Europe and throughout the Middle East launched festive celebrations in the street, praising Palestinian terrorists and supporting the unprecedented attack that killed some 350 Israelis on Saturday, in one of the biggest disasters in Israeli history.

Rachel Riley, a British-Jewish television presenter, wrote on her social media accounts that she was horrified to come across multiple groups of people in London who were apparently reveling in the fact that Israelis had been killed.

Riley wrote that she had visited a cafe in the Acton neighborhood in West London with her family, when they saw a group of men on the street waving Palestinian flags and smiling.

“People have been brutally murdered, kidnapped and there are people in London dancing,” she wrote.

Later on, Riley updated that she “just passed two cars in West London driving with Palestinian flags flying from each window, bouncing up and down in their cars, seemingly celebrating like they were having a party.

“Make no mistake, this is a dangerous and terrifying time for all Jews around the world.”

Luana sent a tweet that purports to show Muslims celebrating in Malmö, Sweden. The Google translation is this:

In Malmö, a city emptied of its Jewish population, residents now celebrate massacres of Israelis. Completely open and shameless. We are used to seeing such scenes in Islamist Gaza, not in Sweden. I expect Malmö’s municipal councilor Katrin Stjernfeldt Jammeh (s) (@KatrinS_J) and our party leaders to condemn this development in the strongest possible terms.

As for the West Bank, it’s business as usual:  TREAT TIME!

In Palestinian Authority-controlled enclaves in Judea and Samaria, Palestinians rallied in the streets, handing out sweets to celebrate the Hamas attack.

*Mo Dowd has finally reached the bottom of the journalistic barrel in her NYT column, “Travis, don’t fumble Taylor!” Her point is to urge Taylor Swift to stay with her football-playing boyfriend, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce , because he’s a Good Man Who’s Hard to Find

Have men evolved on the issue of equality more slowly? Even very successful men have confessed to me that they feel intimidated by powerful women, preferring mates who are more malleable and more awed by them.

And so, I worry for Taylor Swift.

Her romance with Travis Kelce, the charming Kansas City Chiefs tight end, has mesmerized the country in a Mars-Venus moment. The macho N.F.L. is thrilled that Taylor’s joyous appearances at games are luring more of her perfervid female fan base to watch football. (I admit, I tuned in to the Chiefs-Jets game to see the colliding constellations of “Swelce.”)

. . .Asked at a team news conference on Friday about his new paramour, Travis replied with a sexy smile, “I was on top of the world after the Super Bowl, and right now even more on top of the world, so it’s fun, man.”

And he doesn’t have that look in his eyes that guys who hook up with megafamous divas sometimes get, as if they want to run for daylight.

I have two questions. Does anybody over the age of 16 care about what Mo Dowd thinks of this romance? Second, didn’t Dowd used to write some pieces that were more than tabloid fluff?

*Raja Abdulrahim has yet another piece sympathetic to Palestine in the latest NYT, “Netanyahu warned Gazans to get out of the way of an onslaught, but most have nowhere to go.” An excerpt:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel warned Palestinians on Saturday night to clear out of any place in the Gaza Strip where Palestinian fighters might be hiding or operating amid an ongoing onslaught of the blockaded coastal enclave.

But for the more than two million residents of the densely populated and impoverished territory where fighters live and operate among civilians, residents said there was nowhere to run or hide.

“All of the places which Hamas is deployed, hiding and operating in that wicked city, we will turn them into rubble,” Mr. Netanyahu said in his statement, referring to the Palestinian militant group that controls Gaza. “I say to the residents of Gaza: Leave now because we will operate forcefully everywhere.”

. . .“Where are we going to go?” he said, standing outside his damaged home near the al-Watan Tower, one of three Gaza City high-rise buildings that were destroyed by Israeli airstrikes on Saturday night. “There are no shelters, no nothing. We are a tiny strip of land and it can barely hold all the people here.”

If the situation worsened — which he expected it to — he said they might have no choice but to take the children to the hospital for safety, assuming it was less likely to be attacked.

“The sea is behind us and the enemy is in front of us,” he said.

The Gaza Strip has been under a suffocating 16-year blockade imposed by Israel, and supported by Egypt, limiting what can go in, including food and medicine, and preventing most residents from leaving.

. . .More than 20,000 Gazans were seeking shelter at dozens of schools across Gaza, according to the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA. But nowhere in Gaza seemed safe. On Saturday, a hospital, an ambulance and a mosque were hit by Israeli strikes, according to Gazan authorities.

UNRWA said three schools that it runs were also damaged by Israeli strikes.

“The security situation is very difficult. Movement is almost nonexistent,” said Raji Sourani, a lawyer with the Palestinian Center for Human Rights in Gaza. “The intensity of strikes and bombing and deteriorating situation on the ground is unprecedented.”

I feel sorry for the people who feel that can’t hide, but that’s only because Hamas wants to insinuate itself among the civilian populace.  Once again, they need to get rid of Hamas. Somehow Abdulrahim manages to imply that Israel shouldn’t go into Gaza because the people can’t get away from Hamas. What she really wants is either for Israel to disappear or for Israel not to retaliate against Gaza.  What I want is for the NYT to dump this biased and tendentious reporter. She is incapable of reporting news objectively, and is apparently brought in to give a desired anti-Israeli slant to the reportage.

*No Free Speech in Switzerland Department. A Swiss writer has been sentenced to two months in jail and given a hefty fine for what is considered hate speech. This wouldn’t have been a crime in the U.S.:

LGBTQ+ groups hailed the 60-day jail sentence a court in Switzerland gave to a writer and commentator for deriding a journalist as a “fat lesbian” and other critical remarks.

The Lausanne court sentenced French-Swiss polemicist Alain Bonnet, who goes by Alain Soral, for the crimes of defamation, discrimination and incitement to hatred on Monday. He was ordered to pay legal fees and fines totaling thousands of Swiss francs (dollars) in addition to the time behind bars.

Soral lashed out at Catherine Macherel, a journalist for Swiss newspapers Tribune de Geneve and 24 Heures, in a Facebook video two years ago. He called her a “fat lesbian” and said Macherel’s work as a “queer activist” meant she was “unhinged,” according to Swiss public broadcaster RTS.

“This court decision is an important moment for justice and rights of LGBTQI people in Switzerland,” said Murial Waeger, co-director of the lesbian activist group LOS, in a statement. “The conviction of Alain Soral is a strong signal that homophobic hatred cannot be tolerated in our society.”

In an email Tuesday to The Associated Press, Pascal Junod, a lawyer for Soral, mockingly blasted the conviction for a “crime of opinion” and said the case aimed to probe whether a person had “sinned against the dogmas of single thought.” Soral will appeal to Swiss federal court and “if necessary” to the European Court of Human Rights, the lawyer wrote.

Waeger said the verdict represented a milestone in the application of a measure approved by Swiss voters in 2020 that made it illegal to discriminate against people on the basis of sexual orientation.

First of all, this is not discrimination; it’s speech, for crying out loud! Second, can you call people names who aren’t gay, or will that also land you in jail? Can you call someone a “dirty Jew” or suggest that an Asian is an “unhinged slant-eye” without going to jail? Of course these insults are unwarranted and should be criticized, but not formally punished.  Clearly Switzerland doesn’t have the equivalent of the First Amendment, and I’m wondering whether blasphemy is a crime there, too.

Yes, it does. Here’s what Wikipedia says:

In Switzerland, Article 261 of the penal code titled “Attack on the freedom of faith and the freedom to worship” (Störung der Glaubens- und Kultusfreiheit) is defined as:

Any person who publicly and maliciously insults or mocks the religious convictions of others, and in particularly their belief in God, or maliciously desecrates objects of religious veneration,

any person who maliciously prevents, disrupts or publicly mocks an act of worship, the conduct of which is guaranteed by the Constitution, or

any person who maliciously desecrates a place or object that is intended for a religious ceremony or an act of worship the conduct of which is guaranteed by the Constitution,

shall be liable to a monetary penalty.

Maybe they don’t enforce this heinous law, but they should take it off the books.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili, having protected the nuts, is now protecting the grapes, and wants them to be eaten (they’re tasty!):

Hili: Grapes are not being picked.
A: I know, but nobody is interested.
In Polish:
Hili: Winogrona nie zebrane.
Ja: Wiem, ale nie ma chętnych.

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

From Divy. I WANT THAT HOUSE!

Another funny wedding announcement from BuzzFeed:

From Jesus of the Day. You think this is bad? Try criticizing Hamas’s invasion of Israel online:

Masih on the most recent unveiled Iranian woman beaten to near death (she may well die):

Women swimmers fight for their own space:

From Simon, who says, “Such gifted extemporaneous iratory. We might miss this stuff when he gets locked up.”

Barry says, “The answer is a mystery.”

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a Jewish family murdered en masse:

Tweets from Dr. Cobb. The first one is hilarious!

Look at this beautiful glowing ctenophore!

Nature published a complicated Templeton-funded paper on “assembly theory”, which apparently is a way that physics can predict future evolution. But it’s above my pay grade. Fortunately, there are responses from some people for whom the paper is not above their pay grade:

18 thoughts on “Monday: Hili dialogue”

  1. On this day:
    1410 – The first known mention of the Prague astronomical clock.

    1604 – Kepler’s Supernova is the most recent supernova to be observed within the Milky Way.

    1635 – Roger Williams is banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony after religious and policy disagreements.

    1701 – The Collegiate School of Connecticut (later renamed Yale University) is chartered in Old Saybrook.

    1740 – Dutch colonists and Javanese natives begin a massacre of the ethnic Chinese population in Batavia, eventually killing at least 10,000.

    1799 – HMS Lutine sinks with the loss of 240 men and a cargo worth £1,200,000.

    1804 – Hobart, capital of Tasmania, is founded.

    1825 – Restauration arrives in New York Harbor from Norway, the first organized immigration from Norway to the United States.

    1874 – The Universal Postal Union is created by the Treaty of Bern.

    1911 – An accidental bomb explosion triggers the Wuchang Uprising against the Qing dynasty, beginning the Xinhai Revolution.

    1919 – The Cincinnati Reds win the World Series, resulting in the Black Sox Scandal.

    1936 – Boulder Dam (later Hoover Dam) begins to generate electricity and transmit it to Los Angeles.

    1963 – In Italy, a large landslide causes a giant wave to overtop the Vajont Dam, killing over 2,000.

    1967 – A day after his capture, Ernesto “Che” Guevara is executed for attempting to incite a revolution in Bolivia.

    1969 – In Chicago, the National Guard is called in as demonstrations continue over the trial of the “Chicago Eight”.

    1970 – The Khmer Republic is proclaimed in Cambodia.

    1981 – President François Mitterrand abolishes capital punishment in France.

    1995 – An Amtrak Sunset Limited train is derailed by saboteurs near Palo Verde, Arizona.

    2006 – North Korea conducts its first nuclear test.

    2007 – The Dow Jones Industrial Average reaches its all-time high of 14,164 points before rapidly declining due to the 2007-2008 financial crises.

    2012 – Pakistani Taliban attempt to assassinate outspoken schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai.

    Births:
    1835 – Camille Saint-Saëns, French composer and conductor (d. 1921).

    1859 – Alfred Dreyfus, French colonel (d. 1935).

    1873 – Charles Rudolph Walgreen, American pharmacist and businessman, founded Walgreens (d. 1939).

    1888 – Nikolai Bukharin, Russian journalist and politician (d. 1938).

    1890 – Aimee Semple McPherson, Canadian-American evangelist, founded the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel (d. 1944).

    1900 – Alastair Sim, Scottish-English actor and academic (d. 1976).

    1907 – Jacques Tati, French actor, director, and screenwriter (d. 1982).

    1907 – Horst Wessel, German SA officer (d. 1930). [A German street gangster and, according to some sources, a procurer of prostitutes who became a Sturmführer (“Assault Leader”), the lowest commissioned officer rank in the Sturmabteilung (SA), the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party. After his murder in 1930, Joseph Goebbels turned him into a martyr for the Nazi Party.]

    1923 – Donald Sinden, English actor (d. 2014).

    1931 – Tony Booth, English actor (d. 2017). [Most famous for playing Mike Rawlins, the “lefty layabout” in the BBC series Till Death Us Do Part (remade as All in the Family in the US). He was the father-in-law of former Prime Minister Sir Tony Blair.]

    1936 – Brian Blessed, English actor.

    1939 – John Pilger, Australian-English journalist, director, and producer.

    1940 – John Lennon, English singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer (d. 1980).

    1944 – John Entwistle, English singer-songwriter, bass player, and producer (d. 2002).

    1948 – Jackson Browne, American singer-songwriter and guitarist.

    1950 – Jody Williams, American academic and activist, Nobel Prize laureate.

    1952 – Sharon Osbourne, English television host and manager.

    1969 – PJ Harvey, English musician, singer-songwriter, writer, poet, and composer.

    1969 – Steve McQueen, English director, producer, and screenwriter.

    1975 – Sean Lennon, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, producer, and actor.

    To himself everyone is immortal; he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead:
    1562 – Gabriele Falloppio, Italian anatomist and physician (b. 1523). [His contributions to science go well beyond the eponymous tubes. Amongst other things, he conducted one of the earliest clinical trials; his involved the use of condoms (he is the first to have described them) to prevent the contraction of syphilis. Despite all that, his work dealt mainly with the anatomy of the head and added much to what was known before about the internal ear.]

    1911 – Jack Daniel, American businessman, founded Jack Daniel’s (b. 1849).

    1941 – Helen Morgan, American singer and actress (b. 1900).

    1967 – Joseph Pilates, German-American fitness trainer, developed Pilates (b. 1883).

    1972 – Miriam Hopkins, American actress (b. 1902). [She received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress for the 1935 film Becky Sharp, becoming the first performer nominated for a colour picture.]

    1974 – Oskar Schindler, Czech-German businessman (b. 1908).

    1978 – Jacques Brel, Belgian singer-songwriter and actor (b. 1929).

    1988 – Felix Wankel, German engineer, invented the Wankel engine (b. 1902).

    2004 – Jacques Derrida, Algerian-French philosopher and academic (b. 1930). [To blame for “deconstruction” and the fad for abstruseness in academic writing. He believed in the abolition of age of consent laws, as did Foucault, who he later fell out with.]

  2. My point is twofold: Islam corrupts and inspires hatred, like all religions, but these days it corrupts and inspires hatred more often and more brutally.

    Maybe yes, maybe no. I think it is very important to find out if Islam drives brutal hateful behaviour, or if hateful brutes use Islam as a justification for what they would do anyway. I don’t know the answer, perhaps both are too intertwined to untangle. But if you are addressing the wrong cause then expecting a change in the effect is a likely to end in disappointment.

    In not directly related news there is a peer reviewed scientific paper “On Hens, Eggs, Temperatures and CO2: Causal Links in Earth’s Atmosphere” https://www.mdpi.com/2413-4155/5/3/35 which argues that increasing temperature results in subsequent increasing levels of carbon dioxide – not carbon dioxide levels driving temperature. *If* the causation is as described then many climate models have a false assumption baked in.

    Cause and effect is important.

    1. Sure, warming temperatures melt ice and permafrost and causes forest fires, etc., and that releases CO2. But the increasing levels of CO2 are correlated tightly with the historical record of burning fossil fuels.

  3. Our regular reminder, that Queer has no-thing what-so-ever to do with L, G, or B, and is in fact antagonistic of those ideas, in the words of the President of the American Library Association Emily Drabinski (though numerous Queer writers reiterate this hostile idea):

    “Queer theory has its roots in disruption of, rather than assimilation to, norms of identity. Politically, queer emerged as part of a political movement of gender and sexual minorities in the 1960s. Distinct from mainstream lesbian and gay movements, groups like Queer Nation resisted assimilationist strategies that sought rights on the basis of stable and unchanging identities. ”

    Source: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/669547

    We find another reminder of the origin of “gender” as used outside the mundane linguistic function, as published in the occult doctrine The Kybalion (1908):

    “The “I” represents the Masculine Principle of Mental Gender—the “Me” represents the Female Principle. The “I” represents the Aspect of Being; the “Me” the Aspect of Becoming. You will notice that the Principle of Correspondence operates on this plane just as it does upon the great plane upon which the creation of Universes is performed. The two are similar in kind, although vastly different in degree. “As above, so below; as below, so above.” ”

    https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Kybalion

    1. Not to put to fine a point on this, a short quote to show the relationship to the “creation of Universes” quote :

      “… we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds.”

      From intro to Cruising Utopia –
      The Then and There of Queer Futurity
      10th anniversary ed. (2019, orig. 2009)
      José Esteban Muñoz
      NYU Press

  4. Biden has lately done a poor job of educating the not very bright American Public why it is important to support Ukraine. Let’s hope he does a better job with Israel. The Russian economy is slowing going down the toilet and the money is nearly worthless. The same job is needed in Iran.

    I thought Kansas City nearly lost that game yesterday. I guess Swifty was not there.

  5. I am heartened to see that the Assembly Theory paper is getting some shade thrown on it. It was brought up recently over in the Peaceful Science web site, where you may read it along with a glowing follow-up paper, but so far it has not been taken apart there and I don’t know why: https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/assembly-theory-explains-and-quantifies-selection-and-evolution/16345. My gut was telling me it was total B.S., and the illustrations alone seemed pretty nutty.

  7. RE Assembly Theory: This sentence alone sets off the BS detector klaxon.
    >>>>
    In AT, objects are not considered as point particles (as in most physics), but are defined by the histories of their formation as an intrinsic property, mapped as an assembly space
    <<<<

  8. Muslims in London are celebrating Hamas’s attack on Israel and slaughter of its residents. I’m not of course denigrating all British Muslims by showing the repugnant video below, full of elated genocidal thugs.

    Same problem in Germany.

    After the Hamas attack on Israel with many dead and injured, several people in Berlin-Neukölln celebrated the attack. In the meantime, a charge of “approval of criminal acts” has been filed – the police are investigating.

    https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/regional/berlin/palaestinenser-neukoelln-100.html

    ARTE and Bayerische Rundfunk no longer work with the freelance journalist, Malcolm Ohanwe, as he justified Hamas’ killing with a tweet: “If the Palestinians’ tongues are systematically cut off, how are they supposed to fight back with words? When the Palestinians’ right to vote is cut off, how are they supposed to fight back with crosses? If their movement is restricted, how are they supposed to fight back with demos? What do people expect?”

    https://www.sueddeutsche.de/medien/nahostkonflikt-arte-br-1.6280890

  9. You think this is bad? Try criticizing Hamas’s invasion of Israel online:
    Absolutely! Nevertheless, many brave women, including Julie Bindel and lawyers Sarah Phillimore and Joanna Cherry, have been very vocal in condemning the misogyny and violence of Hamas. https://twitter.com/SVPhillimore/status/1711373796945354912

    They’ve been getting a lot of abuse from the usual suspects, of course…

  10. Trans rights activists shouted down a Jewish woman by calling her a Nazi whilst she was addressing the crowd at yesterday’s Let Women Speak event in Liverpool and speaking about the brutal treatment, both of women and others by Hamas during the current conflict and also of her family during WWII: https://twitter.com/JenKteach/status/1711000005178167759

    They have since attempted to excuse their behaviour by saying that they couldn’t hear her! You couldn’t make it up. Many of those trying to silence the Let Women Speak event were trade union members and other attendees of the Labour Party conference in Liverpool, which opened yesterday. The Labour Party has yet to condemn their actions.

  11. Does Raja Abdulrahim realise that the sentence she quotes from a Gazan – “The sea is behind us and the enemy is in front of us” – is true for every Jewish Israeli?

  12. When I was a kid, Columbus Day was always October 12. It had nothing to do with the second Monday in October. The moving of holidays to Mondays didn’t happen until the 1970s.

  13. I exceeded my one-email-per-day quota, so I hope PCC(E) sees this :

    Sean Carroll (@seanmcarroll):

    “Responses to this have been kind of depressing. I have my own degree of skepticism, but there’s been way too much superficial dismissal. Ambitious new theories will often seem weird. Knee-jerk reactions make it harder to investigate truly novel ideas.

    [ Nature research paper:

    Assembly theory explains and quantifies selection and evolution

    @Nature ]

    Substantive critique is great (I would like to hear it!) but there’s been a lot of drive-by name-calling.”

    https://x.com/seanmcarroll/status/1711875002998444330?s=46

    …if I may, agree, but also, … I mean, is there no evidence of ideological subversion in the “alchemy of the word” in the paper?

    Let a hundred flowers bloom? Flowers might bloom in compost, I suppose – but compost is not excrement.

    … ooo, “Email me new comments” button! Awesome!… I hope…

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