Wednesday: Hili dialogue

February 14, 2024 • 6:50 am

Welcome to a Hump Day (“dia de gepa”  in Catalan ): Wednesday, February 14, 2024, and Valentine’s Day. If you have a sweetie, remember the song below and shower them with love.  Foodwise, it’s  National Cream-Filled Chocolates Day.

For Valentine’s Day, but a good idea in general:

And here’s my valentine to all the readers:

“vintage pop-up valentine w/ cat and heart” by karen horton is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

And Matthew’s Valentine’s Day tweet:

Simon sends Valentine greetings from Larry the Cat, the Chief Mouser of the Cabinet Office:

And here’s today’s Valentine Google Doodle. Click below to take a chemistry quiz. First, based on your personal traits, you’re given an element that represents you (I’m fluorine). Then, by swiping right or clicking the “X” when presented with a series of elements, you choose which ones you can bond to (swipe) or can’t (“X”). It’s SCIENCE, Jake!

It’s also Ash Wednesday, Race Relations Day, Frederick Douglass Day (perhaps born on this day in 1818), Library Lovers Day, National Organ Donors Day, Statehood Day for both Arizona and Oregon, and Parents’ Worship Day in parts of India.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the February 14 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*I no longer trust the NYT to give accurate information about the war between Israel and Hamas, so I’ll quote the Times of Israel here (it is, by the way, an anti-Netanyahu left-wing venue); the paper seems to give better information and more detail. Here’s from their article on negotiations about peace, “Progress reported towards six-week hostage deal as intel chiefs huddle in Cairo.”

Israel and Hamas are making progress toward an extended truce and hostage release deal, according to two officials with direct knowledge of the talks, as key meetings were held Tuesday between the sides in the Egyptian capital.

A senior Egyptian official said mediators have achieved “relatively significant” progress in the negotiations shortly before Mossad chief David Barnea, Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar, CIA chief Bill Burns, Egyptian intel chief Abbas Kamel and Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al Thani met in Cairo to advance the talks further.

The Egyptian official said the meeting would focus on “crafting a final draft” of a six-week humanitarian pause, with guarantees that the parties would continue negotiations toward a permanent ceasefire.

A Western diplomat in the Egyptian capital also said a six-week deal was on the table but cautioned that more work is still needed to reach an agreement. The diplomat said Tuesday’s meeting would be crucial in bridging the remaining gaps.

Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the sensitive talks with the media.

While the officials did not disclose the precise details of the emerging deal — including how many hostages would be released — the sides have been discussing varying proposals for weeks.

Frankly, I don’t believe that Israel will accept a six-week cease-fire until the IDF has worked over Rafah. Nor do I think the people of Israel, despite their urgency to bring the hostages home, would accept that, either. (It turns out that of all the hostage’s families, only three out of over a hundred think that Israel should have a cease-fire now, which is informaiton I get from my Hebrew-reading informants). Israel is not dumb enough to give Hamas the chance to rebuild itself, and as for a permanent cease fire, I’d bet against it.

UPDATE: This morning the ToI says that the Israeli negotiating delegation headed home without a deal, and no proposal even came close to what Netanyahu and the war cabinet wanted. Nevertheless the world press, and especially the Egyptian government, keeps reporting that a deal is right around the corner. It isn’t. There will be no cessation of hostilities until Rafah and the Hamas leaders are taken.

*Freed from the encumbrance of a border deal, the Ukraine/Israel aid package passed the U.S. Senate, though its chances in the House, sans border deal, are dicey:

The Democratic-controlled Senate passed a $95.3 billion package backed by President Biden that contains a fresh round of aid for Ukraine and also funds for Israel and Taiwan, overcoming the objections of many Republicans who opposed spending so much money abroad.

The deal marked a victory for proponents of a muscular role for America in foreign affairs. The bill now faces an uphill fight in the GOP-run House, where House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) has indicated it will need changes, potentially including another run at a border crackdown, to stand any chance of becoming law.

The Senate’s 70-29 approval of the measure comes at a critical moment for Ukraine, which has been running short of supplies and manpower after a failed counteroffensive against Russia last year. Twenty-two Republicans joined almost all Democrats in supporting the bill. Three members of the Democratic caucus who have expressed concerns about Israel’s military operations in Gaza voted no. Passage occurred around 6:30 a.m. Tuesday after opponents delayed the vote with a marathon night of floor speeches.

“With this bill, the Senate declares that American leadership will not waver, will not falter, will not fail,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.), who pressed Johnson to move quickly, a sentiment that was echoed by the Biden administration.

The bill’s chances are uncertain in the House because of the greater power of Ukraine skeptics and influence of Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump, who has opposed more aid and recently suggested turning the aid package into a loan. Some lawmakers are continuing to demand tighter control of the U.S. border as a condition for any aid, trying to restart a legislative fight that stalled out last week after Republicans, including Johnson, rejected as inadequate a bipartisan compromise devised by Sens. James Lankford (R., Okla.), Kyrsten Sinema (I., Ariz.) and Chris Murphy (D., Conn.).

I’m happy that aid is going to the two countries, though I thought the GOP didn’t want a bordfer bill passed because it would look good for the Democrats. But the fact is that we still have a serious problem of illegal immigration, and there has to be some way to achieve bipartison consensus. Just not at the expense of helping our allies. And I continue to be appalled by the fact that the narcissistic loon, not even in government, seems to be holding the reins on the Republican stagecoach.

*From Jez Grove, who’s quoted below quoting a BBC article:

And some good news, although the punishments are extremely light:

‘Three women have been found guilty of terrorism offences after they displayed images of paragliders, “celebrating” the Hamas tactics.Heba Alhayek, 29, and Pauline Ankunda, 26, attached images to their backs seven days after Hamas militants used paragliders to enter Israel in October.Noimutu Olayinka Taiwo, 27, stuck one to a placard’s handle at a central London pro-Palestinian march.They denied charges under the Terrorism Act.The three were charged with carrying or displaying an article to arouse reasonable suspicion that they were supporters of banned organisation Hamas.Convicting them at Westminster Magistrates’ Court, Deputy Senior District Judge Tan Ikram said: “Seven days earlier, Hamas went into Israel with what was described by the media as paragliders.“A reasonable person would have seen and read that.“I do not find a reasonable person would interpret the image merely as a symbol of freedom.” ‘

But Mr Ikram, delivering his verdict, said: “I want to be clear, there’s no evidence that any of these defendants are supporters of Hamas, or were seeking to show support for them.”

He said he had “decided not to punish” the defendants, and handed the trio each a 12-month conditional discharge.

Yes, I realize that Hamas is a terrorist organziation and that supporting it in the UK is against the law, but I’m enough of a free speech diehard that I still consider this acceptable speech. And so does the US. After all, the “Day of Resistance Tookit” promulgated to its campus subgroups by the Students for Justice in Palestine has that logo at the end. To wit (note; this is before Israel went into Gaze):

Odious but still free speech (to me)

Jez adds this as lagniappe (?):

A second Labour Party election candidate has just been suspended for anti-Semitism!

The Labour leader Keir Starmer is having a hard time trying to demonstrate that he has expunged Jew hatred from the party!

*Almost everybody I know has gotten covid, though, thank Ceiling Cat, I’ve been virus-free.   And now, according to the WaPo, the CDC is changing the Written-in-Stone Five Day Isolation Rule if you get infected. I’ve put the new Roolz in bold below:

Americans who test positive for the coronavirus no longer need to routinely stay home from work and school for five days under new guidance planned by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The agency is loosening its covid isolation recommendations for the first time since 2021 to align it with guidance on how to avoid transmitting flu and RSV, according to four agency officials and an expert familiar with the discussions.

CDC officials acknowledged in internal discussions and in a briefing last week with state health officials how much the covid-19 landscape has changed since the virus emerged four years ago, killing nearly 1.2 million people in the United States and shuttering businesses and schools. The new reality — with most people having developed a level of immunity to the virus because of prior infection or vaccination — warrants a shift to a more practical approach, experts and health officials say.

“Public health has to be realistic,” said Michael T. Osterholm, an infectious-disease expert at the University of Minnesota. “In making recommendations to the public today, we have to try to get the most out of what people are willing to do. … You can be absolutely right in the science and yet accomplish nothing because no one will listen to you.”

The CDC plans to recommend that people who test positive for the coronavirus use clinical symptoms to determine when to end isolation. Under the new approach, people would no longer need to stay home if they have been fever-free for at least 24 hours without the aid of medication and their symptoms are mild and improving, according to three agency officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share internal discussions.

Fever-free for one day and improving!  Now I’m almost looking forward to getting covid! (Not really.)

*Finally, an appropriate piece for Vaentine’s Day: the NYT consulted historians and other experts to figure out when kissing got started. Their hypothesis is summarized in a new Perspective in Science by Sophie Lund Rasmussen and Troels Pank Arboll

The Danish husband-and-wife team maintain that since at least the late third millennium B.C., kissing was a widespread and well-established part of romance in the Middle East. “Kissing was not a custom that emerged abruptly in a single point of origin,” Dr. Arboll said. “Instead, it seems to have been common across a range of cultures.”

Dr. Arboll and Dr. Rasmussen proposed that the earliest account of kissing was etched into the Barton Cylinder, a clay tablet that dates to around 2400 B.C. The object was unearthed in the ancient Sumerian city of Nippur in 1899, and named after George Barton, the professor of Semitic languages at Bryn Mawr College, who translated it 19 years later. It is currently housed in the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, where, from 1922 to 1931, Dr. Barton taught Semitic languages and the history of religion.

And here’s the adaptive hypothesis. It might be right, and bits of it could even be tested:

In “The Science of Kissing: What Our Lips Are Telling Us,” Sheril Kirshenbaum writes about the chemistry of attraction, how a kiss locks two people together in an exchange of colors, tastes and textures. Dr. Rasmussen believes that kissing evolved as a way of sizing up potential partners through their scent.

“With both humans and hedgehogs, it’s all about finding the strongest, healthiest mate to produce the strongest, healthiest offspring,” she said. “So you unconsciously evaluate a person’s suitability through chemical cues like bad breath, which might indicate bad teeth, which might indicate bad genes.”

There’s more about the history of kissing in the article, and if you’re a fan of osculation you should probably read it.

From the original Science perspective:

Humanity’s earliest recorded kiss occurs in sources from the ancient Middle East. Kissing is attested in ancient Mesopotamian texts from 2500 BCE onward. Ancient Mesopotamia constituted the areas along the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, which today roughly cover Iraq and Syria. Writing was first invented simultaneously in southern Iraq and in Egypt around 3200 BCE. In Mesopotamia people wrote in cuneiform script on clay tablets, which primarily recorded the Sumerian and Akkadian languages from ∼3200 BCE to 75 CE. In the earliest texts in the Sumerian language, kissing was described in relation to erotic acts, possibly as a postcoital activity, and the locus was the lips. In the Akkadian language, references to kissing can be subdivided into two distinct groups, the first designating friendly and familial affection, describing a display of submission or respect through the act of kissing the feet or the ground, and the second being an erotic action with the lips as the primary locus.

Here’s a Mesopotamian rendition of what is clearly a romantic kiss  (ca 1800 BCE) soon after the practice is said to have originated

(From Science) A clay model from Mesopotamia, dated ∼1800 BCE, shows a couple kissing. The original is kept at the British Museum.PHOTO: THE BRITISH MUSEUM/CC BY-SA 4.0

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is stalking prey that might not exist:

Hili: Something is rustling.
A: Probably the wind is moving the leaves.
Hili: Don’t spoil things for me.
In Polish:
Hili: Coś szeleści.
Ja: Pewnie wiatr porusza liśćmi.
Hili: Nie oszukuj.

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

From Rivka:

From Strange, Stupid, or Silly Signs:

From the Darwin Awards 2024 site:

 

From Masih, who shows the Islamic Republic of Iran censoring BUTTOCKS!

From Jez, who found this amusing:

From Luana, who refuses to be called a “LatinX” or a “Latiné”:

From Barry, a human hamster wheel that makes snowcones. What a great idea!

From Simon; just when you think Trump couldn’t get any crazier:

From Bryan; something to remember:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, twin sisters, probably gassed upon arrival. I’m surprised they weren’t used by Josef Mengele in his infamous “twin experiments” (which of course also ended in death):

One tweet from Dr. Cobb. Yes, Darwin really said this, and it’s both my and Matthew’s favorite Darwin quote because it gives us some emotional commonality with The Great Man.

 

36 thoughts on “Wednesday: Hili dialogue”

  1. These froghoppers are 165 million years old & represent the earliest record of a mating fossil.

    Needs a soundtrack:

  2. I’m anticipating Critical Immigration Studies.

    There’s a woman in Massachusetts who took two migrants in and said it’s nice that she was cooking meals. This was on the news, there’s a video.

    Of course, that can be fine. But – another angle shows an open door to .. what? What is that, a person cooking in exchange for … room and board?

    “.. covid-19 […] four years ago, killing nearly 1.2 million people in the United States ”

    I heard that “secondary” pneumonia played a role in those deaths. I did not look it up. It’d be nice to know how significant pneumonia was, because I knew that is a major cause of death in older populations – I looked it up when Hitch died – bacterial pneumonia, I think…,

    [ reads Waki-pee-duh ]:

    Yep:

    “Hitchens died of pneumonia on 15 December 2011 in the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, aged 62.[151]”

  5. On this day:
    1349 – Several hundred Jews are burned to death by mobs while the remaining Jews are forcibly removed from Strasbourg.

    1530 – Spanish conquistadores, led by Nuño de Guzmán, overthrow and execute Tangaxuan II, the last independent monarch of the Tarascan state in present-day central Mexico.

    1556 – Having been declared a heretic and laicized by Pope Paul IV on 4 December 1555, Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer is publicly defrocked at Christ Church Cathedral.

    1778 – The United States flag is formally recognized by a foreign naval vessel for the first time, when French Admiral Toussaint-Guillaume Picquet de la Motte renders a nine gun salute to USS Ranger, commanded by John Paul Jones.

    1779 – James Cook is killed by Native Hawaiians near Kealakekua on the Island of Hawaii.

    1849 – In New York City, James Knox Polk becomes the first serving President of the United States to have his photograph taken.

    1852 – Great Ormond St Hospital for Sick Children, the first hospital in England to provide in-patient beds specifically for children, is founded in London.

    1876 – Alexander Graham Bell applies for a patent for the telephone, as does Elisha Gray.

    1899 – Voting machines are approved by the U.S. Congress for use in federal elections.

    1912 – The U.S. Navy commissions its first class of diesel-powered submarines.

    1918 – Russia adopts the Gregorian calendar.

    1920 – The League of Women Voters is founded in Chicago.

    1924 – The Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company changes its name to International Business Machines Corporation (IBM).

    1929 – Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre: Seven people, six of them gangster rivals of Al Capone’s gang, are murdered in Chicago.

    1945 – World War II: On the first day of the bombing of Dresden, the British Royal Air Force and the United States Army Air Forces begin fire-bombing Dresden.

    1945 – President Franklin D. Roosevelt meets King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia aboard the USS Quincy, officially beginning U.S.-Saudi diplomatic relations.

    1946 – The Bank of England is nationalized.

    1949 – The Knesset (parliament of Israel) convenes for the first time.

    1961 – Discovery of the chemical elements: Element 103, Lawrencium, is first synthesized at the University of California.

    1966 – Australian currency is decimalized.

    1979 – In Kabul, Setami Milli militants kidnap the American ambassador to Afghanistan, Adolph Dubs, who is later killed during a gunfight between his kidnappers and police.

    1989 – Union Carbide agrees to pay $470 million to the Indian government for damages it caused in the 1984 Bhopal disaster.

    1989 – Iranian leader Ruhollah Khomeini issues a fatwa encouraging Muslims to kill Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses.

    1990 – The Voyager 1 spacecraft takes the photograph of planet Earth that later becomes famous as Pale Blue Dot.

    2000 – The spacecraft NEAR Shoemaker enters orbit around asteroid 433 Eros, the first spacecraft to orbit an asteroid.

    2003 – Iraq disarmament crisis: UNMOVIC Executive Chairman Hans Blix reports to the United Nations Security Council that disarmament inspectors have found no weapons of mass destruction in Ba’athist Iraq.

    2005 – In Beirut, 23 people, including former Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, are killed when the equivalent of around 1,000 kg of TNT is detonated while Hariri’s motorcade drives through the city.

    2005 – YouTube is launched by a group of college students, eventually becoming the largest video sharing website in the world and a main source for viral videos.

    2018 – Jacob Zuma resigns as President of South Africa.

    2018 – A shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida is one of the deadliest school massacres with 17 fatalities and 17 injuries.

    Births:
    1483 – Babur, Moghul emperor (d. 1530).

    1545 – Lucrezia de’ Medici, Duchess of Ferrara (d. 1561).

    1813 – Lydia Hamilton Smith, African-American businesswoman (d. 1884). [She also died on this day.]

    1819 – Christopher Latham Sholes, American journalist and politician, invented the typewriter (d. 1890).

    1838 – Margaret E. Knight, American inventor (d. 1914). [Today’s Woman of the Day, see next post below.]

    1847 – Anna Howard Shaw, American physician, minister, and activist (d. 1919).

    1859 – George Washington Gale Ferris Jr., American engineer, inventor of the Ferris wheel (d. 1896). [I’ve now got Todd Rundgren’s “The Wheel” as my earworm of the day.]

    1882 – John Barrymore, American actor (d. 1942).

    1890 – Nina Hamnett, Welsh-English painter and author (d. 1956).

    1891 – Katherine Stinson, American aviator (d. 1977).

    1898 – Fritz Zwicky, Swiss-American physicist and astronomer (d. 1974). [In 1933, Zwicky was the first to use the virial theorem to postulate the existence of unseen dark matter, describing it as “dunkle Materie“.]

    1913 – Jimmy Hoffa, American trade union leader (d. 1975).

    1917 – Herbert A. Hauptman, American mathematician and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2011).

    1924 – Patricia Knatchbull, 2nd Countess Mountbatten of Burma (d. 2017). [Declined a marriage proposal from King Charles, when he was Prince of Wales.]

    1927 – Lois Maxwell, Canadian-Australian model and actress (d. 2007).

    1942 – Michael Bloomberg, American businessman and politician, 108th Mayor of New York City.

    1944 – Carl Bernstein, American journalist and author.

    1944 – Alan Parker, English director, producer, and screenwriter (d. 2020).

    1947 – Tim Buckley, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 1975).

    1948 – Teller, American magician and actor.

    1967 – Stelios Haji-Ioannou, Greek-English businessman, founded easyJet.

    1970 – Simon Pegg, English actor, director, and producer.

    Don’t be afraid of death so much as an inadequate life. (Bertolt Brecht):
    1744 – John Hadley, English mathematician, invented the octant (b. 1682).

    1933 – Carl Correns, German botanist and geneticist (b. 1864).

    1959 – Baby Dodds, American drummer (b. 1898). [Regarded as one of the best jazz drummers of the pre-big band era. He was among the first drummers to be recorded improvising while performing.]

    1975 – Julian Huxley, English biologist and eugenicist, co-founded the World Wide Fund for Nature (b. 1887).

    1975 – P. G. Wodehouse, English novelist and playwright (b. 1881).

    1976 – Gertrud Dorka, German archaeologist, prehistorian and museum director (b. 1893).

    1989 – James Bond, American ornithologist and zoologist (b. 1900).

    2002 – Mick Tucker, English drummer (b. 1947). [Co-founded Sweet.]

    2010 – Dick Francis, Welsh jockey and author (b. 1920).

    2015 – Louis Jourdan, French-American actor and singer (b. 1921).

    2018 – Morgan Tsvangirai, 2nd Prime Minister of Zimbabwe (b. 1952).

    1. Woman of the Day:
      [Text from The Attagirls]

      Woman of the Day inventor Margaret Knight, known as Mattie, born OTD 1838 in Maine. A female Edison and mother of the grocery bag or square bottomed paper bag, she held 26 patents for her inventions for a range of items including improvements to internal combustion engines, a window frame and sash, and machinery for cutting soles of shoes.

      Mattie’s father died when she was 12 and despite having only a rudimentary education, she was set to work in a cotton mill to help with the family finances. Even as a little girl, she was mechanically-minded. Playing with dolls didn’t interest her. What she wanted was a jack knife, gimlet and pieces of wood and she was famous for her well-made kites and sleds which were reportedly the envy of the town’s boys.

      During that first year at the cotton mill, Mattie witnessed an industrial accident and realised that a stop motion device could be used to shut down machinery in textile mills, preventing workers from being injured. She invented one. By the time she was a teenager, her invention was being used in mills.

      Mattie started working in a paper bag factory in Massachusetts in 1867, after the American Civil War, and soon realised that it would be much easier to pack items into bags if the bottom of the bag was flat instead of envelope-shaped. She invented a machine that would automatically fold and glue paper bags to create square bottoms.

      Mattie built a wooden prototype of her machine but needed a working iron model to apply for a patent so she commissioned a machine shop to build one to her design. Machinist Charles Annan spotted it while visiting the machine shop and patented it which meant that when Mattie applied for her patent in 1870, it was too late. He had ownership.

      Did that stop her? It did not. She took him to court for “patent interference”. His case rested on his argument that as a woman, “she could not possibly understand the mechanical complexities of the machine” and that his was possibly a different machine. Mattie’s case consisted of meticulous hand-drawn blueprints, journals and models, plus a number of witnesses who testified that she had been making models and drawings of the machine since 1867. The 16 day hearing cost her $100 a day in legal costs (£1,832 per day in today’s sterling) but she won.

      Mattie was awarded her patent in 1870. As an indication of how unusual it was for a woman to be awarded a patent, it’s worth noting that even today, less than 10% of “primary inventor” patent awardees are female. Centuries-old discouragement leaves a legacy. Mattie was honoured by Queen Victoria in 1871 for her invention of the paper bag machine.

      Mattie co-founded the Eastern Paper Bag Company in 1870 with a business partner from Massachusetts. She had no interest in managing the business, instead receiving royalties from the company. Her real interest was in developing more inventions. As well her mechanical designs, she invented a dress and skirt shield in 1883, a clasp for robes in 1884, a cooking spit in 1885, a numbering machine in 1894 and a rotary engine in 1902.

      Her invention had a huge impact on the paper industry. Paper bags began to proliferate throughout the retail world as paper bags replaced cloth sacks, crates and boxes for shopping. To this day, thousands of machines based on Margaret’s idea are still used to produce flat-bottomed paper bags, though today’s bags have accordion sides which means they are more compact to store and have more defined corners.

      In 2006, Mattie was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of fame. A scaled-down but fully functional patent model of her original bag-making machine is in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC.

      “I’m only sorry I couldn’t have had as good a chance as a boy, and have been put to my trade regularly.”

      https://twitter.com/TheAttagirls/status/1757668881731133926

        1. Yes, Su, women have invented so many things, often very practical ones, that they have not had the popular credit for, including the car heater – Margaret Wilcox, 1893!

  6. Please do not get Covid. It is not to be taken lightly: both due to its immediate and direct impact on a person including immediate severe and easily identifiable post viral infections and the more unspecified but real symptoms generally known as “long covid”. Dr Fauci recognized long covid as a real thing very early on and made a hunk of research dollars available for its study. There was also a TWiV panel discussion on these types of long-term illnesses that are too often dismissed as in the patient’s head as opposed to a continuing physical malady. One of the impacts of the current strain going around the past year with my acquaintances has seemed to be a pretty severe fatigue lasting well after the fever subsides.

  9. > Three women have been found guilty of terrorism offences after they displayed images of paragliders, “celebrating” the Hamas tactics.

    The BBC article omits the kicker. She “grew up in Gaza and was granted asylum in the UK because her family were critical of Hamas”.

    I don’t understand how a terrorism conviction for supporting the exact same terrorist group you claimed to be fleeing, does not automatically and immediately cancel your asylum status.

      1. Thanks, I had not read this about the judge.

        Yet more evidence that a working country isn’t just a set of roles you can slot arbitrary people into. No system of written rules about what being a judge means can replace shared moral culture.

  12. I have been reading Israeli news outlets for some time (in English) and I find them to be quite variable in their outlook regarding the war in Gaza. I don’t have much faith in the American news outlets, as they almost invariably lean against Israel. They might mention an Israeli military success—such as rescuing hostages—but this success is always accompanied by the number of associated Palestinian casualties as a counterpoint—even when the numbers come from the Gazan Ministry of Health, which is an arm of Hamas itself. It’s so formulaic that it appears tainted by ideology and not to be trusted.

    What I read about the ongoing talks of ceasefire varies day by day, but so far seems to be a series of back and forth proposals and rejections. That does not mean that there is no progress, however. The parties may be getting closer to agreement. All that said, Israel needs to eliminate the four battalions of a Hamas forces in Rafah and it needs to capture, deport, or otherwise dispose of Hamas’s leadership before accepting a long-term cease fire.

    2. Here’s an example of disingenuous coverage, reported by Camera. In this case, CBS purposely misrepresented the U.S. position regarding the upcoming IDF operation in Rafah: https://www.camera.org/article/cbs-falsely-reports-u-s-warned-israel-not-to-attack-rafah/.

      I can’t tell you how many times I’ve yelled at the TV screen over the past few days as I heard reporters talk about an impending “catastrophe” and how Biden and Kirby were warning Israel not to go into Rafah. Not true. The U.S. administration was clear that any incursion into Rafah needs to include a plan to move civilians out of harm’s way. The administration did not tell Israel not to go into Rafah. The reporting I’m seeing is disingenuous.

  14. OK. Egypt. As I wrote lately:

    “Gaza has a large border with Egypt and in the last decade 3,000 Egyptians have been killed by an Islamic insurrection in Sinai which is in direct co-operation with Hamas.

    Egypt’s hatred of the Palestinians goes back nearly a century even though many Palestinians have family roots there. Ask any random Palestinian his full name and Egyptian, Syrian or Jordanian place-names almost always are mentioned because the “Palestinian people” mainly arrived from surrounding states to work on British and Zionist infrastructure projects in the 1930s and 1940s. Many after Jewish arrivals.”
    from: https://themoderatevoice.com/worst-houseguests-ever-the-palestinians/
    ————————
    Now. Just imagine 3,000 Texans killed by illegals in Texas… who want to destroy the US and kill all non-Mexican Americans (and many of them also.)
    ————————-
    The rest of the Arab world know how hate and vengeance fueled the Pal mvt is, how fanatically Islamic it is. We stupids in the west think oh, if we’re kind to them they’ll dial back the hate. This is so wrong and misunderstanding the entire situation as our minds in the rich, secular, non-aggrieved West aren’t set up to consider moral abomination.
    D.A.
    NYC/FL

  15. On the generic “Insert Org Name” poster, the creature hanging from the paraglider appears to be heading down into the mob as if to attack them. I hope for their sakes he hasn’t lit the fuse on his suicide vest yet.

    The facial expressions on the mob, contorted with demented, insane slobbering fury rather say it all, don’t they. The artist wasn’t looking for a Soviet realism vibe.

  16. Forgot to say – thanks for the Valentine’s card!

    Let’s see if this works :

    <—<3—€

    … yes. Yes, it worked.

  17. Speaking of religious Super Bowl ads. During the entire football season, there has been a very expensive add campaign that puts forth the idea that Jesus is us, and uses the “US” in his name to reinforce the message. (As if Jesus’s original name was the English, Jesus.) During the Super Bowl, they had an ad where people of different races or backgrounds or professions are shown washing each others feet. After watching it, I just laughed, noting that the ad was uber-woke. Woke is bad enough on its own, but now it’s intertwined with Christianity. Blech… Maybe they’re trying to persuade the young woke folk.

  18. I read the largest letters first, but then I read the letters at the very top.

    Does that make me broken? Maladjusted? Special?

Comments are closed.