Sunday: Hili dialogue

June 2, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Sunday, June 2, 2024, and National Rotisserie Chicken Day. The best bargains in roasted pullets come from Costco, which have cost only five bucks for the past 20 years. And they’re three-pound giants that will provide at least four meals. Here’s a video about their chickens:

 

It’s also American Indian Citizenship Day, National Cancer Survivors Day, I Love My Dentist Day, National Frozen Yogurt Day, National Rocky Road Day, Decoration Day, honoring Canadian veterans, and International Sex Workers Day

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 2 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*As far as I can see, President Biden simply made up an offer that he said Israel had extended to Hamas for ending the war, and then urged Hamas to accept it. But there’s no evidence Israel made such an offer, and Netanyahu has implicitly denied it.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel threw up a hurdle on Saturday to President Biden’s declaration a day earlier that it was “time for this war to end,” reiterating that Israel would not agree to a permanent cease-fire in Gaza before the destruction of Hamas’s military and governing capabilities.

President Biden, in an unusually detailed address at the White House on Friday, described what he said was a new Israeli proposal for a three-stage road map to a permanent cease-fire. But Israel remains deeply divided over the shape of any possible truce agreement — particularly whether to commit to an end to the war against Hamas.

As outlined by Mr. Biden, the proposal did not mention who would rule the Gaza Strip after the war. Unless other arrangements are reached, that could leave Hamas de facto in charge of the territory, which the Palestinian armed group would consider a major strategic victory after nearly eight months of an Israeli military offensive.

On Saturday, Mr. Netanyahu did not explicitly endorse or reject the proposal as outlined by Mr. Biden, which broadly conformed to previous Israeli truce plans. But the timing of his remarks, first thing the following morning, seemed to put the brakes on Mr. Biden’s hopes for a speedy resolution to the war.

“Israel’s conditions for ending the war have not changed: the destruction of Hamas’s military and governing capabilities, the freeing of all hostages and ensuring that Gaza no longer poses a threat to Israel,” Mr. Netanyahu’s office said in the statement released on Saturday morning.

Mr. Netanyahu has promised his public “absolute victory” against Hamas in Gaza, but its leaders have largely managed to evade Israeli attempts to take them out. He has pledged to bring home the remaining 125 living and dead hostages, but would most likely have to accede to Hamas’s demand for a permanent truce to do so. And if he did agree to such a deal, his far-right coalition allies could pull out, threatening his hold on power.

What’s clear is that the Israeli public wants Hamas destroyed as the first priority, with hostage recovery an important but not overweening on.  And Biden really has to stop making stuff up in his attempt to get reelected stop the war, leaving Hamas the winner.

*In February I reported that a stingray in a North Carolina aquarium had been pronounced pregnant, despite the fact that there was no male around to impregnate her (see this AP story). It was either parthenogenesis (offspring without fertilization, or a miracle.) But now we know that, after considerable waffling and the failure of Charlotte the Stingray to produce offspring after twice the gestation period, it was all a hoax. (h/t Norman, Robert).

There will be no “virgin birth” or “sharkrays.” Charlotte, the stingray that showed signs of pregnancy earlier this year, is not pregnant, according to the owners of the aquarium where she resides.

Brenda Ramer, the owner of Aquarium & Shark Lab by Team ECCO in Hendersonville, N.C., told an Asheville TV station that Charlotte has a reproductive disease that “negatively impacted her reproductive system.”

A Facebook post by the aquarium did not mention Charlotte’s purported pregnancy but called the findings “truly a sad and unexpected medical development.”

Reproductive disease is common in older female rays in captivity and is already a topic of interest for aquatic vets and scientists.

The aquarium is still weaselly, though (from the second link):

Brenda Ramer, the owner of Aquarium & Shark Lab by Team ECCO on Main Street in Hendersonville confirmed the news to News 13 exclusively after the aquarium posted information on its Facebook page that Charlotte had a reproductive disease that “negatively impacted her reproductive system.” The post stopped short of stating Charlotte wasn’t pregnant.

The story has created a bit of a national frenzy following Charlotte since February when the aquarium, using ultrasound images, reported Charlotte had become pregnant on her own without a male stingray swimming around with her.

“The labs show she has a reproductive disease,” said Ramer. “That’s all it’s called is a reproductive disease and that’s the tricky part. If you just look up reproductive disease you’ll start getting, there were papers written in 2008, 2013. There are a couple of papers out there in regard to it.”

Ramer said she’s trying to get the information out to a level people can understand around possibly what happened that ended Charlotte’s pregnancy.

Ramer said she has known Charlotte wasn’t pregnant since last Friday. She said her vets have given her a diagnosis of “diapause” as to why perhaps Charlotte’s reported pregnancy ended.

Righto: no babies produced after six months when the gestation period is three months. These people are not honest, and I’m worried that the place doesn’t have the resources to treat this poor ray.

*Most Israeli hostages that have been released have remained silent, through choice or fear of damaging hostages still in captivity, but enough has now slipped out to let us know that, as expectred, they haven’t been treated kindly. One of them, Israeli Moran Stella Yanai, tells her story in the Washington Post. The only saving grace is that she wasn’t sexually abused, but she tells of other women hostages that were, and beyond that the treatment was execrable. Pretending to be Arab, she had been caught and released twice on October 7, but the third time she was taken back to Gaza.

She then climbed a thin tree, hoping to find a hiding place, but fell and fractured her ankle in two places. Limping and exhausted, she said she fell into the hands of a larger and more organized pack of militants — 13 in total — who seized her and did not let go. They ripped off seven of her rings, her body chain, her bracelets, and most of her other jewelry, she recalled, and packed her into one of their stolen Israeli getaway cars.

From that moment, and throughout her captivity, she said, she was keenly aware of her body and its vulnerability.

The men laid her down across their laps, like a hunted animal, she thought. They beat her on the short ride to Gaza, she said. She remembers trying to close her eyes, but the group’s leader pulled her hair and shouted at her to keep them open. He forced her to watch the gunmen as they glared at her and, as the rocky desert road gave way to city blocks, to see the revelers who lined the streets, cheering and jeering. She said some tried to strike her on the head as the men transferred her from the car to a hospital.

“Welcome to Gaza,” the group’s leader told her.

“They felt like they had won a prize,” Moran recalled. “It was the biggest party I’ve ever seen.”

Moran recounted being moved from house to house over the next seven weeks, with new guards each time. She lived in fear of them, she said, but also depended on them for survival.

“They didn’t rape me, they didn’t touch me,” she said.

What haunts her most are the firsthand accounts of rape from other female hostages, whispered to her in captivity. She holds their secrets, not divulging names to protect their privacy, and to not further endanger their lives.

Their stories “broke me a little bit,” she said. “But they also gave me so much strength to fight even harder for my brothers and sisters, to get them home.”

Wherever she was held, the rules were the same, she said. Begging, speaking audibly, crying, or expressing any kind of emotion was forbidden — unless ordered otherwise. In one hideout, she described her captors forcing her to perform a scene they had choreographed. Over and over, she was made to rest her face between her hands, to pout like “a lost little girl,” and use a soft, high-pitched voice when asking for food or water.

People haven’t exactly forgotten about the hostages, rather (except for Israelis) they seem to have downgraded the immorality of taking civilians and subjecting them to mental and physical torture for months.  They should ALL be returned (my depressing theory is that many are dead), and there should be NO exchange for jailed Palestinian terrorists.

*From Peggy Noonan’s provocatively titled op-ed in the WSJ, “We are starting to enjoy hatred.”

When was the last time you saw anyone try to address the other side with respect and understanding, and venture something like, “I think you’re seeing it this way, but I want to explain why I see it so differently, and that way we might both understand each other and proceed with respect.” Instead we accuse each other and put each other down and it doesn’t feel merry and high-spirited, like political business as usual, it feels cold.

Both sides have an equal but different sense of superiority. Both sides enjoy looking down on the other.

The left leans toward condemnation. It is going from “Trump is a criminal” to “Trump supporters are criminal.” They understand things the other dopes don’t. Class is involved. I have quoted the friend who said recently, with no bitterness, that Democrats see Trump voters as toothless, smelly Walmart shoppers. The left does look down, sometimes from a privileged economic position, which makes it the more shameful.

Trump supporters lean toward manipulation. They charge the other side are bad human beings—selfish elites who have no feeling for, no affiliation with, the common man. They’re coastal elites who look down on flyover states as they sip martinis in first class. Some Trump voters say his foes oppose him to go to “Georgetown cocktail parties” or similar gatherings in New York and Los Angeles. This started about a quarter-century ago but sped up with Donald Trump, and I thought at the time: Are cocktail parties still going on? I knew they existed in the 1930s and 1940s, because they were featured in the old movies I watched on television as a child. Nick and Nora Charles threw them! In my town the elites who oppose Mr. Trump don’t have cocktail parties, they doggedly attend fundraisers for hospitals and libraries and go to professional events. The most establishment Trump foes are among the hardest-working people in America. They are earnest. They run the institutions you’ll rely on if you have a heart attack on the sidewalk or a story that needs exposing or a court case that needs taking. And they drink water. At least cocktail parties make them sound glamorous and carefree.

But it really is something that we’re so estranged we know nothing of the other side’s lives, and because we know nothing even our insults are lame and need updating.

Her theory, which is hers:

But some enjoy their hatred—this is the new part, and I think pretty widespread—because it helps them avoid seeing that they are involved in a tragedy.

The tragedy is that one of two old men, neither of them great, neither of them distinguished in terms of character or intellect, who are each in his way an embarrassment, and whom two-thirds of voters do not want as presidential candidates, will be chosen, in this crucial historical moment in which the stakes could not be higher, to lead the most powerful nation on earth.

. . .This is a tragedy—that this is what we’ve got, these are our choices.

When you’ve got a major hate on, you don’t have to notice.

This doesn’t make a ton of sense to me; people like me like to hate Trump because we don’t notice that we don’t have a good electoral choice? I don’t think so; I majorlated hated Trump when he ran against Hillary Clinton, and there was more of a clear-cut choice. But Noonan is right: the division in our country is palpable and horrible. But how can I sit down with a Trump supporter and reason? Neither of us is going to give an inch.

*One of the San Blas islands off Panama, Cardi Sugtupu (also called Gardo Sugdub), is about to be evacuated due to rising sea levels. It’s 1.2 km form the mainland, and here’s a photo from Wikipedia:

Cotopaxi5897, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

On a tiny island off Panama’s Caribbean coast, about 300 families are packing their belongings in preparation for a dramatic change. Generations of Gunas who have grown up on Gardi Sugdub in a life dedicated to the sea and tourism will trade that next week for the mainland’s solid ground.

They go voluntarily — sort of.

The Gunas of Gardi Sugdub are the first of 63 communities along Panama’s Caribbean and Pacific coasts that government officials and scientists expect to be forced to relocate by rising sea levels in the coming decades.

On a recent day, the island’s Indigenous residents rowed or sputtered off with outboard motors to fish. Children, some in uniforms and others in the colorful local textiles called “molas,” chattered as they hustled through the warren of narrow dirt streets on their way to school.

“We’re a little sad, because we’re going to leave behind the homes we’ve known all our lives, the relationship with the sea, where we fish, where we bathe and where the tourists come, but the sea is sinking the island little by little,” said Nadín Morales, 24, who prepared to move with her mother, uncle and boyfriend.

Gardi Sugdub is one of about 50 populated islands in the archipelago of the Guna Yala territory. It is only about 400 yards (366 meters) long and 150 yards (137 meters) wide. From above, it’s roughly a prickly oval surrounded by dozens of short docks where residents tie up their boats.

Every year, especially when the strong winds whip up the sea in November and December, water fills the streets and enters the homes. Climate change isn’t only leading to a rise in sea levels, but it’s also warming oceans and thereby powering stronger storms.

The Gunas have tried to reinforce the island’s edge with rocks, pilings and coral, but seawater keeps coming.

“Lately, I’ve seen that climate change has had a major impact,” Morales said. “Now the tide comes to a level it didn’t before, and the heat is unbearable.”

‘One thing is for sure: more of these islands, and then those elsewhere, like the Maldives, will abandoned because of rising sea levels. Worry about your grandchildren. It looks as if humanity will be destroyed not by the Sun burning up Earth, but humans making that happen via greenhouse gases.

Here’s a video of the island and its indigenous inhabitants. There’s a shot of how it looked 40 years ago, and there was a lot of land then.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili caught a mouse. Malgorzata explains the dialogue:

Andrzej found a dead mouse on the verandah and he blamed Hili (correctly) which she doesn’t really understand because it was a gift to us from her. Though she knows that we do not like such gifts

Hili: I know.
A: What do you know?
Hili: THat you have a grudge against me for the mouse on the verandah.
In Polish:
Hili: Wiem.
Ja: Co wiesz?
Hili: Że masz pretensje o tę mysz na werandzie.

And a photo of the loving Szaron:

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From Fat Cat Art:

From Science Humor:

From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy; this one shows how all consumers are idiots:

From Masih; an Iranian woman who lost her arm, not her eye, at the hands of the cops. There are English subtitles:

From Merilee; he fought the law, and the law won (sound up):

From Luana; commentatory Briahna Joy Gray spouts a lot of nonsense, calling for a one-state solution that will include Jews, for when Hamas calls for “eliminating Israel”, it’s not about “killing all the Jews” but just getting rid of a Jewish state (Palestine is, of course a “Muslim terroritory.” How deluded can someone get?

From Simon, who says, “Not a cult or anything. .  .”

From Malcolm, who says “more than you want on your line.” Indeed: that gator is MAD!

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one I retweeted:

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. The first shows beautiful golden beetles, though I’d have to see them in their natural habitat to see if this is really camouflage:

I’m not into this game (I don’t even know how to play it), but I’ll defer to Matthew:

19 thoughts on “Sunday: Hili dialogue”

  1. In the fisherman video, that’s a crocodile, not an alligator. Crocodiles are more aggressive than alligators, but it seemed to be interested in the fish, not the fisherman.

    GCM

  2. I hope that you will do a post on the UChicago graduation ceremony. I could find only scant coverage by the Maroon as compared with the Harvard Crimson which provided full live video of their exercises. Apparently, according to local news reports, it rained. Were the protesters fair weather complainers or did they suck it up and get out in the rain? From your post earlier in the week, they apparently were organizing something. Thanks!

  3. To the nutbag who thinks Hamas just wants a “democratic country”:

    Have you ever read the Hamas Charter?

    If they are so interested in a “democratic country”, why is it that they have never held an election since 2006 when they were first put into power in an election?

    Not really expecting an answer.

    L

    1. Or pretty much ANYTHING they have said, written, shouted or exploded since 1990 – everything is all about the utter destruction of all Israelis.
      This goes for all of Palestine or, if you DISAGREE…. where is the Pal peace movement? Where are the sane ones with whom we can negotiate? Names? Orgs?

      I’ll wait…

      D.A.
      NYC

  4. As an Israeli, I wouldn’t believe Bibi if he told me the sky was blue. He’s a liar, telling everyone what they want to hear one minute and then denying it the next. He’s also unable to make tough decisions, which is how we ended up in this situation to begin with. As far as I can tell, most Israelis are actually exhausted and are worried that the hostages will end up like Ron Arad (and Israeli aerial navigator that was taken prisoner and was never returned). Hamas, as far as I can tell, are counting on the world stopping the war without them having to make any concessions (in which case the hostages will never return). Getting them back is a win, not a loss. We now control the border between Egypt and Gaza, which is where Hamas gets most of its weapons. We destroyed most (all?) of their weapons making abilities inside the strip. Many of our people spent months in reserve duty and need a rest. I suspect that pausing for a few weeks for a hostage deal will not be the end of the world, and will give Israelis a moral boost to see them back home. But again, Bibi is incapable of making tough decisions.

    P.s. I’m saying “pause” and not “end of war” because we all know Hamas will break any ceasefire at the first opportunity, giving Israel the right to continue the war.

    1. Another thing we all know is that if there is a real ceasefire, and Hamas doesn’t break it, then they’ll take Gaza back again. I don’t think you want that. And of course you know that they’re still firing rockets at Israel. You also realize that we’re not going to get the hostages back just by “pausing the war”. No, Israel will have to release a hug number of convicted terrorists and those detailed on suspicious of terrorism, and those terrorists will, like the last batch, go back to their old ways.

      I haven’t mentioned Netanyahu, as I’m not a supporter, but you don’t mention any of this above.

      1. Of course I know all that, and you are right. It’s a choice between several evils. I don’t know what’s the right thing to do, and I obviously can’t predict the future. To be honest, I’m just glad I don’t have to make any of the decisions myself. I just want whoever we can save back, and I suspect that it will never happen. There are young women out there who may be heavily pregnant by now. There are men who are being beaten and abused and, if they are still alive, there are two young children. We owe it to them to bring them back. Do I want the war to end now? No. Do I want to win? Definitely. But if we win and they are all dead and lost in the end, how will we be able to live with ourselves?

        1. It’s like the advice given by the police to people whose family members are kidnapped: don’t pay the ransom, for it encourages more kidnapping.

      2. There’s no “two sides” or comparison between what Israel gets wrong (sometimes all countries do, the parameters of wrong are important) and what Pal does.
        This asymmetry is amazing. I refuse to hear augments that treat each side’s mistakes equally – it demeans us to take “Palestine’s” moral claims seriously.

        Bibi is terrible in the way a burnt meal is terrible – Pal is terrible in the way that meal exploded and burnt your house down.
        There are no “two sides” morally.

        https://themoderatevoice.com/there-are-no-two-sides-in-gaza/

        D.A.
        NYC

  5. I didn’t know islands do not exhibit subsidence. Learn something new every day.

    1. I think it depends on the island. For example, Tangier Island ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangier,_Virginia )in the Chesapeake Bay of Virginia does undergo subsidence according to scientists. It certainly suffers from erosion and mean sea-level rise, but also subsidence due to several sources including extraction of ground water on the mainland, rebound sinking of areas on the U.S. East coast since retreat of last ice age glaciers, and compacting of fractured deep rock from a meteor impact 35 million +/- years ago.

    2. Sea levels have been rising since the end of the last glacial period twelve thousand years ago, rapidly at first than at about 2 mm a year for the last few thousand years. It is slow because the thermal time constant of the oceans is huge. Islands have disappeared in that time.
      As for the Maldives, this 800 km long archipelago is uniformly one metre above sea level. Thousands of kilometres away in the Pacific are thousands of islands also one metre above sea level. Anybody would think that there is some sort of mechanism that keeps them all at just this height.

  6. I think Peggy Noonan is stating the obvious; humans love to hate. Not for nothing did Orwell’s dystopia feature a daily “Two Minutes of Hate.”

  7. “What’s clear is that the Israeli public wants Hamas destroyed as the first priority, with hostage recovery an important but not overweening on.”
    I would like to mention a survey made about a week ago by a popular TV news program “Ulpan Shishi” (“Friday Studio”). The question was about the top priority: the destruction of Hamas vs. the release of the hostages. The results: the release of hostages 64% , the destruction of Hamas 30%. Unfortunately I haven’t found a English version of the report, for the Hebrew one see https://rotter.net/forum/scoops1/850333.shtml
    And here is a slightly older (7 May) survey, with broadly similar results: 56% vs 37%. https://allisrael.com/poll-most-israelis-believe-hostage-deal-more-important-than-rafah-operation.
    I hope I haven’t missed any other relevant recent survey.

  9. I think Peggy Noonan wants all Trump supporters and Biden supporters to be more honest about their standard bearers. Biden is an awful president, from his Janus “support” of Israel to his attempt to buy young votes with unfair loan forgiveness.

    Trump has done and said many horrible things, and I’m sure there are many we don’t even know about.

    Noonan wants Trump supporters to be less sure of themselves, to maybe feel shame wearing t-shirts and having rallies for someone with such profound problems as a candidate and as a person.

    And at the same time, the destroy-Trump-at-any-cost Democrats should acknowledge that the Trump supporters are justified in feeling passed over and mocked by the MSM and the university class. That Biden is a very weak man–weak in his morals and weak of mind and body. No one wants President Harris.

    Everyone should simmer down and be a little depressed at the choice facing us in November.

  10. I listened to Biden’s speech regarding a Gaza deal—supposedly extended by Israel—and almost immediately thereafter I began reading from Netanyahu that a permanent cease-fire before all the hostages are released and Hamas is permanently neutralized is a “non-starter.” The fact that Netanyahu responded on Shabbat suggests that Biden caught him off guard and that he may have misrepresented the (supposed) deal, leaving out some all-important parts.

    Would Israel really propose a deal that its own Prime Minister cannot back? I doubt it—unless the negotiations went rogue, which I also doubt. Either Israel did not make an offer to Hamas—and Biden is out to lunch—or Israel *does* have an offer on the table that *does* meet Netanyahu’s criteria, but the details are buried within the agreement itself. (I’ve read that it’s about four pages long, but I don’t think it has been publicly released.)

    I find it hard to believe that Netanyahu would propose a deal that Netanyahu doesn’t endorse. My hope is that there is an Israeli deal on the table and that Biden’s speech—and the world’s (largely positive) response—will encourage Hamas to accept it. That would seem to be the best interpretation of this smokescreen of confusion that one could hope for.

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