Saturday: Hili dialogue

June 15, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to CaturSaturday, June 15, 2024, cat shabbos and National Lobster Day. Rather than showing a photo of a dead lobster (I hate it when they kill them by boiling), I’ll show a Japanese painting of a lobster, which Wikipedia says is a “silk painting by Nagasawa Rosetsu (長沢芦雪), 18th century”:

Nagasawa Rosetsu, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also Magna Carta Day (signed on this day in 1215), National Megalodon Day, National Electricity Day (it was on this day in 1752 when Ben Franklin famously flew a kite to prove that lightning was an electrical discharge), Global Wind Day, Native American Citizenship Day, Nature Photography Day, and, in the UK, National Beer Day (I’ll have my favorite, Timothy Taylor’s Landlord).

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 15 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*According to the Times of Israel, a Hamas official asserts that neither he nor anyone else has any idea of how many hostages taken on October 7 are still alive.

“No one has any idea” how many of the 116 remaining hostages in Gaza who were kidnapped from Israel on October 7 are still alive, senior Hamas official Osama Hamdan told CNN on Thursday.

“I don’t have any idea about that. No one has any idea about this,” he said, while denying that the four hostages rescued by Israeli forces last weekend had been abused during their more than eight months in the terror group’s captivity.

“I believe if they have mental problems, this is because of what Israel has done in Gaza,” Hamdan told CNN  in Beirut, upon being pressed on the testimony of a doctor who treated the rescued Israelis and said they were beaten “almost every day” and suffered from malnutrition.

The status of the remaining hostages is a key topic in negotiations for a potential deal between Israel and the terror group, which triggered the war on October 7, when thousands of terrorists poured into southern Israel from Gaza, killing 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking 251 hostages.

Hamas has refused to provide a list of the hostages still living, and has only sporadically provided signs of life for some captives, mainly in the service of propaganda.

As part of a potential deal, Israeli negotiators have demanded that living hostages be released before dead bodies, while Hamas negotiators have sought deals that would allow them to release an indeterminate number of bodies in place of living captives.

When I asked Malgorzata if this refusal worked against Hamas’s own purposes because it would extend the war, she said that a longer war was what Hamas wanted, for the more dead Palestinians, the more the world will pressure Israel to end the war (leaving Hamas in power), and the more that demonstrators would give Hamas moral support. And without a list of living hostages (and dead ones), how can Israel possibly begin to bargain with Hamas? But if the war goes on forever, eventually Hamas will be destroyed, won’t it? Malgorzata responded that Hamas doesn’t think that the war will go on forever: it will be stopped by the pressure of the world’s anti-Israel opinion and the withholding of weapons by countries like the U.S. I asked for more information, and Malgozata emailed me this:

Four European countries, Norway, Ireland, Spain and Slovenia, recognized the “State of Palestine”. The UN, EU and US are pressing for creation of a “Palestinian State”. All this plus demonstrations makes Sinwar sure that he is winning. And as the latest poll of Palestinian shows, so does the majority of Palestinians.

*As usual, I proffer three items from Nellie Bowles’s weekly news report at the Free Press, called this week “TGIF: This establishment accepts Presidential prison coins.”

→ Only certain monuments are protected: Protests this week took over Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C., and activists defaced the big old statues, spraying tons of graffiti and such. No one got in trouble for that, obviously. All chill. But then in Spokane, Washington, three teenagers were arrested for riding scooters willy-nilly over the pride flag mural painted on the asphalt of an intersection. Here is what those felonious, bigoted teens did to the pride flag:

But this (via Jon Hartley) is fair game and cool:

→ A grim new weekly feature: Here are the latest absolutely terrifying videos of our president. Whatever you think of Biden—be you to his right or be you throwing pigs’ blood at the White House right now (i.e., to his left)—you should want our president to succeed. To project strength, for all of our sakes. This week we have: Biden stiff, his limbs locked, and his face looking confused, for a painfully extended period of time while everyone around him dances and claps at a Juneteenth celebration. He looked like he’d stumbled out of a nursing home but into a nice background while Doug Emhoff stood by, all “I should be in a hot tub in Malibu right now.”

We also have Biden rambling a bunch of nonsensical syllables in a speech and seeming to not notice. We have him with the G7 leaders to watch a demonstration but wandering away, looking confused, alarming the other Gs, until the Italian prime minister pulls him back into the group. Four more years! Four more years!

Oy! I get readers’ comments and emails that I shouldn’t call attention to Biden’s “issues,” as that might lead to him being defeated. I think that’s a case of wish-thinking overcoming empirical evidence. I remain a Democrat, but one deeply worried about whether Biden is compos mentis.

I’m putting this up because we had a similar incident near the University:

→ New York had a weird week: The head of the Brooklyn Museum and several other museum leaders had their doorways vandalized with things like posters featuring their full names and the words White Supremacist Zionist. Also, lots of upside-down red triangles spray-painted on the doors, which is the symbol Hamas uses to signify military targets, plus red paint poured across the entry to symbolize that blood is spilled here. It’s so annoying that all these fascists call the protests “antisemitic.” These are beautiful anti-war protests. Basically drum circles. It’s not antisemitic to criticize the government of Israel, okay? And sometimes that looks like telling local Jews they should die and alerting the neighborhood that there’s a Jew there—right there!—with symbols indicating target this one for death. That’s just a policy argument, fair and square. So much bad-faith interpretation. So many sensitive Zionists nowadays. What is your address, by the way?

About ten days ago, walking to work in the early morning, I saw that someone had splashed red paint all over the windows of the Medici, a popular restaurant and bakery near campus (see photo below). I had no idea what it meant. Perhaps the owner of the Medici, Kathy Morsbach, is Jewish? The paint has been removed from the windows, but not the sidewalk.

*You win some in the Supreme Court, but if you’re on the Left you lose more often.  This happened yesterday, by the now-typical vote of 6-3, the Supreme Court overturned a ban on “bump stocks” put in place by the Trump Administration. What are bump stocks? If you don’t know, let Wikipedia enlighten you—and tell you why they were banned:

Bump stocks or bump fire stocks are gun stocks that can be used to assist in bump firing, the act of using the recoil of a semi-automatic firearm to fire cartridges in rapid succession.

The legality of bump stocks in the United States came under question following the 2017 Las Vegas shooting, in which 60 people were killed and 869 people injured.

Now they’re okay now, thanks to the gun-loving conservatives of the Supreme Court:

The Supreme Court on Friday struck down a ban on bump stocks enacted by the Trump administration after a deadly mass shooting in Las Vegas in 2017.

The decision, by a vote of 6 to 3, split along ideological lines. Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the majority, found that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives had exceeded its power when it prohibited the device, an attachment that enables a semiautomatic rifle to fire at a speed rivaling that of a machine gun.

The agency, he added, had overstepped in issuing a rule that classified bump stocks as machine guns.

“We hold that a semiautomatic rifle equipped with a bump stock is not a ‘machine gun’ because it cannot fire more than one shot ‘by a single function of the trigger,’” Justice Thomas wrote. He included several diagrams of the firing mechanism in the opinion.

The decision was a forceful rejection of one of the government’s few steps to address gun violence, particularly as legislative efforts have stalled in Congress. It also highlighted the deep divisions on the court over the issue as the country grapples with gun violence.

Although the case centers on firearms, it is not a Second Amendment challenge. Rather, it is one of several cases this term seeking to undercut the power of administrative agencies.

Apparently the executive branch simply can’t ban something like this. And I’m not sure that Congress can, as it may be considered a violation of the Second Amendment. After all, the Founders surely wanted a “well regulated militia” to be able to use the equivalent of machine guns!

*The value of Elon Musk’s pay package as CEO of Tesla has now risen (given stock prices) to $48 BILLION DOLLARS, though that faces legal challenges. How can somebody possibly spend all that money?

Tesla shareholders’ backing of Elon Musk’s multibillion-dollar compensation package helps clarify his immediate future atop the world’s most valuable automaker. Now the electric-car company has to figure out how to pay him.

Musk and Tesla face legal opposition to the stock-option deal that was passed in 2018, now valued at roughly $48 billion. The latest vote is also being challenged in court.

The company’s board has argued that shareholder support for the plan would resolve concerns raised by the judge who rescinded the original plan, potentially leading the court to reverse its decision. Legal experts say the vote won’t automatically change the judge’s mind.

For his part, Musk is enjoying the backing shown by Tesla shareholders and is trying to allay fears that he would turn his attention to his other companies—a concern among some shareholders should Musk have lost the vote.

“I just want to start off by saying, ‘Hot damn, I love you guys,’” Musk said at the start of his remarks at Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting in Texas.

. . .Delaware Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick threw out the original 2018 pay package on concern that Musk had too much influence over the approval process.

Lawyers for Tesla and for Richard Tornetta, the shareholder who filed a lawsuit challenging Musk’s compensation, are due to meet in court in early July. The plaintiff’s lawyers contend that the pay package should be voided because the board breached its fiduciary duties and that shareholders hadn’t been fully informed before the original vote.

This issue is way above my pay grade, if you will, but one thing is for sure: Musk is going to come out of this the world’s richest man, which he already is, having a net worth of over $208 billion.

*Finally, we’ve been told that Kate Middleton, the Princess of Wales, has been treated for cancer, though we haven’t been told what kind it was. That’s okay: such medical details are at the discretion of the patient to disclose. (Her father-in-law, King Charles, is also suffering from an undisclosed form of cancer.) What we do know is that she’s just announced that she’s making “good progress” in her treatment, although what that means is nebulous.

From the AP:

The Princess of Wales said Friday she is “making good progress” in her cancer treatment and will attend King Charles III ‘s ceremonial birthday parade on Saturday, Kate’s first public appearance since her diagnosis.

The 42-year-old wife of Prince William has not made any public appearances this year. She announced in March that she was undergoing chemotherapy for an unspecified form of cancer.

“I am making good progress, but as anyone going through chemotherapy will know, there are good days and bad days,” Kate said in a statement released Friday, adding that she faces “a few more months” of treatment.

“I’m looking forward to attending The King’s Birthday Parade this weekend with my family and hope to join a few public engagements over the summer, but equally knowing I am not out of the woods yet,” Kate said.

The announcement is a significant milestone, but does not mark a return to full-time public duties for Kate. The palace issued a new photo of Kate, taken in Windsor earlier this week, showing her next to a tree, dressed casually in jeans and a blazer.

The palace said the king was “delighted” that Kate will attend Trooping the Color, also known as the King’s Birthday Parade. It is an annual military parade that marks the monarch’s official birthday in June. King Charles III, who also is being treated for an undisclosed form of cancer, is due to oversee the ceremony, in which troops in full dress uniform parade past the king with their ceremonial flag, or “color.”

She’s too young to have this ailment, and I wish her well, as I do the King.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is obsessed with ants these days:

A: What are you doing?
Hili: I’m trying to count the passing ants.
In Polish:
Ja: Co ty robisz?
Hili: Próbuję policzyć przechodzące mrówki.

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

From Darwin Awards 2024!!!/Epic Fails:

From Cat Memes:

From Strange, Stupid, or Silly Signs:

Tweeted by Masih. Remember when the Taliban promised that no girl would be deprived of schooling?

Retweeted by J. K. Rowling. Seriously, is that a woman?

From my feed. I had to post this as I love the stuff from Studio Ghibli:

From Simon, who says, “We can hope”. Mary Trump is a niece of The Donald and doesn’t like him much. . .

From Malcolm, a video that’s fricking adorable!

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one I retweeted:

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. First, one of his beloved optical illusions. Check for yourself:

I want my own Hector! It sits on his finger! (Sound up.)

 

24 thoughts on “Saturday: Hili dialogue”

  1. A spiny lobster (Palinurus spp) rather than a true lobster (Homarus spp), though, in the Japanese painting. The flesh of the latter is sweeter, and of course you get to eat the claws too. I had many older people in Nova Scotia tell me how they were shamed for taking lobster sandwiches to school, as it was considered poor people’s food. Rather like oysters in Dickens’ day, things have changed since!

  2. Machine guns (or at least bump stocks) for everybody! Now I understand what they mean by the U.S.A. being a beacon on the hill. (Or was it a light on the hill? Whatever … ) It’s a lighthouse, warning the rest of us not to go in that direction.

    1. I know police departments everywhere are celebrating with
      wild abandon that SCOTUS has once again protected the
      sanctity of the 2nd amendment.

  3. Cribbed from Twitter (that thing one can spend a spare $44 billion on):

    An English kid, a French kid, a Spanish kid and a German kid are wandering downtown when they see a street juggler. Noticing that the kids are struggling to see over the crowd, the juggler stands on a soap box. “Can you see me now?”, he asks. The kids reply:

    Yes
    Oui
    Si
    Ja.

  4. I too am delighted that Kate feels up to attending the King’s birthday celebration after several months of chemo and her reported good days and bad days. My experience with six months of chemo, infusions once every two weeks, fifteen years ago was that it was generally not debilitating, but rather annoying with progressive loss of strength and immunity that accumulated over the six-month treatment period. She began her treatments young, otherwise healthy, and athletic it appeared. I do wish her the very best over the final treatments of her regimen, and over the critical five-year post-treatment observation period.

  5. “How can somebody possibly spend all that money?” By buying things like Twitter.

  6. Hamas says that nobody knows how many hostages are left. This means either (1) they aren’t being managed centrally and they really don’t know, (2) they are being managed centrally but are not a priority, or (3) many are dead and Hamas doesn’t want to admit it for fear of losing leverage. Over the course of the war, Hamas has learned that the leverage provided by the hostages isn’t as potent as that provided by dead Gazans. The world has proven this by largely ignoring the Israeli hostages and by reacting only to the numbers of Gazans dead.

    Hamas can extend the war much longer by holding hundreds of thousands of non-combatant Gazans hostage than they can by holding 125 frail and starving Israelis hostage. As Malgozata says, Hamas will extend the war long enough to get a deal that keeps them in power. It’s Israel’s job to destroy Hamas as a military and political force *before* a deal keeping Hamas in power is struck.

  7. Wrt President Biden ‘wandering off’, I saw more complete footage of the moment, and it’s no big deal. Clearly he initially participated in the photo op and then moved off to the side to chat with another skydiver folding his parachute on the ground, before he was ushered back to the group. That part has been edited out of a lot of media coverage. He’s not so camera-obsessed as Trump who, years ago, rudely pushed other dignitaries out of his way to get to the front of the line for a photo op.

    1. +1. I see no point in Democrats continually whining over Joe’s lack of perfection. The contrast with The Orange Moron is uuuuuuuge.

      1. As always, I see my brief as holding the Democrats to account. I let a gazillion other people go after Trump, about whom I’ve made my feelings VERY CLEAR, including saying that I think he has narcissistic personality disorder. He’s reprehensible and I will do all I can to defeat him. But I’m not going to use my site to bash him time after time. Many other people do that already.

        Sorry, but I am not keen whataboutery like “Jerry, stop bashing the Democrats and GO AFTER TRUMP!” And it’s not a “lack of perfection” in Biden that concerns me; the guy really looks (and talks) like he’s losing it.

    2. Yes, that’s probably right, but what worries me about Biden is not his wandering off or stumbling or hesitant walking. It’s what he says and how he says it. I’m baffled about why other Democrats aren’t concerned that he might lose it during a second term. And I”m constantly criticized for calling attention to what worries me about his behavior. I suppose it’s because people think I might drive people into the arms of Trump by worrying about Biden. My view about that is “I don’t have that power and, anyway, I want to write about things I’m thinking.”

    3. Thanks for pointing that out. (Bill Maher pointed it out on his show last night.) Shall one give Bowles the benefit of the doubt and assume she’s not aware of this edit? If she was aware, why didn’t she mention it? If Biden wishes to talk to a military service member and express his appreciation for the member’s service (as opposed to rudely pushing others out of the way for the sake of a photo op) he has every bloody right to do so. How long would it have inconvenienced the other dignitaries (and the media) – 30 seconds?

      Re: Bowles’s handwringing about Biden’s response to the dancing at a Juneteenth celebration: what did she expect him to do? Dance the Chicken Noodle Soup? The Nae Nae? The Griddy? Did Biden’s staff not serve him well by not giving him a heads up on the expectations of Bowles and her ilk?

    4. I hope PCC might reconsider regularly quoting Nellie Bowles. By doing so, he has inadvertently posted, and helped spread, fake news. If one doesn’t wish to see Trump elected, then I don’t see the point of focusing on Biden’s age in the run-up to the election. Who does it help? If Biden starts to go senile in his second term, then by all means point it out when it happens, but why jump the bridge before you’ve arrived at it?

      The argument that one’s influence is limited doesn’t quite wash: a website read by thousands of people is still part of the media, and still plays a collective part in shaping attitudes. Of course, a person can write whatever they think on their own website…just as their readers can praise some thoughts and question the usefulness or timing of others.

      1. This Reader thinks I’m fine with PCCe posting stuff from The Free Press, as it gets the same treatment as numerous stories from many other sources. WEIT readers have always been welcome to point out an error, correction, update or a link. And do so frequently.

  8. The I Love Bikes Twitter account follows Molly Cameron and other such bike racers. From that thread:

    I keep seeing:

    “It’s not happening.”
    “It’s fake culture war stuff.”
    “The far right made it up.”
    “There are about 19 total of them competing across all sports.”

    🧵Here’s a thread of males CURRENTLY competing in ONE sport: women’s cycling.

    https://twitter.com/i_heart__bikes/status/1797295411457147046

      1. “Molly” does not look remotely feminine. If you Google the name and select “images” it’s 100% a man.

        I’m so tired of this.

  9. At least part of what you republished regarding Biden has been identified in the mainstream ream media as a deepfake due to the framing editing. Biden did NOT wander off. When you see the unedited frame(which I did), you see him talking to a person a few feet away, out of the frame. And Dana Milbank in The Washington Post did a whole long column on the total craziness of Trump’s recent speeches. Your posts and published comments seem to be mostly very supportive of right wing politics while you operate under the pretense of being progressive.

    1. Yes, see above. And when was I EVER supportive of Trump? Give me a fricking break. And no, I am not pretending to be “progressive” as I think that progressive Democrats are the worst bit of the party, though still better than Republicans.

      I’m sorry to say that you’re are rude and uncivil, and apparently haven’t read the Roolz.

    2. “Your posts and published comments seem to be mostly very supportive of right wing politics and you operate under pretense of being progressive.

      Doesn’t seem like you’ve been following this site for any length of time. Other regular commenters here might ask you to make your case.

      I’ll just say you are so far off, it’s actually funny. Especially the “pretense” part.

  10. Re Elon’s money.
    It is a bit like Putin’s “wealth”. Things – especially in finance – change at scale.
    I wrote about Putin’s wealth a few years ago when it was widely discussed.
    https://democracychronicles.org/what-we-get-wrong-about-putins-motivations-and-money/

    With Elon, for decades he’s been able to buy whatever he wanted but that isn’t what motivates him I think. His big check in a few years will go towards some bigger dream (as Dr. B notes above: Twitter) or SpaceEx or some Mars stuff.
    He doesn’t need the money for a new car or higher apartment like we might. 🙂

    Seeing wealth at scale is difficult for people like us not at that level in the same way understanding the motivations of very religious people (Hamas) is hard for seculars like ourselves. We don’t take martyrdom seriously – we have no frame of reference for that. As Sam Harris has pointed out – Christian fanatics are better at understanding the motives of jihadis.

    D.A.
    NYC
    my column: https://democracychronicles.org/author/david-anderson/

    1. Musk’s biggest dream has long been expanding humanity beyond Earth. (Mars in particular, though I prefer habitats built directly in space, which is what Bezos also favors). Why? To help ensure that humanity survives any civilization-ending catastrophe that might befall us on Earth. That’s been Musk’s guiding star.

      But before that can be done, humanity must continue to survive on Earth, or his dream will prematurely die, too. That’s a major reason why he jump-started the modern electric car business with Tesla. His concerns about uncontrolled A.I. are also why he’s gone into A.I. research and computer-brain interfaces — to try to keep us fleshy humans apace with pure silicon.

      WaPo had a breathless article on Friday about Musk’s pay package, using the same hype its author accused Musk of. I responded with a comment that, of course, was interpreted as a fanboy defense of him even though I had pointed to Musk’s personal and political flaws. Musk haters made their pitch, and I responded in relatively civil tones with facts and supportable rationales, eschewing the ad hominems they are prone to. (To be fair, Musk fanboys tend toward ad hominems, too.)

      Whatever goals in space that I might share with Musk, though, I’m now concerned that he is making back-door deals with a potential Trump administration. It seems he may be thinking that an autocracy on Earth would allow him to reach his goals in space quicker and with more assurance than with a small-d democratic presidency.

      I’m very conflicted — save democracy, or save humanity? I fear there might not be a choice.

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