Saturday: Hili dialogue

July 6, 2024 • 6:45 am

Greetings on CaturSaturday, July 6, 2024, cat shabbos and National Fried Chicken day, one of the great contributions of America to world cuisine.  Here’s a video of a manger at Stroud’s in Kansas City, Missouri, reputed to serve America’s best fried chicken. (I’ve never been there).  A sample meal and some tips on how they make great chicken are included.

It’s also World Zoonses Day, recognizing infectious disease spread to humans by animals (July 6, 1885 was the day that Louis Pasteur saved the life of a boy bitten by a rabid dog by injecting rabies vaccine), National Air Traffic Control Day, International Cherry Pit Spitting Day, National Hand Roll Day (sushi), and International Kissing Day (labeled by Wikipedia as “informally observed”!) There are rules for setting records when spitting cherry pits, and the world record is currently “28.51 metres (93 ft 6.5 in), set in 2004 by Brian ‘Young Gun’ Krause”.

Here’s how it done in Wisconsin. One guy in this video does it as a regular hobby:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the July 6 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Biden’s interview on ABC News last night will be the subject of the next post.

*Ceiling Cat help me now! Democrats are having a rethink about whether Kamala Harris can replace Biden as a candidate who can beat Trump.  Just because she’s VP doesn’t mean she’s been tested, and we have better candidates in line, like Gretchen Whitmer, who has been tested and has done a great job. But, the NYT says this:

Her allies emphasize that she has been taking on a bigger role for some time, notably after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade two years ago and during high-profile foreign assignments. But even before the questions about Mr. Biden’s age and acuity burst into the open, people close to her say, she was looking for more powerful ways to support the ticket.

Now, the effort to reintroduce herself has reached its most critical moment, with Mr. Biden’s candidacy plunged into crisis after a devastating debate performance in Atlanta and Democrats seriously weighing the prospect that she could become the nominee.

And while Ms. Harris, 59, has shown steadfast support for Mr. Biden in the frenzied week since the debate, her allies insist she is the only logical choice to lead the ticket if he steps aside.

Representative James E. Clyburn, the South Carolina Democrat who is widely credited for reviving Mr. Biden’s 2020 campaign, said in an interview this week that he would support Ms. Harris should the president bow out. He threw cold water on any alternative.

“This party should not, in any way, do anything to work around Ms. Harris,” he said.

. . . . But many Democrats acknowledge that having her at the top of the ticket comes with substantial risks. Her 2020 presidential campaign unraveled swiftly, raising questions about her strength as a candidate. Even Mr. Biden, early in his presidency, described her as a “work in progress.” And Democrats have expressed concerns at times that she struggled to convey publicly that she was in command of the issues.

Please, Ceiling Cat, NO! ABC News and FiveThirtyEight doesn’t think she’ll do much better than Biden:

For the most part, national polls have shown Harris doing about the same as Biden in head-to-head polls against Trump. In a March Fox News poll for example, Trump led Harris by 6 points and Biden by 5 points (well within the survey’s margin of error). And as recently as June 28, a Data for Progress poll showed the president and vice president each losing to Trump by 3 points (also within the margin of error). That said, a June 28-30 CNN/SSRS poll found Harris losing to Trump by only 2 points while Biden was trailing by 6. This was also within the margin of error but was nonetheless a bigger gap and could mark the beginning of a shift for Harris.

When we plug all these polls into a polls-only version of the 538 forecasting model — which jettisons the economic and political priors our full model uses, giving us an apples-to-apples comparison between candidates — Harris has a slightly higher chance of winning the Electoral College than Biden, but it’s not a significant difference: 38-in-100 versus 35-in-100. On a state-by-state level, Biden looks stronger than Harris in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, while Harris’s odds are higher than Biden’s in Nevada.

Of course I’d vote for her over Trump, but I’d prefer Whitmer.  Despite that, I’ve gotten angry emails saying that my refusal to fully embrace Harris means I’m both a sexist and a racist.  The person hasn’t noticed that my top candidate is also a woman, and my opprobrium for Harris has nothing to do with her pigmentation.

*Well, Nellie Bowles is taking a break from writing her inimitable TGIF columns for The Free Press. She’s temporarily replace by podcaster Katie Herzog, whose new summary is called “TGIF: It’s just my brain.” As always, I proffer three items from TGIF, but it’s clear that Katie is no Nellie, though she tries. . .   The first one is on the debate about Biden’s age and ability (an excerpt):

→ Will he or won’t he?  . . . So far, most of the freakout is happening behind closed doors. Publicly, most Democrats are standing by their man—for now. Just three Dems in Congress have called on Biden to step aside. And, barring that chat with the ally, the president himself seems to be in full “I’m not quitting” mode.

Not that he has done anything this week to demonstrate his fitness for office. While the president laid low, his press secretary said that it was really just a cold, plus maybe a bit of jet lag. White House aides told Axios that the president is “dependably engaged” from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. In a meeting with concerned Democratic governors who flew in to check on the old guy at the top of the ballot, he said all he needs is to work less, sleep more, and be able to clock out after 8 p.m. In that same meeting, the president is reported to have said: “It’s just my brain.” This is supposed to reassure us? What’s even more troubling is that longtime friends of the Bidens told New York magazine’s Olivia Nuzzi that they were “shocked to find that the president did not remember their names.” Incoming statement from the White House: “Guys, it’s just face blindness.”

I get it: Biden is a beloved elder statesman, and no one wants to hurt the old man’s feelings. So just do what they did at the retirement home when my grandpa had dementia: tell him whatever he wants to hear. Good news, Mr. President, you won the election! We’ll get Gorbachev on the line for you right after dinner. More ice cream? It’s chocolate chip. Seriously, this works.

This is confusing. Who is Katie for? Nellie wouldn’t be this ambiguous:

→ KHive, assemble: Personally, I vote Al Franken as Biden’s replacement. He’s smart, funny, Midwestern, and he loves women. But Vegas has Kamala as the probable Democratic nominee. And I guess that makes sense, given that she’s the vice president and all. “It’s her party now,” read the banner headline on Drudge this past Wednesday.

The imminent possibility of President Kamala Harris allowed us to revisit some of the finest moments: “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you;” is a classic. “I just love Venn diagrams. It’s just something about those three circles, the analysis about where there is the intersection, right?” 10/10. “It is time for us to do what we have been doing. And that time is every day. Every day it is time for us to agree that there are things and tools that are available to us to slow this thing down.” What?? And on and on, in an endless stream of nonsensical platitudes. Here at TG towers, we stand with Kam. She’s stepmom hot, she’s (unintentionally) funny, and she’s got all the desperate charisma of a real estate agent trying to make commission on the last day before the new quarter. They say all politicians need to pass the beer test, but forget that. Kamala passes the “five cosmos at the bar, a basket of fries to share, then shots” test with flying colors.

→ An essay on the queerness of cheese, finally: Eater writer Nat Belkov details how working with cheese at Murray’s, a New York chain, resolved his gender identity issues and led him to transition. Here’s Belkov: “Cheese is weird, and therefore, really only attracts people that see that weird as wonderful. These often aren’t the same people that choose to live life as exclusionists.”

And here I was thinking cheese was just delicious, and the people who are attracted to cheese are everyone in the entire world. But in fact, cheese is gay—happy belated Pride!—or at least queer-coded, according to Belkov, because making cheese is sort of a kooky passion and requires trial and error. “Being queer—especially living a gender-nonconforming life or navigating the awkward beauty of an identity transition—requires a similar persistence along with a trust of the process.” And now I go to my fridge and inform the pepper jack that his other mother and I will love him no matter what.

*A NYT story on an Olympic runner doesn’t make sense. The story calls her nonbinary and transgender, but she was born a female and is running as a woman (h/t: Jackie T).

The biggest race of Nikki Hiltz’s career is coming soon, but the middle-distance runner who identifies as transgender and nonbinary said that racing to a spot on the U.S. Olympic team held a special significance because it came at the end of Pride Month.

Hiltz, 29, whose sex was assigned as female at birth, earned a ticket to the Paris Games with a meet-record time of 3:55.33 in the women’s 1500-meter final of the U.S. Olympic trials on June 30. The performance easily beat the previous Olympic trials record, which was 3:58.03 set by Elle St. Pierre at the 2021 U.S. track and field trials. St. Pierre finished third on Sunday to also earn a spot on Team USA along with the second-place finisher, Emily Mackay.

“This is bigger than just me,” Hiltz told NBC. “It’s the last day of Pride Month, and I wanted to run this one for my community. All the LGBTQ folks, you guys brought me home that last 100. I could just feel the love and support.”

Note the “assigned female at birth” bit. Has the NYT really bought into that?  But a bit more:

Runners like Hiltz who were assigned female at birth do not face the same restrictions for women’s divisions as transgender athletes who were assigned male at birth.

Many sports have grappled in recent years with questions about gender and sex. The governing body for the Olympics updated its policies in 2021 and defers to each sport’s governing body for rules on participation.

I don’t think sports has grappled with gender; it’s grappled with biological sex.  Your gender has no obvious connection with athletic performance, and if Hiltz is a biological woman and if her reproductive innards, chromosomes and hormones don’t show her to be an intersex individual (remember that she was “assigned female at birth”, which leads to the question “ok, but how?”), well, let her compete against biological women. One expert I consulted said that the story is just there to demonstrate the virtue of the NYT.

But whatever Hiltz identifies as, she’s a good runner, as this tweet shows:

*This really burns my onions: the head of America’s largest retail bank is now getting set to charge customers to have checking accounts! It’s intolerable, mendacious, and disgusting. From the WSJ:

The head of America’s biggest retail bank has a warning for its 86 million customers: Prepare to pay for your bank accounts.

Marianne Lake runs Chase Bank, the sprawling franchise inside JPMorgan JPM -1.21%decrease; red down pointing triangle Chase that is the country’s biggest bank for consumers and one of its biggest credit-card issuers. Lake is warning that new rules that would cap overdraft and late fees will make everyday banking significantly more expensive for all Americans.

Lake said Chase is planning to pass on the costs of higher regulation and charge customers for a number of now-free services, including checking accounts and wealth-management tools, if the rules become law in their current form. She expects her peers in the industry will follow suit.

“The changes will be broad, sweeping and significant,” Lake said. “The people who will be most impacted are the ones who can least afford to be, and access to credit will be harder to get.”

This isn’t the first time banks have said they would pass on higher costs to consumers when regulators have attempted to cap their fees. In 2010, after the post-financial crisis overhaul of bank regulations, lenders warned that they would levy fees on debit cards because of a cap on some card charges—but few ended up doing so because consumers threatened to move their business. Some consumer advocates say this time is no different.

. . . “The banks say that their only option is to pass on their costs to customers, but that’s not true,” said Dennis Kelleher, president of Better Markets, an economics think tank that is in favor of the proposed bank regulations. “Yet again, banks are dressing up their attempts to maximize their own profit under the guise of what’s good or bad for customers.”

I swear to Ceiling Cat: if my bank tries this trick on me, I’ll move my money out. But what if they all do the same thing?

*And the topper of the news, which is all bad these days, is that passengers say air travel is getting worse.

Air travel got more miserable last year, if the number of consumer complaints filed with the U.S. government is any measure.

The Transportation Department said Friday that it received nearly 97,000 complaints in 2023, up from about 86,000 the year before. The department said there were so many complaints that it took until July to sort through the filings and compile the figures.

That’s the highest number of consumer complaints about airlines since 2020, when airlines were slow to give customers refunds after the coronavirus pandemic shut down air travel.

The increase in complaints came even as airlines canceled far fewer U.S. flights — 116,700, or 1.2% of the total, last year, compared with about 210,500, or 2.3%, in 2022, according to FlightAware data. However, delays remained stubbornly high last year, at around 21% of all flights.

So far this year, cancellations remain relatively low — about 1.3% of all flights — but delays are still running around 21%.

More than two-thirds of all complaints last year dealt with U.S. airlines, but a quarter covered foreign airlines. Most of the rest were about travel agents and tour operators.

Perhaps part of this is a leftover from covid, whose abating led to a surge in air travel. And with planes getting crowded, people get more testy.  But one thing I have noticed is the high number of delays and, especially, a real downturn in the quality of food.  But what choice do we have? (When I can, I usually fly Southwest, which doesn’t offer meals but has good snacks and funny flight attendants.) But crikey, the stuff that passes for “meals” on United or American wouldn’t be fit for anybody who wasn’t trapped.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili, behind an open window, is supervising the cleanliness at work:

Hili: Your keyboard has dandruff.
A: It’s not a dandruff but dust and your hair.
Hili: Yes, blame me for everything.
In Polish:
Hili: Twoja klawiatura ma łupież.
Ja: To nie łupież tylko kurz i twoja sierść.
Hili:Tak, wszystko na mnie.

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

From Cat Memes:

From yesterday’s Friday flashback for Jesus and Mo patrons, a strip called “gift”, with the note, “Friday Flashback today is from 2011, when the boys had a go at winning the Templeton Prize.” You can become a patron here.

From Strange, Stupid, or Silly Signs, contributed by Dianna Farni.  Coke joins the Deception Parade:

Since women aren’t allowed in sports stadiums with men in Iran, and this was Masih’s first trip to one in the U.S., she got very emotional and even cried.

One of my retweets, with comments (see the story here). Gretchen wrote the “s-word”!

From Malgorzata, a Rutgers faculty member demanding city housing for “unhoused” pro-Palestinian campers:

From Luana. Indeed, Pew has already changed the title, as you can see here.

One from my feed: Larry stays on!

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I retweeted:

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. For some reason, Brits like to take their cats to the polling station to be photographed:

Great photo; Matthew thinks it looks like a mayfly:

25 thoughts on “Saturday: Hili dialogue”

  1. “I swear to ceiling cat.…I’ll move my money out. But what if they all do the same thing?” Cash at home in mattress? Buy a gun safe and fill it with cash? Our local, small business merchants have started passing credit card charges like 3.5% on to the customer but are good with cash or check. If checking accounts cost us, I see no other course but cold cash….or just stop buying crap. When will a candidate of the people out the banks that they use the money we keep there and are not doing charity in providing savings and checking accounts….elizabeth warren, where are you? Or maybe you are screaming about it, but media gives you no coverage? It all is very depressing.

    But on the brighter side: Gretchen Whitmer: the Al Franken of Michigan! Gotta love her. Vote the rascal in.

    1. I pulled out of Chase about a year ago. Now I only use
      a credit union. They only charge for check printing and
      otherwise give you interest on your balance.

  2. Re the UK election:

    In a Labour landslide all sitting Labour MPs should have been safe. Sitting Labour MP Khalid Mahmood, a moderate Muslim, had a 15,000 majority last time, in a safe Labour seat in Birmingham with a largely-Muslim population.

    He lost to an independent candidate, Ayoub Khan. A sitting Labour MP losing to an independent in the middle of a landslide is unprecedented. The problem was that Khalid Mahmood has a moderate Muslim who had criticised Hamas. Ayoub Khan is a Hamas-supporting “river to the sea” Muslim who wants Isreal to not exist and who has denied that Hamas committed atrocities on Oct 7. He’s now an MP.

    Labour’s shadow minister Jonathan Ashworth also lost his Leicester South seat, which previously had a majority of more than 22,000, to a pro-Hamas independent, Shockat Adam, who declared “this is for Gaza”. Labour also lost the safe seats of Dewsbury & Batley, and Blackburn, again to pro-Gaza Islamists running as independents. Several others were only won narrowly, for example in east London, shadow-minister Rushnara Ali had his majority of 31,000 slashed to 1600 against independent-candidate Ajmal Masroor. Again, this is moderate-Muslim Labour candidates losing to Islamists.

    In addition there are many, many newly-elected Labour MPs who have similar sympathies. The new Justice Secretary and member of the cabinet Shabana Mahmood has been photographed holding a Palestine Solidarity Campaign placard. Their aims are “an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestine” (that means all of it). Despite this explicit pro-Gaza sympathy, she only just got re-elected, her majority dropping from 32,000 to 3,400 against pro-Hamas independent Akhmed Yakoob.

    Keir Starmer will have little choice but to succour this faction. What they’d like, for starters, is a de facto blasphemy law with a prohibition on anything that can be construed as “Islamophobic”. Starmer has already promised this. Of course they’ll also want a continuation of large-scale immigration from Muslim countries. Any questioning of whether this is in Britain’s interests will be denounced as “racist”.

    1. “Of course they’ll also want a continuation of large-scale immigration from Muslim countries.”

      Citation needed.

  3. Move your money from a bank to a credit union. In my experience have found credit unions actually work hard to please their members/depositors. Banks work for their stockholders, Credit Unions work for their members.

    1. So, Credit Unions and Banks are indistinguishable.
      (Assuming that Credit Unions in the US are owned by their depositors, as in the UK. Which isn’t a given. Reminds me to check if I’ve still got any money in my Credit Union account.)

      1. Credit unions in the US are owned by their depositors; your deposits are your shares in the credit union. Banks are owned by their shareholders, too – but your deposits in a bank are not shares.
        And, as others have noted, credit unions pay better interest rates than banks, and generally provide free checking accounts
        But when it comes to almost everything else – the practical aspects of banking, there’s little between credit unions and banks: both have checking, savings, “money market” or other high interest savings, term deposits, debit and credit cards, mortgages (credit unions generally with better rates than banks), car loans (ditto), etc., and even deposit insurance (though banks are insured through the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and credit unions through the National Credit Union Association).
        To my mind, there’s no good reason to bank with a “bank”.

  4. I almost never write checks anymore, but about 20 years ago our bank started charging fees for writing checks. We voted with our feet and joined a credit union where checking is free. Isn’t it commonplace to charge for checking unless your balance is high enough? Yes, it’s annoying. We felt that we were being nickel and dimed by our bank so we we moved on.

    So sad to read about the death of Istvan Ferenc Reiner at the hands of Nazi monsters. He looked like such a happy-go-lucky boy. I wonder what happened to his parents.

    1. Here in the UK, if I write even one cheque [sic] a year, that’s an unusual occurrence. And I hardly ever receive them. The last one was a tax refund from His Majesty’s Revenue & Customs a couple of months ago, and I was very surprised, because a previous tax refund had been sent direct to my bank account.

      1. I’m having to deal with probate for Mum, and am chasing up a payment form the TaxMan – which will probably be by cheque. Since she never did online banking, that option isn’t open.

  5. In re Nikki Hiltz: if she was born female but identifies as non-binary and transgender, one would ask if she has received testosterone as a result of the transgender aspect? That would surely make her an unfair participant in women’s sports.

    And with respect to bank charges, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet! In the UK and Canada I have become accustomed to the bank charging me for the right to make a huge profit off my money. The latest trick is to make me do their work for them online, by reducing numbers of tellers, opening hours, and even closing branches. They pull in record profits yet, in order to continue to ‘grow’ the value of their stock, have to make even more. So out go the staff and the branches, and the sheep can learn to shear themselves.

    1. In re : sport – did anyone else notice the first black-African stage winner in the Tour de France on … Wednesday? Biniam Girmay, an Eritrean, won the final sprint and stage 3 (Piacenza,Italy to Turin, Italy)
      What is it about East African physique/ genetics/ whatever that makes them so good at “endurance” sports? Even despite the obvious handicaps of competing in the West with black skin. (Granted, Eritrea isn’t “classic” East Africa from the PoV of training at altitude etc that some of the marathoneers have.) When, I wonder, will the Sherpas and Gurkahs come to take the East African maillots – assuming that altitude is a major factor. Come to think of it – the Andeans have had a fair bite at the high-altitude cherry too.
      Oh, i didn’t look at the results yesterday. He’s Maillot Verte now – another first for “Black” or “African”.
      I’m sure the racists will be spitting boules. World’s-tiniest-violin.GIF , as they say in Emoji.

      1. That post is the perfect exemplar of what someone else said here, that the demand for racism is greater than the supply.

      2. Congratulations also to Richard Carapaz, the first Ecuadorean to wear the maillot jaune at the Tour de France on day 4 (winning it on day 3). Bob Roll claims that he is such a hero in Ecuador that he needs a police escort to go out training.

    2. To compete in the female category now, Ms Hiltz could have taken testosterone in the past as long as she had stopped before she rose high enough in the rankings to become of interest to the anti-doping squad. As long as she never failed a drug test she would be home-free with any durable performance gains.

      However any woman could do this, and some have been caught out by the vagaries of pharmacokinetics. It doesn’t seem likely that a cheater would call attention to herself in the obscure world of women’s track and field by making the totally boring and biologically irrelevant claim to be non-binary. That would only motivate “think-dirty” people like me to dig into her past to see what we might turn up.

      I’m going with the interpretation that being non-binary is somehow sincerely meaningful to her and the papers are treating it the way they might have breathlessly covered “the first ‘openly lesbian’ runner to win a major track meet” in the 1980s. Big whoop.

      The other angle is that it may be part of the propaganda that never sleeps. “See, there’s nothing wrong with transgender athletes in sport. Look at Nikki Hiltz!” I consider this in the same vein as the new (black) sheriff in Blazing Saddles rescuing himself from a lynch mob by pulling a gun on himself and threatening to shoot himself if they didn’t disperse.

  6. With regard to Kamala Harris, to the extent that she’s been tried, as on the Border, I’d say she’s failed. And let’s not forget her dismal performance in the 2020 Primaries. Remember, diversity hires for jobs that require competence must also be competent.

    Whenever I hear the Joe Biden “I’m not quitting,” I can’t help but hear it as a small child insisting, “I’m not sleepy,” when it’s bedtime.

    As for not hurting Biden’s feelings, the Dems are in a much tougher place; they can’t go completely down the “Biden’s not fit” road, because that is a gift to the GOP, especially if Biden does wind up being the Nominee. Likewise, invoking the 25th Amendment, which may be necessary, puts Biden in the “first time a sitting President has” list.

    1. But but but “she’s stepmom hot, [has] all the desperate charisma of a real estate agent trying to make commission on the last day before the new quarter [and] passes the ‘five cosmos at the bar, a basket of fries to share, then shots’ test with flying colors.” C’mon man!

    1. Put someone in more energetic than Harry Kane and I’d agree. OR, at least sub him early. He said apparently he hasn’t played well, hard to argue with him even if he did shoot 40 + goals for his club.
      All wars should be fought on the football field.
      I congratulate the crowd at the game what a racket!

  8. Gretchen sounds great. But she’s the wrong sex.
    We learned that from Hillary (whom I volunteered for in 2016).

    The presidency is no place for DEI. Even IF G.W. is teh best person for the job – it won’t LOOK like that and we can’t afford to lose a single mid-swing voter.

    Straight white Newsome only I’m afraid. We have to take a hit on total equal opportunity – a perfect place for sure – for the moment. Esp considering the opposition.

    Rosemary wrote well about Newsome above – I don’t know him at all – but just like Reagan he is (nationally) a new face, a pretty, presidential face. And I think can beat Trump. And isn’t insane. I’ll take “too woke” over Trump anyday.
    The presidency is not a proving ground for “who can do it best”.

    D.A.
    NYC

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