Thursday: Hili dialogue

January 18, 2024 • 7:45 am

Welcome to Thursday, January 18, 2024, and National Gourmet Coffee Day. Make sure that if you celebrate, you simply make regular coffee with good beans (cream and sugar are allowed); for what’s below is NOT gourmet coffee!

“Starbucks – Peppermint Hot Chocolate and Chai Eggnog Latte” by Calgary Reviews is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

It’s also Thesaurus Day, Winnie the Pooh Day (celebrating the birth of A. A. Milne on this day in 1882), and National Peking Duck Day.

Here’s my favorite character in Winnie the Pooh: the lugubrious donkey Eeyore, here illustrated by Ernest Howard Shepard in 1926.  (Many readers probably consider Tigger as their favorite character.)

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the January 18 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

First, Davis didn’t prove much of a respite from frigid Chicago on Tuesday; it was pouring rain all afternoon and evening, not usual for this time of year. Fortunately, the rain stopped and it was cloudy but cool most of the day, though it turned sunny in the afternoon. It’s not hot but tolerable:here’s the weather yesterday morning:

Well 60°F is better than 8°F, the temperature in Chicago. Plus we had a nice Indian dinner Tuesday night. Foreground, my onion uttapam (made with fermented rice+lentil flour), and in the background, my friend’s thali with curried chicken. I was very happy with the uttapam, particularly because it came with copious amounts of coconut chutney, the real reason to eat these things. There was also sambar, a South Indian spicy soup.

*The Supreme Court seems poised to deal a blow to the view that the executive branch of the government can, in effect, enact regulations and laws, putting into effect rules that bypass the legislative branch.

Members of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority seemed inclined on Wednesday to overturn or limit a key precedent that has empowered executive agencies and frustrated business groups hostile to government regulation.

Judging from questions in two hard-fought arguments that lasted a total of more than three and a half hours, the fate of a foundational doctrine of administrative law called Chevron deference appeared to be in peril.

The doctrine takes its name from a 1984 decision, Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the most cited cases in American law. Discarding it could threaten regulations in countless areas, including the environment, health care, consumer safety, nuclear energy and government benefit programs. It would also transfer power from agencies to Congress and the courts.

Under Chevron, judges must defer to agencies’ reasonable interpretations of ambiguous statutes. In close cases, and there are many, the views of the agency take priority even if courts might have ruled differently.

. . . .seJustice Brett M. Kavanaugh responded that “the reality of how this works is Chevron itself ushers in shocks to the system every four or eight years when a new administration comes in.” He said the doctrine affected laws on securities, antitrust, communications and the environment.

Other conservative justices said courts must use the ordinary tools of statutory interpretation to decide what laws mean without giving decisive weight to agencies’ views. The court’s three liberal members, by contrast, said agencies were often in a better position than courts to interpret ambiguous statutes in their areas of expertise.

This looks to be another 6-3 decision. And although this is just my gut feeling, and one that, sadly, puts me with the Satanic Six, it seems to me that the way to make federal laws is through Congress, and the way to judge whether those laws are constitutional is through the federal courts. The problem with letting agencies do this is that they may have more of a political agenda than, say, the Congress plus judiciary combined.  (The riposte is that agencies have more expertise.) In this day and age mine may be a dumb opinion, though, and I’m willing to listen to counterarguments.

*More from the Supreme Court, which will soon rule whether Donald Trump’s name can be taken off Republican primary ballots because he’s being tried for promoting insurrection. They will hear arguments on the issue, based on a ruling in Colorado, on February 8, and the sooner they decide, the better. In the meantime, a judge in Maine has put his own ruling on hold pending the decision of the Supremes.

A Maine judge on Wednesday put off deciding whether Donald Trump’s name can appear on that state’s primary ballot, saying the Supreme Court needs to rule on the issue first in a similar case out of Colorado.

The ruling sent the case back to Maine’s secretary of state and put it on hold. It came amid a nationwide push from Trump’s critics to prevent the former president from running for office again.

Section 3 of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution bars from office those who engaged in insurrection after swearing an oath to uphold the Constitution. The amendment was ratified in 1868, and the clause was used initially to keep former Confederates from returning to power after the Civil War.

Trump’s critics have cited the measure in lawsuits arguing Trump is banned from office because of his behavior before and during the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Colorado’s top court last month ruled Trump should be taken off the primary ballot there, and a week later Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows (D) reached the

The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the Colorado case and will hear arguments on Feb. 8. Its ruling on the issue is likely to apply to all states.

Of course it will apply to all states. Much as I’d like to see Trump out of the race, the way I’d interpret the 14th amendment is that someone can be barred for insurrection only after they’re convicted of insurrection. And that hasn’t yet happened to Trump. However, there are those who think he should be allowed to run even if he’s convicted in the insurrection case. At any rate, the primaries will continue to occur, and until a decision is handed down, I suspect Trump’s name will be on them.

*As far as I know, the Covid pandemic is thought by experts to have originated from a lab leak in Wuhan, though that speculation has “low confidence“. And because the opinions of experts go back and forth, so who am I to judge? However, a new report from the WSJ further muddies the waters, claiming that China had the genetic sequence of the coronavirus a full two weeks before letting the world know. That, of course, would delay any vaccine or other palliatives for at least that period of time.

Chinese researchers isolated and mapped the virus that causes Covid-19 in late December 2019, at least two weeks before Beijing revealed details of the deadly virus to the world, congressional investigators said, raising questions anew about what China knew in the pandemic’s crucial early days.

Documents obtained from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services by a House committee and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show that a Chinese researcher in Beijing uploaded a nearly complete sequence of the virus’s structure to a U.S. government-run database on Dec. 28, 2019. Chinese officials at that time were still publicly describing the disease outbreak in Wuhan, China, as a viral pneumonia “of unknown cause” and had yet to close the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, site of one of the initial Covid-19 outbreaks.

China only shared the virus’s sequence with the World Health Organization on Jan. 11, 2020, according to U.S. government timelines of the pandemic.

Grammar point: “only” is misplaced above, it should be between “Organization” and “on”.  I am readily exercised, as my friends know, by the frequent misplacement of the word “only.” But I digress:

The new information doesn’t shed light on the debate over whether Covid emerged from an infected animal or a lab leak, but it suggests that the world still doesn’t have a full accounting of the pandemic’s origin.

Yes, why wouldn’t the Chinese immediately tell WHO as soon as it had a good sequence? Did they know the release came from one of their labs? More:

he extra two weeks could have proved crucial in helping the international medical community pinpoint how Covid-19 spread, develop medical defenses and get started on an eventual vaccine, specialists have said. In late 2019, scientists and governments worldwide were racing to understand the mystery disease eventually named Covid-19 that would kill millions and sicken many more.

It “underscores how cautious we have to be about the accuracy of the information that the Chinese government has released,” said Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle who has reviewed the documents and the recently discovered gene sequence. “It’s important to keep in mind how little we know.”

We may never know whether the virus came from the Wuhan lab, the Wuhan wet market, or somewhere else. And I’m not sure how much it matters, save that labs have to amp up their security with unknown microbes. But two weeks in those early days could have saved a substantial number of lives.

*While Thomas Friedman and Anthony Blinken continue to flounder about pronouncing on the Middle East war, floating all kinds of unworkable solutions while showing their failure to grasp the local politics, Bret Stephens once again has it right in a NYT op-ed called “The genocide charge against Israel is a moral obscenity.” Indeed, if you don’t agree with Stephens’s title, I’d say you’ve lost your own moral compass.

In recent decades, as many as three million people perished in a famine in North Korea that was mainly government-induced. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians were gassed, bombed, starved or tortured to death by the Assad regime, and an estimated 14 million were forced to flee their homes. China has put more than a million Uyghurs through gulag-like re-education camps in a thinly veiled attempt to suppress and erase their religious and cultural identity.

But North Korea, Syria and China have never been charged with genocide at the International Court of Justice. Israel has. How curious. And how obscene.

It’s obscene because it politicizes our understanding of genocide, fatally eroding the moral power of the term. The war between Israel and Hamas is terrible — as is every war. But if this is genocide, what word do we have for the killing fields in Cambodia, Stalin’s Holodomor in Ukraine, the Holocaust itself?

Words that come to mean much more than originally intended eventually come to mean almost nothing at all — a victory for future génocidaires who’d like the world to think there’s no moral or legal difference between one kind of killing and another.

It’s obscene because it perverts the definition of genocide, which is precise: “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” Notice two key features of this definition: It speaks of acts whereas part of the genocide case against Israel involves the misinterpretation of quotes from Israeli officials who have vowed Hamas’s elimination, not the elimination of Palestinians. And it uses the term as such — meaning the acts are genocidal only if they are directed at Palestinians as Palestinians, not as members of Hamas or, heartbreakingly, as collateral deaths in attempts to destroy Hamas.

If Israel were trying to commit genocide, it wouldn’t be putting its soldiers at risk or allowing humanitarian relief to arrive from Egypt or withdrawing many of its forces from Gaza. It would simply be killing Palestinians everywhere, in vastly greater numbers, as Germans killed Jews or Hutus killed Tutsis.

It’s obscene because it puts the wrong party in the dock. Hamas is a genocidal organization by conviction and design. Its founding charter calls for Israel to be “obliterated” and for Muslims to kill Jews as they “hide behind stones and trees.” On Oct. 7, Hamas murdered, mutilated, tortured, incinerated, raped or kidnapped everyone it could. Had it not been stopped it would not have stopped. One of its leaders has since vowed to do it “a second, a third, a fourth” time.

This is all correct, and really, I have no use for those people who spend their time accusing Israel of genocide when the real culprits, Hamas, who have openly and gladly admitted their genocidal intentions, are ignored. What a moral travesty it is that no Western nation has accused Hamas (or the countries Stephens mentions above) of genocide!  Not one nation in the world is willing to do so.

*We haven’t spoken of the war in Ukraine for a while, as it’s been pushed off center stage by what’s happening in Gaza.  But Ukraine is still fighting for its life, and my impression has been that it’s not winning—that slowly but surely, Russia is pushing into the country as well as wrecking it. Now a big military macher at NATO thinks that the whole war needs a rethink, though what that rethink is remains elusive, at least in the AP article that describes it.

Ukraine is locked in an existential battle for its survival almost two years into its war with Russia and Western armies and political leaders must drastically change the way they help it fend off invading forces, a top NATO military officer said on Wednesday.

At a meeting of the 31-nation alliance’s top brass, the chair of the NATO Military Committee, Admiral Rob Bauer, also said that behind President Vladimir Putin’s rationale for the war is a fear of democracy, in a year marked by elections around the world.

Over two days of talks in Brussels, NATO’s top officers are expected to detail plans for what are set to be the biggest military exercises in Europe since the Cold War later this year. The wargames are meant as a fresh show of strength from NATO and its commitment to defend all allied nations from attack.

At this point you may well be asking, “So what? What good do wargames do?”. And you’ll be right given that NATO is not going to commit troops to fighting the Russians. There’s some gobbledygook:

As the war bogs down, and with U.S. and European Union funding for Ukraine’s conflict-ravaged economy held up by political infighting, Bauer appealed for a “whole of society approach” to the challenge that goes beyond military planning.

“We need public and private actors to change their mindset for an era in which everything was plannable, foreseeable, controllable and focused on efficiency to an era in which anything can happen at any time. An era in which we need to expect the unexpected,” he said as he opened the meeting.

“In order to be fully effective, also in the future, we need a warfighting transformation of NATO,” Bauer added.

But what is the sweating admiral trying to say? It turns out to be simple: “Give Zelensky more weapons!” I’m not sure how much of a “transformation of aims that really is. Yes, the UK will send 20,000 more troops to participate in the war exercises, but in the end it comes down to donations from NATO countries:

The U.K. will also send advanced fighter jets and surveillance planes, plus warships and submarines.

With ammunition stockpiles diminishing as allies send military materiel to Ukraine, the Norwegian government said Wednesday it was earmarking 2 billion kroner ($192 million) to boost defense industry production capacity, saying there is “a need for large quantities of ammunition.”

Norway’s Defense Minister Bjørn Arild Gram said that “increasing capacity in the defense industry is important, both for Ukraine, but also to safeguard our own security.”

Half the funds will go to Nammo, a Norway-based aerospace and defense group that specializes in the production of ammunition, rocket engines and space applications, “to increase the production of artillery ammunition,” Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre said.

But I fear that this won’t be enough, for Russia has not only lots of ammunition and weapons, but a lot more fighters.  I of course approve of all the help we can give Ukraine, a scrappy little country with tough fighters and tough cats, being slowly nibble away by a rancid dictatorship. But I fear we’ll have to stand by as at least a sizable chunk of Ukraine–if not all of it–will fall under Putin’s control.

*From Tom Gross:

Today, Kfir Bibas, the world’s youngest hostage, is one year old.

He was 8 months old when he was kidnapped at gunpoint with his brother Ariel, age 4, and his parents Yarden and Shiri, from their home on the kibbutz by Hamas terrorists on October 7.

Kfir was born on January 18, 2023.

The Red Cross hasn’t visited them even once.

Spare a thought for Kfir and Ariel the world’s youngest hostages

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili wants Kulka to go back upstairs where she lives:

Hili: Could you facilitate Kulka’s return to her home?
A: But she didn’t ask for it.
Hili: I did.
In Polish:
Hili: Czy mógłbyś umożliwić Kulce powrót do jej domu?
Ja: Przecież ona o to nie prosiła.
Hili: Ja prosiłam.
. . . and a photo by Paulina of Baby Kulka playing in the snow:

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

I may have posted this before, but it’s good because it’s true:

I posted this on Facebook 13 years ago today; it’s one of the best cat memes ever:

From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy:

From Masih: These two Iranian journalists were just released after a year in prison for simply reporting on the death of Mahsa Amini. Now they’re threatening to put them back in the hoosegow for now wearing hijabs. Such is life in the Islamic Republic of Iran:

The clip below is from MEMRI, which is always reliable. If you want to see the homophobia of Islam, rarely mentioned by Western “progressives,” have a listen.  This was sent by freader joolz, who adds:

I will never understand why LGBTQ ideologists show unconditional support for Palestine.  Concern for the citizens is never tempered with ‘….. but their homophobia is unacceptable’ or ‘….. but their treatment of women is barbaric’.
Things in war are rarely 100% good or bad, but pretending that’s the case is delusional.
This tirade was in Jerusalem, but I have no doubt many Palestinian men think this way. It may be a handy link to highlight the cognitive dissonance of those who pretend they are ‘left’, rather than those who are actually left.
The homophobic tirade was actually delivered at the Al-Aqsa mosque, one of the holiest sites in Islam. I wonder how gay people can want this attitude to extent from the river to the sea:

From Jay, who says, “Dogs vs. cats: End of the discussion. Indeed! Look at that demented d*g!

And from Jay’s partner Anna; read the thread; I enclose four tweets. Creating a climate hostile to one’s race should extend to all races:

From Barry: a truculent crow wants more grooming!

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a one-year-old boy gassed to death upon arrival at the camp:

Two tweets from Professor Cobb. The first one has good news about the saiga antelope (Saiga tatarica), which approached extinction due to poaching (the horns are used in Chinese medicine) and to two episodes of disease that killed many animals.

To show how many disappeared, here’s a Wikipedia map showing the current and past distribution of the two subspecies:

White: historic distribution of the Saiga (Saiga tatarica); green: current distribution of Saiga tatarica tatarica; red: current distribution of Saiga tatarica mongolica

And a pianist does a blues version of Beethoven:

45 thoughts on “Thursday: Hili dialogue”

  1. Speaking of people not listening or not believing what people say is what they mean, here’s Klaus Schwab saying that, in the future, A.I. will make elections unnecessary. I am certain that that wouldn’t have been my example of the anticipated power of prescriptive A.I., but we all have our ideas of what onerous or disruptive activities A.I. could free us from.

    1. How about degrowth, or Yuval Harari making H. sapiens into a … my god, I need to go read it again – hackable animal sounds ok to some extent but I think Harari’s idea is a new species. I think he’s buds with Dr. Evil too.

  2. I am tired of this continuing “lab leak” crap. It seems to be the opinion of security, state, and defense dept mouthpieces with no research or peer reviewed analysis. There have been at least two peer reviewed papers by actual scientists that put it as spillover and from wet market. I am heading out right now but will try to run down journal reference later this morning. First saw pre-publication on TWiV a couple of years ago.

    1. +1 Appreciate this. The evidence for spillover via the Wuhan market is convincing & well covered via TWiV and other sources.

    3. Jim, I believe these are the papers to which you refer.

      https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715
      https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8337

      For what it’s worth, I’m with Jerry on this one: we may never have definitive proof. Interestingly, there are reports all week about both Fauci and Collins backing away from the lab leak as “conspiracy theory” stance; however, as these are Republican characterizations of closed-door hearings, I would wait for the transcripts. (Just as I would if it were Democrats’ characterizations.) That said, the Republicans also report that both Fauci and Collins acknowledge that there was no scientific basis for the six-foot social-distancing rule. At least that part is credible, as anyone who thought about it for two minutes realized that nearly four years ago.

      1. No scientific basis for the six foot distancing rule?

        Does that mean that the transmissibility of covid as a function of distance hadn’t been scientifically studied? Wasn’t it simply a logical step, to keep one’s distance from others who may be infected, when little was “scientifically” known about covid?

        1. The best distance was alone, on a beach, jogging or surfing. But we cited and arrested people for that.

        2. Curt, As I recall, lots of lab studies were done, but variability of environmental conditions indoors or out, warm or cold, moving air or not, droplet size, and on and on, meant that there was no definitive distance. Not a failure of science but as I think you are implying: just using a little “sechel” along with the range of science results says sixish feet is a good number. Three feet likely not far enough….ten feet is likely not practicable. So, yeah…six feet is logical.

          1. Yes, given all that they didn’t know about how the virus would infect people, in an emergency with the pandemic upon us, they made educated choices as to what reasonable precautions to take.

      2. Thanks Ken and Doug. I was later getting back than I intended. There was also a Cell paper in 2021 https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(21)00991-0.pdf
        And a new slant (which I will read this evening) in a 2023 bioethics paper focusing a bit on motivation for the various origin claims at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11673-023-10303-1.

        This in general is outside of my expertise as I am but a lowly retired flight test engineer, but I do have a science background, have read quite a bit of relevant biochem since 2019, I can listen to experts such as those on TWiV, but mostly when I hear hooves, I think horses, not zebras.

    4. Nobody doubts that there are published papers supporting the wet-market hypothesis. What I find strange is that you don’t think that the intelligence organizations that concluded that the origin was most likely a lab leak took them into account. The intelligence organizations had access to that information (and not only the scientists who wrote them, but every scientist in the country—they all have telephones and email addresses—as well as classified information that the scientists didn’t have. That is not to say that the lab leak hypothesis is true—after all, even the intelligence agencies favoring this hypothesis only had low confidence in their conclusions—but the intelligence agencies had access to more information, not less, than the scientists did, and hence, potentially, were in the better position to judge the issue.

  3. This book – really, a few essays – is worth a read :

    The Gulf War did not take place
    Jean Baudrillard
    (Translation 1995 by Paul Patton)
    Indiana University Press
    1991

    The contents (beside the intro) give an idea of the jist:

    1. The Gulf War will not take place
    2 The Gulf War : is it really taking place?
    3. The Gulf War did not take place

    Lower-case preserved. A rare case of post-whateverism getting to some genuine idea with consequence.

    Or namely, as James Lindsay put it : “The issue is never the issue – the issue is always the Revolution.”

    1. Missed edit:

      “The current thing did not take place” was supposed to be in the Lindsay quote.

  4. “Of course it will apply to all states.”

    Respectfully, I don’t think this is correct–or at least not necessarily correct. One perfectly plausible outcome at SCOTUS is that the court will say that Colorado was within its rights to make the determination that it did. Section 3 is live without congressional action, it applies to the presidency, and Colorado’s process was sufficiently rigorous. But it could rule on those questions of law without touching the questions of fact: was January 6 an insurrection, and did Trump “engage” in insurrection. The court has good reason not to let a single state judge decide those matters for the whole country, yet it has no mechanism for fact-finding on its own. So it may settle the legal questions, while also saying that other states can use their own state election laws and processes to make their own determinations on those questions of fact. Of course that would result in a mess, with Trump on some state ballots and not others–but I think it’s a plausible outcome nevertheless.

  5. Oops, late with this due to parent/teacher consultations for my youngest.

    On this day:
    1778 – James Cook is the first known European to discover the Hawaiian Islands, which he names the “Sandwich Islands”.

    1788 – The first elements of the First Fleet carrying 736 convicts from Great Britain to Australia arrive at Botany Bay.

    1886 – Modern field hockey is born with the formation of The Hockey Association in England.

    1896 – An X-ray generating machine is exhibited for the first time by H. L. Smith.

    1911 – Eugene B. Ely lands on the deck of the USS Pennsylvania anchored in San Francisco Bay, the first time an aircraft landed on a ship.

    1919 – World War I: The Paris Peace Conference opens in Versailles, France.

    1943 – Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: The first uprising of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto.

    1945 – World War II: Liberation of Kraków, Poland by the Red Army.

    1958 – Willie O’Ree, the first Black Canadian National Hockey League player, makes his NHL debut with the Boston Bruins.

    1967 – Albert DeSalvo, the “Boston Strangler”, is convicted of numerous crimes and is sentenced to life imprisonment.

    1977 – Scientists identify a previously unknown bacterium as the cause of the mysterious Legionnaires’ disease.

    1977 – Australia’s worst rail disaster occurs at Granville, Sydney, killing 83.

    1978 – The European Court of Human Rights finds the United Kingdom’s government guilty of mistreating prisoners in Northern Ireland, but not guilty of torture.

    1981 – Phil Smith and Phil Mayfield parachute off a Houston skyscraper, becoming the first two people to BASE jump from objects in all four categories: buildings, antennae, spans (bridges), and earth (cliffs).

    1983 – The International Olympic Committee restores Jim Thorpe’s Olympic medals to his family.

    1990 – Washington, D.C. Mayor Marion Barry is arrested for drug possession in an FBI sting.

    1993 – Martin Luther King, Jr. Day is officially observed for the first time in all 50 US states.

    2007 – The strongest storm in the United Kingdom in 17 years kills 14 people and Germany sees the worst storm since 1999 with 13 deaths. Cyclone Kyrill causes at least 44 deaths across 20 countries in Western Europe.

    Births:
    1734 – Caspar Friedrich Wolff, German physiologist and embryologist (d. 1794).

    1752 – John Nash, English architect (d. 1835).

    1779 – Peter Mark Roget, English physician, lexicographer, and theologian (d. 1869). [There’s still only one word for “thesaurus”.]

    1882 – A. A. Milne, English author, poet, and playwright (d. 1956).

    1886 – Clara Nordström, Swedish-German author and translator (d. 1962).

    1892 – Oliver Hardy, American actor and comedian (d. 1957).

    1904 – Cary Grant, English-American actor (d. 1986).

    1908 – Jacob Bronowski, Polish-English mathematician, historian, and television host (d. 1974).

    1911 – Danny Kaye, American actor, singer, and dancer (d. 1987).

    1933 – David Bellamy, English botanist, author and academic (d. 2019).

    1933 – John Boorman, English director, producer, and screenwriter.

    1933 – Ray Dolby, American engineer and businessman, founded Dolby Laboratories (d. 2013).

    1934 – Raymond Briggs, English author and illustrator (d. 2022).

    1941 – Denise Bombardier, Canadian journalist and author (d. 2023).

    1955 – Kevin Costner, American actor, director, and producer.

    1960 – Mark Rylance, English actor, director, and playwright.

    1964 – Jane Horrocks, English actress and singer.

    1971 – Amy Barger, American astronomer.

    1971 – Pep Guardiola, Spanish footballer and manager.

    The monuments of the nations are all protests against nothingness after death; so are statues and inscriptions; so is history. (Lew Wallace):
    1783 – Jeanne Quinault, French actress and playwright (b. 1699).

    1873 – Edward Bulwer-Lytton, English author, poet, playwright, and politician, Secretary of State for the Colonies (b. 1803).

    1936 – Rudyard Kipling, English author and poet, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1865).

    1952 – Curly Howard, American actor (b. 1903).

    1954 – Sydney Greenstreet, English-American actor (b. 1879).

    1966 – Kathleen Norris, American journalist and author (b. 1880).

    1973 – Irina Nikolaevna Levchenko, Russian tank commander (b. 1924).

    1989 – Bruce Chatwin, English-French author (b. 1940).

    1990 – Melanie Appleby, English singer (b. 1966).

    2000 – Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, Austrian architect (b. 1897).

    2004 – Galina Gavrilovna Korchuganova, Russian-born Soviet test pilot and aerobatics champion (b. 1935). [Today’s Woman of the Day, see next post below.]

    2009 – Tony Hart, English painter and television host (b. 1925).

    2010 – Kate McGarrigle, Canadian musician and singer-songwriter (b. 1946).

    2015 – Christine Valmy, Romanian cosmetologist and author (b. 1926).

    2016 – Glenn Frey, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and actor (b. 1948).

    2017 – Rachael Heyhoe Flint, Baroness Heyhoe Flint, English cricketer, businesswoman and philanthropist (b. 1939).

    2017 – Roberta Peters, American coloratura soprano (b. 1930).

    2023 – David Crosby, American singer-songwriter (b. 1941).

    1. Woman of the Day:
      [Text from Wikipedia]

      Galina Gavrilovna Korchuganova (Russian: Галина Гавриловна Корчуганова; born 22 March 1935, died on this day in 2004) was a Soviet test pilot and aerobatics champion.

      She discovered her passion for aviation after joining a sport parachute club as a teenager, and she finished high school with top student honours. She studied aviation technology at the Moscow Aviation Institute and graduated in 1959.

      After graduation, Korchuganova began working at Ramensk Avionics Construction Bureau as an engineer. She flew planes for sport, but dreamed of becoming a professional test pilot – a job not open to Soviet women at the time. When the Soviet paramilitary organization DOSAAF began searching for female space flight candidates in 1962, Korchuganova was included in a shortlist of 18 candidates, although she didn’t make it into the next phase of selection.

      In 1965, Korchuganova set a world aviation record with a Yak-32 jet on a 100 km closed circuit track. One year later, she competed at the World Aerobatic Championship in Moscow and won gold in the women’s individual competition, becoming the first women’s world aerobatics champion. Media gave her the nickname “the mistress of the sky”. Now, at last, Soviet officials permitted Korchuganova to become a test pilot. She initially struggled to obtain the necessary formal support for her training, facing reluctance from male pilots who were unwilling to work with a woman, but aviator Valentina Stepanova Grizodubova – who worked as head of the Science Research Center of Flight Test – stepped in and supported Korchuganova, and the young test pilot graduated from the Kirovograd flight school in 1969.

      Korchuganova went on to achieve 42 world aviation records in multiple types of aircraft, including two YAK-40 world records with cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya in 1980. Korchuganova became proficient in more than 20 types of aircraft and gradually advanced from the rank of 5th class test pilot to 2nd class. By the end of her flying career in 1984, she had accumulated more than 4,000 hours of flight time, including 1,500 hours as a test pilot.

      She worked at the Museum of Aviation and Astronautics (музее авиации и космонавтики) in Moscow following her retirement.

      In 1992, Korchuganova founded Aviatrissa, the first Russian aviation club for women. She served as its president and increased its membership from 13 to 550, helping to organize aviation forums that brought pilots together from all over the world.

      Following a diagnosis of liver cancer, Korchuganova died on 18 January 2004 and was buried in Khovanskoye Cemetery. She was posthumously inducted into the Women in Aviation International Pioneer Hall of Fame in 2006.

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galina_Korchuganova#

  6. Only, indeed …
    Only the bear gave the bishop the banana.
    The only bear gave the bishop the banana.
    The bear only gave the bishop the banana.
    etc

    1. I never thought about all the possibilities until your post got me started. Very interesting! Yet, I do think that I get the positioning right, but I may do so only some of the time.

  7. Chevron: It does seem weird that we depend on government agencies to interpret how laws are to be enforced, as this can cause whipsaw changes as administrations change. It also provides a way for government agencies to avoid enforcing laws or to interpret them in ways contrary to Congress’s intent. On the other hand, requiring Congress itself or the courts to spell out interpret laws fully might overwhelm them. It would take longer-than-forever for Congress to incorporate all of the nuances and corner cases into the laws themselves and it’s hard to believe that the courts would be able to handle all the cases without adding so much infrastructure that the courts would become as large as the bureaucracies themselves. So, in theory it seems like the courts should interpret the laws, but that might not be practical. It’ll be interesting to see what happens.

    Trump on the ballot: If Trump is struck from the ballot, his supporters would have further impetus to cry foul, or worse. The best solution is for the voters to vote for someone else. It doesn’t seem like that will happen but—much as I don’t want Trump to be President—that is how our (form of) democracy works.

    Genocide: It’s Hamas that has avowed to commit genocide, nor Israel.

    Ukraine: Ukraine is slowly losing the war. Putin is banking that the west will lose interest or resolve. This seems to be happening, despite the fact that an emboldened Russia will be an even bigger menace in the future.

    It’s important to spell out (or abbreviate :-)) “fluid” ounces to distinguish them from ounces by weight. It’s a weird thing in our weights and measurement system that causes lots of ambiguities, often around cooking. My wife tells me that it usually doesn’t cause a problem because there are unwritten conventions for when to use fluid ounces or ounces by weight. Good that she knows them.

    1. “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

      Our form of democracy works by upholding the constitution–and it clearly says that there are cases where people cannot hold office. IMO it is much better that we go through this process and, if it holds up, exclude him from the ballot, than turn a blind eye and pretend it will all work out.

      1. > … exclude him from the ballot, than turn a blind eye and pretend it will all work out.

        For so long I’ve been hoping that something (anything) would exclude T from the ballot. But as T already mouths off to judges— I don’t see a debate stage large enough to contain his giant ego. Many would rather just be entertained by the coming Sequel Circus.

  8. I’m not sure if this is a correction or an apology, but IMO Peppermint Hot Chocolate and Chai Eggnog Latte with whipped cream and chocolate sprinkles on top is a wonderful gourmet coffee and I’d drink one right now if I could. It’s practically as gourmet as you can get without a couple of lit sparklers sticking out of it.

    Of course, in my defense I should mention that I also think the best alcoholic drinks also come with whipped cream and chocolate sprinkles on top. I’m going out for my birthday in a few days and will probably order a Pink Squirrel — which, as I recall, is served with whipped cream. I will ask for a cherry. I don’t drink often, but when I do it’s gourmet all the way.

  10. The tweet by FAIR, “Federal Court Upholds Discrimination Claim of Racially-Hostile Environment at Penn State”, is misleading. What the court did was dismiss most of the plaintiff’s claims. What it held is that one claim is allowed to go forward, the one on a racially hostile climate. But letting a claim proceed is not the same as upholding the claim. To dismiss a claim without hearing any evidence the motion to dismiss must pass a very high bar; to dismiss it, the court must consider the allegations, as stated by the plaintiff, to be true. This rule gives every benefit of the doubt to the plaintiff– it is not a ruling that the plaintiff’s allegations are true.

    The court’s split ruling on the motion to dismiss (which went mostly for the defendants) also brought up the possibility of applying the Garcetti standard to faculty at public universities. The Garcetti standard would essentially prevent faculty from speaking unfavorably (in the perception of administrators) about the running of the university.

    The court’s ruling in full is here https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.paed.610617/gov.uscourts.paed.610617.31.0.pdf .

    For a discussion of Garcetti as applied to faculty see here: https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/amicus-brief-support-petitioner-and-reversal-porter-v-board-trustees-north-carolina

    and here: https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2023/11/fire-asks-us-supreme-court-to-clarify-status-of-academic-freedom-after-garcetti.html

    GCM

  11. Anyone interested in gourmet coffee should look at the separate coffee menu on Austrian Airlines. You can get a wonderful Eiskaffee which will keep you happy for many miles on your way.

    1. The cat was playing too; no fat tail, no arched back. I doubt that claws were deployed.

      Reminds me of an Alaskan Malamute who was attacked by a goose, but interpreted it as play and did a lot of excited bouncing. The goose seemed nonplussed that this animal, unlike the others it had encountered, did not run away cowering.

  13. I think that one reason why the lab leak theory won’t die is not only because of China’s behavior, but also because public figures in the West branded it a “conspiracy theory” in February 2020—even though it was plausible, and long before there was even strong circumstantial evidence to rule it out. (For anyone who wants to hang their hat on the Proximal Origins paper, well, feel free.) This line was then pushed by both government officials and major media. Here is just one prominent example: “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.” That was reported in Science on February 19, 2020; they were referencing a Lancet piece published online the day before. Perhaps it makes me a conspiracy theorist to note that Peter Daszak, a coauthor of that Lancet letter, might have had significant conflicts of interest.

    It wasn’t long before “natural origin” was treated as a scientific consensus in some circles. The consensus. In science. That quickly. On an extremely complicated subject. With little data. That polarity of “consensus” versus “conspiracy theory” on a complicated subject about which little is known drives skepticism—or, at least, it should. When government and media and big tech then try to police the discourse in fighting “disinformation,” then it will further encourage emotional and political “thinking”—on both sides.

    As I suggested, I am agnostic on the SARS-COV-2 source at this point. But I will say this: in our highly polarized and ideological political environment, I have become deeply suspicious of any claims that “The Science says” or that “all experts agree.” I have become wary of accusations that dissenters are necessarily trafficking in conspiracy theories or hate. I wave off demands that I should dismiss data and argument simply because the source is from the political “other.” New issues or positions continually arise which few people had even heard about until the day before yesterday, but we are instantly told through the media megaphones that all the smart and right-thinking people agree; only the fools, morons, conspiracy theorists, haters, blah blah, would even entertain that things are not so clear cut as claimed. It is unfortunate that discussion of COVID origins and public health practices could not avoid this dynamic.

    Now, back to that article on The Role of White Supremacy in the False Insistence on Two Sexes. (Yeah, I made that up, but I am also afraid to google it.)

    1. There probably are a whole bunch of reactions to Andrews article on Gaza. He will publish them in the next week or so. I like Andrew but I disagreed with him on this. To me it seems like because of the perfidy of Hamas(and UNRA, etc.) anyone should wait before attacking Israel’s behavior. There was the incident of the attack on the hospital that turned out to have nothing to do with the IDF. There were many journalists screaming at Israel before the truth came out. It is obvious that Hamas wants Israel blamed and no one should push that narrative, that doesn’t help the Gazans. Jerry wondered why no one was doing more to point the finger at Hamas. Maybe there is something we can do?

    2. Comments on Sullivan’s article on the Free Press site were heavily negative. Many rebuttals received dozens, some hundreds, of likes. Readers of the Free Press, at least, seem to get it that civilians of a foreign state that makes war on you will get killed whenever their deaths will help the war effort more than not killing them will. When the war aims are existential survival, almost any useful action is permissible, even mandatory, as the primary obligation of a state is to protect its citizens from annihilation by foreigners. No military can afford to throw away the lives of an unlimited number of its soldiers solely to prevent casualties among for-now non-combatants to satisfy a tut-tutting world.

      Sullivan has a blind spot about all of this, which comes out in his specific complaints that Israel does too much of this and not enough of that.

  15. Throughout the Wet Market vs Lab Leak controversy it has seemed to me that there are two very different lab leak “theories.” One posits that the virus was man-made in the lab and then somehow leaked and the other posits that it was a natural virus being studied and then somehow got loose from the lab. One of those two scenarios is much more unlikely than the other, yet they are always confused, conflated and rigorously mixed together in any discussion of the issue I’ve encountered.

  16. Here is Jacob Bronowski, born 116 years ago, from the Ascent of Man TV series speaking on themes of both longstanding and immediate importance on this website.

    “https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltjI3BXKBgY”

  18. A little late to this post, but the misunderstanding about “Florida” ounces reminded me of the hospital patient who complained about the taste of the Kentucky jelly…

  20. Hmm. I think someone’s got something wrong here:
    “The U.K. will also send advanced fighter jets and surveillance planes, plus warships and submarines.”
    I don’t think the UK is likely to gift any of their multi-billion pound nuclear submarines to Ukraine. We (Brits) used to have smaller diesel/electric subs, but they were scrapped, or sold on to other nations, at the end of the Cold War. And in any case how would the Ukrainians know how to operate such massively complex systems with, as I understand it, the capacity to launch Tomahawk Cruise Missiles. (I used to work in the shipyard where the subs are built) I’m also a bit suspicious about the advanced jets and warships – although I suppose some obsolescent, smaller ships, like minehunters might be a possibility, but even then a lot of training would be needed before the Ukrainians would be able to use them.

  21. As expected, here’s nuanced coverage/details of the SARS-CoV-2 sequence, by a panel of competent virologists. I expected that this would be covered in the next This Week in Virology, but the week’s podcast is released every Sunday, so I had to wait three days for it. Start @ 25:50, for just a few min.

    Summary: the sequence was released Dec 29 2019 (which you may recall was right about when alarm bells were starting to go off), BUT IT WAS REJECTED, because of incomplete compliance with formatting standards, or something like that. When they fixed that, two wks had gone by.

    This is quite different from withholding the sequence for two wks. It would be nice if the WSJ at least had a virologist on retainer. However far 1211 Ave of the Americas is from 352 7th Avenue, that’s how far someone would have had to go to consult with WEiT if they wanted to meet in-person.

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