Friday: Hili dialogue

November 22, 2024 • 6:45 am

It’s already the end of the “work” week: Friday, November 22, 2024, and in a week I’ll be in Poland! It’s National Cranberry Relish Day, and I suppose one spoonful per year, ingested at Thanksgiving dinner, won’t hurt you, but the stuff is pretty dire.  Jellied cranberries are better. Here’s how they are grown, which requires lots of water:

It was on this day in 1963 that John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. I remember the moment exactly: it was announced over our junior high-school public address system.  It was one of those incidents that never lets you forget how you learned about it. 

It’s also National Kimchi Day in South Korea, which must be a big celebration, and Humane Society Anniversary Day in the U.S.,

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the November 22 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*I reported yesterday (or rather, stole from other people’s reports) about Matt Gaetz’s withdrawal from consideration as Attorney General. Here’s some more information from the NYT:

Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas and a senior member of the Judiciary Committee, said it was “pretty obvious” that Gaetz didn’t have the votes to be confirmed.

. . .Matt Gaetz told people close to him that he concluded after conversations with senators and their staffs that there were at least four Republican senators who were implacably opposed to his nomination: Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and John Curtis of Utah.

Gaetz told confidants he did not want to get in a protracted confirmation battle and delay Trump from getting his attorney general in place immediately at the start of his administration.

. . . . Gaetz’s withdrawal creates a vacuum at the apex of the Justice Department but not necessarily instability, even if his replacement is not confirmed quickly. Trump has already tapped two of his personal lawyers — Todd Blanche and Emil Bove — to top operational posts; both are well-regarded department veterans whose appointments were welcomed by some career department staff.

Here are the candidates who remain, and it’s a pretty sad lot (from the NYT).  Noem, Rubio, Kennedy, and Hegseth. .  oh my!

*Speaking of Hegseth, the WSJ has an article titled, “Trump team blindsided by latest details of sexual-assault allegations against Hegseth.”

Members of President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team were blindsided by the latest details to emerge about a 2017 sexual-assault allegation against Pete Hegseth, increasing their frustration with the man nominated to lead the Pentagon, according to people familiar with the matter.

The transition team, which hadn’t been told about the original allegation before announcing Hegseth, was surprised again late Wednesday night when the Monterey, Calif., city police released a report about the 2017 allegations. The heavily redacted report details a boozy night at a hotel in California, a poolside argument and two conflicting versions of what ultimately took place inside Hegseth’s hotel room.

The Monterey police said a redacted version of the report had been released to Hegseth on March 30, 2021. The transition team wasn’t told that a copy of the police report had been released to Hegseth previously, the people familiar with the discussions said.

“This is another instance of people being blindsided, so I think there’s rising frustration there,” said a person familiar with the transition. While the president-elect is still behind Hegseth for now, “if this continues to be a drumbeat and the press coverage continues to be bad, particularly on TV, then I think there is a real chance that he loses Trump’s confidence.”

Hegseth told reporters on Capitol Hill on Thursday after meetings with senators that “the matter was fully investigated and I was completely cleared.” Through his lawyer, he has acknowledged the sexual encounter but said it was consensual, while the woman who made the allegation hasn’t spoken publicly.

Officially, Trump’s transition team is standing by Hegseth. “This report corroborates what Mr. Hegseth’s attorneys have said all along: the incident was fully investigated, and no charges were filed because police found the allegations to be false,” Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for Trump’s transition team, said in a statement.

The “blindsiding” is either because Hegseth hid stuff from the Trump team or they simply didn’t ask for a full account of every allegation against him. Hegseth admits he paid off one woman, but did so only to protect his career from a damaging lawsuit.  Now his career is endangered without a lawsuit. From NPR:

After the woman hired an attorney a couple of years later to consider a lawsuit, both parties reached an agreement. Parlatore noted in his statement to the Post that the MeToo movement was gaining momentum at the time, and he told CBS News that Hegseth would have faced “an immediate horror storm” had he been publicly accused of sexual assault, a quote that Parlatore confirmed to NPR.

My judgment: like Gaetz, he will have to withdraw.

*The Senate voted on a Bernie-Sanders-led measure to block the sale of weapons to Israel, but the vote failed.

The Senate on Wednesday voted down a measure, led by Sen. Bernie Sanders and a handful of Democrats, that sought to block the sale of some $20 billion in U.S.-made weapons to Israel, in a last-ditch effort to limit the carnage, suffering and destruction caused by its 13-month war in Gaza.

The measure failed, with none of the three resolutions it comprised garnering more than 19 supporting votes. But the effort — the first time Congress has voted on whether to block an arms sale to America’s closest Middle East ally — also served as a bellwether of the dissatisfaction within President Joe Biden’s own party about his handling of the Middle East crisis.

Wednesday’s vote, spurred by Sanders’s filing of rarely invoked joint resolutions of disapproval, follows the Biden administration’s determination a week ago that it would not take punitive action against Israel for failing to surge humanitarian aid into Gaza. The administration in October warned Israel that absent “concrete measures” to surge food, medicine and other basic supplies into the ravaged Palestinian territory within 30 days, it could risk losing some U.S. military assistance.

Biden’s decision not to act — after international aid groups and the United Nations said the crisis in northern Gaza had reached catastrophic levels over the past month — infuriated liberals, who have called on him repeatedly to hold Israel accountable for a war that has killed roughly 2 percent of Gaza’s population, according to local health authorities. The International Criminal Court, meanwhile, has accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of war crimes, charges he strenuously denies.

Sanders, an independent from Vermont who caucuses with Democrats, was slow in the first few months of the war to join other liberals’ calls for a cease-fire in Gaza, even after thousands of Palestinian civilians had been killed under Israeli bombardment. That reticence drew a backlash from his progressive supporters. He has since been among the most vocal critics of the administration’s approach to Netanyahu.

As far as I can learn, the “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza is manufactured. While some people may not get enough to eat on some days, nobody is starving to death, though Hamas and the UN pretends that there are.  And remember that 100 food trucks going into Gaza the other day were hijacked, and it’s probable that the hijackers were from Hamas (who else would have that power?). Finally, there are 14 field hospitals in Gaza as well as some of the larger hospitals are still working.

Here is the list of Senators who voted against Israeli aid include Elizabeth Warren (expected) but also Dick Durbin, my own Senator. I have written him asking for an explanation.

*The International Criminal Court issued two arrest warrants for war crimes: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.

In a massive legal bombshell, the International Criminal Court on Thursday issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant over the war in Gaza, an unprecedented step that put the two at risk of being detained in much of the world.

The three judges of the ICC’s Pre-Trial Chamber I issued the warrants unanimously on charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes, which the court’s top prosecutor Karim Khan alleges were committed during the ongoing war against the Hamas terror group in Gaza.

The decision marked the first time the ICC has ever issued arrest warrants against leaders of a democratic country.

In a massive legal bombshell, the International Criminal Court on Thursday issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant over the war in Gaza, an unprecedented step that put the two at risk of being detained in much of the world.

The three judges of the ICC’s Pre-Trial Chamber I issued the warrants unanimously on charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes, which the court’s top prosecutor Karim Khan alleges were committed during the ongoing war against the Hamas terror group in Gaza.

The decision marked the first time the ICC has ever issued arrest warrants against leaders of a democratic country.

The court also issued a warrant for Hamas military chief Mohammed Deif, who Israel says was killed by an IDF strike in Gaza in July. Khan had sought arrest warrants for Deif and slain Hamas leaders Ismail Haniyeh and Yahya Sinwar for the terror group’s October 7, 2023, massacre that sparked the ongoing war in Gaza.

Since neither Israel nor the US have accepted the jurisdiction of the ICC, it doesn’t really affect our relationships, but both men are subject to arrest if they set foot in 120 other countries, though other countries often don’t bother to carry out what the ICC wants.  Countries who said they would arrest either man include Italy, France, Canada (of course), Jordan, and the UK. The US has rejected the warrants, and Argentina, Hungary, and the Czech Republic.

The United States rejected a decision by the International Criminal Court (ICC) to issue arrest warrants on Thursday for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense chief, a White House National Security Council spokesperson said.

“The United States fundamentally rejects the Court’s decision to issue arrest warrants for senior Israeli officials. We remain deeply concerned by the Prosecutor’s rush to seek arrest warrants and the troubling process errors that led to this decision,” the spokesperson said, adding the US is discussing next steps with its partners.

I don’t know if this case will be argued out before the ICC, or whether Israel will send lawyers to defend Netanyahu and Gallant.  Better call Natasha Hausdorff! Here she is on the allegations, speaking yesterday for ten minutes on Radio Times about the charges:

*The Washington Post’s op-ed columnis Jennifer Rubin says that conventional news in papers, social media, and on television is dying, but one venue is burgeoning, and should be a model of how the news is conveyed: ProPublica, a nonprofit funded by philanthropists and foundations. It was the first online news source to win a Pulitzer Prize, and has won several more, as well as other awards.

The plight of the news business has gotten steadily worse over the past decade. Cable TV networks are shedding audience share at an alarming rate. Increasingly, they seemed to have forgotten who their audience even is. The hosts of “Morning Joe” visiting Mar-a-Lago was the sort of move, judging from the backlash, that is likely to increase its progressive audience’s flight from MSNBC. CNN, in its effort to be all things to all people, is also hemorrhaging viewers. Many national newspapers are losing subscribers (and hollowing out their coverage), and local media has been shriveling for years. (The Post’s decision not to endorse a presidential candidate unleashed an exodus of hundreds of thousands of readers who had expected a clarion voice in defense of democracy.)

It is not merely this shrinkage in conventional news consumption that should be alarming. The preponderance of voters who get no news whatsoever suggests the very notion of an “informed electorate” might become a thing of the past.

However, there is a part of the news ecosystem that seems to be growing by leaps and bounds: nonprofit news, especially the juggernaut ProPublica, which has been responsible for buckets of scoops that for-profit media have missed.

ProPublica has reported on everything from the actual tax rates paid by billionaires to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s financial scandals to the story of a Georgia woman whose death resulted from the state’s abortion law. It has run stories on everything from how “Opponents of Missouri Abortion Rights Amendment Turn to Anti-Trans Messaging and Misinformation” to how “Tribal College Campuses Are Falling Apart. The U.S. Hasn’t Fulfilled Its Promise to Fund the Schools.” One of its most recent investigations revealed, “Private schools across the South that were established for white children during desegregation are now benefiting from tens of millions in taxpayer dollars flowing from rapidly expanding voucher-style programs.” (You come away wondering what else you are missing relying on for-profit media.)

I recently spoke with Stephen Engelberg, ProPublica’s editor. He described the extraordinary expansion of an experiment that began in 2008 with a $10 million budget. Since then, its national coverage and staff (now about 150) have boomed, its budget has increased to $50 million, and it has created hubs across the country to fill the gap in regional and state news. It went from 36,000 donors in 2022 to 55,000 today.

Starting with a single hub in Illinois, it has added others in the South, Southwest, Northwest, Midwest, Texas (in collaboration with the Texas Tribune) and New York. It has received seven Pulitzer Prizes, five Peabody Awards, eight Emmy Awards and 15 George Polk Awards in the short time it has operated

Moreover, ProPublica has pioneered an inventive partnership with local papers all over the country. ProPublica provides an enterprising investigative reporter with salary for a year plus the infrastructure necessary to report the story, including editors, research assistance and lawyers.

I have never read this site before, but will start doing so. One problem is that we need more than one nonprofit news site if there’s to be competition, yet grant and foundation dollars are limited, so this can’t completely replace the for-profit news. Further, I don’t know if the site has any biases at all; readers who look at it should weigh in below. Finally, it is an investigative reporting site, and so if you want breaking news you’ll have to look elsewhere.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili thinks the fallen leaves are rubbish (Malgorzata says that, in Poland, Trump is held responsible for everything bad that America does):

Hili: Autumn has made a terrible mess.
Andrzej: It’s all Trump’s fault.
Hili: You have been listening to the BBC again.
In Polish:
Hili: Jesień strasznie naśmieciła.
Ja: Wszystko przez Trumpa.
Hili: Znowu słuchałeś BBC.

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

From Jesus of the Day. Ah, the good old days! I never had this female-attracting collar. What an outfit!

From Things with Faces: a weirdly-marked tuxedo cat:

From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy, a lovely doormat:

Masih didn’t tweet anything new today, but here’s something from J. K. Rowling, who’s decided to publicize those people who threaten her online:

One I retweeted, and I may have posted it before:

x

I’ll be at this meeting along with Luana on a panel on censorship in science, but there are a gazillion other to see, as Lukianoff notes:

I am pretty sure this is for real, but it’s horrible.  It’s religion, Jake!

One from my feed that I retweeted with a comment:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted:

Two posts from Professor Cobb. I want this brick badly!

Dramatic paws.Norwich.#WallsOnWednesday

— Duncan Mackay (@theduncanmackay.bsky.social) 2024-11-20T09:29:35.883Z

Living groups of animals originated quickly:

Our latest, by Emily Carlisle, Zongjun Yin, Davide Pisani and myself: Ediacaran origin and Ediacaran-Cambrian diversification of Metazoa http://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/…

— Philip Donoghue (@phil-donoghue.bsky.social) 2024-11-15T17:53:30.375Z

34 thoughts on “Friday: Hili dialogue”

  1. Comment by Greg Mayer

    The datings in the Carlisle et al. metazoan figure seem way off. The mouse/man split in the Cretaceous is borderline conceivable, but the platypus split in the Permian and birds in the Carboniferous is ridiculous– much too early. I’m not sure what this means for other splits which are not as well-constrained by fossil data.

    GCM

    2. I haven’t read the whole article carefully yet, but over the last year I’ve been developing simple models of the fossilization and recovery process. The observed age gap between the oldest and second-oldest fossils of a lineage is a measure of the incompleteness of the fossil record, and under simple probabilistic models, tthe size of this gap leads to an estimate of the expected age gap between the oldest fossil and the date of lineage origin. Generally speaking, the early fossil records of many lineages is extremely incomplete, and the predicted lineage ages (taking into account the stochastic nature of fossil recovery and the observed age gaps between fossils of that lineage) are often much greater than those based on a more literal non-quantitative reading of the fossil record.

      I’m not sure if some of the conflicts you mention might be due to a too-literal reading of the fossil record?

      1. Comment by Greg Mayer

        Lou– Yes, you are correct: first appearances in the fossil record are (if the fossils are properly identified) minimum dates, so the fossil record must be assessed judiciously, and origins may be earlier.

        Seeing now that the color codings of the periods extend up the chart as shading, the split of the platypus, with error bars, ranges from Permian to Jurassic, with the center in the Triassic (not the Permian, which I had originally “eye-balled” it as). This is still early, but more plausible; the fossil record, which is good for early mammals around this time, points very strongly to the mid or later Jurassic for this split (as do molecular data).

        The bird split in the figure is given as definitely early Carboniferous (very narrow error bars), which is still a bit early. It’s not as crazy as I initially thought, though, because with no other amniotes in the tree, the bird split reflects not the origin of birds (Jurassic), but the split between sauropsids and theropsids, which was a very early split in the Amniota.

        The most notable claim in the figure is that the metazoan phyla arose mostly in the Ediacaran, which would generally be later than some other estimates, while the fossil-record-as-minimum-date issue makes later dates suspect. (Because the late date could be a minimum, rather than the actual, date of the split.) So, there are things that seem both early and late in this tree. I’ll have to look at the actual paper; I’ve just been working off the figure so far!

        GCM

        1. I just read the paper, skimming over parts that I don’t understand—the Bayesian analysis, mostly. I agree with Greg that:

          “The most notable claim in the figure is that the metazoan phyla arose mostly in the Ediacaran, which would generally be later than some other estimates, while the fossil-record-as-minimum-date issue makes later dates suspect.”

          For a hundred years, paleontologists have fretted over the apparent rapidity of the “Cambrian explosion.” For most of those hundred years, paleontologists thought that the clustering of appearance of the major groups of organisms (the phyla) was more apparent than real—that limitations of the fossil record kept us from documenting what was in reality a more gradual process. More recently, paleontologists came to accept that the rapid appearance of the phyla was indeed real. Even so, it was still not clear how tightly clustered the diversification “events” were.

          Squeezing the metazoan diversification of the into the Ediacaran is an interesting conclusion (although I admit that I haven’t kept up with the literature that closely). Regarding the various anomalies, I suppose that I’m not surprised that some of the branching points in the cladogram don’t line up with the appearances in the fossil record. Paleontologists—at least those of my generation—are used to living with such inconsistencies until they get resolved.

    3. Thanks for posting this. This is the sort of content that brought me to the site in the first place!

  2. There is also a nine-minute Natasha Hausdorff video interview from this morning at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TYy_ejSAg8
    I found the latter half of it to be particularly instructive.

    While I cannot find it right now, she has in the recent past, also explained the differences between the ICC and the ICJ as well as their origins. Readers might consider searching for that video.

  3. If you like that brick you would really have liked the path at my old house. After the new gas pipe had been installed (because connecting the old one would be illegal owing to its route in the house) the cat next door sat patiently watching the workers carefully smooth out the concrete that reinstated the surface and leave.

    Then she took a walk along its full length, and I suspect those prints are there to this day.

    1. If you were in Canada around that time you might remember a beer commercial on TV where a guy dressed like that, but fatter with his shirt open displaying a hairy chest with a heavy gold chain hits on a woman in a bar with, “Hey Baby, what’s your sign?” She looks him up and down, says, “Exit”.

        1. Reminded me of those TV ads for Hai Karate cologne that showed women so aroused by the scent that they would assault any man wearing it. Each bottle actually came with instructions on how to defend yourself against all the babes who would be flinging themselves at you.

          Too bad I was just a kid at the time. With that cologne and that shirt, I would have been unstoppable.

  5. In a similar manner as to how Tulsi Gabbard is called a “Russian Asset”, can we call these senators as “Hamas Assets”?

  6. Time to cash in the UN and turn the building in Manhattan into condos. The United Nations was useful as the consortium of nations that won the Second World War but it hasn’t done anything useful since about 1965.

    It is shameful that Canada has endorsed the jurisdiction of this rogue Court over a sovereign ally.

  7. Love the video of the woman mimicking contest contestants. She’s got what it takes!

    The ICC arrest warrants are a big deal, and Israel’s leaders could end up being isolated in their own country—which, of course, is one of the goals. Questions abound. Can the charges be challenged and dismissed before actual arrests take place? Or do the charges stand until there are arrests and trials? Can trials take place in absentia? Should/can the U.S. try to strongarm the ICC into dropping the charges? Or should they ignore them, given that the U.S. is not a member? Netanyahu and Gallant cannot afford to ignore the charges and expect to be able to travel in safety. These questions may already have clear answers, but I’ll be watching developments in the coming days.

    1. If the United States were to abandon the UN and stop paying to support its activities, it and its kangaroo court would collapse like a house of cards. The judges of the ICC, deprived of their per diems and travel expenses would have to convene on Zoom and look ridiculous, with no legitimacy but their own puffed up importance. (As Alice replied to the Queen of Hearts who cried “Off with her head!”, “You’re nothing but a pack of cards,” thus ending the dream. A social construct has power only as long as everyone agrees it does….or as long as those who have power under a social construct can enforce their edicts against those who disagree.

        1. “Let’s make a car ad that looks like a 1980’s music video populated by extras from Logan’s Run.”

  9. Sorry, but if your religion allows old men to marry young girls like this, maybe it’s time to have a conversation with yourself and realize your religion is not a religion of peace.

    It’s a real tight battle between islam and mormonism for the title of “Most Pedophilic Religion.” It may come down to three-pointer at the buzzer, a last-second field goal attempt, or a penalty shot shootout…

    2. “Tell me straight out, I call on you-answer me: imagine that you yourself are building the edifice of human destiny with the object of making people happy in the finale, of giving them peace and rest at last, but for that you must inevitably and unavoidably torture just one tiny creature, that same child who was beating her chest with her little fist, and raise your edifice on the foundation of her unrequited tears- would you agree to be the architect on such conditions? Tell me the truth.”
      Ivan to Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov.

      A passage Hitchens used to preface chapter 16 in GING: “Is Religion Child Abuse?” I agree with Hitchens, and Dawkins has said the same; religion is a form of child abuse. And that is a terrifying reality to confront.

  10. Can you guess who benefits most from ICC’s insane charges? Putin. After Netanyahu and Gallant are alleged to be war criminals for defending their country, can any other indictment coming from that institution be taken seriously?

    Not to mention that anything that diverts the world’s attention and resources from Ukraine benefits Putin massively. Maybe it is no coincidence that Oct. 7 is Putin’s birthday.

  11. The Pro-Publica article on “segregation academies” seemed sort of biased.

    They focus on tiny schools that are associated with local churches. That the enrollment reflects the demographics of the congregation rather than that of the outside community is not proof of bias.
    Nor is the fact that the schools were founded in the 60s and 70s.

    Not approving of religious schools is a valid opinion to take, but if one is going to go as far as the articles claim with accusations of discrimination, it seems like more substantial proof would be required.

  13. ProPublica has done good work, but like so many other non-profits and journalistic entities, it also suffers from its fair share of social justice devotees influencing its reporting, ever vigilant to find the most deeply hidden kernels of racism and sexism in society. One famous example was this report about how speed cameras are racist:
    https://www.propublica.org/article/chicagos-race-neutral-traffic-cameras-ticket-black-and-latino-drivers-the-most

Comments are closed.