Thursday: Hili dialogue

April 4, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Thursday, April 4, 2024, and it’s National Cordon Bleu Day, defined by Wikipedia as  “a dish of meat wrapped around cheese (or with cheese filling), then breaded and pan-fried or deep-fried.”  Great for your arteries! They add this:

The French term cordon bleu is translated as “blue ribbon“. According to Larousse Gastronomique, the cordon bleu “was originally a wide blue ribbon worn by members of the highest order of knighthood, L’Ordre des chevaliers du Saint-Esprit, instituted by Henri III of France in 1578. By extension, the term has since been applied to food preparation to a very high standard and by outstanding cooks. The analogy no doubt arose from the similarity between the sash worn by the knights and the ribbons (generally blue) of a cook’s apron.

Here’s schnitzel cordon bleu from Switzerland (Schnitzeland?)

Rainer Zenz, GPL, link here via Wikimedia Commons

Because it’s 4/4, it’s also 404 Day (“A 404. . . message is a computer error message that indicates a web server was communicated with, but the server was unable to find what was requested. These messages are often accompanied by the phrase ‘not found'”, Ramen Noodle Day (I lived on them in grad school), World Rat Day, National Burrito Day, International Carrot Day, National Vitamin C Day, and NATO Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 4 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Low key and later breaking news that may turn out to be very important. Iran may be planning a rocket attack on Israel in retaliation for Israel’s bombing the Iranian embassy complex in Syria. Buried in the Times of Israel is what may be confirmation of a rumor I heard: the headline of the short piece, given in its entirety below, is “IDF calls up air defense reservists amid concerns of retaliation for strike on Iran mission in Syria.”

The IDF says that it has bolstered its air defense array, calling up reservists following a fresh assessment.

The move follows threats by Iran to respond to the alleged Israeli assassination of Mohammad Reza Zahedi, the IRGC’s most senior official in Syria, along with his deputy, five other IRGC officers, and at least one member of Hezbollah.

Channel 12 reports that Israel is on high alert for a potential Iranian response to the strike in Syria and that a retaliatory strike originating from Iranian territory — as opposed to from one of its proxies — would require a more significant IDF response.

A new piece says this:

With Iran vowing to retaliate for a strike earlier this week on one of its consular buildings in Damascus that it blames on Israel, the IDF on Thursday said it had halted home leave for all combat troops following a fresh assessment.

“The IDF is at war and the issue of the deployment of forces is constantly reviewed as needed,” the IDF noted in its announcement.

While Israel has not claimed responsibility for the attack, which killed Iran’s top Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps general in Syria along with his deputy and five other IRGC officers, Tehran has blamed Jerusalem and vowed revenge.

On Wednesday night, the IDF said it was bolstering air defenses and calling up reservists, following an assessment.

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said earlier Wednesday that Israel is “increasing preparedness” in the face of threats from across the Middle East. Gallant said the defense establishment is “expanding our operations against Hezbollah, against other bodies that threaten us,”

Israel is clearly preparing for missile strikes from Iran.

*Readers will know that I see absolutely no need for the government or states to put people to death, as there is nothing positive achieved by killing a prisoner save satisfying the brutish feelings of those who favor pure retribution, and much to gain by eliminating execution. One of the things to gain is possible rehabilitation of the condemned, even to the point of letting them back into society again. And that seems to be the solution for Brian Dorsey, convicted in 2006 for killing two people and scheduled to die in a week.

Among those asking Missouri’s governor to spare the life of Brian Dorsey, who was convicted of two murders and is set to be executed on Tuesday, were Roman Catholic bishops, law professors and national mental health groups.

There was also a less expected cohort seeking clemency: more than 70 current and former prison workers who got to know Mr. Dorsey behind bars.

That level of public support from correctional workers is rare in death penalty cases, though it remains to be seen whether it persuades Gov. Mike Parson, a Republican, to commute Mr. Dorsey’s sentence to life in prison.

Mr. Dorsey, 52, pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in the 2006 deaths of his cousin Sarah Bonnie and her husband, Ben Bonnie. His request for clemency made no claim of innocence. Instead, it argued that he had received inadequate representation from court-appointed lawyers and that he had turned his life around in prison, where he had a spotless record of behavior and worked for years as a barber for correctional employees.

“From my perspective after decades in corrections, I do not hesitate to say that executing Brian Dorsey would be a pointless cruelty,” Timothy Lancaster, a former officer at the prison where Mr. Dorsey was held, wrote in a recent column in The Kansas City Star. Mr. Lancaster described Mr. Dorsey as “an excellent barber and a kind and respectful man.”

Of course Dorsey’s tonsorial skills aren’t really relevant to his possible release, but “kind and respectful man” certainly is.

But then there’s this below, a statement from one of the murder victim’s relatives, and clearly a demand for retribution. Why, after all, does justice entail death, particularly if someone can be released and contribute to society?

“All of these years of pain we finally see the light at the end of the tunnel,” those relatives said in the statement, which was reported by local news outlets. “Brian will get the justice that Sarah and Ben have deserved for so long.”

A bit more:

The advocacy of so many corrections officials on behalf of Mr. Dorsey is “really remarkable,” said Robin M. Maher, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, which studies capital punishment and is critical of many of its facets. “I’ve never seen any other case with this kind of support from current and former corrections staff,” Ms. Maher said.

Mr. Dorsey’s application for clemency took note of the rare support, and said, “These state employees have nothing to gain, and potentially something to lose, by coming forward.”

Indeed.  If they worry that 18 years in prison isn’t long enough, give Dorsey another five and reevaluate him. But at least stop the damn execution!  In about 50 years, Americans will look back and wonder “why were we killing everybody on death row?”  Besides Japan, we’re the only modern, Western democracy to retain the death penalty. If it’s supposed to be a deterrent, televise it.

*From the Harvard Crimson we have an article by Law School professor Randall Kennedy called “Mandatory DEI statements are ideological pledges of allegiance. Time to abandon them.” (h/t Luana). Kennedy is black and has “heterodox” views, which means he holds views that progressives see as inappropriate for a black man. This is one of them:

By requiring academics to profess — and flaunt — faith in DEI, the proliferation of diversity statements poses a profound challenge to academic freedom.

A closer look at the Bok Center’s page on diversity statements illustrates how.

For the purpose of showcasing attentiveness to DEI, the Center suggests answering questions such as: “How does your research engage with and advance the well-being of socially marginalized communities?”; “Do you know how the following operate in the academy: implicit bias, different forms of privilege, (settler-)colonialism, systemic and interpersonal racism, homophobia, heteropatriarchy, and ableism?”; “How do you account for the power dynamics in the classroom, including your own positionality and authority?”; “How do you design course assessments with EDIB in mind?”; and “How have you engaged in or led EDIB campus initiatives or programming?”

The Bok Center’s how-to page mirrors the expectation that DEI statements will essentially constitute pledges of allegiance that enlist academics into the DEI movement by dint of soft-spoken but real coercion: If you want the job or the promotion, play ball — or else.

Playing ball entails affirming that the DEI bureaucracy is a good thing and asking no questions that challenge it, all the while making sure to use in one’s attestations the easy-to-parody DEI lingo. It does not take much discernment to see, moreover, that the diversity statement regime leans heavily and tendentiously towards varieties of academic leftism and implicitly discourages candidates who harbor ideologically conservative dispositions.

In addition to exerting pressure towards leftist conformity, the process of eliciting diversity statements abets cynicism. Detractors reasonably suspect that underneath the uncontroversial aspirations for diversity statements — facilitating a more open and welcoming environment for everyone — are controversial goals including the weeding out of candidates who manifest opposition to or show insufficient enthusiasm for the DEI regime.

Detractors also reasonably object to what they see as a troubling invitation to ritualized dissembling. A cottage industry of diversity statement “counseling” has already emerged to offer candidates prefabricated, boilerplate rhetoric.

Candidates for academic positions at Harvard should not be asked to support ideological commitments.

I don’t think Harvard itself requires diversity statements, but the Bok Center page mentioned by Kennedy above does, and Harvard will even help you put together yours if you’re a Harvard person applying for a job. Oy!

*From the Free Press newsletter about Scotland, where draconian speech laws just took hold:

→ J.K. Rowling takes a free-speech stand: On Monday, new hate speech legislation went into effect in Scotland that criminalizes “stirring up hatred” against a series of “protected characteristics,” including race, age, religion, disability, and “transgender identity.” People found guilty under the Hate Crime Act face up to seven years in jail. The legislation is, in short, a free-speech travesty. On the morning the law came into effect, Scotland’s “minister for victims and community safety” admitted in an interview that misgendering a trans person could lead to a police investigation.

Enter J.K. Rowling, the most famous person living in Scotland. As readers of The Free Press know, critics have accused Rowling of hate speech because she says trans women are male and women have a right to female-only spaces. On Monday, the day the law came into effect, the Harry Potter author posted a dare on X. In it, she named 10 transgender women, called them all men, and said: “If what I’ve written here qualifies as an offense under the terms of the new act, I look forward to being arrested.”

Afterward, the Scottish police said that Rowling’s posts were not being “treated as criminal.” Reacting to the police’s decision, the author said she “hope[d] every woman in Scotland who wishes to speak up for the reality and importance of biological sex will be reassured by this announcement, and I trust that all women—irrespective of profile or financial means—will be treated equally under the law,” and “If they go after any woman for simply calling a man a man, I’ll repeat that woman’s words and they can charge us both at once.”

Here are some tweets from Rowling, who’s on a roll today, and her tweets are funny. They could have been put up by Titania.

First, from the BBC:

Social media comments made by JK Rowling challenging Scotland’s new hate crime law are not being treated as criminal, Police Scotland has said.

The Harry Potter author described several transgender women as men, including convicted prisoners, trans activists and other public figures.

The new law creates a new crime of “stirring up hatred” relating to protected characteristics.

The force said complaints had been received but no action would be taken.

And then Rowling’s reaction:

Then she starts with the satire (I’ve posted 6 of the 11 tweets in her thread):

https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1774747378563608782

Apropos, Ross Douthat writes “Scotland’s censorship experiment threatens free expression.”

The new Scottish law criminalizes public speech deemed “insulting” to a protected group (as opposed to the higher bar of “abusive”), and prosecutors need only prove that the speech was “likely” to encourage hatred rather than being explicitly intended to do so. One can offer a defense based on the speech in question being “reasonable,” and there is a nod to “the importance of the right to freedom of expression.” But a plain reading of the law seems like it could license prosecutions for a comedian’s monologue or for reading biblical passages on sexual morality in public.

The law has attracted special attention because J.K. Rowling responded to its passage with a series of social media posts about transgender individuals that seemed to fall afoul of the law’s dictates. If they do, she wrote, “I look forward to being arrested when I return to the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment.”

My prediction is that neither Rowling nor any figure of her prominence will face prosecution. Rather, what you see in West’s examples is that the speech police prefer more obscure targets: the teenage girl prosecuted for posting rap lyrics that included the N-word or the local Tory official hauled in by the cops after posting to criticize the arrest of a Christian street preacher.

Which is, of course, a normal way for mild sorts of authoritarianism to work. Exceptions are made for prominent figures, lest the system look ridiculous, but ordinary people are taught not to cross the line.

The Scottish law is a joke and I have no idea how it got passed. I would have thought that, of all places, Scotland wouldn’t be uber-woke.  And I wonder who the first person arrested will be.

*Carole Hooven and Alex Byrne, partners at home, have collaborated on a NYT op-ed called “The problem with saying ‘sex assigned at birth’.” There’s more than one problem!:

This trend began around a decade ago, part of an increasing emphasis in society on emotional comfort and insulation from offense — what some have called “safetyism.” “Sex” is now often seen as a biased or insensitive word because it may fail to reflect how people identify themselves. One reason for the adoption of “assigned sex,” therefore, is that it supplies respectful euphemisms, softening what to some nonbinary and transgender people, among others, can feel like a harsh biological reality. Saying that someone was “assigned female at birth” is taken to be an indirect and more polite way of communicating that the person is biologically female. The terminology can also function to signal solidarity with trans and nonbinary people, as well as convey the radical idea that our traditional understanding of sex is outdated.

The shift to “sex assigned at birth” may be well intentioned, but it is not progress. We are not against politeness or expressions of solidarity, but “sex assigned at birth” can confuse people and creates doubt about a biological fact when there shouldn’t be any. Nor is the phrase called for because our traditional understanding of sex needs correcting — it doesn’t.

This matters because sex matters. Sex is a fundamental biological feature with significant consequences for our species, so there are costs to encouraging misconceptions about it.

Sex matters for health, safety and social policy and interacts in complicated ways with culture. Women are nearly twice as likely as men to experience harmful side effects from drugs, a problem that may be ameliorated by reducing drug doses for females. Males, meanwhile, are more likely to die from Covid-19 and cancer, and commit the vast majority of homicides and sexual assaults. We aren’t suggesting that “assigned sex” will increase the death toll. However, terminology about important matters should be as clear as possible.

. . . .The problem is that “sex assigned at birth”— unlike “larger-bodied”— is very misleading. Saying that someone was “assigned female at birth” suggests that the person’s sex is at best a matter of educated guesswork. “Assigned” can connote arbitrariness — as in “assigned classroom seating” — and so “sex assigned at birth” can also suggest that there is no objective reality behind “male” and “female,” no biological categories to which the words refer.

And my favorite part:

A more radical proponent of “assigned sex” will object that the very idea of sex as a biological fact is suspect. According to this view — associated with the French philosopher Michel Foucault and, more recently, the American philosopher Judith Butler — sex is somehow a cultural production, the result of labeling babies male or female. “Sex assigned at birth” should therefore be preferred over “sex,” not because it is more polite, but because it is more accurate.

This position tacitly assumes that humans are exempt from the natural order. If only! Alas, we are animals. Sexed organisms were present on Earth at least a billion years ago, and males and females would have been around even if humans had never evolved. Sex is not in any sense the result of linguistic ceremonies in the delivery room or other cultural practices. Lonesome George, the long-lived Galápagos giant tortoise, was male. He was not assigned male at birth — or rather, in George’s case, at hatching. A baby abandoned at birth may not have been assigned male or female by anyone, yet the baby still has a sex. Despite the confusion sown by some scholars, we can be confident that the sex binary is not a human invention.

Alas, some whose neurons seem to be shy of a few dendrites don’t seem to realize that.  But what’s the solution? It’s in the last sentence of their essay:

Meanwhile, we can each apply Strunk and White’s famous advice in “The Elements of Style” to “sex assigned at birth”: omit needless words.

And of course the needless words are the last three.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the Hili dialogue is impenetrable as only Andrzej (who writes them) knows what it means. I tried to get some understanding, but it’s hopeless. If you have a guess, put it below:

Hili: Why do so many people knowing that A equals B assume that it’s the same with C?
A: Usually because they are loyal to D.
In Polish:
Hili: Dlaczego tak wielu ludzi wiedząc, że A równa się B zakłada, że tak samo jest z C?
Ja: Zazwyczaj z powodu lojalności wobec D.

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

From Not Another Science  Cat Page:

From The Dodo Pet:

From Now That’s Wild (and why I never had a d*g):

From Masih: Some Iranians aren’t sad that an unknown plane (i.e., from Israel) killed Iranian military commenders and members of Hezbollah on a strike in Syria:

From J. K. Rowling again, who apparently won’t be charged with any hate crimes even though she defied police to arrest her.

Sound up, Note that the CAT is more faithful to Ukraine!

Titania tweeted again, calling attention to her/his new column:

Parrot needs to work on its skills:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one I reposted:

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. First, a fantastic eclipse of the Sun by the Earth, taken by astronauts on the Moon:

Yes, the relationship of hoatzins (Opisthocomus hoazin) to other birds remains a mystery. Here’s what Wikipedia says:

Much debate has occurred about the hoatzin’s relationships with other birds. Because of its distinctness, it has been given its own family, the Opisthocomidae, and its own suborder, the Opisthocomi. At various times, it has been allied with such taxa as the tinamous, the Galliformes (gamebirds), the rails, the bustards, seriemas, sandgrouse, doves, turacos and other Cuculiformes, and mousebirds.  A whole genome sequencing study published in 2014 places the hoatzin as the sister taxon of a clade composed of Gruiformes (cranes) and Charadriiformes (plovers). Another genomic study in 2024 instead places it as the sister group to the Phaethoquornithes (containing numerous aquatic bird orders). The combined group was found to be sister to the Mirandornithes (flamingos and grebes).

In 2015, genetic research indicated that the hoatzin is the last surviving member of a bird line that branched off in its own direction 64 million years ago, shortly after the extinction event that killed the nonavian dinosaurs. Another genetic study from 2024 instead suggested a Late Cretaceous origin (around 70 million years ago), but found that this early divergence is shared with a majority of extant bird orders, making it no more primitive than them.

Don’t forget that hoatzin chicks have claws on their wings that they can use to climb back up to the nest when jumping in the water to escape predators. They’re also used to simply move around in the trees. Probably a retained primitive character, but the claws disappear with age.

36 thoughts on “Thursday: Hili dialogue”

  1. Correction: i know (certainly think)you mean you see NO need to put people to death. “No” is missing from the sentence.

  2. Lots to pick from:

    1. On the endless sex “pseudoscience” topic :

    I’m reading the gnostic literature/gospels. It is somewhat sparse, but there’s a definite thread in them that comes up occasionally, relating androgyny, father/male, and female, and how those determine access to the spirit and God and all that crap.

    For example, see the gospel of John. The clearest term for the gnostics – including Valentinians, Rosicrucians, Manichaeism, etc. etc. is simple : cult. Or, religious cult. There is every reason, then. to recognize e.g. Queer Theory as the doctrine of a religious cult. IMHO this might resolve a lot of conflict – though the doctrine means bodies (Foucault) going around in public spaces (Foucault) getting their sexy time on as performativity (Butler) for the soul (Butler).

    2. Why is Scotland’s Hate Monster mascot colored – that is, not white? Is the red color concealing something, or is red its identity?

  3. My prediction is that the first person arrested under the new hate crime law will be a (non-famous) religious person, as they seem to be already second-class citizens in the UK, and liberals won’t defend them.

    1. By “religious” you mean “Christian” don’t you?

      You can bet that, were it, say, a Muslim who called for the elimination of Jews then “liberals” would indeed defend him.

    2. The Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act is in deep trouble already. Now that JK Rowling has forced Police Scotland to say that “misgendering” isn’t a hate crime the primary purpose of the new law has been effectively dismantled.

      Unbelievably, the law was partially designed to protect men who crossdress occasionally (an example given in the Scottish parliament was of a man wearing stockings and suspenders to attend a performance of The Rocky Horror Show), but not women. Supposedly, a later law combating misogyny will be brought forward – cynics believe that the delay is due to the difficulty Scottish parliamentarians will have in defining women.

      More hate crime complaints were made against Scotland’s First Minister, Humza Yousaf, than against JKR. Police Scotland says that no “non-crime hate incident” (NCHI) will be recorded about either of them.This is in breach of the police force’s own guidance and is being challenged by a Scottish Conservative member of the Scottish parliament, who has recently discovered that an NCHI was recorded about him before the new law came into effect. He says that Police Scotland are failing to apply NCHIs apolitically.

      Scotland is making itself the laughing stock of the world, for no useful purpose.

        1. You should watch his “white, white, white” rant about senior members of the Scottish hierarchy if you want to see genuine hate. It is on YouTube.
          He seems to be completely unaware that Scotland is over 96% “white”but then he is the SNP First Minister of Scotland and knowing anything would be a first looking at his in government record. He is not known as Humza Yousless for no reason.

  4. I can recommend Randall Kennedy’s 2021 book, “Say It Loud!” And a 90 minute 2021 Manhatten Institute video in which Kennedy is part of an excellent panel discussion on critical race theory, with a 30-minute intro with John McWhorter. Video is at

  5. You threw me off with the first line saying that it’s Friday. I thought, “Where did Thursday go???” But Thursday is right here, right now.

    1. It wasn’t just you – I also had a 1-millisecond flash of “Friday” before the correction neurons fired up!… yep! There it is! In the leading sentence, but not the title.

  6. Given that Scotland selected the unicorn as its national animal, it shouldn’t be surprising when some looniness comes out of its legislature.

  7. The Scottish law is a joke and I have no idea how it got passed.

    The party in power (the Scottish Nationalist Party) is in power largely because of a single issue, namely independence. The other policies of the party are not necessarily reflected in the views of the electorate.

  8. Every time I hear “sex assigned at birth,” I get an image in my head of obstetricians randomly assigning penises to some infants and vaginas to others – and without the poor tyke’s consent! It’s only if that were the case that sex would truly be a social – and medical – construction.

  9. There’s a third reason for the use of the phrase “sex assigned at birth.” It’s an attempt to include mismatched gender identities into the category of Intersex.

    The argument is that if your brain tells you that you aren’t your sex, that’s a disorder of sexual development just as legitimate as CAIS. Therefore, a failure to acknowledge the legitimacy of trans identities (TWAW/TMAM) is just like the old practice of doctors cutting up babies with ambiguous genitalia to “fit” them into the category the doctor decides they belong in.

    That was the original way the phrase was used. A boy with a small penis was quickly snipped and turned into a girl: “sex assigned at birth.” We’re supposed to believe that assuming a baby with a penis is a boy is a similarly cavalier method of assigning sex to what may turn out to be a trans girl. As usual, loaded language is being used in place of argument to get a quick, visceral reaction.

  10. I’m a former defense atty in NYC and against the death penalty. But there are worse injustices in our system: the entire drug war and solitary confinement as two big ones. Death penalty cases distract us (and our host) from bigger issues I feel.

    We atheists always point to Nth Europe/Australia, etc. as proof we don’t need religion as a moral compass but often leave out Japan in this lesson. Despite the aesthetics of Shinto and Buddhism – from a Middle East monotheistic standpoint Japan is deeply atheist. And there’s a strong aversion to magical cults and other nonsense we take as given in the west. I often joke the “religion” of Japan is just..well.. Japanese social culture.

    That said, weirdly, I’ve always thought how the death penalty works, morally, there. I have to assume it is a hand-me-down of samurai culture.
    I took a summer of law studies in my American J.D. degree abroad in Tokyo so I”ve thought about this issue a lot, that being a decade after living in Tokyo as a young man and speaking Japanese.

    Their death penalty – less than a dozen a year, if that, and only for utterly horrible crimes, puzzles me…
    They might be on to something?

    D.A.
    NYC

  11. From the BBC:

    Police Scotland has received more than 3,000 hate crime reports since a new law was introduced on Monday, the BBC understands.
    It creates a new crime of “stirring up hatred” over protected characteristics.
    A large number were about a 2020 speech by First Minister Humza Yousaf – then justice secretary – highlighting white people in prominent public roles.

    The speech in question:
    https://x.com/drelidavid/status/1719473451214201310?s=61&t=f3tfa_dRLrupkxoDqTq45g

  12. I followed the link to “some whose neurons seem to be shy of a few dendrites.” Agustín Fuentes’ list of books includes “Why We Believe: Evolution and the Human Way of Being” (2019) about the god-shaped hole in human cognition. I was surprised but then not really surprised to read that the book was copublished by the Templeton Foundation (as Templeton Press). This review of the book includes a gratuitous swipe at our host.

    https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/rirt.13934

  13. Late again, but hopefully normal service will be resumed tomorrow.

    On this day:
    1581 – Francis Drake is knighted by Queen Elizabeth I for completing a circumnavigation of the world.

    1660 – Declaration of Breda by King Charles II of Great Britain promises, among other things, a general pardon to all royalists and opponents of the monarchy for crimes committed during the English Civil War and the Interregnum.

    1796 – Georges Cuvier delivers the first paleontological lecture.

    1818 – The United States Congress, affirming the Second Continental Congress, adopts the flag of the United States with 13 red and white stripes and one star for each state (20 at that time).

    1841 – William Henry Harrison dies of pneumonia, becoming the first President of the United States to die in office, and setting the record for the briefest administration. Vice President John Tyler succeeds Harrison as President.

    1887 – Argonia, Kansas elects Susanna M. Salter as the first female mayor in the United States.

    1925 – The Schutzstaffel (SS) is founded under Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party in Germany.

    1944 – World War II: First bombardment of oil refineries in Bucharest by Anglo-American forces kills 3,000 civilians.

    1945 – World War II: United States Army troops liberate Ohrdruf forced labor camp in Germany.

    1945 – World War II: Soviet Red Army troops liberate Hungary from German occupation and occupy the country themselves.

    1949 – Cold War: Twelve nations sign the North Atlantic Treaty creating the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

    1958 – The CND peace symbol is displayed in public for the first time in London.

    1964 – The Beatles occupy the top five positions on the Billboard Hot 100 pop chart.

    1967 – Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” speech in New York City’s Riverside Church.[21]

    1968 – Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated by James Earl Ray at a motel in Memphis, Tennessee.

    1968 – Apollo program: NASA launches Apollo 6.

    1969 – Dr. Denton Cooley implants the first temporary artificial heart.

    1973 – The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City are officially dedicated.

    1975 – Microsoft is founded as a partnership between Bill Gates and Paul Allen in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

    1979 – Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto of Pakistan is executed.

    1983 – Space Shuttle program: Space Shuttle Challenger makes its maiden voyage into space on STS-6.

    1984 – President Ronald Reagan calls for an international ban on chemical weapons.

    1996 – Comet Hyakutake is imaged by the USA Asteroid Orbiter Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous.

    2002 – The MPLA government of Angola and UNITA rebels sign a peace treaty ending the Angolan Civil War.

    2017 – Syria conducts an air strike on Khan Shaykhun using chemical weapons, killing 89 civilians.

    Births:
    1640 – Gaspar Sanz, Spanish guitarist, composer, and priest (d. 1710).

    1648 – Grinling Gibbons, Dutch-English sculptor (d. 1721).

    1785 – Bettina von Arnim, German author, illustrator, and composer (d. 1859).

    1802 – Dorothea Dix, American nurse and activist (d. 1887).

    1868 – Philippa Fawcett, English mathematician and educator (d. 1948). [Today’s Woman of the Day, see next post below.]

    1869 – Mary Colter, American architect, designed the Desert View Watchtower (d. 1958).

    1899 – Hillel Oppenheimer, German-Israeli botanist and academic (d. 1971).

    1913 – Muddy Waters, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 1983).

    1914 – Marguerite Duras, French novelist, screenwriter, and director (d. 1996). [Her script for the film Hiroshima mon amour (1959) earned her a nomination for Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards.]

    1923 – Peter Vaughan, English actor (d. 2016).

    1928 – Maya Angelou, American memoirist and poet (d. 2014).

    1932 – Anthony Perkins, American actor (d. 1992).

    1939 – Hugh Masekela, South African trumpeter, flugelhornist, cornetist, composer, and singer (d. 2018).

    1946 – Dave Hill, English guitarist.

    1948 – Berry Oakley, American bass player (d. 1972).

    1949 – Junior Braithwaite, Jamaican-American singer (d. 1999).

    1952 – Gary Moore, Northern Irish singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer (d. 2011).

    1965 – Robert Downey Jr., American actor, producer, and screenwriter.

    1973 – David Blaine, American magician and producer.

    1979 – Heath Ledger, Australian actor (d. 2008).

    Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. (James Baldwin):
    1609 – Carolus Clusius, Flemish botanist, mycologist, and academic (b. 1526). [Pioneering botanist and perhaps the most influential of all 16th-century scientific horticulturists.]

    1617 – John Napier, Scottish mathematician, physicist, and astronomer (b. 1550).

    1774 – Oliver Goldsmith, Irish novelist, playwright and poet (b. 1728).

    1863 – Ludwig Emil Grimm, German painter and engraver (b. 1790).

    1923 – John Venn, English mathematician and philosopher, created the Venn diagram (b. 1834).

    1929 – Karl Benz, German engineer and businessman, founded Mercedes-Benz (b. 1844).

    1931 – André Michelin, French businessman, co-founded the Michelin Tyre Company (b. 1853).

    1976 – Harry Nyquist, Swedish engineer and theorist (b. 1889).

    1983 – Gloria Swanson, American actress (b. 1899).

    1993 – Alfred Mosher Butts, American game designer, invented Scrabble (b. 1899).

    1995 – Kenny Everett, English radio and television host (b. 1944).

    2007 – Karen Spärck Jones, English computer scientist and academic (b. 1935). [Responsible for the concept of inverse document frequency (IDF), a technology that underlies most modern search engines.]

    2009 – Maxine Cooper, American actress, activist and photographer (b. 1924).

    2013 – Roger Ebert, American journalist, critic, and screenwriter (b. 1942). [In 1975, Ebert became the first film critic to win the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.]

    2014 – Margo MacDonald, Scottish journalist and politician (b. 1943).

    1. Woman of the Day
      [Text from the excellent The Attagirls X/Twitter account]

      Woman of the Day Philippa Garrett Fawcett, born OTD 1868 in Cambridge. Daughter of the suffragist Millicent Garrett Fawcett and Henry Fawcett MP, and niece of Britain’s first female doctor Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Philippa achieved distinction in her own right. On 7 June 1890 at the age of 22, she took first place in the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos, the first time a woman had done so. It caused consternation, consternation I tell you.

      The Tripos was famously difficult: 12 papers and 192 progressively more difficult questions over eight days and for those in contention for the title of Wrangler, a further three days of exams consisting of 63 still more testing problems. Preparation took months.

      To attain first prize as Senior Wrangler, Cambridge’s champion mathematician, was regarded as the greatest intellectual distinction of all. No fewer than nine Senior Wranglers including Sir Isaac Newton and Stephen Hawking became Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge.

      Philippa rose at 8am and studied for an intense six hours a day, often not retiring until 11pm, but she didn’t go as far as her male competitors who worked through the night with wet towels wrapped around their heads. She knew she was being watched. The scandalised Pall Mall Gazette reported that she dared to wear “her thick brown hair down to her shoulders, and has even been known (so I have heard) to ride on top of a bus” but she was determined – according to a contemporary news report – to deny ammunition to those who tried “to make out that the women’s colleges are peopled by eccentrics.”

      Women then were considered incapable of mastering maths. Fragile, dependent creatures prone to nerves and possessed of a mind several degrees inferior to a man’s, studying during puberty was tantamount to dicing with death because most Victorian scholars believed that “the brain and ovary could not develop at the same time.”

      To take first place – Philippa knocked spots off the second place candidate with a score a full 13% higher than his – was unthinkable. Yet she did. Did this accord her the much prized title of Senior Wrangler, first among Cambridge mathematics firsts? Her cousin Marion was there when the results were announced:

      “It was a most exciting scene in the Senate…Christina and I got seats in the gallery and grandpapa remained below. The gallery was crowded with girls and a few men, and the floor of the building was thronged with undergraduates as tightly packed as they could be. The lists were read out from the gallery and we heard splendidly. All the men’s names were read first, the Senior Wrangler [G.T. Bennett of St John’s College] was much cheered. At last the man who had been reading shouted “Women.” A fearfully agitating moment for Philippa it must have been. He signalled with his hand for the men to keep quiet, but had to wait some time. At last he read Philippa’s name, and announced that she was “Above the Senior Wrangler.”

      That’s right. Only men could be named Senior Wrangler so No. 2 got the title. Philippa was simply listed as “Above the Senior Wrangler” instead.

      Despite this mealy-mouthed nod from the university, Philippa’s achievement attracted media attention internationally and The Daily Telegraph made this its lead story, “Once again has woman demonstrated her superiority in the face of an incredulous and somewhat unsympathetic world… And now the last trench has been carried by Amazonian assault, and the whole citadel of learning lies open and defenceless before the victorious students of Newnham and Girton. There is no longer any field of learning in which the lady student does not excel.”

      Cambridge would be proud to award a degree to someone of such ability, wouldn’t it? Except, of course, women could attend lectures then but they were not accorded degrees on the basis of their sex.

      Philippa became a Steamboat Lady.

      Until I read about Phillippa, I’d never heard of “steamboat ladies” but this was the nickname given to women students at Oxbridge who travelled to Trinity College Dublin between 1904 and 1906 to be awarded an ad eundem degree – an academic degree awarded on the grounds of mutual recognition or equivalence. Trinity had long held the view that there was no reason to restrict women students from graduating on the same terms as men if they achieved the same grades and its Board agreed to recognise eligible female Oxbridge students by awarding a Trinity degree.

      The Board anticipated that only small numbers of women would take up the offer to graduate and that they would be Irish women who had studied in Oxford or Cambridge colleges. In fact by 1907, Trinity had granted degrees to some 720 steamboat ladies, all of whom would have been awarded degrees if they had been men.

      Philippa was a mathematics lecturer at Newnham College for ten years before going to South Africa to set up teacher training colleges. She later returned to take up a senior post with London County Council. She died on 10 June 1948, two months after her 80th birthday and one month after Cambridge finally allowed women to be awarded a degree.

      https://twitter.com/TheAttagirls/status/1775774247182344521

        1. Now Phillippa was a real hidden figure…the brain and the ovary could not develop at the same time….really?! Yes, an excellent article.

  14. My sex was once reassigned by Washington state’s DMV. It took a couple of years for me to notice that the gender attributed to me on my driver’s license was “F.” When I renewed, I never had them change it because I liked the novelty. Sometimes a fun thing to point out at parties. Nowadays, I’m sure the woke would disapprove of a cis male doing such a disrespectful thing.

      1. A woman I worked with loved telling a joke about a little girl saw her mother’s driver’s license: “Oh, I’m so sorry you got an “F” in Sex.”

  15. Seeing hoatzins in the wild was a highlight of a trip to Ecuador some years back.
    Also, a favorite pun: A magazine article about the bird’s unusual digestive system (they eat leaves and are foregut fermenters like ungulates) was titled “Alimentary, my dear hoatzin”.

  16. The Scottish law makers NEED a long cold dip in the nearest Lock. Perhaps common sense will surface instead of THAT monster.

  17. There lots of arguments to be made about the death penalty, but to me the most effective arguments against it are:
    1) The obvious point that there’s no way back from death. Wrongful convictions are not unknown. An innocent person spending many years in jail is a travesty, but at least something can be salvaged if they are later exonerated. If you execute an innocent person, well…
    2) How can it be applied consistently? Who determines which crimes — and under what circumstances — deserve death, and which ones don’t. Too much play in the joints.
    Even if one argues that there are some crimes for which — if guilt is undisputed — execution is justified, now you have the case of a convict who appears to have been truly rehabilitated. This may be rare, but it is not insignificant. Are we still going to kill him?

    But on the other hand, I understand that the victims’ families will want retribution. I’d love to be noble and say that this is wrong and that no one should feel that way, but if someone close to me were brutally murdered, I cannot swear that I wouldn’t feel the same. This desire for retribution is a social reality that is not going to change. But the Dorsey case makes this harder too.

    As for deterrence, I don’t think executions should be televised. Like most civilized people (I hope), I would never watch one; it would be horrifying and disgusting. But sadly I think that there are still a lot of people who would watch, and in many cases for the wrong reasons. This then just becomes another aspect of continuing social deterioration, and I seriously doubt if this step would increase the deterrent effect in any appreciable way. I presume this was Dr. Coyne’s point.

    1. I agree that televising executions would not be a deterrent. After all, public executions were common throughout history and were viewed as entertainment for the whole family.

      Well into the 20th century, African-Americans accused of murdering or raping Whites were publicly burned alive in front of thousands of cheering spectators. These were technically “lynchings” as opposed to legal executions, but they were done with the approval of authorities. They were done in broad daylight by people who made no attempt to hide their faces. Sometimes the burning would be announced ahead of time in newspapers and trains would schedule extra runs for people who wanted to see the show. Refreshments were sold. Photographs of the charred corpses would be sold as postcards.

      If you televise executions, people will be having parties to watch, as they do with the Super Bowl.

      1. That people would flock to enjoy the entertainment of executions — and they would— does not mean the spectacle wouldn’t have deterrence value. Quite the contrary. The very popularity of lynching (as an act and as a spectacle) surely lay in its effective deterrence against black aspirations or even continued residence in the community. Indeed it seems to have been the capricious randomness that sent the message.

        The weak deterrent effect of public executions might be better expressed in the perhaps apocryphal observation that when a crowd gathered in 18th-century London to watch a pickpocket being hanged, other pickpockets made a good haul moving through the throng to steal the purses of the distracted and often drunken spectators.

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