Tuesday: Hili dialogue

July 30, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to The Cruelest Day: Tuesday, and July 30, 2024, and National Cheesecake Day.  I can’t claim this is an American invention, as they may have had it in ancient Greece, but the Jewish New York version is one I particularly crave—especially from Junior’s in Brooklyn.  Here Julia tries many of the cakes from Junior’s; be sure to see the “cake shakes” at the end (22:50):

It’s also Father-in-law Day, World Snorkeling Day, Paperback Book Day, Share a Hug Day, National Whistleblower Appreciation Day, and International Day of Friendship with its related observance of Día del Amigo in Paraguay.

There’s a Google Doodle again today, honoring one Olympic sport. Can you guess which one it is? Click to see, and note the cat:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the July 30 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

First, the results of yesterday’s UNSCIENTIFIC and unrepresentative polls about who readers think will win the Presidency and who they will vote for:

Voters think Harris will win:

And the voters are, as I expected, Democrats, favoring Harris by a very large margin—almost seven to one.

*It’s not rare for Presidents, when the Supreme Court goes against their wishes, to want to change the composition of the Court. Often, for example, they want to add more judges to outweigh the ones who vote against the wishes of the Executive Branch.  President Biden is now suggesting a change, but in the form of term limits for the Justices.

President Biden said on Monday that he was pushing for legislation that would bring major changes to the Supreme Court, including imposing term limits and creating an enforceable code of ethics on the justices.

In an opinion essay in The Washington Post, Mr. Biden also said that the court’s decision to grant broad immunity to presidents for crimes they commit in office was an example of “dangerous and extreme” decision-making that had put the American people at risk. He added that a number ethical concerns posed a threat to the integrity of the court.

“What is happening now is not normal, and it undermines the public’s confidence in the court’s decisions, including those impacting personal freedoms,” Mr. Biden wrote. “We now stand in a breach.”

. . . . In a social media post, Speaker Mike Johnson called the proposal “dead on arrival” in the House.

Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, praised efforts to change the court and said she was a partner in the effort.

“These popular reforms will help to restore confidence in the court, strengthen our democracy and ensure no one is above the law,” she said in a statement sent by her campaign.

In his remarks, Mr. Biden is expected to argue that the current system of lifetime appointments for Supreme Court justices gives a president undue influence for decades. He will propose a process in which a president would appoint a justice every two years to spend 18 years on the bench.

Mr. Biden supports a code of conduct that would require justices to disclose gifts, refrain from public political activity and recuse themselves from cases in which they or their spouses have financial or other conflicts of interest, according to the plan the White House laid out.

In general, yes, I approve of a code of ethics for the Court (why not?) and think their decision about Presidential immunity was confused and misguided. In principle, I also approve of term limits, as 18 years is a generous period, allowing Justices to get the hang of things and exert their influence. On the other hand, there are two problems. First, as Speaker Johnson said, this simply isn’t going to fly, not at least in this administration.  We’ll have a Republican-controlled House until at least January of next year, and so, if Harris is elected, the problem devolves to her. And if the House is still controlled by the GOP, you can forget about it. Further, the Senate may pose a problem as well, at least if a cloture vote is required to stop a filibuster against this significant change. That requires 60 votes, and the Democrats don’t have them. (The GOP, of course, has no appetite to change the Court right now).

Second, I’m not sure whether this will “restore confidence in the court”.  Each President gets to appoint two justices at most during his/her term, and those will be justices of the Prez’s political leaning. In other words, the court will remain politicized, and will become more ideologically “unequal” (i.e. to Biden, more favorable to Democrats) only to the extent that we have a succession of Democratic Presidents.  And will the GOP accept a court as Left-wing as the court now is Right-wing?  Given the fact that American is politically divided, any degree of ideological homogeneity is going to anger half the country.  Nevertheless, I am not deeply opposed to this idea; it’s just that it has no chance of passing now, and probably not much of one in our lifetimes.

Finally, ALL federal judges have lifetime terms, so you can’t just limit this to the Supreme Court. That means the President will have to appoint a spate of judges every two years, unless he intends these limits to apply to only one federal court.

*Israel has not yet responded in a big way to the missile attack (now pretty well confirmed that it was from Hezbollah) that killed 12 young people, all under 20, on a soccer field in a Druze village. Although Israel has promised big-time retaliation, and is certainly pondering its alternatives, right now the response has been stronger than usual but doesn’t involve Israeli boots on Lebanese ground:

The IDF confirms carrying out a drone strike earlier today in southern Lebanon’s Mays al-Jabal, killing two Hezbollah operatives.

Separately, the IDF says fighter jets struck Hezbollah infrastructure in Kfarhamam, used in a rocket attack on the Mount Dov area.

Meanwhile, Hezbollah launched a barrage of 20 rockets at the Gome Junction area, just south of Kiryat Shmona, earlier today. The IDF says the rockets hit open areas, and no injuries were caused.

A short while after the attack, a Hezbollah site in southern Lebanon’s Houla, used to carry out the rocket barrage, was struck by fighter jets, the IDF adds.

Here’s an IDF film of the fighter-jet strikes.  Translation:

During the day, fighter jets of the Air Force, in cooperation with the 210th Division, attacked an infrastructure of the terrorist organization Hezbollah in Kfar Hammam, from which launches were made to the area of ​​Mount Dov

All this news is from yesterday:

Earlier today, a drone launched from Lebanon was shot down by the Israeli Navy over Israel’s territorial waters in northern Israel, the military says.

The drone was intercepted by one of the Navy’s Sa’ar 6-class corvettes.

Over the weekend, another Hezbollah drone, thought to be heading toward Israeli offshore gas infrastructure, was shot down by the Navy.

And this is dangerous:

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich insists there is no solution to the crisis in the north, short of the Israeli reoccupation of southern Lebanon.

During a speech in Jerusalem’s Old City, Smotrich continues to beat the war drums, saying that “there is no way to restore security to the residents of the north without a war that will destroy Hezbollah, that will reoccupy southern Lebanon, and that will return the security strip that is today in our territory back to the territory of Lebanon.”

Israel occupied a strip of land in southern Lebanon from the early 1980s until the IDF’s withdrawal in May 2000.

What angers me most about all this is Biden’s broken promise that the U.S. would prevent any other country from “taking advantage” of Israel’s attack byu Hamas. That was a lie on Biden’s part, and puts me off a bit on the soon-to-retire President.  Does he want Israel destroyed? On top of that is the UN’s shameful history of passing binding rules preventing Lebanon from firing rockets at Israel, or moving closer to the border, and then putting thousands of UN troops in Lebanon to enforce that. Was that resolution serious? Of course not! Lebanon has been committing one war crime after another by firing at civilians, but all you get from the ICJ and UN are crickets. This is the kind of double standard that supporters of Israel must live with.

One thing is for sure: if Israel invades Lebanon to stop these attacks, the world will find a way to condemn it.  As we all know, Israel is allowed to defend itself only within its own borders. Imagine if the U.S. was held to that policy during World War II!

*While I thought J. D. Vance was a canny VP pick for Trump, perhaps able to glean the vote of Middle America, it turns out that Vance has spent the last week or more chewing on his metatarsals, and may in fact prove a liability to Trump. Vance is still on the defensive about his “cat lady” remark (VERY unwise!), and has yet to find his footing:

Trump later said choosing Vance was a difficult pick, likening it to “The Apprentice,” his former reality television show, in a meeting with Florida’s delegates in Milwaukee. But Trump said it was partially about securing the future of the Republican Party after he was gone. “He is going to be a superstar in the future,” Trump told delegates and donors huddled inside the Baird Center, according to an attendee.

Whether that bet — one of the most consequential Trump will make this year — pays off remains unclear. In the nearly two weeks since, President Biden has dropped out of the race and Vice President Harris is now the likely Democratic nominee, energizing Democrats. Vance, meanwhile, had a rocky first full week on the campaign trail since departing the convention, attracting unwanted attention to the Republican ticket.

The Trump campaign has spent the past week trying to clean up after Vance’s controversial comments, including previous interviews in which he mocked “childless cat ladies” or took a position on abortion much stronger than Trump’s.

In addition, previous emails between Vance and a friend reported by the New York Times show Vance saying he hated the police because they mistreated people, calling Trump a “morally reprehensible human being” and saying that “the more white people feel like voting for Trump, the more Black people will suffer.” A Trump adviser called the emails “not ideal.”

Vance has come under attack from friendly quarters, as well, including the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board, social media personality Dave Portnoy and conservative media star Ben Shapiro. Some question the vetting from Trump’s team and are asking if picking Vance could now backfire.

I’m just waiting for the world’s most popular childless cat lady (below) to declare for Harris—which, of course, she will.  And that will further energize the youth vote for Harris.

*On to the Dems, for I’m worried about Kamala Harris’s seeming indifference to Israel, somewhat of a break with Biden’s policy. The AP reports that she’s “quickly pivoting to convincing Arab-American voters of her leadership” (which of course means dissing Israel, like deliberately skipping Netanyahu’s joint appearance in Congress last week); and of course Harris is closer to the anti-Israeli “progressive” wing of the Democrats than is Biden. It may go this far:

Her first test within the community will come when Harris chooses a running mate. One of the names on her short list, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, has been public in his criticism of pro-Palestinian protesters and is Jewish. Some Arab American leaders in Michigan say putting him on the ticket would ramp up their unease about the level of support they could expect from a Harris administration.

The WSJ goes farther in an op-ed, accusing Harris of being a “gift to Hamas”:

Vice President Kamala Harris became the de facto nominee and gave Hamas an important gift. Never mind her childish boycott of Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress last Wednesday. Why was it necessary to side with the Palestinian narrative that places the blame for the war on Israel? “We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies,” she said the next day, after meeting with Mr. Netanyahu. “We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering. And I will not be silent.” This is a direct threat to Israel if it continues the war, a war the Biden-Harris administration itself supported and called “just.”

Ms. Harris, who in a recent interview said she was “hearing stories” about people in Gaza “eating animal feed, grass,” is apparently unaware that food prices there are significantly lower than in Israel. In any other war in the past century, has one side regularly supplied food and goods to the enemy’s civilians—and still been attacked by the White House?

By adopting the anti-Israel narrative, Ms. Harris is giving Hamas’s leader, Yahya Sinwar, every reason in the world to refuse a hostage deal. Why give Israel the hostages without ending the war if there is a possibility the 47th president will force Israel to end it anyway? “Let’s get the deal done so we can get a cease-fire to end the war,” Ms. Harris said Thursday, distancing the deal with her words.

This is more than diplomatic incompetence. Ms. Harris’s worldview is troubling in its immorality. Campus protesters “are showing exactly what the human emotion should be as a response to Gaza,” she said recently. “There are things some of the protesters are saying that I absolutely reject, so I don’t mean to wholesale endorse their points. But we have to navigate it.” The state of the Democratic Party is such that its presumptive presidential nominee claims that a war between a pro-Iranian murder organization and a democratic state “is not a binary issue.”

She’s wrong; it is indeed a “binary issue” in a moral sense, as Sam Harris has pointed out. This is one of the issues that worries and distresses me. I think that voters for Harris have to realize that there’s a very real chance that she’ll deep-six Israel to cater to the progressives.

*You’ve probably heard that the Olympic surfing competition is not in Paris but in Tahiti, thousands of miles away. For it’s there that one gets the huge—and treacherous—waves that allow surfers to show their mettle. The WSJ reports:

Before Olympic surfers actually see the Teahupo’o wave arrive, in those final pristine moments of calm before all hell breaks loose, they will hear it coming.

Cries rise from the flotilla of boats carrying spectators and rescue teams as they spot the mountain of water rolling towards them roughly 500 yards off the coast of Tahiti. When it arrives, a thick slab of ocean will suddenly surge into the air and fold over on itself. Then it claps down in a movement so powerful that it sounds like a bomb going off.

“It’s not the time to be like, ‘Oh, God…I don’t know if this is going to work out for me,’” says Jessi Miley-Dyer, a pro surfer and Commissioner for the World Surf League. “You’ve got to paddle into it, then pull your head down and go, ‘Okay, I’m going to make this, and this is going to be the ride of my life.’”

To the uninitiated, the idea of holding the surfing competition of the Paris Olympics 9,800 miles from the French capital might sound odd. There’s no shortage of respectable waves on the Atlantic coast of France. But none of those surfing spots can generate the mix of exhilaration and primal fear that gave Teahupo’o its name in Tahitian: the place of skulls.

Teahupo’o swell originates from winter storms at the southwestern edge of the Pacific Ocean, near New Zealand. It then travels virtually unimpeded for days across deep waters, gathering momentum and energy, before slamming into Tahiti. The pitch of this collision is amplified by the unique underwater topography of the island’s coastline, which is bordered by an extremely shallow reef that suddenly drops off into the ocean abyss.

Daring to surf Teahupo’o requires a willingness to place yourself at the intersection of an unstoppable force and an immovable object. As the wave curls along the reef, surfers have a window of a few seconds to shoot the gap as Teahupo’o collapses behind them, generating a massive ball of foam that spits them out of the barrel.

“It wasn’t even thought to be surfable, really. In the late ’80s, early ’90s, everyone was like, ‘Can we really do this?’” said Joe Turpel, the NBC commentator known as the voice of international surfing competitions.

. . . Instead, the path to victory involves starting as deep as possible in the wave’s barrel, a strategy that means overriding your basic survival instincts. It involves paddling into the one wave you might just miss—and miss badly, ending up in its ferocious churn. Once you commit, there’s a nearly vertical take-off that sends the surfer into freefall before catching the bottom of the wave and turning sharply into the tube. Then it’s a race against the giant foam ball to make it out.

Here’s a video of some good rides at Teahupo’o. None of the waves, however, match the world’s biggest and scariest: the giant waves of Nazaré in Portugal. A few daring surfers have essayed those, but they’re too dangerous for the Olympics.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hiri would fain go hunting but the pickings are slim:

Hili: This meadow doesn’t rise to my expectations.
A: What is it lacking?
Hili: A few mice.
Hili: Ta łąka nie spełnia moich oczekiwań.
Ja: Czego jej brakuje?
Hili: Kilku myszy.

And a photo of the uber-affectionate Szaron

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

From Cat Memes. Look at this poor kitty!

From The Dodo Pet:

From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy:

From Masih, the usual harassment unveiled women in Iran face from the Pecksniffs or, worse, the Morality Police:

From Bryan. Do you really think this guy is better than Jackson Pollock?

Musk is wrong here. Try your own search with “President Donald”

From my feed, the famous dueling “changing of the guards” at the border between India and Pakistan. Talk about a competition (fueled by animosity, of course). It reminds me of a Māori haka:

Changing of the guard, Indian-Pakistan border pic.twitter.com/JcnyZj09NV

I may have posted this before, but so be it. Is the kitten scared, excited, or both?

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I retweeted:

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. First, a pig shrub:

Matthew says about this one, “Funny but not real obvious

37 thoughts on “Tuesday: Hili dialogue”

  1. “restore confidence in the court”

    Consider:
    1.5 of the 6 conservative justices were appointed by presidents who didn’t win the popular vote. In the past this almost never happened. Now it is a common occurrence and has skewed strongly in one direction.
    2.The Republicans shamelessly blocked Obama’s replacement for Scalia for almost a year then ignored (shamelessly) their own logic to jam Barrett through.
    3.The ethics situation is out of control. Consider what Fortas resigned for and compare it to what has been revealed about Alito and Thomas.
    4.The non-recusals of Thomas and Alito in the recent immunity case are infuriating. If the actions of both of their wives (and in the case of Thomas there is ample evidence that the 2 communicated about it) doesn’t “give the appearance of the possibility of lack of impartiality” I don’t know what does.
    5.The brazen lying about stances (e.g. abortion as “settled law”) during hearings is also out of control.

    Obviously these are things that erode confidence in the court. Term limits would maybe help a bit (and clearly have been passed in the past) but at the very least an ethics board with teeth needs to be created.

    1. Yours is a partisan position, Ted.
      1) That several Justices were appointed by Presidents who lost the popular vote is irrelevant. The Presidents were lawfully elected and have the prerogative to appoint Judges no matter how many votes they won.
      2) Yes, the Republicans played crafty politics. But, they will say, so what? That’s politics. That’s what having a Senate Majority allowed us to do. Do the Democrats claim they won’t do the same when the stakes are reversed?
      3) With ethics, the devil is in the details. Will a Dem-dominated ethics board “with teeth” convened by a Dem administration be able to unseat a Republican-appointed judge? (Parliamentary ethics officials have publicly shamed the PM on several occasions but he’s still in office. He can fire his cabinet ministers but no little cabal can fire him.)
      4) Pass.
      5) No one expects candidates for a position to predict truthfully what they would do in a hypothetical future situation, and then hold them to what they said in a job interview. Of course you’re sore about abortion but surely no one doubted how those judges would rule. Would you be putting that up for ethics dismissal?

      Because your position is partisan, intended to purge the Court of right-leaning judges, you can’t expect even the non-partisans on the other side to agree with those arguments in support of reforms.

      1. Nope.
        1. Not only did Bush put 2 justices on the Supreme Court he did so by winning a Supreme Court case to be elected in the first place that had a 5-4 split with 2 justices who had strong reasons to recuse and did not.“Lawful” maybe but you can see the issue people have here.
        2.because we’re talking about erosion of public trust. This was brazenly political in ways that flouted long-standing norms. If it happened the other way I’d get the anger coming from the right.
        3. I agree doing this in a way that is non-partisan would be quite hard. However both republicans and democrats are pretty alarmed about justices essentially taking lots of gifts and money from those whose cases they may later decide. Something has to be done. And no the devil is not in the details. What this court has done with the taking of graft and then flouting it has no precedent that I know of. As I said Fortas resigned over far far less.
        4.Pass on your pass.
        5.sure but we are talking about perception of the court. This is fair game wrt perceptions.

        I think you are mistaking partisanship for what constitutes reasons why no one trusts the court anymore. I’m left leaning but had a problem with how Bork was treated. People can be partisan but still not be blind. The court in the 60-70s was quite left leaning but the public had much more faith in the court then than now, implying that even many right leaning Americans had such faith. This is the most unethical and brazenly partisan court wrt to ethics and refusals we’ve had in quite some time.

    2. I will never forgive turtle head for blocking Obama’s replacement of Scalia just as I cannot forget that same reptile’s statement immediately following Obama’s election that he would do everything in his power to prevent Obama from succeeding (or something to that effect). That marked the beginning of politics becoming a competition between parties that said “to hell” with the country’s welfare as a whole. The descent began then. I pity Mitch McConnell’s physical demise — don’t take glee in any human suffering — but, man! What a jerk!

  2. “Finally, ALL federal judges have lifetime terms, so you can’t just limit this to the Supreme Court. That means the President will have to appoint a spate of judges every two years, unless he intends these limits to apply to only one federal court.”

    This is incorrect. The proposal would affect only SCOTUS, not other federal courts. For an explanation of how it would work, see this article by Yale law professor Akhil Amar: https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/2023-09/cato-supreme-court-review-1.pdf

    1. I stand corrected if your article was written after Biden’s proposal and explains exactly what Biden proposed. If it just shows a way that one can give term limits to Supreme Court justices only, then it’s not really relevant to Biden’s proposal. But why not term limits for all federal judges? Why limit it to the Supreme Court. After all, some cases (like the legality of teaching intelligent design) are decided by federal judges not on the Supreme Court (in that case, a Republican-appointed judge decided that ID was “not science”).

      1. No, that article is not specific to Biden’s proposal–which, if it has any details, I haven’t seen yet. It’s one of several 18-year SCOTUS proposals that have been kicking around for 20 years or so. Some would require a constitutional amendment, but this one wouldn’t. The reason is that it doesn’t take away a justice’s status as a Supreme Court justice after 18 years; it just reassigns them to tasks other than actively sitting for and deciding cases. But for that reason, it’s specific to the Supreme Court and wouldn’t have any effect on lower court judges. Is that the kind of proposal that Biden is putting forward? I don’t know yet, but I think it should be. It’s much cleaner and simpler than something that would affect every federal judgeship.

  3. I oppose the changes to the Court exactly because they are ones that the Executive wants. The Executive clearly sees this as a way to have more influence over the Court, and, to that extent, they jeopardize the balance of power between the three branches.

    As for Vance, I wouldn’t pay too much attention to what the MSM says. After all, a couple of weeks ago they said Biden was fine.

      1. There are twitter posts on the “GOP is weird” trend that include pictures of some of the outré characters that are part of the Biden cavalcade. Puts weird in perspective.

  4. Mood for today :

    x.com/rainmaker1973/status/1818176756890714159?s=46

    #Olympics
    #surfing

  5. Mr. Biden supports a code of conduct that would require justices to disclose gifts, refrain from public political activity and recuse themselves from cases in which they or their spouses have financial or other conflicts of interest, according to the plan the White House laid out.

    Imo Biden should have limited his proposal to just this one element. It’s the hardest to criticize and easiest to win bipartisan support. Though it might not “fix” the Supreme Court the way proponents want it fixed, it’s a start.

  6. I reproduced some of the discrepancies in search suggestions on the 28th. I did not try Meta AI which also produced a discrepancy.

    Apparently the systems are settling.

  7. I think the insider trading that Congress participates in is a far more egregious ethics violation than justices accepting gifts from people with no business before the court.

    And the notion that the political opinions of one’s spouse can be a conflict of interest is just ridiculous.

    1. Wut??

      1.In the case of Alito he is a co-owner on the 2 houses. This means he is fine with flying these flags. THESE ARE HIS HOUSES! No one, and I men no one, would doubt this is a major conflict of interest except in this day and age when motivate reasoning rules. The case under discussion was in part about the very thing these flags signify. In fact the examples given for conflict of interest are almost tailored to this case, as Alito himself said some years back about flying flags as political messages.
      2.Thomas’ wife has text messages where she discussed the desire of halting Biden’s confirmation and says she discussed it with “my friend” which is the term she uses for Clarence and intimates his approval.

      Yes insider trading is egregious. So is the court’s malfeasance.

      1. You could argue that a spouse’s opinions point toward bias, but bias is not the same as conflict of interest. Conflict of interest is when you or a close family member stands to gain from a decision you make. A good example is when Biden was point person for Ukraine while Hunter was collecting big bucks from Burisma. Biden ensured that the prosecutor looking into Burisma was fired, which was good for Burisma and Hunter. Bias is when a judge lets it be known that he or she favors one side or the other. A good example is when RBG called Trump a “faker” and said he should resign. She was clearly biased against Trump. Another example is the judge in the hush money case against Trump, who was on record as donating to the Democrats.

        1. The long-standing and accepted framework is:
          1.If there is the PERCEPTION of bias.
          2.And the case applies to the potential bias.

          Ginsberg should have recused herself if a case came before the court that related in some way to what she said or did. There was none. Hunter Biden is irrelevant here-neither he nor Joe is a justice of the court where this long-standing and commonly accepted concept applies.

          As I pointed out-Alito’s wife is also irrelevant-HE OWNS THE HOUSES. Her views don’t matter if the reasonable presumption exists that he agrees with these views. Given they were flown at both his houses this is a reasonable view. The “perception of bias” is obvious. Secondly the case *directly* involved actions related to the meaning of the flags. Nothing could be clearer here. To quote Samuel Alito perceptions and flags for the past where he now contradicts himself:

          https://www.newsweek.com/samuel-alito-supreme-court-flag-opinion-inverted-flag-1906235

          1. Owning a house does not make someone responsible for the behaviours of others at that property.

            Particularly if they live there, are also owners, and are doing nothing illegal.

        2. Recounting, at this late date, the simplistic Hannity version of the Ukrainian prosecuter story is a pretty clear example of bias in itself.

  8. From Biden’s opinion piece: “But the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision on July 1 to grant presidents broad immunity from prosecution for crimes they commit in office means there are virtually no limits on what a president can do. The only limits will be those that are self-imposed by the person occupying the Oval Office.”

    One could forgive the average American, who should be able to trust the representations given by their President, if he now believes that a president could, with full immunity, rape an intern, murder a cabinet official, and take a massive cash bribe while in office.

    Of course, it has been some time since we have been able to trust the representations given by our Presidents.

  9. Google proposed “President Donald Duck” and nothing else when I had typed as far as the o. With the the n added, I got Trump and Tusk, too, with Trump in the lead of the 3 Donalds.
    I’d say the kitten is a classic mix of curious/fascinated and scared. Human children can be just like that.
    Masih’s tweet reminded me of what happened to me a few years ago. I was in a wooded area crouching to look at some insects when two boys of about 10-12 approached, one of whom I had already heard speaking aggressively from a distance. The aggressive-sounding boy tried to scare me (an elderly woman alone in the woods) by practically putting his face into mine and making a scary noise. I didn’t react. He asked me what I was doing. I said, looking at insects. He said, very loudly: Haram! (He seemed quite shocked.)
    Germany, early 2020s.

  10. Safari gave me “President Donald Trump” followed by “President Donald Duck” when I entered “President D”

  11. I really appreciated the changing of the guard in India/Pakistan.
    Sure reminded me of the John Cleese “Ministry of Silly Walks” skit.

    1. That’s a huge tourist attraction in the area for years now and very spectacular. There’s a lot of feeling behind it from both sides of the bleachers – on each side of the border- considering all the animus and history.
      Never got to see it in India but I love the videos of it.

      More frontiers should put on shows like that. I bet the Korean DMZ one would be awesome. Less so Israel-Lebanon though that will soon have some excitement all of its own soon.

      D.A.
      NYC

  12. Love the painter guy. The image looking north is very similar to downstairs from my apartment but up 8th not Lex. It looks like that in the rain.
    Excellent.
    D.A.
    NYC

  13. There is nothing idiotic about the Reese’s peanut butter cups pictured. Standard RPBCs are made with milk chocolate, which is at least 14% milk. This new version uses some sort of oat-derived fluid instead.
    So by ‘plant based’ they mean ‘100% plant-derived ingredients’.
    No doubt their market research suggested it would sell better than ‘vegan’.

  15. This is a response to “Cedric:”

    Are you purposely trolling? We are talking about recusals for the *perception* of bias. That perception need not describe Alito’s actual feelings. That’s how recusal works-it is meant to give confidence of impartiality. No one, anywhere, said anything about illegal activity. If you own a house where you are flying flags in solidarity with Jan.6ers and you then are supposed to preside over a case where the president is accused of acts related to Jan.6 then this is about as clear as it comes:
    1.Perception of bias: Yes it is reasonable to assume you have a horse in this race (even if you claim “it was my wife’s fault!”)
    2.Adjudicating over a case related to the perceived bias.

    Some comments here are like things from an Onion article. I can’t even tell if they are serious. This has nothing to do with your political stripes-you absolutely cannot get a more clear cut case of what this longstanding institution would consider a “no-brainer” recusal case. The fact that people are bringing up Joe Biden, Ginsberg or legality (and yes if you own the house and your wife flies multiple such flags than it is REASONABLE to assume the other owner shares the same views-as Alito himself wrote in the Massachusetts flag case).

  16. Pretty sure that last video about the guy introducing Trump is fake, and probably obviously so and intended as humor.

Comments are closed.