Friday: Hili dialogue

May 31, 2024 • 6:45 am

Say farewell to the lusty month of May, for it’s the last day of the month: Friday, May 31, 2024. And sundown shabbos for Jewish cats begins, and it’s also National Macaroon Day, but if you go to the link, you see a bunch of MACARONS, which are not the same thing!  Macarons are light, meringue-based filled cookies, often tinted with food coloring and flavored with almond.  They are overpriced and not that good, but beloved of culinary social climbers. Here are vanilla MACARONS:

Michelle Naherny, CC BY-SA 4.0 Wikimedia Commons

In contrast, MACAROONS, which are far superior, are real cookies, also flavored with almond, but much denser and containing coconut. Don’t they look better?

“coconut macaroons” by Stacy Spensley, licensed under CC by 2.0.

It’s also National Meditation Day, National Heat Awareness Day, World Parrot Day, and World No Tobacco Day. 

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 31 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*We all know the big news, given in a banner headline in the NYT (click to read):

A short excerpt as we discussed this last night:

[Trump’s] streak ended minutes after 5 p.m. on Thursday, as 12 jurors found Mr. Trump guilty on all 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up a sex scandal that could have imperiled his 2016 presidential campaign.

As the verdict was announced by the jury foreman, there was almost no reaction from Mr. Trump’s two rows of friends, family and aides. Mr. Trump sat slack and glum at the defense table. On the bench behind him, his son Eric shook his head from side to side. The courtroom was silent as the foreman repeatedly announced, “Guilty. Guilty.”

When Mr. Trump got up to leave court, his face looked as if he’d been punched in the solar plexus. As he entered the aisle of the courtroom, he reached for Eric Trump’s hand and they clasped their hands together. The former president left with an entourage that included his longtime friend, the real-estate investor Steve Witkoff. “He is my dear friend,” Mr. Witkoff said later. “I stand with him.”

Mr. Trump exited the courthouse in his motorcade, smiling out the window at his fans as he typically does. But days of predictions from his allies that the case would end in a hung jury or even in an acquittal did not come to pass.

In private conversations with his advisers in recent days and weeks, Mr. Trump, who was found liable by two civil juries in the last year and a half in Manhattan, had often seemed resigned to the notion that he would be convicted in this case. He has insisted privately that the verdict can play to his political advantage, just as the indictments energized and consolidated his support in the Republican primaries.

He has telegraphed for almost a year now his playbook for managing the fallout.

Mr. Trump and his allies on Capitol Hill and in conservative media assiduously prepared their audiences to be outraged, whatever the outcome. There was no need for talking points to be distributed. Everyone knew what to think and what to say. Minutes after the verdict, Mr. Trump’s allies said roughly the same thing in simultaneous posts on social media: This was a threat to the U.S. system of justice.

. . . . Mr. Trump has asserted, relentlessly and without evidence, that the Manhattan charges are part of a sweeping conspiracy against him, orchestrated by President Biden and unnamed henchmen around him. His allies, chief among them his former strategist Stephen K. Bannon, have already called for congressional Republicans to issue subpoenas to anybody involved in any of the prosecutions of Mr. Trump.

Nobody is predicting jail time for him, or even house arrest (in the White House?)  Will he have to do community service? How about if he repairs the country? Trump will be sentenced on July 11.

BEFORE THE VERDICT:

Trump is waiting for the jury’s verdict in a private room in the New York courthouse. Unlike during the trial, the former president has access to Diet Coke, candy and chips, as he waits, according to a TikTok video posted by his son Donald Trump Jr. The video shows Trump sitting behind a wooden table with snacks, including Milk Duds, Whoppers, chocolate candy bars and Lay’s potato chips.

Here’s that video. Look at all the junk food!

@digital_news777

Donald Trump Jr & Donald Trump 😎💥👏🏼 #presidenttrump #trump #trump2024 #celebrity #president #donaldtrumpjr

♬ original sound – Digital_news

And from Jonathan Alter in yesterday’s NYT op-ed section, posted before the convictions: “The best move for the Trump jury: a split decision.”

With the jury still deliberating, it’s time for those of us who have heard every minute of this trial to place our bets. My prediction is this: Donald Trump will be convicted on nine of 34 counts of falsifying business records. He’ll go down for the nine fraudulent checks he signed in the White House in 2017 — each a piece of a broader effort to falsify business records and, ultimately, to interfere unlawfully in the 2016 election.

I could easily be wrong, of course, but here’s my reasoning. To resolve differences with a split-the-baby approach, the jury might decide that Trump’s fingerprints are literally on those checks, while the 11 false invoices, 12 false ledger entries and two false checks signed by Donald Jr. and Eric are not as closely connected to Trump, though he was the one who caused the falsification of all of them.

Jurors are showing commendable signs of diligence. It would have hurt the credibility of their verdict had they returned with one too soon on Wednesday, the day they began deliberating. On Thursday morning they reheard portions of the judge’s instructions and many pages of important trial testimony. No one has any idea if they will ask to hear more.

I think Trump deserves to be convicted on all 34 counts. But reasonable jurors could legitimately conclude that they are more comfortable with nine.

And if they reach that outcome, it could have a political effect. A conviction on fewer counts would be the best possible outcome for the country, demonstrating that the jury was unbiased and carefully considered each count, dismissing most of them.

You judge guilt or innocence not with how many verdicts you’re “comfortable with,” or “what’s the best outcome for the country,” but what the evidence leads you to believe. Clearly Alter thinks that Trump’s guilty of all nine counts, and he has good reasons, but he thinks that nine “guilty” verdicts is a “comfortable” outcome. Oy! Well, I’ll take nine, but with that he’d probably get probation.

And here’s the results of yesterday’s readers’ poll about whether Trump is likely to be convicted (data as of 6 p.m. last evening). The readers were right!

From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy:

*Over at the NYT, Pamela Paul is being heterodox again in an op-ed called “Activism thrives on campus. What happens after graduation?” (It’s archived here.)

Activism has played a big part in many of these young people’s lives and academic success. From the children’s books they read (“The Hate U Give,” “I Am Malala”) to the young role models who were honored (Greta Thunberg, David Hogg) to the social justice movements that were praised (Black Lives Matter, MeToo, climate justice), Gen Z has been told it’s on them to clean up the boomers’ mess. Resist!

Imagine the surprise of one freshman who was expelled at Vanderbilt after students forced their way into an administrative building. As hetold The Associated Press, protesting in high school was what helped get him into college in the first place — he wrote his admissions essay on organizing walkouts, and got a scholarship for activists and organizers.

Things could still work out well for many of these kids. Some professions — academia, politics, community organizing, nonprofit work — are well served by a résumé brimming with activism. But a lot has changed socially and economically since Boomer activists marched from the streets to the workplace, many of them building solid middle-class lives as teachers, creatives and professionals, without crushing anxiety about student debt. In a demanding and rapidly changing economy, today’s students yearn for the security of high-paying employment.

Not all employers will look kindly on an encampment stint. When a group of Harvard student organizations signed an open letter blaming Israel for Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks, the billionaire Bill Ackmanrequested on Xthat Harvard release the names of the students involved “so as to insure (sic) that none of us inadvertently hire any of their members.” Soon after, a conservative watchdog groupposted names and photos of the students on a truck circling Harvard Square.

Calling students out for their political beliefs is admittedly creepy. But Palestinian protests lacked the moral clarity of the anti-apartheid demonstrations. Along with protesters demanding that Israel stop killing civilians in Gaza, others stirred fears of antisemitism by justifying the Oct. 7 massacre, tearing down posters of kidnapped Israelis, shoving “Zionists” out of encampments and calling for “globalizing the intifada” and making Palestine “free from the river to the sea.”

Paul mentions the number of law firms that won’t hire, or have rescinded job offers to, people who were pro-Palestinian activists. She warns that this may be a general trend in corporate America:

Corporate America is fundamentally risk-averse. As The Wall Street Journal reported, companies are drawing “a red line on office activists.” Numerous employers, including Amazon, are cracking down on political activism in the workplace, The Journal reported. Google recently fired 28 people.

. . . The toughest lesson for young people of this generation may be that while they’ve been raised to believe in their right to change the world, the rest of the world may neither share nor be ready to indulge their particular vision.

*As we all know, the war between Ukraine and Russia isn’t going so well for Ukraine, and I worry a lot that America is losing interest in the defense of a friendly and democratic ally.  Now, however, the WaPo announced that President Biden, who had previously forbidden the use of US-provided weapons against Russia, may be changing that policy.

The United States is actively weighing whether to lift one of President Biden’s longest-held precautionary measures of the Ukraine war: a ban on the use of U.S.-provided weapons for offensive strikes inside Russia.

The reassessment, several weeks in the making, is a byproduct of Russia’s renewed cross-border assault on the northeastern city of Kharkiv, a chorus of pressure from European officials and a visit to Kyiv by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken this month that reinforced the peril facing Ukraine at this point in the war.

Blinken, during a visit to Moldova on Wednesday, became the first senior Biden administration official to publicly indicate that Washington is considering a policy shift that would allow Ukrainian forces to use longer-range ATACMS missiles and other U.S. weapons to attack positions inside Russia.

Blinken said the United States may “adapt and adjust” its position on the restrictions based on evolving battlefield needs.

“We’re going to make sure that [Ukraine] has the equipment it needs,” Blinken told reporters in the Moldovan capital, Chisinau. “And another hallmark of our support for Ukraine over these now more than two years has been to adapt. As the conditions have changed, as the battlefield has changed, as what Russia does has changed in terms of how it’s pursuing its aggression, escalation, we’ve adapted and adjusted, too.”

The actions that Ukraine is taking against Russia constitute a “just war”. And yet there’s far less attention paid to Ukraine’s attempt to defend itself than Israel’s, which, though I see as a just war, is not by any means considered “just.”  This is why I’m surprised that so many people seeem to have lost interest in Ukraine.

*Lordy, lordy, and also from the NYT, which actually commissioned Philippe Lazzarini, the head of UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) to write an op-ed called “Israel must stop its campaign against UNRWA“.

While Israel has long been hostile to UNRWA, following the abhorrent attacks of Oct. 7 it unleashed a campaign to equate UNRWA with Hamas and depict the agency as promoting extremism. In a new dimension to this campaign, the Israeli government made serious allegations that UNRWA staff were involved in the Hamas attack.

There is no question that individuals accused of criminal acts, including the deplorable assault on Israel, must be investigated. This is exactly what the United Nations is doing. Those individuals must be held accountable through criminal prosecution and, if found guilty, punished.

The Office of Internal Oversight Services, the top investigative body in the U.N. system, is overseeing this inquiry. It is looking into allegations against 19 out of 13,000 UNRWA staff members in Gaza. To date, one case was closed because there was no evidence. Four cases were suspended because the information was insufficient to proceed. Another 14 cases remain under investigation.

But we must distinguish the behavior of individuals from the agency’s mandate to serve Palestinian refugees. It is unjust and dishonest to attack UNRWA’s mission on the basis of these allegations.

This implies that UNRWA is the only organization investigating itself, which is certainly not the case. Israel has evidence that a gazillion UNRWA workers were part of a network that approved of the October 7 massacre, and UNRWA schoolteachers regularly use textbooksthat demonize Jews and call for their slaughter. There was a network of Hamas tunnels and a command center under the UNRWA headquarters in Gaza city, and this piece gives more evidence of collusion between UNRWA and Hamas, all ignored by

HonestReporting, however, takes that article apart.in a rebuttal called “UNRWA head demonstrates moral bankruptcy in whiny NYT op-ed.” I’ll give only a very short excerpt from the rebuttal:

While [Lazzarini] refers to the dozen UNRWA employees who have been accused by Israel of participating in the October 7 massacre, he treads lightly: He says that UNRWA investigates Israel’s allegations but at the same time creates the impression of a false dichotomy between the organization and its employees.

In fact, he ignores evidence suggesting that UNRWA has become a Hamas front:

  • Israel has said that 190 UNRWA employees, including teachers, have doubled as Hamas or Islamic Jihad terrorists.
  • Israel uncovered a Hamas facility under UNRWA headquarters in Gaza.
  • The IDF regularly releases data showing that Hamas terrorists use UNRWA schools in Gaza.
  • UN Watch exposed that 3,000 UNRWA teachers were in a Telegram group that celebrated the October 7 attack.

Not to mention that UNRWA shouldn’t even exist: it’s the only organization where refugees (from 1948, many of whom left at the behest of Arab leaders) continue IN PERPETUITY,  so that all descendants of those original refugees also get aid and are considered refugees. It should be merged with the one organization that takes care of refugees from all other countries.

I sent Malgorzata Lazzarini’s pathetic piece, and she said this:

Today a huge store of weapons was found in one of UNRWA schools. And guess where there was a booby-trapped tunnel which killed three IDF soldiers? In an UNRWA medical clinic. But this poor lamb [Lazzarini]  knew nothing about it.

And I found the relevant tweet:

*Finally, an extremely rare blue-eyed cicada was spotted here in Illinois (their eyes are invariably red), one of the states where the double-brood emergence is taking place. The AP Oddities section describes it and shows it:

 It was late morning when The Morton Arboretum’s Senior Horticulturist Kate Myroup arrived at the Children’s Garden with a special guest: a rare, blue-eyed female Magicicada cassini cicada, spotted earlier in the day by a visitor.

A lucky few saw the cicada Friday at the arboretum in Lisle, Illinois, before its release back into the world in suburban Chicago to join its red-eyed relatives, the more common look for most cicada species, as the 2024 cicada emergence gets underway.

As the enclosure opened, the blue-eyed lady took flight into a tree. The unique bug then flew down to land on the pants of Stephanie Adams, plant health care leader. Intrigued young guests snapped photos.

“It’s a casualty of the job,” said Adams, who frequently is decorated with the bugs.

Floyd W. Shockley, collections manager of the Department of Entomology at the Smithsonian Institute, said the blue-eyed cicada is rare, but just how rare is uncertain.

“It is impossible to estimate how rare since you’d have to collect all the cicadas to know what percentage of the population had the blue eye mutation,” he said.

Actually, two of them have been found in Illinois; one from the Morton Arboretum above and another in a Wheaton, Illinois backyard, which is shown below. But they killed it!

A meme from Facebook:

From Science Humor via Ash White:

From Strange, Stupid, or Silly Signs (I doubt whether this is a real photo. . .)

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili finally caught that annoying grass stem:

Hili: I got it.
A: And now what?
Hili: I will show mercy.
In Polish:
Hili: Mam ją.
Ja: I co teraz?
Hili: Okażę jej łaskę.
And the roses are going wild at Hili’s house in Dobrzyn:

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

From Masih, explaining how she had an op-ed rejected by the NYT.  The reason they gave was ridiculous: “we don’t know why Rushdie was attacked.”

From Luana; be sure to read the whole tweet:

Ricky Gervais does a politically incorrect comedy bit:

From Malgorzata; a picture from a schoolbook in Gaza (I might have shown this before, but this is the kind of propagandizing that produces terrorists):

From Barry; cat bullying:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one I retweeted:

Two tweets from Doctor Cobb. First, a pigeon deliberately making itself inbread:

I think this hen has, like Honey, purloined some offspring from other broods:

22 thoughts on “Friday: Hili dialogue”

  1. I thought that we were good at soap opera with our Royal Family, but you guys are even better with your Trump Saga.

  2. Here is a quick example of how Derrida deconstruction can divorce any truth from reality, like the spectrum of gender and the binary biology of sex. What is a touchstone of Scientific Truth? E=mc2 Einstein. the ‘c’ in there is the speed of light in meters / second. What is a meter? Well, I had this conversation with son in law, who is a Dominican and leans woke, when I found out that a pendulum made of a rod a meter long has a period of 2 seconds. In fact the standard meter WAS going to be defined as a length with a swing of 1 second from one side to the other, until it was decided that gravity varies from place to place too much. T = 2π √(L/g) Anyway Dave insisted “it’s just an arbitrary social convention!”. So there you have it, by extension, E=mc2 is just an arbitrary social convention – from which it is a short leap to the oppressive colonial power structure or whatever.

    What’s really ironic is a universal skeptic like Derrida shutdown a speech from the Skeptical Inquirer, you’ve been out skepticized! See denialism, or Carneades, a Greek skeptic so powerful Cato the elder sent him packing back to Athens, whereas Columbia et al can’t fall over themselves fast enough to award the popular Derrida honorary diplomas.

    1. The units of the two equations are by convention, but the relations conveyed in the equations are not by convention e.g. if L doubles then T goes up by sqrt(2). So the equations convey the physics, and are statements about reality, independent of social convention.

  4. “They are overpriced and not that good, but beloved by culinary social climbers”

    Thank you! Macarons rank #1 for me in the gap between how delicious they appear and how tasteless they always are. If you want to be let down, eat a macaron.

  5. “. . . losing interest in the defense of a friendly and democratic ally.”

    I am of two minds regarding Ukraine. On the one hand, I don’t like Russia and don’t trust their intentions towards other countries. On the other, Ukraine is not our ally (we have no treaty of alliance with them), their claims towards democracy more or less vanished when they canceled elections, and everyone is friendly when they want something from you. At the same time, the mounting evidence of the last three years is that we’d probably do very badly if it came to war with Russia, especially since we’ve all ready sent so much of our ammunition and spare equipment to Ukraine, and have depleted the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. We need to stop pretending that we are Ukraine’s ally, lest we be treated like one.

    1. Do you think it’s the same with Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania? Why not throw in Poland for good measure. Russia will make a good bordering neighbor for Germany, Hungary, and Romania. Perhaps it will stabilize Europe. /s

      1. No, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary and Romania actually are our allies.

    2. Seeing how Ukraine is currently fighting the war that, unless they fend off Russia, will inevitably have to be fought in the Baltic states or Poland, the Ukraine is effectively a Western ally, and we should do what is necessary to keep them from losing.

      1. “will inevitably have to be fought in the Baltic states or Poland”

        Sure, let’s assume that Russia has the desire to invade Poland, or the Baltics, or even Germany. Let’s also assume as true the often-asserted yet unprovable claim that Russia’s incursion into Ukraine is about colonial expansion and a recapturing of the former territories of the USSR and countries of the Warsaw Pact rather than about historical and geopolitical considerations unique to Russia and Ukraine. Let’s grant all that for sake of argument.

        Will alone is insufficient; military capability is required. What specific military capabilities will Russia use to invade or otherwise attack NATO member countries? Russia can barely hold or advance in Ukraine. They can’t even establish air superiority there. We are to accept that they can roll into Poland? Germany? Against US-led opposition? Perhaps they will release the full fury of their air force, mostly kept in reserve in the current conflict. Perhaps they would do so knowing that the NATO countries will not hesitate to respond in kind against Russian territory. Really?

        Nonsense. This fearmongering of Russia rolling further west into NATO is a version of the mentality that gave us gems such as “you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” or “we fight them there so that we don’t have to fight them here.” It’s propaganda. There are legitimate arguments to be made about US support for Ukraine, but “Poland is next if we don’t act” is not one of them. Domino theory redux is no more credible than the original.

        1. Yes, let us assume that – not just for the sake of argument, but because that would be in line with everything Putin has said and done for the last decades.
          Yes, as it currently stands, Russia would not be capable of invading any NATO states – but why is that? Only because Ukraine has been trained and equipped by Western nations, and because their leadership turned out much more capable and stubborn than anyone had a right to hope. Imagine that Russia had rolled over Ukrainian resistance in the first couple of days, installed an obedient puppet regime and essentially taken over the country with its industry and its army – can you imagine the situation Europe would be in then?
          Since the war has started, Russia has pretty much switched over to all-out wartime economy and drafted increasing numbers of soldiers. Assume that the West stops its support, Ukraine eventually folds to the pressure, and Russia conquers the country. Do you think that’ll be the end of it? Especially if – ceiling cat forbid – a US president is elected who is willing to throw NATO allies under the bus if he doesn’t feel they don’t deserve to be defended?

        2. They should not get away with invading Ukraine period.

          If they do, look forward to China taking Taiwan.

          1. The U.S. is so concerned about Taiwan. Where was that exceptional American concern when the U.S. broke off diplomatic relations with Taiwan and established relations with mainland China (as part of the U.S. – Nixon and Kissinger – effort to counter and contain the USSR) in the early 70’s?

            Do you have an opinion about the U.S. using Ukraine as a means of countering and containing and minimizing Russia? Is the great concern driven by Russia’s efforts to expand westward? Or by the U.S.’s/NATO’s effort to expand eastward over the last three decades?

            Does Russia have a legitimate claim to a “sphere of influence”? Or is the U.S., by virtue of its “Exceptionalism,” the only country worthy to claim a “sphere of influence”? (Re: the Monroe Doctrine.)

            Let some European or Asian power (attempt to) establish a military alliance in the Americas and see how the U.S. reacts. (Re: the 10/62 Cuban Missile Crisis.) The current state of Taiwan-China affairs emanates from the Chinese civil war of the late 1940’s. Imagine some foreign trying to insert itself into or into the aftermath of the U.S. civil war.

            Any curiosity about who sabotaged the Nordstream pipeline?

    4. If you don’t like Russia, why are you so down on a war that is depleting Russia’s military strength and impacting its economy? Let’s remember that at the start of the conflict everyone expected Russia to quickly steamroll Ukraine. Now everyone—aside from you—realizes that Russia is a weaker force than we thought.

      Also, Ukraine was an unofficial ally of the US before the war. And considering that the country is being invaded and under martial law at the moment, it’s silly to kvetch about the presidential election being postponed.

      1. It has been long known that apart from its nuclear arsenal Russia has always been weaker and less prepared for conventional combat, this was further confirmed at the end of the Cold War when it was realised particularly that the fear of Russian armoured divisions invading Germany was just that, fear.

  7. Sentencing predictions? Well, He deserves at least as much jail time as Michael Cohen got. But he will likely get 1 year in jail. If he behaves himself like a good boy, maybe they’ll let him finish it out halfway at Mar-a-Gaolo.

    BTW, do the naysayers on this site, wrt the validity and appropriateness of this trial, realize that they are selling the Judge and Jury short?

  8. I have read about UNRWA. My, what a scumbag organization.
    Really, not an inept characterization. The lying that comes from its leaders is beyond the beyond.

  9. While everyone is predicting no jail time for the Great Orange Turd, I think there is an argument for it – Michael Cohen has served time for essentially the same actions (albeit prosecuted under different law). It doesn’t sent the right message if the Head Crook gets a slap on the wrist.

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