Thursday: Hili dialogue

June 27, 2024 • 6:45 am

We’re rushing headlong into July, for it’s already June 27, 2024, and it’s National Ice Cream Cake Day (and National Onion Day).  Here’s how they grow onions for many commercial chain restaurants, like Outback Steakhouse (I’ve never been there, but their Blooming Onion is famous):

Here’s a blooming onion from Scotty’s Steak House (in Wikipedia). It’s like a huge flower of onion rings: a single large onion battered and fried:

Waptaff assumed (based on copyright claims)., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

DON’T FORGET THAT THE PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE IS TONIGHT. I think it’s gonna be on several television channels, and it begins at 8 pm. Big fun!

It’s also National Indian Pudding Day (perhaps my most favorite dessert, especially served warm with vanilla ice cream), Industrial Workers of the World Day, National HIV Testing Day, Canadian Multiculturalism Day, Helen Keller Day (she was born on this day in 1880) and lived to be 87, Mixed Race Day in Brazil, National PTSD Awareness Day, and Seven Sleepers’ Day or Siebenschläfertag, a German holiday based on a legend, and the weather today is supposed to predict the weather over the next seven weeks (all in Germany, of course).

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 27 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The NYT summarizes the important Supreme Court cases on the docket this year, some of which have already been decided. But there are nine other big one waiting for a ruling. All of them, both decided and to-be-decided, are summarized at the link, and you can also see the article archived here.

No Supreme Court term in recent memory has featured so many cases with the potential to transform American society.

The court has already decided that Mr. Trump can stay on the ballot and that an abortion pill will remain widely available. The justices have yet to issue rulings in about nine other major cases, including ones affecting Mr. Trump as well as ones on the opioid crisis, homelessness, social media and the power of administrative agencies. The next set of rulings is set to come down starting at 10 a.m. on Thursday.

In recent years, some of the court’s biggest decisions have been out of step with public opinion. Researchers at Harvard, Stanford and the University of Texas conducted a survey in March to help explore whether that gap persists.

For each case, the article answers four questions: Is there a major precedent involved?; Are there recent rulings on the subject?; What is at stake?; and Where does the public stand?  It’s a very useful summary, and of course you’ll want to look at “immunity for former Presidents” and “Jan. 6 obstruction charges.”

*Swiss tennis great Roger Federer got an honorary doctorate at Dartmouth this year, and his graduation speech has become a viral hit:

Mr. Federer, who dropped out of school in his native Switzerland at 16 to play professionally, noted early in his remarks that he was not an obvious choice for a commencement speaker.

“Keep in mind, this is literally the second time I have ever set foot on a college campus,” he told the more than 2,000 graduates.

After some warm-up jokes about beer pong (which is said to have been invented at a Dartmouth fraternity party) and a few shout-outs to local institutions (“I got a chance to hit some balls with my kids at the Boss Tennis Center … I also crushed some chocolate chip cookies from Foco”), Mr. Federer got down to business and offered the graduates some tennis lessons that doubled as life lessons.

The part of the speech that has caught on with audiences far beyond the Ivy League environs of the Dartmouth campus — prompting numerous TikTok videos, many of them set to inspirational string music — was his reframing of his years of dominance on the tennis court.

“In the 1,526 singles matches I played in my career, I won almost 80 percent of those matches,” Mr. Federer said. “Now, I have a question for all of you. What percentage of the points do you think I won in those matches?”

The answer was 54 percent.

“In other words,” he said, “even top-ranked tennis players win barely more than half of the points they play.”

He went on, “The truth is, whatever game you play in life, sometimes you’re going to lose. A point, a match, a season, a job.”

Oh, and Wikipedia gives some info on his diet:

Federer follows a more flexible diet than most of the other players on tour, with pizza being Federer’s favorite dish. Federer’s personalized pizza from Player’s Restaurant was created by Chef Yan Dilie and has fresh figs, Parma ham, rocket and white truffle cheese cream. He also reportedly enjoys chocolate. Federer is a self-confessed lover of pasta and he has said that his personal favourite is the classic spaghetti pomodoro, which he ordered before every match during the 2020 Australian Open.

Well, the advice that you’re not going to win everything is a bit anodyne for graduation speakers, but at least it might hit home for some of his entitled audience. Here’s his speech:

*Bret Stephens’s column at the NYT “Should American Jews abandon elite universities?“, answer the question “yes, pretty much”. Stephen is the NYT’s most sensible writer about America’s reaction to the war, especially with respect to campuses:

The notable fact about the anti-Israel campus demonstrations is that they are predominantly an elite phenomenon. Yes, there have been protests at big state schools like the University of Nebraska, but they have generally been small, tame and — thanks to administrators prepared to enforce the rules — short-lived. It’s Stanford, Berkeley, Yale, Penn, Harvard, Columbia and many of their peers that have descended to open bigotry, institutional paralysis and mayhem.

Two questions: Why the top universities? And what should those on the other side of the demonstrations — Jewish students and alumni most of all — do about it?

. . .How did the protesters at elite universities get their ideas of what to think and how to behave?

They got them, I suspect, from the incessant valorization of victimhood that has been a theme of their upbringing, and which many of the most privileged kids feel they lack — hence the zeal to prove themselves as allies of the perceived oppressed. They got them from the crude schematics of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion training seminars, which divide the world into “white” and “of color,” powerful and “marginalized,” with no regard for real-world complexities — including the complexity of Jewish identity. They got them from professors who think academic freedom amounts to a license for political posturing, sometimes of a nakedly antisemitic sort. They got them from a cheap and easy revision of history that imagines Zionism is a form of colonialism (it’s decidedly the opposite), that colonialism is something only white people do, and that as students at American universities, they can cheaply atone for their sins as guilty beneficiaries of the settler-colonialism they claim to despise.

They also got them from university administrators whose private sympathies often lie with the demonstrators, who imagine the anti-Israel protests as the moral heirs to the anti-apartheid protests and who struggle to grasp (if they even care) why so many Jewish students feel betrayed and besieged by the campus culture.

. . . . But the real problem lies with some of the main convictions and currents of today’s academia: intersectionality, critical theory, post-colonialism, ethnic studies and other concepts that may not seem antisemitic on their face but tend to politicize classrooms and cast Jews as privileged and oppressive. If, as critical theorists argue, the world’s injustices stem from the shadowy agendas of the powerful and manipulative few against the virtuous masses, just which group is most likely to find itself villainized?

Not even the most determined university president is going to clean out the rot — at least not without getting rid of the entrenched academic departments and tenured faculty members who support it. That could take decades. In the meantime, Jews have a history of parting company with institutions that mistreated them, like white-shoe law firms and commercial banks. In so many cases, they went on to create better institutions that operated on principles of intellectual merit and fair play — including many of the universities that have since stumbled.

If you are an Ivy League megadonor wondering how to better spend the money you no longer want to give a Penn or a Columbia — or just a rising high school senior wondering where to apply — maybe it’s time to forgo the fading prestige of the old elite for the sake of something else, something new. That’s a subject for a future column.

Yes, the man is right, but it will be a long time before the prestige of a place like Harvard will fade so much that it’s no longer highly attractive to applicants and their parents.

*The Wall Street Journal asked those who have debated Biden and Trump, and other politicos, how each man could beat the other.  Here are some responses:

. . . . . “[Trump is] going to try to get Biden rattled,” said former Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who debated Trump while vying for the 2016 Republican nomination. “If Biden takes the bait, he’s going to be hitting to Trump’s agenda, not to his own.”

For Biden to beat Trump, that might be the key: avoiding getting pulled into a school yard-brawl style debate and allowing the former president’s aggressive antics to play out in real-time for viewers.

Jeff Roe, a Republican political strategist who worked on Sen. Ted Cruz’s 2016 bid for the GOP nomination, said Biden needs to come in with three major points he aims to make and focus on those points.

He added that Trump can be expected to taunt Biden even when his microphone is off.

Philippe Reines, a Democratic strategist who played Trump during 2016 mock debates for Clinton, said Biden could beat Trump on the merits—or Trump “just implodes, beats himself, which is what I think he did in one of the two debates in 2020,” referring to their first matchup that year.

and for Trump?

However, Biden is a self-professed “gaffe machine” and has struggled with long-winded answers and meandering digressions. Trump could benefit from being restrained, which might lead Biden to commit an unforced error or be lulled into an awkward pause—which would be magnified in the audience-free CNN studio.

“His weakness was that he didn’t always conclude thoughts or arguments authoritatively, which sometimes made it seem like his train of thought wasn’t complete or he was trailing off,” said Andrew Yang, who faced Biden on several multicandidate debate stages during the 2020 primaries.

During a Democratic primary debate, Biden’s future vice president, Kamala Harris, told him that she didn’t think he was a racist, but it was hurtful to hear him talk about the reputations of two deceased segregationist senators he had worked with. She also sharply questioned his opposition to federally ordered busing to integrate schools during the 1970s, saying “there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools…and that little girl was me.”

Biden called Harris’s broadside a mischaracterization of his record, but the exchange showed that his decadeslong political career could make him vulnerable.

Remember, the debate begins TONIGHT at 9 p.m. ET/ 8 p.m. CT, coming from CNN’s studios in Georgia.

*Speaking of the debate, the polling continues, and although a poll of all Americans show the race to be a virtual tie, remember that the Presidency is decided not on the basis of popular vote, but on Electoral College votes, which is simply stupid. Nevertheless, the WaPo gives us pause for thought:

We have gathered the best available national and state level polling data, and factored how citizens in each state voted in the last two presidential elections, to calculate whom voters currently favor in the presidential race.

Donald Trump is leading in 5 of the 7 battleground states that are most likely to determine the outcome of the election. The polls are particularly close in the first three battlegrounds below, meaning our average is within a normal-sized polling error of 3.5 points and either a Trump or President Biden victory is plausible. In the other four battlegrounds, the candidates’ polling leads are larger, but the race is still close.

Well, it’s still a squeaker, but I can’t wrap my head around the notion that Trump is even considered electable in America.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is having a Big Think:

A: Do you have a moment?
Hili: No, I’m thinking about what’s most important.
In Polish:
Ja: Masz chwilę czasu?
Hili: Nie, jestem zajęta myśleniem o tym, co najważniejsze.

Szaron is outside on the windowsill:

And Andrzej notes, “The cherries in our orchard are ripening.” They are pie cherries, and I hope Malgorzata freezes some so I can have cheery pie on my next visit to Dobrzyn:

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

An awesome meme from Anna Krylov, who, like the rest of us, is becoming a misanthropist:

A bumper sticker from Linkiest:

From Science Humor:

Posted by Masih. Ahmad Reza Djalali is an Iranian doctor arrested on trumped-up charges of espionage:

Pinkah poo-poos the Scientific American article I discussed the other day:

From Barry, who says he “loves this little guy.” Sound up to hear this laughing kookaburra laugh! And read the Wikipedia section on its call.

From Malcolm; a cat masseuse:

From Malgorzata: a woman from Manchester calls for the elimination of the Jews:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted.

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. First, firing the bard (a household singer and poem-reciter):

. . . and a pack of capybaras wandering around at dawn (in single file!):

32 thoughts on “Thursday: Hili dialogue”

  1. “….but I can’t wrap my head around the notion that Trump is even considered electable in America”

    +1. Yeah. Me too, Jerry…me too.

    1. And if Trump were not considered electable, neither would Biden be. Strange times.

    3. And something is happening here
      But you don’t know what it is,
      Do you,
      Mr. Jones?

      Try this thought experiment: inventory the issues that Jerry writes about and about which he cares most deeply, starting with Israel/Hamas and support for Israel in its existential battle; anti-semitism at our elite universities and anti-semitism world-wide; wokeism in all of its manifestations and how it has infiltrated science and scientific journals; the required teaching of “indigenous ways of knowing”; and so forth. On these issues, in a 50/50 electorate, who are the Trump voters, and who are the Biden voters?

      1. Perhaps, but realize that my brief is to criticize the Left, not the Right, and there’s no way in hell I’d ever vote for Trump. There are many many Trump positions I disagree with (the environment is one, abortion is another), but again, I prefer pointing out the perfidies of the Left–particularly the progressive Left–than of the right.

        Thus I stand by my view that Trump is a sick man with a narcissistic personality disorder. You’ve cherry-picked some issues to make me look as if I favor Trump. I don’t. He may win, but to think that this sick man is the best America can produce as President? That curls the soles of my shoes, as I said.

        2. Didnt mean to imply you would ever vote for Trump and dont believe i did so imply. I was responding to the question of mystification expressed by you and Jim…why would anyone vote for Trump?…by referring to the core issues about which you write so passionately and consistently and pointing out that these very issues resonate positively with Trump voters to a greater extent than with Democratic voters. And though i dont want to arm-chair diagnose folks psychologically, like whoever that woman was at Yale who last time came out with a variety of Trump diagnoses, I will say that when you add in majority views on the issues of illegal immigration and globalization’s impact on workers and towns across America, then if Trump were only marginally a more normal guy he’d get 60% of the popular vote and carry north of 40 states.

          1. Marginally more normal? He is so far out on the upper tail of the distribution of bad behavior stemming from insanity, a marginal reduction would still make him off the charts! The man is a bull-goose looney.

          2. No Mike. My mystification was not why somebody might vote for trump, but, rather, was why something north of 75 million people would vote for him…key word is electable. I agree that the far left is scary and that Biden coddles them or at least never stomps on them while trump does so often and to cheers. But as Jerry has pointed out, maybe not in so many words, trump is bat shit nuts and one cannot predict any boundaries to his behavior. Biden is an executive that I recognize from my upbringing and formal education. Trump is the antithesis of that. Good to hear from you!

  2. Even a church pastor has to answer to the congregation or be replaced. The modern seat of scienterrific new age societal moral values are currently your tenured Derrida nihilistic humanities profs like Judith Butler pontificating on gender and other ‘identities’ as freely divorced from any physical basis 🙂 IOW an apophatic religion you cannot touch.

    1. Even a church pastor has to answer to the congregation or be replaced.

      That reminded me of an amusing story: On WEIT I read about a Catholic priest who told his congregation that Jesus Christ had an erection when he died on the cross. I don’t know what happened to the poor chap.

      …humanities profs like Judith Butler…

      I just looked her up. I suppose professors with tenure have some security. There is a point to tenure, but it does not always go the way you want. Perhaps that’s part of the point 🙂

  3. Ah, the Wobblies (IWW). I thought they had gone the way of the Comintern until the hardware store where my niece was assistant manager tried to unionize under their guidance five or six years ago. The IWW HQ is in Chicago, according to their website in this building on Belmont.

  4. We just had our own version of the presidential election debate here in Britain: last night, Rishi Sunak and Kier Starmer faced each other in a debate on the BBC, ahead of the UK general election, which takes place next Thursday, July 4.

    Polling strongly suggests that Sunak’s Conservative party, which has governed the UK for the past 14 years, is going to suffer a defeat of epic proportions, possibly even getting fewer MPs elected than the Liberal Democrats, who would then become the official opposition party to Starmer’s Labour.

    Friday, July 5th promises to be an interesting day in the UK.

    1. Vast swathes of Conservative voters are intending to instead vote for the upstart Reform party. The main reason seems to be immigration, now running at 1.2 million immigrants a year (= 1.8% of the population a year), which Conservative voters don’t like, and which the Conservative government have not reduced.

      Their calculation is not that Reform will get in (they won’t), nor that Labour will reduce immigration levels (they won’t), it’s that by voting for Reform, and thus giving the Conservatives a colossal drubbing, they send the message that, if the Conservatives then want any chance at the next election, they need to adopt policies that will control immigration to levels acceptable to the swathes of voters that might vote for them.

      Even Labour voters blanch at immigration levels that amount to a ~ 20% population turnover in a decade.

      1. I’m pro-immigration myself and not just b/c I’m an immigrant.

        But I have some respect for people who aren’t as pro as I am and – particularly in the UK it seems – feel like their population has been replaced.

        Who can they vote for w/o looking like or being called racists by the insane woke?

        Immigration is a delicate thing – too much too fast and too alien (OK – I’ll say it – Muslim) causes a blowback.

        Not everybody living in enlightenment type western countries enjoy their downtowns being taken over by genocidal, terroristic anti-Semitics proclaiming a Caliphate of blood from the “Religion of Peace”.

        D.A.
        NYC
        https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/06/10/photos-of-readers-93/
        https://democracychronicles.org/author/david-anderson/

    2. The other day on NPR’s “Morning Edition,” host Steve Inskeep took a bit of umbrage, faux or not, that the Brits would presume to hold an election on July 4. All in good fun, no doubt. Cutesy-wutesy. A dose of fatuous infotainment. Apparently, the Brits needed to check in with him first. Any latent “Amuricun Exceptionalism” there?

  5. B Stephen’s column is spot-on. This same philosophy has obviously captured governments as well, especially where those same elites and party have gained power. How else can one explain something like the “Pico Pogrom” with the police standing down as Jews are beaten up outside of a synagogue and prevented to enter due to the protesters rather than the protesters being pushed back. After a few years of violent protests, vandalism, arson, beating up Jews, and cheering on rapists and baby killers, with either tacit or explicit support from those elites and party faithful, the pattern is very visible.

    Regarding the disinformation on social media SCOTUS case – it was decided based on lack of standing, a convenient way for 1) the liberal justices to avoid blaming the administration by deciding on the actual case itself and to allow continued government control and 2) Barrett and Kavanaugh to repay the guy who got them on the court by paving the way for a future Trump presidency to silence dissent. By allowing the favored party to avoid consequences, it also allows potential future ideologues to do the same. The dissent from Alito made more sense than the decision.

  6. Bret Stephens is correct. The elite universities have poisoned themselves, and it will take a generation for the poison to work its way out of the system. The good(ish) news is that there are other places for students to go. It’s also good that the elite schools are looking very bad in the press. They care about appearances.

    Those cherries are amazing! Please freeze enough for all of us! 🙂

    I remember hearing friends and relatives in 2016 laughing at the prospect of a Trump presidency. They said that he couldn’t possibly win. I didn’t laugh. I said that a Trump victory *was* possible; all he needed was enough votes. The same is true in 2024.

  7. Doesn’t this qualify as indigenous science?

    “Siebenschläfertag, a German holiday based on a legend, and the weather today is supposed to predict the weather over the next seven weeks (all in Germany, of course).”

    Same question wrt Punxsutawney Phil.

    2. It certainly is an “other way of knowing” and indigenous in nature. However, it is perpetrated by western euro-centric oppressors, so it doesn’t count.

  8. Wrt Anna’s meme that everyone sucks, this from the man himself: “I am very poorly today & very stupid & hate everybody & everything.”

  9. “But the real problem lies with some of the main convictions and currents of today’s academia: intersectionality, critical theory, post-colonialism, ethnic studies and other concepts that may not seem antisemitic on their face but tend to politicize classrooms and cast Jews as privileged and oppressive.”

    Fred Crews could inform us of the predecessor ideologies and academic fads. Why is it that the rot always seems to start—and penetrate most deeply—at the “elite” institutions? To what degree does the academic “cult of the new” contribute?

  10. I don’t imagine it was a coincidence that Sarah Elizabeth’s picture was placed right after the ranting, pig-ignorant British troll. Pity that the old hag probably wouldn’t gain any understanding even if she saw it.

  11. In other news, Kinky Friedman, perhaps the first Jewish Country & Western singer, has died of Parkinson’s disease. He was known for his satiric songs (sample title: “They Ain’t Making Jews Like Jesus Anymore”); when his singing career dried up, he switched to writing mysteries like The Love Song of J. Edgar Hoover. He was friends with Bob Dylan and toured with him in the 1970s.

    1. I’m reminded of Christopher Hitchen’s 2005(?) documentary “U.S. Supersized – Texas,” or something to that effect. He visited with Friedman at a book shop Friedman owned, if memory serves me.

  13. Kookaburra sound effects used to be de rigeur for movies with spooky, unsettling jungle scenes, even though the Laughing Kookaburra is a denizen of eastern Australia. I even seem to recall hearing one in a movie about WWII in the Paciific.

    1. Yes grasshopper (couldn’t help myself) in NZ the laughing kookaburra was a part of my early social life in the late 50’s and I think the early 60’s. How? the opening title sequence to the Newsreels shown before the matinee main feature at the “pictures”…
      Which reminded me we stood up for “God save the Queen” before the show commenced until we decided bugger that and later, we abolished the practice as we got our own National anthem.

  14. Weird kookaburra sounds are very familiar from my Aussie childhood. There are a lot of strange bird calls there. That’s before you even get to the stranger animals such as echidnas and platapussies and the like.

    PCC(E) should really go there on a trip. I’m sure there are lots of WEIT fans down there who’d be honored to show him around.

    D.A.
    NYC
    https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/06/10/photos-of-readers-93/

  15. Camp Song from the 60s
    Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree
    Merry merry king of the bush is he
    Laugh kookaburra laugh kookaburra
    Gay your life must be

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