Sunday: Hili dialogue

May 26, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Sabbath for goyische cats: Sunday, May 26, 2024, and National Blueberry Cheesecake Day (I prefer cherries, but blueberries are acceptable atop cheesecake, though plain is the best if you want to appreciate the cake itself).

The Indianapolis 500 Race will be run today, and it’s also National Paper Airplane Day, Sally Ride Day (she was born on this day in 1951), World Redhead Day, National Cherry Dessert Day (the sweet cherries are ripe in Dobrzyn, but the sours won’t be ready for two months), and, in Australia, National Sorry Day commemorating 62 years of “The Stolen Generations”, involving “the children of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent who were removed from their families by the Australian federal and state government agencies and church missions, under acts of their respective parliaments.” Oy!

Here’s the Guinness World Record for longest paper airplane flight: 252 feet, 7 inches (77 meters), achieved two years ago by Kim Kyu Tae, of South Korea. (See more here if you want to fold a long-distance plane.)

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 26 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Despite the International Court of Justice apparently ordering the IDF to stop its assault on Rafah (it’s really not clear from their order), Israel continues its attack on the southern Gaza City, where most of the remnants of Hamas remain.

Israeli troops on Saturday engaged in clashes with Palestinian gunmen across the Gaza Strip, including Rafah, a day after the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to halt operations in the enclave’s southernmost city that would risk destroying the civilian population.

A statement from the Israel Defense Forces said that a cell in Rafah that opened fire at troops was killed, and several tunnel shafts were found and destroyed, alongside caches of weapons.

The fighting came after Palestinian media on Friday evening reported a large Israeli airstrike in Rafah’s Shaboura area, one of the neighborhoods located about halfway between the Israeli border and the coast where the IDF began operating against Hamas earlier in the week.

The IDF operation in Rafah, which it asserts is Hamas’s last major stronghold, has fueled further international criticism of Israel over the war in Gaza, with the ICJ issuing a significant but somewhat ambiguous ruling instructing Israel to stop military activities that could result in the destruction of the civilian population sheltering there.

Israeli officials said they consider the ICJ order to allow room for some operations in Rafah, rejecting interpretations that Israel halt the offensive altogether.

“What they are asking us, is not to commit genocide in Rafah. We did not commit genocide and we will not commit genocide,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s national security adviser, Tzachi Hanegbi, told Channel 12 news.

Asked whether the Rafah offensive would continue, Hanegbi said: “According to international law, we have the right to defend ourselves and the evidence is that the court is not preventing us from continuing to defend ourselves.”

The “genocide” accusation is one of the biggest of the many lies pervading discourse about the war: the idea that Israel (no, not Hamas) is committing “genocide.” If so, it’s the worst genocide ever committed, what with Israel evacuating civilians, sending in food, and doing its best to concentrate on military targets.  You can absolutely calibrate someones moral compass by whether they accuse Israel rather than Hamas of having genocidal intent.

*At the end of 2020 and beginning of 2021, as reported recently by the NYT, the American flag at the home of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was hung upside down. That’s a symbol of distress, but, at the time, was also used by some Trump supporters to indicate their rancor at the election being “stolen” by Biden. This is a potentially serious breach of objectivity by a judge who might have to adjudicate issues related to the election. Now the WaPo reports that Alito’s wife says that the flag was inverted as a sign of a “neighborhood dispute.”

The wife of Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. told a Washington Post reporter in January 2021 that an upside-down American flag recently flown on their flagpole was “an international signal of distress” and indicated that it had been raised in response to a neighborhood dispute.

Martha-Ann Alito made the comments when the reporter went to the couple’s Fairfax County, Va., home to follow up on a tip about the flag, which was no longer flying when he arrived.

The incident documented by reporter Robert Barnes, who covered the Supreme Court for The Post for 17 years and retired last year, offers fresh details about the raising of the flag and the first account of comments about it by the justice’s wife.

The Post decided not to report on the episode at the time because the flag-raising appeared to be the work of Martha-Ann Alito, rather than the justice, and connected to a dispute with her neighbors, a Post spokeswoman said. It was not clear then that the argument was rooted in politics, the spokeswoman said.

The upside-down flag has long been a sign of distress for the military and protest by various political factions. In the fraught weeks before and after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, it had also been adopted by supporters of the “Stop the Steal” movement, which embraced Donald Trump’s false claims that Joe Biden stole the election from him. Some of the rioters who participated in the attack had carried upside-down American flags with them.

Alito said in a statement to the Times that he had no involvement in the flag being flown at his home, which he said was briefly raised by his wife in response to a neighbor’s use of “objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”

The Post subsequently reported on May 17 that residents said the flag was raised following a heated confrontation between Martha-Ann Alito and a neighbor over political yard signs, one of which carried a profane anti-Trump message and another that carried a message along the lines of “you are complicit.” One resident, who like the others spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their privacy in a sensitive situation, said the flag flew for between two and five days.

This sounds to me like a tempest in an espresso cup. Alito’s too smart to do this as a political symbol, but, on the other hand, he didnt stop his wife from doing it in response to a fight over Trump. The tempest probably derives from the Post’s bias, but what will really count is Alito’s votes and opinions, not the direction of his flag.

*As the Wall Street Journal reports, The U.S.’s “floating pier” off Israel, intended to bring humanitarian supplies to civilians in Gaza, hasn’t gotten off to a stellar start.

An ambitious U.S. effort to get aid into Gaza via a floating pier in the Mediterranean Sea has gotten off to a sluggish start, facing many of the same logistical challenges that have throttled broader attempts to ease the humanitarian crisis in the besieged Palestinian enclave.

The Pentagon spent $320 million and engaged 1,000 soldiers and sailors to open a major maritime corridor last week, delivering on President Biden’s promise in March that the U.S. military would install a temporary dock off the Gaza coast for cargo ships to unload food, water and other supplies. Fourteen ships from the U.S. and other countries are involved in a mission supported by humanitarian groups and several nations including Israel.

But in the first week of operations, only 820 tons of aid was delivered through the pier, of which around two-thirds reached distribution points within Gaza, the Pentagon said Thursday. That is roughly equivalent to 71 truckloads—far below the initial target of 90 truckloads a day, and about 15% of the estimated minimum daily need for a population of more than two million people facing crisis-level acute food insecurity.

But where is the third of that food going? Here’s the WSJ’s answer:

Around a dozen trucks from the pier never made it to their destinations inside Gaza, according to United Nations officials, who said that desperate Gazans commandeered the aid and that the trucks couldn’t use alternative routes due to Israeli restrictions—familiar problems plaguing aid operations in the strip.

Could those desperate Gazans comandeering the aid be. . . . Hamas, which has been commandeering right and left? And if it was commandeered, weapons must have been used.  Are they in the hands of non-combatant criminals? Who knows, but given Hamas’s record of absconding with food meant for civilians, I’m suspicious.

There’s more:

“It is not flowing at the rate that any of us would be happy with, because we always want more,” national security adviser Jake Sullivan said Wednesday, adding that the U.S. was working to get “necessary security arrangements in place” to prevent looting.

One step to improving aid to Gaza came Friday when Biden secured a commitment from Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi to resume shipments of U.N.-provided assistance for civilians in the southern part of the strip.

Don’t forget that food is also coming in through crossings to Israel, and at a higher rate than before the war. Two studies (n.b., reported by Israelis) argue that more food is entering Gaza than the people actually need, but the problem is looting and distribution (a lot of stolen food, meant to be given away, has appeared on the black market at grossly inflated prices). And you’d have to be blind not to have kept up with documented reports of the amount of food diverted to the needs of Hamas in the past few months.

*Reader Rosemary Alles contributed a news item in which she finds a curious convergence:

Christ the King has met Allah the Great in service of jew hatred.
In an interesting and disturbing confirmation of the horseshoe theory, the phrases “Christ is King” and “Allahu Akbar” are both being used as antisemitic tropes. Recent events that caused the firing of Candace Owens from the Daily Wire have underlined the phenomena on the lunatic right:Quote:
“It was at this point when Owens started quoting the Bible. She tweeted the following:

Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God. Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.

No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other.

You cannot serve both God and money.

She followed up this tweet with:

Christ is King.

…. Is Owens’ use of the term any better here [compared to previous uses cited in the article]? I would argue that her use of it is nearly as despicable because she was using it to mock or troll Ben Shapiro, who is widely recognized as an Orthodox Jew. Given her comments about Israel and the Jews in the prior month, how is someone supposed to read her tweet apart from seeing it as an attack on Jews? She also implied the common antisemitic trope about Jews being all about money. If Owens and Shapiro were having a civil conversation, and she told him that she believes “Christ is King,” then I would have no problem with it, and I doubt that Shapiro would either.”

And, on the other end of the horseshoe, on the lunatic (or woke) left, we hear cries of “Allahu Akbar” on campuses and at the gates of the peoples’ house, the White House.

From the NY Sun: “As of Friday, Occupy Columbia is still going strong, with students gathered on the lawn for public prayer services as cries of ‘Allahu Akbar’ resound through the campus.”

And from the NY Post: “Tens of thousands of pro-Palestinian protesters massed in Washington, DC, Saturday afternoon before descending upon the White House to chant, “Allahu akbar” and “F–k Joe Biden” as they accused the president of genocide and demanded a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip.”

Next, Muhammad on a white horse will meet the Four Horsement of the Apocalypse at Harvard Yard. Stay tuned.

*From the AP’s ever-intriguing “oddities” section, we learn about a Thai town overrun with rhesus macaques—a canny but nasty monkey whose prevalence has made the town a tourist destination. But what’s good for the tourists is bad for the locals:

A Thai town, run ragged by its ever-growing population of marauding wild monkeys, launched an offensive against the simian raiders on Friday, using trickery and ripe tropical fruit.

Several high-profile cases of monkey-human conflict recently convinced authorities in Lopburi in central Thailand that they had to reduce the animals’ numbers.

If all goes well, most will end up behind bars, before starting a new life elsewhere.

The first stage of the plan, instituted Friday, is to bait cages with the animals’ favorite food, then wait for hunger to get the better of their natural caution.

There was early success for the catchers on one street, with three of the macaques falling for the ruse and ending up trapped because they had fancied a taste of rambutan fruit. The cages had been placed on the street earlier in the week so the monkeys got used to them and found them less threatening.

There are thought to be around 2,500 monkeys running around the town. The capture of the unlucky trio and around 30 others -– trapped in other parts of the town — slightly pared down that total.

“Slightly”? They’ve caught 1.2% of the total and the rest are going to learn to avoid the cages simply by watching.

The roaming monkeys have long been a symbol of the town, 140 kilometers (90 miles) north of Bangkok, and are a major tourist draw. They’ve become increasingly aggressive, however, with several videos of them snatching food from residents and causing injuries being widely shared online.

One auto parts shop now trades from behind wire. The owners erected it at the time of the coronavirus pandemic, but keeping out the light-fingered primates was also a prime concern. They say they’ve adapted to the monkey problem, but not everyone has.

. . . The town’s mayor, Chamroen Salacheep, agrees that the monkeys, while bringing in visitors, have also become bad for trade, with shops and malls seeing a drop in income and even people’s homes damaged. Lopburi, he said, is almost an “abandoned town.”

After they catch them (remember, nearly 99% are still free), they check them, sterilize them, and then put them in a big pen to be released later.

But the monkeys were there before the people: the people of Lopburi are living on land stolen from macaques. Give it back to the monkeys!

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s in a desperate battle:

A: What happened?
Hili: Nothing, I’m fighting with the devil.
In Polish:
Ja: Co się stało?
Hili: Nic, walczę z diabłem.

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

From The Absurd Sign Project Uncensored 2:

From the Sign Appreciation Society via Stephen (is this aimed at Hitler the Teppichfresser?):

I couldn’t help showing this picture from America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy because it’s so bizarre. And I’m pretty sure it’s real.

From Masih, we have two tweets about Iranian Islamists in London attacking their opponents, including kicking a woman on the ground. The BBC story is here, and it’s not clear that only one side is to blame. Here’s from the story:

Four people have been injured and one person has been arrested following a clash between pro-Iran supporters and anti-Iranian government protesters in north-west London.

The Metropolitan Police said officers were called to Alperton Lane, Wembley, at 18:21 BST on Friday following reports of disorder.

An event was taking place to mark the death of the president of Iran Ebrahim Raisi who died in a helicopter crash on Sunday along with the country’s foreign minister and six others.

Police said clashes broke out between the groups outside the venue and as a result officers attended alongside London Ambulance Service (LAS) paramedics.

A spokesperson for the Metropolitan Police confirmed four people were hurt and treated for non life-threatening injuries.

A tweet showing Ilhan Omar objecting to showing of the October 7 footage outside an encampment at UCLA

And one response:

From Malcolm. Guess what’s happening in the first event (see below for answer) and then look at that scary oil platform.

What’s happening in the video two tweets above? Here’s the answer:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a heartbreakingly sad photo. These people probably lived no more than two hours after the photo was taken.

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb, who didn’t leave Manchester after all. Look what this great guy did for a frog and a possum!

We’ve discussed these isopods that consume a fish’s tongue and then proceed to act like its tongue to get protection and food. Oy! This one leaves home quickly!

17 thoughts on “Sunday: Hili dialogue”

  2. Today’s Auschwitz photo is saddest and most emotional to me yet. The innocence of these children…wearing required mogen davids…so ineffably sad.

    Reply

  3. I find this Hili Dialogue – in both senses – very fulfilling?…, I suppose is the word.

    [ no caffeine yet ]

    Reply

  5. I find it interesting—and predictable—that the U.S. built food pier has encountered the same problems that Israel has had with food distribution.

    Reply

    2. The problem is Hamas stealing the food to sell. They don’t care about the welfare of the Gazans.

      Reply

  7. If you really think Alito’s flying the upside-down flag was just a tempest in a teapot, you must not know about the flag that was flown at his NJ vacation home in July and Sept., 2023. It is the “appeal to heaven” flag that is a symbol of radical Christian Nationalists:
    https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/22/us/justice-alito-flag-appeal-to-heaven.html

    I disagree that he is “too smart” to do this–both he and Thomas are flaunting their Christian Nationalist creds, though in slightly different ways. They are convinced they have nothing to lose because of their life-time tenure on the Supreme Court–with almost no chance of any disciplinary action such as impeachment.

    Reply

      1. I don’t think that has anything to do with a NYT retrofit because I’ve read/heard that from numerous media sources–centrist to left-wing. I just picked the NYT article at random this morning, although I don’t subscribe to the NYT or read it. It was just the first one that popped up. Various media must have had access to both of the flag postings for quite a while–three years for the one at his house and almost a year for the one at the vacation house. Why? That would seem more like shielding the Supreme Court from bad press than furthering anti-SCOTUS propaganda.

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    3. Will it do for those of a liberal persuasion to lecture Alito about “controlling” his wife regarding raising an upside-down Star-Spangled Banner for whatever reason, or for anything else for that matter? (Re: the “optics” of doing so)

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  9. Some aboriginal children in Australia (as in Canada) were removed from homes of alcoholic and otherwise unfit parents and put up for adoption, a policy which saved their lives. Closure of residential schools meant these neglected children had nowhere else to go. Unfortunately many of the children had been afflicted with fetal alcohol syndrome and didn’t turn out so well, outcomes which were conveniently blamed on adoptive erasure of their aboriginal heritage. In the modern retelling of these sorry events, it has become expedient in the name of Reconciliation to impugn the reputations of these long-dead “colonialist” child-protection workers who were trying to do their best under the law for these children whom none of their own people would raise a finger for.

    It is difficult to determine today whether the criteria child-protection workers used to decide to apprehend children were reasonable or over-zealous by today’s lights because of the taboo against saying “alcohol” and “aboriginal” in the same sentence. Tales of children being wrenched from their loving parents’ arms by badge-wielding officers of the Crown are really impossible to make sense of when alcohol-driven neglect and violence can’t be mentioned.

    Today we pretty much turn our faces away.

    Reply

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