Sunday: Hili dialogue

September 29, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the first goyische sabbath of Autumn: it’s Sunday, September 29, 2024, and National Coffee Day. Here’s a photo of the latte I made for myself this morning (it is lightly dusted with cinnamon).

For those who couldn’t find all 20 cats in yesterday’s picture, here’s an annotated and complete reveal by reader MA. Click to enlarge; each cat has a number.

And a reflection of Chicago architecture, taken on the way to dinner with Mr. Evolution:

It’s also Broadway Musicals Day, National Corn Day (in Mexico), World Rivers Day, National Mocha Day, Goose Day, and National Biscotti Day. 

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the September 29 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Nasrallah is with Allah. Hezbollah confirmed yesterday that Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, both Herzbollah’s spiritual and political leader, was killed in an IDF bombing attack. The IDF announced the death earlier, and their announcements are almost 100% reliable, but ultimate confirmation must also come from Hezbollah, and it did.

Israeli airstrikes battered areas near Beirut again on Saturday evening, hours after Hezbollah confirmed that its longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah had been killed in an Israeli bombing that flattened residential buildings near Lebanon’s capital the night before.

The assassination, which Israel said hit the Iranian-backed militia’s underground headquarters, was a stunning escalation of Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah in a conflict that has gone on for nearly a year. Hezbollah began firing into northern Israel on Oct. 8 in solidarity with Hamas, which is also supported by Iran, and Israel frequently responded with its own strikes. But Israel intensified the conflict dramatically over the last two weeks, fueling fears of an all-out regional war that could draw in bigger players like Iran.

Mr. Nasrallah was a towering figure among anti-Israel forces across the Middle East and beyond, and his death struck a tremendous blow to Hezbollah, ending an era in the Lebanese group’s decades-old fight with Israel and raising questions about its future. Mr. Nasrallah played multiple roles in the lives of Hezbollah’s members, serving at once as a religious guide, political strategist and commander in chief.

His death deprives the organization of his vast experience, personal relationships with other militia leaders and the unifying force of his rhetoric and personality. Israel had been tracking his movements for months and decided to strike because it believed it had only a short window before he moved to a different location, Israeli officials said.

The Israeli military strikes on Friday near Beirut were aimed at breaking Hezbollah by killing top commanders, and if successful they would allow Israel to avoid a ground invasion into the country, a senior Israeli official told reporters on Friday. But the fighting with Hezbollah did not seem poised to end.

Other Hezbollah commanders were also killed in this targeted strike, and Lebanon is pretty much in turmoil. As the Times of Israel reports, many Lebanese who don’t like Hezbollah (it is in fact their de facto government, even though it’s not supposed to be) are celebrating, along with Muslims in Syria.

Videos circulating on social media show residents of the rebel-held region of Idlib, in north-western Syria, celebrating the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah last night, before the IDF and the terror group announced it officially today.

Residents are shown handing out sweets to passers-by, thanking Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and vowing that Syrian President Bashar Assad will be next in line.

Hezbollah has long been an ally of the Syrian regime under the Assad family and helped it in its fight against the Syrian opposition since the outbreak of the civil war in 2011 until 2019. The intervention of the Lebanese terror group was critical in defeating rebels and maintaining Bashar Assad in power.

Here are two tweets, the first with videos. I can’t, of course, vouch that they’re genuine:

*The Wall Street Journal reports that students from the Northern U.S. are increasingly choosing not to apply to “elite” schools in that area, but are heading south where college is cheaper and more “fun.”:

A growing number of high-school seniors in the North are making an unexpected choice for college: They are heading to Clemson, Georgia Tech, South Carolina, Alabama and other universities in the South.

Students say they are searching for the fun and school spirit emanating from the South on their social-media feeds. Their parents cite lower tuition and less debt, and warmer weather. College counselors also say many teens are eager to trade the political polarization ripping apart campuses in New England and New York for the sense of community epitomized by the South’s football Saturdays. Promising job prospects after graduation can sweeten the pot.

The number of Northerners going to Southern public schools went up 84% over the past two decades, and jumped 30% from 2018 to 2022, a Wall Street Journal analysis of the latest available Education Department data found.

At the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, total freshmen from the Northeast jumped to nearly 600 in a class of about 6,800, up from around 50 in 2002. At the University of Mississippi, in Oxford, they increased from 11 to more than 200 in a class of about 4,500 in 2022. At the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, 11% of students came from the Northeast in 2022, compared with less than 1% two decades prior.

This flow of students to Southern colleges promises to impact the region’s economy for years. About two-thirds of college graduates go on to work in the same state where they graduate, according to a recent study from researchers at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and others. The transplants are well-educated, motivated young workers at the least expensive points in their careers.

For most of American history, many high-school seniors have aspired to go to college in the Northeast, home to the Ivy League. Southern academic stalwarts, such as Duke, Tulane, Emory and Vanderbilt, have long drawn their share of students from up North, but the recent uptick of students going to the South is fueled by attendance at public universities.

Though far more students apply to Ivy League schools than in 2002, some of the hottest Southern public schools—including Clemson and Georgia Institute of Technology—have seen even a bigger spike in interest. At Alabama, applications were up more than 600% in the same period—about three times as much as bids to attend Harvard.

For out-of-state students, Southern schools are often a bargain, according to figures from roughly 100 of the nation’s top public research universities. Last school year, such Southern schools charged students from other states a median $29,000 in tuition and fees, the least of top public colleges in any region.

Scholarships often make it cheaper.

Here’s a figure from the article showing where students are going. Look at the spike in Southern schools! (click to enlarge).  But where is North Carolina?

Well, the “fun” part mostly involves sports like football (watching, not playing), and I’m not too keen on that. But I did go to undergraduate school in the South (The College of William and Mary in Virginia), and it was dead cheap for in-state residents and also a wonderful place to get a liberal education. And Duke, Vanderbilt, and so on are excellent schools, too. There’s more to life than Harvard.

*A new WaPo article is titled, on the front page, “Half the U.S. has banned trans girls from girls sports. A mom may be among the first to face a penalty.” (The title at the news site, however, is different.) Here’s the skinny:

Jessica Norton eased her minivan out of the driveway, and she told herself she’d done what any mother would. Her daughter Elizabeth had wanted to play high school volleyball, and Norton had let her. Norton had written female on the permission slips. She’d run practice drills in the yard, and she’d driven this minivan to matches all across their suburban Florida county.

, , , , Until recently, Norton had worked at the high school Elizabeth attended. But last fall, an armed officer with the Broward County Public SchoolsPolice had told Norton she was under investigation for allowing Elizabeth to play girls sports. District leaders banned Norton from the building. They discussed the investigation on the local news, and soon, everyone in Coconut Creek seemed to know Elizabeth is transgender. (Norton asked The Washington Post to use the child’s middle name to protect her privacy.)

In the nine months since, school officials had talked about Elizabeth as if she were dangerous, but Norton knew they couldn’t possibly be picturing the 16-year-old who stood at the edge of the driveway in Taylor Swift Crocs. This girl loved Squishmallows and Disney World. She had long red hair, and she was so skinny, the principal described her to investigators as “frail.”

. . . . Elizabeth didn’t have an advantage, Norton thought. She was a normal teenage girl, and yet her very existence had thrust them into one of the nation’s most contentious debates.

Over the last few years, half the country, including Florida, had banned trans girls from playing on girls teams. Proponents of the lawsargued that they were fighting for fairness, and thedebate had spilled into the stands with an anger that worried Norton. Critics called trans competitors “cheats.” Crowds booed teenage athletes. And somespectators had begun eyeing cisgender competitors for signs of masculinity.

. . . . For all that fury, though, no one had been punished yet under one of the bans. Soon, Norton feared, she might become the first. The Broward County School Board planned to take up her case that afternoon, and the agenda included only one proposed outcome: termination.

For much of her life, all the big sports associations allowed trans athletes to compete, and most states did, too. Some required athletes to show proof they were taking hormones or blockers, but a dozen states, including Florida, had no restrictions at all. As long as a student could show their gender identity was consistent, they could play.

Trans people represent less than 1 percent of the country’s population, and for decades, state lawmakers rarely mentioned them. But as gay people won protections and the right to marry, LGTBQ+ rights groups and right-wing leaders began looking for new issues to galvanize supporters. Both turned their attention to trans rights.

. . . . Over the next few years, Florida and two dozen other states passed nearly identical bans on trans girls in sports. Many Republican lawmakers spoke about trans athletes as if they were all the same — tall and muscular, physically dominant, grown men cross-dressing for the sake of a secondary school athletic win. The bill sponsors didn’t mention trans girls who never went through puberty. They hardly ever talked about children like Elizabeth who tried and failed to make a seventh grade team. By 2023, multiple polls, including one by The Post and KFF, found that two-thirds of Americans agreed that trans girls should not be allowed to play girls sports.

First of all, the trans-in-womens-sports issue didn’t come up because right-wing groups were looking for new issues to galvanize supporters. It came up because many more men were transitioning, there were more men with a woman’s identity participating in sports, and these “trans women” were starting to win. Many of us are left wing and oppose such results on the grounds of mere fairness.  To keep a level playing field, I think that—with the possible exception of elementary-school sports like kickball—segregation of the biological sexes in sports should begin after elementary school.  As for how to create fairness, well, there can be “other” leagues, or everyone of trans gender can participate on men’s teams.  I don’t think mothers should be punished, as Elizabeth was, but I think there should be a ban on men with women’s identities competing against biological women.

*Russia’s foreign minister made a nuclear threat at the UN, though it was veiled:

Russia’s top diplomat warned Saturday against “trying to fight to victory with a nuclear power,” delivering a U.N. General Assembly speech packed with condemnations of what Russia sees as Western machinations in Ukraine and elsewhere — including inside the United Nations itself.

Three days after Russian President Vladimir Putin aired a shift in his country’s nuclear doctrine, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accused the West of using Ukraine — which Russia invaded in February 2022 — as a tool to try “to defeat” Moscow strategically, and “preparing Europe for it to also throw itself into this suicidal escapade.”

“I’m not going to talk here about the senselessness and the danger of the very idea of trying to fight to victory with a nuclear power, which is what Russia is,” he said.

The specter of nuclear threats and confrontation has hung over the war in Ukraine since its start. Shortly before the invasion, Putin reminded the world that his country was “ one of the most powerful nuclear states,” and he put its nuclear forces on high alert shortly after. His nuclear rhetoric has ramped up and toned down at various points since.

On Wednesday, Putin said that if attacked by any country supported by a nuclear-armed nation, Russia will consider that a joint attack.

He didn’t specify whether that would bring a nuclear response, but he stressed that Russia could use nuclear weapons in response to a conventional assault that posed a “critical threat to our sovereignty.”

The United States and the European Union called his statements “irresponsible.”

The new posture was seen as a message to the U.S. and other Western countries as Ukraine seeks their go-ahead to strike Russia with longer-range weapons. The Biden administration this week announced an additional $2.7 billion in military aid for Ukraine, but it doesn’t include the type of long-range arms that Zelenskyy is seeking, nor a green light to use such weapons to strike deep into Russia.

Hold off on the nukes, guys: that way lies mass destruction and WWIII.  As for Ukraine, I think the U.S. has to support it with all the resources we can muster. It is a democratic country being attacked without cause by an autocracy that wants to absorb it. It is against the principles of America to stand by and let that happen.  On that issue I stand with the Biden administration rather than with Trump, who seems willing to let Ukraine attain “peace” by giving up more of its territory to Russia, as it did with Crimea.

*Francis Ford Coppola has a new movie out called “Megalopolis,” and he’s put everything behind it, including selling much of his famed California vineyard, to make it a success. (I read about the movie in Rolling Stone while waiting for my flu shot yesterday. BTW, you should be getting your flu shot NOW).  The Free Press writes about it in a piece called “In defense of Megalomania.” The movie sounds weird, but hey, it’s Coppola, the man who made “The Godfather” and “Apocalypse Now”:

Megalopolis takes place in the far future, in a city called New Rome that is very recognizably New York. An opening scene finds Cesar, the architect hero played by Adam Driver, gazing down at the landscape from a precarious perch atop the Chrysler Building. Cesar is the inventor of a substance dubbed “Megalon,” which looks and behaves like gold ectoplasm and can be used to do just about anything—including build cities, which is Cesar’s goal.

His vision: to remake New Rome as a utopia called Megalopolis.

His enemies: the city’s current power players, including corrupt mayor Cicero, played by Giancarlo Esposito.

The parallels between this story and the current state of American politics aren’t exactly subtle; we are reminded that Rome (the old one) didn’t fall in a day; the decline of a civilization is a slow crumble that starts with people losing faith in their leadership, their government, their democracy.

A title card at the film’s start reads: CAN WE PRESERVE OUR PAST AND ALL ITS WONDROUS HERITAGE? OR WILL WE TOO FALL VICTIM, LIKE OLD ROME, TO THE INSATIABLE APPETITE FOR POWER OF A FEW MEN?

Yes, it is ambitious.

And long before anyone had even seen Megalopolis, a consensus had emerged that Coppola’s four-decade, self-financed passion project was shaping up to be a trainwreck: wildly expensive, weirdly experimental, and proof that the director’s ego had finally spiraled out of control.

So far the reviews have been mixed, with few having the all-out approbation that the first two “Godfather” films got (Part III stunk to high heaven.) But I will see it. Here’s the official trailer:

 

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is devoid of prey

A: What do you see there?
Hili: A lack of mice.
In Polish:
Ja: Co tam widać?
Hili: Brak myszy.

And a photo of Baby Kulka:

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

From Stash Krod:

From The Dodo Pet:

From America’s Cutural Decline into Idiocy:

From Masih, the Voice of the Iranian Opposition, who reports that the head of the Iranian theocracy has been moved to a new location. I’m wondering whether Israel is contemplating an attack on Iran, trying to squelch its drive to create nuclear weapons:

Cat television sent in by Merilee:

Malgorzata sent one of the all-time put-downs of an pro-Palestinian spokesman by artist and singer Elica Lebon, an Iranian immigrant to the UK. This was on the Piers Morgan show. I’d sure want her on my side!

From Luana; Bernie makes a boo-boo (you can see the story here; it involves a student risking losing his student visa after expulsion):

From Simon, who calls this “location, location”:

From the Auchwitz Memorial, a nascent poet who died in Auschwitz after living in a ghetto. The poem is deeply moving.

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. He says the first one is a “good balanced thread on Covid origins.” It does favor the wet-market theory for the origin of the disease:

Matthew’s comment on this is “Lol”:

20 thoughts on “Sunday: Hili dialogue”

  1. The excerpt from Piers Morgan: pretty much what I have wished that I could have put together and said numerous times recently. Thank you for sharing, Malgorzata.

    1. Agreed. A transcript of Elica Lebon’s statement should go to our friends in Congress who are either equivocal about their support for Israel or who are calling for support to end. President Biden should get a copy to encourage his continued support (his equivocations have been exasperating), and Vice President Harris should get a copy in the hope that she is capable of forming a morally sound position and expressing it plainly. (I’d like to be convinced that she is so capable.)

      1. I cannot imagine VP Harris ever stringing together such a coherent, fact and data based, and logical extemporaneous commentary about anything.

  2. Great news for courageous Iranian women. From CBS news last night:

    Per CBS:

    A senior general in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps was also reportedly killed in the strike [that got Nasrallah], Iranian state media said Saturday. General Abbas Nilforoushan, 58, had been identified as the deputy commander for operations by the U.S. Treasury. The treasury sanctioned Nilforoushan amid the monthslong protests over the death of Mahsa Amini after her arrest and death in custody, saying that he led an organization “directly in charge of protest suppression.”

  3. As to SARS-CoV-2 origins, yesterday Vincent Racaniello and Daniel Griffin discussed the work in Science noted above in yesterday’s episode of This Week in Virology. Start @ 18:30. Also on this page there are links to eight previous episodes of this podcast, going back to mid-2021, all of which come down on the zoonotic origin scenario. It’s the wet market, Jake.

    1. Also, as far as current COVID stats, WV far outpaces all other states reporting (at least half don’t seem to), with 6.8% of all deaths in the past week due to COVID. This is by far the highest % that has shown up on this map (which changes weekly via the same link) in the couple months that I’ve been following it. So do get your fall shot! A colleague @ Penn State told me last week that “Everyone here has COVID.”

      And if anyone needs further reason to be worried about COVID, go to 42:20 in the TWiV episode linked above, for the discussion on a paper that studied effects on memory in volunteers infected with the virus.

      As far as the vaccines, if you have experienced the day-after reactogenicity (flulike symptoms) after the Pfizer or Moderna mRNA shots in the past, you mat want to try NovaVax’s spike-protein-based shot this time around. I’ve gotten it the last two times and experienced zero reactogenicity vs. increasing reaction to each Moderna shot after the first one. Everyone that I’ve heard from who has gotten NovaVax seems to have had the same experience.

      That said, if the mRNA shots were the only game in town, I’d happily put up with them, even if the reaction lasted longer. They’re a great triumph of molecular biology. But if there’s an alternative that gives about the same level of protection, having an extra day of being productive is great.

      1. I think I might try the NovaVax then. I had very rough reactivity the first few times I’d taken the Moderna RNA vaccine, though the effects were mild the last two times.

      2. 2nd-ing your endorsement of This Week in Virology. It isn’t a polished series but it is very useful and interesting. I watched it a lot, starting during covid.
        Top shelf stuff.
        D.A.
        NYC

  4. Sad about the young man dead on arrival. The EMTs should have left him on the street, I suppose. (Not joking: there is evidence that persons with no vital signs who never get a pulse during initial attempts by EMTs can be pronounced dead at the scene and not transported.)

    Canada doesn’t mandate the provision of free ambulance services under the provincial universal single-payer health coverage systems. Only medically necessary services by doctors or in public hospitals must be covered free first-dollar with no co-payments, deductibles, or maximums, and no opting out. Everything else is at the discretion of the provincial welfare system for the elderly and indigent but is not part of what we colloquially call “medicare”.

  5. I read some of the comments under “you were in Georgia” tweet. It seems that Tr*mp was referring to a poll taken in Louisiana, not an imaginary visit to the place.

    This was actually an own goal for those of us who do not want to see him as president again.

  6. The article on “Elizabeth” was frustrating on so many levels, but I think this form of argument is particularly confused:

    Many Republican lawmakers spoke about trans athletes as if they were all the same — tall and muscular …They hardly ever talked about children like Elizabeth …

    Of course they don’t— because they shouldn’t. That’s not how it works and it’s got nothing to do with bigotry.

    When a new law or rule is proposed which doesn’t spell out exceptions, you test it with the hard cases, not the easy ones. If Little League suddenly decides to change the age requirement and include men of 21 in with the 12 year olds, the fact that we can pick out some very weak, short, or unskilled men who play like middle schoolers isn’t relevant. The age limitation exists because men of 21 can’t be expected to fit that profile.

    The same applies with sex categories. The intentional obtuseness here is disingenuous. No trans activist is planning on having a checklist of exactly how “effeminate” a “trans girl” has to be to make the team. On the contrary, once you claim that gender identity is a more scientific and reliable way to determine who’s male or female than sex is, no other criteria will ever be philosophically, morally, or legally justifiable. All limitations will eventually succumb to the quivering lip of the next trans athlete who is just barely being excluded.

    They make such a fuss over this particular Elizabeth being frail to distract from the fact that under the Trans-Girls-Are-Girls rules Elizabeth could indeed be a big, husky bruiser breaking all the records and they’d simply be proud that she was brave enough to live her best life.

    1. Your last paragraph sums up exactly what this article is doing. They’ve deliberately picked someone with a slight build.

      (But even teenage boys with a slight build are stronger than teenage girls.)

    2. Agreed about the misdirection over the boy being “frail”. WaPo is paywalled for me. The AP had ~ the same story here.

      https://apnews.com/article/transgender-girl-sports-florida-be36fe49a6a4457630107aa56c34dc1e

      “Norton’s child began taking puberty blockers at age 11 and takes estrogen but has not had gender-affirming surgery. Such procedures are rarely done on minors.” As if the second sentence justifies what’s described in the first, which is a form of child abuse.

      Also love the passive voice “…began taking puberty blockers…” as if medically diverting a boy’s physiology and sexual development to become a sexless elfish waif is something that just naturally happens to Broward County progressives.

      The AP story more or less explains that the mom is being fired not for transing her son but for not doing her job. Works in IT services for the school where her son attended, long ago got his student records to say “female”, was later told to change it back to “male”, didn’t do that, then signed an athletics permission form that asks for sex at birth and entered “female”.

      Worst part: her son was socially popular at school as a girl, but so traumatized by being outed as male that he left and now attends high school online. Mom could have helped him come to terms with his sexuality as a child, and he could have become a perfectly happy femme gay teenager (it’s Broward County after all). Instead she affirmed his mental illness (PBs at 11!) and set the stage for his teen life to blow up.

      But as Helen Joyce has said, the parents will never own up to any of this. They’ll always believe they did the right thing and that the school is transphobic, because otherwise they’d have to admit they harmed their own child.

    4. So agree with Sastra’s comment! If WaPo wants to argue that sports should be segregated by things like weight, height, running speed, punching power, etc — instead of sex — then they should make that argument because at least it would be consistent, unlike this article.

      Even so, we’d end up with very few females in sport.

    5. Coaches of girls teams who include males are big supporters of this. They are incentivized to win, and how they win is irrelevant as long as it is within the rules.

      A middle school boy who thinks he’s a girl is a prize, especially if the school and the state athletics board endorses the student’s self identity. Start him in the weight room and with a good trainer, and he’ll dominate in high school girls’ sports, with the coach receiving accolades for winning so many games.

  7. Coaches of girls teams who include males are big supporters of this. They are incentivized to win, and how they win is irrelevant as long as it is within the rules.

    A middle school boy who thinks he’s a girl is a prize, especially if the school and the state athletics board endorses the student’s self identity. Start him in the weight room and with a good trainer, and he’ll dominate in high school girls’ sports, with the coach receiving accolades for winning so many games.

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