Friday: Hili dialogue

January 12, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the tail end of the week: Friday January 12, 2024, and National Curried Chicken Day. I doubt that any reader will actually eat this, but let us know if you do. Here’s a photo of the type that inspired one of my friends to ask, when it was served, “Are you gonna eat that, or did you already eat that?”

“Chicken Katsu Curry with Rice – Wagamama Flinders Lane” by avlxyz is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

It’s also National Glazed Donut Day, International French Onion Soup Day (cultural appropriation), National Hot Tea Day, International Kiss a Ginger Day, National Marzipan Day, National Pharmacist Day,National Youth Day in India, and Prosecutor General’s Day in Russia.

Here is the Mother of All Glazed Doughnuts: the “Big Dat” from Dat Donuts on Cottage Grove near the University. Yes, I ate the whole thing (photo is in 2009):

A video of the making of Big Dats:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the January 12 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*In Yemen, the U.S. and its allies (thank you, UK) launched serious air and naval strikes on the Houthis yesterday, severely reducing the terrorist group’s ability to launch rockets and commandeer ships in the Red Sea and Persian Gulf (see below).

The United States and a handful of its allies carried out the air and naval strikes early Friday against more than a dozen targets in Yemen linked with the Houthi militia. The strikes were a sharp escalation of American action against Houthi drone and missile attacks in the crucial commercial shipping lanes of the Red Sea, which the militia has said are in support of Palestinians under Israeli bombardment in Gaza.

A spokesman for the Houthis, referring to the American-led strikes, told Al Jazeera: “It’s not possible for us not to respond to these operations.”

Iran called the U.S.-led strikes a violation of Yemen’s sovereignty and of international laws, according to state media. Hamas, the armed Palestinian group that controls Gaza, denounced what it called “act of terrorism” and said the United States and Britain would be responsible for “repercussions on the security of the region.”

President Biden called the strikes a “clear message that the United States and our partners will not tolerate attacks on our personnel or allow hostile actors to imperil freedom of navigation in one of the world’s most critical commercial routes.”

Of course now the U.S. is being accused of widening the war. I guess they want the Houthis to completely shut down shipping traffic in the Red Sea and

*We have to keep track of Trump’s many trials, and this news is about his civil fraud bench trial in New York, in which he’s already been convicted of fraudulently overestimating his net worth to get bank loans.  And, in court yesterday, Trump was out of control, impugning the judge and the state’s attorney and making a hash of everything:

Donald J. Trump on Thursday delivered abrupt remarks in his own defense on the final day of his civil fraud trial in Manhattan, attacking the New York attorney general, who brought the case, insulting the judge to his face and declaring himself “an innocent man.”

Mr. Trump’s remarks were chaotic and emotional and lasted only minutes, during which he impugned the attorney general, Letitia James, a Democrat, saying she “hates Trump and uses Trump to get elected.”

He also took aim at the judge, Arthur F. Engoron, remarking, “You have your own agenda, I certainly understand that.” He added, as the judge stared stonily at him, “You can’t listen for more than one minute.”

Justice Engoron instructed the former president’s lawyer to “control your client.” But Mr. Trump continued until the lunch break, at which point he stopped as suddenly as he had started.

The episode ushered in a dramatic conclusion to a monthslong trial that has enraged the former president and threatens his family business.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers had initially put forward his plan to speak in his own defense last week, but the judge imposed limits on his remarks. Justice Engoron ruled that the former president could not deliver “a campaign speech” or attack the judge, his staff or Ms. James. Mr. Trump’s legal team objected, apparently scuttling his plan to speak, until one of his lawyers renewed the request at the end of the defense’s closing arguments on Thursday and the judge permitted it.

But despite the judge’s objections and restrictions, the former president appeared to speak his mind exactly as he had planned, reiterating that he “did nothing wrong,” and arguing that the attorney general “should pay me” for what he’s gone through.

Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades, this may be the next President of the United States. He can’t even keep his yap shut in front of a judge who will help determine the penalties, which could include taking Trump’s company away from him.

*Oh boy, yet another body of water rendered dangerous for shipping, but this time not by the Houthis, but by Iran, which seized a Greek-registered oil tanker in the straits between the Gulf of Oman and the Persian Gulf yesterday.

The Iranian Navy said it had seized an oil tanker off the coast of Oman that has been at the center of a dispute between Iran and the U.S., raising the stakes amid a spate of attacks by Iran-backed Houthi rebels along Middle Eastern shipping routes and warnings of retaliation from Washington.

The seizure came as Secretary of State Antony Blinken wrapped up a weeklong tour of the region aimed at cooling tensions there, especially in the waters of the Middle East, where attacks have risen since the Israel-Hamas war began.

Houthi rebels from Yemen have repeatedly targeted commercial ships transiting through another key waterway, the Red Sea, in retaliation for Israeli actions in Gaza. Iran’s seizure of the vessel Thursday raises the specter of threats to shipping spreading to the Persian Gulf, another key trade route.

Since the start of the war in Gaza, America and its allies have pursued backchannel diplomacy to avoid directly confronting Iran and its proxies, who have continued to provoke the West, including with attacks on U.S. bases in Syria and Iraq by Shiite militias sponsored by Tehran. The threat of strikes on Yemen signals that the U.S. is close to drawing a line.

“The U.S. is failing to understand that with Iran you cannot solve problems using diplomacy,” said Jacob Nagel, a former Israeli national security adviser and senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. “There needs to be full economic pressure and a credible military threat.”

Iran’s Navy identified the boarded tanker as the Greek-managed St. Nikolas. The tanker was impounded “in retaliation for the theft of oil by the American regime,” the Iranian army said. Iranian state media showed Iranian commandos landing on the ship’s deck from a military helicopter.

The vessel, formerly known as the Suez Rajan, has a complicated past. Last year, the Suez Rajan’s charterers pleaded guilty to charges filed in a U.S. court that it carried sanctioned Iranian oil. The company was fined and its Iranian oil cargo was seized.

. . . “The Iranian Army’s seizure of the oil tanker does not constitute hijacking,” a spokesman for the Iranian mission at the United Nations in New York told The Wall Street Journal. “Rather, it is a lawful undertaking sanctioned by a co

Here’s where the ship was seized:

*Four new papers in Nature (too many to summarize, but subject to a single News item here),

More than 1,600 ancient genomes have helped to trace the roots of a host of genetic traits found in modern Europeans. The genomes suggest that many characteristics — including a heightened risk for multiple sclerosis — were carried to Europe by people who migrated to the continent in three distinct waves starting around 45,000 years ago.

These results and others were published today in four related papers in Nature.

The findings provide evidence that some of the regional variation in certain traits was caused by differences in migrants’ dispersal patterns. That contradicts the idea that genetic differences arose mainly as people adapted to conditions in specific locations in Europe.

“This is a tour de force,” says Lluís Quintana-Murci, a population geneticist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris who was not involved in the study. He says that the research provides unprecedented detail on how ancient ancestry can influence disease risk to this day. “It’s a beautiful example of how, by addressing very basic fundamental anthropological and genomic questions, you can inform medicine,” he says.

Well, I haven’t read the papers, so I can’t comment on the specific findings, but you can find them at the source. To me it’s not surprising that there were multiple migrations to Europe over a relatively short time (in this case, 40,000 years, since we know that there were earlier migrations out of Africa that didn’t leave any living descendants (well, a few of their genes). Here’s the assumption people were working on:

Europe was settled by anatomically modern humans in three main waves: hunter-gatherers reached Europe from Asia around 45,000 years ago; farmers arrived from the Middle East 11,000 years ago; and pastoralists — animal herders — came from the steppes of western Asia and eastern Europe 5,000 years ago. Archaeologists and historians had assumed that these groups mixed with one another throughout the continent, and that populations in particular places evolved distinct traits in response to their local environments.

Perhaps there’s a reason they thought that all the different waves of migrants mixed thoroughly, but my working assumption would be that they didn’t, for each group would consist of people who were from one area and were more socially coherent than they would be with the other groups.

The dispersal patterns mean that many modern Europeans carry some genetic ancestry from all three population waves, but the relative amount of each varies depending on the location, Willerslev says.

Next, the researchers compared the ancient genomes with those of 410,000 modern individuals whose genetic profiles are stored in the UK Biobank, a massive database of genetic and physical information. The data provided clear evidence that many traits trace back directly to one of the three migration waves.

For instance, modern northern Europeans are taller and lighter skinned than their southern counterparts because they have more ancestry from the steppe pastoralists. And those with the most hunter-gatherer ancestry, commonly found in northeastern Europe, have variants that put them at higher risk of diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease.

In other words, the distribution of traits in Europe largely reflect the genes already differentially represented in populations as they moved from Africa to Europe, and are not solely the results of natural selection causing genetic differentiation in situ. 

*Canada’s conservative National Post (who else would write such a piece) has a commentary called “Irwin Cotler: South Africa is inverting reality by accusing Israel of genocide” with the subtitle  “It is Hamas that should go on trial at the International Court of Justice, not the Jewish state.”

In the wake of the Oct. 7 atrocities, apologists for Hamas — as if there could be any justification for mass murder — took the position that the events of Oct. 7 had to be understood, if not justified, in their “historical context.” The true historical context of the Oct. 7 invasion — the context that set the stage for those heinous acts — is the standing crime of incitement to genocide not only by Hamas, but by its patron, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and by Iran’s other terrorist proxies, including Hezbollah in Lebanon and Ansar Allah (the Houthis) in Yemen, all of whom have called for the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews. Indeed, Hamas’s founding charter openly declared its genocidal intentions, and since it took power in Gaza in 2006, it has engaged in a domestic campaign of antisemitic indoctrination, while its leaders have clearly and consistently incited genocide against Israelis and Jewish people worldwide. Since Oct. 7, Hamas leaders have continued to proudly declare their genocidal intentions, with senior Hamas official Ghazi Hamad pledging to commit the Oct. 7 atrocities “again and again.”

South Africa’s ICJ application inverts this reality, placing Israel — for its response to the Oct. 7 invasion, which genocide scholars have found to have likely constituted genocide — in the docket of the accused.

This is not to suggest, or to have it inferred, that what is happening in Gaza is not a human and humanitarian tragedy. Innocent Gazans have been killed, displaced and deprived, and have experienced terrible suffering.

At the same time, Israel’s actions in Gaza are impossible to reconcile with the intention to commit genocide — a necessary element of the crime. Israel consistently seeks to minimize harm to civilians ­using measures including leaflets, messages and phone calls to urge civilians to evacuate targeted areas, creating humanitarian zones and corridors, and facilitating humanitarian aid.

It goes on, but that’s pretty much all you need to say, except for the list of war crimes committed by Hamas.  The author, by the way, is “the International Chair of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, the former Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, and was Canada’s first Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism.”

*What the deuce? Yes, they discovered a tunnel under a famous Brooklyn synagogue, but clearly not for Hamas. I have in fact visited this synagogue, where they dragged me inside, slapped a kippah on my head, draped a tallis around my torso, placed tefillin on my head and arms, and fervently prayed over me (I told them I was a nonbeliever, but they said that was okay: my presence in that garb would be a mitzvah that would hasten the return of the Messiah!) But I digress:

Those supporting the tunnel said they were carrying out an “expansion” plan long envisioned by the former head of the movement, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson. But that hasn’t stopped a proliferation of social media posts falsely suggesting the passage is proof of illicit activities such as child sex trafficking.

“This entire episode is immensely painful for us, the Jewish community at large and all decent people,” Rabbi Motti Seligson, a spokesperson for Chabad, told The Associated Press. He also noted that sensationalism and errors in the media “have provided fodder to these individuals who are trolling online.”

The illegal tunnel discovered under a historic Brooklyn synagogue compromised the stability of several structures surrounding the religious complex, prompting an order to vacate as well as citations against its owners, city officials said.

Inspectors with New York City’s building safety agency uncovered a tunnel that was 60 feet (18.3 meters) long and 8 feet (2.4 meters) wide beneath the Chabad-Lubavitch global headquarters in Crown Heights. It connected four buildings owned by the Hasidic group through openings cut into basement walls.

The excavation work was done without the approval of the Department of Buildings, agency spokesman Andrew Rudansky said in an email to The Associated Press on Wednesday. He said the tunnel was empty except for dirt, tools and debris.

The findings came after a two-day investigation into the structural stability of the complex, an internationally revered Hasidic Jewish center that became the site of a brawl Monday between police and worshippers seeking to defend the tunnel.

WHY?

Rabbi Motti Seligson, a spokesperson for Chabad, said the underground passage was built by a group of “young agitators” seeking unauthorized access to the synagogue. When Chabad officials attempted to seal the openings on Monday, worshippers inside the tunnel refused to leave until they were dragged out by police.

The Lubavitchers are a strange group. Many of them thought that their leader, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson was the Messiah, and when he died in 1994 a lot of them refused to accept that the Messiah was dead. This caused a schism among the Lubavitchers, but whether this has anything to do with the tunnel “agitators” is above my pay grade. But I doubt it has anything to do with terrorism or child trafficking, though people are already leveling that accusation at the Jews who build the tunnels. Go figure.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili doesn’t trust that Spring is coming:

A: Days are a bit longer now.
Hili: Allegedly.
In Polish:
Ja: Dni są już trochę dłuższe.
Hili: Podobno.
Shhh. . . . Baby Kulka is sleeping:

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

From Divy:

From Bad Cat Clothing:

And another cat meme, this time from Sue. What a great present!

From Masih, another Iranian woman protestor beat up badly by the cops. She fled the country to Turkey after imprisonment and torture, but is now suffering the aftermath. If you want to donate for Modaeresi’s medical care (and she needs money), go here (it’s in the link, too).

This is unbelievable, and I had to retweet it. I weep for America, and this is “progressive” San Francisco (well, that may explain it). Nellie Bowles explains in The Free Press:

Across the country, a progressive San Francisco Jewish man testified against the official city resolution for a cease-fire, saying that five of his family members were killed by Hamas, while the crowd at City Hall loudly jeered him. Some made pig noises or stood behind him making horns with their fingers, a nod to the old conspiracy theory that Jews have horns (I check the mirror every morning). When someone else at the meeting read language that acknowledged the rape of Israeli women, the crowd shouted: “Liar.”

A lovely Happy Dance:

A photobombing fish:

 

A akateboarding kitty!:

From cesar; read the whole thread to see what happened:

From Malcolm, an adorable playing kitten (I’d leave the sound off):

From the Auschwitz Memorial, another family wiped out in the camp:

One tweet from Dr. Cobb today. You explain to me, using an ecological or evolutionary perspective, why a turtle would help another turtle this way. (There are several possible answers.)

29 thoughts on “Friday: Hili dialogue”

  1. “… the distribution of traits in Europe largely reflect the genes already differentially represented in populations as they moved from Africa to Europe, and are not solely the results of natural selection causing genetic differentiation in situ. ”

    ^^^ I came for the evolution …

    ” I doubt that any reader will actually eat this, but let us know if you do. ”

    … I stayed for everything else!…

    But no, I wouldn’t, but that ain’t chicken curry – but chicken curry is great if made in e.g. an Indian restaurant.

    1. This curry dish is a Japanese dish with a thick katsu sauce. My Asian wife and in-laws love this kind of food. I enjoy eating it; it’s not half bad, actually. But I much prefer the Indian dish, chicken Tikka.

      1. Oh, right – there’s the Thai one’s too, which is good – though … actually, I never heard of Japanese curry.

        … well, I guess that goes to show my currant priorities! 😉

      2. Not being a foodie by any stretch of the imagination, but isn’t the “chicken tikka” one of those “stereotypical nationality dishes” which was invented elsewhere, like Chinese Chow Mein being invented by an American cook. In this case, the chicken tikka being a Glaswegian invention, once stripped of the essential battering and deep-frying.

        1. I was under the impression that CTM was the only “counterfeit” Indian dish. (BTW, this is curry – onion / no cream based sauce, v. tomato-cream).

          Indian food, as expected, further breaks down to regions – e.g. Kerala, Kashmiri, North, etc. which I don’t know very well.

      3. When my oldest was little, it was his favorite dish. Ordering it properly and politely in a restaurant was his first real phrase in Japanese (he was five).

    2. If, like me, you’re not into hot curries, I recommend Korma or Butter Chicken. Very tasty.

  2. On this day:
    475 – Byzantine Emperor Zeno is forced to flee his capital at Constantinople, and his general, Basiliscus gains control of the empire.

    1554 – Bayinnaung, who would go on to assemble the largest empire in the history of Southeast Asia, is crowned King of Burma.

    1792 – Federalist Thomas Pinckney appointed first U.S. minister to Britain.

    1866 – The Royal Aeronautical Society is formed in London.

    1895 – The National Trust is founded in the United Kingdom.

    1915 – The United States House of Representatives rejects a proposal to require states to give women the right to vote.

    1916 – Both Oswald Boelcke and Max Immelmann, for achieving eight aerial victories each over Allied aircraft, receive the German Empire’s highest military award, the Pour le Mérite as the first German aviators to earn it.

    1918 – The Minnie Pit Disaster coal mining accident occurs in Halmer End, Staffordshire, in which 155 men and boys die.

    1932 – Hattie Caraway becomes the first woman elected to the United States Senate.

    1942 – World War II: United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt creates the National War Labor Board.

    1962 – Vietnam War: Operation Chopper, the first American combat mission in the war, takes place.

    1966 – Lyndon B. Johnson states that the United States should stay in South Vietnam until Communist aggression there is ended.

    1967 – Dr. James Bedford becomes the first person to be cryonically preserved with intent of future resuscitation.

    1970 – Biafra capitulates, ending the Nigerian Civil War.

    1971 – The Harrisburg Seven: Rev. Philip Berrigan and five other activists are indicted on charges of conspiring to kidnap Henry Kissinger and of plotting to blow up the heating tunnels of federal buildings in Washington, D.C.

    1976 – The United Nations Security Council votes 11–1 to allow the Palestine Liberation Organization to participate in a Security Council debate (without voting rights).

    1991 – Persian Gulf War: An act of the U.S. Congress authorizes the use of American military force to drive Iraq out of Kuwait.

    1998 – Nineteen European nations agree to forbid human cloning.

    2004 – The world’s largest ocean liner, RMS Queen Mary 2, makes its maiden voyage.

    2005 – Deep Impact launches from Cape Canaveral on a Delta II rocket.

    2006 – A stampede during the Stoning of the Devil ritual on the last day at the Hajj in Mina, Saudi Arabia, kills at least 362 Muslim pilgrims.

    2007 – Comet C/2006 P1 (McNaught), one of the brightest comets ever observed is at its zenith visible during the day.

    2010 – An earthquake in Haiti occurs, killing between 220,000 and 300,000 people and destroying much of the capital Port-au-Prince.

    Births:
    1673 – Rosalba Carriera, Italian painter (d. 1757). [Today’s Woman of the Day, see next post below.]

    1729 – Edmund Burke, Irish philosopher, academic, and politician (d. 1797).

    1799 – Priscilla Susan Bury, British botanist (d. 1872).

    1822 – Étienne Lenoir, Belgian engineer, designed the internal combustion engine (d. 1900).

    1856 – John Singer Sargent, American painter and academic (d. 1925).

    1874 – Laura Adams Armer, American author and photographer (d. 1963).

    1876 – Jack London, American novelist and journalist (d. 1916).

    1893 – Hermann Göring, German commander, pilot, and politician, Minister President of Prussia (d. 1946).

    1899 – Paul Hermann Müller, Swiss chemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1965).

    1904 – Mississippi Fred McDowell, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 1972).

    1916 – Ruth R. Benerito, American chemist and inventor (d. 2013).

    1916 – P. W. Botha, South African politician, 8th Prime Minister of South Africa (d. 2006).

    1916 – Mary Wilson, Baroness Wilson of Rievaulx, British poet and Spouse of the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (d. 2018).

    1920 – James Farmer, American activist and politician, co-founded Congress of Racial Equality (d. 1999).

    1920 – Jerzy Zubrzycki, Polish-Australian sociologist and academic (d. 2009).

    1923 – Ira Hayes, American marine who raised the U.S. flag on Iwo Jima (d. 1955).

    1926 – Ray Price, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 2013).

    1928 – Ruth Brown, American R&B singer-songwriter and actress (d. 2006).

    1930 – Tim Horton, Canadian ice hockey player and businessman, founded Tim Hortons (d. 1974).

    1932 – Des O’Connor, English entertainer, singer and TV presenter (d. 2020).

    1941 – Long John Baldry, English-Canadian singer-songwriter and voice actor (d. 2005).

    1944 – Joe Frazier, American boxer (d. 2011).

    1944 – Cynthia Robinson, American R&B trumpet player and singer (d. 2015).

    1945 – Maggie Bell, Scottish singer-songwriter.

    1948 – Anthony Andrews, English actor and producer.

    1948 – Brendan Foster, English runner and sportscaster

    1949 – Haruki Murakami, Japanese novelist, short-story writer, and essayist.

    1951 – Kirstie Alley, American actress and producer (d. 2022).

    1957 – John Lasseter, American animator, director, and producer.

    1961 – Simon Russell Beale, Malaysia-born English actor and historian.

    1964 – Jeff Bezos, American computer scientist and businessman, founded Amazon.com.

    1968 – Heather Mills, English businesswoman, activist and model.

    1969 – David Mitchell, English novelist.

    1971 – Peter Madsen, Danish engineer, entrepreneur, and convicted murderer.

    1974 – Melanie C, English singer-songwriter and actress.

    1992 – HAL 9000, Artificial intelligence from Arthur C. Clarke’s Space Odyssey series.

    We were aware of the fact that death walks hand in hand with struggle. (Stokely Carmichael):
    690 – Benedict Biscop, English scholar and saint, founded the Monkwearmouth–Jarrow Abbey (b. 628).

    1665 – Pierre de Fermat, French mathematician and lawyer (b. 1601).

    1833 – Marie-Antoine Carême, French chef (b. 1784). [He codified and to some extent simplified classical French cookery, insisted on the finest and most expensive ingredients, and was regarded as the foremost chef of his day.]

    1899 – Hiram Walker, American businessman, founded Canadian Club (b. 1816).

    1909 – Hermann Minkowski, Lithuanian-German mathematician and academic (b. 1864).

    1960 – Nevil Shute, English engineer and author (b. 1899).

    1965 – Lorraine Hansberry, American author, playwright, and director (b. 1936).

    1976 – Agatha Christie, English crime novelist, short story writer, and playwright (b. 1890.

    2001 – William Redington Hewlett, American engineer and businessman, co-founded Hewlett-Packard (b. 1913).

    2003 – Maurice Gibb, Manx-Australian singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer (b. 1949).

    2003 – Alan Nunn May, English physicist and spy (b. 1911).

    2004 – Olga Ladyzhenskaya, Russian mathematician and academic (b. 1921).

    2013 – Precious Bryant, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1942).

    2013 – Eugene Patterson, American journalist and activist (b. 1923). [Awarded the 1967 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing. He was once approached by the FBI, who wanted him to write an article about Martin Luther King Jr.’s alleged infidelities which they had uncovered through wiretaps. Patterson told them “We’re not a peephole journal. We don’t print that kind of stuff.”]

    2020 – Sir Roger Scruton, English philosopher and writer (b. 1944).

    2022 – Ronnie Spector, American singer (b. 1943).

    2023 – Lisa Marie Presley, American singer-songwriter (b. 1968).

    1. Woman of the Day:
      [From Wikipedia]

      Rosalba Carriera (born on this day in 1673, died 15 April 1757) was a Venetian Rococo painter. In her younger years, she specialized in portrait miniatures. Carriera would later become known for her pastel portraits, helping popularize the medium in eighteenth-century Europe. She is remembered as one of the most successful women artists of any era and the first female painter to initiate a new style in the art community. She revolutionized the world of technology by binding coloured chalk into sticks, which led to the development of a much wider range of prepared colours. This expanded the availability and the usefulness of the pastel medium.

      Initially, Carriera engaged in lace-making and other crafts with her mother and sisters. An early biographer, Pierre-Jean Mariette, suggested that when the lace industry began to falter, Carriera had to find a new means of providing for herself and her family and so set up her studio.

      The popularity of snuff-taking gave her an opportunity. Carriera began painting miniatures for the lids of snuff-boxes and as independent works. She was among the first painters to use ivory instead of vellum as a support for miniatures. Soon she also began producing portraits in pastel. Prominent foreign visitors to Venice, young sons of the nobility on the grand tour and diplomats for example, sought out her work. The portraits of her early period include those of Maximilian II of Bavaria; Frederick IV of Denmark; the “Artist and her Sister Naneta” (Uffizi); and Augustus the Strong, King of Poland and Elector of Saxony, who acquired a large collection of her pastels.

      By 1700, Carriera was already creating miniatures and by 1703 she completed her first pastel portraits. In 1704, she was made an Accademico di merito by the Roman Accademia di San Luca, a title reserved for non-Roman painters.

      Between 1720 and 1721, Carriera worked in Paris, where her work was in great demand. While in Paris, Carriera was a guest of the great amateur and art collector, Pierre Crozat. She painted Watteau, all the royalty and nobility from the King and Regent downwards, and was elected a member of the Academy by acclamation.

      Two of her sisters and her mother were members of the party in France. Both sisters, particularly Giovanna, helped her in painting the hundreds of portraits she was asked to execute. Carriera’s diary of these 18 months in Paris was later published by her devoted admirer, Antonio Zanetti, the Abbé Vianelli, in 1793. Her extensive correspondence has also been published.

      In the short time she spent in Paris, Carriera’s work contributed to forming the new aristocratic tastes of the court and by extension, the tastes of Parisians. No longer did art serve only the monarchy’s needs.

      In 1730, Carriera made a long journey to the royal court in Vienna, Austria. While there, Holy Emperor Charles VI became her benefactor and was fully committed to supporting her work. The Emperor amassed a large collection of more than 150 of her pastels. In return, the empress worked underneath her and received formal artistic training.

      After her sister Giovanna’s death in 1738, Carriera fell into a deep depression which was not aided by the loss of her vision (which might have been damaged by miniature painting in her youth) some years later. She underwent two unsuccessful cataract surgeries but ended up losing her vision completely. She outlived all her family, spending her last years in a small house in the Dorsoduro district of Venice, where she died at the age of 84.

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

    3. 1916 – Both Oswald Boelcke and Max Immelmann, for achieving eight aerial victories each over Allied aircraft, receive the German Empire’s highest military award, the Pour le Mérite as the first German aviators to earn it.

      Wait, what? A German empire award, awarded to Germans, for action against enemies of Germany, has a French name? As ever, you need to read Wiki with at least a salt cellar on hand, if not a pinch already in-hand.

  3. I will, indeed, have curry chicken today for lunch. Alas, there is no good Indian restaurant around us, but the company Deep makes several frozen meals that are very good, including their curry chicken. I just happen to have a couple in the freezer.

    Regarding the big donut, yes, but did you eat it all at once?

  4. With regard to the Jewish man at the San Francisco meeting, it probably didn’t occur to the anti-Semites in the crowd, but the pig noises would be offensive to the people that they are trying to support. An indication, perhaps, that they are more interested in hating Jews than they are in cavorting with Muslims.

  5. I am glad you followed the thoroughly depressing video from San Francisco with the thoroughly delightful one of the little kid. That was good curating.

  6. Regarding the turtle clip, my go to on this behavior is that Hamilton’s Rule may apply. The degree of relatedness among the group is sufficiently positive to overcome costs, which seem negligible, especially if all they had to do was congregate around the belly up turtle.

    1. I noticed they all responded to the distress signals. How do they know in regard to relatedness, I would grant that in the wild relatives may dominate a given area. I think more in terms of a genetic adaption response given certain signals, tit for tat, (R Dawkins, Selfish Genes) and as you say, Hamilton rules, they all ‘know’ the costs.

  7. The belly-up turtle may attract predators. It is of value to all the group to flip it.

    Or it shows that they really carapace. (Groan)

  8. All I can say as an optimist in defence of America is that the people taunting Mr. Weiss* in the mostly empty chamber were leftists brought in for the occasion perhaps waiting their turn to denounce Israel and “Islamophobia.” In assessing the health of the body politic these people are more like a peri-rectal abscess that can be lanced and drained to let the pus out, and less like a severe systemic disease affecting vital body organs. Nonetheless, an abscess cannot be left unattended too long before it is incised to prevent dangerous sepsis.

    At one time I might have been sad that most jeering him seemed to be coloured people but now it is just par for the course. Bravo to him for speaking up. I’m surprised that young people know the “horns” trope. Taught from the PEZ perhaps?
    ———————
    * I’m only assuming his surname is Weiss because he referred to his cousins with that name, which is not necessarily his, of course. I just thought he should have a name for this comment.

  10. Many of them thought that their leader, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson was the Messiah, and when he died in 1994 a lot of them refused to accept that the Messiah was dead.

    What did they believe to be the Messiah’s role? These days, I suppose the Messiah might be expected to defeat those who are a threat to Israel.

  11. And another cat meme, this time from Sue. What a great present!

    The sauce being, of course, that the cat would need to jump over the perched obstacles to be able to knock all of the temptations off the edges.
    I bet the cat knocked over the whole table, for the bonus points.
    (Watching the snooker, with green and brown next to play, and both jammed into one corner. Get out of that, Ali Carter! Someone, somewhere must have a snooker-playing cat.)

  12. As so many have said above, the spectacle at the San Francisco meeting was disgusting. Whether the motivation was antisemitism or not, the behavior was certainly disrespectful and an excellent example of how activists try to shout down their opponents rather than engage with them on the merits.

    Thanks go to Irwin Cotler for his National Post piece attempting to turn the world right-side up again.

    Fascinating about the multiple migrations out of Africa. It is not at all surprising that there were multiple migrations at different times undertaken by representatives of different local groups. I wonder if founder effects played a role in these migrations, as the groups involved were probably quite small—either families or closely related individuals. It’s amazing how much resolving power modern genetic analysis has!

  13. the “Big Dat” from Dat Donuts on Cottage Grove near the University.

    But whose tee-shirt are you wearing, with a mock-heraldic coat of arms celebrating atheism?
    Wouldn’t that violate some laws on “offending public decency” in some (many) jurisdictions in the States? At least as much as half of the population sunbathing “bare-sternum” in the park.

  15. Turtle: I agree with both comments 6 & 7 (high degree of relatedness in a small pond or ‘Shush, don’t attract predators’), or the possibility for reciprocal altruism in a small pond. Interesting that almost all the turtles come to help and in fact are needed so that the turtle is braced for its flipping rather than just being pushed sideways. Also interesting that the turtle stops thrashing as it is surrounded, suggesting that it knows it is about to be ‘rescued’ and no longer needs to ‘call’ more rescuers. That suggests to me that this in not just a one time occurrence but may happen fairly frequently.

    The San Francisco Board of Supervisors did approve a ‘cease fire resolution’ by a vote of 8 to 3. The ostensible reasoning for local governments doing these sorts of things is to send messages to higher levels of government about local opinions, in this case about support for Israeli defense. I’m completely unsure if the opinions voiced at tumultuous local council meetings accurately reflect actual local opinion. I suspect polling would be more accurate. In any case, I think this wastes massive amounts of local councils’ time as they are called upon to voice official positions on issue after issue. This time could and should be spent dealing with actual local issues. There have been two loud and extremely long city council meetings (2 AM) in my city demanding a cease fire resolution. I wrote the council members a letter suggesting that the city council should instead institute a policy of ‘institutional neutrality’ on issues that do not directly impact the city. It might take a little while for the population to believe that they mean it, but ultimately would save them a massive amount of time, headaches and late nights that are currently spent on issues completely beyond their purview.

    1. I wonder if the SF board has issued a resolution about defecating on the sidewalks/streets.

  16. JOJO
    So, I’d like you to draw a picture of where Jews live. A typical hive; where you all sleep, eat, and where the Queen Jew lays the eggs.

    ELSA
    You really are an idiot.

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