Sunday: Hili dialogue

February 4, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the Sabbath for goyische cats: Sunday, February 4, 2024 (remember that the Sabbath was made for cats, not cats for the Sabbath), and National Homemade Soup Day.

It’s also Dump Your Significant Jerk Day, Rosa Parks Day (she was born on this day in 1913), Liberace Day (he died on this day in 1987), National Stuffed Mushroom Day, National Hemp Day, World Cancer Day, and International Day of Human Fraternity (a UN holiday, of course).

Here’s a five-minute video biography of Rosa Parks:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the February 4 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The U.S. has struck back in retaliation for three Americans killed in Iraq by Iranian-backed forced. There were dozens of airstrikes, some including giant B-1 bombers flown over from the U.S. But the Washington Post says that, by and large, the retaliation was ineffective:

U.S. strikes against Iran-linked militants in Iraq and Syria overnight killed dozens of fighters and several civilians, according to statements from Iraq government, militia groups and a local monitoring network on Saturday, in a first round of retaliatory action as the Biden administration attempts to respond to the killing of three U.S. soldiers without stoking regional conflict.

The airstrikes were a show of force, but appeared to do little damage to direct Iranian assets in the region, instead largely targeting Iran’s proxy forces.

“It looks like a very significant action by the Biden administration, but on the other hand I don’t think it’s going to be anywhere near sufficient to deter these groups,” said Charles Lister, director of the Middle East Institute’s Syria program. “These militias have been engaged in this campaign for more than 20 years, they are in a long-term struggle. They are ultimately engaged in an attritional campaign against the U.S.”

The overnight strikes on 85 targets, carried out using B-1 bombers flown from the United States, were part of what U.S. officials say would be a multiday campaign at regional targets linked to Iran. President Biden has said that further military action in response to the U.S. troop deaths “will continue at times and places of our choosing”.

U.S. officials have described the operation as a carefully calibrated military response aimed at deterring further attacks on U.S. interests in the region while avoiding ramping up the cycle of regional conflict.

Syria and Iraq warned that the strikes could do that.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani described the strikes as another American “strategic mistake” alongside its support of Israel during its war on Hamas. They contribute to “tension and instability” in the region, he said.

Sounds like Vietnam all over again. On the other hand, are we not supposed to retaliate because it will “inflame the region”?  Or should we just pull out our troops from Iraq?

*According to the NYT, Kamala Harris, campaigning in South Carolina, is not only supporting Biden’s bid for President this fall, but also “laying the groundwork” for her own candidacy in 2028.

Ms. Harris’s trip, as well as her college tour last year and an ongoing circuit to defend abortion rights and promote the Democratic agenda, also served two larger purposes: working to shore up Mr. Biden’s lingering vulnerabilities with Black voters and young voters, and keeping the first woman and first woman of color to serve as vice president at the forefront for the next presidential contest in 2028.

Perhaps the most influential Democrat in South Carolina is already on board with Ms. Harris as a future White House candidate.

“I made very clear months ago that I support her,” said Representative James E. Clyburn, whose 2020 endorsement of Mr. Biden before his state’s primary election helped rejuvenate the former vice president’s struggling campaign and carry him to the nomination. “That’s why we got to re-elect the ticket. Then you talk about viability after that.”

Ms. Harris, who ended her 2020 presidential campaign months before the South Carolina primary, has sought to deepen her ties here.

“There is an unspoken language between the vice president and African American women in this state,” said Trav Robertson, a former chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party. “She doesn’t have to go into a room and say things — because they already know they have a shared experience.”

What, exactly, is that shared experience? Kamala Harris is half Jamaican-American and half Indian, and if she’s not priivileged, she’s not anything. Is the experience merely sharing a darker pigmentation of the skin? Beyond that, I’m not at all impressed with Harris and would prefer other Democrats to follow Biden, if he doesn’t die in office. One of them is Peter Buttigieg.

*The Wall Street Journal‘s “news analysis” suggests that if Israel stopped attacking Gaza and accepted the latest cease-fire proposal, it would calm tensions throughout the region, especially eroding the influence of Iran.

More than 27,000 people, mostly women and children, have died in Gaza, according to Palestinian health authorities whose figures don’t distinguish between militants and civilians.

The dynamic puts the Biden administration under even greater pressure to achieve its other, overlapping policy goal in the region: a cease-fire in Gaza that would free the remaining Israeli hostages held by Hamas.

The U.S. is pushing a proposal that would stop the war initially for six weeks to let hostages out and pave the way to a more lasting peace. Significant obstacles remain to getting both sides to agree to the deal, not least internal divisions over whether to accept its terms as they stand.

Achieving a deal would do more to calm tensions in the Middle East than the latest round of strikes, regional officials and analysts say.

Disabling Tehran’s ability to project power through its so-called “axis of resistance” altogether would require more than a cease-fire or military strikes in Iraq and Syria, experts in the region’s dynamics say. Iranian allies have become part of the political fabric across the region: from Lebanon where Hezbollah is both a political party and seen as the main guarantee against Israeli attacks to Yemen where the Houthis have captured the capital and act as the de facto government.

“The problem of U.S. policy in regards to the axis is that it has never seriously committed to a long-term strategy working with local partners to counteract Iranian influence and the axis’ ascendancy,” said Arash Azizi, a historian at Clemson University, S.C., and author of a biography on Qassem Soleimani, the Revolutionary Guard commander who masterminded Tehran’s alliance of militias before he was killed in a 2020 U.S. drone strike.

And all this begins with a cease-fire in Gaza. If you’ve read any of the terms of the deal that people are proposing (not Israel), they’re horrifying, and would lead to the renaissance of Hamas and terrorism against Israel, a dribbling out of hostages rather than a simultaneous release, and the release of thousands of Palestinians in Israeli prisons for terroristic acts.  It seems as if the whole world, including the U.S., wants to tell Israel how to fight its war. Now the WSJ extols even greater advantages of not allowing Israel to win the war.

*Target, which seems to keep putting its foot in its mouth, screwed up trying to celebrate Black History Month, issuing a book (or rather, a “magnetic learning activity”) full of mistakes. As the AP reports:

Target says it will stop selling a product dedicated to Civil Rights icons after a now-viral TikTok spotlighted some significant errors.

In a video posted earlier this week, Las Vegas high school teacher Tierra Espy displayed how three Civil Rights icons — Carter G. Woodson, W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington — were misidentified in the magnetic learning activity.

“These need to be pulled off the shelves immediately,” Espy, who uses the TikTok handle @issatete, says in her Tuesday video. “I teach U.S. History … and I noticed some discrepancies as soon as I opened this.”

In a Friday interview with The Associated Press, Espy explained that she purchased the “Civil Rights Magnetic Learning Activity” at the end of January, in hopes of giving it to her kids. But when she opened the product at home, she quickly found the egregious errors and shared them online.

Soon after, Target confirmed that it would stop sales of the product.

“We will no longer be selling this product in stores or online,” Minneapolis-based Target said in a statement. “We’ve also ensured the product’s publisher is aware of the errors.”

Target did not immediately address how long the product had been for sale, or a timeline for when its removal would be complete. The product’s removal comes at the start of Black History Month, which Target and other retailers are commemorating with special collections aimed at celebrating Black history.

The erroneous magnetic activity featured in Espy’s video has a Bendon manufacturing label. The Ohio-based children’s publisher did not immediately respond to requests for statements Friday.

. . .In addition to an apology, Espy said the incident underlines the importance of reviewing products before making them available to consumers — which would help avoid harmful errors like this down the road.

“Google is free, and like I caught it in two seconds. They could have caught it by just doing a quick Google search,” she said.

Not good optics. Here’s the video with the owner’s commentary (the video may be gone by today, so watch soon):

@issatete

Idk who needs to correct it but it needs to be pulled off the shelves nontheless. Any person could have missed the mistake but it just takes one person to point it out and ask for corrections #blackhistory #blackhistorymonth #blacktiktok

♬ original sound – Issa tete

*Finally, the “Trilobites” column of the NYT, written this week by Carolyn Wilke, highlights the smarts of rosy-faced lovebirds (a type of parrot), especially their propensity for “beakiation”:

The parrots proved their talents to Dr. Dickinson and colleagues recently in a lab as they navigated perches that got smaller and smaller. When a rod got thin enough, the birds gave up on trying to keep their balance with two feet. Instead, they moved beneath the wire, hanging from their beaks and swinging their legs and bodies, almost like a monkey swinging from tree to tree in a forest. While parrot owners may have spotted such beak-swinging in their pets, the scientists set out to understand the forces behind it, which they described Wednesday in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

It’s not the first time parrots have been observed using their noggins to get by. In a previous study, the same team gave lovebirds a surface to walk across, progressively making it steeper. As the runway’s angle increased, the birds started to use their beaks to grab and help climb. The researchers went as far as to suggest that the animals essentially walk with three limbs.

For their latest study, the team placed a sensor that measured forces in the path of the birds and observed that the head does more than stabilize the motion as the birds move their feet along the wire.

“In a limb loading sense, they are — on their head itself — able to hold their entire body weight just with their head, which is pretty remarkable,” said Melody Young, a biomechanist at the New York Institute of Technology and an author of the study.

There’s a video showing this in the article. But wait! There’s more!

The movement pattern that comes with using the head as a third limb requires parrots to coordinate their beaks and legs. “We tend to see birds as just wings because flight is so great,” Dr. Provini said. But birds have evolved diverse ways to use their legs: walking, hopping, paddling, perching. And their heads and necks are very powerful, she noted.

The beak-swinging resembles the movement of monkeys. So the scientists coined the term “beakiation,” a play on the word brachiation, the term for the monkey-bar motions of primates. The researchers compared the beak-swinging of the parrots with the brachiation of gibbons — whose swings ricochet with momentum — and the inverted walking of sloths.

The idea that these birds are using intelligence to “solve problems” may be misleading. I’ll give you ten to one parrots do this in the wild, and have been doing it for generations. It’s likely a mostly evolved behavior triggered by environmental cues—like thin twigs. The real smarts of an animal involve intuiting or rapid learning to solve problems they’ve never encountered, like thirsty crows dropping stones in a thin cylinder to raise the water level. Yes, parrots are smart, but beakiation doesn’t impress me much. Talk to me when a parrot solves an eight-step puzzle like a crow does.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the cats, out on the veranda, are eager to come in from the cold:

Szaron: The door handle is moving.
Hili: Yes, they will let us in now.
In Polish:
Szaron: Klamka się rusza.
Hili: Tak, zaraz nas wpuszczą.

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

From Scott (have I shown this before?):

From Kristin:

From Strange, Silly, or Stupid Signs:

From Masih, a strong criticism of women in Congress who apparently don’t care about the fate of women in Iran:

Titania issued a rare tweet, including an original poem:

From Barry, LOOK AT THE SIZE OF THIS CAT! Why are these exotic cats always in Russian homes?

From Jay, IDF forces in Gaza. Wait for it (there’s music). Now this is equality: women fighting side-by-side with men.

From Jez, who adds: “Sharron Davies, who reposted the tweet, is a British Olympic swimming silver medallist who lost out on gold thanks to East Germany’s testosterone doping programme for its female swimmers and is now campaigning to stop a new generation of sportswomen losing out to competitors with a testosterone-based advantage (this time, male ones).”

From Roz, a persistent cat:

From the Auschwitz Memorial; a Polish woman fights back as she and other women are about to be gassed. The details aren’t know but it was apparently Franciszka Mann, a ballerina. She and the other women all died, of course.  I retweeted this.

One tweet from Dr. Cobb, with an illusion. The lines are straight; check them with a ruler:

18 thoughts on “Sunday: Hili dialogue”

  1. What, exactly, is that shared experience? … Is the experience merely sharing a darker pigmentation of the skin?

    In woke ideology, all people “of color” are continually suffering a welter of racist microaggressions in daily life, and that amounts to their shared experience.

    Despite the fact that 30 million such people are continually walking around with mobile video recording devices, it is notable how little actual evidence there is for these bad experiences. (And yet they are also sufficiently ubiquitous and powerful as to explain all disparities in crime rate, education level and everything else.)

    Reply

  2. On this day:
    1555 – John Rogers is burned at the stake, becoming the first English Protestant martyr under Mary I of England. [She was known as Bloody Mary for a good reason.]

    1703 – In Edo (now Tokyo), all but one of the Forty-seven Ronin commit seppuku (ritual suicide) as recompense for avenging their master’s death.

    1789 – George Washington is unanimously elected as the first President of the United States by the U.S. Electoral College.

    1794 – The French legislature abolishes slavery throughout all territories of the French First Republic. It would be reestablished in the French West Indies in 1802.

    1810 – Napoleonic Wars: Britain seizes Guadeloupe. [France had gained Guadeloupe under the terms of the 1763 Treaty of Paris, in exchange for some of its Canadian territories.]

    1846 – The first Mormon pioneers make their exodus from Nauvoo, Illinois, westward towards Salt Lake Valley.

    1859 – The Codex Sinaiticus is discovered in Egypt.

    1861 – American Civil War: In Montgomery, Alabama, delegates from six breakaway U.S. states meet and initiate the process that would form the Confederate States of America on February 8.

    1912 – Tailor Franz Reichelt dies while testing his self-made parachute on the Eiffel Tower.

    1941 – The United Service Organization (USO) is created to entertain American troops.

    1945 – World War II: The Yalta Conference between the “Big Three” (Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin) opens at the Livadia Palace in the Crimea.

    1948 – Ceylon (later renamed Sri Lanka) becomes independent within the British Commonwealth.

    1961 – The Angolan War of Independence and the greater Portuguese Colonial War begin.

    1967 – Lunar Orbiter program: Lunar Orbiter 3 lifts off from Cape Canaveral’s Launch Complex 13 on its mission to identify possible landing sites for the Surveyor and Apollo spacecraft.

    1974 – The Symbionese Liberation Army kidnaps Patty Hearst in Berkeley, California.

    1974 – M62 coach bombing: The Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) explodes a bomb on a bus carrying off-duty British Armed Forces personnel in Yorkshire, England. Nine soldiers and three civilians are killed.

    1976 – In Guatemala and Honduras an earthquake kills more than 22,000.

    1977 – A Chicago Transit Authority elevated train rear-ends another and derails, killing 11 and injuring 180, the worst accident in the agency’s history.

    1999 – Unarmed West African immigrant Amadou Diallo is shot 41 times by four plainclothes New York City police officers on an unrelated stake-out, inflaming race relations in the city.

    2004 – Facebook, a mainstream online social networking site, is founded by Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin.

    Births:
    1677 – Johann Ludwig Bach, German violinist and composer (d. 1731).

    1725 – Dru Drury, English entomologist and author (d. 1804).

    1778 – Augustin Pyramus de Candolle, Swiss botanist, mycologist, and academic (d. 1841).

    1818 – Emperor Norton, San Francisco eccentric and visionary (d. 1880). [Bizarrely, he was treated deferentially in San Francisco and currency issued in his name was honoured in some establishments that he frequented.]

    1868 – Constance Markievicz, Irish revolutionary and first woman elected to the UK House of Commons (d. 1927). [She was also elected Minister for Labour in the First Dáil, becoming the first female cabinet minister in Europe. She didn’t take up her seat in Westminster.]

    1883 – Reinhold Rudenberg, German-American inventor and a pioneer of electron microscopy (d. 1961).

    1895 – Nigel Bruce, English actor (d. 1953). [Dr Watson to Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes.]

    1899 – Virginia M. Alexander, American physician and founder of the Aspiranto Health Home (d. 1949).

    1900 – Jacques Prévert, French poet and screenwriter (d. 1977).

    1902 – Charles Lindbergh, American pilot and explorer (d. 1974).

    1905 – Hylda Baker, English comedian, actress and music hall performer (d. 1986).

    1906 – Clyde Tombaugh, American astronomer and academic, discovered Pluto (d. 1997).

    1913 – Rosa Parks, American civil rights activist (d. 2005).

    1915 – Norman Wisdom, English comedian, actor and singer-songwriter (d. 2010). [Oddly, he was big in Albania: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Wisdom#Popularity_in_Albania ]

    1921 – Betty Friedan, American author and feminist (d. 2006). [She also died on this day.]

    1921 – Lotfi Zadeh, Iranian-American mathematician and computer scientist and founder of fuzzy logic (d. 2017).

    1929 – Jerry Adler, American actor, director, and producer.

    1936 – Claude Nobs, Swiss businessman, founded the Montreux Jazz Festival (d. 2013).

    1943 – Wanda Rutkiewicz, Lithuanian-Polish mountaineer (d. 1992).

    1943 – Ken Thompson, American computer scientist and programmer, co-developed the B programming language.

    1947 – Dan Quayle, American sergeant, lawyer, and politician, 44th Vice President of the United States. [Stand-up comedian Boothby Graffoe called me my university’s Dan Quayle when I was vice president of the students’ union.]

    1948 – Alice Cooper, American singer-songwriter.

    1952 – Jenny Shipley, New Zealand politician, Prime Minister of New Zealand.

    1957 – Matthew Cobb, British zoologist and author.

    1960 – Siobhan Dowd, English author and activist (d. 2007).

    1970 – Hunter Biden, American attorney and lobbyist, son of U.S. President Joe Biden. [Yesterday was the anniversary of Beau Biden’s birth.]

    1972 – Dara Ó Briain, Irish comedian and television host.

    1975 – Natalie Imbruglia, Australian singer-songwriter and actress.

    Death is the wish of some, the relief of many, and the end of all. (Seneca):
    1617 – Lodewijk Elzevir, Dutch publisher, co-founded the House of Elzevir (b. 1546).

    1928 – Hendrik Lorentz, Dutch physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1853).

    1968 – Neal Cassady, American novelist and poet (b. 1926).

    1970 – Louise Bogan, American poet and critic (b. 1897). [She was appointed the fourth Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress in 1945, and was the first woman to hold this title. Throughout her life she wrote poetry, fiction, and criticism, and became the regular poetry reviewer for The New Yorker.]

    1975 – Louis Jordan, American singer-songwriter and saxophonist (b. 1908). [My earworm of the day: “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby”.]

    1982 – Alex Harvey, Scottish singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1935).

    1983 – Karen Carpenter, American singer (b. 1950).

    1987 – Liberace, American singer-songwriter and pianist, (b. 1919).

    1987 – Meena Keshwar Kamal, Afghan activist, founded the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (b. 1956). [Today’s Woman of the Day, see next post below.]

    1995 – Patricia Highsmith, American novelist and short story writer (b. 1921).

    2010 – Helen Tobias-Duesberg, Estonian-American composer (b. 1919).

    2012 – Florence Green, English soldier (b. 1901).

    2012 – Susanne Suba, Hungarian-born watercolorist and illustrator, active in the United States (b. 1913).

    2013 – Reg Presley, English singer-songwriter (b. 1941). [Altogether now: “Wild Thing! I think I love you…”]

    2021 – Millie Hughes-Fulford, American astronaut, molecular biologist and NASA payload specialist (b. 1945).

    Reply

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

      Meena Keshwar Kamal (Pashto/Persian: مینا کشور کمال; 27 born February 1956, assassinated on this day in 1987), commonly known as Meena, was an Afghan revolutionary political activist, feminist, and women’s rights activist.

      In 1977, when she was a student at Kabul University, she founded the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), an organization formed to promote equality and education for women and continues to “give voice to the deprived and silenced women of Afghanistan”. Despite the Saur Revolution and women’s rights placed high on the Democratic Republic’s agenda, Meena felt that there had been no vast changes of women’s deprivation in Afghanistan. In 1979 she campaigned against government, and organized meetings in schools to mobilize support against it, and in 1981, she launched a bilingual feminist magazine, Payam-e-Zan (Women’s Message). She also founded Watan Schools to aid refugee children and their mothers, offering both hospitalization and the teaching of practical skills.

      At the end of 1981, by invitation of the French Government, Meena represented the Afghan resistance movement at the French Socialist Party Congress. The Soviet delegation at the Congress, headed by Boris Ponamaryev, left the hall as participants cheered when Meena started waving a victory sign. She would eventually move and base her RAWA organization in Quetta, Pakistan, in opposition to the Afghan Marxist government.

      Meena was married to Afghanistan Liberation Organization leader Faiz Ahmad, who was murdered by agents of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar on 12 November 1986. She was assassinated in Quetta, Pakistan less than three months later, on 4 February 1987. Reports vary as to who the assassins were, but are believed to have been agents of the Afghan Intelligence Service KHAD, the Afghan secret police, or of fundamentalist Mujahideen leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. In May 2002, two men were hanged in Pakistan after being convicted of her husband’s murder. She and her husband had three children, whose whereabouts are unknown.

      A special issue of Time magazine on 13 November 2006, included Meena among “60 Asian Heroes” and wrote that “Although she was only 30 when she died, Meena had already planted the seeds of an Afghan women’s rights movement based on the power of knowledge.”

      RAWA says of her “Meena gave 12 years of her short but brilliant life to struggle for her homeland and her people. She had a strong belief that despite the darkness of illiteracy, ignorance of fundamentalism, and corruption and decadence of sell outs imposed on our women under the name of freedom and equality, finally that half of population will be awaken and cross the path towards freedom, democracy and women’s rights. The enemy was rightly shivering with fear by the love and respect that Meena was creating within the hearts of our people. They knew that within the fire of her fights all the enemies of freedom, democracy and women would be turned to ashes.”

      An enduring quote from Meena states:

      Afghan women are like sleeping lions, when awoken, they can play a wonderful role in any social revolution.

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

      Reply

      1. That looks beautiful, something I might add to my road trip list. Family lore is that ancestors on my dad’s side were Mormons in Nauvoo, but reassessed their commitment as the violence increased. They stayed in Illinois.

        Reply

    1. There was an op ed out there saying that our current responses are unsustainable. The attacks from the Houthis et al are relatively cheap, while ours (B1 bombers from the U.S.??) are too expensive to justifiably keep up for long.

      Reply

  4. Having a pet lynx is great. Until it rips your face off because it is a lynx. Russians have pets because the government dgaf about it.

    Reply

    1. Yes, I was holding my breath a little. I get that she’s had it since it was a kitten and has domesticated it. But it’s not a domesticated species, it’s a wild animal. Cue The Tiger King.

      Reply

    2. I was a little concerned that it might have had its teeth removed and perhaps been declawed, but I couldn’t be sure. I hope not.

      Reply

  5. “It was genuinely disturbing to see Claudine Gay ousted from Harvard simply for being an empowered black woman.”
    Really? According to accounts she remains at Harvard on a substantial salary. Not as President but because of other failings, eg allowing rampant antisemitism in the university and not because of being an empowered black woman.
    Am I missing something?

    Reply

    2. If you expand the tweet (which I don’t normally bother to do unless they are videos or if Jerry tells me to), it will become clear. In this case the clue was the “original poem”…

      Reply

      1. Thanks. I did wonder if it was “sarcasm” I don’t partake of the “tweet” ever, so obviously missed this entirely.
        Oh dear how sad never mind.

        Reply

  6. Kamala for President? Really? I strongly suspect that there will be better candidates in the race when the time comes. Even if she ends up with a second term as Vice President, my expectation is that she will be as ineffective then as she is now. The list of better candidates will be long.

    Reply

  9. Funny thing about that optical illusion. If I look at the horizontally-aligned rows one at a time, I can see that they’re straight. But I cannot for the life of me see the vertical rows that way (unless of course I reorient my phone.)

    Reply

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *