Sunday: Hili dialogue

February 11, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Sunday, the Sabbath for goyische cats; it’s February 11, 2024, and National Peppermint Patty Day.

“York Peppermint Pattie Ice Cream Bar 1” by theimpulsivebuy is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

It’s also Autism Sunday, Inventors’ Day, National Latte Day, and International Day of Women and Girls in Science (UN Women, which celebrates all women of the world except Israeli ones)

And of course it’s Super Bowl Sunday with its attendant holidays Super Chicken Wing Day and Man Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the February 11 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Now that UNRWA has been caught with its hand in the cookie jar (see below), the UN is whining that it’s been investigating the agency for a long time for its purported ties with Hamas. (It’s not really “purported”; any mushbrain can figure out that it was true. For one thing, look at UNRWA’s school textbooks.)

When the United Nations launched an investigation a decade ago into whether a handful of its employees in Gaza were members of Hamas, it was not long before a senior U.N. legal officer in the territorystarted receiving death threats.

First there were emails, sent from anonymous accounts, according to three senior U.N. officials based in Gaza at that time.

Then came a funeral bouquet, delivered to the main U.N. compound, labeled with the legal officer’s name.

Finally there was a live grenade, sent to the compound with its pin still inside, according to two of the officials.

The U.N. evacuated the legal officer, a British lawyer and former military officer, hurrying him to Jerusalem, the three people said.

Previously unreported episodes like this one, from October 2014, form part of the back story to the current crisis embroiling UNRWA, the U.N. relief group in Gaza now sheltering more than half of the enclave’s population.

Current and former UNRWA officials say that the agency has long taken seriously and investigated accusations of infiltration by Hamas, which seized power in Gaza in 2007. The agency has variously responded to tips from Israel, the United States and its own networks. It was the kind of challenge, they said, that all aid groups operating in hostile environments faced, not unique to UNRWA, which has worked in the enclave for decades.

Rather than addressing such issues in a systematic process, they dealt with them in a piecemeal way mostly in private, working with officials at the United Nations in New York. Over the years, several people who had proven Hamas links were fired or left the agency, including after the 2014 investigation, current and former officials said.

Israel has long made a broader accusation: UNRWA didn’t go far enough to root out Hamas and was unwilling to clean up systematically. It has said UNRWA is a completely compromised organization that is too weak to protect against infiltration and needs to be replaced by a more neutral aid group.

Clearly the UN didn’t do enough to investigate UNRWA, and it didn’t want to. Too much much flowed into the organization, and although I don’t think the UN actually wanted to support terrorism, they didn’t look at that possibility very closely. Not only does UNRWA need to be investigated (and then disbanded), but the UN itself should be subject to severe scrutiny.

*To support the claims above, we now have incontrovertible evidence of complicity between UNRWA and Hamas: three days ago (the timing is a bit unclear), the IDF found a fancy headquarters Hamas tunnel and headquarters which ran beneath UNRWA headquarters in Khan Younis, the second largest city in Gaza.  In that tunnel they found cells where, apparently, 20 hostages were kept.

And today, the IDF revealed a huge Hamas complex and data center right underneath UNRWA headquarters in Gaza City.  Also see the article in the Times of Israel about the tunnel in Gaza City. This is the death knell—or should be—for UNRWA.

In Gaza City, from the WSJ:

Hidden deep below the headquarters of the United Nations’ aid agency for Palestinians here is a Hamas complex with rows of computer servers that Israel’s armed forces say served as an important communications center and intelligence hub for the Islamist militant group.

Part of a warren of tunnels and subterranean chambers carved from the Gaza Strip’s sandy soil, the compound below the United Nations Relief and Works Agency buildings in Gaza City appears to have run on electricity drawn from the U.N.’s power supply, Israeli officials said.

A Wall Street Journal reporter and journalists from other news organizations visited the site this week in a trip organized by Israel’s military. A tunnel also appeared to pass beneath a U.N.-run school near the headquarters.

The location of a Hamas military installation under important U.N. facilities is evidence, Israeli officials say, of Hamas’s widespread use of sensitive civilian infrastructure as shields to protect its militant activities. Tunnel complexes have also been found near or under some of Gaza’s largest hospitals.

Israel’s discovery of the Hamas operations below Unrwa offices is likely to put further pressure on the agency, which is facing international scrutiny after Israeli allegations that at least 12 of its employees had links to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which authorities say killed 1,200 people.

Israeli military officials assert that people working at Unrwa would have been aware of the tunnel complex, either from activities during its construction or by what they said would have been a jump in electricity usage when the complex started operating.

Here’s the path of the tunnel, in white, as shown by the WSJ:

Here’s a photo of the Gaza intelligence hub as shown by the WSJ:

(from the WSJ) A room containing around eight black server racks inside what Israeli military officials say is a Hamas intelligence hub located directly underneath the headquarters of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency in Gaza City. PHOTO: DOV LIEBER/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

From the Times of Israel, a shot of cables from the UNRWA server room going underground to the Hamas intelligence hub:

(Emanuel Fabian/Times of Israel)

From the Times of Israel: another shot of Hamas’s underground data center:

The Hamas electrical room in the tunnels under UNRWA headquarters.

Weapons found in UNRWA headquarters, though they could have been put there by Hamas after the building was evacuated:

Weapons recovered by IDF troops in the UNRWA headquarters, in a photo published by the IDF on February 10, 2024. (Israel Defense Forces)

A Hamas poster inside the underground hub:

(From the WSJ, my bolding): A poster made by Hamas’s military wing the Al-Qassam brigades warns its operatives to maintain secrecy inside what Israeli military officials say is a Hamas hub underneath Unrwa headquarters in Gaza City. ‘You must know that keeping secrets is a religious duty,’ the poster begins in red. PHOTO: DOV LIEBER/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

From the Times of Israel:

Beneath the Gaza Strip headquarters of the controversial United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, known commonly as UNRWA, the Hamas terror group hid one of its most significant assets, the Israeli military has revealed.

The subterranean data center — complete with an electrical room, industrial battery power banks and living quarters for Hamas terrorists operating the computer servers — was built precisely under the location where Israel would not consider looking initially, let alone target in an airstrike.

UNRWA’s Gaza headquarters is located in Gaza City’s upscale Rimal neighborhood, an area that the IDF had previously operated in, dismantled the local Hamas battalion and withdrawn its troops from.

At the time of the initial ground offensive in Gaza City, the military had not found or known much about the Hamas data center. But new intelligence, primarily emerging from the Shin Bet interrogations of captured terrorists, helped pinpoint where to dig.

“The IDF was here previously, the first time was to destroy the enemy, but when we were here the last time we collected a lot of intelligence documents and findings, a lot of prisoners, and thanks to this we reached here. Now we carried out a targeted operation to take this capability away,” said the commander of the 401st Armored Brigade, Col. Benny Aharon, while giving a media tour of the tunnel and UN complex on Thursday.

“We had a basis of information, but not enough to be able to dig down 20 meters and find it, we needed a bit more. There’s information we get from prisoners we capture, from computers we find, from documents, maps,” he said.

. . .The IDF also said that in some of the offices of UNRWA officials, troops found equipment and documents that indicated “that the same offices were also used by Hamas terrorists.”

“There is no doubt that UNRWA staff knew that [Hamas] was digging a massive tunnel beneath them,” Aharon said. “There’s a perimeter wall, a gate, cameras, at the gate they log who comes in and out. Whoever worked at UNRWA knew very well who was coming in, and who they were covering for.”

Now the Khan Younis tunnel, further south, was a bit fancier–lined with tiles! Here are the lovely walls (from Balconik):

. . . and a video of the Hamas headquarters below UNRWA headquarters in Khan Younis:

*Finally, an editorial from the NYT a week ago by the foreign minister of Norway. Click to read, if you must, but the whole thing rings hollow now. The NYT finally put up the story several days late, but didn’t mention tunnels under UNRWA headquarters in its headline, and that fact is buried in the story.

Philippe Lazzarinie, the head of UNRWA, denies everything, saying that the organization knew nothing.  Saying they left Gaza City on October 12 is ridiculous; the tunnels had long been there and, moreover, Lazzarini was informed about them years ago.  The man is a blithering idiot, desperately denying everything to save his job.  His notion that UNRWA didn’t know what was below its headquarters in Gaza is both laughable and insulting to a thinking person. (For one thing, wouldn’t they notice a huge electricity bill?) But here’s his “defense” on Twitter:

If UNRWA isn’t disbanded now, it would be a travesty. There’s no way that anyone will believe that UNRWA didn’t know about the presence of Hamas headquarters beneath them, especially with Hamas drawing on electricity from the UNRWA headquarters. UNRWA is complicit with terrorism, and needs to go. And note how much money those tunnels must have cost. That money was siphoned away from Gazan civilians, and its source was largely Western democracies. The whole thind stinks.

*Bret Stephens takes on Biden’s increasingly worrisome memory and speech in a NYT op-ed, “Democrats can no longer stay silent about Biden.”

Well before Thursday’s report, Biden was entering the election year as the weakest presidential incumbent at this stage of the race in decades. He has consistently polled behind Donald Trump in national polls and trails his predecessor in five of six key battleground states.

The Biden team seems to think his numbers will improve as more Americans notice that inflation is behind them, crime is down, jobs are abundant, Republicans refuse to do anything about the border and Trump is as awful as he ever was.

Before Thursday, that might have been enough, barely, to convince Americans that the president deserved another term to “finish the job,” as he likes to say. After Thursday, millions of Americans will have even greater grounds to fear that it’s the job that might finish him.

If Biden thought he was going to help himself with his performance Thursday night — angrily insisting “my memory is fine” and then mistaking Egypt’s president for Mexico’s — he’s mistaken. Any one of his gaffes is forgivable, even amusing, but the accumulation of them looks like a medical pattern. Tens of millions of Americans have direct experience watching a close relative slide into dementia. As Hemingway said of bankruptcy, it tends to happen gradually, then suddenly.

Democrats will not be well served trying to silence commentary on this subject, as if a giant shushing sound would quell public doubts. Trying to shield the president from too much public exposure — the White House strategy till now — will reinforce the impression that there’s something to hide. But more public exposure will probably lead to more embarrassments.

Below: the “performance on Thursday night” with YouTube comments from Bloomberg Television:

President Joe Biden, during an impromptu press conference, said his memory is “fine” and lambasted a Justice Department report on his handling of classified information, particularly its questions about his mental acuity and age. Biden answered defiantly — and sometimes angrily — questions about his capacity to continue serving in the White House. Yet even as he defended himself against a tide of scrutiny about his mental fitness, Biden mistakenly referred to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi as the leader of Mexico.

That gaffe is at 9:41. In my view, Biden did okay, but I still think he’s showing early signs of age-related mental degeneration. (I’m not a doctor, but just play one in academia.) One of my friends, a Democrat likes me, think that more people will vote for Joe because he showed flashes of anger, making him seem more human. But I think all the brouhaha about his memory—flashes of forgetfulness—will hurt him in the election. If only he’d chosen Gretchen Whitmer or Mayor Pete as his VP candidate. If Biden becomes to senile to govern, we’ll be stuck with Kamala Harris, and let’s not even think about that possibility.

*Even the NYT has an editorial-board editorial about Biden’s worrisome performance, “The challenges of an aging President“.

Mr. Biden’s performance at his news conference on Thursday night was intended to assure the public that his memory is fine and argue that Mr. Hur was out of line; instead, the president raised more questions about his cognitive sharpness and temperament, as he delivered emotional and snappish retorts in a moment when people were looking for steady, even and capable responses to fair questions about his fitness.

His assurances, in other words, didn’t work. He must do better — the stakes in this presidential election are too high for Mr. Biden to hope that he can skate through a campaign with the help of teleprompters and aides and somehow defeat as manifestly unfit an opponent as Donald Trump, who has a very real chance of retaking the White House.

*“How a liberal billionaire became America’s leading anti-DEI crusader.” That’s the headline that the WaPo uses, and of course you know it’s referring to Bill Ackman. But I didn’t know he started off as someone on the Left.  So many of us have been forced to act as if we were on the right, or align with certain Right-wing positions, because “progressive leftism” is intellectually depauperate, authoritarian, and, frankly, silly. Ackman is one of the many on the Left that has moved to the center on matters of import:

Though the billionaire power broker had made a career forcing management changes in businesses including Wendy’s and JCPenney, Ackman seemed an unlikely backer for his tennis buddy’s project. A longtime Democratic donor, Ackman had helped propel the career ofSen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), and his philanthropic efforts included paying for thousands of undocumented immigrants to attend college. Moreover, Ackman had praised the movement Ramaswamy opposed — known as environmental, social and corporate governance, or ESG — endorsing ESG practices in his 2021 shareholder letter.

But the tumultuous years of the pandemic had shifted the Wall Street billionaire’s worldview. Like others in his uber-wealthy circles, Ackman had come to believe that well-meaning ESG efforts had curdled into something pernicious, stifling debate, destroying careers and undermining the meritocratic values that made the free-market system “the most powerful potential force for good in addressing society’s long-term problems,” as he once put it.

In hours of interviews with The Washington Post, Ackman, who is Jewish, argued that campus responses to the Oct. 7 attack had been lackluster compared with the solidarity shown post-George Floyd. To Ackman, the contrast exposed the hypocrisy of the movement for “diversity, equity and inclusion,” or DEI — which includes race-based hiring goals and diversity trainings he called “unhealthy” and the“root cause of antisemitism.”

“Say whatever you want about me being a powerful person,” Ackman said. “I don’t want to advantage my own group at the expense of another. What I want is fairness.”

A master of making public companies bend to his vision, Ackman is translating his Wall Street tactics to attack the ideology of DEI, which generally asserts that including underrepresented groups benefits companies. Ackman says those efforts have in practice become discriminatory and claims even Martin Luther King Jr. would have opposed them.

He is creating a think tank, which he describes as a cross between a research center for his curiosities and an incubator of solutions, underpinned by a philosophy he defines as: “Look, I don’t like when people get screwed.” He says he will pursue his crusade against “discrimination in all forms … to the ends of this earth,” echoing a line from his infamoussix-yearbattle with the supplement company Herbalife. He communicates with his 1.2 million followers on X — a platform he rarely used before the pandemic — in thousand-plus-word screeds written from the elliptical,Ubers and his private jet. He wants everyone to know that his most popularrecent X post has 36 million views. (“Pretty f—–g huge,” he says. “How many subscribers does the Washington Post have?”)

Despite his intention to end the DEI industry, he has yet to speak to someone who works in the field.

Ackman’s evolution mirrors many elites who, like the hedge fund manager, see themselves as moderates and not culture warriors.

The group includes Elon Musk, whosays he voted for Democrats including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and President Biden, but now surrounds himself with a right-wing cohort online and recently declared “Diversity Equity and Inclusion” to be “propaganda words.”

Note that Ackman emphasizes the hypocrisy of universities and DEI, not simply that universities couldn’t say that endorsing genocide was off the free-speech table. Although he’s defending a wife accused of plagiarism, as was Claudine Gay, Ackman is correct, I think, is fingering DEI as a promoter of antisemitism on campuses. Not on purpose, of coure, but because their philosophy automatically puts Jews down as “white adjacent oppressors.”  Frankly, I’m glad he helped get rid of Claudine Gay, who was unqualified for her position.

*An unknown coven of Southern Flying Squirrels was discovered when a dying oak tree was being cut down and the resident squirrels abandoned ship. There’s only one other population of these secretive and nocturnal animals known in the state. I hope the ones shown gliding in this video managed to find a new nest.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is on an intellectual prowl:

A: Where are you going?
Hili: I’m looking for a lost thought.
In Polish:
Ja: Gdzie idziesz?
Hili: Szukam zgubionej myśli.

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

From Linkiest:

From Phun.org:

From Thomas, a Loose Parts cartoon by Dave Blazek:

Masih is silent today, but did retweet this from Garry Kasparov, who’s concerned with “colonializing” by Russia and China.  Listen to the video:

Below: boycotting Starbucks? No, it isn’t in Israel and doesn’t sell Israeli products. The reason given by the AP is simply this:

Gabrielle Blake, a student at Kent State University in Ohio, said it’s been tough to get her caffeine fix without stopping at one of the Starbucks stores on campus. But she’s been boycotting the company since October, when it sued Workers United — the union organizing its employees — because the union had posted a pro-Palestinian message on social media.

Starbucks wanted to stop the union from using its name and logo, saying the company had no official stance on the war and the union’s post might confuse customers. But many boycotters, like Blake, thought Starbucks should offer more support to the people of Gaza.

Boycott it because the company is institutionally neutral? Why not boycott every company that doesn’t explicitly support the people of Gaza against Israel?

From Barry: What is up with this goat???

From Bryan. Well, of course the child has to want to be Christian, otherwise they’re not comparable:

From Malcolm. Is this bird helping the cat or attacking it?

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a ten-year-old girl gassed upon arrival:

Tweets from Matthew. These are indeed marshmallow paws:

A Christmas carol. Sound up, though you won’t be able to take it for more than ten seconds:

30 thoughts on “Sunday: Hili dialogue”

  1. On this day:
    660 BC – Traditional date for the foundation of Japan by Emperor Jimmu.

    55 – The death under mysterious circumstances of Tiberius Claudius Caesar Britannicus, heir to the Roman Empire, on the eve of his coming of age clears the way for Nero to become Emperor.

    1534 – Henry VIII of England is recognized as supreme head of the Church of England.

    1794 – First session of United States Senate opens to the public.

    1808 – Jesse Fell burns anthracite on an open grate as an experiment in heating homes with coal.

    1812 – Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry is accused of “gerrymandering” for the first time.

    1826 – University College London is founded as University of London.

    1858 – Bernadette Soubirous’s first vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary occurs in Lourdes, France.

    1861 – American Civil War: The United States House of Representatives unanimously passes a resolution guaranteeing noninterference with slavery in any state.

    1903 – Anton Bruckner’s 9th Symphony receives its first performance in Vienna, Austria.

    1938 – BBC Television produces the world’s first ever science fiction television programme, an adaptation of a section of the Karel Čapek play R.U.R., that coined the term “robot”.

    1953 – Cold War: U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower denies all appeals for clemency for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

    1953 – Israeli-Soviet relations are severed.

    1963 — The Beatles recorded their first album Please Please Me.

    1979 – The Iranian Revolution establishes an Islamic theocracy under the leadership of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. [That’s currently going well…]

    1990 – Nelson Mandela is released from Victor Verster Prison outside Cape Town, South Africa after 27 years as a political prisoner.

    1997 – Space Shuttle Discovery is launched on a mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope.

    1999 – Pluto crosses Neptune’s orbit, ending a nearly 20-year period when it was closer to the Sun than the gas giant; Pluto is not expected to interact with Neptune’s orbit again until 2231.

    2001 – A Dutch programmer launched the Anna Kournikova virus infecting millions of emails via a trick photo of the tennis star.

    2011 – Arab Spring: The first wave of the Egyptian revolution culminates in the resignation of Hosni Mubarak and the transfer of power to the Supreme Military Council after 17 days of protests.

    2013 – The Vatican confirmed that Pope Benedict XVI would resign the papacy as a result of his advanced age.

    2020 – COVID-19 pandemic: The World Health Organization officially names the coronavirus outbreak as COVID-19, with the virus being designated SARS-CoV-2.

    Births:
    1800 – Henry Fox Talbot, English photographer and politician, invented the calotype (d. 1877).

    1802 – Lydia Maria Child, American journalist, author, and activist (d. 1880). [Today’s Woman of the Day, see next post below.]

    1847 – Thomas Edison, American engineer and businessman, developed the light bulb and phonograph (d. 1931).

    1855 – Ellen Day Hale, American painter and author (d. 1940). [She also died on this day.]

    1869 – Else Lasker-Schüler, German poet and author (d. 1945).

    1874 – Elsa Beskow, Swedish author and illustrator (d. 1953).

    1900 – Ellen Broe, Danish nurse, pioneer in nursing education (d. 1994).

    1904 – Lucile Randon, French supercentenarian (d. 2023).

    1909 – Joseph L. Mankiewicz, American director, producer, and screenwriter (d. 1993).

    1914 – Josh White, American blues singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 1969).

    1915 – Patrick Leigh Fermor, English soldier, author, and scholar (d. 2011).

    1917 – Sidney Sheldon, American author and screenwriter (d. 2007).

    1919 – Eva Gabor, Hungarian-American actress (d. 1995).

    1925 – Virginia E. Johnson, American psychologist and academic (d. 2013).

    1926 – Leslie Nielsen, Canadian-American actor and producer (d. 2010).

    1930 – Mary Quant, British fashion designer (d. 2023).

    1932 – Dennis Skinner, English miner and politician. [The “Beast of Bolsover”, known for his heckling in the House of Commons where he represented the town of Bolsover for 49 years.]

    1935 – Gene Vincent, American singer and guitarist (d. 1971).

    1936 – Burt Reynolds, American actor and director (d. 2018).

    1962 – Sheryl Crow, American singer-songwriter and guitarist.

    1964 – Sarah Palin, American politician, 9th Governor of Alaska.

    1969 – Jennifer Aniston, American actress and producer.

    1971 – Damian Lewis, English actor.

    1972 – Kelly Slater, American surfer. [He is widely regarded as the greatest professional surfer of all time, and holds 56 Championship Tour victories. Slater is also the oldest surfer still active on the World Surf League, winning his 8th Billabong Pipeline Masters title at age 49.]

    1974 – Alex Jones, American radio show host and conspiracy theorist. [Still hasn’t coughed up for his misdeeds, I presume?]

    1981 – Kelly Rowland, American singer and actress.

    1996 – Daniil Medvedev, Russian tennis player.

    We all pay for life with death, so everything in between should be free. (Bill Hicks):
    1650 – René Descartes, French mathematician and philosopher (b. 1596).

    1862 – Elizabeth Siddal, English poet and artist’s model (b. 1829).

    1868 – Léon Foucault, French physicist and academic (b. 1819).

    1931 – Charles Algernon Parsons, English-Irish engineer, invented the steam turbine (b. 1854).

    1948 – Sergei Eisenstein, Russian director and screenwriter (b. 1898).

    1963 – Sylvia Plath, American poet, novelist, and short story writer (b. 1932).

    1976 – Lee J. Cobb, American actor (b. 1911).

    1985 – Henry Hathaway, American actor, director, and producer (b. 1898).

    1986 – Frank Herbert, American journalist and author (b. 1920).

    1993 – Robert W. Holley, American biochemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1922). [Shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1968 (with Har Gobind Khorana and Marshall Warren Nirenberg) for describing the structure of alanine transfer RNA, linking DNA and protein synthesis.]

    2000 – Lord Kitchner, Trinidadian singer (b. 1922).

    2000 – Roger Vadim, French director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1928).

    2006 – Peter Benchley, American author and screenwriter (b. 1940).

    2006 – Matilda, American chicken and stage magician, oldest known chicken (h. 1990).

    2012 – Whitney Houston, American singer-songwriter, producer, and actress (b. 1963).

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

      Lydia Maria Child (née Francis; born on this day in 1802, died October 20, 1880) was an American abolitionist, women’s rights activist, Native American rights activist, novelist, journalist, and opponent of American expansionism. Her journals, both fiction and domestic manuals, reached wide audiences from the 1820s through the 1850s. At times she shocked her audience as she tried to take on issues of both male dominance and white supremacy in some of her stories.

      Despite these challenges, Child may be most remembered for her poem “Over the River and Through the Wood.” Her grandparents’ house, which she wrote about visiting, was restored by Tufts University in 1976 and stands near the Mystic River on South Street, in Medford, Massachusetts.

      Child died in Wayland, Massachusetts, aged 78, on October 20, 1880, at her home. At her funeral, abolitionist Wendell Phillips shared the opinion of many within the abolition movement who knew her, “We felt that neither fame, nor gain, nor danger, nor calumny had any weight with her.”

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

    2. Pluto crosses Neptune’s orbit….- i remember sitting in eighth grade science class in 1960, learning and carefully memorizing Bode’s Law, marveling at such a simple mathematical description of the heavens. I do not recall our teacher pointing out that the prediction started to fail at the eighth planet out and really failed at the ninth other than saying it was a good “law” for some of the planets. Nor do I recall her pointing out that in just a few years (in our lifetime) the ninth and eighth planets would swap order and Pluto would be the eighth planet from the Sun for two decades. Finally we were taught that the planets all orbited in a plane which I some years later learned was called the ecliptic. But most of them have orbits that actually vary a bit above and below the ecliptic with Pluto’s orbit, in addition to its greater eccentricity, at a significant 18 degree angle to the ecliptic. How much more interesting that class would have been if these variations from simplicity had been mentioned.

      1. An astonishing development – reminds me of a quote that I cannot find – science progresses slowly, but it is cumulative.

        Agree with incorporating history, empirical development of knowledge, somehow…. but that doesn’t mean anyone gets out of problem sets!

        James Burke’s sprawling Connections comes to mind as well.

  2. Is this bird helping the cat or attacking it?

    The latter:

    “Get off my fence you feline fucker!”

  5. What is the geology of Gaza @ 20m – was Hamas tunneling thru dirt or stone? Either way, somewhere there must be great dumping grounds of tunnel tailings.

    Otherwise, Patrick Leigh Fermor’s “Abducting a General,” about the kidnapping of General Kreipe in WWII by the Resistance in Crete is a good read.

    And back in the late ’70s, anyway, Burt Reynolds had a restaurant in Atlanta that I remember for the shrimp salad that consisted of shrimp, rice, onions, celery and black olives and was quite good.

  6. Fair’s fair. Trump had to take a competency test; Biden should to. Aside from his difficulties speaking, he’s something of a fabulist, repeating fictitious stories about how his son Beau died, how he drove a truck, how he was appointed to the Naval Academy, of football victories he participated in, awarding his uncle the Purple Heart, his role in the Civil Rights movement, and others. None of his behaviors are new since his election. Among other issues we are faced with the possibility that his doctors have lied publicly about his health, which should be a scandal of its own.

    1. “Me and Jimmy Rogers” comes to mind. (Recorded by several country and western singers it was written by the one and only Shel Silverstein.)

    2. Are you sure Trump HAD to take a competency test? My quick research indicates “‘the president said he asked his physician’ . . . whether there was ‘some kind of a cognitive test that I could take’ in order to ‘shut these people up,’ referring to critics who had questioned his mental acuity.”

      That’s from Politico.

      It’s a little thing, I know, but let’s not misrepresent why Trump took that test.

      It also takes only seconds to find videos of Trump misrepresenting the purpose and scope of that test. His explanations paint it as some kind of IQ test, whereas the test he took is actually the kind of test you’d give to a grandparent to make sure they wouldn’t get lost on a trip to the supermarket.

  7. We have learned over the years that Trump is a bad person and has done all kinds of self-serving, idiotic, and unethical things. And yet, people still vote for him. We see Biden do unethical things, like supporting his relatives in their get-rich-by-last-name schemes. And now, we see he’s too mentally compromised to be in the job. He would be forced out of any other job–but people still vote for him.

    I can’t imagine anyone can honestly say Biden is competent to be in office after this special counsel report. It’s really awful that many of us see two awful choices facing us in November.

    1. Roman Hruska, the late senator from the great state of Nebraska, once excused the hit on Supreme Court nominee, Carswell (or Haynesworth…my memory fades these days!) that he was just a mediocre jurist and did not rise to the standard expected of a Supreme Court justice, with the statement that there are a lot of mediocre people in the US and they deserve representation on the Supreme Court like everyone else. In that spirit, I an 75, accumulating plaques in my brain, can only remember the year my father died because it was the year of the famous 1970 total solar eclipse which he saw the week before he died, and I, on occasion, mix up the names of my children and grandchildren….well you get the picture. And, per Sen Hruska’s thinking, I am glad to have representation in the Oval Office. I think President Biden is excellent and do not understand why this heavily weighted report gets so much credence from so many people. …. Much like the “it escaped from a lab” assertion regarding SARs Cov -2.

  8. I pity the opossums. The gnostic knights have their knives out for them. And then there are the ewts who, when people began to talk about one of them, went from being an ewt to a newt. (The last from The Etymologicon.)

  9. The UNRWA cannot escape the devastating reports, particularly those that place the organization’s headquarters on Hamas’s tunnel network and Hamas’s servers on the U.N. electrical grid. I can’t even fathom the amount of money that the United States inadvertently contributed to Hamas’s tunnels, and ultimately, Hamas’s attack on Israel. Past U.N. investigations of UNRWA were no more than window dressing, raising the possibility that the U.N., too, is complicit. The entire organization needs a deep revamp.

    1. Correct me if wrong but isn’t the USA the largest monetary contributor to the UN and it hosts its headquarters? Can it not bring pressure regarding the fiasco that is UNWRA? I know that there are several Special UN organizations that run successfully, my personal experience with ICAO springs to mind but I personally do not hold the UN in high regard particularly with its direct antisemitism. The one thing it is united about is condemning Israel for everything.
      I am not from or live in the USA but have quite a few friends there who do and they do not like the way their taxes fund the UN. Is this a common complaint?

        1. About UNWRA. Can any readers confirm a story I heard on NPR (I now suspect NPR’s neutrality) saying that Israel has concerns about disbanding UNRWA because there is no other agency to provide any/all social services inside Gaza?

  11. In connection with UNRWA’s officials investigating themselves, and in celebration of Super Chicken Wing Day, here is the official Super Chicken theme song:

  12. Prof. Coyne writes: “Frankly, I’m glad he helped get rid of Claudine Gay, who was unqualified for her position.”

    Prof. Coyne does not explain what the qualifications would be for the presidency of Harvard, which would have helped us understand where Gay fell short. Many commentators have suggested that her rather minimal publication record should have disqualified her, but as Alvin Tillery pointed out, her number of publications at the time of appointment placed her fourth among the past seven presidents of Harvard, and her citation figures are the second highest.

    https://medium.com/@atillery2/putting-the-racist-crusade-against-harvards-dr-claudine-gay-in-context-26535c307f96

    Gay was clearly on an administrative track at Harvard, most recently serving as Dean of FAS, a better record of administrative experience than Drew Faust Gilpin had.

    The plagiarism charges against Gay were certainly serious, enough to lead her to lose the support of her Board, and justified her resignation, but I would be interested to learn in what regard she was unqualified for the Harvard presidency to begin with.

      1. Gay did a more than competent job in her other administrative positions, and there were no charges of incompetence prior to the congressional hearing. On the other hand, ‘competence’ is such a fuzzy concept that you need to be more specific about the skills/knowledge/abilities/talents for which you think she lacked competence.

        That said, I should also make it clear that I am not trying to support Gay: her plagiarism charges seem to have been serious enough to justify the loss of support that led to her resignation. But I also think that criticisms of Gay and her performance should be grounded.

        1. I feel she failed entirely to create an inclusive and welcoming culture, something essential for long term health of a fee charging educational business.

          That she didn’t even try demonstrates a clear inability to do what should be the core part of the job.

          1. Sorry, but your view of what the “core part” of the job of the president of a major research university is just leaves me [nearly] speechless. And to assert that “she didn’t even try” assumes facts not in evidence, as we say in law. I get it that you don’t like her. That’s enough.

  13. Shortly I’ll be going to my first-ever Sunday Super Bowl gathering with the family of my wife’s son. She’s looking forward to the commercials. I’m looking forward to the food and watching the kids looking at the game. (I think American football is almost as barbaric as boxing.)

  14. Has Biden’s alleged mental incompetence done any damage to the US or the “system”? He’s been verbally stupid for decades now, nobody cared.
    It is the fact he LOOKS and MOVES so old. People talk like he’s going to go off with the fairies and press the nuke button. It doesn’t work like that and neither does running the U.S.A.

    I argue it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter b/c the system, with him atop, is working very, very well. Absent Kamala, it should for a few more years.

    The alternative, Trump, is unthinkable. Not b/c he’s old and just as demented (he is, hear him ramble for even a few minutes), but because he is a psychopath.* That is dispositive over an older guy, with good experience and judgement, who flubs his words. No contest.

    D.A.
    NYC
    *See “Hare Psychopath Checklist” as an instrument of diagnosis of psychopathy.

    1. I propose that he exhibits the general lack of situational awareness common to people in his condition.
      The end result is that instead of the administration being run under the leadership and general philosophy of an elected executive, lots of middle managers are running little fiefdoms in accordance with their own political views.
      Border policy is being conceived and implemented by open borders activists. Depts of Land Management and Interior hold contradictory positions on energy.
      We certainly do not have a consistent national stance on Israel.
      An active and aware executive would be a moderating influence on activists who might otherwise enact national policy that conforms with their personal priorities, but are destructive in the larger view.

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