Thursday: Hili dialogue

May 23, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Thursday, May 23, 2024, and National Taffy Day, the best way to extract your dental work.  Here’s a video about how commercial taffy is made:

It’s also The Declaration of the Báb, International Chardonnay Day, and World Turtle Day. 

Reader Divy, who with her husband owns several hundred individuals in dozens of species, sent us a turtle for today with this caption:

This is Francis, a Malaysian giant turtle (Orlitia borneensis). We adopted him from a rescue group about 4 years ago. He is very personable and outgoing, and his favorite pastime is eating. His carapace is a little misshapen, as it should be a bit more domed, but we love him anyway. He’s on the market for a girlfriend, so we’re on the lookout for one😸:

Finally, there’s a Google Doodle today celebrating the estimable Mexican dish of chilaquiles (click below to see where the photo goes).  The lowdown on the Doodle (and the dish) is here, including this:

We have the exclusive first look at the new Google Doodle, illustrated by Oakland-based artist Chava Oropesa, which features the beloved Mexican breakfast dish chilaquiles, which means “chilis and greens” in the Aztec language Nahuatl.

Chilaquiles, a dish with a rich cultural history, was born out of resourcefulness. Instead of discarding stale corn tortillas, people began cutting them into strips, frying them up, and sautéing them in salsa. Today, this beloved Mexican dish can be found on menus in Mexican restaurants across Mexico and the southwest of the U.S. It is usually garnished with a combination of cream, queso fresco, onions, and avocados.

I like it with a fried egg or two—one variant of the dish.

My variant:

Grueslayer, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 23 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*An independent state of Palestine has just been recognized by three European countries, though why they’d reward Hamas’s attack with a state defies me. It seems meant more to punish Israel than anything else, for neither Palestine nor Israel actually wants two independent states.

Three European nations said they would recognize an independent Palestinian state, reflecting deepening international frustration with Israel’s war in Gaza, where the Israeli military was moving deeper into Rafah to shore up its control of the besieged enclave’s border with Egypt.

Norway, Spain and Ireland said Wednesday that they were taking the necessary steps to bring into effect their recognition of a Palestinian state and expected other countries to follow in the coming weeks. The move runs counter to Washington’s long-held position that a future state comprising the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem should come about through a negotiated solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

President Biden “believes a Palestinian state should be realized through direct negotiations between the parties, not through unilateral recognition,” a White House National Security Council spokesperson said in response to Wednesday’s decisions. Serious talks on a two-state solution have been moribund for years.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said plans by European countries to recognize a Palestinian state were “a reward for terrorism,” and that such a reward “will not bring peace—and it will not stop us from defeating Hamas either.” The war began in response to a Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7 that killed 1,200 people, most of them civilians, according to Israel.

Actually, many other places have recognized an independent Palestinian state, like all the light green countries in the map below:

From the WSJ

Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist group, welcomed the move as “an important step on the path to establishing our right to our land and establishing our independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.”

The United Nations granted nonmember observer status to Palestine in 2012. About 140 countries have recognized a Palestinian state, but Europe has long been split on the issue. In 2014, Sweden recognized a Palestinian state, and Slovenia said it may follow soon. Britain and Germany, meanwhile, continue to say they will only do so through a formal peace process involving Israel.

And a really dumb statement:

“In the midst of a war, with tens of thousands killed and injured, we must keep alive the only alternative that offers a political solution for Israelis and Palestinians alike: Two states, living side by side, in peace and security,” Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre said Wednesday.

In fact, this recognition won’t do squat about the issue. Where will the state be? Will they kick all the Jews out of the West Bank and East Jerusalem? How would they connect Gaza with the West Bank? None of these problems can be solved without the participation of Israel and Palestine, and not under their present leaders. See the Elder of Ziyon’s sardonic column on this, along with this sardonic cartoon showing the leaders of Ireland, Norway, and Spain:

*From the NYT we read that Biden is forgiving another $7.7 billion in student loans.  As a friend noted, “Forgiving the most privileged people in history – using taxpayer money, 167 billion dollars of it.  Surreal.  What an idiot.” My friend voted for Biden before, but won’t this time, but, like me, he/she despises Trump. This puts my friend (and maybe me come November) in a quandary.  I’d surely vote for Biden if Illinois weren’t going for him anyway, but I’m keeping my eye on him.  But to the news:

President Biden announced another round of student loan forgiveness on Wednesday, canceling $7.7 billion in debt for 160,000 people in what has become a centerpiece of his campaign for re-election.

The announcement builds on Mr. Biden’s strategy of chipping away at college debt by refining existing programs, even as his administration pursues an even larger plan over the opposition of Republicans.

Many borrowers in this round of forgiveness, who qualified through public service loan forgiveness, the president’s SAVE plan or another income-driven repayment plan, have already begun receiving emails notifying them of their approvals, the Education Department said in a statement.

The Biden administration has now canceled about $167 billion in loans for 4.75 million borrowers, or roughly one in 10 federal loan holders. The president has set forward a much bigger goal: forgiving debt for nearly 30 million borrowers as soon as this fall. But the broader program is still being finalized and could fall victim to legal challenges, as Mr. Biden’s first, far more ambitious attempt at mass debt cancellation did.

Forgiving student loan debt is a key part of Mr. Biden’s outreach to the younger voters who overwhelmingly supported him in 2020 but have shown signs of drifting away.

Of course a President is supposed to both lead but also enact things that their constituents want done, but this is neither: it’s arrant pandering. It’s simply not fair to forgive all these student loans while those who sweated and toiled to pay off their own loans get bupkes.

* Also from the NYT, and article called “On campus, a new social litmus test: Zionist or not?” In fact, I heard from two colleagues today that their Jewish relatives, in different colleges, have graduated without friends, having been ostracized because they were Jewish. And that’s what this article describes:

Last fall, a Barnard College sophomore named Sophie Fisher reached out to her freshman year roommate to catch up over coffee. Her old friend’s response was tepid, and Ms. Fisher wondered why. The two had been close enough that the roommate had come to the bar mitzvah of Ms. Fisher’s brother.

Several months later, the reason became clear.

Over Instagram, Ms. Fisher’s roommate wrote to her that they couldn’t be friends anymore because she had been posting in support of Israel since the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7. In other words, she was a Zionist. Ms. Fisher thought she had been careful to avoid inflammatory posts, but the roommate, Ms. Fisher said, accused her of racism.

. . .The protests have been characterized by heated rhetoric around the term “Zionist,” a word that typically refers to people who believe Jews have a right to a state in their ancestral homeland in present-day Israel (regardless of how they may feel about the war in Gaza). Many Palestinians and those who support them associate the word with mass displacement during the 1948 war triggered by the creation of Israel, as well as the killings over the past months of thousands of civilians and the decimation of Gaza.

Through chants, statements and sometimes physical obstruction, many protesters have made clear they don’t want to share space with people they consider Zionists — and indeed, that they find the ideology unacceptable. At the University of California, Los Angeles, pro-Palestinian students blocked peers who identified themselves as Zionists from parts of campus. Given that a large majority of American Jews say caring about Israel is an important part of their Jewish identity, these instances of exclusion have led to a debate over whether the encampments are de facto antisemitic. (Complicating matters, some of the most outspoken anti-Zionist protesters are Jewish.)

Some Jewish students on campus believe these dynamics amount to a kind of litmus test: If you support Palestine, you’re in. If you support the existence of or aren’t ready to denounce Israel, you’re out. And they say this is not limited to pro-Palestine protests. It is, instead, merely the most pointed form of a new social pressure that has started to drip down from the public square onto the fabric of everyday campus life, seeping into spaces that would seem to have little to do with Middle East politics: club sports, casual friendships, dance troupes.

Finally, there’s a quote from a U. Chicago grad student:

“If Zionists are complaining about losing a friend, that’s completely trivial compared to what the Palestinians are facing,” said Mike Miccioli, 25, a physics Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago and a member of Students for Justice in Palestine there. He said he hoped that Zionism would become socially toxic on campus.

“I think anyone who subscribes to the Zionist ideology should be viewed as you would view one who proclaims to be a white supremacist,” he said.

As goes campuses, so goes America. As the last paragraph implies, there are other litmus tests for “acceptability,” including positions on DEI, Trump, hiring by merit, and so on. But except for whom you want for President (and I admit, I have no friends who support Trump, though I don’t ask everyone). My question is how much of the “anti-Zionism” is antisemitism and how much is simply DEI-like opprobrium towards white “settler-colonists”, i.e., Israelis, higher up in the hierarchy of power. But seriously, I’m not down with comparing “Zionism” with white supremacy.

*Some fascinating new science is reported in a Nature News piece that summarizes a preprint in bioRχiv (h/t Matthew):

Genetic information usually travels down a one-way street: genes written in DNA serve as the template for making RNA molecules, which are then translated into proteins. That tidy textbook story got a bit complicated in 1970 when scientists discovered that some viruses have enzymes called reverse transcriptases, which scribe RNA into DNA — the reverse of the usual traffic flow.

Now, scientists have discovered an even weirder twist. A bacterial version of reverse transcriptase reads RNA as a template to make completely new genes written in DNA. These genes are then transcribed back into RNA, which is translated into protective proteins when a bacterium is infected by a virus. By contrast, viral reverse transcriptases don’t make new genes; they merely transfer information from RNA to DNA.

“This is crazy molecular biology,” says Aude Bernheim, a bioinformatician at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, who was not involved in the research. “I would have never guessed this type of mechanism existed.”

The bacteria has reverse transcriptase but also a mysterious sequence of RNA whose function was unknown. It turns out that this RNA folds itself up in a three-dimensional structure and the bacteria’s reverse transcriptase went around that RNA over and over again, writing a new DNA sequence that wasn’t encoded by any linear code. This new DNA sequence then represents a gene that gets translated into a protein. This whole process is triggered when a virus infects the bacterium, triggering the production of that protein (called “Neo”) that prevents virus-infected bacteria from dividing.

They don’t know how the virus triggers the sequence that winds up with the bacterium producing “Neo,” nor do we know how Neo works. But it’s clearly an adaptation to keep bacteria from being destroyed by viruses, which is also why CRISPR evolved. But this system works in a completely bizarre and unpredictable way:

The discovery that reverse transcriptase — which has previously been known only for copying genetic material — can create completely new genes has left other researchers gobsmacked. “This looks like biology from alien organisms,” Israel Fernandez, a computational chemist at Complutense University of Madrid, wrote on X.

“Their findings were astonishing,” says Nicolás Toro García, a molecular biologist at Zaidín Experimental Research Station in Grenada, Spain, and should help researchers to develop biotechnology applications for the system.

The discovery has even left Sternberg in awe [Samuel Sternberg is the senior author of the bioRχiv paper] : “It should change the way we look at the genome.”

*Finally, Nikki Haley announced that she’ll be supporting Trump in November.

Nikki Haley said Wednesday that she will be voting for Donald Trump in the general election, encouraging the presumptive GOP nominee to work hard to win support from those who backed her in the primary.

“I will be voting for Trump,” Haley, Trump’s former U.N. ambassador, said during an event at the Hudson Institute in Washington.

But Haley also made it clear that she feels Trump has work to do to win over voters who supported her during the course of the primary campaign, and continue to cast votes for her in ongoing primary contests.

No surprise there! I presume she wants a plum position in the Trump Administration (oy, do I hate those two words!) should The Donald win in November.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, birds are eating MY cherries! But I bet Hili likes the influx of starlings!

Hili: These starlings love cherries.
A: Unfortunately.

In Polish:
Hili: Te szpaki uwielbiają czereśnie.
Ja: Niestety.
And a photo of Baby Kulka, whose staff just had a human baby:

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

From reader Pliny the In Between’s Far Corner Cafe, the reappearance of Angry Cat Man (me!):

From Strange, Silly, or Stupid Signs:

From Science Humor:

From Masih, who notes that everyone dancing in this video was killed by the Iranian regime, and for trivial reasons:

J. K. Rowling is jousting again. She always wins.

A long description of Israel at the present time. The video at the end is of pro-Palestinian students going rogue at the University of Amsterdam:

From Simon, who says, “This drink has no coffee. . . . or if it does, that cat will be bouncing off the ceiling.”

From Malcolm; a friend found again (second tweet).  I’m not sure what the object is in the first tweet; perhaps a manta ray.

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a family of four murdered upon arrival at Auschwitz:

From Matthew, who says this is from a German television talent show. Only in Germany!

And another from Dr. Cobb. Live and learn!

30 thoughts on “Thursday: Hili dialogue”

  2. There’s a little joke in the “Made from nuts” circle in the Venn diagram from Science Humor.

    Reply

  3. If anyone wants to know the origin of Kamala Harris’ expository style – look no further than this sublime, ethereal, holistic humor from The Daily Show :

    “Meet Kamala Harris’s “Holistic Thought Adviser,” the person responsible for making her speeches sound more like…idea journeys.”

    x.com/thedailyshow/status/1793372466251001861?s=46

    Reply

  4. Student loan forgiveness from Biden is pandering. But so are tax breaks for the wealthy from Republicans. I could do without either.

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    1. So all wealth belongs to the State, except that slice of it they might deign to let you keep?

      Student loans are other people’s money lent to impecunious borrowers, which those other people are now not going to get back after all and the borrowers are going to be allowed to keep it without having produced any wealth themselves. Is this how you see taxation of the wealth generated by high-income earners? That their income is an ill-gotten debt to the State and the State panders to them by taking less of it “back”?

      Reply

      1. The student loans in question are federal, so those nameless ‘other people’ lenders are the feds. I have wondered if an acceptable compromise policy might be based on the principle that the U.S. federal government is not in the banking business: restrict federal student loan repayment to the principle, and do not charge interest. It has been the interest payments that cripple people who did not realize that making minimum [monthy] payments often condemns them to a life-time of student loan debt that never gets paid off.

        Reply

  5. Question for the times – why does determinism seem to be all the rage in the zeitgeist? That’s the assumption behind the hundreds of billions being poured into hardware for artificial intelligence that the human mind can be replicated on any old turing machine regardless of the substrate – are living communities neurons really machines? People regularly toss about the simulation hypothesis for smoky dorm room fun.

    Daniel Dennette was smart enough to throw the rationalists a conceit with his “free will compatible determinism” that way Dan can have his nice and rational deterministic cake, and still have the freedom of choice whether to eat it or not.

    Reply

    1. Brains have to be deterministic (or, at least, very largely so) else they could not have evolved. Brains are hugely expensive in evolutionary terms (taking 50% of the energy requirement of a developing child). They could only evolved if the the decisions that the brain makes are strongly influenced by genes, and that requires deterministic chains between gene-expression during development and decisions made decades later.

      Besides, you don’t need huge and hugely expensive brains (10^14 neural connections) to throw a quantum dice or just make a random decision, the brain only makes sense as a deterministic device computing a decision from all the inputs — just as AI does.

      Reply

    1. Susan, thanks for the link to Prof Bartsch’s tender post. President Zimmer leaves a clear and powerful legacy for the now-strayed UChicago to go back home to.

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  7. Meanwhile, across the Pond, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced yesterday that there will be a general election on July 4th, ending months of speculation about the date. Larry the 10 Downing Street cat declined to comment publicly, but informed sources say that he is looking forward to welcoming new tenants into his house on July 5th.

    Reply

  9. Loan forgiveness is looking at the symptom, not the root cause. Tuition is out of control because student loans cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. The money flowing into colleges and universities is funding the expansion of administration staff. This is the problem that needs to be solved. By forgiving loans there is even less reason for colleges and universities to reduce spending.

    Reply

    1. Agreed, university costs will continue to spiral out of control if universities can charge whatever they like and the federal taxpayer effectively just pays it on behalf of the student.

      And it’s astonishing that a Democratic government should be so keen on such an expensive policy that, nearly entirely, benefits only the better-off half of society. It’s no wonder that the “working class” increasingly look elsewhere when voting.

      Reply

  10. “Where will the state be? Will they kick all the Jews out of the West Bank and East Jerusalem? How would they connect Gaza with the West Bank?”

    Imagine a world without US power and all the answers to these questions become quite clear.

    Reply

  11. I don’t think that was a manta ray in the short clip. I don’t think it was an animal at all. It looks to me like a mass of kelp. I’ve been startled by unexpected heaps of seaweed or kelp drifting into me. It can be quite unnerving until you realize just what it is.

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  12. Perhaps we can appeal to fellow reader Divy for some Reader Wildlife Photos of her turtles? That Francis is a handsome devil, even with the flattened carapace. Maybe we could see some more?

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  13. At this point we should just end the Federal student loan program, except for collecting money for outstanding loans.

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  15. Despite what your friend says, I don’t believe that the forgiveness of some student loan debt on the part of President Biden makes him an “idiot.” Many students were promised loan forgiveness but the system was/is such a mess that they were left holding the bag. Full disclosure, I am in the loan forgiveness program and I work in public service, but I doubt my loans will be forgiven under the old program or under Biden’s current changes. I don’t think this issue is quite as simplistic as your friend thinks, and helping Trump get elected because of it seems pretty “idiotic” to me. I hope he/she doesn’t carry through with sitting out the election on the basis of this issue.

    Reply

  16. No skin in this.
    Student loan disappearing act? This could be a longitudinal study chance. What did these students actually achieve, did they contribute by other means over a lifetime. Went into business, employed staff, etc. Could be good for policy decision in some part.
    The US have blown stacks of dollars on useless wars, cost in lost lives and their lost contribution… family, local economic stability. War on drugs, how’s that going? When a prescription drug can come from behind and become a killer. More lost lives and contributions.
    Life is unfair. Born before ubiquitous modern medicine and dying before your time. Your sibling just ripped off you parents wealth.
    My point, Biden may be handing out lollies but what else is news. tRump sucking away at your democracy, we was robbed then the cost of cleaning up after him. That c**t doesn’t deserve it either.
    This crop of students got lucky.

    Reply

  17. An off-topic post for all my British cobbers – some new lyrics for the old song
    “When The Boat Comes In”.

    Who will have a Rishi on a little dishy
    Who will have a Rishi when the vote comes in?

    Reply

  18. Latin American music, mainly the tango, uses the bandoneon, which is a small instrument that looks and sounds like accordions. It is in fact basic to tango in Argentina and elsewhere where the tango is performed

    Reply

  19. Re Europe recognising a Palestinian state:

    Norway has hurt feelings on account of the recent ugly death of their treasured Oslo Accords.

    Spain and Ireland have no such excuse. Today I rang the Israeli embassy and suggested they consider announcing, or covertly threatening to announce, recognition of the independent state of Catalonia. At least the consular official got a good laugh over it.

    Reply

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