Wednesday: Hili dialogue

October 16, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to a Hump Day (“Дан грба” in Serbian ), Wednesday, October 16, 2024, and National Liqueur Day. Here’s my favorite:

Ralf Roletschek, GFDL 1.2, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also International Pronouns Day, National Dictionary Day, World Bread Day, National Fossil Day, World Food Day, Hagfish Day (!), and Global Cat Day. Here I am with my last cat, Teddy. I miss him.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 16 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Bowing to pressure from the United States, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has told the U.S. that in retaliation for Iran’s missile attack on Israel, the reprisal will come from the IDF attacking only military targets.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has told the Biden administration he is willing to strike military rather than oil or nuclear facilities in Iran, according to two officials familiar with the matter, suggesting a more limited counterstrike aimed at preventing a full-scale war.

In the two weeks since Iran’s latest missile barrage on Israel, its second direct attack in six months, the Middle East has braced for Israel’s promised response, fearing the two countries’ decades-long shadow war could explode into a head-on military confrontation. It comes at a politically fraught time for Washington, less than a month before the election; President Joe Biden has said publicly he would not support an Israeli strike on nuclear-related sites.

When Biden and Netanyahu spoke Wednesday — their first call in more than seven weeks after months of rising tensions between the two men — the prime minister said he was planning to target military infrastructure in Iran, according to a U.S. official and an official familiar with the matter. Like others in this story, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive deliberations.

The retaliatory action would be calibrated to avoid the perception of “political interference in the U.S. elections,” the official familiar with the matter said, signaling Netanyahu’s understanding that the scope of the Israeli strike has the potential to reshape the presidential race.

An Israeli strike on Iranian oil facilities could send energy prices soaring, analysts say, while an attack on the country’s nuclear program could erase any remaining red lines governing Israel’s conflict with Tehran, triggering further escalation and risking a more direct U.S. military role. Netanyahu’s stated plan to go after military sites instead, as Israel did after Iran’s attack in April, was met with relief in Washington.

Netanyahu was in a “more moderated place” in that discussion than he had previously been, said the U.S. official, describing the call between the two leaders. The apparent softening of the prime minister’s stance factored into Biden’s decision to send a powerful missile defense system to Israel, both officials said.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant vowed Tuesday that Israel would respond to the Iranian attack, saying its response would be “precise, painful and surprising.” But, he added, “we are not interested in opening additional fronts or new conflicts.”

Well, perhaps Biden trade that missile defense system (which comes with 100 American soldiers) for a promise not to attack Iran. I still find it bizarre that the U.S. wants to run the foreign policy of another country to influence American elections.  Iran will get the bomb, and. . . bye, bye Israel. But there will be a short post on this later today.

*In an article called “The Panda Factories” (archived here), the NYT reveals that China has taken more giant pandas from the wild than have been released into the wild. And the captive ones are apparently not having such a great life:

Two chunky pandas, a male and a female, are due to arrive from China this week at the National Zoo in Washington. If everything goes as planned, they will eventually have cubs.

Exchanges like this have helped turn giant pandas into the face of conservation worldwide.

The panda program was created with the stated goal of saving a beloved endangered species. Zoos would pay up to $1.1 million a year per pair, which would help China preserve the pandas’ habitat. By following carefully crafted breeding recommendations, zoos would help improve the genetic diversity of the species.

And someday, China would release pandas into the wild.

But a New York Times investigation, based on more than 10,000 pages of documents, has found that the Chinese authorities and American zoos have put a rosy sheen on a program that has struggled, and often failed, to meet those objectives. The records, photographs and videos — many of them from the Smithsonian Institution Archives — offer a detailed, unvarnished history of the program.

They show that, from the beginning, zoos saw panda cubs as a pathway to visitors, prestige and merchandise sales.

On that, they have succeeded.

Today, China has removed more pandas from the wild than it has freed, The Times found. No cubs born in American or European zoos, or their offspring, have ever been released. The number of wild pandas remains a mystery because the Chinese government’s count is widely seen as flawed and politicized.

Along the way, individual pandas have been hurt.

. . . This panda proliferation has prompted debates among zoo workers and scientists over whether it is ethical to subject animals to intensive breeding when they have no real prospect of being released into the wild. But those discussions have largely played out privately because researchers and zookeepers said that criticizing the program could hurt their ability to work in the field.

Veterinary medicine is always risky, especially with wild animals. When an animal’s life is in danger, the benefits of intervening outweigh the risks. And when a species is on the verge of extinction, conservationists sometimes make a last-ditch effort to save it.

But with pandas, zoo administrators take chances again and again simply to make more cubs, while keeping the grimmest details from the public.

One of the culprits, besides China, is the National Zoo in Washington, D. C., part of the Smithsonian Institution. It’s a grim story, and I’ve decided that no countries should take pandas for exhibits. I already concluded that they’re being used not to educate the public, but simply to make money. Videos will suffice if you want to learn about them.

*From the Free Press‘s morning summary, it seems that that Kamala Harris is involved in a case of plagiarism. And it also seems that although the nature and magnitude of her plagiarism (evinced in an early book) is not materially different from the plagiarism that brought down Harvard President Claudine Gay, the MSM are doing everything they can to minimize accusations against their favored candidate.

From the FP:

  • Whole sections of Kamala Harris’s 2009 book, Smart on Crime, appear to have been lifted from other sources without attribution, reports Christopher Rufo. He offers some examples on his Substack and they certainly look a lot like plagiarism. No wonder “plagiarism hunter” Stefan Weber tells Rufo that the book, which Harris co-authored with Joan O’C Hamilton, contains more than a dozen “vicious plagiarism fragments.” How did The New York Times report on the revelations that a presidential candidate might have plagiarized? Their headline: “Conservative Activist Seizes on Passages From Harris Book.” But of course.

Rufo’s Substack piece on the accusations of plagiarism is here, and a thread showing some of the alleged instances of plagiarism is here.  Remember, Harris is only one author of a two-authored book (though her name is highlighted in bit print), Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer, so even if this is plagiarism, perhaps Harris didn’t participate in it.  The author in smaller type is Joan O’C. Hamilton.

The NYT has analyzed Rufo’s claims in this article (click to read, or find it archived here).  The headline seems a bit, well, slanted.  And so is the text:

The book:

The article is about as slanted as it can get. Of course every news source favors a candidate of its ideological stripe, but I get really steamed when the Paper of Record (and I used to subscribe to the paper version) does that.

Quotes:

The conservative activist Christopher Rufo published claims on Monday that Vice President Kamala Harris had copied portions of her 2009 book “Smart on Crime,” citing five sections that he said were lifted from widely available sites including Wikipedia and news reports.

The passages called into question by Mr. Rufo on his Substack platform involve about 500 words in the approximately 65,000-word, 200-page book. Ms. Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, wrote the book with another author when she was the district attorney in San Francisco.

In a review of the book, The New York Times found that none of the passages in question took the ideas or thoughts of another writer, which is considered the most serious form of plagiarism. Instead, the sentences copy descriptions of programs or statistical information that appear elsewhere.

Umm. . .that’s not how academics judge plagiarism, nor how they judged Claudine Gay. The NYT has changed the normal conception of plagiarism to exculpate Harris. And this:

Jonathan Bailey, a plagiarism consultant in New Orleans and the publisher of Plagiarism Today, said on Monday that his initial reaction to Mr. Rufo’s claims was that the errors were not serious, given the size of the document.

“This amount of plagiarism amounts to an error and not an intent to defraud,” he said, adding that Mr. Rufo had taken relatively minor citation mistakes in a large amount of text and tried to “make a big deal of it.”

The Harris campaign in a statement rejected the accusations as a right-wing attack to try to derail her growing support.

An error? An ERROR??  It looks to me as if the NYT is investigating not Harris, but Rufo. The article is egregiously biased in its entirety, and is worst case I’ve seen from the Times yet (besides firing editors and reporters for innocuous statements that offended other editors).

Rufo, of course, is mad at the NYT for this, and you can find lots of comments about this by him (and other folks) on his Twitter (X) feed. Here’s one of Rufo’s responses to the consultant who did the plagiarism analysis for the NYT. Did the NYT really reach its conclusion after looking at less than a third of the questionable material?

Luana sent me this meme:

*Speaking of Harris, many sources have pointed out that while she’s strongly supported by black women (but is still underperforming with them), she isn’t by black men.  Knowing this is a vulnerability in a nearly tied election, her campaign quickly confected some new policies designed to attract black male voters.

Vice President Kamala Harris and her Democratic allies are rolling out a blizzard of policies, events and outreach in an attempt to shore up her standing with Black men with just three weeks to go until Election Day.

Harris on Monday night stopped by a Black-owned business in Erie, Pa., to discuss her new economic plan for Black entrepreneurs ahead of a rally there. At the same time, actor Don Cheadle and NFL defensive tackle Thomas Booker headlined a “Monday Night Football” watch party in Detroit in an attempt to use celebrity surrogates to connect with voters. Her strategy is emerging less than a week after former President Barack Obama admonished Black male voters who he said were reluctant to back a Black woman, stern remarks that some in the party say risk making matters worse for Harris.

Quentin James, founder and president of the Collective PAC, a pro-Harris group, said it was important for Democrats to use policy to persuade Black men to vote for Harris over Republican former President Donald Trump. James, who attended Monday night’s event in Detroit, said Obama’s remarks suggesting Harris’s support with Black men is somewhat soft because they are “not feeling the idea” of a female president weren’t helpful.

“While I understand the sentiment of having a desire to see increased engagement, chastising voters has never worked, and it won’t work this time either,” said James, who gave the Harris campaign feedback on the new set of policies rolled out on Monday aimed at improving the economic position of Black men.

Asked if it would be helpful for Obama to reiterate those comments at future campaign stops, James said: “If the goal is to increase Black male engagement, hell no.”

The new policies and football meetup are part of Harris’s latest efforts to reach out to Black men, a core constituency for the party. Polling shows a potential lack of enthusiasm among those voters, as early voting is already under way in some states. Securing the support of Black men could prove decisive in key battleground races, particularly as Harris attempts to drive up turnout in places like Detroit, Philadelphia and Atlanta.

The vice president wants to offer one million forgivable business loans for Black entrepreneurs to use to start businesses, create more training and apprenticeship programs and study diseases, such as diabetes and sickle cell anemia, that predominantly affect Black men.

Here’s Harris’s tweet (it’s pinned at the top of her feed) announcing her change in policy. It also involves marijuana-selling opportunities and protection against bitcoin fraud:

. . . and from the ever-reliable “Oddities” section of the AP, we have a story of duplicity, with Dave Jankins, the winner of the male competition, being in possession of a steel chestnut in a conkers competition. Don’t know conkers? Wikipedia explains:

Conkers is a traditional children’s game in Great Britain and Ireland played using the seeds of horse chestnut trees—the name ‘conker’ is also applied to the seed and to the tree itself. The game is played by two players, each with a conker threaded onto a piece of string: they take turns striking each other’s conker until one breaks.

The Washington Post now has the story, too.

And the miscreant (from the AP):

The World Conker Championships said Tuesday that it was investigating allegations of cheating after this year’s men’s winner was found to have a steel chestnut in his pocket.

More than 200 enthusiasts of the traditional game entered the annual competition on Sunday in the small village of Southwick in central England. The game involves players using conkers — the glossy brown seeds from the horse chestnut tree — threaded onto a string to try and smash their opponent’s chestnut. Each player takes three alternate strikes.

Veteran player Dave Jakins, 82, won the men’s tournament. But organizers said they launched an investigation after claims that he may have used a steel chestnut.

The allegations were raised by Alastair Johnson-Ferguson, who lost in the men’s final against Jakins after his conker “disintegrated in one hit,” The Telegraph newspaper reported.

Organizers confirmed a steel conker was found in Jakins’ pocket. Investigations were ongoing, but they said that it appeared unlikely that he was able to cheat under the scrutiny of judges. Jakins has denied the allegations.

“He was very closely watched by four judges. It looks like it was absolutely impossible for him to cheat,” St. John Burkett, chair of the event’s organizing committee, told Sky News.

So if they find that he had a steel chestnut but didn’t appear to use it, would they still retract his title? Stay tuned.  But the overall winner was Kelci Banschbach, the winner of the women’s contest.

Here’s last year’s competition:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej is distressed and tempted to be intemperate:

Hili: Why are you not writing?
A: Because I’m thinking.
Hili: You’d better not write what you are thinking.
In Polish:
Hili: Czemu nie piszesz?
Ja: Bo myślę.
Hili: Tego co myślisz lepiej nie pisz.

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

From Duck Lovers:

 

From The 2024 Darwin Awards!!!/Epic Fails:

From The Cat House on the Kings:

From Masih, who does an investigative report. Her words are in Farsi but there are English subtitles:

I may have posted this before. If so, here it is again:

From Malcolm, a music loving cat, and that moggy really loves music!

Two from my feed. First, a cartoonist’s signature:

Saving the life of a wasp. What a nice man! (Of course, it didn’t help the parasite.) I have a feeling I’ve posted this before:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I retweeted:

Two from Doctor Cobb, Emeritus Professor.  First, an amazing height for a raptor to hunt:

Of course this is reversed, but the speed of building a new barn for your neighbors is amazing:

24 thoughts on “Wednesday: Hili dialogue”

  1. I liked a Tweet suggesting that the left is shortly going to redefine “plagiarism” to mean “plagiarism plus power”, such that black women cannot be guilty of it.

  2. I doubt that Kamala has even read her book. The plagiarist is the ghost writer. I wonder how many of these types of political hagiographies (which I never read) contain significant plagiarized passages?

  3. Years ago I was reading a journal article by a PhD student of a professor at an elite university whom I worked with in our mutual, fairly narrow research field. The words felt very familiar and I realized that the guy had virtually copied and pasted several paragraphs from an introduction I had written in an earlier paper of mine. The write-up of his research results was his own (I assume…at least it wasn’t mine) but he did take a shortcut in the somewhat boiler plate introductory section. In any case I called his advisor, who was signed on as a co-author, and informed him of the situation saying I was flattered by this obvious endorsement of my writing style, but perhaps not all research engineers would look at it that way if it were to happen to them. I am sure that he was red-faced at the other end of the phoneline and that he admonished his student for the misdeed. So I learned that the concept of not plagiarizing is not innate or obvious but apparently must be taught to be assured.

  5. Candidate Harris proposes subsidies (“totally forgivable loans”) for black men wanting to get into the cannabis business. What’s next, sponsoring commercial watermelon-eating contests?

    Cringe. Besides, anyone in the cannabis business knows that the illegal market remains more lucrative even when dope is legalized. The legal industry is going belly up in Canada, partly because the government enforces potency, can’t resist taxing it, and they don’t allow the dealers to sell to schoolchildren. That’s three strikes right there. Government loans to the legal cannabis businesses are like student loans. Gone.

    (We have similar programs in Canada for black- and indigenous- owned businesses. This helps chiefly the well-connected and sharp-elbowed members of these races who are already doing pretty well for themselves thank you very much.)

    1. I can only somewhat buffer this by pointing out that its prohibitively expensive to start a business selling cannabis, so they tend to be started by people who have the resources while those lower down on the economic ladder are shut out. You can interpret this as meaning that the businesses are white owned, as a rule.
      It still reads very strange to me that Kamala would specifically target black men, and not “urban entrepreneurs”. I don’t see how that sort of blatant discrimination can even be legal and maybe it isn’t.

  6. Yep. The election is going to be close. And in consequence, we will have the pleasure of watching a new game show between now and November 5: Extreme Pandering! It’s going to be epic.

  7. Regarding the Pandas at The National Zoo in DC. I volunteered at The Department of Invertebrates at the zoo around 1999. DOI had everything from spiders, cockroaches,sea stars, anemones, ants, bees, scorpions, corals, horseshoe crabs, blue crabs, giant octopus, and many others. Also including a Pollinarium featuring pollinators like butterflies and humming birds.The Pandas were the star attraction at the zoo and cost over 2 million dollars a year. The DOI was run on a shoestring by devoted staff and volunteers who would interact with the public to explain these diverse exhibits which is so much better than people just looking at the various animals. The DOI has been closed but I think the public these days might be more interested in the invertebrate world and I think they should take the money used to rent pandas and reopen DOI.

  8. A phrase in the WSJ article is wrong: “….study diseases, such as diabetes and sickle cell anemia, that predominantly affect Black men.”

    Diabetes affects far more than black men! All races and both sexes are affected.

    And sickle cell disease—while it mostly affects black people—affects women as often as men.

    1. It’s true that all people, irrespective of melanin content, can get diabetes but in the U.S. there are differences in relative risk between racial groups.

      From the American Diabetes Association the frequency (rate) of diabetes by self-reported race;
      13.6% of American Indians/Alaskan Native adults
      12.1% of non-Hispanic Black adults
      11.7% of Hispanic adults
      9.1% of Asian American adults
      6.9% of non-Hispanic White adults

      There are likely many reasons for the differences; some cultural, some biological, but they do appear to be real.

      1. Less than a two-fold difference and the excess prevalence is about the same in Hispanics and even higher in aboriginals. Kind of meh for me as a target for black-affinity spending, which I suspect is Fr. Katz’s point. You risk alienating the people who pay for healthcare if you throw money at a specific race when the disease is common in all races….and even more common in some non-targeted races.

        1. Whatever Frau Katze’s point, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to me, in fact it seem medically prudent, to look into why such differences exist. Are they cultural or biological or some combination? If biological, are there therapies that might work better for black men than white men?

          It’s good medicine to understand the differences in patient populations and it may be of importance here. Who knows? But to understand them, it may take money and if that hurts the feelings of “the people who pay for healthcare”, I say; “tough noogies”. Public research and medical monies should not be allocated based on personal preferences.

  9. I’m actually pretty shocked that Mr. Bailey went public with his comments. Does he not see that Trump is an existential threat? The NYT was trying to help Harris, and this is not furthering the cause. On the other hand, I doubt that many NYT readers will ever be exposed to his X post, so the harm to her campaign or the paper will be minimal.
    She probably didn’t know about it and I’d guess her contribution to the book is that she sat down for a few interviews with the coauthor who did the actual writing. But her name is on the book as one of the two authors, so she does have to bear blame.

    Regarding the pandas – I’ve seen them in the National Zoo, and while it was cool to see them, I’d much rather have pandas (or any animal) thriving in the wild than removed from their homes just so we can see them.

    1. Another reason to have exhibits like Department of Invertebrates. Don’t know for sure but most of the animals living at DOI might not have been negatively affected by captivity, compared to larger animals who normally range for miles. And you can show visitors all the various behaviors and how they have adapted to their environments. And I think the public is becoming more aware of the smaller lives they always took for granted.

  10. On Charteuse: Apparently, the monks have stopped selling to the public. That’s what I’ve been told and read anyway.

    It’s almost unavailable.

    Subs I’ve found:

    Yellow: Strega
    Green: Genepy from Dolin (Chambery in the Savoie)
    Accompani Floral Green (Accompani is in Portland, OR)

  11. I suppose there are a number of reasons the US does not want Israel to attack Iran’s nuclear sites and oil infrastructure. One, however, would be that the US is using the threat of attacking those targets for itself. The US needs to have leverage over Iran to contain it’s wilder ambitions.

  12. The conkers competition takes me back to my childhood near Toronto. There was a huge chestnut tree a few blocks down from us and the kids in the neighborhood would make trips down there to harvest the nuts off the ground. I remember using a nail to drill a hole through and usually I knotted an old shoe string to provide the line. Who won or lost was not really much of an issue. It was just something to do.

    1. Sounds like my childhood experience – there was a row of large old horse chestnut trees along Sheppard, where we’d go to harvest our conkers.

      1. I was on Lawrence Avenue. I guess you were more of a downtown kid. I bet we could have beaten you guys. We had better chestnut trees. 😉

        1. Nope, Sheppard is north of the 401. When we first moved there, there was no bus service on the weekends. It was the sticks.

  13. So Harris’s coauthor committed plagiarism. Guess you’ll all have to vote for the con artist who sexually assaults women and wants to dismantle democracy instead.

    Goodbye America, it was nice knowing you.

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