Thursday: Hili dialogue

February 1, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the first day of February in 2024, and National Cake Pop Day, a bizarre confection invented in the last two decades.

Image by Berries.com is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

It’s also these food months:

Canned Food Month, National Chocolate Lovers Month, National Cherry Month, National Grapefruit Month, National Snack Food Month, National Potato Lovers Month, Return Shopping Carts to the Supermarket Month, National Hot Breakfast Month, 3rd Weekend of February: National Margarita Weekend, “Superbowl Sunday” : National Pork Rind Day (aka National Pork Rind Appreciation Day).

And Car Insurance Day, National Dark Chocolate Day, National Sweater Day (in Canada), National Baked Alaska Day (good stuff!), National Freedom Day (United States), celebrating the signing in 1865 of the 13th Amendment that prohibited slavery. And today marks the start of Black History Month in the U.S. and Canada.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the February 1 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The drone that killed three American soldiers in Iraq has been identified as coming from an Iranian-backed group that has now been identified. Everybody knew that Iran was behind it, but now we’re even more sure:

The United States on Wednesday attributed the drone attack that killed three U.S. service members in Jordan to the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, an umbrella group of Iran-backed militias, as President Joe Biden weighs his response options to the strike.

The attribution comes as Iran threatened on Wednesday to “decisively respond” to any U.S. attack on the Islamic Republic after the U.S. said it holds Tehran responsible. The U.S. has signaled it is preparing for retaliatory strikes in the Mideast in the wake of the Sunday drone attack that also wounded at least 40 troops at Tower 22, a secretive base in northeastern Jordan that’s been crucial to the American presence in neighboring Syria.

National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Wednesday the U.S. believes the attack was planned, resourced and facilitated by the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, an umbrella group that includes the militant group Kataib Hezbollah. He said Biden “believes that it is important to respond in an appropriate way.”

Kirby said Biden was continuing to weigh retaliation options to the attack but said “the first thing you see won’t be the last thing,” adding it “won’t be a one-off.”

. . . . The Iranian warnings first came from Amir Saeid Iravani, Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations in New York. He gave a briefing to Iranian journalists late Tuesday, according to the state-run IRNA news agency.

“The Islamic Republic would decisively respond to any attack on the county, its interests and nationals under any pretexts,” IRNA quoted Iravani as saying. He described any possible Iranian retaliation as a “strong response,” without elaborating.

. . . “Sometime, our enemies raise the threat, and nowadays we hear some threats in between words by American officials,” Revolutionary Guard commander Gen. Hossein Salami, who answers only to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said at an event Wednesday. “We tell them that you have experienced us, and we know each other. We do not leave any threat without an answer.”

“We are not after war, but we have no fear of war,” he added, according to IRNA.

Kirby, for his part, said the U.S. doesn’t “seek a war with Iran. We’re not looking for a broader conflict.”

I seriously doubt that the U.S. will attack anything on Iranian territory. Rather, they’ll go after the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, perhaps in a big way. Neither the U.S. nor Iran wants a “wider war”, and you can’t get any wider than us attacking Iran.  I am curious, though, to see what the U.S. will do.

*Crikey! According to the Washington Post, now Egypt and Israel, which had decent relations, are squabbling because Israel wants to take over the crossing point between Egypt and Gaza.

Israeli troops push farther south in Gaza, officials in Jerusalem are signaling what could be a central, and politically perilous, aim of the war’s next phase: taking control of the border crossing with Egypt.

Since December, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly asserted that Israel cannot eliminate Hamas without exercising authority over Gaza’s southern border region, including Egypt’s Rafah crossing, which has served as a vital transit point for people and humanitarian aid into the besieged enclave.

“The Philadelphi Corridor — or, to put it more correctly, the southern stoppage point [of Gaza] — must be in our hands. It must be shut,” Netanyahu said in late December, referring to a buffer road along the border. “It is clear that any other arrangement would not ensure the demilitarization that we seek.”

Before Oct. 7, Egyptian and Hamas border authorities each managed their respective sides of the Rafah crossing, which sits along the Philadelphi Corridor, a no man’s land approximately nine miles long and several hundred yards wide that stretches from the southernmost tip of Gaza to the Mediterranean Sea. Israel hasn’t had boots on the ground along the border since 2005, when the country withdrew its forces from the Gaza Strip.

. . . Reestablishing Israeli control over the area will be crucial to creating “a new strategic situation in Gaza” in which Hamas is unable to attack Israel again, according to Michael Milshtein, a senior fellow at Reichman University and a former head of Palestinian affairs for Israeli military intelligence.

. . .The military campaign has damaged Hamas, but the group is still believed to command thousands of fighters. Its top leaders remain at large and much of its tunnel network, especially in the south, is intact, Israeli officials say.

“You must take control over this corridor, including Rafah border crossing,” Milshtein said. “Otherwise, it means that if there will be a cease-fire or even a broader settlement in Gaza, and the whole border will still be open, Hamas will very quickly get everything this organization needs from the military point of view” and reconstitute itself.

But the idea of Israeli troops returning to the border has set off alarm bells in Cairo, which said in recent weeks that such a move would risk undermining the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty — a landmark accord that led to a half-century of coexistence and cooperation between the once-bitter foes.

To explain, Egypt promised Israel that they would close all Hamas’s tunnels from Egypt to Gaza, as that was the only plausible source of Hamas’s weapons. Israel wants the right to permanently guard the Gaza/Egypt border to keep the weapons from coming in, since Israel won’t be able to close off the tunnels from the Egyptian ends. (We don’t know whether the location of these tunnels were known to Egyptians, and guards were bribed, or were hidden from Egyptians.)

*The NYT column “Abolish the U.N.’s Palestinian Refugee Agency” might have been expected from Bret Stephens, but it’s his summary of the testimony that went down yesterday in Congress, as well as what people have known about UNRWA for years.

Last Friday, Israeli officials presented the U.S. government with an intelligence dossier detailing the involvement of 12 UNRWA employees, seven of them schoolteachers, in the massacre of Oct. 7. As reported by The Times’s Ronen Bergman and Patrick Kingsley, the charges range from kidnapping an Israeli woman to storing rocket-propelled grenades to murdering civilians in a kibbutz.

Awful enough — and the U.N. rightly moved swiftly to terminate the employment of nine of those identified by the dossier. But that may be the least of it. “Intelligence estimates shared with the U.S. conclude that around 1,200 of UNRWA’s roughly 12,000 employees in Gaza have links to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and about half have close relatives who belong to the Islamist militant groups,” The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.

The figures are worth bearing in mind the next time you weigh the credibility of information about Gaza sourced to the U.N. Also worth bearing in mind is that this has been going on for years. As Bassam Eid of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group noted over a decade ago, “In order for UNRWA to survive, they accept [Hamas’s] conditions because they want to continue their activities.”

The new revelations were enough for the Biden administration to suspend its funding for the agency — worth nearly $350 million in 2022 — while it investigates the allegations. As of Tuesday, other major funders, including France, Germany and Japan, have followed suit.

That’s a start. But the fundamental problem with the agency isn’t that it appears to be infested with terrorists and their sympathizers, or that their salaries are paid by naïve foreign donors. It’s that UNRWA may be the only agency in the U.N. system whose central purpose is to perpetuate grievance and conflict. It should be abolished.

And here’s one solution since nobody wants Palestinian civilians to be deprived of the necessities of life. Read, and learn some history:

Think of it this way. The United Nations has two agencies dedicated to the plight of refugees. One, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, is responsible for the well-being of nearly all the world’s more than 30 million refugees, with a mandate to help them resettle in third countries if they can’t go home.

The other is UNRWA, which theoretically operates under the umbrella of the high commissioner but is really its own organization. No other group except for Palestinians gets its own permanent agency

Why? In part, because neighboring Arab countries like Lebanon cruelly refused to fully absorb Palestinian refugees, refusing them not only citizenship but also, in many cases, the right to most forms of work. In 1991, Kuwait went further by expelling hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in a matter of days, because the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat had supported Saddam Hussein during the Persian Gulf war. Think of that the next time Arab governments profess solidarity with the Palestinian people.

The solution? Dissolve UNRWA, fire the miscreants, and put it under the umbrella of UNHCR or, better yet, other international agencies with no record of being complicit with terrorists. The UN is rotten to the core, and I don’t trust them to properly investigate UNRWA. But I know this: there is no reason why Palestinians should have their own refugee agency.

*The NYT sums up the immigration problem: it’s the refugee issue, stupid!

For decades, single young men, mainly from Mexico and later Central America, did their best to sneak past U.S. border agents to reach Los Angeles, Atlanta and other places hungry for their labor.

Today, people from around the globe are streaming across the southern border, most of them just as eager to work. But rather than trying to elude U.S. authorities, the overwhelming majority of migrants seek out border agents, sometimes waiting hours or days in makeshift encampments, to surrender.

Being hustled into a U.S. Border Patrol vehicle and taken to a processing facility is hardly a setback. In fact, it is a crucial step toward being able to apply for asylum — now the surest way for migrants to stay in the United States, even if few will ultimately win their cases.

In December alone, more than 300,000 people crossed the southern border, a record number.

It is not just because they believe they will be able to make it across the 2,000 mile southern frontier. They are also certain that once they make it to the United States they will be able to stay.

Forever.

And by and large, they are not wrong.

If you don’t know why they’re not wrong, you need to learn more about the problems with our immigration system. (Hint: cases linger for years before they go to immigration court, and rarely is anyone deported, even if they arrived solely for economic advantage rather than as refugees.)

*From the AP’s “oddities” section, a woman almost got compacted to death, but survived:

A woman fell into a dumpster while throwing out her garbage and was later rescued from a trash truck that had compacted the contents while she was inside, fire department officials in New Hampshire said.

Luckily, neighbors heard her screams and the trash compartment was equipped with a camera. The driver spotted the woman stuck inside and called 911. By then, the driver “had reportedly compacted the garbage up to four times,” the Manchester Fire Department said in a news release.

Rescuers used a basket ladder to reach the top of the truck and lift her out. By then, she was “standing/talking/yelling, but was not alert enough to answer questions,” the news release said.

The woman was taken to a hospital after Monday’s misadventure. Her name was not released.

It’s a good thing the trash compartment had a camera! I wonder if that’s standard protocol.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Chief Editor Hili is reproving Andrzej. (Look at her face!)

A: Why are you looking at me like that?
Hili: You are writing too much and reading too little.
In Polish:
Ja: Co tak patrzysz?
Hili: Za dużo piszesz, za mało czytasz.

And a snoozing Szaron:

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

From Anna:

From FB: An Off the Mark cartoon by Mark Parisi:

From Facebook:

From Masih, who has a request about a propaganda visit of a UN official to Iran. There is also a petition here.

 

Below: Richard Dawkins reacts to this tweet from New Zealand’s science advisor, a tweet that’s probably from about 2019 (but she’s still the Chief Science Advisor to the new Prime Minister):

From Bryan, who adds:

The reason I send this miserable way to spend anyone’s time – with the cringe – is my perception of :
•Demoralization (Morgan repeatedly refers to fairness).
•emotional warfare
In sum, I interpret this as a struggle session attempt by a gnostic wizard. But of course, that’s an opinion.
Note that Santina insists that “a transwoman is a woman”.

From Simon: The dog is not fooled!

From Malcolm, a cat doing some dangerous fishing:

A cat tweet from Roz; I may have posted this one before, or, given cats, there could be many videos like this.

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a ten-month-old infant gassed upon arrival.

A tweet from Dr. Cobb touting his upcoming biography of Francis Crick. Matthew says “Coolio,” but this is something I don’t understand. I asked Matthew, who explained, “An ad for a McClure play in which Billy the Kid and Jean Harlow speak in animal noises. Crazy, man!”

26 thoughts on “Thursday: Hili dialogue”

  1. On this day:
    1662 – The Chinese general Koxinga seizes the island of Taiwan after a nine-month siege.

    1835 – Slavery is abolished in Mauritius.

    1861 – American Civil War: Texas secedes from the United States and joins the Confederacy a week later.

    1865 – President Abraham Lincoln signs the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

    1884 – The first volume (A to Ant) of the Oxford English Dictionary is published.

    1893 – Thomas A. Edison finishes construction of the first motion picture studio, the Black Maria in West Orange, New Jersey.

    1895 – Fountains Valley, Pretoria, the oldest nature reserve in Africa, is proclaimed by President Paul Kruger.

    1896 – La bohème premieres in Turin at the Teatro Regio (Turin), conducted by the young Arturo Toscanini.

    1942 – World War II: U.S. Navy conducts Marshalls–Gilberts raids, the first offensive action by the United States against Japanese forces in the Pacific Theater.

    1942 – Voice of America, the official external radio and television service of the United States government, begins broadcasting with programs aimed at areas controlled by the Axis powers.

    1950 – The first prototype of the MiG-17 makes its maiden flight.

    1960 – Four black students stage the first of the Greensboro sit-ins at a lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina.

    1964 – The Beatles have their first number one hit in the United States with “I Want to Hold Your Hand”.

    1968 – Vietnam War: The execution of Viet Cong officer Nguyễn Văn Lém by South Vietnamese National Police Chief Nguyễn Ngọc Loan is recorded on motion picture film, as well as in an iconic still photograph taken by Eddie Adams.

    1979 – Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returns to Tehran after nearly 15 years of exile.

    1981 – The Underarm bowling incident of 1981 occurred when Trevor Chappell bowls underarm on the final delivery of a game between Australia and New Zealand at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG).

    1992 – The Chief Judicial Magistrate of Bhopal court declares Warren Anderson, ex-CEO of Union Carbide, a fugitive under Indian law for failing to appear in the Bhopal disaster case.

    1996 – The Communications Decency Act is passed by the U.S. Congress.

    1998 – Rear Admiral Lillian E. Fishburne becomes the first female African American to be promoted to rear admiral.

    2002 – Daniel Pearl, American journalist and South Asia Bureau Chief of The Wall Street Journal, kidnapped on January 23, is beheaded and mutilated by his captors.

    2003 – Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated during the reentry of mission STS-107 into the Earth’s atmosphere, killing all seven astronauts aboard.

    2004 – Hajj pilgrimage stampede: In a stampede at the Hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia, 251 people are trampled to death and 244 injured.

    2007 – The National Weather Service in the United States switches from the Fujita scale to the new Enhanced Fujita scale to measure the intensity and strength of tornadoes.

    2009 – The first cabinet of Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir was formed in Iceland, making her the country’s first female prime minister and the world’s first openly gay head of government.

    2013 – The Shard, the sixth-tallest building in Europe, opens its viewing gallery to the public.

    2021 – A coup d’état in Myanmar removes Aung San Suu Kyi from power and restores military rule.

    Births:
    1462 – Johannes Trithemius, German lexicographer, historian, and cryptographer (d. 1516).

    1687 – Johann Adam Birkenstock, German violinist and composer (d. 1733).

    1761 – Christiaan Hendrik Persoon, South African-French mycologist and academic (d. 1836).

    1866 – Agda Meyerson, Swedish nurse and healthcare activist (d. 1924).

    1872 – Clara Butt, English opera singer (d. 1936).

    1894 – John Ford, American director and producer (d. 1973).

    1897 – Denise Robins, English journalist and author (d. 1985). [A prolific English romantic novelist and the first President of the Romantic Novelists’ Association (1960–1966). She wrote under her first married name and under the pen-names: Denise Chesterton, Eve Vaill, ‘Anne Llewellyn’, Hervey Hamilton, Francesca Wright, Ashley French, Harriet Gray and Julia Kane, producing short stories, plays, and about 170 Gothic romance novels. At the time of her death in 1985, Robins’s books had been translated into fifteen languages and had sold more than one hundred million copies. In 1984, they were borrowed more than one and a half million times from British libraries.]

    1898 – Leila Denmark, American pediatrician and author (d. 2012). [The world’s oldest practising pediatrician until her retirement in May 2001 at the age of 103, after 73 years. She was a supercentenarian, living to the age of 114 years, 60 days.]

    1901 – Clark Gable, American actor (d. 1960).

    1902 – Therese Brandl, German concentration camp guard (d. 1947).

    1902 – Langston Hughes, American poet, social activist, novelist, and playwright (d. 1967).

    1904 – S.J. Perelman, American humorist and screenwriter (d. 1979).

    1915 – Stanley Matthews, English footballer and manager (d. 2000).

    1918 – Muriel Spark, Scottish playwright and poet (d. 2006).

    1921 – Teresa Mattei, Italian feminist partisan and politician (d. 2013).

    1921 – Peter Sallis, English actor (d. 2017). [“They’re the wrong trousers, Gromit – and they’ve gone wrong!”]

    1921 – Patricia Robins, English writer and WAAF officer (d. 2016). [Her mother, Denise, was also born on this day in 1897 – see above.]

    1931 – Boris Yeltsin, Russian politician, 1st President of Russia (d. 2007).

    1937 – Don Everly, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 2021).

    1942 – Terry Jones, Welsh actor, director, and screenwriter (d. 2020). [He was also a well-respected medieval historian, having written several books and presented television documentaries about the period, as well as a prolific children’s author.]

    1948 – Rick James, American singer-songwriter and producer (d. 2004).

    1950 – Mike Campbell, American guitarist, songwriter, and producer.

    1951 – Sonny Landreth, American guitarist and songwriter.

    1965 – Brandon Lee, American actor and martial artist (d. 1993).

    1967 – Meg Cabot, American author and screenwriter.

    1968 – Lisa Marie Presley, American singer-songwriter and actress (d. 2023).

    1994 – Harry Styles, English singer-songwriter and actor. [Inexplicably, my sister is a fan.]

    Drown in a cold vat of whiskey? Death, where is thy sting? (W. C. Fields):
    1851 – Mary Shelley, English novelist and playwright (b. 1797). [Today’s Woman of the Day, see next post below.]

    1944 – Piet Mondrian, Dutch-American painter (b. 1872).

    1966 – Hedda Hopper, American actress and journalist (b. 1885).

    1966 – Buster Keaton, American actor, director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1895).

    1968 – Echol Cole and Robert Walker – sparking the Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike. [As African American men, during a rainstorm they were prevented from seeking shelter inside a building due to segregation laws and instead sought refuge in the compactor area of their garbage truck. They were killed when the compactor accidentally activated. Their deaths were a precursor to the Memphis sanitation strike, during which the prominent civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.]

    1976 – Werner Heisenberg, German physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1901).

    1979 – Abdi İpekçi, Turkish journalist and activist (b. 1929). [Murdered while editor-in-chief of one of the main Turkish daily newspapers, Milliyet, which then had a centre-left political stance.]

    1981 – Donald Wills Douglas, Sr., American engineer and businessman, founded the Douglas Aircraft Company (b. 1892).

    2003 – Space Shuttle Columbia crew:
    Michael P. Anderson, American colonel, pilot, and astronaut (b. 1959)
    David M. Brown, American captain, pilot, and astronaut (b. 1956)
    Kalpana Chawla, Indian-American engineer and astronaut (b. 1961)
    Laurel Clark, American captain, surgeon, and astronaut (b. 1961)
    Rick Husband, American colonel, pilot, and astronaut (b. 1957)
    William C. McCool, American commander, pilot, and astronaut (b. 1961)
    Ilan Ramon, Israeli colonel, pilot, and astronaut (b. 1954).

    2012 – Wisława Szymborska, Polish poet and translator, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1923).

    2013 – Ed Koch, American lawyer, judge, and politician, 105th Mayor of New York City (b. 1924).

    2013 – Cecil Womack, American singer-songwriter and producer (b. 1947).

    2014 – Maximilian Schell, Austrian-Swiss actor, director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1930).

    2019 – Jeremy Hardy, English comedian, radio host and panelist (b. 1961).

    2019 – Clive Swift, English actor (b. 1936).

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

      Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (UK: /ˈwʊlstənkrɑːft/; née Godwin; born 30 August 1797, died on this day in 1851) was an English novelist who wrote the Gothic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), which is considered an early example of science fiction. She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her father was the political philosopher William Godwin and her mother was the philosopher and women’s rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft.

      Mary Shelley’s mother died 11 days after giving birth to her. She was raised by her father, who provided her with a rich if informal education, encouraging her to adhere to his own anarchist political theories. When she was four, her father married a neighbour, Mary Jane Clairmont, with whom Mary came to have a troubled relationship.

      In 1814, Mary began a romance with one of her father’s political followers, Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was already married. Together with her stepsister, Claire Clairmont, she and Percy left for France and travelled through Europe. Upon their return to England, Mary was pregnant with Percy’s child. Over the next two years, she and Percy faced ostracism, constant debt and the death of their prematurely born daughter. They married in late 1816, after the suicide of Percy Shelley’s first wife, Harriet.

      In 1816, the couple and Mary’s stepsister famously spent a summer with Lord Byron and John William Polidori near Geneva, Switzerland, where Shelley conceived the idea for her novel Frankenstein. The Shelleys left Britain in 1818 for Italy, where their second and third children died before Shelley gave birth to her last and only surviving child, Percy Florence Shelley. In 1822, her husband drowned when his sailing boat sank during a storm near Viareggio. A year later, Shelley returned to England and from then on devoted herself to the upbringing of her son and a career as a professional author. The last decade of her life was dogged by illness, most likely caused by the brain tumour which killed her at the age of 53.

      Until the 1970s, Shelley was known mainly for her efforts to publish her husband’s works and for her novel Frankenstein, which remains widely read and has inspired many theatrical and film adaptations. Recent scholarship has yielded a more comprehensive view of Shelley’s achievements. Scholars have shown increasing interest in her literary output, particularly in her novels, which include the historical novels Valperga (1823) and Perkin Warbeck (1830), the apocalyptic novel The Last Man (1826) and her final two novels, Lodore (1835) and Falkner (1837). Studies of her lesser-known works, such as the travel book Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844) and the biographical articles for Dionysius Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopaedia (1829–1846), support the growing view that Shelley remained a political radical throughout her life. Shelley’s works often argue that cooperation and sympathy, particularly as practised by women in the family, were the ways to reform civil society. This view was a direct challenge to the individualistic Romantic ethos promoted by Percy Shelley and the Enlightenment political theories articulated by her father, William Godwin.

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

      2. Speaking of MWS, I HIGHLY recommend the movie Poor Things, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, adapted from the novel by Alasdair Gray.

        It’s a steampunk take on the Frankenstein story. Emma Stone is brilliant in it, and it contains nifty references to Mary Shelley. (For example, Bella’s creator is named Godwin, which was Shelley’s maiden name, and also provides him with a nickname worthy of a Frankenstein: “God.”)

  3. “. . . other international agencies with no record of being complicit with terrorists.” Part of the trouble is that international agencies all seem to have been captured by the progressives, so while they might not be complicit now, it’s likely they would become complicit.

  4. Hili nails it today – piercing insight!

    On that note ( 🙂 ):

    Here’s an excerpt of classic-style Dawkins insight by Dawkins himself just recently which, IMHO, brings me back down to the Poetry of Reality :

    R. Dawkins, Feb. 01, 2024

    “The rare tetra-amelia syndrome (babies born without limbs) does not negate the statement that Homo sapiens is a bipedal species. The rare four-winged bithorax mutation does not negate the statement that Drosophila is a Dipteran (two winged) fly. Similarly, the occasional individual who can’t produce gametes doesn’t negate the generalisation that mammals come in only two sexes, male and female, defined by games size.

    Sex is binary as a matter of biological fact. “Gender” is a different matter and I leave that to others to define.”

    Crystal clear, parsimonious. It’s what the world needs now (couldn’t resist a Bacharach reference!). Source eXtweet :

    https://x.com/richarddawkins/status/1753045097959100600?s=46

    … I wonder if Dawkins goes to chat with David Deutsch occasionally…

    2. There are great almost-end-of-humanity novels, like ‘Earth Abides’, ‘The Day Of The Triffids’, ‘Maleval’, ‘A Canticle For Leibowitz’ that focus on small survivor groups which survive global nuclear conflagration, or deadly pestilence, and their struggle to re-establish civilization and humanity. These survivor groups are composed of men and women, and have children and so on.

      A new plot for the genre springs to mind. The single man who survives was born a woman , and the single woman was born a man, but both had had chemical treatment to change gender. A good writer could pad out a novel until that final denouement. (Is ‘final’ necessarily unnecessary?)

      2. The 1959 story “All you Zombies” by R. A. Heinlein, while missing the “small crew survives apocalypse” aspect of this discussion, does fit the “single individual self-generates from nothing” idea, using time travel and full sex-change, in a sort of “vacuum diagram” idea. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_You_Zombies for a complete plot summary (and a diagram, which is too complicated for me to make sense of 🙂 ) .

      3. Reminds me of “Galápagos” by Kurt Vonnegut. A wonderful book. The last fertile male refuses to mate with the any of the few remaining fertile females. No trans issues but interesting all the same.

    1. I’ve not heard that line misquoted, but Shakespeare’s one that it derives from certainly is. Although Wikipedia cites much earlier variants, too including one from Chaucer.

  6. The NZ science advisor Juliet Gerrard is a biochemist for heaven’s sake. I don’t know her personally but I do know her predecessor Sir Peter Gluckman. He is a paediatrician and researcher with an interest in evolutionary medicine. I doubt he would agree with her idiotic position.

  7. UNRWA needs to go. Its complicity and participation in the October 7 atrocities disqualifies it from further support.

  8. I’m an immigrant myself so I learned a bit about the US immigration system by just living, but I got a better look practicing immigration law (just a tad) as an attorney years later.

    One case was bonkers. Immigration “court”. Not like Law & Order, more like a sad classroom in a bad school. My “client” was dead, of AIDS actually (in 2004) but the gvt was still trying to deport him back to Guyana. I showed the judge the (gruesome) pics of him in his last days, and his NY Death certificate. I “won” the case.
    I did a few immigration things but thankfully it wasn’t really my field.

    The border crossers will indeed live here forever, hopefully “legitimized” one day. But we do need to staunch the flow in part b/c a feeling of open borders empowers the right, something a study in 5 EU countries 7 years ago definitively proved.

    D.A.
    NYC
    https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/06/10/photos-of-readers-93/

  10. The underarm cricket incident was a laughable conclusion to a tight match. We Kiwis still use it as a humourous slur on Australian sportmanship (they were blokes) The Australian captain Greg Chappelle regrets he was unable to play fair that day.
    I’M getting a little pisse dat the BBC for always following the Israeli deaths of the 7th Oct with the Hamas Health Authority (yeah right) unverifiable numbers of Gazan deaths.
    For one, Hamas to civilian deaths are not separate.
    It’s like a childish play of death count against another. Sure, report all deaths but in a way that doesn’t smell of bias, petty minded and abysmal bad taste… or is this just me?

  11. Over the years there have been number of things I haven’t agreed with Bret Stephens about, but his columns about Israel/Gaza etc. have been spot on, this one no exception. These columns should be required reading on campus–not that it would really get through to the Gen Zealots.

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