Friday: Hili dialogue

February 23, 2024 • 6:15 am

Welcome to the tail o’ the work week: Friday, February 23, 2024. Jewish cats head home before sundown; all their food for a day is already set out in bowls. It’s also National Banana Bread Day, best (as shown below) with cream cheese.

“banana bread” by sajia.hall is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

It’s also Play Tennis Day, International Dog Biscuit Appreciation Day (?), World Understanding and Peace Day, The Emperor’s Birthday, birthday of Naruhito, the current Emperor of Japan, and Red Army Day or Day of Soviet Army and Navy in the former Soviet Union.

There’s a Google Doodle today (click on screenshot) celebrating the 140th birthday of Casimir Funk, a Polish biochemist who devised the concept of vitamins.

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

Da Nooz:

*The robotic lander “Odysseus” landed successfully on the Moon yesterday at 6:23 p.m.: the first U.S. vehicle on the moon in 52 years! There’s a problem with its sending data, but that seems to have been fixed. Here’s a NASA video of the landing (no video from the Moon, of course) showing the elation of the participants from Intuitive Machines:

*The U.S. is a lot more fearful than I thought about the deployment of nuclear weapons in space by Russia, something that either is already in place or is in the works.

The U.S. government has been in direct contact with Russia to warn Moscow not to deploy a new nuclear-armed antisatellite weapon, which it said would violate the Outer Space Treaty and jeopardize U.S. national security interests, U.S. officials said.

The outreach to Moscow is part of a diplomatic campaign that the Biden administration is mounting to head off the threat that also involves approaches to China, India, G-7 nations and other close allies that have interests in space and channels to Moscow.

The warning to Moscow came after a cryptic warning by Rep. Mike Turner, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who announced an unspecified “serious national-security threat” to the U.S. and requested that President Biden declassify information around it. The White House a day later confirmed Russia was pursuing an “antisatellite capability,” but declined to offer specifics beyond saying that it wasn’t an active threat to Americans’ safety.

The unusual maneuver caught administration officials and lawmakers alike by surprise, and fueled fevered speculation in Washington about the nature of the threat that so alarmed Turner.

The 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which Moscow signed, bans the deployment of nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction in space.

Intelligence that remains classified indicates that Russia is seeking to develop a nuclear weapon that could be launched in space and used to target satellites, The Wall Street Journal reported last week. Officials and lawmakers are concerned that such a weapon, if deployed, could pose an indiscriminate risk to military and civilian satellites alike and lead to enormous disruptions to the global economy and communications infrastructure.

Well, it’s apparently not up there yet, but I wonder how the U.S. has so much information about its imminent production.  Just what we need, a bunch of Russian satellites that can launch nuclear weapon—and I suspect not just at other satellites.

*The Russians are pressuring Alexei Navalny’s relatives to agree to a secret burial, and of course they haven’t yet handed over the body.

The mother of Russia’s late opposition leader Alexei Navalny said Thursday that she has seen her son’s body and that she is resisting strong pressure by authorities to agree to a secret burial outside the public eye.

Lyudmila Navalnaya said investigators allowed her to see her son’s body in the city morgue. She said she reaffirmed the demand to give Navalny’s body to her and protested what she described as authorities trying to force her to agree to a secret burial.

“They are blackmailing me, they are setting conditions where, when and how my son should be buried,” she said in a video statement from the Arctic city of Salekhard. “They want it to do it secretly without a mourning ceremony.”

Navalny’s spokesman, Kira Yarmysh said on X, formerly Twitter, that his mother was also shown a medical certificate stating that the 47-year-old politician died of “natural causes.” Yarmysh didn’t specify what those were.

That’s bullpucky! How can a 47-year-old man, filmed joking around the day before, die of “natural causes” when he just collapsed? It makes no sense.

Navalny’s mother has filed a lawsuit at a court in Salekhard contesting officials’ refusal to release her son’s body. A closed-door hearing has been scheduled for March 4. On Tuesday, she appealed to Putin to release her son’s remains so that she could bury him with dignity.

The fix is in (it was supposed to take two weeks for the toxicology exam, but they said that yesterday. I’m betting he was poisoned. They don’t even want her to have the body, much less see it:

In the video released Thursday, Navalnaya said that she had spent nearly 24 hours in the Salekhard office of the Investigative Committee, where officials told her that they have determined the politician’s cause of death and have the paperwork ready, but she has to agree to a secret funeral.

“They want to take me to the outskirts of the cemetery to a fresh grave and say: ‘Here lies your son.’ I don’t agree to this. I want you too — to whom Alexey is dear, for whom his death was a personal tragedy — to have the opportunity to say goodbye to him,” she said.

Navalnaya accused the authorities of threatening her: “Looking into my eyes, they say that if I do not agree to a secret funeral, they will do something with my son’s body. Investigator Voropayev openly told me: ‘Time is not on your side, the corpse is decomposing’,” she said, reiterating her demand to release her son’s body “immediately.”

I was hesitant at first to agree with Biden that “this is Putin’s doing,” but the behavior around Navalny’s body makes me tend to agree now.

*For some reason I don’t fathom, Scotland has become pretty anti-Israel (Ireland seems to have always been that way). According to Politico, Parliament was thrown into chaos after the Scottish National Party demanded a vote on a ceasefire (h/t Jez).:

Angry MPs staged a walkout in the House of Commons Wednesday night and vented their fury at Speaker Lindsay Hoyle, as a symbolic vote on a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas descended into chaos.

MPs from the Scottish National Party and a raft of Conservatives walked out of the parliamentary chamber in protest at Hoyle, who they accused of tipping the scales in favor of Labour — a charge denied by Hoyle in an emotional statement.

Wednesday night’s fractious scenes came after a day of Commons intrigue over the Gaza vote.

MPs had been set to vote on a motion from the Scottish National Party calling for an “immediate” cease-fire in Gaza. The SNP used its dedicated “opposition day” in the Commons to push the motion.

*Also from Politco (h/t Robert), we have an article about why Palestinian refugees won’t be accepted by Arab states. If you read the news about the Middle East, this is hardly surprising, but it seems that few people know it:

Israel is poised to launch a ground operation in the city of Rafah on Gaza’s border with Egypt, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees have fled in the four months since Israel began retaliating for the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023. Some members of Israel’s conservative government are now openly advancing the idea of expelling the Palestinian population from Gaza altogether.

If that were to happen, they would have nowhere in the Arab world to go, says former U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker. Despite public support for Palestinian rights, in truth nearly every Arab state has long viewed the Palestinians with “fear and loathing,” Crocker says. This is especially true of Egypt, which will continue to refuse to admit Palestinians from across the border, he says.

There’s aQ$A with Crocker, here’s the first bit:

So far, Arab states have not permitted the resettlement of Palestinians in their territory. What’s struck you most about their response to Israel’s war in Gaza?

What’s noteworthy in this entire conflict since Oct. 7 has been the lack of reaction or response from the Arab world. Saudi Arabia continues to hold the door open for a peace agreement with Israel. The UAE, Morocco and Bahrain didn’t even withdraw ambassadors. Jordan did, but of course with about half of its population being Palestinian, Jordan has a particular problem. That lack of reaction I think is very telling. If you needed another example that Arab states are not viscerally concerned about the Palestinians and their fate, this would be it.

The rest of the long interview is historically edifying, but I’ll let you read it for yourself.

*But there’s some lagniappe along with the eternal strife: in Canada, the Wallenberg Centre in Montreal has charged Hamas with war crimes at the International Criminal Court (h/t John):

The Montreal-based Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights filed a massive brief Feb. 14 with the International Criminal Court in the Hague, accusing the terrorist group Hamas of war crimes against the hostages kidnapped during their Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

That attack resulted in the brutal murder of more than 1,200 people in Israel, and more than 250 people kidnapped, as well as thousands injured. More than 100 hostages remain. The more than 1,000-page brief includes evidence and legal analysis, as well as video evidence.

The brief “describes the perpetration of war crimes and crimes against humanity by Palestinian terrorists, including hostage-taking, enforced disappearance, torture and rape.” The group says the brief provides “compelling evidence to serve as a basis for issuing arrest warrants.”

Former federal Justice Minister and Mount Royal MP, and founder of the RWCHR Irwin Cotler said that “Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad not only take Jews captive, but also hold Palestinians, peace activists and humanitarians hostage.

“These perpetrators are therefore not only the enemy of Jews, but also the enemy of Palestinians, and the enemy of peace and our common humanity. They must be held criminally accountable.”

It will be interesting to see how this court rules (its not the same one that’s considering the charges of genocide against Israel), as the evidence is incontrortible. Of course this is largely a symbolic case, as even if Hamas members are found guilty, the ICC has no power to arrest them, though they could be arrested if they traveled to a member state. Still, everyone save the Israelis seems to have forgotten what Hamas did.

*Diversity gone wild!: A new Google AI drawing project, called “Gemini”, has been accused of almost never drawing a white male when asked to draw pictures.  There is a funny series of tweets in which a man gives the program various prompts, and it produces pictures of women or people of color, but no white males.  Even Popes!  Here’s the first tweet in the thread, but look at them all:

More:

In the second tweet he finally go the program to generate white males—by asking for an image of a basketball team!

Luana found this series:

Is this a DEI-infused algorithm, or is it somehow getting its prompts by trawling the Internet?

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is looking for ants!

Hili: An anteater wouldn’t survive here.
A: There are no anteaters here.
Hili: Ants are not visible either.
In Polish:
Hili: Mrówkojad by tu nie przeżył.
Ja: Tu nie ma mrówkojadów.
Hili: Mrówek też nie widać.

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

From Don:

From Bill:

From Strange, Stupid, or Silly Signs:

Masih emphasizes the huge number of executions taking place in the Islamic “Republic” of Iran:

From cesar, who says this about a conference on sexual violence in general which is being attacked simply because there was also sexual violence in Israel on October 7:

“As they say, when people tell you who they are, believe them.    And no, Oct 7 was not the focus of the conference. Not a huge number of protesters,  but………….”

Hillary spoke, was was polite but firm:

From Cate; a nasty man destroys a squirrel’s cache! Leave those nuts alone!

From Malcolm; big cats on ice (sound up):

From Jez. Is this fake? If not, why was someone outside the tent to photograph it?

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one of many gays who died in the camp. Notice the upside-down badge; it was pink, and, as the chart below indicates, was a “homosexueller”:

The badges of Auschwitz. The “gay” badge is circled.

This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Tweets from Dr. Cobb; “3.5 minutes of Irish fun”:

Voyager 1, launched in 1977, was designed to last only three years. But it just died after forty-seven years, and giving us a lot of information. Read a bit about it here.  It’s 15 billion km away from Earth! An excerpt:

Here’s a bit of trivia: Voyager 1 currently holds the record for most distant active spacecraft.  It’s not even close.  The only other contender is Voyager’s little sister, Voyager 2, which had a different mission profile and so lags billions of kilometers behind their older sibling.

Here’s another bit of trivia:  if you’re reading this in 2024?  It’s very unlikely that you will live to see that record broken.  There are only two other spacecraft outside the Solar System — Voyager 2 and New Horizons.  Both of them are going to die before they get as far as Voyager 1.  And nobody — not NASA, not the Chinese, not the EU — is currently planning to launch another spacecraft to those distances.  In theory we could.  In practice, we have other priorities.

38 thoughts on “Friday: Hili dialogue”

  1. Is this a DEI-infused algorithm, or is it somehow getting its prompts by trawling the Internet?

    Google is hyper-woke (as we’ve known since the James Damore memo). They deliberately train their AI to be “anti-racist” and these are the results. We should be aware that they build the same biases into Google search and other Google products.

    An amusing Tweet by the Babylon Bee: “Google Gemini Finally Draws White Man After Being Prompted To Generate Clarence Thomas”. 🙂

    1. There is some of this on the BBC web site. When the BBC illustrates a report with images of people that should be racially neutral, non-white people are greatly over-represented.

    2. Well, there were black slave-owners, and American Indian slave-owners, too, in the 19th century. There were even American Indians who owned black slaves. And going farther afield from America, most of the slave-owners in Africa weren’t white: too much malaria.

      1. And there were hundreds of thousands of white slaves owned by whites as well- 17th/18th century. Many (most?) of them street urchins from London.

        1. Sure, but Michael’s point was that the AI would be forced to produce a white face if you asked it for a 19C slave-owner. My response was just that if it was damned and determined not to acknowledge whiteness, it would have no shortage of slave-owners of colour to draw from. I wasn’t making any comment about the race-based world-wide relative historical indulgence of slave-owning.

          But I’ll still hazard a guess that of all the slave-owners in the world in the 19th century even before the British Empire abolished it, most were not white. If the AI were going on purely random sampling, which it doesn’t, it would be more likely to generate a coloured face than a white one.

          1. I knew the thread’s theme and where you were coming from. I was just pointing out other slavery anomalies lost to history (or at least drowned out by the acceptable facts). Nowadays it’s white owners / black/brown slaves, that’s it. The paradigm is impossibly complex, that is how I read your subtext, so I was adding another bit.

  3. Hillary said it but did Columbia enforce it? Did the university sponsors throw the miscreants out?

      1. Thanks. I’ve been watching the hype from my applied controls knothole since artificial neural networks became all the rage in the early 80’s.

  5. For some reason I don’t fathom, Scotland has become pretty anti-Israel

    Maybe the name of their first minister might be a clue? Humza Haroon Yousaf. Not a traditional Scottish name.

        1. He didn’t – Nicola Sturgeon resigned as first minister, and the Scottish National Party chose him as her replacement.

          2. But didn’t he at least have to get elected to a seat in the Scottish Parliament? Somebody must like him.

          3. Resigned as first minister after a series of scandals in which she spent party money on private expenses and falsely claimed that no males (“trans women”) were being housed in her majesty’s prisons for women in Scotland.

          4. Agreed, Mike. It’s not clear whether Sturgeon jumped because of the “Isla Bryant” debacle or the investigation into alleged financial shenanigans. Of course, it could have been both. And her deletions of her private messages, as exposed by the ongoing pandemic inquiry, conveniently cover the period when her predecessor faced allegations (false ones, it turns out) of inappropriate behaviour; some suspect that Sturgeon and her advisers played a role in those allegations being brought / sustained.

      2. He is useless and a liar too. He avoids any legislative voting which conflicts with his Islamist faith and background and then tells blatant lies about the avoidance.
        He was a completely useless minister under Sturgeon and is completely useless as the Scottish First Minister. His rant about white people in positions of authority should tell everyone in Scotland what a moron he truly is.
        The SNP will be decimated at the next election.

    2. The First Minister’s wife was visiting her family in Gaza on October 7th but that’s not really relevant.

      The Scottish National Party, whose motion for a ceasefire was to be debated in Parliament, had several motivations.

      A big chunk of it is their political philosophy. They are part of the political grouping that supports high taxes, high public spending, authoritarian Government, what they call Net Zero, LGBetc (with a strong recent emphasis on the T) and, despite the inherent conflict, an affinity with Islam.

      They’re also though losing support in Scotland due to multiple and repeated events that appear to be corruption (I’m choosing words carefully due to local libel laws) and because they repeatedly fail to deliver on what is ostensibly their primary policy, independence for Scotland (followed immediately by handing all sovereignty to the EU).

      The political party they’re most likely to lose seats to (both in the local Scottish council Yousef’s the First Minister of, and in Parliament) is the Labour Party.

      The Labour Party are suffering from years of anti-semetism, and also from relying heavily on the vote of muslims. Their leader is however married to a Jewish lady, and despite his many moral and personal failings has never been credibly accused of racism. So there’s a substantial conflict within the party regarding the events in Israel and Gaza, and given a choice between voting on an SNP motion in Parliament or the Government amendment against it, half the Labour Party MPs were looking likely to vote with the SNP.

      The SNP thus set up the Labour Party for public humiliation, while also appeasing their own political extremists, by using an Opposition Day (the SNP get to choose Parliament’s agenda for the day) to put forward a motion that
      – demanded an immediate ceasefire
      – didn’t explain how that would work when Hamas would immediately breach it
      – stated that people in Gaza were under collective punishment; that basically declares Israel as committing war crimes

      This left Labour leadership in a tricky position
      – refuse to support the motion and they’d risk a sizeable percentage of their support across the UK switching to an Islamic party
      – support the motion and they’d alienate most of the rest of their support across the UK
      – have half their party disobey the Party Whips (erm, party policy enforcers) and vote for the SNP motion. That would have involved several senior members of the party having to resign their leadership roles, embarrassing the party and its leader

      So what happened is still being worked through, but includes:
      – A group of Labour MPs was overhead saying “Lindsay’s sorted it for us” (Lindsay Hoyle being the Speaker, who chooses which amendments are presented)
      – The press have reported the Speaker being threatened by Labour whips along the lines of “After the election you need our support if you want to keep your job”
      – The press and others have reported the Labour Party leader, the millionaire Sir Keir Starmer, as having a shouting argument with the Speaker
      – the Labour Party causing an hour of delays to proceedings in the House of Commons to allow that haranguing of the Speaker to take place
      – The Speaker breaking centuries of precedent by selecting an Opposition (i.e. Labour) amendment, which de facto gave the Labour Party the agenda of the SNP’s Opposition Day, directly damaging democracy

      The SNP and the Conservative Party (the party in Government) both walked out of the Chamber (the House of Commons) in protest.

      The Speaker left the Chamber, leaving one of his deputies in the Speaker’s chair. The amendment was proposed, and the deputy declared it passed without a Division (a vote).

      This can only happen if there are no naysayers to the amendment. Audio from the Chamber clearly contains people shouting ‘No’ to the amendment.

      Subsequently.. The Speaker is claiming that he broke with precedent (against the recommendations of his experienced and expert staff) to keep Labour Party MPs safe from the threats they were receiving (for not demanding a ceasefire in Gaza).

      So either:

      ..the Speaker is a corrupt liar and put his own party (he’s a Labour MP) and job (the Speaker is powerful and is guaranteed re-election) ahead of democracy, or:
      ..Parliament is no longer a democratic forum as its proceedings can be dictated through threats of violence.

      Oh, and the Speaker put MPs from other parties at risk, as they’re also receiving threats from people who say things like ‘from the river to the sea’.

      So nothing to do with Scotland, everything to do with Scottish elections, national elections, corruption and a vicious blow to British democracy.

      All of which has been raised in Parliament since, if you care to browse Hansard to check whether my write-up is accurate.

      Is Scotland anti-Israel? No. Not remotely.

  6. On this day:
    532 – Byzantine emperor Justinian I lays the foundation stone of a new Orthodox Christian basilica in Constantinople – the Hagia Sophia.

    1455 – Traditionally the date of publication of the Gutenberg Bible, the first Western book printed with movable type.

    1763 – Berbice slave uprising in Guyana: The first major slave revolt in South America.

    1820 – Cato Street Conspiracy: A plot to murder all the British cabinet ministers is exposed and the conspirators arrested.

    1836 – Texas Revolution: The Siege of the Alamo (prelude to the Battle of the Alamo) begins in San Antonio, Texas.

    1886 – Charles Martin Hall produced the first samples of aluminium from the electrolysis of aluminium oxide, after several years of intensive work. He was assisted in this project by his older sister, Julia Brainerd Hall.

    1898 – Émile Zola is imprisoned in France after writing J’Accuse…!, a letter accusing the French government of antisemitism and wrongfully imprisoning Captain Alfred Dreyfus.

    1917 – First demonstrations in Saint Petersburg, Russia. The beginning of the February Revolution (March 8 in the Gregorian calendar).

    1927 – German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg writes a letter to fellow physicist Wolfgang Pauli, in which he describes his uncertainty principle for the first time.

    1941 – Plutonium is first produced and isolated by Dr. Glenn T. Seaborg.

    1942 – World War II: Japanese submarines fire artillery shells at the coastline near Santa Barbara, California.

    1945 – World War II: During the Battle of Iwo Jima, a group of United States Marines reach the top of Mount Suribachi on the island and are photographed raising the American flag.

    1947 – International Organization for Standardization is founded.

    1954 – The first mass inoculation of children against polio with the Salk vaccine begins in Pittsburgh.

    1974 – The Symbionese Liberation Army demands $4 million more to release kidnap victim Patty Hearst.

    1980 – Iran hostage crisis: Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini states that Iran’s parliament will decide the fate of the American embassy hostages.

    1981 – In Spain, Antonio Tejero attempts a coup d’état by capturing the Spanish Congress of Deputies.

    1983 – The United States Environmental Protection Agency announces its intent to buy out and evacuate the dioxin-contaminated community of Times Beach, Missouri.

    1988 – Saddam Hussein begins the Anfal genocide against Kurds and Assyrians in northern Iraq.

    2020 – Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old African-American citizen, is shot and murdered by three white men after visiting a house under construction while jogging at a neighborhood in Satilla Shores near Brunswick in Glynn County, Georgia.

    Births:
    1633 – Samuel Pepys, English diarist and politician (d. 1703).

    1685 – George Frideric Handel, German-English organist and composer (d. 1759).

    1868 – W. E. B. Du Bois, American sociologist, historian, and activist (d. 1963).

    1889 – Victor Fleming, American director, cinematographer, and producer (d. 1949).

    1904 – Terence Fisher, English director and screenwriter (d. 1980). [Best known for his work with Hammer Films, he was the first to bring gothic horror alive in full colour, and the sexual overtones and explicit horror in his films, while mild by modern standards, were unprecedented in his day.]

    1927 – Jessica Huntley, Guyanese activist and publisher (d. 2013).

    1938 – Sylvia Chase, American broadcast journalist (d. 2019).

    1940 – Peter Fonda, American actor, director, producer, and screenwriter (d. 2019).

    1944 – Johnny Winter, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer (d. 2014).

    1948 – Steve Priest, English singer-songwriter and bass player (d. 2020).

    1950 – Rebecca Goldstein, American philosopher and author.

    1951 – Debbie Friedman, American singer-songwriter of Jewish melodies (d. 2011).

    1954 – Viktor Yushchenko, Ukrainian captain and politician, 3rd President of Ukraine.

    1955 – Howard Jones, English singer-songwriter.

    1955 – Francesca Simon, American-British author. [Author of the Horrid Henry books.]

    1958 – David Sylvian, English singer-songwriter.

    1969 – Martine Croxall, English journalist and television news presenter.

    1983 – Emily Blunt, English actress.

    1994 – Dakota Fanning, American actress.

    A useless life is an early death. (Goethe):
    1792 – Joshua Reynolds, English painter and academic (b. 1723).

    1821 – John Keats, English poet (b. 1795).

    1855 – Carl Friedrich Gauss, German mathematician, astronomer, and physicist (b. 1777).

    1871 – Amanda Cajander, Finnish medical reformer (b. 1827).

    1930 – Horst Wessel, German SA officer (b. 1907). [A street gangster and pimp, after his murder in 1930 he was made into a martyr for the Nazi Party by Joseph Goebbels.]

    1931 – Nellie Melba, Australian soprano and actress (b. 1861).

    1934 – Edward Elgar, English composer and academic (b. 1857).

    1965 – Stan Laurel, English actor and comedian (b. 1890).

    1976 – L. S. Lowry, English painter (b. 1887).

    1995 – James Herriot, English veterinarian and author (b. 1916).

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

    2007 – Hanna Barysiewicz, the oldest female resident of Belarus not registered by the Guinness Book of Records (b. 1888).

    2014 – Alice Herz-Sommer, Czech-English Holocaust survivor, pianist and educator (b. 1903). [Today’s Woman of the Day, see next post below.]

    2016 – Jacqueline Mattson, American baseball player (b. 1928).

    2023 – John Motson, English football commentator (b. 1945).

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

      Alice Herz-Sommer, also known as Alice Herz ( born 26 November 1903, died on this day in 2014), was a Czech-born Israeli classical pianist, music teacher, and supercentenarian who survived Theresienstadt concentration camp. She lived for 40 years in Israel, before migrating to London in 1986, where she resided until her death, and at the age of 110 was the world’s oldest known Holocaust survivor until Yisrael Kristal was recognized as such.

      Aliza Herz was born in Prague, in the Kingdom of Bohemia (a part of Austria-Hungary) in the modern-day Czech Republic, to Friedrich and Sofie “Gigi” Herz. Herz’s family was part of the small German-speaking minority of assimilated Jews in Prague, although Herz stated that she also spoke Czech. Her father was a merchant and her mother was highly educated and moved in circles of well-known writers. She had two sisters, including a twin sister, Mariana, and two brothers. Her parents ran a cultural salon where Herz, as a child, met writers including Franz Kafka and Franz Werfel, composers including Gustav Mahler, philosophers, and intellectuals such as Sigmund Freud. Herz once noted that “Kafka was a slightly strange man. He used to come to our house, sit and talk with my mother, mainly about his writing. He did not talk a lot, but rather loved quiet and nature. We frequently went on trips together. I remember that Kafka took us to a very nice place outside Prague. We sat on a bench and he told us stories.” Herz’s sister Irma was married to Felix Weltsch, who was a prominent German-language Jewish philosopher, journalist, librarian, and Zionist who later worked as a librarian in Jerusalem after his emigration from Austria.

      Herz’s older sister Irma taught her how to play the piano, which she studied diligently, and the Austrian-Jewish pianist Artur Schnabel, a friend of the family, encouraged her to pursue a career as a classical musician, a choice she decided to make. She went on to study under the Czech pianist Václav Štěpán (1889-1944) and at the German Academy of Music in Prague, where she was the youngest pupil. Herz married the businessman and amateur musician Leopold Sommer in 1931; the couple had a son, Stephan (later known as Raphael, 1937–2001). She began giving concerts and making a name for herself across Europe until the Nazis took over Prague, as they did not allow Jews to perform in public, join music competitions or teach non-Jewish pupils.

      After the invasion of Czechoslovakia, most of Herz-Sommer’s family and friends emigrated to Israel via Romania, including Max Brod and brother-in-law Felix Weltsch, but Herz-Sommer stayed in Prague to care for her ill mother, Sofie, aged 72; both women were arrested and Sofie Herz was murdered in a concentration camp. In July 1943 Herz was sent to Theresienstadt, where she played in more than 100 concerts along with other musicians, performing pieces by Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, Schumann, and Chopin among other Czech composers for prisoners and guards. She commented of her performances in the camp:

      We had to play because the Red Cross came three times a year. The Germans wanted to show its representatives that the situation of the Jews in Theresienstadt was good. Whenever I knew that I had a concert, I was happy. Music is magic. We performed in the council hall before an audience of 150 old, hopeless, sick and hungry people. They lived for the music. It was like food to them. If they hadn’t come [to hear us], they would have died long before. As we would have.

      Herz-Sommer was billeted with her son during their time at the camp; he was one of only a few children to survive Theresienstadt. Her husband died of typhus in Dachau, six weeks before the camp was liberated.

      After the Soviet liberation of Theresienstadt in 1945, she and Raphael returned to Prague, and in March 1949 emigrated to Israel, to be reunited with some of her surviving family, including her twin sister, Mariana. Herz lived in Israel for almost 40 years, working as a music teacher at the Jerusalem Academy of Music, until emigrating to London in 1986.

      In London Herz-Sommer lived close to her family in a one-room flat in Belsize Park, visited almost daily by her closest friends, her grandson Ariel Sommer, and daughter-in-law Genevieve Sommer. She practised playing the piano three hours a day until the end of her life. She stated that optimism was the key to her life:

      I look at the good. When you are relaxed, your body is always relaxed. When you are pessimistic, your body behaves in an unnatural way. It is up to us whether we look at the good or the bad. When you are nice to others, they are nice to you. When you give, you receive.

      She also declared a firm belief in the power of music: “Music saved my life and music saves me still… I am Jewish, but Beethoven is my religion.”

      Her son Raphael, an accomplished cellist and conductor, died in 2001, aged 64, of an aneurysm in Israel at the end of a concert tour. He was survived by his wife and two sons.

      Alice Herz-Sommer died in hospital in London on 23 February 2014, aged 110, after being admitted two days previously.

      Throughout her long life, Alice Herz-Sommer continuously proclaimed: “I am still grateful for life. Life is a present.”

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Herz-Sommer

  7. Thanks for the space coverage lately …

    Why Evolution Is True …
    INNNNN SPAAAAYYYCCEE!!!

  8. I fear that Gemini’s explicit bias will gradually creep into history documentaries and children’s textbooks till the average person can be forgiven for believing that that virtually all achievements were primarily accomplished by women and bipoc, with those insisting otherwise framed as racist revisionist. First control the language, then the images, then the history.

    1. The funny thing is that, if believed, these images undercut any claim by non-white and non-males that they have been historically oppressed.

  10. Russian officials who want Navalny’s mother to bury her son’s body quickly never to be seen or examined again, is suspicious to say the least. He was probably poisoned or otherwise dispatched, but even if not, his entire trajectory over the past few years was leading to where he is today. Sadly, dead.

    Yes, the apparent alarm over a Russian space weapon is, well, alarming. Such a weapon could badly disrupt communications of all sorts via electromagnetic pulse. Exploding it even in the vicinity of satellites can be damaging. A direct hit isn’t necessary.

    Finally, none of the Arab states want to have to deal with refugees from Gaza. There may be many reasons for this. One is simply the economics of absorbing them. Another is the fact that they have been poisoned by propaganda to hate Jews and Israel. One would think that potential host countries would be concerned that refugees with those views might be destabilizing.

    It’s quite true that Arab silence is deafening. My guess is that they want Hamas gone as much as the Israelis do. Arab nations and Israel have a major threat in common: Iran.

  11. “In Alabama, this is a chicken.”

    Well, at least you can see a chicken egg with the naked eye. You need a microscope to observe Alabama’s youngest children.

    And if an Alabama resident has 5 frozen children, can they receive a hefty tax credit? Do they have carpool lanes? If so, does a single pregnant woman in a car get to use them legally? If a pregnant woman goes to the movies, does she have to get an extra ticket? What about implications for the census? We can play these ridiculous thought experiments forever. When the obtuseness of religion becomes the buttress of law and politics, calamity ensues; a fact America’s founding fathers knew too well. It took 250 years for lawmakers and politicians to disregard that fact.

    1. I think the Alabama ruling will be interpreted narrowly: as a legal finesse to allow these IVF clinic customers to collect civil damages from the corporation that ran a careless IVF clinic. It’s a victory for the little guy over big business. Your other scenarios are fun but sound like the tale about the guy who insured a dozen expensive cigars against fire, then made a claim after he smoked them. A Soviet movie theatre operating under state diktat might make a pregnant woman buy two tickets — “We’re not happy till you’re not” — but no capitalist theatre would, regardless of fetal personhood, because they would want her to come to the movies more, not less.

      Your prediction that this would end IVF in Alabama is coming true already: the business seems to be collapsing like a house of cards as all the clinics realize they have an unpriced wrongful death liability hanging to the end of time on every single one of the little children they have in their freezers. The couples who brought this appeal must have known this is what would happen if they won: no more IVF for other infertile couples. Sucks to be them I guess, but we got ours.

  12. The only other contender is Voyager’s little sister, Voyager 2, which had a different mission profile and so lags billions of kilometers behind their older sibling.

    Oh, for the love of you-know-who! Gender-neutral pronouns for space probes? Even worse when referring to it as a ‘sister’.
    That’s possibly even worse than a post by PZ on his blog a couple of weeks ago about a spider on his light fitting, a spider that he meticulously referred to with they/them/their pronouns throughout.

Comments are closed.