Tuesday: Hili dialogue

April 16, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to The Cruelest Day: Tuesday, April 16, 2024, and National Eggs Benedict Day, a dish that Anthony Bourdain (RIP) used to say that you should never order at brunch. In fact, he said to avoid restaurant brunches completely. See below at 1:40 for the brunch bit, along with a litany of Bourdain’s other food beefs:

It’s also the Day of the Mushroom (no, not psychedelic ones), National Orchid Day, National Stress Awareness Day, W9rld Semicolon Day, Free Cone Day at Ben and Jerry’s (if you leave near one, get yours!), National Librarian Day, Save the Elephant Day, Emancipation Day in Washington, D.C., National Healthcare Decisions Day, and World Voice Day

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

Da Nooz:

*Trump’s first criminal trial began yesterday; he’s accused of falsifying financial records to cover up hush money paid to two women. It promises to be a real show, with jury selection alone taking a few weeks since people can’t say they’ll be impartial. (Could you?) I think the state has pulled at least 6,000 names as potential jurors. Trump’s already calling people names as well as dozing off in court, but not a single juror was picked on the first day (it’s gonna be tough to find someone who’s “neutral” on Trump).  I’ve put the fun parts in bold:

The first criminal trial of an American president officially began on Monday as prosecutors and defense lawyers convened in a Manhattan courtroom to start selecting the jury that will decide Donald J. Trump’s fate.

The initial pool of prospective jurors dwindled rapidly. More than half of the first group of 96 were dismissed in short order after indicating that they did not believe they could be impartial. Court adjourned for the day roughly two hours after jury selection began, with zero jurors chosen.

Before beginning the arduous process of choosing a jury for the landmark trial — on allegations that Mr. Trump falsified documents to cover up a sex scandal involving a porn star — the judge overseeing the case once again declined to step aside, rejecting Mr. Trump’s latest effort to oust him.

But there was also a ruling that favored the former president: The judge, Juan M. Merchan, rejected a request by prosecutors to introduce accusations of sexual assault that women lodged against Mr. Trump years ago, calling them “rumors” and “complete gossip.”

The Manhattan district attorney’s office, which brought the case against Mr. Trump, also asked the judge to hold Mr. Trump in contempt and penalize him $3,000 for violating a gag order barring him from attacking witnesses in the case.

On social media over the weekend, Mr. Trump assailed one of the prosecution’s key witnesses: Michael D. Cohen, his former fixer. Mr. Cohen paid $130,000 to the porn star, Stormy Daniels, during the 2016 presidential campaign to keep quiet about a sexual encounter she said she had with Mr. Trump.

After the lunch break — during which Mr. Trump posted a video of an ally yelling about the judge’s wife — Justice Merchan said he would hold a hearing later this month to discuss potential violations of the gag order, which also bars Mr. Trump from attacking the judge’s family.

The jury selection process could take two weeks or more, and the trial may spill into June. Mr. Trump is expected to be in the courtroom for much of it.

Mr. Trump seemed alternately irritated and exhausted during pretrial arguments on Monday, sometimes smirking and scoffing, but also appearing to nod off, his mouth slack and his head drooping to his chest. After the trial got underway in the afternoon, he chuckled when Justice Merchan told the first group of 96 prospective jurors that he would ensure a fair trial.

*I’m proud to say that my publisher, which I call “Random Penguin” has filed a lawsuit, backed by other major publishers and authors, against Iowa for banning books in public schools:

A group of major book publishers have joined a lawsuit seeking to block school book banning in Iowa, the latest effort to counter the removal of works from school classrooms and libraries.

The lawsuit was filed by Penguin Random House in November and targets parts of an Iowa law that bans books depicting or describing sex acts from school libraries or classrooms, with the exemption of religious texts. The law also focuses on books that address gender identity or sexual orientation for students in kindergarten through sixth grade.

On Monday, the Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, Macmillan Publishers, Simon & Schuster and Sourcebooks announced they had joined the legal action. The rise of book bans nationwide prompted the collective action, the publishers said.

HarperCollins is owned by News Corp NWSA , the parent of Wall Street Journal publisher Dow Jones & Co. Sourcebooks is majority owned by Penguin Random House.

The lawsuit has so far prevented Iowa from enforcing book bans, said Dan Novack, associate general counsel for Penguin Random House, in an interview. The additional publishers will share the costs of the lawsuit going forward, Novack said.

“Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird is defending the law that keeps sexually explicit books out of the hands of kids in elementary schools,” said a spokeswoman for the Iowa Attorney General’s office. “Parents trust that when they send their kids to school, their kids are there to learn, not to be exposed to inappropriate books in their classrooms or libraries.”

On Friday a federal judge ruled that the ban cannot be enforced so long as the legal challenge is going on, which could take ages.

Bravo to Random Penguin and the other publishers for fighting censorship! The idea that libraries and school librarians will expose kids to inappropriate books is pretty misguided, because school librarians love kids, love books, and are there to educate the kids. The issue of “inappropriate books” should be addressed by the school librarians and by parents, who can exercise power to keep kids from being totally corrupted by the sight of genitalia. The issue should not be addressed by state governments banning books.

*It now looks as if Israel has decided to mount a “forceful response” to last Saturday’s attack by Iran, but doesn’t seek a wider war (is that a contradiction?)

The war cabinet on Monday afternoon wrapped up a discussion on Israel’s response to Iran’s massive missile and drone barrage, amid calls for Jerusalem to exercise caution, so as not to spark a regional war, and reports that a retaliatory move could come “as soon as Monday.”

In an unsourced report, Channel 12 claimed the war cabinet has decided to hit back “clearly and forcefully” against Iran with a response designed to send the message that Israel “will not allow an attack of that magnitude against it to pass without a reaction.”

The response will also reportedly be designed to make plain that Israel will not allow the Iranians to “establish the equation” they have sought to assert in recent days. This was an apparent reference to Iran’s warning that future Israeli strikes on Iranian territory, including its international diplomatic premises, will henceforth again be met by Iranian retaliatory strikes on Israel.

However, the Channel 12 report added that Israel does not want its response to spark a regional war, or to shatter the coalition that helped it defend against Iran’s attack. It noted also that Israel intends to coordinate its action with the US.

The war cabinet meeting finished as the Axios news site reported that Defense Minister Yoav Gallant had told his US counterpart in a Sunday call that Israel has “no choice but to respond” to Iran’s attack, given the use of ballistic missiles.

*Over at her Substack site, Melanie Phillips argues that the mess in the Middle East is largely America’s fault for empowering (and, to some extent, allying with) Iran. She also laughs off the concept of Israel’s “deterrence” on Saturday:

What country other than Israel would be told by the so-called civilised world that it must not respond to an onslaught of more than 300 cruise and ballistic missiles and armed drones fired at the entire country?

If a minute fraction of such an attack were to be mounted against America  or Britain, they would declare themselves at war and destroy the enemy before it could attack them again. It’s only Israel that is not to be allowed to defend itself in the same way.

Does the Biden administration need to see a few thousand Israelis killed in skyscrapers if missiles get through to Haifa or Tel Aviv before it comes to its defence again?

Deterrence does not mean being able to defend yourself against attack. Deterrence means deterring an attack in the first place. Biden’s prohibition would destroy the very concept of Israeli deterrence and allow Iran to continue to tighten its ring of proxy fire around Israel in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen — and Gaza (where Biden wants Israel to submit to a Palestinian terrorist administration after the war).

and on the U.S.’s responsibility (Phillips’s take, not necessarily mine):

But the reason Iran/Hamas felt emboldened to design and perpetrate [the October 7] attack was because it had been empowered over the past two decades by American appeasement and gross ideological irresponsibility — or worse.

In 2015, President Obama’s nuclear deal, which would have enabled a legitimate Iranian nuclear bomb with only a short delay, funnelled billions in sanctions relief into Tehran’s coffers, enabling it to advance its aim of regional hegemony and expand its terrorist empire of Islamic holy war across the world.

This strategy of empowering Iran was continued by the Biden administration. It grovelled to Tehran in an attempt to restore the nuclear deal, relaxed sanctions once again and retaliated only sporadically and limply to repeated attacks by Iranian proxies on US forces in Iraq and Syria.

Iran correctly thought that it could get away with unleashing Hamas on October 7, as well as increasing attacks by Hezbollah on northern Israel, because the Biden administration would prevent a full-on Israeli response.

*Below, a piece on the NPR “scandal” from the Free Press‘s daily newsletter. Remember their NPR essay by Uri Berliner, in which he revealed how horribly ideological the whole enterprise was? (I posted it about it here.)

NPR has struggled to contain the fallout from the essay by Uri Berliner published in these pageslast week. On Friday, NPR’s new CEO Katherine Maher issued a letter to staffers that skirted the substance of Uri’s concerns and instead called his character into question: “Questioning whether our people are serving our mission with integrity, based on little more than the recognition of their identity, is profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning,” she wrote. Of course, Uri did no such thing. Read the essay and judge for yourself.

Now, with the world watching and wondering what has gone wrong at NPR, some inconvenient old tweets of Maher’s have resurfaced.

Like this one about looting:

Or this one, with a selfie out campaigning for Biden. Or this one where she chided Hillary for using the phrase “boy and girl.” Or this one about “white silence.” Or this one about her “cis white mobility privilege.”

Okay. But that last one is a joke, right? Right? Either way, it’s no wonder that a (publicly funded) news organization run by a person with these political reflexes isn’t as evenhanded and intellectually curious as it once was.

Here’s another tweet from the brand-new CEO of NPR.

Matt Taibbi has an article on Maher on his Substack with more bizarre racist tweets, but I don’t subscribe so I can’t read it all.

* I just learned that anti-Israel protestors blocked not only the roads to Chicago’s O’Hare airport yesterday, but also the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.  Travelers were royally peeved. The Bridge was closed for at least five hours because protestors had chained themselves to their vehicles and had to be cut free, while O’Hare road access was blocked for a shorter time, though people had to get out of cabs and Ubers and drag their luggage a considerable distance to the terminal.

“People who block traffic should be arrested,” one person wrote on X.

Another said: “This is why Jesus invented tasers.”

A third person wrote, “There’s no better way to make people dislike you and your cause.”

Indeed, and I wonder why people are doing this.  (There were apparently such obstructive demonstrations all over the U.S., all by pro-Palestinians.) This is not the same kind of civil disobedience as sitting at lunch counters or trying to register for college, acts that don’t inconvenience anyone.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has an arcane conversation, but she does look satanic. Malgorzata’s explanation, “Andrzej is connecting to Darwin’s ‘devil’s chaplain’ while HIli is taking it literally and talking about her ‘bad side’, like being mean to Kulka.”

A: Nature is a devil’s book.
Hili: One is sitting in me as well.
A: And?
Hili: We somehow manage to come to an agreement.
In Polish:
Ja: Natura jest księgą diabła.
Hili: We mnie też jeden siedzi.
Ja: I co?
Hii: Jakoś się dogadujemy.

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

From Stacy:

From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy. Get it?

Stacy also drew my attention to this exchange of tweets by J. K. Rowling. She readers her comments!

From Masih: This 1.5-minute video has one clip of Iranians celebrating their failed attack on Israel and six short clips of men going after women for showing their hair.  What kind of country prompts its men to harass women for showing a bit of hair?

How did they do this in one take?

From Barry, a bouncing Trumpeter Hornbill (Bycanistes bucinator). I may get to see one of these when I go to South Africa:

From Malcolm, a stunning video that looks as if an ape is aping a human by showing off its own baby:

No more clamping of tires!

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted. Have a look at her Wikipedia page:

Tweets from Matthew. Look at the size of this “tame” eagle!

Matthew finds this video (apparently of an Italian imitating an American accent and American sayings) “very funny”:

34 thoughts on “Tuesday: Hili dialogue”

  1. National Eggs Benedict Day? Reminder: When you’re making the sauce, you should whip it thoroughly because . . . there’s no taste like foam for the Hollandaise.

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    2. And you also need to make sure that you serve them on shiny metal plates. After all, there’s no plates like chrome for the Hollandaise.

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  2. The idea that libraries and school librarians will expose kids to inappropriate books is pretty misguided, because school librarians love kids, love books, and are there to educate the kids.

    It would be great if we could indeed trust teachers and librarians to teach appropriately. However, many are now activists who want to push CRT, or care more about transing a kid then educating them, or want to abolish all notions of merit in the interests of “equity”.

    The bans are in response to books like those in this link. People can judge for themselves whether they deem them appropriate.

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    1. Yes, we used to have the concept that some books (or TV shows or movies) were unsuitable for children of certain ages. People need to be asking librarians and teachers why it is vital to have books with illustrations of people having sex, and teaching about an*l s*x and s*x toys available to grade schoolers. I don’t think that when a library removes a book as inappropriate for students or moves it to a limited access section it is a “book ban.” As far as I am concerned, this is not a first amendment issue. It an issue of the sexualization of children.

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      1. Dr.B is going to be pretty angry when he learns what you can access with a cellphone!
        🙂
        D.A.
        NYC

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    2. The Free Press is onto the ALA’s list of “banned” books (where banning means transferred from the kids to the adult sections):

      And what is it that these parents are objecting to? The ALA’s own press release states that Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe—number 1 on its list—is “banned” because of “LGBTQIA+ content,” but parents and school board members tell me their concerns have nothing to do with the book’s “queer” author or characters and everything to do with its explicit sexual content, including the graphic sketches of oral sex found on page 167, something the ALA doesn’t acknowledge or address.
      This is plainly inappropriate for children. The book’s stated reading age is “18 years and up” on Amazon, and 15 at Barnes and Noble.
      According to the ALA, This Book is Gay—number 3 on the list—is also being targeted because of its “LGBTQIA+ content,” yet their list neglects to tell the full story: in addition to a chapter entitled “The Ins and Outs of Gay Sex,” the book explains how to upload photos to adult sex apps (pg. 156).

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      1. Yes, when I originally read about LGBTQ book banning in schools I tried to get specific examples of what people were concerned about and eventually had to go to conservative sites to find them. Whoa. They’re bad. Some of that stuff is clearly porn. I was shocked that none of the mainstream press gave context.

        They end up in school libraries because some adults in charge have no common sense and have decided to take the brakes completely off.

        As for the content teaching young children that sex is assigned at birth and some girls are born with penises and some boys are born with vaginas, my feelings are mixed. On the one hand, it’s a currently popular view that may belong in the school library.

        On the other hand, I’m tempted to classify these books with Young Earth Creationism. We don’t say we’re “banning “ YEC from the schools — we say it’s inappropriate in an educational setting.

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        1. The issue of “banning” versus deeming “inappropriate” is important, as Mike also suggests below. “Book ban” is a red flag to liberals of a certain generation, and it is tough to get the conversation moving beyond that.

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          1. One thing I have started noticing is that bookstores these days often have a “banned books” display.
            Prominently displayed and available for sale, and done without irony.

    3. I think of school libraries limiting access to “Gender Queer” and similar books the same way I think of schools limiting access to biblical creationism. Just because students can access porn/YEC online doesn’t mean that schools have to offer porn/YEC in the classroom too.

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      2. Also – there’s a line of thought that points to X in the world, and uses the existence of X to justify its incorporation into grade-school education.

        E.g. kids will find smut and get into sexy-time anyway, so all these books everyone knows about are important. This is my crude synopsis of a CNN discussion led by Joy Reid (?).

        This must be a fallacy of some sort.

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    4. +1

      We used to trust that professional counselors wouldn’t confuse children, that doctors wouldn’t surgically mutilate them, and that the courts would consistently uphold parental rights. But, by all means, let’s trust the ideologues and activists in other professions, especially those in the educational field who attempt to trans children and keep these actions hidden from parents.

      It’s unfortunate that the bad actions of a small group cast suspicions on a larger one of responsible professionals. But that’s where we are. It’s interesting how people readily see that you don’t want to grant veto power over school books to the most idiotic or ideological parent, but we seem ready to grant power over inventory to the most idiotic or ideological person with a relevant professional credential. And, of course, it is only a bad actor or two, right? No ideological corruption of educational institutions, certifying agencies, credentialing boards, professional journals and organizations. Trust the experts.

      Public funds demand public accountability; the accountability to the public doesn’t end when we hire a credentialed person to do a job—at any level of public service or government.

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  3. I’m actually fine with states “banning” certain books at public K-12 schools, in specific ones that depict graphic sex acts or encourage kids to develop a false understanding of biological sex. For example no child or teen needs to be exposed to the kind of images depicted in books like “Gender Queer” (anyone can Google the images contained in it to see how inappropriate they are).

    Melanie Phillips made some interesting points re: Israel that I’ve read articulated elsewhere. I think that Israel is judged on the assumption only it has causal influence on Middle Eastern politics. In other words, when Israel is attacked, like on October 7th or April 14th, it’s seen as being responsible for provoking Iran or Hamas, or for failing to act reasonably towards them. We see this to a lesser extent when Western nations are hit by terrorist attacks, but it’s nothing like how it’s applied to Israel. It’s quite bizarre, and I attribute it to antisemitism.

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    1. A good test is to ask “how would I feel reading this book in public to children?”

      The follow up might be instead of “public”, the “private” scenario.

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  5. O’Hare, the Brooklyn Bridge, Seattle Airport, Golden Gate Bridge, and Miami, not to mention a pro-Hezbollah rally in NYC. All yesterday. This is coordinated disruption. Why isn’t the FBI investigating this?

    Oh, and there was a fire at an Army munitions factory yesterday in Scranton. The factory just happens to make the bulk of our 155mm shells. A quick search of google news shows that no mainstream outlets are reporting on this.

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    1. Agree with the comments in favor of school library content standards. You have to draw the line somewhere, and this seems to be where the general public views it to be. These are not adults, and if parents of the children in the schools want their kids to view this, then they can provide the books. If these books that have graphic sexual images are ok, then why not erotic graphic novels that have images on every page, or for that matter, photographic images of the same? This issue is focused on graphic portrayal of gay sex; are there similar books currently allowed in schools that have graphic images of straight sex?
      For that matter, what is it about adults who want to ensure that underage children are shown these images?
      Librarians may love learning and kids, but they also have been ideologically captured by the mindset that says they must allow all things LGBTQ+, and to disallow something is equivalent to hate.

      Schools should be a learning environment. You put these books in a school library, and I’ll guarantee that kids are going to be focused on those images rather than “learning” about the LGBTQ+ lifestyle. I cannot remember ever reading the words of the Nat Geo articles about Africa when I was a kid back in the 70’s, but I certainly remember what photos we focused on.

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    2. The seeming coordination of the interstateifada could be more apparent than real. Easily explained by: (1) copy-cat behavior
      (see “mimetic theory”); and (2) the irresistible attraction, for certain mentalities, of drawing attention to oneself. Perhaps the next tactic of pro-Hamas activists will be to pour soup on paintings and super-glue themselves to the wall in museums.

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      1. It could be. It could be simply that one group sees that another is going to shut down traffic one place on a certain, and another group says they should do that, too. I think, though, that it behooves the FBI to determine whether it is that or whether there is coordination.

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  6. Relating to the piece by Melanie Phillips is this piece by Kyle Orton in Fathom (link below). Orton argues that the U.S. has largely tried to treat conflicts with Gaza, with Hezbollah, with Yemen, with Iraq, and with Iran separately over the years, even though all have been (and continue to be) part of Iran’s long-term strategy to expand the Islamic revolution and build a “ring of fire” around Israel—the latter supposedly being the brainchild of assassinated Quds leader Qasam Soleimani.

    The article was hard going for me, as it introduces much that I hadn’t read about before, but one thing stood out that got my immediate attention, and that is the idea that Iran’s so-called proxies (in Gaza, in Yemen, in Lebanon, etc.) are not proxies at all, but are in fact arms of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp (IRGC). According to the article, it has been convenient for the U.S. to keep the various conflicts separate (at least rhetorically) in hope of avoiding war with Iran. But if it’s really true that the warring parties are part of Iran’s IRGC, the regional war has already begun.

    https://fathomjournal.org/iran-is-slowly-surrounding-israel-with-a-ring-of-fire-kyle-orton-on-the-iranian-regimes-attack-on-israel-and-the-wests-ongoing-appeasement-of-tehran-and-refusal-to/

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  7. Someone should warn JKR. Wet concrete can cause severe burns. See “Does Concrete Burn?”. Most people don’t know this, but concrete contains calcium oxide (mixed with water and other things). Wet concrete can be quite dangerous.

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  8. Oops, a whole day late.

    On this day:
    1457 BC – Battle of Megido – the first battle to have been recorded in what is accepted as relatively reliable detail.

    73 – Masada, a Jewish fortress, falls to the Romans after several months of siege, ending the First Jewish–Roman War.

    1746 – The Battle of Culloden is fought between the French-supported Jacobites and the British Hanoverian forces commanded by William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, in Scotland. After the battle many highland traditions were banned and the Highlands of Scotland were cleared of inhabitants.

    1847 – Shooting of a Māori by an English sailor results in the opening of the Wanganui Campaign of the New Zealand Wars.

    1853 – The Great Indian Peninsula Railway opens the first passenger rail in India, from Bori Bunder to Thane.

    1912 – Harriet Quimby becomes the first woman to fly an airplane across the English Channel.

    1917 – Russian Revolution: Vladimir Lenin returns to Petrograd, Russia, from exile in Switzerland.

    1919 – Mohandas Gandhi organizes a day of “prayer and fasting” in response to the killing of Indian protesters in the Jallianwala Bagh massacre by the British colonial troops three days earlier.

    1943 – Albert Hofmann accidentally discovers the hallucinogenic effects of the research drug LSD. He intentionally takes the drug three days later on April 19.

    1945 – World War II: The Red Army begins the final assault on German forces around Berlin, with nearly one million troops fighting in the Battle of the Seelow Heights.

    1945 – The United States Army liberates Nazi Sonderlager (high security) prisoner-of-war camp Oflag IV-C (better known as Colditz).

    1947 – Bernard Baruch first applies the term “Cold War” to describe the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union.

    1963 – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. pens his Letter from Birmingham Jail while incarcerated in Birmingham, Alabama for protesting against segregation.

    2003 – The Treaty of Accession is signed in Athens admitting ten new member states to the European Union.

    2007 – Virginia Tech shooting: Seung-Hui Cho guns down 32 people and injures 17 before committing suicide.

    2008 – The U.S. Supreme Court rules in the Baze v. Rees decision that execution by lethal injection does not violate the Eighth Amendment ban against cruel and unusual punishment.

    2012 – The trial for Anders Behring Breivik, the perpetrator of the 2011 Norway attacks, begins in Oslo, Norway.

    2012 – The Pulitzer Prize winners were announced, it was the first time since 1977 that no book won the Fiction Prize.

    2018 – The New York Times and the New Yorker win the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for breaking news of the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse scandal.

    Births:
    1755 – Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, French painter (d. 1842).

    1821 – Ford Madox Brown, French-English soldier and painter (d. 1893).

    1844 – Anatole France, French journalist, novelist, and poet, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1924).

    1864 – Rose Talbot Bullard, American medical doctor and professor (d. 1915).

    1867 – Wilbur Wright, American inventor (d. 1912).

    1889 – Charlie Chaplin, English actor, director, producer, screenwriter, and composer (d. 1977).

    1892 – Dora Richter, German transgender woman and the first known person to undergo complete male-to-female gender-affirming surgery (d. unknown). [Erwin Gohrbandt, who later became a Nazi war criminal, carried out two of the surgical procedures.]

    1895 – Ove Arup, English-Danish engineer and businessman, founded Arup (d. 1988).

    1911 – Guy Burgess, English-Russian spy (d. 1963).

    1918 – Spike Milligan, Irish actor, comedian, and writer (d. 2002).

    1919 – Merce Cunningham, American dancer and choreographer (d. 2009.

    1921 – Peter Ustinov, English actor, director, producer, and screenwriter (d. 2004).

    1922 – Kingsley Amis, English novelist, poet, and critic (d. 1995).

    1924 – Henry Mancini, American composer and conductor (d. 1994).

    1933 – Joan Bakewell, English journalist and author.

    1934 – Robert Stigwood, Australian producer and manager (d. 2016).

    1939 – Dusty Springfield, English singer and record producer (d. 1999).

    1947 – Gerry Rafferty, Scottish singer-songwriter (d. 2011).

    1954 – Ellen Barkin, American actress.

    1963 – Jimmy Osmond, American singer.

    1984 – Claire Foy, English actress.

    We are such stuff
    As dreams are made on, and our little life
    Is rounded with a sleep.

    1689 – Aphra Behn, English author and playwright (b. 1640).

    1756 – Jacques Cassini, French astronomer (b. 1677).

    1788 – Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, French mathematician, cosmologist, and author (b. 1707).

    1828 – Francisco Goya, Spanish-French painter and illustrator (b. 1746).

    1850 – Marie Tussaud, French-English sculptor, founded the Madame Tussauds Wax Museum (b. 1761).

    1904 – Samuel Smiles, Scottish-English author (b. 1812). [His primary work, Self-Help (1859), promoted thrift and claimed that poverty was caused largely by irresponsible habits, while also attacking materialism and laissez-faire government. It has been called “the bible of mid-Victorian liberalism” and had lasting effects on British political thought.]

    1914 – George William Hill, American astronomer and mathematician (b. 1838). [Working independently and largely in isolation from the wider scientific community, he made major contributions to celestial mechanics and to the theory of ordinary differential equations. The importance of his work was explicitly acknowledged by Henri Poincaré in 1905. In 1909 Hill was awarded the Royal Society’s Copley Medal, “on the ground of his researches in mathematical astronomy”. Hill is remembered for the Hill differential equation, along with the Hill sphere.]

    1958 – Rosalind Franklin, English biophysicist and academic (b. 1920). [Today’s Woman of the Day, see next post below.]

    1965 – Sydney Chaplin, English actor, comedian, brother of Charlie Chaplin (b. 1885).

    1972 – Yasunari Kawabata, Japanese novelist and short story writer, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1899).

    1988 – Khalil al-Wazir, Palestinian commander, founded Fatah (b. 1935).

    1991 – David Lean, English director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1908).

    1998 – Marie-Louise Meilleur, Canadian super-centenarian (b. 1880).

    2008 – Edward Norton Lorenz, American mathematician and meteorologist (b. 1917). [Established the theoretical basis of weather and climate predictability, as well as the basis for computer-aided atmospheric physics and meteorology. He is best known as the founder of modern chaos theory, a branch of mathematics focusing on the behavior of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions.]

    2010 – Daryl Gates, American police officer, created the D.A.R.E. Program (b. 1926).

    2021 – Helen McCrory, British actress (b. 1968)

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

      Rosalind Elsie Franklin (born 25 July 1920, died on this day in 1958) was a British chemist and X-ray crystallographer whose work was central to the understanding of the molecular structures of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), RNA (ribonucleic acid), viruses, coal, and graphite. Although her works on coal and viruses were appreciated in her lifetime, Franklin’s contributions to the discovery of the structure of DNA were largely unrecognized during her life, for which Franklin has been variously referred to as the “wronged heroine”, the “dark lady of DNA”, the “forgotten heroine”, a “feminist icon”, and the “Sylvia Plath of molecular biology”.

      Franklin graduated in 1941 with a degree in natural sciences from Newnham College, Cambridge, and then enrolled for a PhD in physical chemistry under Ronald George Wreyford Norrish, the 1920 Chair of Physical Chemistry at the University of Cambridge. Disappointed by Norrish’s lack of enthusiasm, she took up a research position under the British Coal Utilisation Research Association (BCURA) in 1942. The research on coal helped Franklin earn a PhD from Cambridge in 1945. Moving to Paris in 1947 as a chercheur (postdoctoral researcher) under Jacques Mering at the Laboratoire Central des Services Chimiques de l’État, she became an accomplished (and famous) X-ray crystallographer. After joining King’s College London in 1951 as a research associate, Franklin discovered some key properties of DNA, which eventually facilitated the correct description of the double helix structure of DNA. Owing to disagreement with her director, John Randall, and her colleague Maurice Wilkins, Franklin was compelled to move to Birkbeck College in 1953.

      Franklin is best known for her work on the X-ray diffraction images of DNA while at King’s College London, particularly Photo 51, taken by her student Raymond Gosling, which led to the discovery of the DNA double helix for which Francis Crick, James Watson, and Maurice Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962. Watson suggested that Franklin would have ideally been awarded a Nobel Prize in Chemistry, along with Wilkins but it was not possible because the pre-1974 rule dictated that a Nobel prize could not be awarded posthumously unless the nomination had been made for a then-alive candidate before Feb 1st of the award year and Franklin died a few years before 1962 when the discovery of the structure of DNA was recognized by the Nobel committee.

      Working under John Desmond Bernal, Franklin led pioneering work at Birkbeck on the molecular structures of viruses. On the day before she was to unveil the structure of tobacco mosaic virus at an international fair in Brussels, Franklin died of ovarian cancer at the age of 37 in 1958. Her team member Aaron Klug continued her research, winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1982.

      Franklin’s British Jewish family was affluent and influential. Her paternal great-uncle was Herbert Samuel (later Viscount Samuel), who was the Home Secretary in 1916 and the first practising Jew to serve in the British Cabinet. Her aunt, Helen Caroline Franklin, was married to Norman de Mattos Bentwich, who was the Attorney General in the British Mandate of Palestine. Her family was actively involved with the Working Men’s College, where her father taught the subjects of electricity, magnetism, and the history of the Great War in the evenings, later becoming the vice principal. Franklin’s parents helped settle Jewish refugees from Europe who had escaped the Nazis, particularly those from the Kindertransport. They took in two Jewish children to their home and one of them shared the room of Jenifer, Rosalind’s younger sister.

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

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  9. The legal dispute over “removal of works” fits a dialectical model of conflict as follows:

    Sexual grooming and Queer Theory praxis on children is evil. It has no justifiable expertise for its subversive imposition in grade schools — obscured or protected in school board wizard circles that can be seen in many articles and videos by now. “Eroticism [that] transgresses generational boundaries” (Rubin, G.), inducing crisis in children for “experiencing the queer” (Kumashiro, K.), and “induction into alternative modes of kinship” (Hot Mess, L. M.) — practiced on children in grade schools and public libraries — is not what Voltaire had in mind with his famous aphorism. For the ongoing conflict in grade school, freedom of the press from state interference is the exoteric component – an easily defensible motte. This is formed between conservatives and their adversaries from the Left which easily gains full public support. Protection of esoteric Queer Theory praxis from law is the esoteric component as the bailey, which is the indefensible operational objective both adversaries are generally unaware of. (Motte and Bailey – Shackel, 2005). The Left generally wins and moves to the next phase as with practice of Critical Race Theory on students.

    But it is true that the full weight of law should meet no exceptions with regard to Queer Theory praxis because manipulation and abuse of the defenseless is known historically to follow from protections of authority in general.

    Freedom of speech also means freedom from speech.

    Discernment is not censorship.

    The Book Bans Did Not Take Place
    (After Baudrillard)

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