Monday: Hili dialogue

December 4, 2023 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the top o’ the work week: Monday, December 4, 2023, and National Cookie Day. Here’s my favorite biccie, but it’s made in the UK:

It’s also Cabernet Franc Day, Wildlife Conservation Day, and National Sock Day (if you’re Richard Dawkins, you’ll be deliberately donning mismatched socks).

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the December 4 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*War nooz from the NYT. The U.S. continues to tell Israel how to conduct the war:

The U.S. government is making an intense effort to persuade Israel and Hamas to resume negotiations so they can once again pause hostilities and exchange more prisoners for hostages, a White House spokesman said on Sunday.

“We are still working it really hard, hour by hour, to see if we can get the sides back to the table and see if we can get something moving,” John F. Kirby, the strategic communications coordinator at the White House National Security Council, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “We would like that to happen today. But honestly, I just don’t know.”

In appearances on several Sunday talk shows, Mr. Kirby emphasized that Hamas was to blame for the breakdown in talks, saying that it had not lived up to the terms of its original agreement to begin handing over captives held in Gaza.

He said Hamas had failed to produce a list of women and children who could be released in addition to the 105 hostages who were freed during the original pause in fighting. Among those still held are eight or nine Americans. Osama Hamdan, a representative for Hamas in Lebanon, said on Sunday that negotiations over the hostages would not resume until the Israeli assault stopped.

Israel has since resumed its attacks on Hamas, and Mr. Kirby urged it to avoid civilian casualties, while crediting its forces with making efforts to do so. He said Israeli authorities had been open to U.S. advice about how to make their assault more precise.

I was previously angry that the U.S. was telling the IDF to be careful about killing Gazan civilians but appeared to give no advice about how to do so. I’m heartened a bit that the U.S. is now giving advice on strategy. But I sill think that the IDF will continue to pursue its aims of destroying Hamas while at the same time engaging in an effort that makes destroying Hamas hard: trading hostages for terrorist prisoners. At least the US notes these words from Kirby:

“We believe that they have been receptive to our messages here in terms of trying to minimize civilian casualties,” he said on ABC’s “This Week.” He noted that Israel had published a map directing civilians to what it said were safe zones.

“There’s not a whole lot of modern militaries that would do that, I mean, that is, to telegraph their punches in that way,” he said. “So they are making an effort.”

I sort of agree with this tweet by Goldberg. There are other maps being dropped on Gaza by the IDF as well.

*I found the tweet below followed up by reading the linked article at Haaretz (the paper is by no means a supporter of the Israeli government). It reports the feelings of governments of other Arab states, although we have to take that with a grain of salt. But I’ve heard it elsewhere, too.

Some excerpts:

There are two other actors in this movie whose interests are more complex. The United States wants to restrain Israel’s military moves, but at this stage it isn’t trying to force a deal on Israel or prevent it from continuing military operations in Gaza. And the region’s Sunni Arab states are speaking in two voices.

Publicly, some of them (like Egypt and Jordan) are falling in line with public opinion in their countries and condemning the civilian deaths caused by Israel’s military response. But behind the scenes, almost every leader in the region, including in most of the Gulf states, is urging Israel to end the war only after Hamas is defeated, since they view the organization as a dangerous domestic enemy.

And negotiations are continuing while the IDF looks to southern Gaza:

In conversations between Biden administration officials and Israeli officials, various American proposals were discussed. Washington is interested in trying to continue the hostage deals in the coming days, while extending the cease-fire.

If the fighting resumes, the administration would prefer that Israel first focus on further operations in northern Gaza rather than beginning operations in the densely populated south. It is also asking the IDF to be careful to use precision weaponry and exercise great care when fighting in crowded areas.

Nevertheless, as noted, the moment of decision seems to be approaching. The IDF’s plans for an offensive in southern Gaza have already been presented to the war cabinet, including efforts to deal with the enormous challenge of relocating the Palestinian civilian population in an area where half the people now present have already been forced to move once, when Israel demanded last month that they move from Gaza’s north to its south.

*The United Nations Relief and Works agency, (UNRWA) has been accused of complicity with terrorists, with claims that one Israeli hostage was held for 50 days in a UNRWA employee’s attic.  The UN agency has long been subject to claims of being in bed with Hamas, including having Hamas members as employees and distributing textbooks in its schools that glorify terrorism. Now The Jerusalem Post reports that the UNRWA denies the hostage accusation on “X”, but there are some “added context” by readers (check the links) of the tweet shown below.

The United Nations’s agency in the Palestinian territories is aware of and attempting to get to the bottom of a claim that one of its teachers detained one of the Israeli hostages.

This report originated from Israeli journalist Almog Boker of Israeli Channel 13, who reported earlier this week that one of the hostages held in Gaza since Oct. 7 “was held for almost 50 days in the attic of a house” by a teacher with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. “This is a father of 10 children who locked the abductee in the attic, hardly provided him with food, and did not provide him with medicine.”

UNRWA is angry, as you can see from the tweet. I have little doubt, in light of reports like the ones in the “readers context,” that UNRWA, and by extension the UN, has indeed been guilty of buttressing terrorism. (h/t Rosemary).

Be sure to see the video in the second tweet in today’s selection (the tweet after Masih’s) for a frightening look at the way UNRWA incites Palestinian hatred towards Jews.

UNRWA should have responded by saying “We take these allegations seriously and are investigating them.”  Instead, their angry and threatening response only makes them look more incompetent and, perhaps, complicit in the war. In my view, the organization (the only relief group in the UN devoted to a single territory) should be disbanded and refurbished before it can operate again.

*An op-ed in the Washington Post  by Rick Reilly reveals that one of the named writers for Sports Illustrated (and probably two) was actually an AI bot.

I worked for 23 fabulous years at the impeccable Sports Illustrated, and even afterward I still followed SI writers. My favorite: a kid named Drew Ortiz, a productive young guy who sounded like a cool outdoorsy type. “There is rarely a weekend that goes by where Drew isn’t out camping,” said SI.com, “… or just back on his parents’ farm.”

The only thing a little odd about Drew Ortiz was that he didn’t exist.

He was fake. He was a writer-bot. He was AI SI, FYI. Although, SI didn’t tell me that. They tried to palm him off as real. His author photo came from a website that sells fake headshots. As the website Futurism revealed on Monday, SI has tragically deleted Drew and his entire life’s work.

Which means that nobody gets to read Drew’s bon mots, which sounded like somebody in Uzbekistan talking to Google Translate. Volleyball, he said, “can be a little tricky to get into, especially without an actual ball to practice with.”

. . .Once Drew had been erased like a Russian general, he was replaced with a young woman named Sora Tanaka, who “loves to try different foods and drinks,” SI readers were told. Soon, poof, Sora was vaporized, too. Droids aren’t good at digesting lots of foods and drinks anyway.

SI’s parent company, the Arena Group, did the responsible thing: They blamed the whole mess all on somebody else. The bot pieces, they said, were “licensed content” from a third-party company called AdVon Commerce, which in turn said, uh, no, well, see, all those articles were penned by actual humans who may have used “pseudo names … to protect author privacy.”

And it’s spreading!

Newspapers are also letting machines do their reporting. Last summer, the Columbus Dispatch used a machine to write up high school football games, which stinks because covering high school football is how I got my first break in the business. There go those jobs. And it isn’t just in sports. Headline: “News Corp using AI to produce 3,000 Australian local news stories a week.”

Journalism is getting faker than Velveeta.

I can’t believe that magazines and newspapers can do this without disclosing at the top of the piece that it was written by a bot. Isn’t this duplicitous, like copying your term paper from Wikipedia?

*Another creature thought to be extinct—a mammal this time—has been found alive. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the name is partly an eponym, and so is probably doomed. But the way they got a clue that the blind mole was still around was by sieving DNA from the environment and sequencing it!

A blind mole thought since 1936 to be extinct was recently rediscovered in South African sand dunes using eDNA — a technique that collects skin cells living creatures shed “while they are busy with their lives,” the expedition’s leader said.

The rediscovery of De Winton’s golden mole offers the chance to learn more about a tiny mammal that, so far, has been poorly understood by the scientific community. It also offers a chance to reinvigorate conservation efforts for the elusive critter and gives hope to efforts to find other species scientists presume to be extinct, said Cobus Theron, senior conservation manager for the Endangered Wildlife Trust and leader of the expedition.

But trying to find the little fellow has been like playing a game of whack-a-mole in nature’s arcade.

“It’s very difficult to understand them because they spend most of their lives underground,” Theron told The Washington Post. “They have superb abdominal muscles and they’ve got very strong pedal-like arms to move through the sand. They rely entirely on hearing for hunting so they must have superb sensory hearing.”

A paper chronicling the search for the De Winton’s golden mole was published Nov. 24 in the scientific journal Biodiversity and Conservation.

To find the mysterious mammal, Theron’s team from the Endangered Wildlife Trust and the University of Pretoria used a revolutionary technology called eDNA, meaning the environmental DNA that animals shed in their ecosystems.

Theron’s team collected sand samples along the beaches and dunes on the northwest coast of South Africa — the only place De Winton’s golden mole had been seen previously — and then the crew sifted through those samples in a lab to isolate the eDNA.

To differentiate De Winton’s golden mole from other mole species, the team used a DNA sample that had been maintained by a South African museum for decades.

When the team compared their eDNA sequences to the sample, it was a clear match to the De Winton’s golden mole, their study reported.

Of course finding DNA in the environment isn’t really proof that the creature is still alive, as that DNA could be old. You have to see the creature alive to get proof, and they did.  Here’s a video recounting the discovery:

Now the blind mammal was named after British zoologist William Edward de Winton (1856-1922) so it’s time to sniff out his life for unsavory aspects, all to the end of de-naming the mole.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Szaron are contemplating going out:

Hili: Do you see the night?
Szaron: No, it’s dark out there.
In Polish:
Hili: Widzisz noc?
Szaron: Nie, tam, jest ciemno.

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

Here is the BEST calendar for next year. Sadly’s it’s available only in the UK:

From Stacy:

This could be YOU!  From FB:

Retweeted by Masih; the Guardian piece by Deepa Parent is here.

From Luana. Speaking of UNRWA, please have a gander at their complicity in terrorism (i.e., watch the video). We really need to let people know about this UN “activity”:

From Merilee: a bird playing with a ball! Is it a magpie?

UN Women, after condemning Hamas’s sexual violence on October 7 in a tweet, and then removing it almost immediately, finally found the spine to condemn Hamas (I know—it’s hard!).  To little and too late:

And this is why UN women is reprehensible and should be disbanded and reformulated:

From Jez: “A recycling of a very familiar meme.” This is one of the best recyclings:

This d*g is well equipped!

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a girl aged 2 (probably gassed upon arrival):

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. This one is especially adorable:

This isn’t quite as cute (Matthew’s caption: “Some ppl are crazy”:

12 thoughts on “Monday: Hili dialogue”

  1. On this day (Part 1):
    771 – Austrasian king Carloman I dies, leaving his brother Charlemagne as sole king of the Frankish Kingdom.

    1791 – The first edition of The Observer, the world’s first Sunday newspaper, is published. [It’s now owned by the same group as The Guardian, but has a separate editorial team and is generally much better.]

    1829 – In the face of fierce local opposition, British Governor-General Lord William Bentinck issues a regulation declaring that anyone who abets suttee in Bengal is guilty of culpable homicide.

    1872 – The American brigantine Mary Celeste is discovered drifting in the Atlantic. Her crew is never found.

    1875 – Notorious New York City politician Boss Tweed escapes from prison; he is later recaptured in Spain.

    1881 – The first edition of the Los Angeles Times is published.

    1906 – Alpha Phi Alpha the first intercollegiate Greek lettered fraternity for African-Americans was founded at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

    1909 – The Montreal Canadiens ice hockey club, the oldest surviving professional hockey franchise in the world, is founded as a charter member of the National Hockey Association.

    1918 – U.S. President Woodrow Wilson sails for the World War I peace talks in Versailles, becoming the first US president to travel to Europe while in office.

    1919 – Ukrainian War of Independence: The Polonsky conspiracy is initiated, with an attempt to assassinate the high command of the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine.

    1943 – World War II: U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt closes down the Works Progress Administration, because of the high levels of wartime employment in the United States.

    1945 – By a vote of 65–7, the United States Senate approves United States participation in the United Nations. (The UN had been established on October 24, 1945.)

    1950 – Korean War: Jesse L. Brown (the 1st African-American Naval aviator) is killed in action during the Battle of Chosin Reservoir.

    1956 – The Million Dollar Quartet (Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash) get together at Sun Studio for the first and last time.

    1964 – Free Speech Movement: Police arrest over 800 students at the University of California, Berkeley, following their takeover and sit-in at the administration building in protest of the UC Regents’ decision to forbid protests on UC property.

    1965 – Launch of Gemini 7 with crew members Frank Borman and Jim Lovell. The Gemini 7 spacecraft was the passive target for the first crewed space rendezvous performed by the crew of Gemini 6A.

    1969 – Black Panther Party members Fred Hampton and Mark Clark are shot and killed during a raid by 14 Chicago police officers.

    1971 – During a concert by Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention at the Montreux Casino, an audience member fires a flare gun into the ceiling, causing a fire that destroys the venue. [By coincidence, I heard Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water” yesterday for the first time in ages. Today is also the anniversary of Frank’s death.]

    1978 – Following the murder of Mayor George Moscone, Dianne Feinstein becomes San Francisco’s first female mayor.

    1991 – Terry A. Anderson is released after seven years in captivity as a hostage in Beirut; he is the last and longest-held American hostage in Lebanon.

    1991 – Pan American World Airways ceases its operations after 64 years.

    1992 – Somali Civil War: President George H. W. Bush orders 28,000 U.S. troops to Somalia in Northeast Africa.

    1998 – The Unity Module, the second module of the International Space Station, is launched.

    2005 – Tens of thousands of people in Hong Kong protest for democracy and call on the government to allow universal and equal suffrage.

    2017 – The Thomas Fire starts near Santa Paula in California. It eventually became the largest wildfire in modern California history to date after burning 440 square miles (1,140 km2) in Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties.

    1. On this day (Part 2)
      Births:
      1727 – Johann Gottfried Zinn, German anatomist and botanist (d. 1759).

      1777 – Juliette Récamier, French businesswoman (d. 1849). [An icon of neoclassicism, Récamier cultivated a public persona as a great beauty, and her fame quickly spread across Europe. She befriended many intellectuals, sat for the finest artists of the age, and spurned an offer of marriage from Prince Augustus of Prussia.]

      1795 – Thomas Carlyle, Scottish-English historian, philosopher, and academic (d. 1881).

      1835 – Samuel Butler, English author and critic (d. 1902).

      1865 – Edith Cavell, English nurse, humanitarian, and saint (Anglicanism) (d. 1915). [Celebrated for treating wounded soldiers from both sides without discrimination, she covertly helped some 200 Allied soldiers escape from German-occupied Belgium and return to active service during the First World War, a capital offence under the German military law of the Second Reich. Cavell was arrested and court-martialed for Kriegsverrat (lit: “war-treason”, fig. perfidy), found guilty, and executed by firing squad.]I

      1875 – Agnes Forbes Blackadder, Scottish medical doctor (d. 1964).

      1875 – Rainer Maria Rilke, Austrian-Swiss poet and author (d. 1926).

      1882 – Constance Davey, Australian psychologist (d. 1963).

      1883 – Katharine Susannah Prichard, Australian author and playwright (d. 1969).

      1887 – Winifred Carney, Irish suffragist, trade unionist, and Irish republican (d. 1943).

      1892 – Francisco Franco, Spanish general and dictator, Prime Minister of Spain (d. 1975).

      1908 – Alfred Hershey, American bacteriologist and geneticist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1997).

      1914 – Claude Renoir, French cinematographer (d. 1993).

      1920 – Michael Bates, English actor (d. 1978).

      1921 – Deanna Durbin, Canadian actress and singer (d. 2013).

      1930 – Ronnie Corbett, Scottish actor and screenwriter (d. 2016).

      1930 – Jim Hall, American guitarist and composer (d. 2013).

      1940 – Gary Gilmore, American murderer (d. 1977).

      1944 – Anna McGarrigle, Canadian musician and singer-songwriter.

      1944 – Dennis Wilson, American singer-songwriter, producer, and drummer (d. 1983).

      1945 – Roberta Bondar, Canadian neurologist, academic, and astronaut.

      1948 – Southside Johnny, American singer-songwriter.

      1949 – Jeff Bridges, American actor.

      1951 – Gary Rossington, American guitarist (d. 2023).

      1969 – Jay-Z, American rapper, producer, and actor, co-founded Roc-A-Fella Records.

      1973 – Tyra Banks, American model, actress, and producer.

      1992 – Jin, South Korean singer, songwriter and actor. [Member of the South Korean boy band BTS. They are all currently already serving or signed up for mandatory military service.]

      If your children ever find out how lame you really are, they’ll murder you in your sleep:
      530 BC – Cyrus the Great, king of Persia (b. 600 BC).

      1131 – Omar Khayyám, Persian poet, astronomer, mathematician, and philosopher (b. 1048).

      1603 – Maerten de Vos, Flemish painter and draughtsman (b. 1532).

      1609 – Alexander Hume, Scottish poet (b. 1560).

      1642 – Cardinal Richelieu, French cardinal and politician, Chief Minister to the French Monarch (b. 1585).

      1679 – Thomas Hobbes, English philosopher and theorist (b. 1588).

      1732 – John Gay, English poet and playwright (b. 1685).

      1798 – Luigi Galvani, Italian physician, physicist, and philosopher (b. 1737).

      1850 – William Sturgeon, English physicist, invented the electric motor (b. 1783).

      1902 – Charles Dow, American journalist and publisher, co-founded the Dow Jones & Company (b. 1851).

      1926 – Ivana Kobilca, Slovenian painter (b. 1861).

      1945 – Thomas Hunt Morgan, American geneticist and biologist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1866).

      1967 – Bert Lahr, American actor (b. 1895).

      1975 – Hannah Arendt, German-American historian, theorist, and academic (b. 1906).

      1976 – Tommy Bolin, American guitarist and songwriter (b. 1951).

      1976 – Benjamin Britten, English pianist, composer, and conductor (b. 1913).

      1993 – Frank Zappa, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer (b. 1940).

      1999 – Rose Bird, American academic and judge, 25th Chief Justice of California (b. 1936).

      2011 – Hubert Sumlin, American singer and guitarist (b. 1931).

      2014 – Jeremy Thorpe, English lawyer and politician (b. 1929). [In May 1979 he was tried at the Old Bailey on charges of conspiracy and incitement to murder his ex-boyfriend Norman Scott, a former model. Thorpe was acquitted on all charges, but the case, and the furore surrounding it, ended his political career.]

      2016 – Patricia Robins, British writer and WAAF officer (b. 1921).

      2017 – Shashi Kapoor, Indian actor (b. 1938).

  2. That Israel’s Muslim-majority neighbors share in the desire to see Hamas destroyed (whether they publicly admit it or not) is also supported and explained in this podcast interview with a deeply informed source. Basically, he says that the leaders of those nations know that Hamas hates most of them, and they will be its next targets. https://www.fdd.org/podcasts/2023/12/01/what-hamas-believes/

  3. Part of the Biden administrations rationale for pushing for ceasefires has to be the pressure from his party’s left-wing. A lot of the demonstrations are directed against the administration, and there is a push for Muslim voters to abandon the party.

    Among other issues with ai-generated articles is that ai probably isn’t programmed for journalist ethics and isn’t subject to fact-checking. [I now type “ai” rather than Al, because in the online, san-serif world, it looks like everyone is talking about a guy named “Al”.]

  4. Jeebus. UNRWA, right? The thing is, shutting it down might not be that effective since the whole terrorist training infrastructure, weapons, and fan base will still be there. It could just continue as it has been, with funding from a network of various donors.

  5. With this comment, I am following DrBrydon’s move to “ai” in lower case. I always thought that what has been basically a giant, dumb, curve-fitting program with no dynamic predictive capability should not get the platform it gets, and the lower case seems to me to take it down a notch. So thanks DrB! A couple of months ago, the wapo had a half page report in its news section (A) on some type of space technology…I cannot recall exactly what. As I read it, the style seemed different: it repeated themes several paragraphs apart but with slightly different words. It made historical claims that were similar in different parts of the article without relating them together. I thought, I bet this was written by a bot…it just did not exude a human essence in its style. It was exactly what a machine with no understanding but with access to a vast array of previously written thoughts and words would cobble together.

    1. Could be! Wasn’t it WaPo or some other entity notorious for using a lot of un-paid writers?
      Anyway, I find that as this practice becomes more common, and more generally known, that the readership will go somewhere else. It just does not feel interesting to read something for entertainment that was written by a bot. So this emerging practice could be putting more nails in the coffin of journalism.
      I am not a robot, btw.

      1. Yes. I do not know how much longer thoughtful readers will put up with what nyt and wapo have become. I still get wapo because I live in Virginia and it has a regional/local metro section that covers some Virginia news and politics. Though it has become so woke that I may switch to the right of center Richmond Times Disgrace errr..Dispatch.

  6. The ball-playing bird is not a Eurasian, Black-billed, Yellow-billed, or Australian Magpie (the common magpies of English-speaking countries, the latter not being a “true” magpie).

    GCM

    1. The bird appears to be a Grey-crowned Babbler (Pomatostomus temporalis), which occurs in Australia and New Guinea. I’m guessing the video was taken in the former.

      Full disclosure: I have never been to either Australia or New Guinea and have no personal experience with this species.

  7. Re: Cabernet Franc Day.

    Trader Joe’s (at least out here in CA) carries a decent Cabernet Franc for under $10.

    One of my favorite wine experiences was when a friend brought out a bottle of Cab Franc (not TJ’s!) and a Petit Verdot. So different: the Cab Franc was up front fruity with no finish, and the Petit Verdot was like a bass guitar that lingered.

    And then he had us “blend” them together there at the table, and it was like magic! You. Complete. Me.

  8. The glacial pace of the UN Women report was covered on NPR this morning. One of the women who had been involved in sending the information was describing the information and repeatedly got to “I won’t describe the information in detail.”

    I thought she really should have. Otherwise, it’s about like describing scenes from the Holocaust as, “…they left the barracks and were never seen again.”

    Better than nothing, I guess. The further info about how other Arab leaders really feel is good, too.

    But with the UNRWA video, given the chance, how would it ever be possible to de-program all of those kids?

Comments are closed.