Sunday: Hili dialogue

January 14, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the sabbath for goyische cats: Sunday, January 14, 2024, and a nice food holiday: National Hot Pastrami Sandwich Day,  Don’t forget that it must be on rye with hot mustard, and accompanied by a Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray Tonic:

“Mmm… hot pastrami on rye” by jeffreyw is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

It’s cold today in Chicago, and I froze my face coming to work. . . just so you’d have something to read! This temperature is in Fahrenheit; the equivalent in Celsius is -21°. And it’s windy! And the ground is covered with snow. I hope my flight on Tuesday isn’t canceled. . . .

It’s also Caesarian Section Day (commemorating the first one in the U.S. performed on this day in 1794), International Kite Day, International Dress Up your Pet Day, Feast of the Ass (from Medieval Christianity) Ratification Day in the US (it makes the ratification of the Treaty of Paris, officially ending the Revolutionary War), World Logic Day (a UNESCO celebration), and, as Wikipedia notes, “Sidereal winter solstice celebrations in South and Southeast Asian cultures; marking the transition of the Sun to Capricorn, and the first day of the six months Uttarayana period.”

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the January 14 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The US and British strikes on the Houthi’s military sites in Yemen, which made the terrorist group vow retribution, have turned out to be pretty much of a bust.

The United States-led airstrikes on Thursday and Friday against sites in Yemen controlled by the Houthi militia damaged or destroyed about 90 percent of the targets struck, but the group retained about three-quarters of its ability to fire missiles and drones at ships transiting the Red Sea, two U.S. officials said on Saturday.

The damage estimates are the first detailed assessments of the strikes by American and British attack planes and warships against nearly 30 locations in Yemen, and they reveal the serious challenges facing the Biden administration and its allies as they seek to deter the Iran-backed Houthis from retaliating, secure critical shipping routes between Europe and Asia, and contain the spread of regional conflict.

A top U.S. military officer, Lt. Gen. Douglas Sims, the director of the military’s Joint Staff, said on Friday that the strikes had achieved their objective of damaging the Houthis’ ability to launch the kind of complex drone and missile attack they had conducted on Tuesday.

But the two U.S. officials cautioned on Saturday that even after hitting more than 60 missile and drone targets with more than 150 precision-guided munitions, the strikes had damaged or destroyed only about 20 to 30 percent of the Houthis’ offensive capability, much of which is mounted on mobile platforms and can be readily moved or hidden.

. . . Finding Houthi targets is proving to be more challenging than anticipated. American and other Western intelligence agencies have not spent significant time or resources in recent years collecting data on the location of Houthi air defenses, command hubs, munitions depots and storage and production facilities for drones and missiles, the officials said.

I’d say destroying 25% of an enemy’s capabilities in one set of strikes is a pretty good job, but perhaps the NYT likes to point out American problems because it’s not unsympathetic to the Houthis, just as it’s not unsympathetic to Hamas (I’m partly kidding here). Yes, we got the Houthi’s low-hanging fruits, but I doubt that we and our allies are going to let anybody permanently block the Red Sea and Suez Canal to shipping. It would be dumb to stop attacking now.

*The Presidential election in Taiwan,—which pitted the DPP party, favoring independence from China, against the KMT and PPP parties, favoring closer relationships China—was characterized by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as a “war or peace election”. If the DPP won, that meant, China insinuated, “war.”  Victories by the other parties meant peace with the PRC, which has insinuated that it will take over Taiwan within a few years. Well, the election was over yesterday, and the DPP won. That’s good news for those who want Taiwan to remain independent and democratic.

The Taiwanese politician Lai Ching-te has for years been reviled by China’s Communist Party as a dangerous foe who, by its account, could drag the two sides into a war by pressing for full independence for his island democracy. Right up to Saturday, when millions of Taiwanese voted for their next president, an official Beijing news outlet warned that Mr. Lai could take Taiwan “on a path of no return.”

Yet, despite China’s months of menacing warnings of a “war or peace” choice for Taiwan’s voters, Mr. Lai was elected president.

Mr. Lai, currently Taiwan’s vice president, secured 40 percent of the votes in the election, giving his Democratic Progressive Party, or D.P.P., a third term in a row in the presidential office. No party has achieved more than two successive terms since Taiwan began holding direct, democratic elections for its president in 1996.

At a D.P.P. gathering outside its headquarters in Taipei, thousands of supporters, many waving pink and green flags, cheered as Mr. Lai’s lead grew during the counting of the votes, which was displayed on a large screen on an outdoor stage.

Addressing his supporters at the event, Mr. Lai called for unity, while also pledging his commitment to defending Taiwan’s identity. “Between democracy and authoritarianism, we choose to stand on the side of democracy,” Mr. Lai said. “This is what this election campaign means to the world.”

If China invades Taiwan, that might be the beginning of WWIII given that Biden (though I don’t know about Trump) has vowed to defend the island against China, and the conflagration would probably also include Japan. And if China makes its move, and the U.S. responds, I don’t see how we can limit that war.

*A fanatic audiophile in Richmond, Virginia, has spent more than a million bucks on his stereo system, with the WaPo reporting that building this monstrosity would “change the lives of people who dwelt [in the same house]”

Ken Fritz was years into his quest to build the world’s greatest stereo when he realized it would take more than just gear.

It would take more than the Krell amplifiers and the Ampex reel-to-reel. More than the trio of 10-foot speakers he envisioned crafting by hand.

And it would take more than what would come to be the crown jewel of his entire system: the $50,000 custom record player, his “Frankentable,” nestled in a 1,500-pound base designed to thwart any needle-jarring vibrations and equipped with three different tone arms, each calibrated to coax a different sound from the same slab of vinyl.

“If I play jazz, maybe that cartridge might bloom a little more than the other two,” Fritz explained to me. “On classical, maybe this one.”

No, building the world’s greatest stereo would mean transforming the very space that surrounded it — and the lives of the people who dwelt there.

The faded photos tell the story of how the Fritz family helped him turn the living room of their modest split-level ranch on Hybla Road in Richmond’s North Chesterfield neighborhood into something of a concert hall — an environment precisely engineered for the one-of-a-kind acoustic majesty he craved. In one snapshot, his three daughters hold up newsiding for their expanding home. In another, his two boys pose next to the massive speaker shells. There’s the man of the house himself, a compact guy with slicked-back hair and a thin goatee, on the floor making adjustments to the system. He later estimated he spent $1 million on his mission, a number that did not begin to reflect the wear and tear on the household, the hidden costs of his children’s unpaid labor.

. . .In the 1980s, Fritz launched his project by blowing up the living room into a listening room, a 1,650-square-foot bump-out based on the same shoe box ratio, just under 2 to 1, that worked magic in concert halls from the Musikverein in Vienna to the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. The idea was that the acoustic waves would similarly roll off Fritz’s long, cement-filled walls and 17-foot-high, wood-paneled ceiling to bathe the listener in music.

He got his older son, Kurt, to help pour the concrete floors. Then he worked alongside a construction crew to put up the 12-inch-thick walls and the sound panels to line them.

To minimize hum and potential electrical interference, Fritz outfitted the room with its own 200-amp electrical system and HVAC system, independent from the rest of the house.

He crafted by hand the three 10-foot speakers that loomed like alien monoliths at the head of the room, with the help of Paul Gibson, a former employee at his fiberglass company. Each 1,400-pound slab pulsed with 24 cone drivers for the deeper tones and 40 tweeters — 30 shooting into the room, 10 toward the crimson curtains draping the wall behind — to project the upper-range sounds.

He bought only a few of the components ready-made from a retailer. Fritz and his audiophile friends believed it was idiotic to invest in the kind of top-shelf equipment that gleamed from the glossy pages of High Fidelity magazine. Only a home-crafted system could achieve the audio you desired.

It took Fritz from 1989 to 2013 to build the actual stereo, which uses vinyl records! See the article for more details. But the strain and the cost eventually wrecked his family, leading to a divorce and then estrangement from his son.  He remarried, but then he got ALS, a horrible disease that will kill him within a few years.  When he could no longer operate the system himself, he gave up decided to sell the house. The buyer didn’t want the stereo system, so Fritz auctioned it off, realizing only $156,000.

It’s a very sad tale.

The turntable:

A screenshot from the video on the site:

(from WaPo): Ken Fritz worked for decades to perfect his stereo system at his home in Richmond’s North Chesterfield neighborhood. His obsession built a system that was widely acknowledged by audiophiles but also led to strain in his family. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)

*The AP has an article about how the students on campus now want to dump the First Amendment since it allows offensive speech. Those students are dead wrong, for who will determine what speech is quashed? The courts have already carved out the necessary exceptions to the Amendment over the years (defamation, false advertising, speech that can create imminent and predictable violence), and we’re good to go. All that’s left are the censorious Pecksniffs who infect American campuses:

Generations of Americans have held firm to a version of free speech that makes room for even the vilest of views. It’s girded by a belief that the good ideas rise above the bad, that no one should be punished for voicing an idea — except in rare cases where the idea could lead directly to illegal action.

Today, that idea faces competition more forceful and vehement than it has seen for a century.

On college campuses, a newer version of free speech is emerging as young generations redraw the line where expression crosses into harm. There’s a wave of students who have no tolerance for speech that marginalizes. They draw lines around language that leads to damage, either psychological or physical. Their judgments weigh the Constitution but also incorporate histories of privilege and oppression.

“We believe in a diverse set of thoughts,” says Kaleb Autman, a Black student at the University of Wisconsin whose group is demanding a zero-tolerance policy on hate speech. “But when your thought is predicated on the subjugation of me or my people, or to a generalized people, then we have problems.”

No, Mr. Autman, you have a problem. I’m not going to emit blatantly racist thoughts, but you and others may construe some speech, like calls to eliminate DEI or affirmative action, as “subjugating you and your people.” That’s the big problem: WHO DECIDES?  Remember when Penn Prsident Liz Magill walked back free speech, and then resigned?:

Asked on Capitol Hill about balancing free speech and the safety of Jewish students, Magill told lawmakers that Penn’s approach is “guided by the United States Constitution, which allows for robust perspectives.” A day later, amid pressure from donors, she said Penn’s policies needed to be “clarified and evaluated.”

She suggested rules rooted in the Constitution don’t do enough to protect students in a world with “signs of hate proliferating across our campus and our world in a way not seen in years.”

Campuses across the nation have confronted similar tensions amid rising antisemitism and Islamophobia. Debate has raged over whether to police phrases such as “from the river to the sea” and “intifada” — often used as pro-Palestinian chants but lately also seen by some as calls for the genocide of Jews. Columbia University is among several institutions that recently suspended pro-Palestinian student groups, citing their “threatening rhetoric and intimidation.”

Those types of phrases, however some perceive them, are “clearly constitutionally protected,” says Erwin Chemerinsky, a law scholar and dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley, which was the cradle of the free speech movement in the 1960s. Yet on all sides of the issue, he says, today’s students want to quash speech they don’t like, regardless of its legality.

Chemerinsky is right.  I stand by the First Amendment, with one tiny exception for campuses: students should not be allowed to shout down a speaker. Such deplatforming is legal under the First Amendment but inimical to the real purpose of free speech, especially in colleges.

*The news is thin today, so let’s have a good clean and characteristically Jewish joke:

So it seems that these four Rabbis had a series of theological arguments, and three were always in accord against the fourth. One day, the odd Rabbi out, after the usual “3 to 1, majority rules” statement that signified that he had lost again, decided to appeal to a higher authority. “Oh, G-d!” he cried. “I know in my heart that I am right and they are wrong! Please give me a sign to prove it to them!”

It was a beautiful, sunny day. As soon as the Rabbi finished his prayer, a storm cloud moved across the sky above the four. It rumbled once and dissolved. “A sign from G-d! See, I’m right, I knew it!” But the other three disagreed, pointing out that storm clouds form on hot days.

So the Rabbi prayed again: “Oh, G-d, I need a bigger sign to show that I am right and they are wrong. So please, G-d, a bigger sign!” This time four storm clouds appeared, rushed toward each other to form one big cloud, and a bolt of lightning slammed into a tree on a nearby hill.”I told you I was right!” cried the Rabbi, but his friends insisted that nothing had happened that could not be explained by natural causes.

The Rabbi gets ready to ask for a “very big” sign, but just as he says “Oh G-d…” the sky turns pitch black, the earth shakes, and a deep, booming voice intones from above, “HEEEEEEEE’S RIIIIIIIGHT!”

The Rabbi puts his hands on his hips, turns to the other three, and says, “Well?”

“So,” shrugged one of the other Rabbis, “now it’s 3 to 2!”

I’ll be here all year folks (assuming the site doesn’t go belly-up.)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is staying close to her favorite spot:

Hili: I discover new horizons.
A: Where?
Hili: Most often in the kitchen.
In Polish:
Hili: Odkrywam nowe horyzonty.
Ja: Gdzie?
Hili: Najczęściej w kuchni.
And a photo by Paulina of Baby Kulka playing in the snow:

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

From Divy, a very exclusive club for cats (I don’t understand people who keep their cats off the counters):

From Toni. I don’t buy individual stocks, but if you’d rather make money instead of swill peppermint lattes, here’s some advice:

From Why You Should Have a Duck:

From Masih: a 13-year-old mutilated by the Iranian regime, which apparently likes to shoot out the eyes of young people:

From Rabbi David Wolpe, a visiting scholar at Harvard’s Divinity School, who also resigned from Harvard’s Antisemitism Advisory Group, saying that “the ideology that grips far too many of (Harvard’s) students and faculty, the ideology that works only along axes of oppression and places Jews as oppressors and therefore intrinsically evil, is itself evil.” But no country in the world will bring charges against Gaza, Hamas, and Palestine, which belong to the entities that can be judged at the Hague:

From Roz:

From Malcolm: Catfishing, or lifting a kitty home (does it get down the same way?):

From my feed: this bee has worked too hard and is having a nap:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a French boy gassed upon arrival, age 13:

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. The first he jokingly labeled “Nature is wonderful.”

I love this kind of record (be sure to watch the video). Mrs. Lewis had a surfeit of biological fitness!

46 thoughts on “Sunday: Hili dialogue”

  1. On this day:
    1639 – The “Fundamental Orders”, the first written constitution that created a government, is adopted in Connecticut.

    1784 – American Revolutionary War: Ratification Day, United States – Congress ratifies the Treaty of Paris with Great Britain.

    1899 – RMS Oceanic (1899) is launched. She is the largest ship afloat since Brunel’s SS Great Eastern.

    1900 – Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca opens in Rome.

    1911 – Roald Amundsen’s South Pole expedition makes landfall on the eastern edge of the Ross Ice Shelf.

    1943 – World War II: Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill begin the Casablanca Conference to discuss strategy and study the next phase of the war.

    1952 – NBC’s long-running morning news program Today debuts, with host Dave Garroway.

    1967 – Counterculture of the 1960s: The Human Be-In takes place in San Francisco, California’s Golden Gate Park, launching the Summer of Love.

    1969 – USS Enterprise fire: An accidental explosion aboard the USS Enterprise near Hawaii kills 28 people.

    1973 – Elvis Presley’s concert Aloha from Hawaii is broadcast live via satellite, and sets the record as the most watched broadcast by an individual entertainer in television history.

    2010 – Yemen declares an open war against the terrorist group al-Qaeda.

    2011 – President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia seeks refuge in Saudi Arabia after a series of demonstrations against his regime, considered to be the birth of the Arab Spring.

    Births:
    83 BC – Mark Antony, Roman general and politician (d. 30 BCE).

    1741 – Benedict Arnold, American-British general (d. 1801).

    1800 – Ludwig Ritter von Köchel, Austrian composer, botanist, and publisher (d. 1877).

    1862 – Carrie Derick, Canadian botanist and geneticist (d. 1941). [Today’s Woman of the Day, see next post below.]

    1875 – Albert Schweitzer, French-German physician and philosopher, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1965).

    1886 – Hugh Lofting, English author and poet, created Doctor Dolittle (d. 1947).

    1894 – Ecaterina Teodoroiu, Romanian soldier and nurse (d. 1917).

    1904 – Emily Hahn, American journalist and author (d. 1997).

    1905 – Sterling Holloway, American actor (d. 1992).

    1915 – Mark Goodson, American game show producer, created Family Feud and The Price Is Right (d. 1992).

    1919 – Andy Rooney, American soldier, journalist, critic, and television personality (d. 2011).

    1926 – Warren Mitchell, English actor and screenwriter (d. 2015). [Best known for playing the character Alf Garnett (the part Archie Bunker in the US was based on).]

    1927 – Zuzana Růžičková, Czech harpsichord player (d. 2017). [The first harpsichordist to record Johann Sebastian Bach’s complete works for keyboard. She survived the Terezin, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps and was one of the children looked after by Fredy Hirsch. Růžičková later credited Hirsch with her survival and helped establish a memorial to him.]

    1934 – Richard Briers, English actor (d. 2013).

    1936 – Clarence Carter, American blues and soul singer-songwriter, musician, and record producer.

    1940 – Trevor Nunn, English director and composer. [Dad worked with him at the RSC.]

    1941 – Faye Dunaway, American actress and producer.

    1943 – Shannon Lucid, American biochemist and astronaut.

    1948 – T Bone Burnett, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer.

    1963 – Steven Soderbergh, American director, producer, and screenwriter.

    1967 – Emily Watson, English actress. [Her decision to criticise JK Rowling, to whom she owes her career, is disappointing.]

    1967 – Zakk Wylde, American guitarist and singer.

    1968 – LL Cool J, American rapper and actor.

    1969 – Jason Bateman, American actor, director, and producer.

    1969 – Dave Grohl, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and drummer.

    The opposite of compromise is fanaticism and death. (Amos Oz):
    1676 – Francesco Cavalli, Italian organist and composer (b. 1602).

    1776 – Edward Cornwallis, English general and politician, Governor of Gibraltar (b. 1713).

    1867 – Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, French painter and illustrator (b. 1780).

    1874 – Johann Philipp Reis, German physicist and academic, invented the Reis telephone (b. 1834).

    1898 – Lewis Carroll, English novelist, poet, and mathematician (b. 1832).

    1905 – Ernst Abbe, German physicist and engineer (b. 1840).

    1920 – John Francis Dodge, American businessman, co-founded the Dodge Automobile Company (b. 1864).

    1957 – Humphrey Bogart, American actor (b. 1899).

    1965 – Jeanette MacDonald, American actress and singer (b. 1903).

    1977 – Anthony Eden, English soldier and politician, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (b. 1897).

    1977 – Peter Finch, English-Australian actor (b. 1916).

    1977 – Anaïs Nin, French-American essayist and memoirist (b. 1903).

    1978 – Harold Abrahams, English sprinter, lawyer, and journalist (b. 1899).

    1984 – Ray Kroc, American businessman and philanthropist (b. 1902).

    1987 – Douglas Sirk, German-Swiss director and screenwriter (b. 1900).

    2006 – Shelley Winters, American actress (b. 1920).

    2016 – Alan Rickman, English actor (b. 1946).

    Reply

    1. Woman of the Day:
      [From Wikipedia]

      Carrie Matilda Derick (born on this day in 1862, died November 10, 1941) was a Canadian botanist and geneticist, the first female professor in a Canadian university, and the founder of McGill University’s genetics department.

      Educated at the Clarenceville Academy in Clarenceville, QC, she began teaching by the age of fifteen. She later received teacher training at the McGill Normal School, graduating in 1881 as a Prince of Wales Gold Medal winner. Derick then went on to become a school teacher in Clarenceville and Montreal, and later serving as a principal (at the age of nineteen) of the Clarenceville Academy.

      In 1889, Derick pursued a B.A. from McGill University, and graduated in 1890, at the top of her class in natural science with first-class honours, the highest GPA (94%) that year, and received the Logan Gold Medal. Her graduating class included two other notable Canadian women: Elizabeth Binmore and Maude Abbott. She began teaching at the Trafalgar Institute for Girls in 1890, while also working part-time as McGill’s first female botany demonstrator.

      In 1891, Derick began her master’s program at McGill under David Penhallow and received her M.A. in botany within four years (1896), while holding two simultaneous jobs. She then attended the University of Bonn, Germany, in 1901 and completed the research required for a Ph.D. but was not awarded an official doctorate since the University of Bonn did not give women Ph.D. degrees at the time. Derick also studied at Harvard University for three summers, the Royal College of Science, London in 1898, and the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts for seven summers.

      Following her PhD research, Derick then returned to McGill University. Given her previous seven years of teaching, researching, administration work and publishing (without pay) at McGill University, Derick wrote directly to Principal Peterson and was promoted to the position of assistant professor at one-third the salary of her male counterparts in 1905.

      In 1909, when Penhallow (Derick’s former Master’s supervisor, then chair for McGill University’s Botany Department) fell ill, Derick assumed his role as chair. Penhallow died in 1910. Following Penhallow’s death, Derick continued to run the department for three years. In 1912, McGill University began a search for a new department chair and did not recruit Derick, despite her previous experience or the strong support she received.

      Instead, Derick was officially appointed as professor of morphological botany by McGill University in 1912. This made Derick the first woman both at McGill University and in Canada to achieve university professorship. However, morphological botany was not Derick’s research expertise, and this new position did not come with a pay rise, or a seat on the faculty. Derick was told by the McGill University president that this was a ‘courtesy title’ and she was not actually a professor. Furthermore, the new botany department chair assigned Derick work suitable for a demonstrator, not a professor.

      Derick continued to persevere in her role, and returned to teaching and research after a new demonstrator was hired. She later petitioned to have her title changed to professor of comparative morphology and genetics to be more representative of her expertise and research interests.

      Derick founded McGill University’s genetics department. She created the Evolution and Genetics course (the first of its kind in Canada) and published a number of academic publications on botany. She was one of the few women to be listed in the American Men of Science (1910).

      Due to poor health, Derick retired in 1929. McGill University awarded her the honorary title of “professor emerita,” making her the first female professor emeritus in Canada. She died on November 10, 1941, in Montreal, Quebec.

      An award has been created in her honour at McGill University, titled the Carrie M. Derick Award for Graduate Supervision and Teaching. She was designated as a National Historic Person in 2007, and on her 155th birthday in 2017, she was recognized through a Google Doodle.
      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrie_Derick

      Reply

          1. Whatever the validity or lack thereof of Watson’s criticism of J K Rowling, surely gratitude for the kick start to her career would be a very poor reason for her to refrain from expressing them? If their respective positions in the ‘debate’ were reversed and Watson was the one you agreed with, would you still feel she should have kept quiet out of gratitude?

  2. If everybody bought Starbucks stock instead of Starbucks coffee, the company would soon go bust and their stock would be worthless.

    Some might say it would be worth it.

    Reply

  3. Regarding speech on campus, the question is “for who will determine what speech is quashed?”

    Easy: The parents. We have all grown up with parents who scolded us for criticizing our siblings, for using bad/prohibited language, for ‘talking back’ to adults we should respect, etc etc. How many times does that 10 year old insist that he has a free speech right to call his younger sister a cootie-infested scab?

    When colleges continue to play an in loco parentis role — especially in the view of young undergrads — it should be no surprise that students who have learned that many kinds of speech are prohibited, especially if those forms are seen as hurtful, bring that lesson they learned at the dining room table to campus, and expect their surrogate parents — college administrators — to clamp down on it.

    The job really becomes one of teaching those college students that colleges are no longer substitute parents, and that adulthood — which they at least ostensibly have achieved by the time they arrive as freshmen — means learning that speech rules need to be more nuanced.

    Reply

  4. Off-topic, but since there isn’t much nooz, curious what PCC(E) and other readers think of Biden flouting his campaign promise to end the death penalty by having the DOJ seek a death sentence for the Buffalo supermarket shooter (the Biden DOJ has continued to pursue death sentences that the Trump administration had already sought, but this is the first time the Biden administration has sought a new one.) The Buffalo shooting was an atrocity, of course, but I still don’t think that capital punishment is justified. In the words of Justice William Brennan (who, ironically, kickstarted Merrick Garland’s career by hiring him for a clerkship), “the calculated killing of a human being by the state involves, by its very nature, the absolute denial of the executed person’s humanity. The most vile murder does not release the state from constitutional restraint on the destruction of human dignity.”

    Reply

    1. I do not support the death penalty. Period. Biden is obviously pandering to POC and wokesters for votes he fears he’s losing by supporting Israel. So much for principled thinking.

      Reply

      1. I respectfully disagree as to Biden’s motivation. I don’t think that the woke are pro- death penalty (after all, many of them want to somehow get rid of policing and prisons altogether), and Black people are actually much less likely to support the death penalty than whites (https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/06/02/most-americans-favor-the-death-penalty-despite-concerns-about-its-administration/) I think what is really happening is that Biden knows that he has alienated many moderate voters by kowtowing to the woke set on tons of issues (e.g. massive reverse discrimination to create “equity”, denying due process to those accused of sexual assault on campus), and is overcompensating by trying to be very conservative on other issues. In any case, he’s definitely being unprincipled-another reason why he should step aside.

        Reply

        1. That’s fair. My thinking was that he (Biden) was caving since blacks were (hatefully and disgustingly) targeted in the shooting. Appreciate your comment

          Reply

  5. This one is really interesting I think:

    Kaleb Autman : “We believe in a diverse set of thoughts,”

    This is Marxist code for Marxism. Marxism is corrosive to free society, and is denied power for a reason.

    “But when your thought is predicated on the subjugation of me or my people, or to a generalized people, then we have problems.”

    This is not a mistake. It is trained by Social Emotional Learning in schools – the intersectional identity means the individual has secret, and thereby superior, knowledge that every other contradictory identity has kept hidden from the world by an evil, abstract, imprisoning force – usually structural racism. However, by gaining the consciousness the identity offers, you too can see.

    We can see the model at work :

    The Gnostic wizard sees the image of the world by virtue of special consciousness. The point is to make the world into that image by Hermetic alchemy, thereby liberating all from the prison of the demiurge. Free thought will inevitably shut down that tyrrany.

    Compare that to Deistic religion, in which the image of the world is in the Deity’s mind – unknowable, outside of man (in the archaic parlance).

    I find the use of the word “thought” notable, as in thought reform from Mao Zedong’s China (see Robert J. Lifton’s writing).

    Burma Shave

    Reply

    1. Kaleb Autman needs to crawl back into the womb. The world’s too tough for tender types like him. I’m so tired of these cry babies.

      Reply

  6. “Erwin Chemerinsky […]”

    I got a touch of déja vu reading that section – was it posted before?

    Worth it.

    Reply

    1. I prefer seedless rye too, But I like smoked provolone way more than Swiss.

      That picture put me over the edge. I’m about to go the grocery and pick me up a pound of the best pastrami (in practice, the best is Boar’s head since the only alternative is the house brand) and some crisp crisp dill pickles for the side.

      What mustard goes the best with pastrami, in your opinion?

      Reply

      1. I like Gulden’s (Spicy brown), myself. But I always turn my pastrami sandwiches into Reubens by adding sauerkraut and Russian dressing. My favorite bread is seedless Oroweat Schwalzwalder dark rye. My favorite pastrami comes from Zingerman’s…but Boar’s Head will do. I’ll have to try smoked provolone, sounds like a winner.

        Reply

  8. It’s cold today in Chicago, and I froze my face coming to work. . . just so you’d have something to read! This temperature is in Fahrenheit; the equivalent in Celsius is -21°. And it’s windy!
    You’re dedication is impressive – and on a Sunday, too!

    My sister in Oregon said their powerlines are down and that her friend’s house was destroyed when five trees fell on it. (I’m guessing that the residents were OK, since she didn’t mention them.)

    Reply

    1. Glad that there were apparently no casualties, but… five trees on one house? Surely insurance will cover it all, or would Oregon insurance companies consider that an Act of God?

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      1. Act of bad planning about positioning the house. Or, alternatively, poor management of the tree’s growth, to prevent them getting to a size sufficient to threaten the house.
        Insurance company have a good case for denying cover – if not counter-suing for fraud, depending on the declarations made when they applied for cover.

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      1. Are you in Calgary, by any chance? That’s where my daughter lives, and she says it has been a miserable weekend for taking the d*g for his walks.

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        1. Yes – good call.
          And your daughter’s right. It’s brutal out. Supposed to warm up to -12 C tomorrow, though. That will seem balmy.

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          1. Haha – that’s what I told her: “heat wave coming”.

            Stay safe and warm. We are not having it so bad in Eastern Ontario temperature wise, though we did just get a huge dump of snow.

  9. Your wonderful joke about the rabbis is actually a revised version of an old Talmudic joke, from b.BabaMezia 59b. The dispute is between R. Eliezer son of Hyrcanus and the other rabbis. After R. Eliezer demonstrates that G-d is on his side through a series of miracles, each of which is rejected as irrelevant by the other rabbis, a voice from the sky announces that R. Eliezer is right. Then R. Joshua shouts at the sky, “Torah is not in heaven!” (This is a quotation from Deuteronomy chapter 30).
    The next scene of the story takes place in heaven. The prophet Elijah witnesses that when R. Joshua said “Torah is not in heaven,” G-d laughed with delight and said, “My children have defeated me!”

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  10. So the female Brazilian Cave fly can grow a penis? Great news for all the trans activists—
    dump those cute seahorses and clownfish for a committed true champion of the “Create Your Own Gender Identity” crowd.

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  11. It seems to me that destroying 20-30% of Houthi capacity in such short order is a good start. The U.S. can do more, but the cost will probably increase once the low-hanging fruit has been picked off. The U.S. and the rest of the coalition need to keep the Red Sea open to commercial shipping.

    It’s sad that the Richmond audiophile ended his quest for audio nirvana so unceremoniously. His listening room looks amazing. As an audiophile myself—not in the same league as the Richmond guy, although I have designed and built four of my own power amplifiers—I can understand the intensity of his effort. The two audiophile magazines to which I subscribe regularly review $20,000 amplifiers and $50,000 speakers. At the upper end are $150,000 amplifiers, $400,000 speakers, and $100,000 turntables. (A few components can cost even more.) And all of this is for *home* audio, not for playing music in football stadia. When I first became aware of these kinds of components 30 years ago, I thought it ridiculous that people would spend thousands of dollars on such things. But, I have to admit that with continued exposure to such prices, they don’t seem as preposterous as they had seemed originally. 🙂

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    1. What do you have? I have a small sitting room with Sonus Faber Novo Olympica 3 loudspeakers, and an Esoteric K03XS digital end. No streamer.

      For the Oligarch crowd, CES 2024 is showcasing the $750 K Sonus Faber Suprema Loudspeaker system.

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      1. Some of the offerings out there are outrageously expensive but also outrageously cool. Some are just outrageously outrageous! Go to a high end audio show some time. It’s fun.

        You have some nice components, Ramesh!

        My system (leaving out the computer, cables, and other ancillaries)

        Basis 2001 Signature turntable
        Klyne phono preamplifier
        McIntosh MR71 stereo FM tuner
        Ayre QB-9 Twenty DAC
        Benchmark LA4 line preamplifier
        McIntosh MC2000 power amplifier
        Four different home brew power amplifiers of my own design using a variety of output tubes and topologies
        (I cycle through the amps, one each month, so have an Amplifier of the Month.)
        Avantgarde Duo 2.0 loudspeakers

        Most important and valuable component: my tolerant wife.

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        1. I built a decent home theater system, as I really enjoy good films across a fairly broad spectrum of eras and languages. The downside is that using it properly annoys anyone else who happens to be in the main house when it is on.
          But going in the opposite direction, we got a fairly high end VR setup for festivus. Everyone under the age of 80 in the house is a gamer, so it seemed like something worth trying. The gaming is pretty cool. Flight combat games could make you throw up from perceived motion sickness if you push too hard.
          But the reason I am adding this here is that there is a function to play films on the VR headset. It is wonderful. The resolution is astounding, 4K per eye, and at the basic settings you watch the film from a seat in an old movie theater. The screen floats in front of you, stationary in space, and you can look at different parts of the screen as you would in meatspace.
          Watching 4K IMAX films is better on the headset than on my expensive TV. With good headphones, the sound is perfect.
          Plus, it does not bother anyone else, even if they are sleeping right next to you.
          All the equipment costs $2-3K usd, which is not “the chickens feet” *, but it is pretty economical considering that you get what appears to be a full sized IMAX theater in your bedroom.

          *film trivia…

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      2. You have Avant Garde horn speakers — good stuff! So one of your amps on rotation is a low power single ended triode?

        Strangely enough, one of the two American penpals I have belongs to the Richmond Audio society, and knew this chap. He just wrote to our penpal group,’He kept the class A Krells on 24/7 and complained he had to send the amps back every few years as they burned up their capacitors […] he used so much juice the power company put in a transformer just for his house.’ !!

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        1. Three of my four home brews are SETs. One uses the venerable 300B tube (8 watts), another the even older Type 45 (2 watts) or 2A3 (4.5 watts)—selectable between the two tubes—and the third the type 211 transmitter tube (13 watts). The fourth home brew is a push-pull amp with 2A3 outputs. And the commercial McIntosh is a whopping 130 watts per channel.

          I love all the amps and each sounds just slightly different. Believe it or not, the Type 45 (2 watts) is plenty powerful enough with the Avantgardes. In practice, most home systems only use a watt or two, even with less efficient speakers. That said, power is good! You need it for drum thwacks and other such transients.

          I had a Krell FPB 300 stereo amp (300 watts peer channel). It was biased in Class A, so ran hot, but it wasn’t as bad as the earliest Krells. Mine was a power hog too, but our living room was nice and toasty in the winter.

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    2. Have you ever done a blind shootout of your audiophile system vs. a regular stereo in the 1000-2000$ range?
      I am not into home audio stuff, but I have absorbed more information than I should about music gear. It turns out that connoisseurs will talk at length about the impact of the type of wood and the laquer on the tone of an electric guitar, not to mention the pickups and the amplifier tubes… but are unable to even tell apart different guitar manufacturers in a blind test. I wonder if the same holds true for audiophile stereo gear.

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      1. The following is based pretty much solely on my personal experience, no hard data to back it up.

        I’ve never had equipment in the league that Norman Gilinsky listed in his post. The best system I’ve owned (still own it) is an order of magnitude less expensive, but still quite a bit more than $1K – $2K, even back in the early 90s, and is not regular. I’d call my system “entry level audiophile.”

        In my opinion “entry level audiophile” is all nearly any person would need to get the best sounding music playback. At that price point you can get equipment that will enable the reproduction of a recording without introducing any changes that the large majority of people could. I’m not sure you could get that with “regular” systems, but you don’t need $58,000 speakers with corresponding pre-amp, amp, etc., to get that.

        But a lot of this is subjective. Also, perfect reproduction of a recording is not necessarily what most people would say is best. Tube amps in particular introduce changes that many people prefer. Lots of even quite expensive sound system components are designed to dazzle or enhance by introducing targeted changes.

        After listening to tens of speaker / amp combinations when I purchased my system I settled on components that very precisely reproduce the recording. This sounded best to me in the long run, meaning when listening to music for more than about 10 minutes. The only downside is that bad recordings sound bad. Even worse than when played on a cheap system.

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        1. I agree with Darrell. Most well-designed products measure very similarly in terms of distortion and frequency response, yet different components and different combinations definitely sound different. There’s a lot of subjectivity involved. You can put together a nice system for under $3K, with speakers typically being the most expensive part. If you can invest $7-10K, you can have a super nice rig. The higher price gets you better bass response (good bass is expensive), cleaner sounding midrange and treble, nice casework, good features, and simplicity of use. I’d say that you can get 90% of the way to audio nirvana with a $10K investment. Chasing the remaining 10% is where people and prices go nuts.

          More expensive systems do sound better, and one doesn’t need golden ears to hear the difference. The two major audiophile magazines in the U.S., Stereophile and The Absolute Sound, have good advice on how to set up systems at all price points. They are very good resources.

          As I said somewhere in this thread, go to a high-end audio show (look for the phrase “high-end”) and listen to the different rooms. It’s such fun and will give you a taste of what’s out there even if you never buy anything. Don’t let “high end” intimidate you.

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          1. The truly high end stuff is often gorgeous to look at too. Some achieves art solely on design + visual aesthetics, IMO.

  12. It’s below zero over here in Western Washington too. Not as cold as Chicago though (thankfully). We have a well and the heater wasn’t turned up high enough in the well house and our pipes froze- no water, ack! So I cranked up the heat in the well house and in a couple hours, the water was back without incident. Phew.

    I’m glad Taiwan went for Democracy, though it is a bold stance. I don’t know what a POTUS Trump would do if China invaded Taiwan- I’m sure he’d do what Putin tells him to.

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  13. Cat fishing is a long European tradition. We saw it in Rome regularly; it saves people in apartments without elevators (there are lots of these in Paris and Rome or were when we lived there in the fifties) the trouble of walking down four or five stories to let their cat out.
    Also, lowering baskets with money to get bread or other small items from a street vendor is quite common. In addition, these people living high up install clothes lines from their apartment across the street…which is more of an alley and very narrow….on pulleys.

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