Sunday: Hili dialogue

April 21, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Sabbath for goyische cats: April 21, 2024, and National Chocolate-Covered Cashews Day. which look like something that comes out the nether end, not that goes into the proximal end:

Famartin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also Big Word Day (my recent favorite is “ratiocination“, which I learned from Hitchens), Tuna Rights Day (eat less tuna!), Bulldogs Are Beautiful Day (no they aren’t), National Chickpea Day (hummus!),  National Tea Day in theUnited Kingdom, and, in Texas,  San Jacinto Day, celebrating the day when Texas won its independence from Mexico: April 21, 1836.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 21 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*For once some good bipartisanship in Congress: aid to those countries who need it urgently is moving forward. (I don’t know enough about Tik Tok to render an opinion.)

The House passed a $95 billion package of bills Saturday that would fund aid and weapons for Ukraine, after House Speaker Mike Johnson put his political career on the line to push the long-stalled measure past intense Republican opposition.

Lawmakers voted on four separate measures for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, and another bill that would force the sale of TikTok by its Chinese-controlled owner.

The first vote, on TikTok and sanctions related to Iran and Russia, passed 360-58, and aid for Taiwan also passed easily.  The vote on Ukraine–the most contentious of the four—passed 311 to 112 with one voting present, with all Democrats joined by less than half of Republicans in support. Israel aid then sailed through as well, despite objections from some Democrats over how Israel has handled the war in Gaza.

The measures will be bundled together and sent to the Senate, where leaders have vowed to quickly take them up.

“Even though it’s not the perfect legislation, it’s not the legislation that we would write if Republicans were in charge of both the House, the Senate, and the White House, this is the best possible product that we can get under these circumstances,” Johnson (R., La.) said on Friday.

. . .Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky said on social media he was “grateful to the United States House of Representatives, both parties, and personally Speaker Mike Johnson for the decision that keeps history on the right track.”

About $60 billion of the aid package is aimed at helping Ukraine fight off the Russian invasion while funding the U.S. defense industry. The measure also contains $26 billion for Israel, direct aid as well as money for replenishing U.S. stockpiles and supporting U.S. operations in the region. The proposal allocates about $8 billion to support Taiwan and the Indo-Pacific, as well as humanitarian aid for Gaza. The TikTo

I am guessing without knowing that the squad voted uniformly against aid for Israel, but I haven’t looked it up. I will now. Wait a second. . .

. . . . . Yep, I can’t find a squad member who didn’t vote “nay”. Here are two next to each other in the alphabet, but Jayapal, Bowman, Bush, Lee, Casar, Pressley, and Tlaib also voted “nay”—because of course they want Hamas to win.

*The pro-Palestoinian protestors at Columbia University, arrested and suspended, are back in spades, squatting on the campus quad and shouting antisemitic slogans like “”Oh Al-Qassam [Brigades], you make us proud! Kill another soldier now!” (the Al-Qassam brigades are “Hamas’s military wing that spearheaded the October 7 attack on Israel”), “Free our prisoners, free them all! Zionism will fall!”  (Note that urgings to “kill another soldier now” is clear, despite what people say about “from the river to the sea.”)

Tali Kobrin, a Barnard College student, was deeply uneasy Thursday as she listened to pro-Palestinian protesters at Columbia yelling, “We don’t want no Zionists here!”

“That means you don’t want me, as a Jew, on campus,” said Kobrin, a freshman who supports Israel. “That was really hard to hear.”

While she thought some people might think of anti-Zionism as opposition to Israeli policies, the chants “sounded meaner than that,” she said. She left for her parents’ home in the Bronx shortly before a wave of NYPD officers swept through campus, arresting more than 100 people who refused to leave a pro-Palestinian protest encampment — a rare move by the university to call in external forces to quell a demonstration.

Soph Askanase, 21, said she was one of the first students arrested and is now suspended. The Barnard junior, who has asthma and did not have her inhaler, tried to keep calm by using breathing techniques. “I don’t know if they’ll let me finish my semester,” she said Friday afternoon while picking up a backpack and a tote bag that had been seized, with red marks still on her wrists from police cuffs.

This week at Columbia and Barnard — the affiliated school with its own administration across the street — has been a frightening climax to a tense and uneasy year for many students. After six months of searing protests over the Israel-Gaza war, events at the end of the school year rapidly escalated fears and pressure, drawing sharp dividing lines on campuses that seek to be welcoming communities.

Some pro-Palestinian students saw the administration as increasingly punitive amid scrutiny from federal lawmakers and described a broad chilling effect brought about by doxing, arrests and suspensions. Many students said they spoke candidly only during adhan, the five-times-a-day Muslim call to prayer.

Some Jewish students said the rhetoric at protests has become more extreme, describing demonstrators ordering them away from an encampment and, in one case, brandishing a Hamas logo at them. Several were also upset that despite the police intervention, hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters remained at the center of campus Friday, where they had slept overnight with sleeping bags, improvised mattresses and picnic blankets.

What worries me is that the anti-Israel stuff is being replaced by pro-Hamas stuff.  And it’s simply odious and reprehensible to think that Hamas should be any kind of role model. See below for some of the new chants:

Here are some of the morons saying, “Remember the 7th of October” (and they’re happy about that), followed by “Ten thousand times” (I think).  They want more Jew killing!

Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, and comrades, here is your new model for an elite university. This is an illegal demonstration, even if the speech itself is legal, for it violates place restrictions and is also obstructive, much less creating a climate intimidating to Jewish students. And it’s spreading to other campuses, which means that this stuff will spread to wider America. It was also in Chicago yesterday.

*The Times of Israel reports that its country’s recent “reprisal” for Iran’s attack, consisting of a few missiles fired at an Iranian facility, was actually carefully calculated to send a message to Iran.

The alleged Israeli strike overnight Thursday-Friday on Iranian air defenses near the Natanz nuclear site used a high-tech missile that was able to evade Iran’s radar systems, in a move “calibrated to make Iran think twice” before launching another direct attack on Israel, The New York Times reported on Saturday.

Two unnamed Western officials cited by the newspaper said the missile aimed to show Tehran that Israel is able to dodge and neutralize its defenses.

Two Iranian officials said the strike hit a Russian-made S-300 air defense system. They told the newspaper that Iran had not detected intrusions into its airspace from drones, missiles or aircraft.

The newspaper said the missile was from a warplane fired “far from Israeli or Iranian airspace.”

The report also said that neither the plane nor the missile entered Jordanian airspace — a calculated move to keep Amman out of any potential ramifications for the reprisal strike, after it helped shoot down some of the hundreds of drones and missiles fired by Iran at Israel last weekend.

Satellite imagery seen by the Times of Israel showed damage to the radar of an S-300 system at the Eighth Shekari Air Base in Isfahan, said to be part of an array defending the nearby top-secret Natanz nuclear site. The imagery was not immediately permitted for publication, per the policy of the agency that took the photo.

The Natanz nuclear site is Iran’s premier site for enriching uranium (there are several) and is likely the site where Iran’s first bomb will be assembled. The strike thus showed Iran that Israel could damage their nuclear facilities. However, Iran is close to having enough uranium to build a warhead, and unless Israel plans to pulverize the facility, they (and we) will have to accept the fact that Iran will become a nuclear-armed state. That, of course, is far more dangerous to Israel than to the U.S., but the U.S. has put out the pretense for years that they and the inspectors would prevent Iran from building nukes. Poppycock!

*Over at The Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan discusses the new CEO of National Public Radio adamantly maintaining that “Katherine Maher is not a liberal.” You may have seen some of her cringeworthy tweets from the past, but NPR listeners, might want to read the increasing titer of wokeness about to pour from their speakers. Referring to Rufo’s tweets, Sullivan says:

Nothing to see here. Nothing new. Just a liberal CEO getting blasted by a far-right activist (in this case, Chris Rufo), after an NPR stalwart, Uri Berliner, wrote a public critique of NPR. A tale as old as the MSM.

But of course, the MSM is lying — by obfuscating Maher’s politics and her tweets to make her views seem far milder than they are. She is not, in fact, a liberal of any kind. She is — as the tweets and the record prove — a near-parody of an illiberal leftist, dedicated to replacing open and free debate with benign censorship, and to constructing a journalistic regime rooted not in the pursuit of truth but in the urgent task of dismantling “white supremacy.”

She tweeted “white silence is complicity” in June 2020. She went after James Bennet for “platforming” Tom Cotton. She’s frustrated by the robustness of the First Amendment. She refers to her “cis white mobility privilege.” She chided Hillary for saying “‘boy and girl’ — it’s erasing language for non-binary people.” She even self-flagellates over her own “trans-erasure.” She is Titania McGrath — Andrew Doyles’ comic Twitter parody of a deranged SJW. Literally. Matt Taibbi — peace be upon him — has a delicious side-by-side comparison. [JAC: Go see it!]

All of this, of course, is precisely why Maher was selected to be NPR’s CEO, just as Claudine Gay was picked to run Harvard. Maher’s predecessor, John Lansing, was clear about the recent change in NPR’s mission: “When it comes to identifying and ending systemic racism, we can be agents of change.” In 2020, he said:

The leaders in public media — starting with me — must be aware of how we ourselves have benefitted from white privilege in our careers. … And we must commit ourselves — body and soul — to profound changes in ourselves and our institutions. We must do all this not as a ‘project’, not as an extracurricular activity, we must do this because, by definition, it is our work.

If you want to understand why NPR is now cringe, look no further. If you want to understand why social justice is best understood as a religious cult, ditto. Body and soul? The journalist sounds like a revivalist.

. . .Maher’s full tweetage is a deep dive into the successor ideology. First and foremost, it means an end to the Enlightenment idea of empirical truth, discoverable by a curious human being, regardless of his or her identity. This idea is, in fact, a “white male Westernized construct,” as Maher once explained in an interview. “Seeking the truth, and seeking to convince others of the truth, might not be the right place to start,” Maher argued in her TED talk. “In fact, our reverence for the truth might be a distraction … We all have different truths. They’re based on things like: where we come from, how we were raised, and how other people perceive us.”

That’s why, in Maher’s woke mind, you have to start not with an individual but with an identity. A white reporter is not interchangeable with a black reporter, or a female reporter with a male reporter, and only black reporters know the truth about race, just as only “nonbinary” or trans people can speak about gender. There is no objective truth; there are only narratives based on unfalsifiable “lived experiences”; and the job of NPR is to elevate the narratives that help dismantle the racist, heterosexist, patriarchal, transphobic regime of “whiteness” — and suppress those that don’t

*Hillary Cass, author of the revised Cass Review of gender studies in the U.K. had predictably been threatened and demonized by gender activists, and some who prefer ideology to truth have taken their unwarranted criticisms for granted.  But these criticisms hold no water; they’re simply an attempt at confirmation bias.  According to the Times of London (archived), Cass has not only had her report badly distorted, but has been threatened so viciously that she can’t even use public transportation any more.

Dr Hilary Cass has criticised the spread of “disinformation” around her report, including from a Labour MP, as she revealed she had been told not to travel on public transport over safety fears.

In an interview with The Times, the paediatrician behind last week’s landmark review on the treatment of transgender children said that young people were being put “at risk” by the spread of false information.

Following publication of her 388-page report, figures including the Labour MP Dawn Butler repeated claims that Cass had not included 100 transgender studies in it.

Calling the assertion “completely wrong”, Cass said that it was “unforgivable” for people to undermine her report by spreading “straight disinformation”.

The physician, 66, who has spoken about the toxic debate around the issue, also revealed that she had been sent “vile” abusive emails and been given security advice to help keep her safe.

Of her critics, Cass said: “I have been really frustrated by the criticisms, because it is straight disinformation. It is completely inaccurate.

“It started the day before the report came out when an influencer put up a picture of a list of papers that were apparently rejected for not being randomised control trials.

“That list has absolutely nothing to do with either our report or any of the papers.v

“If you deliberately try to undermine a report that has looked at the evidence of children’s healthcare, then that’s unforgivable. You are putting children at risk by doing that.”

In the days after the Cass review was published, activists claimed on social media that only two out of 100 studies were included in the report.

Butler told the House of Commons: “There are around 100 studies that have not been included in this Cass report and we need to know why.”

Cass explained that researchers had appraised every single paper, but pulled the results from the ones that were high quality and medium quality, which was 60 out of 103.

. . . She added: “I’m not going on public transport at the moment, following security advice, which is inconvenient.”

Such are the extreme gender activists, one of the vilest species of activism, as they brook no dissent and accept only facts that buttress their ideology. Because Cass produced inconvenient conclusions, they go after her personally.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili gussies up her catness with some Shakespeare:

Hili: To go in or to go out, that is the question.
A: You are not the first indecisive cat.
In Polish:
Hili: Wejść, czy wyjść, oto jest pytanie.
Ja: Nie jesteś pierwszą niezdecydowaną kotką.
And a photo of the loving Szaron:

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

From The Dodo Pet:

From Strange, Stupid, or Silly Signs (don’t eat the yellow ice!)

From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy:

Retweeted by Masih, a wishful tweet. Many Iranian people are indeed pro-Israel, but they can’t “save the West” until they get rid of the Islamic Republic.

Below: the British police love to boot out Jewish people from near pro-Palestinian demonstrations, in this case because the man is “quite openly Jewish”.  Note the black guy who menaces the Jew while the copper just stands there.  I think this is part of a trend for the West to become more openly “anti-Jewish”, transitioning from “anti-Israel.”  I’ll post on this next, but it’s not a good sign. . . .

Then the Metropolitan Police tried to apologize for how they treated the Jewish guy, but (as you’ll see), the initial apology (the second one below) wasn’t so great, so the cops deleted it and replaced it by the first one. below. But someone saved the original. (h/t Jez): It’s worth reading the BBC article on this incident and related ones.

 

This is amazing. Harvard still can’t get it right (h/t Luana):

From Simon, the world’s dumbest cat (via Larry the Cat). (Be sure you spot the mouse!):

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one I posted of “the selection”:

Two tweets from Professor Cobb. First, a doomed comet. In the photo below it, I’ve circled the about-to-be-vaporized object (click to enlarge):

Tweeted by a BBC presenter. I love how the kid kisses every bunny before he drives them off. I’m just surprised that they stayed in their carriages!

38 thoughts on “Sunday: Hili dialogue”

  1. AOC also voted against condemning Iran for its attack on Israel, and she also voted against increased sanctions on Iran.

    Reply

  2. Good news for Ukraine! They still have to fight and die for their country but at least now they have a chance.
    My Representative Elise Stefanik voted against funding for Ukraine. She is very tough on university presidents, not so much on bucking Trump.

    Reply

  3. PCC(E) “… If you want to understand why social justice is best understood as a religious cult, ditto.”

    [ gif of Orson Welles clapping ]
    [ from Citizen Kane ]
    [ for example :]
    [ giphy.com/gifs/movie-black-and-white-dark-d5KuLHHTSaRnG ]

    Reply

  4. I enjoyed the image of the notice that being late for the bus would result in missing the bus, but I wonder if it is fair for the original post to have been in “America’s” decline into idiocy, since BCTransit is a Canadian company — in British Columbia.

    Reply

    1. Isn’t Canada part of America, at least the continent? And it being Canadian decline is not surprising .

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    2. It seems to be a conjuncture of several reasons/developments: “The less powerful in a conflict are always right”, and “the lighter your skin the less your perspective counts” is now official doctrine, immigration has changed demographics and brought a huge group of people who do not share the West’s sensibilities about antisemitism nor the West’s love and support for the project that became Israel and who have always rooted for the other side anyway, the Israeli government is full of extremists and is no longer as obviously morally superior to Palestinian extremists as it used to be, and finally, because the carpet bombing of Gaza and Israel’s early blockade of food/water (US pressure was needed to ease that) is a little difficult to justify after one year of screaming genocide and war crimes in the face of a then relatively reticent Russian air campaign with a low rate of civilian casualties. Things have changed since WWII, including international law, and it is now no longer accepted to react to a vicious attack on your people by killing 10 times that number on the other side.

      Reply

      1. But this only applies to Israel. Where was and is the condemnation in Syria where deaths were in the hundreds of thousands or in Sudan and Libya? The list goes on.
        Why is Israel held to an accountable behaviour not applicable everywhere?
        Israel has not committed “genocide” in Gaza or anything close if so they are incredibly incompetent. The majority of Palestinians support Hamas and I reiterate these are the same people who danced with glee when the twin towers of the World Trade Centre were destroyed. Islam is the problem not Israel.

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      2. Ruth, you are entitled to your own opinions but not to your own facts. You are wrong about international law. The major change in the law of armed conflict since the Second World War is the ban on the use of incendiary weapons against civilian agglomerations, which Israel scrupulously adheres to.*

        International law does not, contrary to what you assert, put restrictions on the ratio of body counts that either side may rack up in fighting a just war. This is a common misinterpretation of the “proportionality” rule. In fact, in regard to attacks that kill (or are likely to kill) civilians, military commanders must seek to ensure that the civilian death toll is in some reasonable proportion (by its own reckoning, not the enemy’s!) to the military value of the objective being sought…and that if militarily feasible an approach that kills fewer civilians should be chosen.

        This makes proportionality not numerical but aspirational. An army is not obligated to waste large numbers of its own troops in the effort to reduce civilian casualties, by, say, foregoing aerial bombing altogether and sending infantry to attack unreduced fortifications where civilians are being used as human shields.

        To see how absurd a numerical concept of proportionality would be, consider the recent “first-blood” missile attack by Iran against Israel. One Israeli citizen was injured, none killed, no soldiers wounded. By your proportionality argument, Israel would be obligated to ensure that no Iranian soldiers or civilians were killed in any imaginable retaliation, an impossible standard to meet except by not retaliating at all. Maybe that is the idea.

        Civilians lose their protected status entirely if they become militarized either voluntarily (by acting as non-uniformed combatants or lookouts or rocket makers or tunnel maintenance workers or prostitutes) or coerced as human shields. While a moral army will not slaughter militarized civilians gratuitously — it must accord them POW status if captured alive — it need not concern itself overly with the number who die helping the enemy fight. These deaths could be prevented, of course, if Hamas were to let the civilians take shelter in its tunnels or if it surrendered.

        War for survival makes us confront our own moral limits and some of us will find that we have none. Perhaps that is why many in the West have taken to judging Israel harshly for showing something in all of us that we didn’t think we harboured.
        —————
        * White phosphorus is not a prohibited weapon unless used gratuitously against civilians to inflict burns.

        Reply

  6. As much as I find it 100% believable that Maher is that uber woke NPR CEO – that TED talk is iffy to cite as evidence, since she does define “the truth” as something that is the sum of fact and belief. She separates between “the truth” and “what we know about the world”.

    I think it greatly weakens Sullivan’s claims, when he fails to address this. It is possible to address, since she generally muddles “the truth” and “personal truth”. In it’s current form, the attack on Maher’s credibility is blunted by the omission of that detail.

    Reply

    1. Have you considered it to be a strategic lie – and Maher is a professional manipulator?

      “Scientific method seeks to understand things as they are, while alchemy seeks to bring about a desired state of affairs. To put it another way, the primary objective of science is truth, – that of alchemy, operational success.”

      -George Soros (probably from Alchemy of Finance)

      “feminist theories should be political tools, strategies for overcoming oppression in specific concrete situations. The goal, then, of feminist theory, should be to develop strategic theories, not true theories, not false theories, but strategic theories.”

      -Kelly Oliver – who I think is a professor of philosophy.

      Found from x.com/wokal_distance/status/1596037090558767104?s=46 and James Lindsay.

      Reply

      1. I have indeed. But my critique is aimed at Sullivan for failing to account for the common word games and thus not pushing his point past the all to common “that’s not what she meant” defense.

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  7. The guards pointing at different directions at the camp happened to my Mother at Birkenau. The doctor pointed to the gas chamber and the guard said no and pointed to the barracks. She always said that if the guard was smoking a cigarette at that moment, she would have been gassed.

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  8. Regarding the London police, I think it’s a bit unfair to heap blame onto the police officer. Put yourself in his shoes. You have an emotional protest going on and someone is there, dressed to be instantly recognizable to be from the opposing camp.
    What would you do? Would you ignore that readily identifiable counter-protestor and risk an incident that you don’t have the power to control?
    Isn’t prevention is better than arresting those who have maimed that counter-protestor.

    Reply

    1. As is so often the case, the problem is both the officer and the institution he works for. Both are at fault. The officer could have appealed to the Jewish man’s sense of self-preservation (and expressed solidarity with the Jewish man by admitting to him that the pro-pal demonstrators are violent racists) instead of accusing the man of being “openly Jewish.” But most of the blame falls on the Met for accepting the violent potential of the demonstrations and for not adequately constraining that potential so that a passerby simply looking Jewish would not lead to violence.

      Reply

      1. Why do you characterize the statement “You are openly Jewish” as an accusation, especially when the police officer follows it up with “I’m not accusing you of anything”? The officer states his reasoning for asking him to keep a distance – he is worried about the reaction from the protesting crowd.

        Many protests have a “violent potential” and yet it is important to let them protest. Chances are, that nothing but a few rude gestures would have come out of the man’s presence. You don’t know, that “a passerby simply looking Jewish” would certainly lead to violence. But the officer just didn’t want to take the risk. Which I can totally understand.
        Same with the Met, since the right to protest shouldn’t be easily curtailed.

        Reply

    2. Well, the Met did apologize on behalf of the constable, a second version eliminated the victim-blaming in the first one. So his employer says his read of the situation wasn’t correct.

      If this is a reasonable fear, and I think it is, that a man wearing a kippah will spark a riot just from walking along the sidewalk, a riot that the police know they have not the power to prevent or contain, then we are losing our society. The Met can apologize all it wants, but it can’t hide the fact that it knows the law no longer governs London’s streets. And what will it do the next time?

      Protest that takes over the streets without a permit is not lawful. If you can’t curtail this activity, and if all you can do to prevent a riot is to detain law-abiding counter-protestors so as not to trigger the lawbreakers, this is not good. When do they storm Parliament? Can you stop that, Met Police?

      Reply

      1. Leslie, they have already projected their vile imagery & messages on the Palace of Westminster and Big Ben, the useless Metropolitan Police “Service” cannot control the London Streets, period! A number of parliamentary members are not standing for re election because they state that their lives are under threat , mostly Islam. Like many UK police “service” organizations they are dysfunctional, their crime clear up rate is abysmal. However some say a Police Service is a direct reflection of the society it serves, doesn’t say much about society!

        Reply

  10. Excellent that the aid packages to Ukraine and Israel are going to become law.

    I’m concerned about university protests spreading to other campuses. Not all administrations will respond the way that Columbia did, and Columbia itself may not respond to current and future protests the way Columbia did. The responses will be uneven, and in many cases, the pro-Hamas protests will be tolerated—even if they violate the law or university policy. As long as the line between what is tolerated and what is not remains fuzzy, the pro-terrorism protests will continue.

    And, NPR is dead to me.

    Reply

  12. TheMet.
    When advising and discussing with our son and daughter about violence in a social environment, when out and about… our advice was.
    If you see it coming or not, gather your friends and get out, remove yourself, do not let drunken morons or senseless violence put you in A & E or worse. Then call us, any time any place, we will come and get you.
    Pro Palestinian protesters ARE volatile if nothing else, on the whole there is not a lot of reason, common sense, individual rights, going on.
    I saw this Jewish man in the same situation, clumsily said, but Mr Plod was looking into a hole and made a bridge for himself and his crew, public, individuals. Did he save the day, who knows but nothing further happened, all three parties are injury free. A little personal affront perhaps but no broken bones.
    THEN call it out, which he did. I think he got his point across but I would downgrade his common sense to try and make that point ON the day, brave although it may have been.

    Reply

  13. > Soph Askanase, 21, said she was one of the first students arrested and is now suspended. The Barnard junior, who has asthma and did not have her inhaler, tried to keep calm by using breathing techniques.

    Are you people at the Washington Post frickin’ kidding me?

    Reply

  15. Oops, a day late…

    On this day:
    753 BC – Romulus founds Rome (traditional date).

    1506 – The three-day Lisbon Massacre comes to an end with the slaughter of over 1,900 suspected Jews by Portuguese Catholics. [You don’t need to be “openly Jewish” to be in danger…]

    1789 – John Adams sworn in as first US Vice President (nine days before George Washington).

    1856 – Australian labour movement: Stonemasons and building workers on building sites around Melbourne march from the University of Melbourne to Parliament House to achieve an eight-hour day.

    1918 – World War I: German fighter ace Manfred von Richthofen, better known as “The Red Baron”, is shot down and killed over Vaux-sur-Somme in France.

    1934 – The “Surgeon’s Photograph”, the most famous photo allegedly showing the Loch Ness Monster, is published in The Daily Mail (in 1994, it is revealed to be a hoax).

    1946 – The U.S. Weather Bureau publish a paper which stated the width of a tornado which struck the city of Timber Lake, South Dakota was 4 miles (6.4 km), which would make this the widest tornado ever documented in history.

    1960 – Brasília, Brazil’s capital, is officially inaugurated. At 09:30, the Three Powers of the Republic are simultaneously transferred from the old capital, Rio de Janeiro.

    1962 – The Seattle World’s Fair (Century 21 Exposition) opens. It is the first World’s Fair in the United States since World War II.

    1966 – Rastafari movement: Haile Selassie of Ethiopia visits Jamaica, an event now celebrated as Grounation Day.

    1967 – A few days before the general election in Greece, Colonel George Papadopoulos leads a coup d’état, establishing a military regime that lasts for seven years.

    1972 – Astronauts John Young and Charles Duke fly Apollo 16’s Apollo Lunar Module to the Moon’s surface, the fifth NASA Apollo Program crewed lunar landing.

    1989 – Tiananmen Square protests of 1989: In Beijing, around 100,000 students gather in Tiananmen Square to commemorate Chinese reform leader Hu Yaobang.

    2014 – The American city of Flint, Michigan switches its water source to the Flint River, beginning the ongoing Flint water crisis which has caused lead poisoning in up to 12,000 people, and at least 12 deaths from Legionnaires’ disease, ultimately leading to criminal indictments against 15 people, five of whom have been charged with involuntary manslaughter.

    Births:
    1774 – Jean-Baptiste Biot, French physicist, astronomer, and mathematician (d. 1862). [Established the reality of meteorites, made an early balloon flight, and studied the polarization of light.]

    1814 – Angela Burdett-Coutts, 1st Baroness Burdett-Coutts, English art collector and philanthropist (d. 1906). [Today’s Woman of the Day, see next post below.]

    1816 – Charlotte Brontë, English novelist and poet (d. 1855).

    1838 – John Muir, Scottish-American environmentalist and author (d. 1914).

    1870 – Edwin Stanton Porter, American director, producer, and screenwriter (d. 1941). [Made more than 250 films.]

    1912 – Eve Arnold, Russian-American photojournalist (d. 2012).

    1915 – Garrett Hardin, American ecologist, author, and academic (d. 2003). [Best known for his exposition of the tragedy of the commons in a 1968 paper of the same title in Science.]

    1915 – Anthony Quinn, Mexican-American actor (d. 2001).

    1922 – Alistair MacLean, Scottish novelist and screenwriter (d. 1987). [Many of his novels have been adapted to film, most notably The Guns of Navarone (1957) and Ice Station Zebra (1963). In the late 1960s, encouraged by film producer Elliott Kastner, MacLean began to write original screenplays, concurrently with an accompanying novel. The most successful was the first of these, the 1968 film Where Eagles Dare, which was also a bestselling novel. MacLean also published two novels under the pseudonym Ian Stuart. His books are estimated to have sold over 150 million copies, making him one of the best-selling fiction authors of all time.]

    1923 – John Mortimer, English lawyer and author (d. 2009).

    1926 – Elizabeth II, Queen of the United Kingdom and her other realms (d. 2022).

    1939 – Sister Helen Prejean, American nun, activist, and author.

    1947 – Iggy Pop, American singer-songwriter, producer, and actor.

    1958 – Andie MacDowell, American model, actress, and producer.

    1959 – Robert Smith, English singer-songwriter and guitarist.

    1979 – James McAvoy, Scottish actor.

    Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you. (Ernest Hemingway):
    1699 – Jean Racine, French playwright and poet (b. 1639).

    1910 – Mark Twain, American novelist, humorist, and critic (b. 1835).

    1946 – John Maynard Keynes, English economist and philosopher (b. 1883).

    1978 – Sandy Denny, English singer-songwriter (b. 1947).

    1987 – Gustav Bergmann, Austrian-American philosopher from the Vienna Circle (b. 1906).

    2003 – Nina Simone, American singer-songwriter, pianist, and activist (b. 1933).

    2013 – Leopold Engleitner, Austrian Holocaust survivor, author, and educator (b. 1905).

    2016 – Prince, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, producer, and actor (b. 1958). [Eight years already?!]

    2019 – Polly Higgins, Scottish barrister, author and environmental lobbyist (b. 1968).

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

      Angela Georgina Burdett-Coutts, 1st Baroness Burdett-Coutts (born on this day in 1814, died 30 December 1906), born Angela Georgina Burdett, was a British philanthropist, the daughter of Sir Francis Burdett, 5th Baronet and Sophia, formerly Coutts, daughter of banker Thomas Coutts. In 1837 she became one of the wealthiest women in England when she inherited her grandfather’s fortune of around £1.8 million (equivalent to £170 million in 2021) following the death of her stepgrandmother, Harriot Beauclerk, Duchess of St Albans. She joined the surnames of her father and grandfather, by royal licence, to become Burdett-Coutts. Edward VII is reported to have described her as “[a]fter my mother [Queen Victoria], the most remarkable woman in the kingdom”.

      Burdett-Coutts spent the majority of her wealth on scholarships, endowments, and a wide range of philanthropic causes. One of her earliest philanthropic acts was to co-found (with Charles Dickens) a home for young women who had “turned to a life of immorality”, including theft and prostitution. The home was known as Urania Cottage.

      She avoided taking sides in partisan politics, but was actively interested in improving the condition of indigenous Africans, or the education and relief of the poor or suffering in any part of the world. Though she made no special distinction of creed in her charities, Burdett-Coutts was a notable benefactor of the Church of England, building two churches and endowing church schools.

      She endowed the bishoprics of Cape Town and Adelaide (1847), and the founding bishopric of British Columbia (1857). The granite Greyfriars Bobby Fountain in Edinburgh, with a bronze statue of Greyfriars Bobby, was erected by Baroness Burdett-Coutts. In 1884, she was a co-founder of the London Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, which became the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) in 1889; she also founded the Westminster Technical Institute in 1893, and was closely involved with the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA).

      In 1864, she financed the Ordnance Survey of Jerusalem; the primary goal of the endeavour was to find better drinking water for those living in the city. During this work (1864–1865), the group, led by Charles William Wilson, was able to produce the most accurate and comprehensive map of Jerusalem but was unable to find a new source of water. The Jerusalem Post commented that “Charles Wilson’s work on the Jerusalem Ordnance Survey served as the basis for all future Jerusalem research”. Burdett-Coutts subsequently helped fund other explorations in the Holy Land, sometimes in conjunction with the Palestine Exploration Fund. This effort included a subsequent offer to fund another exploration to find water for Jerusalem, to be led by Charles Warren.

      Burdett-Coutts founded Columbia Market in 1869, in Bethnal Green in the East End of London, the district where much of her work was carried out. With her project in Columbia Square she became a pioneer in social housing. Through her support of missionary and nursing efforts she was associated with Louisa Twining and Florence Nightingale.

      The Wikipedia article has further details of her life.

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela_Burdett-Coutts,_1st_Baroness_Burdett-Coutts

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