Tuesday: Hili dialogue

February 27, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the Cruelest Day: Tuesday, February 27, 2024 (remember, this year is a leap year), and it’s also National Strawberry Day.  Get yourself some of this, which is the world’s best jam, and only sporadically available on Amazon. The price has gone down to below ten bucks for a 12-ounce jar, and it’s available now (click to order):

“Tiptree Strawberry Little Scarlet Conserve” by Brett Jordan is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Read about the jam here; it’s made from tiny wild strawberries grown on the Wilkin & Sons factory property—and picked by hand.

Part of the appeal is the fruit’s rarity. Wilkin is believed to be the only grower in the world to commercially cultivate the unpredictable croppers. The window to pick Little Scarlets lasts just three weeks in June and July. Once picked they’re usually at the factory and in a jar within a few hours to capture the freshest flavor. Artificial additives are kept to a minimum, and the pectin is fruit-based, so it is suitable for vegetarians. With a total sugar content of 67 percent (including those that occur naturally in the fruit), it’s not so great for dieters.

James Bond had it for breakfast!:

There is a good deal of information on Bond’s taste in [From Russia With Love],, including his essential breakfast items: A speckled brown egg from a Marans chicken boiled for three minutes and twenty seconds (“Faddish as he was in many small things, it amuses him to maintain that there was such a thing as the perfect boiled egg.”); three slices wholewheat toast with “a large pat of deep yellow Jersey butter”; coffee from the confectioner De Bry de Paris (with a London branch at 64 New Oxford Street); Tiptree strawberry jam; Cooper’s Oxford marmalade; and Norwegian heather honey from Fortnum & Mason. His silver coffee pot was in a Queen Ann style, his china dark blue and gold from Minton.

It’s also International Polar Bear Day, National Kahlúa Day, World Spay Day, National Protein Day, Marathi Language Day in Maharashtra, India, and World NGO Day. 

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the February 27 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*In an attempt to placate the U.S. and to create a Palestinian state acceptable to everyone, most of the government of the Palestinian Authority (save President Abbas!) has resigned. This is an attempt to create a “reformed” PA that can govern Gaza.

Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh submitted the collective resignation of his entire government on Monday, the P.A.’s official Wafa news agency reported, amid talk of a unity deal with the Hamas terrorist organization.

During a Cabinet meeting in Ramallah, Shtayyeh explained that “this decision comes in light of the political, security and economic developments related to the aggression against Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip, and the unprecedented escalation in the West Bank, including the city of Jerusalem,” according to Wafa.

“We will remain in confrontation with the occupation [Israel], and the Palestinian Authority will continue to struggle to establish the state on the lands of Palestine,” he continued. “I see that the next stage and its challenges require new governmental and political arrangements that take into account the emerging reality in the Gaza Strip, the national unity talks [with Hamas], and the urgent need for an inter-Palestinian consensus based on a national basis, broad participation, unity of ranks, and the extension of the Palestinian Authority’s sovereignty over the entire land of Palestine.”

On Sunday, Sky News Arabia reported that top P.A. officials could offer their resignation “within days” to facilitate the swift establishment of a Palestinian “government of technocrats,” including Hamas members, whose primary purpose would be the reconstruction of Gaza.

The new government is expected to be headed by Mohammad Mustafa, currently the chairman of the P.A.’s Palestine Investment Fund. It would serve during a “transition period” until elections are held.

This will clearly not work. Though it may be acceptable to Blinken and Biden, it won’t be to Israel. For one thing, this is a collaborative government with HAMAS, for crying out loud! It still threatens terrorism against the “occupation,” not to mention that the proposed head of the new government, Mohammad Mustafa, is already tainted by being an important figure in the Palestinian Authority. This is not to mention that Gazans despise the Palestinian authority and would prefer to be led by Hamas.

The Associated Press adds this:

Israel prefers the PA to Hamas. But even though they cooperate on security matters, Israel accuses the PA of inciting terrorism, and the PA accuses Israel of apartheid and genocide.

Israel’s criticism largely focuses on the PA’s provision of financial aid to the families of Palestinian prisoners and Palestinians killed by Israeli forces — including militants who killed Israelis. Israel says the payments incentivize terrorism. The PA portrays them as social welfare for victims of the occupation.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said the PA should have no role in postwar Gaza. He says Israel will maintain open-ended security control over the territory while local Palestinian leaders administer civilian affairs. Netanyahu’s government is opposed to Palestinian statehood.

Two other pieces of news: negotiations in Qatar over the hostages appear to have bogged down, and the IDF has presented the three-man War Cabinet with a plan to evacuate civilians from Gaza and for providing humanitarian aid to South Gaza. No details are available.

*A colleague of Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, who died in a Siberian gulag of natural causes ten days ago, reports that Navalny was close to being involved in a prisoner swap for a Russian imprisoned in Germany.

Alexei Navalny was about to be freed in a prisoner swap when he died, according to his colleague Maria Pevchikh.

She said the Russian opposition leader was going to be exchanged for Vadim Krasikov, a Russian hitman serving a life sentence for murder in Germany.

Two US citizens being held in Russia were also going to be part of the deal, Ms Pevchikh claimed.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told the Financial Times he was “not aware of such agreements”.

BBC News has not seen any evidence for Ms Pevchikh’s claims and is unable to independently verify them. [The article says later that the German government was aware of plans for a swap but gave no further information.]

Ms Pevchikh said negotiations had been in their final stage on 15 February.

Navalny died on 16 February in his cell in the prison colony in Siberia where he was being held on a 19-year sentence over charges that were widely seen as politically motivated.

Prison officials said the 47 year old had fallen ill following a walk.

In a video posted on Navalny’s YouTube channel, Ms Pevchikh, who is the chairwoman of his Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), claimed negotiations for a prisoner swap had been under way for two years.

She added that, after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, “it was clear that Putin would stop at nothing” and that Navalny “had to be freed from jail at any cost, and urgently”.

According to Ms Pevchik, Navalny was going to be freed under a humanitarian exchange and US and German officials were involved in the talks.

Why would Putin be so eager to do a prisoner swap? Was a non-imprisoned Navalny less of a threat, less of a martyr? Of did Putin just want Navalny out of Russia? My guess is that Navalny would have refused to be part of a prisoner swap, but perhaps he had no choice.

*Distressing news from The Guardian: bird flu has arrived in Antarctica. Penguins! (h/t Matthew).

Bird flu has reached mainland of Antarctica for the first time, officials have confirmed.

The H5N1 virus was found on Friday in two dead scavenging birds called skuas near Primavera Base, the Argentinian scientific research station on the Antarctic peninsula.

Additional suspected cases have been reported in brown skua, south polar skua and kelp gull in Hope Bay, also on the Antarctic peninsula, according to data from the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research.

“This discovery demonstrates for the first time that the highly pathogenic avian influenza virus has reached Antarctica, despite the distance and natural barriers that separate it from other continents,” said a Spanish government report on Sunday.

These are the first confirmed cases on the continent itself, which shows the virus is spreading in the region, most likely via migratory birds. This H5N1 outbreak is thought to have killed millions of wild birds globally since 2021, and has spread to every continent except Oceania.

And yes, it kills penguins:

Previous outbreaks in South Africa, Chile and Argentina have shown that penguins are susceptible to the virus. Since H5N1 arrived in South America, more than 500,000 seabirds have died of the disease, with penguins, pelicans and boobies among the most heavily affected.

Researchers wrote in a pre-print research paper in November last year: “If the virus does start to cause mass mortality events across penguin colonies, it could signal one of the largest ecological disasters of modern times.”

Is there any good news these days? Just what we need on top of all the woes of the world—a mass die-off of the words most enchanting birds.

*Speaking of birds, Carl Safina, an ecologist at SUNY Stony Brook, wrote an elegy for Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl who died last week after flying into a building, just a year after a vandal cut a hole in his cage at the Central Park Zoo. Flaco escaped and both thrilled and worried New Yorkers, and Safina argues that his last year was a good one.The essay is called, “Like many a hero, Flaco made his choice.”

Flaco didn’t really make a “choice,” however, either in the deterministic sense or even knowing what going through the hole in his cage would entail. Still, Safina argues for the bird’s freedom—in an area where he probably couldn’t survive and bore no resemblance to any area for which his genes were suited.

But Flaco never looked back. Though the animal literature is peppered with stories of animals — usually pets — who suffer hardships and return home, Flaco never retreated to the zoo. Perhaps freedom itself was the home he’d discovered.

And though we feared for him, his new life thrilled us.

How many of us, our circumstances familiar and safe, are too timid to seek our more fully realized selves? How many of us, viewing our confinements as nothing out of the ordinary, have long stopped wondering what our wings are for? In one of his most surreally profound moments, Flaco turned the tables on all of us — photographed staring into the playwright Nan Knighton’s apartment through a window grate, as if declaring his human viewers the captives, behind bars we built for ourselves.

Need I remind the reader that Flaco was a bird adapted to the wilds of Eurasia, not New York City, and that he was not a human? But I digress:

Have we not all yearned for a life beyond the scope of the one we lead? Flaco showed that our yearning is not misplaced, that we were not merely projecting. His choice reaffirmed a truth: that given a chance, living things choose agency and freedom of movement.

In my own turns as a wildlife rehabilitator, falconer and conservation biologist, I have often observed that when the power of choice is returned to them, animals prefer to take their chances in a free-living existence. Just before the Covid-19 pandemic, my wife and I helped rehabilitate a nestling screech owl found near death, whom we named Alfie. Once she was fit to fly, Alfie briefly came and went from the enclosure that had become her secure home, but she soon chose the larger life.

Did Flaco even know where his cage was? How do we know that he preferred the Big City he encountered after he escaped through the hole in his pen? Really, what “choice” was going on here?

*Molly Ball at the WSJ tells us “What Nikki Haley is really doing?“, something many of us were wondering when she stayed in the GOP race after losing South Carolina, the state where she was governor.

Speculation abounds about Haley’s real motives for staying in the race. Some Principles First attendees theorized she might be positioning herself as a fallback for the party this cycle if Trump—who faces 91 charges across multiple cases—is convicted of a crime or in case of what one called “an errant cheeseburger.” Others hoped she might join a third-party ticket or lead the party forward after a loss in this year’s election. “I think it’s important that there’s somebody there as an alternative for the future,” said Barbara Comstock, a former Republican congresswoman from Virginia who has endorsed Haley ahead of the state’s March 5 primary.

Zean Gassman, 64, who retired from healthcare finance and lives in Annapolis, Md., traveled to South Carolina last week to attend Haley’s and Trump’s events and knock on doors for Haley’s campaign. “It’s like a lottery ticket,” he said. “Your chances are very, very small, but you’re definitely not going to win if you don’t buy a ticket.”

Principles First’s founder, Heath Mayo, said he appreciated Haley’s determination. “There are a lot of theories, but I think she genuinely cares,” he said. “She sees the threat, and she sees there’s no benefit in bending the knee.” Haley, he argued, is making a “long-term strategic calculation that this is the last hurrah” for Trump, and demonstrating Trump’s weakness as a general election candidate. “40% of Republican primary voters picking a different path should be setting off alarm bells in the Trump campaign,” he added. “You can’t get to the White House if you don’t have a message for those voters.”

As much as the anti-Trumpers at the Principles First gathering applauded Haley for lending an assist to their cause, some of them worry that she could eventually do more harm than good if she ends up supporting Trump in November. Such an endorsement, the thinking goes, could be a powerful signal to reluctant conservatives and independents trying to decide which of two unpalatable candidates represents the lesser evil.

I don’t think that Haley’s motives are to demonstrate that there’s an alternative to Trumpism, much less to think that she has a ghost of a chance of winning. If there’s an alternative to Trumpism that she’s broaching, it’s named Nikki Haley. The one statement in the article: “I think it’s important that there’s somebody there as an alternative for the future,” is the correct one. How many politicians do you know who isn’t in it for power—even if that power is to be used for admirable aims?

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is dreaming about past “fat years”, when she got proper food, rather than the lean years with no meat.

Hili: I’m dreaming about the past.
A: Nice?
Hili: Fat.
In Polish:
Hili: Śnię o przeszłości.
Ja: Miłej?
Hili: Tłustej.
And a picture of Szaron and Baby Kulka:

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

From Mark:

From Strange, Stupid, or Silly Signs:

From Unique Birds and Animals:

From Masih, railing against the repressive Iranian regime and the many people it kills: “We Iranians have been sentenced to death, but the execution order hasn’t been signed yet.”

From Eylon Levy, an Israeli government spokesman, who says that it’s not Israel holding up the humanitarian aid going to Gaza, but there are distribution problems, mainly because UNRWA was prohibited from using Hamas (Gazan) police, who would steal much of the food and give it to Hamas.  Now that the UNRWA is in charge of bringing in the food and delivering it, getting the food to the civilians is the UN’s issue.  Blaming the crisis on Israel is ludicrous, because the trucks, stacked up at the Egypt/Gaza border, have already been checked and approved by Israeli authorities.

From Luana; a horse on a horse (screenshot):

From Malcolm: a puppy adopted by a cat. But is the milk okay?

From Simon. It took me a minute to get this one:

Live and learn!

From the Auschwitz Memorial: Leo was gassed to death upon arrival at the camp at age ten, along with his mother and two siblings.

 

Two tweets from Matthew. Look at this micromoth!

Matthew’s comment on this was, appropriately, “yikes!”

23 thoughts on “Tuesday: Hili dialogue”

  1. The ornithologist?

    I kid I kid! That James Bond appears on WEIT occasionally.

    And yes – the true WEIT experience requires some Tiptree. There certainly is something to it – the stuff in the grocery store is way different – and I’ve been looking. Closest is blueberry – that can be pretty good.

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  2. “any area for which his genes were suited.” — that makes a good jumping off point for something I will be harping on, the “blank slate” theory of mind that traces from Aristotle, John Locke, Freud and modern psychology – which the new science of Evolutionary Psychology is trying to reverse. Our minds have lots of evolved pre-processing built in from birth, how optical illusions work is an example – look, that patch there is absolutely the same color as that over there, just the brain is compensating for the shadow. Or the blind spot fill in is like something out of AI.

    Anyway, another thesis I’ll be pushing is the atheist ethics of “Do no harm” are abysmally unrealistic – one thing I will credit the communist for is they recognize that life is a competitive struggle for scarce resources and are willing to put up a fight. Meanwhile the west is sinking into a morass of goody two shoeism 🙂 Why biologists do not understand that is beyond me. Instead of the popular conception of the coddled American snowflakes turning into perfect little genderless angels shielded from all harm by helicopter parents (naturally protecting their genes) from broken families with overprotective mothers and the cowed fathers they control they are just being setup for what one of my high school teachers (LONG ago 🙂 described as the cold hard slap of reality.

    Reply

    1. I could quote the author here :

      “Have we not all yearned for a life beyond the scope of the one we lead?”

      … as an illustration of gnostic temptation – the feature of most religious cults that promise release from the prison of the material world – perhaps by making the world to match a preconceived image.

      When would one know they are in the life that is … outside the scope of.. what.. one .. currently… leads. .?!?

      I also sense a touch of moralizing in the excerpt, with the intent to make the reader feel bad about their current self.

      [ Ouroboros ]

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    2. I recently realized that grief is something that argues against the blank slate. I don’t know if anyone is prepared for it when they experience it, but most experience it in similar ways. There are things around the edges that are culturally influenced, but the response to loss is so strong that I think it is difficult to explain it as somehow learned from society. It seems to be part of human nature.

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    3. If your interested in the “blank slate” theory of mind, you should read Stephen Pinker’s The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. He thoroughly debunks the “theory.”

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  3. On this day:
    380 – Edict of Thessalonica: Emperor Theodosius I and his co-emperors Gratian and Valentinian II declare their wish that all Roman citizens convert to Nicene Christianity.

    425 – The University of Constantinople is founded by Emperor Theodosius II at the urging of his wife Aelia Eudocia.

    1782 – American Revolutionary War: The House of Commons of Great Britain votes against further war in America.

    1801 – Pursuant to the District of Columbia Organic Act of 1801, Washington, D.C. is placed under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Congress. [But DC still has taxation without representation, as I understand it?]

    1812 – Poet Lord Byron gives his first address as a member of the House of Lords, in defence of Luddite violence against Industrialism in his home county of Nottinghamshire.

    1860 – Abraham Lincoln makes a speech at Cooper Union in the city of New York that is largely responsible for his election to the Presidency.

    1900 – The British Labour Party is founded.

    1922 – A challenge to the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, allowing women the right to vote, is rebuffed by the Supreme Court of the United States in Leser v. Garnett.

    1933 – Reichstag fire: Germany’s parliament building in Berlin, the Reichstag, is set on fire; Marinus van der Lubbe, a young Dutch Communist claims responsibility.

    1940 – Martin Kamen and Sam Ruben discover carbon-14. [There are probably doubts about how accurate this date is…]

    1943 – The Holocaust: In Berlin, the Gestapo arrest 1,800 Jewish men with German wives, leading to the Rosenstrasse protest.

    1951 – The Twenty-second Amendment to the United States Constitution, limiting Presidents to two terms, is ratified.

    1964 – The Government of Italy asks for help to keep the Leaning Tower of Pisa from toppling over.

    1973 – The American Indian Movement occupies Wounded Knee in protest of the federal government.

    1991 – Gulf War: U.S. President George H. W. Bush announces that “Kuwait is liberated”. [A little more accurate than Dubya’s “Mission Accomplished” statement …]

    2002 – Godhra train burning: A Muslim mob torches a train returning from Ayodhya, killing 59 Hindu pilgrims.

    2004 – A bombing of a SuperFerry by Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines’ worst terrorist attack kills more than 100 passengers.

    2004 – Shoko Asahara, the leader of the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo, is sentenced to death for masterminding the 1995 Tokyo subway sarin attack.

    2007 – Chinese stock bubble of 2007: The Shanghai Stock Exchange falls 9%, the largest daily fall in ten years, following speculation about a crackdown on illegal share offerings and trading, and fears about accelerating inflation.

    2015 – Russian politician Boris Nemtsov is assassinated in Moscow while out walking with his girlfriend.

    Births:
    1659 – William Sherard, English botanist (d. 1728). [Next to John Ray, he was considered to be one of the outstanding English botanists of his day.]

    1807 – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, American poet and educator (d. 1882).

    1847 – Ellen Terry, English actress (d. 1928).

    1859 – Bertha Pappenheim, Austrian-German activist and author (d. 1936).

    1869 – Alice Hamilton, American physician and academic (d. 1970).[A leading expert in the field of occupational health and a pioneer in the field of industrial toxicology, in 1919, she became the first woman appointed to the faculty of Harvard University.]

    1877 – Adela Verne, English pianist and composer (d. 1952).

    1890 – Mabel Keaton Staupers, American nurse and advocate (d. 1989).

    1899 – Charles Best, American-Canadian physiologist and biochemist, co-discovered insulin (d. 1978).

    1902 – John Steinbeck, American journalist and author, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1968).

    1912 – Lawrence Durrell, British author, poet, and playwright (d. 1990).

    1923 – Dexter Gordon, American saxophonist, composer, and actor (d. 1990).

    1927 – Peter Whittle, English-New Zealand mathematician and theorist (d. 2021). [Worked in the fields of stochastic nets, optimal control, time series analysis, stochastic optimisation and stochastic dynamics.]

    1932 – Dame Elizabeth Taylor, English-American actress and humanitarian (d. 2011).

    1934 – Ralph Nader, American lawyer, politician, and activist.

    1936 – Sonia Johnson, American feminist activist and author. [With Nader, above, that’s two unlikely presidential candidates born on the same day.]

    1941 – Paddy Ashdown, British soldier and politician (d. 2018). [ “Paddy Pantsdown” as he was named by the tabloid press.]

    1950 – Julia Neuberger, Baroness Neuberger, English rabbi and politician.

    1951 – Lee Atwater, American journalist, activist and political strategist (d. 1991).

    1951 – Steve Harley, English singer-songwriter and guitarist.

    1954 – Neal Schon, American rock guitarist and singer-songwriter.

    1956 – Meena Keshwar Kamal, Afghan activist, founded the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (d. 1987).

    1957 – Timothy Spall, English actor.

    1963 – Nasty Suicide, Finnish musician and pharmacist. [One of the founding members of Hanoi Rocks.]

    1967 – Jony Ive, English industrial designer, former chief design officer of Apple.

    1971 – Sara Blakely, American businesswoman, founded Spanx.

    1971 – Derren Brown, English magician and painter.

    1980 – Chelsea Clinton, American journalist and academic.

    1983 – Kate Mara, American actress.

    Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species. (Friedrich Nietzsche):
    1706 – John Evelyn, English gardener and author (b. 1620).

    1735 – John Arbuthnot, Scottish physician and polymath (b. 1667). [He inspired Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels book III and Alexander Pope’s Peri Bathous, Or the Art of Sinking in Poetry, Memoirs of Martin Scriblerus, and possibly The Dunciad), and invented the figure of John Bull.]

    1887 – Alexander Borodin, Russian composer and chemist (b. 1833).

    1892 – Louis Vuitton, French fashion designer and businessman, founded Louis Vuitton (b. 1821).

    1936 – Ivan Pavlov, Russian physiologist and physician, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1849).

    1985 – Ray Ellington, English singer and drummer (b. 1916).

    1993 – Lillian Gish, American actress (b. 1893).

    2002 – Spike Milligan, Irish soldier, actor, comedian, and author (b. 1918). [As it says on his headstone, “Dúirt mé leat go raibh mé breoite“, which translates from Gaelic as “I told you I was ill”.]

    2006 – Linda Smith, English comedian and author (b. 1958). [Appeared regularly on BBC Radio 4 panel games, and was voted “Wittiest Living Person” by listeners in 2002. From 2004 to 2006 she was head of the British Humanist Association: “If God wanted us to believe in him, he’d exist”.]

    2008 – William F. Buckley, Jr., American author and journalist, founded the National Review (b. 1925).

    2012 – Tina Strobos, Dutch physician and psychiatrist (b. 1920). [Today’s Woman of the Day, see next post below.]

    2015 – Leonard Nimoy, American actor (b. 1931).

    Reply

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

      Tina Strobos (née Tineke Buchter; born 19 May 1920, died on this day in 2012) was a Dutch physician and psychiatrist from Amsterdam, known for her resistance work during World War II. While a young medical student, she worked with her mother and grandmother to rescue more than 100 Jewish refugees as part of the Dutch resistance during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Strobos provided her house as a hiding place for Jews on the run, using a secret attic compartment and warning bell system to keep them safe from sudden police raids. In addition, Strobos smuggled guns and radios for the resistance and forged passports to help refugees escape the country. Despite being arrested and interrogated nine times by the Gestapo, she never betrayed the whereabouts of a Jew.

      Strobos began her rescue work by hiding her best friend, a Jewish girl named Tirtsah Van Amerongen. Family friend Henri Polak—a socialist writer and labor leader—also decided to go into hiding, and Strobos’ grandmother agreed to help him.

      Working with her mother and grandmother throughout the war, Strobos rescued over 100 Jewish refugees by hiding them four or five at a time in the family’s boarding house at 282 Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal. The house had once been a city school and had three floors. Once Strobos and her mother started hiding refugees, a carpenter from the Dutch underground arrived at their house and constructed a small hiding place in the attic. The secret compartment was located inside a gable. Although the Gestapo raided the house eight times, they never found this secret compartment. Strobos and her mother had a warning bell system installed in the house, which they used to warn refugees on the upper floors of unexpected Gestapo visits. If the Jews had no time to hide in the secret compartment, they could escape through the window to an adjoining building. The family was also assisted by an anonymous ally at the Gestapo headquarters, who sometimes phoned them to warn of an impending Nazi raid. They never learned the identity of this ally.

      Although some Jews stayed at their house for extended periods, Strobos and her mother mostly used their house as a temporary safe space, sheltering Jews for a short time until they could be moved to a safer refuge. Some refugees were smuggled to Spain, Switzerland, or the Dutch countryside. Strobos and her mother often visited the people that they had arranged hiding places for, cycling miles out into the countryside to provide isolated refugees with valuable news and conversation. Among the refugees Strobos helped was impressionist painter Martin Monnickendam, who painted her portrait and gifted it to her. She kept the painting well into her old age.

      The Strobos residence was only a ten-minute walk away from Anne Frank’s hiding place at 263 Prinsengracht, Amsterdam. Although Strobos never met the Frank family, she later expressed her vexation at the fact that the Franks had not had an escape route built into their refuge: “If I knew they were there, I would have gotten them out of the country.”

      During the war, Strobos was arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo nine times. During these encounters, Strobos was seized by her wrists and thrown against a wall, and she was once knocked unconscious. She never once betrayed the whereabouts of any Jews. To pass interrogations safely, Strobos learned certain tactics. Despite being fluent in German, she always asked for an interpreter to buy extra time to compose herself. When a Nazi officer commented on her legs, Strobos gained more courage: “I realized that he was just a man and he was interested in my legs. So that gave me a sense of power. I got cocky. I could say ‘I didn’t know he was a Jew’ in a stronger, more convincing way.”

      After the war, Strobos completed her medical degree and became a psychiatrist. She studied under Anna Freud in England. Strobos later emigrated to the United States to study psychiatry under a Fulbright scholarship, and she subsequently settled in New York. She married twice and had three children. Strobos built a career as a family psychiatrist, receiving the Elizabeth Blackwell Medal in 1998 for her medical work, and finally retired from active practice in 2009.

      In 1989, Strobos was honored as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem for her rescue work. In 2009, she was recognized for her efforts by the Holocaust and Human Rights Education Center of New York City.

      Strobos died of cancer, aged 91, on this day in 2012, in Rye, New York. The Wikipedia article has more detail about her other wartime resistance activities than I can include here.

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

      Reply

        1. And grandmother – three generations of brave women prepared to risk everything for the safety of others in the face of absolute evil.

          I wish we knew who the anonymous ally in the Gestapo headquarters was.

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  4. The best action Nikki Haley can take is to keep campaigning and continue to get under Trump’s orange skin. However, some journalist with a spine should ask her if she intends to vote for Trump if he is indeed the GOP nominee.

    Reply

    1. It is admittedly hard to know how best she might navigate through the times ahead. But my advice would be to pointedly NOT endorse Trump. As she is a Republican, it would be best if she refused to endorse Biden as well. Her bestest message has been that neither men are suitable for office.

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    2. Haley said that she would vote for Trump weeks ago. She should be asked how she can vote for him since she made it fairly clear that she thinks he admires Putin.

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      1. “admires Putin” that’s a euphemism. He’s Putin’s puppet, full stop. I’m glad she’s still in the primary, pestering the orange oaf, but she’s just another clueless Republican. Whatever a “Republican” is nowadays, it’s certainly not a serious political party anymore.
        Anyone check out the folks who attended the latest CPAC last week? That tells you all you need to know about what the “Republican Party” stands for nowadays. Neo-fascists is the best definition I’ve heard. They most definitely want to do away with Democracy.

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  5. The thing that irks me the most about I-P coverage, especially of the war in Gaza, is how its framed like the Israelis randomly woke up one day and thought “let’s attack Gaza for no reason”.

    10/7 has faded from memory and now the only thing people seem interested in is the Israeli response which they don’t think is a response but rather an act of aggression!

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    2. Right. If I’ve heard correctly on the news, Palestinians and their supporters want a permanent cease fire. Did they want a permanent cease fire on 10/7/23? What were they celebrating on 10/8/23?

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    1. Indeed. I hope that it doesn’t turn out to be the tragedy that we all fear.

      The North Atlantic sea surface warming is incredibly worrying, too.

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  9. That’s one weird wiggle-walking reindeer!

    On Israel: President Biden thinks that a cease-fire in Gaza is imminent.* If so, the terms better be good ones. I don’t think that the Israeli public will tolerate an agreement that doesn’t eliminate Hamas or, minimally, doesn’t include deportation of Hamas leadership from Gaza—in addition, obviously, to returning all of the hostages (or, sadly, their remains). And what about the “revitalized” Palestinian Authority? Was this week’s resignations a prelude to including the PA in the agreement that Biden predicts will happen within the week? Ceiling Cat help us!

    Meanwhile, the Associated Press continues to pound in Israel for its activities in Rafah: https://apnews.com/video/israel-hamas-war-rafah-war-and-unrest-gaza-strip-political-refugees-15aed6d65c554694abe824d22a92a019.

    * https://forward.com/fast-forward/586326/biden-ceasefire-israel-hamas-war/

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