Saturday: Hili dialogue

March 16, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to CaturSaturday, March 16, 2024 and, until sundown, cat shabbos. Foodwise, it’s National Artichoke Heart Day. Here’s a festive way to serve these puppies:

“skewer kebabs with marinated vegetables artichoke hearts sweet peppers bocconcini cheese and vinaigrette dressing in personalized mason jars” by PersonalCreations.com is licensed under CC BY 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit here

It’s also Black Press Day (the first black newspaper, Freedom’s Journal was founded on this day in 1827), Curlew Day, National Corndog Day, Freedom of Information Day,Maple Syrup Saturday, Day of the Book Smugglers in Lithuania, honoring those who smuggled books in Lithuanian (in Latin alphabet) into the Russian empire, where those books were forbidden between 1864 and 1904, and Saint Urho’s Day for Finnish Americans and Finnish Canadians (the Saint is totally fictional, created by Finnish-Americans in Minnesota to connect to their heritage). Finally, it’s National Panda Day, which is surely a day of cultural appropriation.  But baby pandas are the world’s cutest animals. Here’s a short compilation:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the March 16 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Those of us who want Trump to go on trial for his interference in the Georgia election case just got a break. The judge in that case ruled yesterday afternoon that district attorney Fani Willis, who was accused of nepotism for hiring her boyfriend and using his salary go go on joint vacations, can stay on the case—so long as her “former” (?) boyfriend, Nathan J. Wade, withdraws from the case.

The ruling by Judge Scott McAfee of Fulton Superior Court cut a middle path between removing Ms. Willis for a conflict of interest, which defense lawyers had sought, and her full vindication. The judge sharply criticized her for dating Mr. Wade, whom she hired as a special prosecutor on the case, calling it a “tremendous lapse in judgment.”

Ms. Willis and her office did not immediately respond to the judge’s ruling. With delays mounting, the case is now unlikely to come to trial before the 2024 presidential election, when Mr. Trump is almost certain to be the Republican nominee.

Here are the details:

  • Judge McAfee said that disqualifying Ms. Willis was not necessary when “a less drastic and sufficiently remedial option is available.” But he concluded that “the prosecution of this case cannot proceed until the State selects one of two options.” Either Ms. Willis can step aside, along with her office — including Mr. Wade — or he can leave, allowing the case to proceed without further distraction. See highlights of the ruling.

  • Although the decision is a setback for Mr. Trump and his 14 co-defendants, likely leaving in place the district attorney who has been pursuing the case for more than three years, Ms. Willis emerges from weeks of embarrassing hearings and headlines with a bruised reputation that could color the views of a future jury, making convictions more difficult.

  • Mr. Trump and his co-defendants could appeal the judge’s ruling, as could Ms. Willis, further delaying the proceedings and leaving the matter unresolved indefinitely. The state’s Republican-led Senate is also reviewing the conflict-of-interest accusations, and lawmakers have empowered a new oversight commission to investigate and potentially remove prosecutors.

Well, Willis’s reputation is badly damaged, but I trust not her prosecutorial skills. And Wade did the right thing, withdrawing from the case.

*It’s bad enough that Russia has committed an undeniable and unconscionable war crime by invading Ukraine and taking over part of its land, but it’s also trying to make the citizens of occupied Ukraine get Russian passports—and even fight for the Russians.

Russia has successfully imposed its passports on nearly the entire population of occupied Ukraine by making it impossible to survive without them, coercing hundreds of thousands of people into citizenship ahead of elections Vladimir Putin has made certain he will win, an Associated Press investigation has found. But accepting a passport means that men living in occupied territory can be drafted to fight against the same Ukrainian army that is trying to free them.

A Russian passport is needed to prove property ownership and keep access to health care and retirement income. Refusal can result in losing custody of children, jail – or worse. A new Russian law stipulates that anyone in the occupied territories who does not have a Russian passport by July 1 is subject to imprisonment as a “foreign citizen.”

But Russia also offers incentives: a stipend to leave the occupied territory and move to Russia, humanitarian aid, pensions for retirees, and money for parents of newborns – with Russian birth certificates.

Every passport and birth certificate issued makes it harder for Ukraine to reclaim its lost land and children, and each new citizen allows Russia to claim a right – however falsely – to defend its own people against a hostile neighbor.

The AP investigation found that the Russian government has seized at least 1,785 homes and businesses in the Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions alone. Ukraine’s Crimean leadership in exile reported on Feb. 25 that of 694 soldiers reported dead in recent fighting for Russia, 525 were likely Ukrainian citizens who had taken Russian passports since the annexation.

Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman, Dmytro Lubinets, said “almost 100% … of the whole population who still live on temporary occupied territories of Ukraine” now have Russian passports.

Under international law dating to 1907, it is forbidden to force people “to swear allegiance to the hostile Power.” But when Ukrainians apply for a Russian passport, they must submit biometric data and cell phone information and swear an oath of loyalty.

“People in occupied territories, these are the first soldiers to fight against Ukraine,” said Kateryna Rashevska, a lawyer who helped Ukraine bring a war crimes case against Putin before the International Criminal Court. “For them, it’s logical not to waste Russian people, just to use Ukrainians.”

Is somebody going to force Russia to the ICJ for war crimes? You could even consider this a genocide since Ukrainians are as much a “race” as are Palestinians.  People seem to have forgotten about Ukraine vs. Russia in all the brouhaha about Israel versus Hamas.

*As always on Saturdays, I’ll steal three four items from Nellie Bowles’s weekly news summer at The Free Press, called this week, “TGIF: I serve at the pleasure of barbecue. (It’s worth subscribing to the site just for Nellie’s posts alone.

→ Biden is very sorry for saying illegal but also not sorry in the slightest: After his successful State of the Union, Biden had some apologies to make to the base. He had sounded too normal for them. See, when Marjorie Taylor Greene heckled him to “say her name” during the address, he did: “I know how to say her name. Lincoln—Lincoln Riley, an innocent young woman who was killed by an illegal.” This upset his party. Not because he got the victim’s name wrong (it’s Laken Riley), but because of the word he used to describe her suspected killer. So Biden went on MSNBC to express his apologies. “An undocumented person. I shouldn’t have used illegal. I should have used undocumented.” The interviewer prompts further: “So you regret using that word?” Biden: “Yes.” Now that’s mildly funny but what makes it good is that then there was backlash to the apology, so now there’s a whole news cycle about how The President Did Not Apologize. Weird you’d even suggest it.

Here’s principal deputy press secretary Olivia Dalton: “I want to be really clear about something: the president absolutely did not apologize. There was no apology anywhere in that conversation. He did not apologize. He used a different word.” Meaning, the word yes, to say whether he was or wasn’t sorry?

Captured in a single moment, we have the whole beautiful hodgepodge of the Biden border philosophy: a flash of normalcy, a cave to the doctrinaire base, followed by an obvious and random lie from a government official.

→ All the AIs are making the same mess: Asked to make “a picture of German soldiers in 1945,” Adobe’s new artificial intelligence program, Firefly, spat out a gorgeous group of smiling all-black Nazis. The urge to make all images into a diverse trans-inclusive rainbow is kind of a sweet one, in a “communists erase history make better history” sort of way. But then these in-house tech activists keep getting upset when they realize that it might mean diverse trans. . . Nazis. No, no, it was just supposed to be that Mozart is now a blind Hispanic woman! Ted Bundy was obviously a bad white man. The Founding Fathers are diverse—interesting—but Nazis are all blond, pure blond. How do we teach the computer the difference?

→ I wouldn’t personally bet my entire career on this, but okay: America’s favorite unhinged right-wing correspondent has decided to stake her “entire professional reputation” on the President of France’s wife being secretly male. Some might say her entire professional reputation—this being Candace Owens—is not much. But that’s not fully true: Candace Owens has a large audience and is employed by a pretty mainstream conservative news site, The Daily Wire. She isn’t a fringe character, inconvenient though that fact may be. So, yes, it’s an odd wager.

There’s a lot that’s funny about Brigitte Macron. Like, I don’t know: that she met Emmanuel Macron when he was a kid and she was his teacher, and they fell in love, and now he’s president and she’s first lady of France? But that’s not wild enough for our #unfettered Candace. Needing to be as lunatic as possible, Candace Owens simply must go all the way: BRIGITTE IS A MAN. Brigitte and her brother are actually the same person! She’s secretly the father of five! Now, as someone always open to conspiracies, I did look into this. I did some Googling. I did some Reddit. And I can say—with the total confidence of a woman who’s taken a long walk through Reddit’s sweaty tunnels—that it’s just not true.
I don’t understand why anybody pays attention to Candace Owens, who’s a ranter.  Oh hell, one more from La Bowles:

→ Congratulations to Guernica: The literary magazine Guernica has fallen into chaos, unpublishing a piece and seeing mass resignations among its staff. Why did it happen? The article was by a peacenik leftist Israeli, the sort who refused to serve in the IDF and volunteered to drive Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank to get medical care. In her essay she wrestles with all her complicated emotions around the war. Read the archived version here; it’s lovely. But in this quadrant of America today, there are no innocent Israelis. Jews alone are a little sus. So the piece was pulled and many, many Guernica staffers resigned over it ever having been published. Many!

*John McWhorter declares in his latest NYT column, “No, the SAT isn’t racist“:

That’s three down: Last week Brown University reinstated standardized testing as a part of its admissions requirements, following Yale and Dartmouth, which did the same earlier this year. For all that we have heard about how standardized tests propagate injustice, the decisions at these Ivy League schools are antiracism in action, and should serve as models for similar decisions across academia. (M.I.T. was an even earlier re-adopter of testing requirements, in 2022.)

. . . Of course, for years, the leading idea has been precisely the opposite: that the proper antiracist approach is to stop using standardized tests in admissions.

, , , Given this perception, the wave of schools letting go of the SAT after 2020 seemed to many like an acceleration of social justice long overdue. But lately evidence has mounted, steadily, that the SAT is in fact useful in demonstrating students’ abilities regardless of their economic backgrounds or the quality of their high schools. Some studies show scores correlate with student performance in college more strongly than high-school grades, and that without the standardized test data it is harder to identify Black, Latino and lower-income white kids who would likely thrive in elite universities. It was precisely this evidence that led the Dartmouth president, Sian Beilock, to be first out of the gate this year in daring to go back to using the test in admissions. I nominate her as Antiracist of 2024 so far.

Remember that Bill Maher gave her a 2024 Cojones Award the other day. More:

. . . ideas have a way of undergoing mission creep. What an unspoken idea implies, a resonance in the air, eventually manifests itself as an openly asserted new position. In that vein, there is a short step between acknowledging that disadvantage makes it harder to ace the test — which is self-evidently true — and a proposition that is related but vastly more questionable: that Blackness is culturally incompatible with the test.

This is the ultimate source of the idea getting around in the education school world and beyond that it is “white” to cherish hard work, objectivity, the written word and punctuality. This conviction reveals itself both among white people (as in the creator of a graphic to this effect that the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture put online for a spell during the pandemic) and among Black people (such as a Black parent recalling a Black co-worker openly saying that standardized tests are unfairly imposed on Black kids because they “can’t do math,” with the implication of this as a general assumption).

And in turn, this sense of which whitenesses Black people will supposedly struggle with — math, objectivity, etc. — is the seedbed of university departments’ current conviction that attracting more Black majors and graduate students means loosening requirements. Hence classics without Greek or Latin, musicology without playing an instrument and physics without “white empiricism.”

The people promulgating ideas like these are well intentioned. They think of themselves as clearing away outdated notions of merit, which sometimes do bear re-examination. But all of it together constitutes a general cultural mood that alarms me. The SAT as racist, objectivity as white privilege, making academic training easier to attract Black majors and graduate students — there is a family relationship between them. Namely, an assumption that it is graceless or unfair to require Black people to grapple with detail, solve puzzles and make sense of the unfamiliar. At least, we are not to be expected to engage in such things nearly as much as, say, white people.

McWhorter finds this view of African-Americans “a diminished, not to mention depressing, and downright boring racial self-image. It just doesn’t correspond with so very much that Black people do, and are, and seek and always have.”  It is—it’s the soft bigotry of low expectations.

*The latest issue of the prestigious journal Cell has a section on sex and gender. I’ll go through it later (not here, I hope!), but here are some of the contents

Cross-disciplinary collaboration between scientists and science and technology ttudies (STS) scholars offers a way to find solutions to this problem.

Science has an interview with some of the authors or the articles above, and I found this exchange telling:

Q: Do you feel that your trans identity helps you do better science? How so?

. . . . J.M.: In one of my recent papers, I talk about how, if we don’t assume that animals have binary sex, we can actually become better evolutionary biologists. And I don’t think I would have been asking those questions if I wasn’t nonbinary. I’m always going for areas that are blurry and gray because I’m standing in a place that’s outside the binary.

This is not only wrong, but an example of reading into nature what you want to see in humans. First, J. M. will become a worse evolutionary biologist by neglecting the sex binary, because J. M. will be unable to understand stuff like sexual selection, sexual dimorphism, and differential parental care. And note that the author is denying the truth—the binary nature of sex—because this person is “standing outside the [GENDER] binary.”  This is how your “lived experience” gets turned into a bogus biological “truth.”

I’ve now read several articles in the journal, and they’re more or less what you expect from those who want to bend biology towards ideology. If you want to know why there are many more than two sexes, and why that buttresses gender activism, this is the issue for you.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Andrzej are dissing UNRWA, which deserves it:

Hili: I’m worried about the humanitarian crisis.
A: Which one?
Hili: There is a disaster of a shortage of virgins in Paradise for the martyrs.
A: Leave it to the United Nations. UNRWA will deliver.
In Polish:
Hili: Jestem zaniepokojona kryzysem humanitarnym.
Ja: Którym?
Hili: Jest dramat niedoboru dziewic w raju dla męczenników.
Ja: Zostaw to Organizacji Narodów Zjednoczonych. UNRWA dostarczy.

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

From BuzzFeed:

 

From the Dodo Pet:

From America’s Cultural Decline Into Idiocy (I hope they’re excepting Austin and all the BBQ joints):

*Bill Maher put this up yesterday (h/t Debra).

From Masih: more puritanical religionists in Iran harassing women for their (lack of) headscarves:

Found on Facebook:  Read more here. Apparently they were infuriating about the NYT’s promotion of “genocide.”

From Barry, This is Kiffness with another song, but is it ragtime or klezmer?

I guess “not of color” means “high achieving”. The schools should just be honest. 

From Malcolm: cheer-up kittens:

Man, this cat hates the vet’s:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a five year old Jewish boy gassed upon arrival.

Tweets from Dr. Cobb. Big hamster is Russia; little one is Ukraine:

Matthew is doing a deep dive on Francis Crick for the upcoming biography:

13 thoughts on “Saturday: Hili dialogue”

  1. I saw that Cell Press thing and just shook my head – but did anyone read the Judith Butler excerpts in Andrew Sullivan’s piece yesterday? Check it out – actually, I need to re-read it!

    I am further convinced Butler plays the role of a pope or high religious figure. I sort of enjoy her writing as one enjoys B-movies – to laugh at how bad they are.

    Dr. Watson (Cobb) – nice find – the Adventure of the 1600cc Lotus!

    1. My colleagues have been discussing the paper by Beans Velocci and whether the idea of sex as a category is past its best-before date. Agree it’s all unintentionally hilarious. It is hard to tell whether this will all evaporate like a little water poured on the hot fire of scientific rationality, or whether it will successfully douse the flames. A lot of our graduate students and postdocs share Beans’ intersectional worldview about ableism, racism, transphobia, decolonization etc. and those ideas are taught to our high school students. But so far our undergraduates are not clamouring to be told “sex is not binary” in our genetics and evolution courses. So somehow this kind of effort in “Cell” is not gaining real traction. But it might and if it does our universities will become unrecognizable.

      1. Here at my Medium-Sized Midwestern University (MSMU), I see student group postings about LGBTQ events (a positive thing), and we have some office spaces and I think admin that promote these social causes (also a very good thing). But my biology students themselves so far show no interest in cancelling basic biology. I know it can be very different elsewhere.

  2. On this day:
    1190 – Massacre of Jews at Clifford’s Tower, York.

    1244 – Over 200 Cathars who refuse to recant are burnt to death after the Fall of Montségur.

    1872 – The Wanderers F.C. win the first FA Cup, the oldest football competition in the world, beating Royal Engineers A.F.C. 1–0 at The Oval in Kennington, London.

    1898 – In Melbourne, the representatives of five colonies adopt a constitution, which would become the basis of the Commonwealth of Australia.

    1926 – History of Rocketry: Robert Goddard launches the first liquid-fueled rocket, at Auburn, Massachusetts.

    1935 – Adolf Hitler orders Germany to rearm herself in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. Conscription is reintroduced to form the Wehrmacht.

    1945 – World War II: The Battle of Iwo Jima ends, but small pockets of Japanese resistance persist.

    1945 – Ninety percent of Würzburg, Germany is destroyed in only 20 minutes by British bombers, resulting in at least 4,000 deaths.

    1966 – Launch of Gemini 8 with astronauts Neil Armstrong and David Scott. It would perform the first docking of two spacecraft in orbit.

    1968 – Vietnam War: My Lai Massacre occurs; between 347 and 500 Vietnamese villagers are killed by American troops.

    1978 – Supertanker Amoco Cadiz splits in two after running aground on the Portsall Rocks, three miles off the coast of Brittany, resulting in the largest oil spill in history at that time.

    1984 – William Buckley, the CIA station chief in Lebanon, is kidnapped by Hezbollah; he later dies in captivity.

    1988 – Iran–Contra affair: Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North and Vice Admiral John Poindexter are indicted on charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States.

    1988 – Halabja chemical attack: The Kurdish town of Halabja in Iraq is attacked with a mix of poison gas and nerve agents on the orders of Saddam Hussein, killing 5,000 people and injuring about 10,000 people.

    1988 – The Troubles: Ulster loyalist militant Michael Stone attacks a Provisional IRA (PIRA) funeral in Belfast with pistols and grenades. Three persons, one of them a member of PIRA are killed, and more than 60 others are wounded.

    1995 – Mississippi formally ratifies the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, becoming the last state to approve the abolition of slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment was officially ratified in 1865.

    2003 – American activist Rachel Corrie is killed in Rafah by being run over by an Israel Defense Forces bulldozer while trying to obstruct the demolition of a home.

    2005 – Israel officially hands over Jericho to Palestinian control.

    2010 – The Kasubi Tombs, Uganda’s only cultural World Heritage Site, are destroyed in a fire.

    2012 – Former Indian cricketer Sachin Tendulkar becomes the first batter in history to score 100 centuries in international cricket.

    2014 – Crimea votes in a controversial referendum to secede from Ukraine to join Russia.

    2020 – The Dow Jones Industrial Average falls by 2,997.10, the single largest point drop in history and the second-largest percentage drop ever at 12.93%, an even greater crash than Black Monday (1929). This follows the U.S. Federal Reserve announcing that it will cut its target interest rate to 0–0.25%.

    2021 – Atlanta spa shootings: Eight people are killed and one is injured in a trio of shootings at spas in and near Atlanta, Georgia, U.S. A suspect is arrested the same day.

    Births:
    1741 – Carlo Amoretti, Italian scientist (d. 1816). [Wrote many books, including one in 1804 that is considered to be the first modern biography of Leonardo da Vinci.]

    1750 – Caroline Herschel, German-English astronomer (d. 1848).

    1766 – Jean-Frédéric Waldeck, French antiquarian, cartographer, artist and explorer (d. 1875).

    1771 – Antoine-Jean Gros, French painter (d. 1835).

    1789 – Georg Ohm, German physicist and mathematician (d. 1854).

    1799 – Anna Atkins, English botanist and photographer (d. 1871).

    1808 – Hannah T. King, British-born American writer and pioneer (d. 1886).

    1822 – Rosa Bonheur, French painter and sculptor (d. 1899). [Known best as a painter of animals (animalière), she also made sculptures in a realist style.]

    1839 – Sully Prudhomme, French poet and critic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1907).

    1846 – Rebecca Cole, American physician and social reformer (d. 1922).

    1851 – Martinus Beijerinck, Dutch microbiologist and botanist (d. 1931).

    1911 – Josef Mengele, German physician, captain and mass-murderer (d. 1979).

    1920 – Leo McKern, Australian-English actor (d. 2002).

    1926 – Jerry Lewis, American actor and comedian (d. 2017).

    1941 – Bernardo Bertolucci, Italian director and screenwriter (d. 2018).

    1943 – Ursula Goodenough, American biologist, zoologist, and author.

    1953 – Isabelle Huppert, French actress.

    1954 – Jimmy Nail, English singer-songwriter, guitarist, and actor.

    1954 – Nancy Wilson, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, producer, and actress.

    1960 – Jenny Eclair, English comedian, actress and screenwriter.

    1971 – Alan Tudyk, American actor.

    That nature does not care, one way or the other, is the true abyss. That only man cares, in his finitude facing nothing but death, alone with his contingency and the objective meaninglessness of his projecting meanings, is a truly unprecedented situation. (Hans Jonas):
    AD 37 – Tiberius, Roman emperor (b. 42 BC). [Managed to dodge yesterday’s Ides of March…]

    455 – Valentinian III, Roman emperor (assassinated; b. 419). [Ditto!]

    1698 – Leonora Christina Ulfeldt, Danish countess, author of Jammers Minde (b. 1621). [Renowned in Denmark since the 19th century for her posthumously published autobiography, Jammers Minde, written secretly during two decades of solitary confinement in a royal dungeon, her intimate version of the major events she witnessed in Europe’s history, interwoven with ruminations on her woes as a political prisoner, still commands popular interest, scholarly respect, and has virtually become the stuff of legend as retold and enlivened in Danish literature and art.]

    1838 – Nathaniel Bowditch, American ocean navigator and mathematician (b. 1773).

    1898 – Aubrey Beardsley, English author and illustrator (b. 1872).

    1914 – John Murray, Scottish oceanographer, biologist, and limnologist (b. 1841).

    1935 – John James Rickard Macleod, Scottish physician and physiologist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1876). [Noted for his role in the discovery and isolation of insulin.]

    1936 – Marguerite Durand, French actress, journalist, and activist (b. 1864). [Today’s Woman of the Day, see next post below.]The

    1940 – Selma Lagerlöf, Swedish author and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1858). [The first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, which she was awarded in 1909. Additionally, she was the first woman to be granted a membership in the Swedish Academy in 1914.]

    1965 – Alice Herz, German activist (b. 1882). [The first person in the United States known to have immolated herself in protest of the escalating Vietnam War. She died from her injuries ten days later, aged 82.]

    1975 – T-Bone Walker, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1910).

    2013 – Jamal Nazrul Islam, Bangladeshi physicist and cosmologist (b. 1939).

    2013 – Frank Thornton, English actor (b. 1921).

    2019 – Dick Dale, American surf-rock guitarist, singer, and songwriter (b. 1937).

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

      Marguerite Durand (born 24 January 1864, died on this day in 1936) was a French stage actress, journalist, and a leading suffragette. She founded her own newspaper, and ran for election. She is also known for having a pet lion. For her contributions to the women’s suffrage movement in France, the Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand was named in her honor.

      Born into a middle-class family, Marguerite Durand was sent to study at a Roman Catholic convent. After finishing her primary education, she entered the Conservatoire de Paris before joining the Comédie Française in 1881.

      In 1888, she gave up her career in the theatre to marry an up-and-coming young lawyer, Georges Laguerre. A friend and follower of the politically ambitious army general Georges Boulanger, her husband introduced her to the world of radical populist politics and involved her in writing pamphlets for the “Boulangists” movement. However, the marriage was short-lived and in 1891 the couple separated after which Durand took a job writing for Le Figaro, the leading newspaper of the day. In 1896, the paper sent her to cover the Congrès Féministe International (International Feminist Congress) ostensibly to write a humorous article. She came away from the event a greatly changed person, so much so that the following year on 9 December 1897 she founded a feminist daily newspaper, La Fronde to pick up where Hubertine Auclert’s La Citoyenne left off.

      Durand’s newspaper, run exclusively by women, advocated for women’s rights, including admission to the Bar association and the École des Beaux-Arts. As well, its editorials demanded women be allowed to be named to the Legion of Honor and to participate in parliamentary debates. This included, later in 1910, Durand’s attempt to organize female candidates for the legislative elections. At the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris, she organized the Congress For The Rights of Women. As well as establishing a summer residence for female journalists in Pierrefonds in the Picardy region, Durand turned to activism for working women, helping to organize several trade unions.

      Marguerite Durand, consumed by a passion for the equality of women, was an attractive woman of style and elegance who was famous for walking the streets of Paris with her pet lion she named “Tiger.” Instrumental in the establishing of the zoological Cimetière des Chiens in the Parisian suburb of Asnières-sur-Seine where her lion was eventually interred, her activism raised the profile of feminism in France and Europe to an unprecedented level of respectability.

      In the course of her life and activism she compiled an enormous collection of papers that she gave to the government in 1931. The following year, the Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand opened in Paris and still operates as a specialized public library run by the Paris municipal library system, where researchers can work beneath a portrait of Durand.

      She died in Paris on 16 March 1936, aged 72.

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

    2. 1966 Launch of Gemini 8 first docking in orbit: the engineering research into control and docking strategies was done on the ground for several years prior to the in-orbit flight test of Gemini 8. A large motion-based dynamic simulator was constructed among the rafters of the large airplane hangar at NASA Langley Research Center and docking (post-rendezvous) strategies were tested by Langley research pilots and astronaut pilots. An early (1964) report on some of the results is at https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19650012593/downloads/19650012593.pdf
      I found it interesting that the test engineers applied aircraft handling qualities measures (Cooper) to spacecraft handling and there was good agreement between the astronaut evaluations and the NASA research pilot evaluations. Of course in those days, the astronauts had been test pilots themselves.

  4. Hili is correct about UNRWA. He’s smarter than most of the pundits.

    And, thank you Bill Maher for defending Israel. Maybe the protesters calling for Hamas to win should be airlifted to Gaza to join the fight there.

  5. The claim that Ukraine is fighting for the rest of the west is to my mind, true.
    Putin has voiced his propaganda thrust for his “limited military operation” he now calls a war as such. Russia vs the West.
    The Nato Baltic States are gearing up and in deep preparations and planning for what may happen should Ukraine fall.
    The tRump threat being a wacko and unpredictable loom large.
    They’ve moved on and doing for themselves, Putin can’t be trusted.
    It seems that ethnic Russians seem to suffer most when Russian troops invade, the rest of the population know only to well that the Russian military are fully disposed to committing war crimes. Abductions, confiscation, imprisonment, torture, lies, all part if the menu of control for the smarmy Putin.
    Meanwhile in one report, Russians party and holiday in Greece like its 1999 and don’t give a flying f**k.

  6. They’ve been doing the “invasion by passport” thing since 2014 in Donbass and Crimea. They make it so life is unlivable unless the locals accept Russian citizenship.

    Then they have “Russian citizens” there to run in and protect.
    Russia did it a bit in Putin’s fake states like Abkhazia and Sth Osetia also.

    Dicking with people’s citizenship (forcing it or stripping it) is a typical Third World maneuver.
    Civilized countries signed a treaty against it in the 1960s when the USSR began stripping dissidents of USSR citizenship.
    So they’ve been at it awhile.
    D.A.
    NYC

  7. It is high time that the Olympic committee stopped discriminating against athletically challenged people. Just because a person is not able to reach the standard required to allow them to compete does not mean that they should not have the chance. Remove these sats that stop would be athletes from competing. Go Eddie.

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