Tuesday: Hili dialogue

January 16, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the Cruelest Day: Tuesday, January 16, 2024, and by the time you read this I’ll be heading to California for eight days or so. Foodwise, it’s National Hot and Spicy Food Day, giving me a hankering for Szechuan cuisine. Here’s my favorite: mapo dofu:

“CHUKA 101 Mapo Dofu Ramen” by Tokumeigakarinoaoshima is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

It’s also National Good Teen Day (?), Rid the World of Fad Diets and Gimmicks Day, Book Publishers Day, Prohibition Remembrance Day (the Eighteenth Amendment was ratified on this day in 1919, going into effect a year later), National Fig Newton Day, and National Religious Freedom Day,

Here’s a video showing how they make fig cookies, but these are called “Fig Newmans”:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the January 16 Wikipedia page.

There will almost certainly be no more posts today, as I’m flying (assuming that the plane will take off in this cold), and posting will be light for a few days. Bear with me; I do my best!

Da Nooz:

*Tuesday update:  As expected, Trump won a big victory in Iowa yesterday Get used to it; the GOP loves the maniac. But what wasn’t expected is that Ron DeSantis finished second and Nikki Haley third, although the polls showed her leading DeSantis.

The race for the Republican presidential nomination has come into sharper focus the morning after former President Donald J. Trump’s decisive victory in the Iowa caucuses. Mr. Trump presented himself as the party’s inevitable nominee. Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, relieved by a second-place finish, declared his campaign resuscitated.

And Nikki Haley, the former United Nations ambassador, who came in third, linked Mr. Trump and President Biden as the aging symbols of an older generation whose time had passed.

The new contours of this once-muddled contest emerged as the campaign moved from Iowa to New Hampshire. Wasting no time, Mr. Trump, Mr. DeSantis and Ms. Haley all have high-profile events planned in New Hampshire Tuesday night, kicking off what promises to be a brisk, one-week campaign leading to the first-in-the-nation primary next Tuesday.

Mr. Trump flew out with a burst of momentum as he moved into a state that is potentially more competitive for him than Iowa. And he escaped Iowa without a clear challenger for his opponents to rally around.

. . .Iowa quickly claimed one candidate: Vivek Ramaswamy, a wealthy entrepreneur, suspended his campaign for president and endorsed Mr. Trump after his weak showing on Tuesday night.

From Batya Ungar-Sargon at The Free Press:

According to MSNBC’s early entrance polls, Trump won voters without a college degree by 65 percent, to Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s 17 percent and former UN ambassador Nikki Haley’s scant 8 percent. Trump won college grads, too, but by a much slimmer margin—just 35 percent caucused for Trump. Haley, meanwhile, got nearly as many—33 percent, with DeSantis trailing at 23 percent. The AP had a similar breakdown.

It’s going to be a long year. Ceiling Cat bless America!

*Donald Trump is subject to yet another trial brought by E. Jean Carroll, a woman he sexually abused in 1995 or 1996. Trump had already been found liable in a civil suit last May, with a total of $5 million awarded to Carroll for both the assault and punitive damages for defamatory remarks Trump made in 2022. Now he’s being sued a second time for remarks he made in 2019:

A Manhattan jury will be asked a narrow question this week: How much money must former President Donald J. Trump pay the writer E. Jean Carroll for defaming her after she accused him of raping her?

Ms. Carroll’s chance encounter decades ago at the Bergdorf Goodman department store, in which she said Mr. Trump shoved her against a dressing room wall, pulled down her tights and forced himself on her, was already the focus of a trial last year. A jury in May awarded Ms. Carroll just over $2 million for the assault and nearly $3 million for defamation over Mr. Trump’s remark in October 2022 calling her claim “a complete con job.”

The trial starting Tuesday focuses on separate statements by Mr. Trump in June 2019, directly after Ms. Carroll disclosed her allegation in New York magazine. At the time, Mr. Trump called her claim “totally false,” saying that he had never met Ms. Carroll, a former Elle magazine advice columnist, and that she invented a story to sell a book.

Now, Mr. Trump says he wants to attend and testify at Ms. Carroll’s trial, something he didn’t do in the earlier case. That’s sparked a bitter dispute between lawyers for Ms. Carroll, 80, and Mr. Trump, 77, over what the former president could say if he took the stand, and whether he would stray beyond strict boundaries the judge has set.

The judge, Lewis A. Kaplan, has ruled that given the jury’s findings in the first trial, Mr. Trump cannot now contest Ms. Carroll’s version of events — as he frequently does in public statements.

What, then, can he say, other than deny he made defamatory remarks? In fact, given that he still contests Carroll’s statement in public, I don’t think he’s even capable of shutting up about it in court, and then he’ll be in big trouble.  The AP reports that the lawyer who won the $5 million in the first case “urged a judge Friday to take strong measures to ensure the former president doesn’t ‘sow chaos’ when a new jury considers next week if he owes even more in damages.”  But sowing chaos is exactly what Trump’s good at!

*A former Israeli hostage who was held by Hamas for two months before release has spoken out about the physical and mental abuse she endured, abuse that surely still holds for the many women still in captivity.

As soon as Hamas gunmen abducted Agam Goldstein-Almog, 17, from her home in Kibbutz Kfar Aza on Oct. 7, they worked to dismantle her identity.

They shuffled her between subterranean tunnels, abandoned apartments and a school that doubled as a rocket launching site, she said, covering her in a headscarf and a long dress and commanding her to look at the ground. She said they ordered her to recite Islamic prayers and renamed her Salsabil, the natural springs of paradise mentioned in the Quran. They allowed her to shower five times in 51 days, she said.

“They took me, what remained of my family and it felt like, ‘That’s it, now we are living in Gaza,’” she told The Washington Post. “And that’s why it felt like it would be forever.”

Agam said she was forbidden from crying. She was not to mourn her father and older sister, 20-year-old Yam, shot dead by militants in their family home. Sometimes the captors shouted at her, she remembered, other times they tried to win her sympathy with looted creams and perfumes.

With guns cocked, Agam said they warned her family — especially her 9- and 11-year-old brothers — against making noise. If Israel found out where they were hiding, she remembers the kidnappers saying, the military would kill them all.

It was one of countless lies they told to assert “absolute control,” Agam realized after she was freed in late November — during a temporary humanitarian pause that involved the release of more than 100 hostages from Hamas captivity.

In her first interview with international media, Agam described the terror and confusion she endured over nearly two months as a hostage inside Gaza, held with her mother, Chen, and two brothers, Tal and Gal. Speaking from Shfayim, a kibbutz in central Israel that has transformed into a way station for hundreds of her displaced neighbors, she recounted the extreme exhaustion, the oppressive stench of the tunnels, the relentless psychological torture.

She turned the conversation again and again to the 136 hostages still believed to be held captive in Gaza. The Red Cross has not been allowed to visit them. The youngest, Kfir Bibas, turns 1 this week.

The Post could not independently confirm Agam’s account, but it is consistent with those of other former hostages. There are details she still can’t share, Agam said, to protect those left behind. She thinks of them constantly. She is trying to be their voice: “There’s nothing else I can do.”

. . .Agam did not say whether she was sexually abused. She was released on Nov. 26. “They suddenly charged in and told us to be ready at 9 a.m.,” she recalled. “And they told the other girls, who weren’t going home, maybe tomorrow — inshallah — God willing, tomorrow, tomorrow.”

It was another lie. They are among 19 women still held in Gaza.

There’s more, and it’s as bad as you expect.  One issue that Israel is preparing for is what to do if any hostages released in the future were impregnated by terrorists. Israel does have a very liberal abortion policy, allowing the procedure right up to the moment of birth.

Here’s a new video by Bari Weiss on the issue (and others, such as pig noises).  I’ve lost a lot of respect for Briahna Joy Gray (see 20:54):

*The Houthis are making good on their vow to reliate for U.S. strikes on their assets in Yemen, but their retaliation yesterday was pretty lame.

Fresh attacks targeted American ships in the Middle East, days after the U.S. led a round of strikes meant to blunt the capability of Houthi rebels to hit ships transiting the Red Sea.

A Houthi missile struck the Gibraltar Eagle, a U.S. bulk carrier, off the coast of Yemen without causing injury or significant damage on Monday, said the U.S. Central Command, which oversees U.S. military operations in the Middle East.

The Houthis later claimed responsibility for the attack.

Eagle Bulk Shipping, the ship’s U.S. owner, didn’t respond to a request for comment. , the ship’s U.S. owner, didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The Houthi actions, initially directed against Israeli-linked vessels, have rattled global markets, upended international shipping routes and become increasingly indiscriminate. The rebels have attacked everything from boxships to tankers moving sanctioned Russian oil as the global shipping nexus complicates their ability to identify specific targets.

They vowed again Monday to continue their campaign against U.S. and international targets in the region in response to Israel’s actions in Gaza. “Anyone attempting to hinder us from doing so will fail,” a Houthi official said Monday.

*The Iowa Caucus was yesterday, with voters in that “key” state set to choose a Republican nominee for President. The contest will probably be decided by the time you read this (and of course Trump will win), for I’m writing this on Monday evening, but the question remains: why does it matter?  The AP discusses “what you need to know”:

Iowa appears to be a battle for second place given Trump’s dominance. The real question is whether either of the two Republicans who lead the pack of very distant also-rans can make it a two-person race in the long run.

To do that, they probably need to at least come out of Iowa with a silver medal.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis once talked of winning the state, but he’s lowered expectations to simply having a good showing. With his campaign apparatus in turmoil and funds drying up, he needs a strong finish in a state where its movement conservatives would normally be his natural audience.

Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley’s technocratic and consensus-building pitch doesn’t seem tailor-made for Iowa, but the caucuses come just as she gained increased attention and financial support. Her strongest state may be the next one up, New Hampshire, and a second-place finish in Iowa could put her in a strong position as attention shifts to New England.

Rarely has so much ridden on a second-place finish in the first nominating state.

. . .One of the more unexpected side plots in the 2024 Republican primary has been Vivek Ramaswamy, a 38-year-old pharmaceutical entrepreneur who wrote a book called “Woke, Inc.” and then decided to run for president. His aggressive, social media-driven approach initially attracted some curiosity from Republican voters but seemed to turn many off after he attacked rivals during the debates.

Ramaswamy’s hard-charging style may not exactly be “Iowa nice,” but neither is Trump’s and he’s far ahead. Ramaswamy has been all over Iowa, hitting the campaign milestone of visiting all 99 counties in the state not once, but twice.

It’s not clear what Ramaswamy is competing for — he goes out of his way not to criticize Trump, but flames all other candidates in a potential audition for the frontrunner’s administration. Iowa will help determine whether he has a reason to keep running his quixotic campaign.

I doubt that Trump will nominate the second-place finisher to be his Vice-President, as he doesn’t want anybody that popular to be his second in command. So what, really, is riding on this second-place finish. And “a potential audition for Trump’s administration?”  I wouldn’t count on it.

*The lawsuit against the University of California’s DEI requirements has been dismissed, but only because of lack of standing.

A federal judge threw out a lawsuit that challenged the University of California system’s requirement that applicants for faculty positions must file diversity statements.

The court, which issued the ruling on Friday, did not rule on the merits, but said that the plaintiff lacked standing to sue because he never actually applied for the open faculty position that he singled out in his suit.

That would be John Haltigan, a psychology professor from Toronto who never even applied for the job, but constructed a faux diversity statement that he thought would sink his application. As I wrote earlier, he wasn’t hurt because he didn’t apply, so it’s no surprise that he didn’t have standing. More:

In his lawsuit, John Haltigan, who has a Ph.D. in developmental psychology, said he would have applied to a position at U.C. Santa Cruz, but that the D.E.I. statement made his application futile, since he is “committed to colorblindness and viewpoint diversity.” The lawsuit contended that the requirement acts as a “functional loyalty oath,” violating his rights under the First Amendment.

The Pacific Legal Foundation, a libertarian group that filed the lawsuit for Dr. Haltigan, did not make him available for an interview. But in a February post on Substack, he wrote that D.E.I. statements have become “a political litmus test” that has eroded diversity of thought in academia.

“Public trust in our universities has been severely diminished as a consequence,” he wrote in the post.

The rules need to be challenged by somebody with standing, that is, somebody who was actually damaged by the DEI policy. Haltigan couldn’t claim that because he wasn’t denied the job since he didn’t apply for it. The real test case has yet to be brought.

If you want to read from the judge’s decision, see this post at The Volokh Conspiracy.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s being the sartorial police!

Hili: Do you think that I don’t see anything?
A: What’s the matter?
Hili: You are putting on this torn jumper again.
In Polish:
Hili: Czy ty naprawdę sądzisz, że ja nic nie widzę?Ja: O co ci chodzi?Hili: Znowu wkładasz ten podarty sweter.

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

From the FB site I am Not a Grammar Cop, with the caption, “Hyphens save lives”:

From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy:

From Mark; now THIS is a pizza!

Down in Florida, it was 57°F yesterday (positively Arctic there), and Jango, staffed by Divy and Ivan, was cold. After all, he is a Floridian cat.

From Masih: This woman and many others (watch the video) were blinded in one eye, thanks the the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Google Translation: I am happy since the day when I, as the first woman, put my photo on Instagram on my sports page and showed the dirty crime of Ja. The face was shot in the eyes. You can celebrate freedom with one eye.

From my own feed. These ducklings want to sleep with the kittens:

Greta may well want the end of Israel, for the sign on the left is ambiguous. At any rate, she should stick to climate change.

From Malcolm; how to get people to take the stairs and get some cardio workout:

From Ros; a kitten trying to sleep on a barbell, for crying out loud!

From my feed; THREE sugar gliders in one hand:

From the Auschwitz Memorial. This Polish teacher, head shaved, lived about six weeks after arriving at Auschwitz.

Two tweets from Doctor Cobb. Matthew put a frowny face 🙁 on the first one. Indeed!  You can read more in the Jerusalem Post; the player was also kicked out of Turkey, which sides with Hamas. (h/t Jack)

Matthew, who’s aging like all of us, posted this tweet with his comment:

41 thoughts on “Tuesday: Hili dialogue”

  1. Going to California
    On Led Zeppelin IV (1971) : https://youtu.be/NrUIJY_Xu2s?si=0NXiJFzqTjzDNQrU

    I did not know this :

    “Jimmy Page and Robert Plant wrote this song, drawing inspiration from Joni Mitchell, specifically her song “California.” ”

    See songfacts dot com for more connections to Joni (which I was oblivious to ’til now!) : https://www.songfacts.com/facts/led-zeppelin/going-to-california

    Obscure music note : Imagine Dragons have a tune (Zero) with a melodic phrase that opens each time with the same lilting descending major line as Going to California (IMHO).

  2. On this day:
    27 BC – Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus is granted the title Augustus by the Roman Senate, marking the beginning of the Roman Empire.

    550 – Gothic War: The Ostrogoths, under King Totila, conquer Rome after a long siege, by bribing the Isaurian garrison.

    929 – Emir Abd-ar-Rahman III establishes the Caliphate of Córdoba.

    1120 – Crusades: The Council of Nablus is held, establishing the earliest surviving written laws of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem.

    1605 – The first edition of El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha (Book One of Don Quixote) by Miguel de Cervantes is published in Madrid, Spain.

    1707 – The Scottish Parliament ratifies the Act of Union, paving the way for the creation of Great Britain.

    1786 – Virginia enacts the Statute for Religious Freedom authored by Thomas Jefferson.

    1862 – Hartley Colliery disaster: Two hundred and four men and boys killed in a mining disaster, prompting a change in UK law which henceforth required all collieries to have at least two independent means of escape.

    1909 – Ernest Shackleton’s expedition finds the magnetic South Pole.

    1919 – Nebraska becomes the 36th state to approve the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. With the necessary three-quarters of the states approving the amendment, Prohibition is constitutionally mandated in the United States one year later.

    1920 – The League of Nations holds its first council meeting in Paris, France.

    1942 – The Holocaust: Nazi Germany begins deporting Jews from the Łódź Ghetto to Chełmno extermination camp.

    1942 – Crash of TWA Flight 3, killing all 22 aboard, including film star Carole Lombard.

    1945 – World War II: Adolf Hitler moves into his underground bunker, the so-called Führerbunker.

    1969 – Czech student Jan Palach commits suicide by self-immolation in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in protest against the Soviets’ crushing of the Prague Spring the year before.

    1969 – Space Race: Soviet spacecraft Soyuz 4 and Soyuz 5 perform the first-ever docking of manned spacecraft in orbit, the first-ever transfer of crew from one space vehicle to another, and the only time such a transfer was accomplished with a space walk.

    1979 – Iranian Revolution: The last Iranian Shah flees Iran with his family for good and relocates to Egypt.

    1991 – Coalition Forces go to war with Iraq, beginning the Gulf War.

    2001 – US President Bill Clinton awards former President Theodore Roosevelt a posthumous Medal of Honor for his service in the Spanish–American War.

    2002 – War in Afghanistan: The UN Security Council unanimously establishes an arms embargo and the freezing of assets of Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and the remaining members of the Taliban.

    2003 – The Space Shuttle Columbia takes off for mission STS-107 which would be its final one. Columbia disintegrated 16 days later on re-entry.

    2006 – Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is sworn in as Liberia’s new president. She becomes Africa’s first female elected head of state.

    2020 – The first impeachment of Donald Trump formally moves into its trial phase in the United States Senate.

    Births:.
    1634 – Dorothe Engelbretsdatter, Norwegian author and poet (d. 1716). [Described as Norway’s first recognized female author as well as Norway’s first feminist before feminism became a recognized concept.]

    1728 – Niccolò Piccinni, Italian composer and educator (d. 1800).

    1853 – André Michelin, French businessman, co-founded the Michelin Tyre Company (d. 1931).

    1874 – Robert W. Service, English-Canadian poet and author (d. 1958).

    1882 – Margaret Wilson, American author (d. 1973). [Awarded the 1924 Pulitzer Prize for The Able McLaughlins.

    1893 – Daisy Kennedy, Australian-English violinist (d. 1981).

    1898 – Margaret Booth, American producer and editor (d. 2002).

    1900 – Edith Frank, German-Dutch mother of Anne Frank (d. 1945).

    1902 – Eric Liddell, Scottish runner, rugby player, and missionary (d. 1945).

    1908 – Ethel Merman, American actress and singer (d. 1984).

    1932 – Dian Fossey, American zoologist and anthropologist (d. 1985).

    1933 – Susan Sontag, American novelist, essayist, and critic (d. 2004).

    1942 – Barbara Lynn, American singer-songwriter and guitarist.

    1944 – Jill Tarter, American astronomer and biologist. [Best known for her work on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). Tarter is the former director of the Center for SETI Research, holding the Bernard M. Oliver Chair for SETI at the SETI Institute. In 2002, Discover magazine recognized her as one of the 50 most important women in science.]

    1948 – John Carpenter, American director, producer, screenwriter, and composer.

    1959 – Sade, Nigerian-English singer-songwriter and producer.

    1980 – Lin-Manuel Miranda, American actor, playwright, and composer.

    1988 – FKA Twigs, English singer-songwriter and actress.

    For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied. (Susan Sontag)
    1547 – Johannes Schöner, German astronomer and cartographer (b. 1477).

    1794 – Edward Gibbon, English historian and politician (b. 1737). [Best known for his six-volume The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.]

    1834 – Jean Nicolas Pierre Hachette, French mathematician and academic (b. 1769).

    1856 – Thaddeus William Harris, American entomologist and botanist (b. 1795).

    1936 – Albert Fish, American serial killer, rapist and cannibal (b. 1870).

    1942 – Carole Lombard, American actress and comedian (b. 1908).[Died in the crash of TWA Flight 3, see above.]

    1972 – Ross Bagdasarian, Sr., American singer-songwriter, pianist, producer, and actor, created Alvin and the Chipmunks (b. 1919).

    1981 – Bernard Lee, English actor (b. 1908). [Best known for his role as M in the first eleven Eon-produced James Bond films. Lee’s film career spanned the years 1934 to 1979, though he had appeared on stage from the age of six.]

    1988 – Andrija Artuković, Croatian politician, war criminal, and Porajmos perpetrator, first Minister of Interior of the Independent State of Croatia (b. 1899).

    1990 – Lady Eve Balfour, British farmer, educator, and founding figure in the organic movement (b. 1898).

    1996 – Marcia Davenport, American author and critic (b. 1903). [Best known for her 1932 biography of composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the first American published biography of Mozart.]

    1996 – Kaye Webb, English journalist and publisher (b. 1914).

    2001 – Auberon Waugh, English author and journalist (b. 1939).

    2002 – Robert Hanbury Brown, English astronomer and physicist (b. 1916).

    2009 – John Mortimer, English lawyer and author (b. 1923). [Creator of Rumpole of the Bailey.]

    2010 – Glen Bell, American businessman, founded Taco Bell (b. 1923).

    2013 – André Cassagnes, French technician and toy maker, created the Etch A Sketch (b. 1926).

    2013 – Pauline Phillips, American journalist and radio host, created Dear Abby (b. 1918).

    2017 – Eugene Cernan, American captain, pilot, and astronaut (b. 1934). [The last man to stand on the Moon, so far…]

    2021 – Phil Spector, American record producer, songwriter (b. 1939).

    1. Women of the Day:
      [From The Attagirls]

      Women of the Day are the 15,000 women aged between 17 and 24 who left home for the first time in 1942 to heed a call to join the Women’s Timber Corps [AKA the Lumberjills], solving Britain’s desperate need for timber after Germany occupied Norway, our main timber importer.

      The Lumberjills – a name coined by the Northern Daily Mail after 25 Lancashire clerical workers, typists and hairdressers left Manchester for a timber training camp in the South-East of England – felled and crosscut trees by hand, operated sawmills, drove timber trucks and ran whole forestry sites. It was hard, dirty work, both physically and mentally demanding. The chain saw hadn’t been invented. They lived and worked in the most basic conditions.

      In 1939, Britain imported 96% of its timber. Timber was critical to the war effort for many things: railway lines, telegraph poles, gun butts, ships, aircraft, as well as packaging boxes for bombs and supplies. It was also used to make pit props in the mining industry but with the men away fighting, there was only seven months supply of wood stockpiled. When the war started, the imports stopped.

      The Government initially refused to employ women to fell trees but there were already thousands of members in the Women’s Land Army doing their bit so the official position became untenable. The Women’s Timber Corps, a separate branch of the Land Army, was officially created in April 1942. In May 1942, the Scottish Women’s Timber Corps set up training camps.

      The camps taught women all aspects of the timber industry. They were trained in felling, using axes and large cross saws. The chain saw hadn’t been invented. It was hard physical work. They learned to measure and carry out sawmilling which meant cutting the wood into usable pieces and moving tree trunks around as haulage. Ultimately, women proved themselves fully capable of wielding 14lb axes, carrying logs, working in dangerous sawmills, driving timber trucks and calculating the reliable production figures that the Government depended on.

      The Scottish lumberjills were among those to experience the most extreme living conditions. They lived in bothies or wooden huts in the forests where there was no such thing as a toilet or somewhere to wash. They used the streams, and certainly knew some hardships.

      One Lumberjill, Bella Nolan, challenged a foreman to a felling dual to prove she was just as strong as a man. She took one end of the cross-saw and he took the other. Together they chopped down 120 trees that day.

      At the end of the war, the women were refused some of the grants, gratuities and benefits given to women in civil defence and the armed service. Their jobs were given to prisoners of war and their records destroyed. The director of the Women’s Land Army and Women’s Timber Corps, Lady Gertrude Denman, resigned in protest. The Lumberjills were also not invited to attend any Remembrance Day parades because they were not part of the fighting forces.

      The WTC was disbanded in August 1946 but the work they did was vital to Britain’s war effort.

      Their war efforts are now recognised, and there are two statues honouring them. In 2007, a statue was unveiled in Queen Elizabeth Park near Aberfoyle in Scotland and in Dalby Forest in North Yorkshire, there is a sculpture called Push Don’t Pull. In 2008, surviving Lumberjills were finally recognised by the government and awarded a medal.

      The attitude was that women can’t do anything. You could see it on the men’s faces. But they grew to get the idea. We just got on with it.

      https://twitter.com/TheAttagirls/status/1747159420297953722

      2. Love the Woman of the Day posts. Seems like the Lumberjills efforts were so necessary… and then so disposable afterwards.

        1. Thanks, Su. Yes, in so many cases women’s wartime roles were disposed with and rapidly forgotten. It’s definitely worth following @TheAttagirls on X for their daily Woman/Women of the Day posts.

          I started doing the “On this day” posts below the line here on 1 January 2023 and it was quickly pointed out that I wasn’t including enough women. I’ve tried to include more since, and the Woman of the Day is my attempt to rectify it further still.

  4. That pizza looks like a tarte tatin with pepperoni.

    “Sleep with the kittens” doesn’t sound nearly as menacing as “sleep with the fishes.” The cats are like, Whatever, they’re warm.

  5. Bari Weiss’s video is very powerful. Note the first few minutes where she describes how the entire world rallied around the 276 Nigerian girls who were brutally kidnapped by the terrorist group Boko Haram. What have the same people—including Michelle Obama—been saying in support of the women and girls held hostage by Hamas? Nothing. There is only silence. The hypocrisy is palpable.

    1. That’s not quite true. Both of the Obama’s made public statements shortly after Oct 7 condemning the attacks and hostage taking and expressing grief for the dead and the taken, and their families and friends. Not silence, not leading the charge either.

      Is it enough? What should be expected of them?

      When the Nigerian event occurred the Obamas where in the White House. They were supposed to lead the charge then and as POTUS & FLOTUS they were subjects 1&2 of the press.

        1. After watching the video I remembered a conversation I had with a friend who had come back from Eastern Europe. This was in the early 70s and he was telling me about dissidents against the Communist regime who had been tortured. At the time I was a member of the CPUSA and I believed all dissidents we’re CIA spies. He said “but they are using torture!” and I replied that they were doing the same to us so they deserved it. I found out how rotten the CP was many years later. Hopefully the young lefties of today will wake up to the reality of Hamas a lot quicker.

  6. I am forever doomed to associate Fig Newtons with eating bug parts. As a kid there was a popular factoid spread around, taken as truth, that the FDA had regulations specifying that certain specific numbers of certain specific bug parts (legs, heads, etc.) were allowed in Fig Newtons.

    To this day I can’t think of them without thinking about eating bugs.

    3. It is not as if they put bugs in there on purpose. In any agricultural product, there are going to be some dirt, bugs, or stems harvested along with the produce.

      If the rule was no bug parts at all, then the manufacturers might routinely dispose of hundreds of tons of produce every time an ant leg was found in a test batch. So someone at the FDA had to quantify the difference between acceptable and unacceptable. Besides, there is no actual hazard involved. I bet you would eat more bugs in an hour on a motorcycle than ten lifetime’s worth of eating Fig Newtons.

      We bale thousands of bales of hay every year. Some small percentage of bales end up with live snakes in them. It is not optimal that it happens, but is not usually a problem except when the pointy end of the snake is sticking out of the bale.
      I am sure it is very inconvenient for the snake, of course.

      It is better to learn to live with these realities than to dwell on them.

      1. Yes, I know. I was just trying to be funny. Of course anyone that takes a moment to think about it would realize that it’s impossible to remove all insect parts, and lots of other stuff, from agricultural products.

        Besides, a little extra protein is good for you.

      3. My wife worked for years in produce departments of various supermarkets. When she worked at a particular “high end” store, she was managing the “organic” sections (sorry, have to put that in scare quotes). Many people would come to her saying, can I get a new head of Romaine for free? The last one had a slug in it. That is one of dozens of examples. Seriously people! The disconnect is sad and funny simultaneously. Of course, the disgruntled customer would get another head of Romaine, no questions asked, with appropriate apologies.

        1. We had an extensive garden one place we lived when I was a kid. A lot of work, but pretty amazing quality and yield.

          Of all the stuff we grew broccoli was the most bug-ridden. I’d go out and cut some broccoli for dinner, put it in a pot of warm water and let it sit for awhile, come back later and skim all the bugs off the top of the water, remove and then cook the broccoli.

  7. Piano-key steps: I know that subway station, Odenplan, Stockholm, quite well. Rode past it almost every day for 3.6yrs, and sometimes got off there. The video’s ~11y/o. Not sure how long they lasted, but they weren’t there last time I was there in 2019.

    Also, completely agree that Greta is diluting her message by opening a separate franchise. Someone should explain the Peter Principle to her.

    1. I was also wondering how much “cardio” someone is actually getting by walking up a small flight of stairs like that. I’d say “nil.” Maybe you’ll burn an extra calorie or two. It is a novel idea though and looks fun.

      1. Depending on what stop you get off at, in the Washington DC Metro there are some very long and steep escalators that I always walked up. Very often everybody did the same as they were often out of order.

      3. Sure, I will attest that many flights of stairs in this world of ours could induce beneficial cardio, but the set of stairs in question would not.

  8. ‘A jury in May awarded Ms. Carroll just over $2 million for the assault and nearly $3 million for defamation over Mr. Trump’s remark in October 2022 calling her claim “a complete con job.”

    A reporter on NPR’s 1/16/24 “Morning Edition,” at minute 1:04, stated that “Decades later, while Trump was president, Carroll wrote a book about it [the assault]. Trump denied it, and then defamed her, saying, ‘She’s not my type.’ That’s the case that’s going to trial today.”

    So, saying, even publicly, “She’s not my type” (or, “He’s not my type”) nowadays constitutes defamation? Am I reading that clearly? Would Carroll have preferred Trump saying, “She’s my type”? (I wonder why the NPR reporter focused on that. Is it that, since Trump assaulted her, she must have been his type?) If asked by some intrepid reporter, I wonder if Carroll would say about Trump, “He’s not my type.”

    Not everybody is everybody’s “type.”

    1. I think the salient point of this defamation suit isn’t that he said “she’s not my type” it’s that (when the incident was revealed in her book) he said it didn’t happen and called her a liar.

        1. Filippo has looked at the referenced link. Would that NPR’s reporting had referenced some sufficient portion of its substance. Did the link mention that Trump identified a photo of Carroll as a photo of one of his wives? (I don’t recall seeing that.) Or is that from a separate source?

          In any event, Trump must not have paid all that much attention to or much cared about his wives to the extent that he could recognize them, and/or has an insufficiency of neurons to rub together.

          1. The Trump misidentification is from multitudinous different sources. You can see the picture, hear the wrong ID, and hear his own lawyer correct him at (e.g.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70nOy7U2dmk&t=72s My comment was only on the “not my type” remark; i have not looked at the npr story. And of course, Carroll might not be Trump’s type (she doesn’t resemble Ivanka); perhaps he just mistook her because he was tired from working 24/7 on solving the world’s problems..

    2. BTW, it doesn’t seem right that the amount awarded for the assault (“rape”?) – two million, is less than that awarded for defamation, three million.

      FURTHER THE AFFIANT SAITH NOT.

  9. It’s not clear what Ramaswamy is competing for — he goes out of his way not to criticize Trump, but flames all other candidates in a potential audition for the frontrunner’s

    He’s acting as a stalking horse for Musk’s 2028 campaign?
    Which of course will not happen, since President Tangerine Shitgibbon will make the presidency a hereditary monarchy in his second term.

  11. Quick heads up here about the South Africa poison infecting the I/P situation:

    The ANC has been going broke for the last several years. Their time is nearing an end as they reach bankruptcy but they do have a way out! Simply accept mega money from any Nefarious State that would give them enough and, in return, they’d promise to take Israel the ICHR on a genocide charge.

    So easy!

    I would like to remind our generous readers that Helen Suzman et al were Jews at the forefront of the anti Apartheid struggle – much the same as it was in the civil rights era.

  13. You’re welcome Mark. You wouldn’t be wasting your precious time to hear the thoughts of the Grand Old Lady speaking at UM 32 years ago.

    How times have changed. And how, in so many ways.

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