Sunday: Hili dialogue

32 thoughts on “Sunday: Hili dialogue”

1. On this day (Part 1):
   1317 – The “Nyköping Banquet”: King Birger of Sweden treacherously seizes his two brothers Valdemar, Duke of Finland and Eric, Duke of Södermanland, who were subsequently starved to death in the dungeon of Nyköping Castle.

   1520 – Martin Luther burns his copy of the papal bull Exsurge Domine outside Wittenberg’s Elster Gate.

   1541 – Thomas Culpeper and Francis Dereham are executed for having affairs with Catherine Howard, Queen of England and wife of Henry VIII.

   1684 – Isaac Newton’s derivation of Kepler’s laws from his theory of gravity, contained in the paper De motu corporum in gyrum, is read to the Royal Society by Edmond Halley.

   1768 – The first edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica is published.

   1799 – France adopts the metre as its official unit of length.

   1896 – Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi premieres in Paris. A riot breaks out at the end of the performance.

   1901 – The first Nobel Prize ceremony is held in Stockholm on the fifth anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death.

   1906 – U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in the mediation of the Russo-Japanese War, becoming the first American to win a Nobel Prize in any field.

   1907 – The worst night of the Brown Dog riots in London, when 1,000 medical students, protesting against the existence of a memorial for animals that have been vivisected, clash with 400 police officers.

   1909 – Selma Lagerlöf becomes the first female writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.

   1936 – Abdication Crisis: Edward VIII signs the Instrument of Abdication.

   1942 – World War II: Government of Poland in exile send Raczyński’s Note (the first official report on the Holocaust) to 26 governments who signed the Declaration by United Nations.

   1948 – The Human Rights Convention is signed by the United Nations.

   1949 – Chinese Civil War: The People’s Liberation Army begins its siege of Chengdu, the last Kuomintang-held city in mainland China, forcing President of the Republic of China Chiang Kai-shek and his government to retreat to Taiwan.

   1953 – British Prime Minister Winston Churchill receives the Nobel Prize in Literature.

   1968 – Japan’s biggest heist, the still-unsolved “300 million yen robbery”, is carried out in Tokyo.

   1978 – Arab–Israeli conflict: Prime Minister of Israel Menachem Begin and President of Egypt Anwar Sadat are jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

   1983 – Democracy is restored in Argentina with the inauguration of President Raúl Alfonsín.

   1993 – The last shift leaves Wearmouth Colliery in Sunderland. The closure of the 156-year-old pit marks the end of the old County Durham coalfield, which had been in operation since the Middle Ages.

   1995 – The Israeli army withdraws from Nablus pursuant to the terms of Oslo Accord.

   1996 – The new Constitution of South Africa is promulgated by Nelson Mandela.

   1999 – Helen Clark is sworn in as Prime Minister of New Zealand, the second woman to hold the post and the first following an election.

   2017 – ISIL is defeated in Iraq.

   1. On this day (Part 2)
      Births:
      1787 – Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, American educator, founded the American School for the Deaf (d. 1851).

      1811 – Caroline Mehitable Fisher Sawyer, American poet, biographer, and editor (d. 1894).

      1815 – Ada Lovelace, English mathematician and computer scientist (d. 1852).

      1830 – Emily Dickinson, American poet (d. 1886).

      1851 – Melvil Dewey, American librarian, created the Dewey Decimal System (d. 1931).

      1908 – Olivier Messiaen, French composer and ornithologist (d. 1992).

      1913 – Morton Gould, American pianist, composer, and conductor (d. 1996).

      1914 – Dorothy Lamour, American actress and singer (d. 1996).

      1926 – Guitar Slim, American blues singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 1959).

      1934 – Howard Martin Temin, American geneticist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1994).

      1949 – Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Ugandan-English journalist and author.

      1952 – Clive Anderson, English lawyer and television host.

      1960 – Kenneth Branagh, British actor director, producer, and screenwriter.

      1974 – Meg White, American drummer.

      1980 – Sarah Chang, American violinist.

      1982 – Sultan Kösen, Turkish farmer, tallest living person. [He’s 251 cm (8 ft 2.82 in).]

      Eat leaden death, demon:
      1896 – Alfred Nobel, Swedish chemist and engineer, invented Dynamite and founded the Nobel Prize (b. 1833).

      1909 – Red Cloud, American tribal chief (of the Oglala nation) (b. 1822).

      1920 – Horace Elgin Dodge, American businessman, co-founded Dodge (b. 1868).

      1928 – Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Scottish architect and painter (b. 1868).

      1946 – Damon Runyon, American newspaperman and short story writer (b. 1884).

      1967 – Otis Redding, American singer-songwriter and producer (b. 1941).

      1978 – Ed Wood, American director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1924).

      1992 – Dan Maskell, English tennis player and sportscaster (b. 1908).

      2001 – Ashok Kumar, Indian actor, singer, and producer (b. 1911).

      2005 – Richard Pryor, American comedian, actor, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1940).

      2006 – Augusto Pinochet, Chilean general and dictator, 30th President of Chile (b. 1915).

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

      2017 – Max Clifford, British publicist (b. 1943).

      2020 – Barbara Windsor, English actress (b. 1937).

      2021 – Michael Nesmith, American musician (The Monkees), songwriter, actor, producer, and novelist (b. 1942).

2. I noticed that yesterday and today, WEIT is prefilling my name and email address for comments. Excellent! Thanks. This is the first time I have seen this service in all of my years as a faithful WEIT reader and commenter. I use an iPad and Safari browser.

   1. Thanks for the comment. I only tried since you said it worked, and by golly, it worked for me too. I look below as I’m typing right now and everything is filled in. Hip hip hurray!

      And the edit function has been working for a couple weeks as well. I’m sure happy Jerry found a WordPress guru.

      I use Windows 11 Home and Google Chrome, so it seems to be working across platforms…

   2. Yes, but I’d rather have the box to check for receiving comments/subscribing to a post.

3. A great response to AOC’s nonsense about allowing transwomen to compete in women’s sports: https://x.com/chartconsultllc/status/1732267601647034577

   1. AOC is really good at finding the most absurd take on anything, as if she were trying hard to be maximally wrong. Like, biological men being banned from women’s sports is really just men putting obstacles in the way of women…

4. I presume this new book is selling like hotcakes

   According to Kendi, “Whiteness prevents white people from connecting to humanity”. He’s in for a shock when he learns about what happened in Rwanda…
   https://x.com/iamyesyouareno/status/1732001688536395900

   1. In this case, free speech again proves its worth in revealing someone for who he really is. Kendi is revealed as someone who hates white people. Indeed, this has been clear to me from reading his famous book, How to Be an Anti-Racist. In the book’s first part, when he was still Ibram Henry Rogers, he recapitulates how his early career was built on his hatred of whites. But this career was taking him nowhere, and as the book progresses, he transforms himself into a new persona with a new, African-sounding name, a new hairdo, and a newly defined concept, anti-racism, by which persona his career took off and brought him fame and fortune. However, scratch the surface of his self-defined “anti-racism,” and you reveal the hatred that has always been at the core of this concept.

5. Re Kate Cox, What possible reason could there be to keep this pregnancy on hold?
   Of course it is not justice that motivates the court. It is simply politics. The need to signal ideological purity. Us vs. Them.

6. Forcing surrendering enemies to strip is a practice with ample precedent in the war in the Pacific. “Surrendering” Japanese soldiers were notorious for secreting bombs or grenades on their persons, and exploding them when amongst a group of Americans. They would even hide grenades in their underwear.

7. I don’t know…. I’ve always been partial to cytosine.

   1. I’m a Uracil man, myself.

8. I’m guessing that that the governments of the permanent members of the Security Council knew by prior diplomatic communication that the U.S. would veto the cease-fire resolution. This allowed lukewarm allies like France and Japan to vote for it in order to suck up to their Muslim populations and/or Chinese puppet masters without fear that it would pass, since it was obviously going to garner support from nearly all 15 of the Security Council members, and did.

   Seen this way, Britain’s abstention can be seen as a principled signal that they were snubbing their own Muslims in not voting for it. One veto is all you need. If the United States is that veto, it lets other countries off the hook.

   It shows that American leadership is still important for things that matter.

   1. Good points!

9. you wrote “That, of course, would be the precursor of a permanent cease-fire, the resurrection of Hamas, and the weakening and, ultimately, the destruction of Israel.”
   How would a cease-fire be existential to the state of Israel.

   1. It would, as I said, lead to a permanent cease fire that would force Israel back into the status quo, occupying the same territory. Hamas would revive and, as they’ve pledged, commit even more acts of butchery, supported by Iran. Other states or groups, like Hezbollah or Iran, seeing that attacking Israel was a winning project, would strike as well, as Israel would be weakened.

      A permanent cease fire would mean that Israel would be the one country in the world forbidden to defend itself against attack.

10. There are two trans-gender items that bear commenting today that I think show why one can’t advocate for “full civil rights for trans people”, no matter how appealingly liberal such a position seems. Even the codicil, “except for common-sense restrictions on change rooms, sports, violence shelters, and prisons” doesn’t cut it.

    First, trans people already enjoy, in the WEIRD countries, all the civil liberties — protection against state tyranny — under various constitutions that everyone else does: habeas corpus, freedom of speech, unlawful search and seizure, voting, etc. What trans activists want (and which well-meaning liberals often support) in addition are civil rights under which the state uses its power to constrain the freedom of private actors to curtail the desires of trans people to express their gender. The goal here is to add gender identity or expression to various civil rights laws (called human rights codes in some countries like Canada) as a protected ground against discrimination in, typically, employment and accommodation. This would make it illegal to fire a man for wearing a dress or enormous rubber breasts at work, just as it illegal to fire a black man for being black, even if both black men and autogynephilic men in dresses and rubber breasts alienate customers or make white or female employees uncomfortable. Tough, says the law. Race and gender expression are protected from private discrimination.

    Sounds good so far. But see where this leads. It now becomes illegal to bar “transwomen” from a lesbian speed-dating event otherwise open to members of the public. Why? Because a transwoman is considered in the law to be a woman who is transgendered. To exclude “her” is to discriminate on the basis of gender identity/expression and that is illegal.

    The same argument applies to women’s sports (as AOC is going on about.) All “women” must be allowed to compete and change together. To exclude “transwomen” is to discriminate on the basis of gender. It’s not just “transphobic”, it’s illegal, in jurisdictions that protect gender expression. And, while we’re at it, the Colorado case of an 11-year-old girl who was made to share a bed in a hotel with an adolescent boy on a school trip. The school had (manipulating the truth) assured parents that boys and girls would be assigned to different floors with chaperones supervising. (Duh.) What they didn’t say was that the boy was considered under Colorado law to be a girl. The school then pressured the mortified girl to lie to her parents about why she was reassigned to another bed…and some other girl had to sleep with the boy.

    Human/civil rights laws don’t allow these carve-outs to be done ad hoc. Worried about expensive suits by activists alleging human rights violations, the affected businesses, schools, etc. just go along and hope nothing really bad happens. A right isn’t a right if someone else says, “Except where we say it doesn’t apply…” Besides, even if you wrote the law to exempt locker rooms, sports, shelters, and prisons (the usual four, which, by the way, are not exempted in Canada) did anyone forecast the Colorado school trip case, or the lesbian speed-dating case?

    No, you have to resist efforts to make gender a protected ground against private discrimination that the state will punish.

    1. Its more and more plausible to me that the post-LGB alphabet people are captured by a subversive doctrine invented for advancing a communist vanguard.

       How?

       Dialectical political warfare – at the expense of the “LGB”s.

       I think it is working.

       There’s a former KGB agent, Yuri Bezmenov (1939-1993), who said that the majority of KGB activity is ideological subversion, that develops over decades – as contrasted with the romantic spy-movie stuff, which is some smaller fraction.

       https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Bezmenov

11. I notice that all those Hamas fighters look very well fed.

    1. On A Ukrainian blogger site that has been covering the Israeli/ Hamas conflict, an aerial video view (unverified) of Hamas fighters bulling Palestinians civilians and taking their food aid and driving off.

12. “fetal heartbeat at 6-weeks”

    At 6 weeks, it is neither a fetus nor a heartbeat. It’s an embryo (until approx. 10 weeks) and the “heartbeat” is a cluster of cells that exhibit electrical impulses. Sure, it may become a heart, but at 6 weeks it is not a heart, nor a beat, nor does it signal the heart (or pregnancy) will be viable.

    But I guess “embryonic cellular flutter” just doesn’t tug at the heartstrings…

    Also, I’ve never had a real bagel… 🙁

    1. Yes! We must be careful to avoid falling into forced-birthers’ manipulation of terminology. Another thing I’ve noticed is that many of them, perhaps foreseeing the pushback around “fetal heartbeat” and 6-week bans, are now trying to normalize 15-week bans, making that the new standard.
       On the Kate Cox matter, I believe the fetus hasn’t yet developed to the point of being able to feel pain, but will have that ability soon. The forced-birthers know this, hence their statement that in utero palliative care is the humane solution. Disgusting!

    2. Actually the heart at 6 weeks does beat as a co-ordinated muscle, generating contractile force and pulsatile blood flow, both detectable by ultrasound. (The concentric contraction of the ventricular muscle walls is directly imaged. Doppler picks up the to and fro movement of the red cells in the blood.) All four chambers are distinct in aborted anatomic specimens (although not resolvable in vivo) and the valves are starting to develop. The heart strings, aka chordae tendinae come later, but it is a heart doing its heart things. I make no argument about the metaphysics of what that means. It is of course not sufficient to sustain fetal life independent of the maternal-placental circulation on which it depends for oxygen, nutrients, and waste removal, but it is necessary that the augmentation of flow (slight at first) steps in to support the rapidly growing embryo.

       What the ultrasonographer (and the usually thrilled woman) hear is not a heartbeat like what you hear with a stethoscope but the acoustic Doppler signal amplified and transposed down into the audible range, not so very different from the ultrasonographic display of pulsatile blood flow (“whoosh whoosh whoosh”) in other areas of medicine. Both video and audio examples are readily available on the web. I won’t link to any because, perhaps for obvious reasons, they are posted by pro-life people whom many readers will find upsetting. Without Doppler circuitry you would see the heart beating but you wouldn’t be able to hear it.

       I’ve heard somewhere else that the “heartbeat” is just primitive electrical activity transmogrified into sound by electronic wizardry to manipulate pregnant women. That is itself manipulative disinformation. We’re not talking about a blastocyst here.

       Sorry to disappoint, but ’em’s da facts.

13. Try a bagel at Stan’s Donuts (there’s one in Hyde Park). Delicious.

14. Justice? What kind of justice is it to risk and mother’s life for a fetus that will suffer and die even if it’s born?

    It used to be the case that obstetricians asserted, without evidence, that foetuses could not perceive pain in utero.
    AIUI, the development of pre-birth surgery for a variety of conditions (heart malformations in particular, which can work with placenta circulation, but would fail when the lungs become active) has led to people trying the operations with, and without, anaesthesia (for the foetus). And thus now there is evidence that foetuses can suffer pain in the uterus.
    Which is really what you’d expect. But the idea that foetuses cannot experience pain still seems to be a belief in legal circles. That is a false belief that really needs challenging.
    You can also bet fairly significant money that someone, somewhere, is going to be demanding routine pre-birth anaesthesia for all foetuses about to go through birth – be it natural or Caesarean. That’ll raise a right ruckus when, not if, it happens.

    1. I’ve never heard of the belief that fetuses can’t feel pain in utero, but I have heard comments to the effect that pain meds issued to the mother pre-birth would also be beneficial to the fetus. Of course, that was the reason that I didn’t attempt “natural” childbirth for my son, born some 50+ years ago. I was so noble I took everything they were willing to give me and asked for more! 🙂

15. Ceiling Cat,
    Something lighthearted and endearing for distraction:

    https://x.com/Rainmaker1973/status/1733840462916526552?s=20

16. “Why is “G” (guanine) the favorite nucleotide?”

    I think the reason is scatalogical :

    guano

17. “What’s your favorite nucleotide?”

    “Gee….”

18. I demand equal rights for uracil.

    1. No way – it’s mine to possess as I will.

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