Tuesday: Hili dialogue

January 23, 2024 • 7:45 am

Welcome to the Cruelest Day, Tuesday, January 23, 2024, with one day left of my trip to California. Foodwise, it’s National Pie Day, and, coincidentally, I’ll be having a slice of Key Lime pie for breakfast. I’ve long maintained that pie is the best breakfast.

“Key Lime Pie à Everglades City” by Guillaume Capron is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

It’s also Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’s Jayanti (Orissa, Tripura, and West Bengal, India). Bose, born on this day in 1897, is seen as a national hero by many Indians despite the fact that, in his attempts to free India from the British, he collaborated with the Nazis and created the Indian National Army in collaboration with the Japanese. He died in a mysterious plane crash in 1945.  Finally, in Taiwan and South Korea, it’s World Freedom Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the January 23 Wikipedia page.

Oh, and posting will be light today, tomorrow, and perhaps Friday as I prepare for the trip back home. Bear with me; I do my best.

Da Nooz:

*Despite Iran’s support for terrorist organizations like Hamas and the Houthis, Reuel Marc Gerecht and Ray Takeyh have written an op-ed for the NYT called “Why Iran doesn’t want a war.“

For years, Iran has provided funding, arms or training to Hamas and Hezbollah, which are fighting Israel, and to the Houthis, who have been attacking ships in the Red Sea. Iran has also launched its own strikes in recent days in retaliation for a deadly bombing earlier this month, claiming to target Israeli spy headquarters in Iraq and the Islamic State in Syria. It has also exchanged strikes with Pakistan across their shared border.

While Iran is clearly asserting its military strength amid the widening regional turmoil, that doesn’t mean its leaders want to be drawn into a wider war. They have said as much publicly, and perhaps more important, they have meticulously avoided taking direct military action against either Israel or the United States. The regime appears to be content for now to lean into its longtime strategy of proxy warfare: The groups they back are fighting Iran’s foes and so far, neither Israel nor the United States has signaled any interest in retaliating directly.

Some of this reluctance clearly stems from political unrest in the country, much of it promoted by Iran’s brave women (see my daily tweets from Masih Alinejad):

At the heart of Iran’s aversion to a major conflict are the domestic issues that have been preoccupying the regime. The elderly supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is seeking to secure his legacy — by overcoming political headwinds to install a like-minded successor, pursuing a nuclear weapon and ensuring the survival of the regime as an Islamist paladin dominating the Middle East — and that means not getting dragged into a wider war.

Ayatollah Khamenei’s government has been trying to keep his political opposition in check since 2022, when the Islamic Republic faced perhaps its most serious uprising since the revolution. The death of Mahsa Amini in the custody of the morality police tapped into widespread frustration with the country’s leaders and triggered a national movement explicitly intent on toppling the theocracy. Using brutal methods, the mullahs’ security forces regained the streets and schools, well aware that even unorganized protests can become a threat to the regime. Iran is also facing an economic crisis because of corruption, chronic fiscal mismanagement and sanctions imposed because of its nuclear infractions.

. . . Of course, the more conflict Iran engages in — directly or indirectly — also increases the chance that a rogue or poorly judged strike could send the violence spinning out of control — in a direction Iran does not favor. History is riddled with miscalculations, and there is a real possibility that Iran could find itself pulled into the larger conflict that it has sought to avoid.

And of course if Iran gets embroiled in a war with the U.S., Iran would lose. That, combined with public discontent, might destroy any theocracy for good.

*According to MEMRI, a biology teacher in Pakistan was forced to publicly renounce evolution and Darwin. After being badly injured by a bomb earlier, the teacher continued to teach the prohibited material, and so clerics demanded an long public recantation. The teacher, Sher Ali, is a brave man.  There is an audio at the link above that tells you exactly what Ali said in his renunciation, including an affirmation that women’s intellects are inferior to those of men. (I’m sure he doesn’t accept that.):

In October 2023, a video emerged on social media showing a group of Islamic religious scholars in the Bannu district of Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. In the film, the clerics are forcing Sher Ali, a teacher of zoology, to renounce, on camera, a number of beliefs and scientific ideas such as Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Sher Ali is an assistant professor of biology at the Government Postgraduate Decree College in the Bannu district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. He holds a Master of Science degree in Zoology from the University of Peshawar, and a Master of Philosophy degree in human genetics from the Quaid-e-Azam University of Islamabad.

In some images available on social media, Sher Ali can be seen holding a copy of the book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, by internationally acclaimed Israeli author Yuval Noah Harari. Sher Ali is an intellectual who publicly discusses widely respected scientific ideas in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where Islamist groups are powerful.

In May 2022, Sher Ali’s car was attacked with a magnetic bomb, leaving him in a wheelchair for months and raising the question among his students and followers whether he would continue to speak at seminars and teach openly. However, in an interview with one of his students from his hospital bed, Sher Ali revealed his optimism that he would continue to teach.

This seems to have prompted a group of radical clerics associated with the Deobandi school of Sunni Islam to gather together to force him to renounce certain scientific ideas. The Deobandi school is named after the Dar-ul-Uloom Deoband, the second largest Islamic seminary in the word, after Jamia Al-Azhar of Cairo. The Dar-ul-Uloom seminary is near New Delhi, India. A translation of Sher Ali’s renunciation, as written by the clerics, is given below.

Here’s the poor guy being forced to renounce what he said. If he tries to teach Darwin again, or extol the minds of women, he’ll be killed for sure:

*The Washington Post reports that the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 vote, has overruled Texas by requiring the state to remove some of the barriers between the U.S. and Mexico, barriers intended to prevent immigrants from entering.

The Supreme Court sided with the Biden administration on Monday and cleared the way for border patrol agents to remove razor wire Texas officials installed along a busy stretch of the southern border until the legality of the barriers is resolved in court.

As is typical in emergency actions, the majority did not explain its reasoning for dissolving an order from a lower court. Four conservatives — Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh — noted their dissents without explanation.

Even though immigration and border security matters are generally the purview of the federal government, Abbott has mobilized thousands of National Guard troops and lined the banks of the Rio Grande near Eagle Pass with razor wire to try to block illegal entries.

Earlier this month, federal officials said Texas National Guard personnel had blocked U.S. Border Patrol agents who were investigating reports of drowning migrants from a section of the Rio Grande where the state had placed the wire barriers.The bodies of three migrants, a woman and two children, were found in the river by Mexican authorities days later.

. . .Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar urged the justices to “restore Border Patrol’s access to the border it is charged with patrolling and the migrants it is responsible for apprehending, inspecting, and processing.”

Yes, there’s a crisis at the border, but it needs to be resolved legally, not with Texas going rogue. That a conservative court would at least put a stay on the state’s behavior suggests that these things need federal approval. The problem, of course, is that neither Congress nor Biden is doing much about it. And that may tell in November’s election.

*Once again the US and UK have struck back at the Houthis for trying to control shipping traffic in the Sea, particularly to Israel. This time it was a big strike, and of course the media wag their fingers and say that this could lead to a “wider war”. But what are we to do, and if not us, who? Should we let the Houthis take what they want, like Portland shoplifters?

A U.S.-led coalition launched a series of strikes against Houthi targets Monday, U.S. and U.K. officials and the Houthis said, in the second major assault in a continuing bid to stop the Yemeni rebel group’s attacks on ships transiting the Red Sea.

The strikes marked at least the sixth time the U.S. has targeted the group, which is armed, funded and supported by Iran. In most instances, the U.S. said it was launching self-defense strikes.  Monday’s strikes were aimed at stopping the group from being able to launch attacks.

An official in the Royal Navy said the attacks struck dozens of targets, including rocket launchers, missile depots, warehouses and radar sites.

. . . In the hours leading up to the coalition strikes, a U.S.-flagged and -owned heavy load carrier was targeted with a Houthi missile while sailing eastbound in the Gulf of Aden, British security consulting firm Ambrey said, while mariners were warned to avoid the area. Roughly 85 ships were sailing through the waterway to the Suez earlier Monday.

. . .In what they said was a response to Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis began attacking commercial ships in the end of November, rattling global markets and upending international shipping routes.

Initially directed against Israeli-linked vessels, the attacks have become increasingly indiscriminate. The rebels have attacked vessels from boxships to tankers moving sanctioned Russian oil as the global shipping nexus complicates their ability to identify specific targets.

Last week, vessel traffic through the Suez Canal was down 34% compared with the end of November, according to data by Lloyd’s List Intelligence.

Though eager to protect global shipping, the Biden administration has been reluctant to respond too forcefully to the Houthis lest it trigger a war in the region, in part because of the group’s backing from Tehran, Western security officials and advisers have said.

But, as noted above, perhaps Iran wouldn’t want to get involved, and if the Houthis are widening their war by indiscriminately raiding ships, then they have to be stopped. The alternative is to stop all shipping through the Suez Canal, which would be unthinkable.

*This sad story shows how much the Russians love their cats. A train conductor threw a pet cat off a train into the snow, thinking it was a stray. It was not; it was a pet. The cat died of the cold, and all hell broke loose.

More than 300,000 people have signed a petition calling for a Russian train conductor to lose her job after she threw a pet cat off a train, believing it was a stray.

The white and ginger tom cat, known as Twix, escaped from his carrier on a train traveling between Yekaterinburg and St. Petersburg on Jan. 11. He was found by the conductor, who forcibly ejected the animal from the carriage while the train was stopped in the town of Kirov, east of Moscow.

Hundreds of people banded together in sub-zero temperatures to search for the animal, who was later found dead on Jan. 20, a little over half a mile from the train tracks where he had been left. Volunteers reported that Twix had perished from the severe cold and suffered a number of suspected animal bites.

The incident has sparked widespread outrage in Russia, with thousands following the story on dedicated social media accounts. Others reshared viral footage of the cat being dropped into the snow in temperatures approaching -22 Fahrenheit (-30 Celsius).

. . .A separate petition calling for criminal charges to be brought against the conductor had gathered more than 100,000 signatures on Sunday, after being published online on Jan. 19.

Local authorities have so far declined to prosecute the conductor, who has not been publicly named.

In a statement, Russian state train operator RZhD said that it “sincerely regretted” the death of Twix, and vowed that it would change its rules on how employees should approach unaccompanied animals.

Here’s the poor moggie from The Moscow Times (credited to “social media”). You can see a short video of Twix being dumped at this site (I can’t bear to post it.)

Now no animals will be heaved off of trains, but will be handed to people in the station who will take them to rescue organization. I still say that the conductor should be fired. What kind of person would throw out a cat into the snow in subfreezing weather?

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is cold (she hates winter):

Hili: I’m going back home.
A: Why?
Hili: My paws are freezing.
In Polish:
Hili: Wracam do domu.
Ja: Dlaczego?
Hili: W łapki zimno.

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

From Stash Krod:

From Thomas:

From Facebook: product duplicity!

From Masih; a video showing Iranian “morality police” beating up a woman for showing a bit of her hair. For, you know, a bit of hair could incite the uncontrollable lust of men and lead to trouble. . .

A wonderful man revives a newborn foal that wasn’t breathing:

From cesar: Larry Summers, former President of Harvard, beefs about the constitution of Harvard’s new antisematism task force. The tweet is long, so expand it. Harvard can’t seem to do anything right these days.

From Luana, a CodwPink member accosts Marco Rubio about Hamas. I’m no Republican, but he gives a good answer, and it would be good no matter what his political affiliation.

From Barry, two adorable kitten videos.

From the Auschwitz Memorial. a Dutch girl sent to the camp at age 17; did not survive.

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. He considers the statement in the first one to be deeply wrong (well, Matthew used language that I can’t reproduce here):

This makes me really hungry for noodles:

29 thoughts on “Tuesday: Hili dialogue”

  1. On this day:
    1556 – The deadliest earthquake in history, the Shaanxi earthquake, hits Shaanxi province, China. The death toll may have been as high as 830,000.

    1570 – James Stewart, 1st Earl of Moray, regent for the infant King James VI of Scotland, is assassinated by firearm, the first recorded instance of such.

    1571 – The Royal Exchange opens in London.

    1656 – Blaise Pascal publishes the first of his Lettres provinciales.

    1795 – After an extraordinary charge across the frozen Zuiderzee, the French cavalry captured 14 Dutch ships and 850 guns, in a rare occurrence of a battle between ships and cavalry.

    1849 – Elizabeth Blackwell is awarded her M.D. by the Geneva Medical College of Geneva, New York, becoming the United States’ first female doctor.

    1870 – In Montana, U.S. cavalrymen kill 173 Native Americans, mostly women and children, in what becomes known as the Marias Massacre.

    1909 – RMS Republic, a passenger ship of the White Star Line, becomes the first ship to use the CQD distress signal after colliding with another ship, the SS Florida, off the Massachusetts coastline, an event that kills six people. The Republic sinks the next day. [CQD had been used before by ships, but not after colliding in this way. CQD was supposedly replaced by SOS in 1906, but wasn’t universally adopted. On 15 April 1912, RMS Titanic radio operator Jack Phillips initially sent “CQD”, which was still commonly used by British ships. Harold Bride, the junior radio operator, suggested using SOS, saying half-jokingly that it might be his last chance to use the new code. Phillips thereafter began to alternate between the two.  Although Bride survived, Phillips perished in the sinking.]

    1941 – Charles Lindbergh testifies before the U.S. Congress and recommends that the United States negotiate a neutrality pact with Adolf Hitler.

    1950 – The Knesset resolves that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.

    1957 – American inventor Walter Frederick Morrison sells the rights to his flying disc to the Wham-O toy company, which later renames it the “Frisbee”.

    1960 – The bathyscaphe USS Trieste breaks a depth record by descending to 10,911 metres (35,797 ft) in the Pacific Ocean.
    1963 – The Guinea-Bissau War of Independence officially begins when PAIGC guerrilla fighters attack the Portuguese Army stationed in Tite.

    1967 – Milton Keynes (England) is founded as a new town by Order in Council, with a planning brief to become a city of 250,000 people. Its initial designated area enclosed three existing towns and twenty-one villages. The area to be developed was largely farmland, with evidence of continuous settlement dating back to the Bronze Age.

    1986 – The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducts its first members: Little Richard, Chuck Berry, James Brown, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Fats Domino, The Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley.

    1997 – Madeleine Albright becomes the first woman to serve as United States Secretary of State.

    2002 – U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl is kidnapped in Karachi, Pakistan and subsequently murdered.

    2003 – A very weak signal from Pioneer 10 is detected for the last time, but no usable data can be extracted.

    2018 – The China–United States trade war begins when President Donald Trump places tariffs on Chinese solar panels and washing machines.

    Births:
    1745 – William Jessop, English engineer, built the Cromford Canal (d. 1814).

    1783 – Stendhal, French novelist (d. 1842).

    1813 – Camilla Collett, Norwegian novelist and activist (d. 1895). [Often referred to as the first Norwegian feminist. She was also the younger sister of Norwegian poet Henrik Wergeland, and is recognized as being one of the first contributors to realism in Norwegian literature. She became an honorary member of the Norwegian Association for Women’s Rights when the association was founded in 1884.]

    1832 – Édouard Manet, French painter (d. 1883).

    1889 – Claribel Kendall, American mathematician (d.1965).

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

    1898 – Randolph Scott, American actor (d. 1987).

    1898 – Freda Utley, English scholar and author (d. 1978).

    1910 – Django Reinhardt, Belgian guitarist and composer (d. 1953).

    1918 – Gertrude B. Elion, American biochemist and pharmacologist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1999). [Today’s Woman of the Day, see next post below.]

    1918 – Florence Rush, American social worker and theorist (d. 2008).

    1928 – Jeanne Moreau, French actress (d. 2017). [Best known for François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim (1962). Most prolific during the 1960s, Moreau continued to appear in films into her 80s. Orson Welles called her “the greatest actress in the world”.]

    1930 – Derek Walcott, Saint Lucian poet and playwright, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2017).

    1944 – Rutger Hauer, Dutch actor, director, and producer (d. 2019).

    1948 – Anita Pointer, American singer-songwriter (d. 2022).

    1950 – Suzanne Scotchmer, American economist and academic (d. 2014).

    1950 – Luis Alberto Spinetta, Argentinian singer-songwriter, guitarist, and poet (d. 2012).

    1951 – Chesley Sullenberger, American airline pilot and safety expert. [Best known for the “Miracle on the Hudson”.]

    1998 – XXXTentacion, American rapper (d. 2018).

    All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain… Time to die:
    1789 – John Cleland, English author (b. 1709). [Best known for his fictional Fanny Hill: or, the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, whose eroticism led to his arrest. James Boswell called him “a sly, old malcontent”.]

    1789 – Frances Brooke, English author and playwright (b. 1724). [She wrote the first English novel known to have been written in Canada.]

    1803 – Arthur Guinness, Irish brewer, founded Guinness (b. 1725).

    1806 – William Pitt the Younger, English politician, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (b. 1759). [Became PM at the age of 24.]

    1875 – Charles Kingsley, English priest and author (b. 1819).

    1883 – Gustave Doré, French engraver and illustrator (b. 1832).

    1931 – Anna Pavlova, Russian-English ballerina (b. 1881).

    1944 – Edvard Munch, Norwegian painter and illustrator (b. 1863).

    1956 – Alexander Korda, Hungarian-English director and producer (b. 1893).

    1976 – Paul Robeson, American actor, singer, and activist (b. 1898).

    1981 – Samuel Barber, American pianist and composer (b. 1910).

    1989 – Salvador Dalí, Spanish painter and sculptor (b. 1904).

    1994 – Brian Redhead, English journalist and author (b. 1929).

    1999 – Jay Pritzker, American businessman, co-founded the Hyatt Corporation (b. 1922).

    2002 – Pierre Bourdieu, French sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher (b. 1930).

    2004 – Helmut Newton, German-Australian photographer (b. 1920).

    2005 – Johnny Carson, American talk show host, television personality, and producer (b. 1925).

    2016 – Jimmy Bain, Scottish bassist (b. 1947).

    2017 – Gorden Kaye, English actor (b. 1941).

    2018 – Hugh Masekela, South African trumpeter, composer and singer (b. 1939).

    2021 – Larry King, American journalist and talk show host (b. 1933).

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

      Gertrude “Trudy” Belle Elion (born on this day in 1918, died February 21, 1999) was an American biochemist and pharmacologist, who shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with George H. Hitchings and Sir James Black for their use of innovative methods of rational drug design for the development of new drugs. This new method focused on understanding the target of the drug rather than simply using trial-and-error. Her work led to the creation of the anti-retroviral drug AZT, which was the first drug widely used against AIDS. Her well known works also include the development of the first immunosuppressive drug, azathioprine, used to fight rejection in organ transplants, and the first successful antiviral drug, acyclovir (ACV), used in the treatment of herpes infection.

      Elion was born in New York City to parents Robert Elion, a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant and a dentist, and Bertha Cohen, a Polish Jewish immigrant. Her family lost their wealth after the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Elion was an excellent student who graduated from Walton High School at the age of 15. When she was 15, her grandfather died of stomach cancer, and being with him during his last moments inspired Elion to pursue a career in science and medicine in college. She attended Hunter College for free due to her grades, graduating summa cum laude in 1937 with a degree in chemistry.

      Soon after graduating from Hunter College, Elion met Leonard Canter, an outstanding statistics student at City College of New York (CCNY). They planned to marry, but Leonard became ill. On June 25, 1941, he died from bacterial endocarditis, an infection of his heart valves. In her Nobel interview, she stated that this furthered her drive to become a research scientist and pharmacologist.

      Unable to find a paying research job after graduating because she was female, Elion worked as a secretary and high school teacher before working in an unpaid position at a chemistry lab. Eventually, she saved up enough money to attend New York University and she earned her M.Sc. in 1941, while working as a high school teacher during the day. In an interview after receiving her Nobel Prize, she stated that she believed the sole reason she was able to further her education as a young female was because she was able to attend Hunter College for free. Her fifteen financial aid applications for graduate school were turned down due to gender bias, so she enrolled in a secretarial school, where she attended only six weeks before she found a job.

      Unable to obtain a graduate research position, she worked as a food quality supervisor at A&P supermarkets  and for a food lab in New York, testing the acidity of pickles and the color of egg yolk going into mayonnaise. She moved to a position at Johnson & Johnson that she hoped would be more promising, but ultimately involved testing the strength of sutures. In 1944, she left to work as an assistant to George H. Hitchings at the Burroughs-Wellcome pharmaceutical company (now GlaxoSmithKline) in Tuckahoe, New York. Hitchings was using a new way of developing drugs, by intentionally imitating natural compounds instead of through trial and error. Specifically, he was interested in synthesizing antagonists to nucleic acid derivatives, with the goal that these antagonists would integrate into biological pathways. He believed that if he could trick cancer cells into accepting artificial compounds for their growth, they could be destroyed without also destroying normal cells.  Elion synthesized anti-metabolites of purines, and in 1950, she developed the anti-cancer drugs tioguanine and mercaptopurine.

      She pursued graduate studies at night school at New York University Tandon School of Engineering (then Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute), but after several years of long-range commuting, she was informed that she would no longer be able to continue her doctorate on a part-time basis, but would need to give up her job and go to school full-time. Elion made a critical decision in her life, and stayed with her job and give up the pursuit of her doctorate. She never obtained a formal Ph.D., but was later awarded an honorary Ph.D. from New York University Tandon School of Engineering (then Polytechnic University of New York) in 1989 and an honorary S.D. degree from Harvard University in 1998.

      While Elion had many jobs to support herself and put herself through school, Elion had also worked for the National Cancer Institute, American Association for Cancer Research, and World Health Organization, among other organizations. From 1967 to 1983, she was the head of the department of experimental therapy for Burroughs Wellcome.

      She officially retired from Burroughs Wellcome in 1983, but continued almost full-time work at the lab. One of her passions during this time was encouraging other women to pursue careers in science. She played a significant role in the development of AZT, one of the first drugs used to treat HIV and AIDS. She also was crucial in the development of nelarabine, which she worked on until her death in 1999.

      Rather than relying on trial and error, Elion and Hitchings discovered new drugs using rational drug design, which used the differences in biochemistry and metabolism between normal human cells and pathogens (disease-causing agents such as cancer cells, protozoa, bacteria, and viruses) to design drugs that could kill or inhibit the reproduction of particular pathogens without harming human cells. The drugs they developed are used to treat a variety of maladies, such as leukemia, malaria, lupus, hepatitis, arthritis, gout, organ transplant rejection (azathioprine), as well as herpes (acyclovir, which was the first selective and effective drug of its kind). Most of Elion’s early work came from the use and development of purine derivatives. Elion’s research contributed to the development of:

      Mercaptopurine (Purinethol), the first treatment for leukemia, also used in organ transplantation.
      Azathioprine (Imuran), the first immuno-suppressive agent, used for organ transplants.
      Allopurinol (Zyloprim), for gout.
      Pyrimethamine (Daraprim), for malaria.
      Trimethoprim (Proloprim, Monoprim, others) for meningitis, sepsis, and bacterial infections of the urinary and respiratory tracts.
      Acyclovir (Zovirax), for viral herpes.
      Nelarabine for cancer treatment.

      Gertrude Elion died in North Carolina in 1999, aged 81.

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gertrude_B._Elion

      1. Probably the best adaptation of a Philip K. Dick novel to film.

        Blade Runner (1982), based on Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Harrison Ford, Sean Young and Rutger Hauer. A screenplay had been in the works for years before Scott took the helm, with Dick being extremely critical of all versions. Dick was still apprehensive about how his story would be adapted for the film when the project was finally put into motion. Among other things, he refused to do a novelization of the film. But contrary to his initial reactions, when he was given an opportunity to see some of the special effects sequences of Los Angeles 2019, Dick was amazed that the environment was “exactly as how I’d imagined it!”, though Ridley Scott has mentioned he had never even read the source material.[84] Following the screening, Dick and Scott had a frank but cordial discussion of Blade Runner’s themes and characters, and although they had wildly differing views, Dick fully backed the film from then on, stating that his “life and creative work are justified and completed by Blade Runner”.[85] Dick died from a stroke less than four months before the release of the film.

        wikipedia

      2. Blade Runner remains a classic. And not only was the rooftop scene in the movie intense and memorable, it was partly ad-libbed by Rutger Hauer. It could be argued that Harrison Ford’s character is not the only one showing puzzled amazement, but that Ford is himself thinking, “Wow, this guy’s a real poet.”

        In any case, it’s a scene that showed what good science fiction can achieve, but it remains rare in cinema.
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tears_in_rain_monologue

          1. Blade Runner is a classic in the dystopian subcategory of science-fiction cinema. It’s very well done. Much more rare is good utopian science-fiction cinema. Below I describe some of my favorites.

            “Things to Come” (1936) shows a plausible utopian society built by advanced science & technology, although a strain of bombastic anti-intellectual cynicism threatens it. In any case, it ends on a hopeful note involving the first orbital expedition to the Moon, with two astronauts, including the daughter of the main protagonist. The movie had amazing production design for its time. Although purists disagree, I favor the colorized version of the black & white movie.

            “Forbidden Planet” (1956) ends on a false note of anti-hubris, which seems tacked on — probably because society was then focused on, and fearful of, the new and very real possibility of nuclear annihilation. But the movie otherwise shows a peaceful interstellar human future, much like Star Trek has often portrayed since the 1960s. (It’s usually nasty alien beings that provide tests of humanity’s peaceful utopia in Star Trek.)

            The only problem with the advanced alien civilization described in “Forbidden Planet” is that it had “overlooked” one crucial aspect of the “ultimate” technology it had successfully achieved. But the Twilight Zone-type ending for that civilization seems improbable to me. Surely that civilization would have been aware of the issue that led to its demise in the story. So, with that caveat, I consider it a “positive” story about the future.

            Even though “2001” (1968) has many ambiguities, it nevertheless shows a humanity that survives and transcends its terrestrial origins. The main problem with the story, however, is that humanity does so with the externally imposed “help” of an enigmatic alien entity rather than through its own efforts. Like in “Things to Come,” the movie’s production values are amazing for the time, and remain so.

            While “Her” (2013) shows an aimless human society with lonely citizens populating the relatively near urban future, it shows the advance of artificial intelligence not as a malevolent antagonist, but — at the end — as a separately evolved strain of intelligence with much expanded potential in some other dimension (which is not described). Biological humans, however, are left behind to fend for themselves. The “singularity” happens, but only to humanity’s “children,” not to the “parents” themselves.

            The potential for relevant utopian stories in science-fiction cinema has been barely tapped.

  3. Pakistani biology professor Sher Ali’s coerced renunciation of Darwin reminds me of the coerced apologies that people have to make when they cross the speech police in the U.S.—statements like “I apologize for my failure to recognize the hurt that my words have caused to (fill in the blank).”* It seems like the difference between the two types of apologies is not a difference of kind, but only of degree.

    *Note that this is not an actual quotation, but an example of the types of apologies I’ve read.

  4. If those people harassing senator Rubio were really concerned about the deaths in Gaza they would be demanding that hamas release all the remaining hostages. They don’t do that because, like hamas, they don’t actually care about them. They like this war because it allows their anti semitism free reign.

  6. What Masih in Iran/about Iran is dealing with is the same as what the Pakistani teacher is dealing with: exactly the same as what the Israelis have to live next to every day.
    These are not reasonable people, we hallucinate ourself into thinking they are b/c it suits us to think: “Oh they’re just like us.”
    When in fact religious fundamentalism, PARTICULARLY in the Islamic context, desires very different outcomes and makes decisions, values things in a totally different context.
    D.A.
    NYC

  8. Since mom wasn’t stimulating her foal as she should have, I’m glad someone was there to do it.

    Completely off any pertinent topic, I ran across a phrase yesterday that I really enjoyed. It was from a Brit, with regard to something terrible. He called it “highly suboptimal”. Love it.

  9. +3 to Jez for the memorial of Gertrude Elion. Incidentally, her collaborator (and Nobel co-recipient) George Hitchings was a graduate of Franklin High School in Seattle, the University of Washington, and the UW’s marine biological lab in Friday Harbor. It is also noteworthy that the pioneering work by Hitchings and Elion was not done at a university, but in the research laboratory of Burroughs Wellcome. Shades of the old days, when Bell Labs turned out one Nobel-worthy discovery after another, and a few
    similar corporate labs (e.g., Xerox Park, IBM) were heavy hitters in basic research.

  10. I really do not think most people here appreciate the situation at the southern border.
    Somehow, the key goal of the Border Patrol has been changed to that of expediting as many people as possible into the US.
    It would be bad enough if they just neglected to enforce the law, but they are actively working against the law and interests of the country to bring as many people as possible across the border, and to transport them into the interior.
    When the current administration talks about raising the budget for border enforcement, they mean more money to raise their capacity to bring even more people across.
    We know very little about who is crossing the border. Many of them discard their identification and other documents upon crossing. Ranchers near the border find piles of IDs.
    From the perspective of the people who live anywhere near the border, the federal government is very much betraying it’s constitutional duty to “protect each of them (the states) against Invasion”.
    The story about the park seized by Texas is illustrative of that. The Feds had been occupying it as a staging ground to process vast numbers of migrants in. Texas seized it to stop that activity. Originally the story about the drowning migrants was spun as Texas stopping the feds from saving them. The reality was they that had drowned elsewhere hours before.
    Part of the problem is that Biden, Mayorkas & co. have been deceptive from the beginning about the status of the border and the reasons for their actions. That leaves the rest of us in the position of trying to guess their motivations.
    If we were on a ship, and you started to notice that the crew, on the Captain’s orders, were going around cutting holes in the hull all day and night, you might conclude that they were trying to sink the ship.

    The question might be phrased as “Why has the Biden administration brought more than 5 million illegal aliens into the US?
    The answer seems to be that they have so far lacked the budget or logistics to bring in 10 million, or 50 million.

    So the issue is, for many people, once they realize that this is actually happening, the primary issue for the upcoming election.

    1. The only people who made it their primary issue are people who live in places like Iowa and New Hampshire, places that don’t really have people immigrating en masse.

      1. You think the mayors of Chicago and New York don’t think it’s an issue? Mayor Adams found it such an issue that any migrants who spoke French he put on the bus to Plattsburgh and told them to sneak into Canada where we have free health care. Truly free: our doctors don’t get paid for care to non-residents unless they have money and feel like paying. As Max says, many have “lost” their ID and their health records and Canadian Québec doctors have no idea of anything about them except that they are in labour and pushing when they arrive at a clinic or an ER. (The Creole dialect spoken in rural Haiti is not easily understandable by Québec francophones, even by earlier immigrants from Haiti’s larger towns and cities.)

        If this “eyes of the hippopotamus” slice of the issue is a problem for us, I can only imagine what it’s like in places that get the whole hippo.

    2. Max, everything you’ve said is 100% accurate and well stated. Yet so many want to beat their bleeding hearts and talk about being compassionate and remind us that “we’re a nation of immigrants”. I don’t understand why so many are unable to hold two thoughts at the same time. Facts are facts.

  11. The photo of the “product duplicity” reminds me of the time I received a request for a donation from a school for Native Americans. The letter included a dream-catcher with the note “The children of the Yaddayadda Indian reservation hand-made this dream-catcher just for you!” The dream-catcher had a tag attached reading “Made In China.”

    1. I’m not even sure there is “duplicity”. The “made in XXX” phrase has never meant “every atom of this product was made in country XXX”, merely that a substantial part of the work involved in the product was done in country “XXX”.
      Very often these days, that means that parts were made in China (India, Malaysia -wherever is cheapest) then shipped by the container-load (40ft shipping container – see Ever Given post of a few minutes ago) to country “XXX”, where the parts are finally assembled. And a European (“Schuko”, “CEE 7”), British (“BS1363”, “Type G”), or American (“NEMA”, “Harvey Hubbell”) power lead included. If the power supply is designed to handle 110/230 V~ and 50/60 Hz input, that’s two fewer lines of inventory to stock and source or ship (which is why most commodity power bricks accept that range of inputs.)
      That may not be what the Man on the Clapham Omnibus thinks, but it is the case in law. I think that the European interpretation on the amount of work needed to assert “made in XXX” is about 30%, though whether that is in hours, or value … would probably keep lawyers in feed for generations if anyone chose to squander money challenging it.
      In the picture, it looks like parts made in China, assembled with a housing made (or assembled) in America. Or possibly even only boxed with a manual (translated from Chinese to American by a blind Hungarian speaker of Devangari inserting his golden fingers into the wrong places), which might meet the necessary levels of work/ value.
      (We (when I worked for an American company) used to have to make “made in UK” assertions like this for our equipment (computerised shipping containers) circulating between EU, UK and Norway. (No, Norway is not part of the EU.) The kettles we had to import from America at 150$ each were a blatant bit of tax-efficient repatriation of profit.)

  12. The alternative is to stop all shipping through the Suez Canal, which would be unthinkable.

    So unthinkable that the world was gearing up for precisely this “unthinkable” event just under 2 years ago.
    Already, trade is routing around the obstruction. Which will lead to moderate delays (around a week ~10 days) and a small increase in costs (the Suez Canal corporation charges less than the fuel for going around the Cape of Good Hope – but not a huge amount less). The lack of vocal upset about this suggests that shipping companies have kept their contingency plans in good order and put them into operation. Now would probably be a good time to be operating a bunkering wharf in Cape Town.
    Egypt’s continuing construction of a second “carriageway” to the Suez Canal will also mitigate the risk of future blockages there. I’m not sure when that is due to come into effect, but it is in progress. It won’t have any effect on the possible Aden bottleneck though. But if nothing else, Aden-Sanaa is a fairly short passage which might need convoying through.
    The climate-change induced problems in the Panama canal may be a bigger problem (reduced rainfall means there is less water available to float ships through the lock systems). That is going to kill seamen if they have to re-route around Cape Horn, or through the North West Passage. Or, for that matter, the North East Passage.

    1. What do you make of the rail bridge Mexico is planning to build between its Atlantic and Pacific coasts, Gi-A? From Jerry’s posts about his Antarctica trips, anything would be better than sailing through the Drake Passage.

Comments are closed.