Sunday: Hili dialogue

June 23, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Sunday, June 23, 2024, and National Pecan Sandies Day, referring to one species of a “sandie“, a sugar cookie. Here’s a particularly good version of a cookie that’s usually dry: lemon pecan sandies with nuts on top:

torbakhopper, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also National Hydration Day, so don’t forget to carry around your bottle of water to suck on, International Widows’ Day, SAT Math Day (it’s coming back), National Detroit-Style Pizza Day (read about it here; it’s not worth considering unless you lack access to Chicago or New York pizzas), Pink Flamingo Day, Saint John’s Eve and the first day of the Midsummer celebrations (although this is not the real summer solstice), and United Nations Public Service Day.

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

Da Nooz:

*The NYT has a guest op-ed by Michael LaRosa, identified as “a former special assistant to President Biden and a former press secretary for Jill Biden.”  And LaRosa is worried that Trump could pick a certain running mate who could damage Biden in blue states like Pennsylvania (LaRosa’s home). Who is it?

There is one person on Donald Trump’s reported shortlist of running mates who has the ability to carve a Pennsylvania-shaped slice out of the so-called blue wall of Rust Belt states that Democratic presidential candidates typically need to win: Senator Marco Rubio of Florida.

That sound you’re hearing is the collective explosion of heads from my friends in the Democratic Party, followed by admonitions that “Latinos do not vote as a monolith.” That’s true: Cuban, Venezuelan, Dominican and Mexican Americans, as well as Puerto Ricans, do not vote in unison.

But there is something Latino voters have in common: their Latin American roots and the pride that comes from casting a vote for someone who looks and talks like them. Mr. Rubio would break a significant cultural barrier as the first Latino on a national ticket. We’ve seen how that feeling of cultural and identity pride can marshal voters and transcend ideological and partisan preferences, and it should never be underestimated.

Seldom do running mates play an outsize role in our presidential contests, as most voters focus on the top of the ticket. But Mr. Rubio gives Mr. Trump something no other presidential candidate has offered — the chance for Latinos to vote for one of their own to be a heartbeat away from the presidency.

. . . To understand just how much of a threat Mr. Rubio would pose to Democrats, let’s consider the conventional wisdom: Mr. Trump is likely to win back some Sun Belt states he lost in 2020, while Mr. Biden is holding his own in the Rust Belt. But if Mr. Biden loses Pennsylvania, it would almost certainly be curtains for his campaign.

. . . If even a fifth of Pennsylvania’s roughly 615,000 eligible Latino voters back Mr. Trump, they could easily swing the state to the red column. Most political strategists agree that the state will be won by a slender margin in November.

Now LaRosa concentrates on Pennsylvania, and I’m not sure what effect Rubio’s choice for VP would have on votes elsewhere.  I’m no pundit!  But I did hear on last night’s NBC News that Trump had narrowed his choice of VP down to three candidates—and one of them is Rubio.

*The Washington Post has a lame article about how this week’s Presidential-candidate debate might change the probabilities of Biden and Trump. DUUUH! But I do have a sense that this one is especially important, as voters will be looking for signs of senility in Biden and of insanity in Trump. They both need to be steady and hinged rather than unhinged (I don’t know if the latter is possible with Trump).  But here’s what scares me:

Recently, there has been some movement, in Biden’s direction. It has come since Trump was convicted of 34 felony charges in the New York trial involving hush money payments to an adult-film actress and the falsification of business records. The movement is incremental at best, leaving the two candidates still in a statistical dead heat nationally. The battleground states remain competitive, though Trump has had a narrow advantage in more of them than Biden this year.

An aggregation of national polls in June, compiled by The Post’s polling unit, currently shows Biden leading Trump in a two-way race by two-tenths of a percentage point. In March, just ahead of the president’s State of the Union address, Trump was leading by 1.2 percentage points. With third-party candidates included, the current poll average shows the two tied, compared with a Trump lead of six-tenths of a percentage point in May. Overall, a small change.

One closely watched polling average produced byFiveThirtyEight showed Biden leading Trump by two-tenths of a percentage point, 40.7 percent to 40.5 percent as of Friday. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was at 9.7 percent in this aggregation. On the day before his conviction in New York, Trump was leading in this average by 1.2 percentage points.

Another popular poll aggregator, RealClearPolitics, shows Trump leading by half a percentage point. Just ahead of Biden’s State of the Union, Trump’s lead was 2.3 percentage points; on the day before his conviction, his lead was 1.2 percentage points. With third-party candidates included, Trump leads by 1.3 percentage points. RealClearPolitics noted on Friday — perhaps as a reality check to remind people that 2024 is not 2020 — that at this time in 2020, its average of polls showed Biden leading Trump by 9.8percentage points.

Here’s an aggregate of the polls from yesterday afternoon’s FiveThirtyEight:

It’s a squeaker, and Biden’s 0.2% advantage doesn’t hearten me much. Not only do I have to worry about Trump being elected, but, even if he’s not, I have to worry about him pulling another “Stop the Steal” stunt with all that that entails.  Oy, my kishkes!

*From the WSJ, a title that discombobulated me a bit: “America is running out of options in the Gaza war.”  This implies that it’s our war, but that’s not what’s important. What’s important is that Biden’s strategy seems to be aimed at assuring not Israel’s victory, but Biden’s in November:

When war erupted in Gaza last year, the Biden administration hoped to keep the conflict short, stay closely aligned with Israel and stem the war’s spread to Lebanon and other parts of the Middle East.

Eight months later, achieving those goals is proving increasingly difficult for the White House, highlighting a political vulnerability for President Biden ahead of his face-to-face debate against the presumed Republican nominee, Donald Trump, on Thursday.

U.S.-led talks on a cease-fire to halt the war and free hostages held by Hamas have all but collapsed. Attacks by Hezbollah across Israel’s northern border have intensified, raising the Biden administration’s fears of a full-fledged conflict. And the White House and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have traded accusations over whether the U.S. has slowed arms deliveries.

The strains underscore Biden’s challenge of achieving a foreign-policy win ahead of the November U.S. presidential election, a win that would require agreement from warring parties operating under a very different timeline.

The Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar has shown little interest in concluding a swift cease-fire, and Netanyahu’s opposition to a Palestinian state has sidelined the Biden administration’s broader strategy for the region, including stabilizing a postwar Gaza.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaking at a cemetery in Tel Aviv on Tuesday. PHOTO: SHAUL GOLAN/PRESS POOL

Eventually the leaders will tire of war and favor a deal, but not as quickly as Biden hopes. “Their clocks are not synchronized with Biden’s,” said Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “They are much more in line with one another, and they are ticking much more slowly.”

I’ve written many times how I think Biden is misguided in trying to get a ceasefire, implementing a strategy that would keep Hamas in power while Israel has to release thousands of Palestinian terrorists from its jails to get back the hostages (of whom only 50 may still be alive) and their bodies.  Biden told Israel that invading Rafah was a “red line” that should not be crossed, but then changed his mind.  And Blinken is constantly shuttling to Israel trying to talk the War Cabinet (now just Netanyahu) into simply stopping the war, ensuring that Israel would lose.  This only makes sense in light of Biden’s strategy being aimed at, as the article above implies, ensuring his re-election. I consider manipulating somebody else’s war so you can stay in power unethical at best.  I do appreciate America remaining as Israel’s ally, and supplying it with the tools of war, but Biden’s public waffling about the war has confused me.

*The Free Press proclaims that “Astronomers may have found life beyond Earth.”  “May have found life”?  What’s the evidence for that?  Here it is:

A few months ago, the space telescope hoovered up several as-yet-unreleased images of K2-18b, an exoplanet—meaning a planet outside our solar system. K2-18b is 120 light-years from Earth and, importantly, resides in the habitable, or Goldilocks, zone around the star it orbits. Not too hot, not too cold, it may be just the right temperature for an Earth-like atmosphere that might—might—include life.

Until the 1990s, human beings didn’t know exoplanets existed. Now, we know there are 5,000-plus in our galaxy alone; in the wider universe, astronomers believe there may be as many as 40 billion in the habitable zone.

“There might be simple life all throughout the galaxy,” Jessie Christiansen, an astrophysicist at Caltech and chief scientist at the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute, told me. She meant microbes, bacteria, single-celled organisms.

Alexei Filippenko, a UC Berkeley astronomer, told me in an email: “If there is life on K2-18b, it would demonstrate that life on Earth is not unique—a very important discovery.” He added: “Perhaps it would change the religious outlooks of some people, but not others. It depends on whether one subscribes to the belief that God made Earth unique in terms of life.”

Whether there is intelligent life is the big question, Jessie Christiansen said. That is, organisms with brains or brain-like structures.

Astronomers are now poring over the images from the James Webb Space Telescope, and in a few months we’ll know whether the molecule dimethyl sulfide is found in K2-18b’s atmosphere. If it is, the odds that there’s life on K2-18b will have jumped.

Well, I’d bet a lot that there is some other planet that has life on it in our Universe—there simply must be, unless you think God chose only Earth for life.  And dimethyl sulfide is a biogenic compound, found on Earth only when produced by plants, algae, or bacteria. Wikipedia repeats this claim, which isn’t new:

On September 12, 2023, NASA announced that their investigation into exoplanet K2-18b revealed the possible presence of dimethyl sulfide, noting “On Earth, this is only produced by life.”

The question is whether on other planets the molecule can be produced abiogenically—in the absence of life.  I’d guess no, but we’re far from knowing everything about other planets!

*I’ve always maintained that when it comes to writing about the war between Israel and Hamas, the NYT’s Tom Friedman is about the dumbest analyst out there. Now The Elder of Ziyon has a good takedown on the stupidity of Thomas Friedman (the title of the Elder’s piece is “How stupid is Thomas Friedman? (How wet is water?)”  Friedman’s statements are doubly indented below.

My estimation of Friedman keeps going even lower.

From his latest idiocy:

Yes, yes, I can hear the criticism from the war hawks right now: “Friedman, you would let Hamas’s leader, Yahya Sinwar, come out of his tunnel and declare victory?”
Yes, I would.In fact, I wish I could be at the news conference in Gaza when he does, so I could ask the first question:

“Mr. Sinwar, you claim this is a great victory for Hamas — a total Israeli withdrawal and a stable cease-fire. I just want to know: What existed on Oct. 6 between you and Israel, before your surprise attack? Oh, let me answer that: a total Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and a stable cease-fire. If you don’t mind, I’d like to stick around for a few days to watch you explain to Gazans how you started an eight-month war — causing the destruction of roughly 70 percent of Gaza’s housing stock and leaving, by your count, some 37,000 Gazans dead, many of them women and children — so you could get Gaza back to exactly where it was on Oct. 6, in a cease-fire with Israel and no Israeli troops here. Another Hamas victory like this and Gaza will be permanently unlivable.”

I have a news flash for Tom Friedman: Gaza is not a democracy. Yahya Sinwar has never given a press conference in his life and he never will. He isn’t afraid of reporters’ questions because he would kill any reporter who manages to publicly ask him something that would make him look bad.

Every reporter in Gaza knows this, but somehow the great  award-winning Tom Friedman hasn’t quite grasped that

And to Israelis who would ask, “Friedman, are you crazy, you would let Sinwar run Gaza again?” my answer would again be — yes, for now.

And who, pray tell, would remove Sinwar sometime in the future?  I guess that’s a “day after” question that he doesn’t need to answer.

The only people who can defeat Hamas are the Palestinians of Gaza. They, too, need better leadership, and if they find it, we should help them rebuild. But until then, Israel would be crazy to want to stay in Gaza and be responsible for its reconstruction. That honor should go to Sinwar.

Moron. That “honor” goes to the UN and EU NGOs who are happy to pick up the pieces,  every time, and reward Hamas terror without doing a thing to effect change.

It goes on, giving more examples of Friedman’s ignorance about the war.  To think the man would approve of Sinwar running Gaza again! Yes, moron is not far wrong.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Andrzej have a conversation through the window:

Hili: Yes, that’s the right decision.
A: But you don’t know what I’m doing.
Hili: I can see it on your face.
In Polish:
Hili: Tak, to właściwa decyzja.
Ja: Przecież nie wiesz co ja robię.
Hili: Widzę po wyrazie twojej twarzy.

And a photo of the affectionate Szaron:

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

From Cat Memes; it’s the kitten’s birthday!

From Strange, Stupid, or Silly Signs:

. . . and from Science Humor, which apparently reproduced a panel from Ellen Woodbury’s Pizzacake Comics (check out the Instagram site; it’s a good comic, and donate at this Patreon site)

Masih posted a retweet by J. K. Rowling of some good news from Iran:

From Luana. Here’s a sociological and moral dilemma; should parents be told if their kids come out as trans, uses different pronouns, or uses a different name in school? Senator Wiener says that it’s purely the kids’ responsibility when and to whom they “come out.”

. . . and another dilemma discussed by Ayaan Hirsi Ali (I reported about the rape, committed in a northern suburb of Paris, the other day).  Should the ethnicity of the accused be revealed? Does it matter what age they are? Certainly the names of the accused should be revealed, and in this case that would reveal what Hirsi Ali suspects: the adolescents who raped the young girl were Muslim.

From my feed. It’s very sad and you may well tear up.

From Simon and retweeted by Larry the Cat. I hope that bloke took the cat home!

From the Auschwitz Memorial; one I retweeted:

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb, on a work/holiday week off. Oy, I have to dig through old tweets he sent me! The first one was before my time, and I never rejoice when someone dies, but this is an exception:

Twins! Look at the white spots on the back of their ears, too.,

31 thoughts on “Sunday: Hili dialogue”

  1. Yes. For sure do not underestimate the identity vote for Rubio. I don’t have statistics, but anecdotally I do recall how our local Jewish community was all in for that asshole Joe Lieberman when he was dem vp nominee some years ago. It was pure misplaced pride identity politics. And in a race that is sensitive to a few percentage points in such a nonlinear way with electoral college, this is a Big deal.

    1. …that asshole Joe Lieberman…

      I don’t know anything about him; in fact, this is the first time I heard of him. But I’m interested in knowing why you called him what you did.

    2. You must also take into account that, if Trump picks Rubio, Rubio stands a good chance of being the first Hispanic President.

    3. VPs don’t matter. And most states with a lot of Electoral votes and heavy Hispanic populations: CA, AZ, TX, FL won’t swing on Rubio (and if TX of FL does swing, it won’t be Rubio’s doing…or misdoing).

  3. >I’d bet a lot that there is some other planet that has life on it in our Universe

    I always wanted to believe that there is life elsewhere in our universe. Then I read a paper that dashed my hopes completely.

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1892545/

    The author is Eugene Koonin, a well-respected molecular biologist. This is a speculative paper proposing a solution to the problem of abiogenesis. Until I read this paper, I didn’t appreciate quite how MUCH of a problem abiogenesis is. Koonin does the math. In a nutshell, the odds that abiogenesis has occurred more than once in the observable universe are effectively nil.

    Yea, yea, as I’ve learned, this is an argument that creationists make. But Koonin is emphatically not a creationist, and the fact that creationists seize on the genuine improbability of abiogenesis to ‘prove’ God exists doesn’t mean it’s not a real problem. In fact, the purpose of the paper is to propose that modern cosmology provides a solution to the problem of abiogenesis – one that just incidentally utterly negates any supposed need to resort to a ‘creator.’

    Another paper that goes over essentially the same ground is “Emergence of life in an inflationary universe” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-58060-0

    I’d be interested in other opinions about this.

    1. The key assumption in that paper is that, to get started, life required the by-chance occurrence of an exactly-specified length of RNA more than 100 nucleotides long (with each nucleotide containing ~ 50 atoms, this amounts to the chance occurence of an exact sequence of ~ 5000 atoms).

      Hence this calculation requires the ruling out of anything simpler as being the first self-replicating molecule. Can we rule that out? Do we know enough the possibilities to properly do such a calculation?

      1. Given an infinite number of monkeys and an infinite number
        of typewriters….you know the rest.

    2. This argument smacks of the concept of “specified complexity” and “irreducible complexity” used by intelligent design advocates like William Dembski. These ideas have been refuted and are considered pseudoscience. Essentially the process of abiogenesis is not understood well enough to ascribe probabilities.

      1. The linked Koonin article explains why it is different from the problem of irreducible complexity.

    3. As others have said, the model resembles some creationist models which also conclude that it’s impossible. But what this and what creationists fail to take into account is that no origin-of-life researcher proposes this sort of all-or-none event.

    4. Just looking at Koonin’s paper at arms-length for starts, very interesting that the reviewers are named, and that their comments appear at the end along with his replies.

  4. “As voters will be looking for signs of senility in Biden and of insanity in Trump”
    Your phrasing made me laugh. It’s true. Incredible that these are our only viable options.

  5. If you don’t want Trump to win, and you want Hamas eliminated, what you need is Michigan (200k Arabs). That means, for the next 130 days: low-intensity war in Gaza, endless negotiations, and a lot of PR.

    1. This might be saying the quiet part out loud but I think you mean 200k Muslims, not Arabs, in Michigan. There are many Somali Muslims and Pakistani Muslims in North America, as well as Turkish, Slavic, and Indonesian Muslims and, of course Arab Muslims. I don’t think East African and South Asian Muslims have any skin in the game as far as land and political self-determination in Palestine goes. Rather the loud Muslims in North America seem united in the religious cause of making Palestine Judenrein. The Persian fugitives from Iran are a notable and vocal exception.

      At the March with Israel on June 9 in Toronto, most of the keffiyeh-swathed pro-Hamas protesters had deep brown skin. (It was a hot day. Most were wearing short pants and short-sleeved shirts as they raised their clenched firsts at us and jeered at us in unaccented English.) And of course, the great sin the government wants to punish is “Islamophobia”, not “Arabophobia.”

    1. The coward he is and in his afterlife hell
      for his crimes he gets a BIG pineapple inserted up his anus every morning…
      See Little Nicky (YouT) for visual verification.

  7. Biden has been tacking from almost the beginning of the war. Helping Israel, putting the brakes on Israel, stating that his support is “ironclad,” then slow-walking the weapons needed to demonstrate that support. He clearly hoped that he could influence events that were mostly out of his control: delivering a quick win for Israel, followed by a cease-fire and, perhaps, by negotiations towards a two-state solution. All of that was calibrated so that Biden could get credit for a major foreign policy victory in November.

    The prize in November is the only thing that can explain Biden’s erratic behavior. He is trying to engineer events in Gaza and the timing of those events so that everything will turn out roses in November. I think he wants Israel to win, but he wants whatever victory he can eke out to be on his November timeline.

    The U.S. President might be able to bully Israel in normal times, but not this time, with Israel’s very existence at risk. Israelis can be counted on to defend their country with uncompromising tenacity.

    Oh. And one more thing. Friedman is a moron and I read that Biden listens to him.

  8. “I never rejoice when someone dies” – you’re a better man than I. I have a short list of people whose demise I fully plan to celebrate. I even promised to drink a glass of Champagne for one of them, and I don’t ever drink alcohol.

  9. There’s a major constitutional problem if Trump picks Rubio. Trump made a big deal some years ago about how he was changing his residency from New York to Florida because NY was such a horrible place (and, from his perspective, it just got much worse!). Rubio is also a Floridian. The 12th Amendment says that electors shall vote for President and Vice President “one of whom, at least, shall not be inhabitants of the same state with themselves.” That means that the Florida electors could not vote for both Trump and Rubio. I suppose that Trump could simply announce that he was changing his residency back to NY, but would his pride let him become a resident of the state where he was convicted of a felony?

    1. I’m sure that the Supreme Court can cobble together an interpretation of what the authors ‘really’ meant to say in the 12th. to bypass objections. It is after all only the 2nd. that is set in stone: all the rest are flexible enough to remain in line with whatever the current Republican aims may be.

      1. Will SCOTUS cobb together quickly enough? Or does it matter? Will the Florida Republicans tolerate risking having to sit out the Electoral College portion of the election? I guess there can always be at least one more lawsuit to which Trump is a party.

  10. “They both need to be steady and hinged rather than unhinged (I don’t know if the latter is possible with Trump).”

    So true and the country doesn’t know if steady is possible with Biden. Especially since he has given no in-depth interviews with serious journalists. Even Biden’s booster the NYT admits that.

    https://www.nytco.com/press/a-statement-from-the-new-york-times-on-presidential-news-coverage/

    “For anyone who understands the role of the free press in a democracy, it should be troubling that President Biden has so actively and effectively avoided questions from independent journalists during his term. “

    As the kids say, break out the popcorn

    1. “So true and the country doesn’t know if steady is possible with Biden. Especially since he has given no in-depth interviews with serious journalists. Even Biden’s booster the NYT admits that.”

      I’m tired of this drivel on WEIT and elsewhere, but here we go. You obviously don’t follow or watch Biden. He’s making speeches all the time, travelling everywhere in America and abroad. In fact, you’re guy Trump complained that he’s using Airforce One like a taxi. I suspect you’ve watched the cheap video fakes of late. And you think NYT is his booster? What nonsense. NYT is only about money nowadays, they don’t care if Trump wins. And NYT hasn’t gotten an in-depth interview because Biden doesn’t want to go there. What’s wrong with that? He’d rather talk to Howard Stern- you catch any of that amazing interview? That last quote is just a privileged news outlet who is appalled that they ain’t all that. And where the hell do you think Trump stands on answering questions from independent journalists during his term? Do you forget he and his staff failed to do a press briefing in his last year in office for 300+ days (and don’t blame Covid)? Like I said above, tired of having to point out the obvious to the new group of WEIT Trumpsters. Anyone who thinks there is even a legitimate comparison between Trump and Biden are simply lost in the cult of personality that is Trump. Trump ain’t gonna win people, unless something really does get stolen. Get outta Biden’s way, give him a full Congress and let’s get shit done! For one thing, codify a woman’s right to her reproductive freedom, and don’t let a single Federalist Society sycophant ever be seated on the Supreme Court again. It’s an unspeakable travesty that there’s a majority of these religious zealots with a theocratic political agenda sitting on the bench. And Trump planted foolish, unqualified, theocratic sycophants all over America’s judiciary. Dontcha get it, people?

  11. Hypothesis: there is a significant probability that Trump will win the presidency again in 2024, and his bootlickers will win power in Congress.
    Argument against. Trump and his bootlickers will both lose because Trump has antagonized a majority of the independent voters, who are essential for any electoral victory outside the deep south. See: Peter Zeihan at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFPuv_OZDg0 .

    Argument for. Performances by the pop-Left (at the Democrats’ national convention this summer, and various other theatrical venues) will create in the public mind an association between chaos and the Democratic Party, which will tilt presidential and other elections to the Republicans. See: 1968.

    1. Conclusion: We are at the mercy of social forces that we do not fully understand and we cannot control.

      Prediction: The 2028 presidential race will be deemed by both parties and nearly all national politicians as “the most important election of our lifetime.” Predictions of national demise will recycle on both sides no matter who the candidates are. I know, I’m really going out on a limb here.

      Certainty: Neither party will hold itself to account for either its failed policies or its failed predictions.

      Hope: My own predictions fail and I am still around to learn about it.

  12. I am compelled by the laws of physics to note that New Haven pizza is the best in the world. Detroit style, NY and Chicago can be great if you aren’t in CT!

  13. If Trump wins and SCOTUS gives him immunity from prosecution we will
    be half way there to saying “bye bye democracy”. Just after his win
    Tramp will need his Goering to get the ball rolling.

    1. What would he do that’s worse than politically weaponising the DOJ and FBI, harassing his political opponents with wave after wave of bogus prosecutions and court cases, threaten his opponents’ supporters with re-education camps, support chemical and physical mutilation of children, sue anybody that tries to assure voter rolls are accurate and encourage forms of voting that are more susceptible to fraud?

      Is there any democracy in the US any more already?

      1. What a stupid comment. Are you a bot? If not, Jerry should turn off your propaganda spigot.

        1. All of those things have happened during the current presidential term. All of them perpetrated by politicians sharing a party with the current president.

          So what would Trump do that’s worse? What did he do when he was in office that was worse?

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