Saturday: Hili dialogue

December 2, 2023 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Saturday, December 2, 2023, and National Fritters Day.  I’ll take corn fritters, thank you, perhaps with a tad of maple syrup on them.

It’s also National Rhubarb Vodka Day (a tasteless alcohol infused with a repugnant vegetable), Special Education Day (I had a friend with a d*g named “Special Ed”), Play Basketball Day, Safety Razor Day, National Mutt Day, and the UN day: International Day for the Abolition of Slavery.

Want to know why mixed-breed dogs are called “mutts”? Go here to learn; it’s complicated!

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the December 2 Wikipedia page.

There will be no Caturday felid feature today as I have things to do.

Da Nooz:

*Obituaries first: Retired Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor died at 93; she was a centrist conservative appointed by Reagan, but now she looks almost liberal. From the NYT:

Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman on the United States Supreme Court, a rancher’s daughter who wielded great power over American law from her seat at the center of the court’s ideological spectrum, died on Friday in Phoenix. She was 93.

The Supreme Court announced her death in a statement, saying the cause was complications of dementia. She grew up in Arizona and lived there most of her life.

In a public letter she released in October 2018, when she was 88, the former justice, who had not been seen in public for some time, announced that she had been diagnosed with the beginning stages of dementia, “probably Alzheimer’s disease,” and consequently was withdrawing from public life.

Although William H. Rehnquist, her Stanford Law School classmate, served as chief justice during much of her tenure, the Supreme Court during that crucial period was often called the O’Connor court, and Justice O’Connor was referred to, accurately, as the most powerful woman in America.

Very little could happen without Justice O’Connor’s support when it came to the polarizing issues on the court’s docket, and the law regarding affirmative action, abortion, voting rights, religion, federalism, sex discrimination and other hot-button subjects was basically what Sandra Day O’Connor thought it should be.

That the middle ground she looked for tended to be the public’s preferred place as well was no coincidence, given the close attention Justice O’Connor paid to current events and the public mood. “Rare indeed is the legal victory — in court or legislature — that is not a careful byproduct of an emerging social consensus,” she wrote in “The Majesty of the Law: Reflections of a Supreme Court Justice,” a collection of her essays published in 2003.

*War news from the NYT: The fighting has begun again in Gaza and has moved to the south. Why did it start? Each side blames the other, of course:

The fragile truce between Israel and Hamas collapsed on Friday morning because the adversaries could not find common ground for further exchanges of hostages and prisoners, according to Israeli and Hamas officials.

. . . Israel said Hamas had fired rockets from Gaza into southern Israel, while Hamas said Israeli troop operations had resumed in northern Gaza. But two Israeli officials and Zaher Jabareen, a Hamas official who oversees prisoner issues, said the real reason the pause ended was a stalemate in prisoner-swap negotiations.

. . . Hamas had begun suggesting deals that would release more Palestinians from Israeli jails, including higher-profile detainees, in exchange for the remaining hostages held in Gaza, who include Israeli soldiers. But Israeli officials have made it clear that they want all women and children held in Gaza released before they will discuss exchanges of other captives.

I’m wondering if the remaining women and children are even alive. It’s complicated because the swap also involves the bodies of Israelis, including the mother and two children reported to have been killed by “Israeli rocket fire”, but it seem clear that no further trading of prisoners for hostages is in the offing. Meanwhile,

Gazans were bracing for expanded hostilities on Saturday, a day after the truce between Israel and Hamas ended, as Israel began turning its focus on southern Gaza for the war’s next phase and as the flow of vital supplies of food, water and medicine again slowed to a trickle.

Israel’s military said it carried out 200 strikes on Gaza on Friday, plunging the territory’s 2.2 million civilians back into the peril and suffering they have been living under since the war began on Oct 7.

. . . After a four-week ground operation in the northern half of the Gaza Strip, Israel believes the top leadership of Hamas, which controls most of the enclave, is now hiding in southern Gaza. Israeli leaders on Friday reiterated their resolve to ensure that the armed group — which was responsible for the Oct. 7 attacks that killed 1,200 people in southern Israel, according to the Israeli authorities — would never again be able to pose a threat to Israel.

Biden and Blinken have given the word to Israel that they have to practice more “surgical” strikes, which is fine, but we’re not sure if Israel isn’t already doing that given the presence of human shields. The U.S. and Israel have also approved more humanitarian aid for displaced Gazans, also good so long as what’s delivered doesn’t go into the hands of Hamas.

*Serial liar and general miscreant George Santos finally got one comeuppance: he was voted out of Congress. He deserved it. However, a fair number of Republicans voted against his expulsion.

George Santos, the New York Republican congressman whose tapestry of lies and schemes made him a figure of national ridicule and the subject of a 23-count federal indictment, was expelled from the House on Friday after a decisive bipartisan vote by his peers.

The move consigned Mr. Santos, who over the course of his short political career invented ties to the Holocaust, Sept. 11 and the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, to a genuine place in history: He is the first person to be expelled from the House without first being convicted of a federal crime or supporting the Confederacy.

Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana announced the tally to a hushed House chamber: The measure, which required a two-thirds majority, passed with 311 lawmakers in favor of expulsion, including 105 Republicans, and 114 against. Two members voted present.

“The new whole number of the House is 434,” a downcast Mr. Johnson announced, confirming that with Mr. Santos’s ouster, the already paper-thin margin of Republican control had shrunk to three votes.

Mr. Santos’s expulsion ends one of the most turbulent political odysseys in recent memory, a stunning reversal in fortune for a political outsider whose election in Long Island and Queens last year was once heralded as a sign of Republican resurgence.

Instead, he became a Republican Party liability whose vast web of lies and misdeeds led many to question how he had managed to escape accountability for so long.

Expulsion from Congress is the least of his woes, though, given that, with 23 federal counts facing him (perhaps all of them felonies), he’s likely to do time not in the House, but in the Big House.

*As always, I am stealing three items from Nellie Bowles’s weekly news summary at The Free Press, called this week “TGIF: You win some, you Newsome.”

→ Different factions battle in Biden White House: President Biden’s official Twitter account posted a message this week that seemed to imply that Israel was committing terrorism: “Hamas unleashed a terrorist attack because they fear nothing more than Israelis and Palestinians living side by side in peace. To continue down the path of terror, violence, killing, and war is to give Hamas what they seek. We can’t do that.” But then other members of his team frantically told the press there’s been no change in policy, no calls for cease-fire. It’s a minor moment but a telling one. Because Biden—shuffling around, joking about the nuclear football, and calling Trump a “congressman” this week—is not in charge. And in fact, whoever has the best-looking ice cream cone—I’m talking about a really good one, fresh, nice scoop shape—can set international policy for the day.

→ . . . wanting clean air means wanting Israel destroyed, of course. Climate movement leader Greta Thunberg has been insistent upon that, turning an eco-rally into an anti-war rally (“there can be no climate justice without international solidarity”) and this week chanting simply “crush Zionism.” How about the Sunrise Movement, America’s primarily youth environmental group? They’ve tweeted more various deranged war stances than anything eco since October 7. Anyway, call me crazy and old-fashioned, but I didn’t used to think clean air required killing Jews. But Greta tells me it does. Therefore, I am joining Hamas, for environmental reasons.

From Greta et ses amies:

I also found a tweet from the Sunrise Movement, mentioned by Nellie above:

This is longish, but you need to know about these claims. I still don’t fully believe the UNRWA employee holding a hostage.:

→ Defund the UN. . . and the WHO. . .  and Amnesty. . .  and. . .  One Israeli hostage claims he was held in the attic of a United Nations worker’s house, an anecdote that has yet to be confirmed. But it is a little strange, the relationship between the UN and Gaza. As Matt Yglesias put it: “It seems odd that there’s one UN agency for Palestinian refugees from the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and their descendants and another UN agency for all other refugees from all other conflicts.”

Facing public pressure, the UN Women’s department didn’t quite admit there had been violence against women but did post this: “We condemn the brutal attacks by Hamas on October 7 and continue to call for the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages.” Well. That was too much for UN Women. The group quickly deleted it and replaced it with something softer that didn’t condemn Hamas. Why would they? Anyway, they did manage to eke out something out about gender violence: “Catcalling her is violence. Now that you know, you have #NoExcuse.”

The WHO, meanwhile, denied having any idea that Hamas operated a huge terror tunnel network under al-Shifa hospital, bringing hostages there and generally using it as a terror party palace. Here’s a WHO representative answering questions about al-Shifa: “Our focus when we went to Shifa Hospital was on the patients, our focus was on the doctors, so that’s what we focused on. We only saw civilians. And that’s all we were focused on. So that was our focus, that’s all we saw.” Right. And Dad, I didn’t know there was drinking at the party. I just thought the soda tasted funny.

And how’s Human Rights Watch? A longtime employee resigned, citing obsessive antisemitic treatment of Israel. (HRW’s own founder said the same thing more than a decade ago, disavowing the group he started.) Meanwhile, HRW’s last executive director, Kenneth Roth, posted that rising antisemitism is simply a rational response to the war.

Here’s Roth’s tweet:

Nellie continues:

Honestly, dismantle the Red Cross while you’re at it. Red Cross workers have shown no interest in visiting Hamas’s hostages in the tunnels, but they are a giddy presence at the nightly hostage exchanges, smiling and generally looking thrilled. Once they load Israelis into Red Cross cars, they make sure to leave the windows unobstructed, to add to the spectacle.

Amnesty International can’t muster calls to free Israeli hostages. But they’ve released this, implying that the only civilian hostages are Thai workers:

I mean “civilian” would be a stretch, I think, for those Israeli toddlers. Babies too, and teenagers? Please. Anyone who’s met one knows that’s an enemy combatant.

*Finally, from the AP oddities section, a stunning new bit of biology about penguins:

It’s a challenge for all new parents: Getting enough sleep while keeping a close eye on their newborns. For some penguins, it means thousands of mini-catnaps a day, researchers discovered.

Chinstrap penguins in Antarctica need to guard their eggs and chicks around-the-clock in crowded, noisy colonies. So they nod off thousands of times each day — but only for about four seconds at a time — to stay vigilant, the researchers reported Thursday in the journal Science.

These short “microsleeps,” totaling around 11 hours per day, appear to be enough to keep the parents going for weeks.

“These penguins look like drowsy drivers, blinking their eyes open and shut, and they do it 24/7 for several weeks at a time,” said Niels Rattenborg, a sleep researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence in Germany and co-author of the new study.

The researchers did not collect sleep data outside the breeding season, but they hypothesize that the penguins may sleep in longer intervals at other times of the year.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is anxious about the onset of winter:

Szaron: What is it?
Hili: Probably one of the millions of fallen leaves.
In Polish:
Szaron: Co to jest?
Hili: Pewnie jeden z milionów zwiędłych liści.

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

From Reader Jon, who (with his wife) enjoyed yesterday’s cartoon about when dogs have free will. He sent another free will cartoon and added this:

Attached is another cartoon about free will and determinism. It remains my longtime favorite.
And now that I think about it — ha! — it may illustrate my first meeting with my future wife. Funny that I didn’t make that connection until now…
(Our first meeting happened in San Francisco at a public atheist winter solstice party in 2009 — but we’d stopped smoking cigarettes long before.)

From Facebook. Apparently they just put the server’s written instructions onto the bill:

From Merilee, a Maria Scrivan cartoon:

From Masih, who introduces another Iranian dissident, one shot in the arm by the government. They both walked out of a meeting with German officials who wanted to keep the meeting secret (read the whole tweet):

Below: Blinken dictating to Israel. I’m getting tired of him acting as if he’s running the show, but of course the U.S. sells ammunition to Israel, so they have to listen to him and Biden. Still, the U.S. can’t stand behind Israel in eliminating Hamas unless they let them eliminate Hamas:

From Jez: a kitten singing at the piano:

From Luana; “From the mountains to the sea, Palestine will be free!” Is she referring to the Urals?

From Malcolm: LATE FEEDING!

From Malgorzata, a history lesson (read the text of the tweet and also the letter:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a Dutch boy, age 5 gassed upon arrival:

TWO tweets from Matthew, a deadly parasitoid. His caption: “I am become death.”

More Parmesan, sir? (Click to enlarge):

24 thoughts on “Saturday: Hili dialogue”

  1. O’Connor cast her share of awful votes (Bowers v. Hardwick, which upheld Georgia’s sodomy law, and was mercifully overruled by Lawrence v. Texas (O’Connor did change her position in Lawrence), McCleskey v Kemp, where the Supreme Court upheld Georgia’s death penalty system despite overwhelming evidence that the race of the victim was a deciding factor in who got sentenced to death, Herrera v. Collins, where the Court held-unbelievably-that a man on death row with evidence of his innocence was not constitutionally entitled to present evidence of his innocence to a federal court, and Bush v. Gore, come to mind) , but the shift the Court has taken now that she’s been replaced by Alito (and especially after Kennedy and Ginsburg were also replaced) has been for the worse. O’Connor would not have voted to overturn Roe or dismantle the Voting Rights Act, as Alito has.

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    1. Re:Bush v. Gore, apparently O’Connor was planning on retiring and was so disgusted by the thought that a Democratic President would choose her replacement that she stuck around long enough to make sure Bush won. So there’s that.

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  2. I’ll leave the corn fritters, but I recently learned how to make Bhaji (aka Pakoras). Those, I could eat all day.

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  3. On this day (Part 1):
    1409 – The University of Leipzig opens.

    1697 – St Paul’s Cathedral, rebuilt to the design of Sir Christopher Wren following the Great Fire of London, is consecrated.

    1766 – Swedish parliament approves the Swedish Freedom of the Press Act and implements it as a ground law, thus being first in the world with freedom of speech.

    1804 – At Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, Napoleon Bonaparte crowns himself Emperor of the French.

    1823 – Monroe Doctrine: In a State of the Union message, U.S. President James Monroe proclaims American neutrality in future European conflicts, and warns European powers not to interfere in the Americas.

    1845 – Manifest Destiny: In a State of the Union message, U.S. President James K. Polk proposes that the United States should aggressively expand into the West.

    1859 – Militant abolitionist leader John Brown is hanged for his October 16 raid on Harpers Ferry, West Virginia.

    1865 – Alabama ratifies the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, followed by North Carolina, then Georgia; U.S. slaves were legally free within two weeks.

    1867 – At Tremont Temple in Boston, British author Charles Dickens gives his first public reading in the United States.

    1908 – Puyi becomes Emperor of China at the age of two.

    1917 – World War I: Russia and the Central Powers sign an armistice at Brest-Litovsk, and peace talks leading to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk begin.

    1942 – World War II: During the Manhattan Project, a team led by Enrico Fermi initiates the first artificial self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction.

    1947 – Jerusalem Riots of 1947: Arabs riot in Jerusalem in response to the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine.

    1954 – Cold War: The United States Senate votes 65 to 22 to censure Joseph McCarthy for “conduct that tends to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute”.

    1954 – The Sino-American Mutual Defense Treaty, between the United States and Taiwan, is signed in Washington, D.C.

    1956 – The Granma reaches the shores of Cuba’s Oriente Province. Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and 80 other members of the 26th of July Movement disembark to initiate the Cuban Revolution.

    1961 – In a nationally broadcast speech, Cuban leader Fidel Castro declares that he is a Marxist–Leninist and that Cuba will adopt Communism.

    1962 – Vietnam War: After a trip to Vietnam at the request of U.S. President John F. Kennedy, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield becomes the first American official to comment adversely on the war’s progress.

    1970 – The United States Environmental Protection Agency begins operations.

    1980 – Salvadoran Civil War: Four American missionaries are raped and murdered by a death squad.

    1982 – At the University of Utah, Barney Clark becomes the first person to receive a permanent artificial heart.

    1988 – Benazir Bhutto is sworn in as Prime Minister of Pakistan, becoming the first woman to head the government of a Muslim-majority state.

    1991 – Canada and Poland become the first nations to recognize the independence of Ukraine from the Soviet Union.

    1993 – Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar is shot and killed by police in Medellín.

    1993 – Space Shuttle program: STS-61: NASA launches the Space Shuttle Endeavour on a mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope.

    1999 – The United Kingdom devolves political power in Northern Ireland to the Northern Ireland Executive following the Good Friday Agreement.

    2001 – Enron files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

    2020 – Cannabis is removed from the list of most dangerous drugs of the international drug control treaty by the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs.

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    1. On this day (Part 2)
      Births:
      1759 – James Edward Smith, English botanist and mycologist, founded the Linnean Society (d. 1828).

      1863 – Charles Edward Ringling, American businessman, co-founded the Ringling Brothers Circus (d. 1926).

      1895 – Harriet Cohen, English pianist (d. 1967).

      1942 – Anna G. Jónasdóttir, Icelandic political scientist and academic.

      1963 – Ann Patchett, American author.

      1973 – Monica Seles, Serbian-American tennis player.

      1978 – Nelly Furtado, Canadian singer-songwriter, producer, and actress.

      1981 – Britney Spears, American singer-songwriter, dancer, and actress.

      The first day after a death, the new absence
      Is always the same; we should be careful
      Of each other, we should be kind
      While there is still time:
      1547 – Hernán Cortés, Spanish general and explorer (b. 1485).

      1594 – Gerardus Mercator, Flemish mathematician, cartographer, and philosopher (b. 1512).

      1814 – Marquis de Sade, French philosopher, author, and politician (b. 1740).

      1859 – John Brown, American abolitionist (b. 1800).

      1885 – Allen Wright, Principal chief of the Choctaw Nation (1866-1870); proposed the name “Oklahoma”, from Choctaw words okra and umma, meaning “Territory of the Red People.” (b. 1826).

      1918 – Edmond Rostand, French poet and playwright (b. 1868).

      1927 – Paul Heinrich von Groth, German scientist who systematically classified minerals and founded the journal Zeitschrift für Krystallographie und Mineralogie (b. 1843).

      1936 – John Ringling, American businessman, co-founded Ringling Brothers Circus (b. 1866).

      1957 – Harrison Ford, American actor (b. 1884). [No, not that one…]

      1982 – Marty Feldman, English actor and comedian (b. 1933).

      1985 – Philip Larkin, English poet, author, and librarian (b. 1922).

      1990 – Aaron Copland, American composer and conductor (b. 1900).

      1990 – Robert Cummings, American actor, director, and producer (b. 1908).

      1995 – Mária Telkes, Hungarian–American biophysicist and chemist (b. 1900).

      1997 – Shirley Crabtree, English wrestler (b. 1930). [Better known as Big Daddy.]

      1999 – Charlie Byrd, American guitarist (b. 1925).

      Reply

      1. Conspicuous by its absence from the list of birthday anniversaries is that of arch-diva Maria Callas.
        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Callas
        I know Jerry likes Kiri Te Kanawa’s performance of “O mio babbino caro,” but, as wonderful as Kiri’s voice is, I think Callas better portrays the youthful cuteness of the character, Lauretta, singing the aria. https://youtu.be/A_w_PLL4YwM?si=1LDL6GqVcY16Kz1x
        (Jez, I realize that you have only so much space to list the daily anniversaries. I appreciate your efforts doing this every day.🙏)

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        1. If anyone’s got a music subscription from down Cupertino way, the Maria Callas greatest hits recording has a spiffy animated cover.

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    2. Yes, STS-61 was a shuttle mission to repair the multi-billon dollar Hubble Space Telescope. Four astronauts spent almost 40 hours of spacewalk time in crews of two to accomplish this on-site in-space repair to make Hubble useful. They dealt with all of the frustrations we deal with when trying to repair machinery on the ground such as stuck bolts and bent frames, but these problems were amplified by the zero-g and hostile vacuum of space. It was a real testament to NASA’s training and these astronauts’ mental toughness and physical condition that this task was fully successful.

      Reply

      1. Although NASA is still expecting — sooner or later — to safely deorbit (and destroy) the Hubble Space Telescope, I’ve read some technical discussion lately about extending its mission with commercial astronauts and replacement parts ferried by a SpaceX Starship mission. Starship’s size has also been mentioned as possibly allowing the vehicle to capture and return the telescope to Earth for display at the Smithsonian Museum, or to put the telescope into a high orbit out of the way of other satellites (which I suggest might be called a “museum” orbit).

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  4. Great items today.

    1. I am decaffeinated at the moment – perhaps it is me – but what is the 2nd “it” supposed to be referring to in this paragraph :

    “Very little could happen without Justice O’Connor’s support when it came to the polarizing issues on the court’s docket, and the law regarding affirmative action, abortion, voting rights, religion, federalism, sex discrimination and other hot-button subjects was basically what Sandra Day O’Connor thought it should be.”

    2. Parmesan must be cheap where that restaurant is located – or the chef will be fired.

    3. Greta Thunberg must understand all the issues at a higher, sublated level than ordinary people. There is a profound connection we cannot grasp, not having reached the climate consciousness required.

    Greta Thunberg, 14 Aug 2014:
    “Teenagers and children – it is not our responsibility. What we are doing now is we demand you take your responsibility and do something. Our job is to demand solutions not provide solutions. We are demanding a solution not providing them.”

    So there must be something deep to it.

    Source:
    https://news.sky.com/story/no-home-comforts-for-greta-and-crew-as-they-sail-to-new-york-11784736

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  5. I have to say I think the House was wrong to expel Santos. Although he will probably be convicted of something, if the standard is having lied and having been charged with a crime, that is setting the bar very low. As Fetterman(!) pointed out, if that is the standard, then Senator Menendez should be expelled now. Others have pointed to Jamaal “Fire Marshal” Bowman who has actually pleaded guilty to a crime. Pending an actual conviction, I think Santos’s fate should have been left to his constituents at the coming election. I think that about Tlaib as well, by the way.

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    1. The genocide – or, “genocide” – as subtext in a paradigmatic desublimation forces the paradilemma : do we accept neohermeneutical tyranny, or absorb raunch culture as art? Either way, the neogendered birth and death of the original paradigm as pre-genocide reveals what was obvious all along :

      McDonald’s Big Fish is neither Big, nor Fish, but rather a Derridian neosynthesis that imprisons the Butlerian soul.

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  7. In my world there is no such thing as “a tad” of maple syrup. The smallest recognized measure is “a lot.”

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