Wednesday: Hili dialogue

Welcome to a Hump Day (“Jornu di gobba” in Sicilian), December 4, 2024, and National Cookie Day. Here are my favorite commercial cookies (of course they’re called “biscuits” in the UK):

It’s also International Cabernet Franc Day, Wildlife Conservation Day, National Sock Day, Wear Brown Shoes Day, and International Cheetah Day. Here’s a wild cheetah I photographed in South Africa this year:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the December 4 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*This seems to have some on so suddenly that I didn’t become aware of it until last night (Polish time).  South Korea appears to be in substantial political and social turmoil because its president, Yoon Suk Yeol, declared martial law in the country—for a time. When he declared the speech, nearly 300 South Korean troops stormed the Parliament.  After the country’s Parliament voted against the move, he rescinded martial law, but the damage had been done. (Article archived here.)

Yoon Suk Yeol won South Korea’s highest office in 2022 by a threadbare margin, the closest since his country abandoned military rule in the 1980s and began holding free presidential elections.

Just over two years later, Mr. Yoon’s brief declaration of martial law on Tuesday shocked South Koreans who had hoped that tumultuous era of military intervention was behind them. Thousands of protesters gathered in Seoul to call for his arrest. Their country, regarded as a model of cultural soft power and an Asian democratic stalwart, had suddenly taken a sharp turn in another direction.

But the events that led to Mr. Yoon’s stunning declaration on Tuesday — and his decision six hours later to lift the decree after Parliament voted to block it — were set in motion well before his razor-thin victory. They were a dramatic illustration of South Korea’s bitterly polarized politics and the deep societal discontent beneath the surface of its rising global might.

. . . . .Mr. Yoon, a conservative leader, has never been popular in South Korea. He won election by a margin of only 0.8 percentage points. The vote, analysts said, was more a referendum on his liberal predecessor’s failures than an endorsement of Mr. Yoon.

. . .From the start, however, Mr. Yoon faced two obstacles.

The opposition Democratic Party held on to its majority in the National Assembly and then expanded it in parliamentary elections in April, making him the first South Korean leader in decades to never have a majority in Parliament. And then there were his own dismal approval ratings.

Mr. Yoon’s toxic relationship with opposition lawmakers — and their vehement efforts to oppose him at every turn — paralyzed his pro-business agenda for two years, hindering his efforts to cut corporate taxes, overhaul the national pension system and address housing prices.

The article also describes social problems in South Korea, including skyrocketing real-estate prices and a lack of jobs that has made young people discontented, less likely to marry and have children.

. . . . by Tuesday night, Mr. Yoon had turned startlingly defiant. He declared that “the National Assembly, which should have been the foundation of free democracy, has become a monster that destroys it.”

Not long after, as protesters rushed to the gates of the National Assembly, lawmakers voted to lift the president’s measure. Mr. Lee, the opposition leader, who survived a stabbing attack in January and later staged a hunger strike against the Yoon government, said Mr. Yoon had “betrayed the people.”

Hours later, Mr. Yoon said he would comply with the legislature’s order. But even then, with his political future now thrown into profound uncertainty, he added a plea.

“I call on the National Assembly,” he said, “to immediately stop the outrageous behavior that is paralyzing the functioning of the country with impeachments, legislative manipulation and budget manipulation.”

Yoon has apparently even accused his opponents of being in league with North Korea, and said this: “The martial law is aimed at eradicating pro-North Korean forces and to protect the constitutional order of freedom,” he said.”  Well, the turmoil in government and the prospect of military rule has abated for the moment, but the opposition is calling for Yoon’s resignation, and threatening to impeach him if he doesn’t step down. North Korea, of course, is watching this with delight, and probably trying to figure out how to use it to the DPRK’s advantage.

*Another one of Trump’s cabinet picks, Pete Hegseth, the nominee for Secretary of Defense, had of course gotten in trouble for accusations of sexual misconduct, excessive drinking, and lack of relevant experience. Now Trump is pondering replacing him.  Guess who might be the candidate? (Article archived here.)

President-elect Donald Trump is considering Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as a possible replacement for Pete Hegseth, his pick to run the Pentagon, according to people familiar with the discussions, amid Republican senators’ concerns over mounting allegations about the former Fox News host’s personal life.

Picking DeSantis, a 2024 GOP primary rival for the presidency, would amount to a stunning turn for Trump. But he would also find in the governor a well-known conservative with a service record who shares Trump’s—and Hegseth’s—view on culling what they see as “woke” policies in the military.

Trump allies increasingly think Hegseth may not survive further scrutiny, according to people close to the president-elect’s team, which considers the next 48 hours to be crucial to his fate.

DeSantis, who served as a Navy lawyer in Iraq and the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, was on an earlier list of potential defense secretary candidates that transition officials presented to the president. Trump ultimately went with Hegseth. But as Hegseth’s nomination has faltered, that list has been revived and DeSantis is again among the choices Trump is considering, the people said.

The discussions are in their early stages, one of the people said, adding that Trump has floated DeSantis’s name in casual conversations with guests at Mar-a-Lago, his private Florida club.

DeSantis is tasked with replacing Florida senator Marco Rubio, who is Trump’s choice for Secretary of State. And guess who is plumping for Rubio’s job should he be successfully confirmed?: do

Already, DeSantis has been preparing to name an interim replacement for Sen. Marco Rubio, whom Trump has nominated as his secretary of state. Allies of Trump have been pushing for that person to be Lara Trump, the president-elect’s daughter-in law, who in March was elected co-chair of the Republican National Committee.

My guess: DeSantis, who does have service experience, won’t get the job given his paucity of leadership experience in the Navy. But what do I know? The only certainty is that Trump is going to have one wonky Cabinet.

*I have taken to reading Bret Stephens’s op-ed columns in the NYT as he usually has a sensible take on things. His latest, which intrigued me because of the Chicago connection, is called “Can Rahm Emanuel flip the script again?” (You may remember that Emanuel was Obama’s chief of staff, a Representative from Illinois, mayor of Chicago (not a popular one), and now is Ambassador to Japan. Stephen’s thesis is that Rahm, who is politically savvy, could turn around the abysmal performance and prospects of the Democratic Party (column archived here).

There’s a buzz around Rahm Emanuel — the former Bill Clinton adviser, former Illinois congressman, former chief of staff to President Barack Obama, former mayor of Chicago — possibly becoming the next head of the Democratic National Committee. The progressive left despises his pragmatism and liberal centrism. He has a reputation for abrasiveness. And his current job, as ambassador to Japan, has traditionally served as a posting for high-level political has-beens like Walter Mondale and Howard Baker.

But he also has a gift for constructing winning coalitions with difficult, unexpected partners.

. . . . Emanuel’s tenure as ambassador was distinguished by his role in engineering two historic rapprochements — last year between Japan and South Korea and this year between Japan and the Philippines — that, along with the AUKUS defense pact with Britain and Australia, form part of a broad diplomatic effort by the Biden administration to contain China.

. . . . So how do Democrats reclaim their old advantages?

“From ’68 to ’88, a 20-year run, you had ‘law and order,’ ‘welfare queens,’ Willie Horton — that was the Republican message,” Emanuel recalls. “Bill Clinton comes around and takes the equation of crime, immigration, drugs, welfare, the whole basket of cultural issues, and gets them off the table.” All of these required Clinton to pick at least as many fights with his party’s left as he picked against Republicans, and even now there are parts of the Democratic Party that are still sore about it.

“As I always say to the left, what part of the peace and prosperity were you most upset with?” he asks. “Which part did you hate? Was it the income growth, the employment growth, the drop in welfare rolls, the drop in crime, the fact that America was respected around the world, peace in the Middle East? Which part did you hate most?”

Emanuel doesn’t think it’s impossible for Democrats to repeat Clinton’s feat, though whether it will take one bad election or more remains to be seen. As in his views about the geopolitics of Asia, where Chinese blundering and bullying should play to America’s advantage, so too in domestic politics. Trump “is going to turn the Oval Office into eBay,” he predicts. It will be the Democrats’ challenge to illuminate the fact. The trick in both cases is not to undermine your own side as you try to defeat the other.

“I think Democrats prefer losing and being morally right to winning,” he says. “Me, I’m not into moral victory speeches. I’m into winning.”

Given his abrasiveness and straight talking that made him an unpopular mayor of Chicago, this strategy may not play well with progressives on the Left, who, in the end, did undermine their own side.

*The Editorial Board of the Washington Post has come out strongly against Joe Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter. The op-ed is “Hunter Biden pardon undermines Democrats’ defense of justice system” (archived here).

President-elect Donald Trump is selecting radical MAGA loyalists for top national security positions, signaling his intention to upend the professionalism and independence of institutions that wield some of the federal government’s most awesome powers. Political opponents, journalists and others could be victims. And President Joe Biden just gave him cover.

To be clear: Mr. Biden had an unquestionable legal right to pardon his son Hunter. But in so doing on Sunday, he maligned the Justice Department and invited Mr. Trump to draw equivalence between the Hunter Biden pardon and any future moves Mr. Trump might take against the impartial administration of justice. He risks deepening many Americans’ suspicion that the justice system is two-tiered, justifying Mr. Trump’s drive to reshape it — or, because turnabout is fair play, to use it to benefit his own side.

Mr. Biden, of course, argues that pardoning his son strikes a blow for fairness in law enforcement. His statement on the pardon — in which he uses the words, “I believe in the justice system, but …” — claims that “no reasonable person” could “reach any other conclusion than Hunter was singled out only because he is my son.” Yet such considerations were apparently not so compelling when he pledged previously not to pardon Hunter. And his son clearly broke the law. A federal jury of Hunter Biden’s peers found him guilty of three firearm-related felonies in Delaware. Hunter also pleaded guilty to tax evasion charges that carry a penalty of up to 17 years in prison. The gun charges, essentially that the younger Mr. Biden lied on a purchase application form when he denied using drugs, are particularly hard to ignore. Such laws, however rarely enforced, are on the books to help keep firearms out of the hands of those who might pose a danger to themselves or others.

. . . Any Democrat who refuses this week to condemn Mr. Biden’s pardon will have less credibility to criticize Mr. Trump, his meddling at the Justice Department and his choices for key positions in that agency. No one should be surprised if Mr. Trump invokes the Hunter Biden pardon to justify clemency for many more of his allies, potentially including Jan. 6 insurrectionists. With this one intemperate, selfish act, the president has undermined, in hindsight, the lofty rationales he offered for seeking the presidency four years ago and indelibly marred the final chapter of his political career.

I can hear it now when Trump pardons the insurrectionists, “If crooked Joe Biden can pardon his own son, I have every right to pardon those who were simply standing up for democracy.” The last sentence is correct: Biden will go down in history as at best a mediocre President, and at worst a self-serving one.

*The journal Science reports a study by Kevin Hatala, Louise Leakey and their colleagues, also published in the journal, that two species of hominims coexisted at the same time and place (what is now Kenya, and 1.5 million years ago).  Here’s the original paper (click to read):

. . . and the editor’s summary:

It is now well accepted that hominin evolution is a story of many lineages existing contemporaneously. Evidence for this pattern has mostly come from fossils being dated to similar time periods. Hatala et al. describe hominid footprints from 1.5 million years ago in the Turkana Basin in Kenya that were made by two different species within hours or days of each other (see the Perspective by Harcourt-Smith). Analyses showed that the footprints were made by individuals with different gaits and stances, and the authors hypothesize these to be Homo erectus and Paranthropus boilei. Although fossils of both species occur in the area, these footprints show that they coexisted and likely interacted. —Sacha Vignieri

And from the Science news piece, which gives a photo:

One day 1.5 million years ago, two or three individuals of our genus Homo walked along a muddy lakeshore. Hours before or after they passed, another member of the human family, likely the smaller brained, big-jawed Paranthropus, hurried along the same shoreline. These early hominins would have seen giant cranes, ancient horses and antelopes—and, possibly, each other, according to a new study of their intermingled footprints published today in Science.

Fossils had hinted that different types of early hominins were contemporaries in Africa at about this time, but the tracks provide the strongest evidence yet that these two species, each with their own distinct upright stride, were in the same place on the same day.

“It’s very exciting—we are getting two very clear, distinctive gait patterns from different species of hominins in a matter of hours or even minutes,” says Charles Musiba, a paleoanthropologist at Duke University who was not part of the study. “They may actually have come across each other.”

These ancient footprints trample the old view, proposed in the 1950s by the evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, that no two hominin species overlapped in time and space, says William Harcourt-Smith, a paleoanthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History who wrote a commentary accompanying the new paper.

To occur in the very same layer, the two prints were likely made within days of each other, as fossilizing footprints require special conditions: usually humans making impressions in mud that are very quickly filled up with volcanic ash or other quick-depositing sediments.

Fossils of both species, one in our genus Homo and the other one of a “robust” hominim that went extinct without leaving descendants, are also found in the same layer of sediments, supporting the authors’ claims.  Hatala et al. discuss the different gaits of these individuals; individuals in Homo, for example, walked more flat-footed than we do now. Here’s a photo of one Homo footprint taken by the paper’s first author:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Andrzej have a difference of opinion about what weather is worse:

Hili: It’s cold and wet outside.

A: I prefer frost and snow.

Hili: I totally don’t understand it.

In Polish:

Hili: Na dworze jest zimno i mokro.
Ja: Wolę mróz i śnieg.
Hili: Tego zupełnie nie rozumiem.

And a photo of Szaron:

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From Jesus of the Day. I’m usually bad at these things, but surprisingly, I saw what it was almost immediately. Don’t let on in the comments lest you spoil it for others:

From Cat Memes:

. . . and I couldn’t resist this from Meow (it’s got eyebrows, too):

From Masih. I can’t embed this tweet with a horrific video, but if you click below you can see it on X. As Masih says, “This video, sent to me by a woman from Tehran, shows her scars from being lashed for not wearing hijab.”  Note: if you are repelled by the effects of severe lashing by isogynists, do not click!

This is what happens to you in Iran if you don’t cover your hair.

Found while perusing X:

From the “you couldn’t make this stuff up” file:

A “misinformation expert” at Stanford, @jeffhancock, billed the state of Minnesota $600/hour to prepare an expert declaration on the dangers of AI-generated content. He swore under penalty of perjury that everything stated in the… pic.twitter.com/UIWfMfRMm1

— Laura Powell (@LauraPowellEsq) December 3, 2024

From Free Black Thought via Luana: our conference at USC next month!

Register to attend the Censorship in the Sciences conference at USC and hear @mdcbowen and @omni_american explain why they started FBT.

As a bonus, you’ll hear keynotes from @jon_rauch, @JMchangama, @wil_da_beast630, and @glukianoff, as well as talks by @Musa_alGharbi,… pic.twitter.com/oEnsMtNY6K

— Free Black Thought (@FreeBlckThought) December 3, 2024

Another book I don’t have to read. . .

It's hard to describe just how dull the Merkel memoirs are.

— Stanley Pignal (@spignal.bsky.social) 2024-12-04T06:43:17.052Z

From my Twitter (X) home feed, which so far is much more interesting than my Bluesky home feed (I don’t follow anyone on either platform):

That’s the most human looking face I’ve ever seen on a monkey. pic.twitter.com/QCi69qL20M

— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) December 3, 2024

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one I reposted:

He lived at most four days after this photo was taken. https://t.co/wkZHjJ6iz5

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) December 4, 2024

Two posts by Dr. Cobb, First, a Korean opposition member desperate to overturn the martial law described above. Matthew says, “N.b.,  the coup is over, the President is a fool, but this guy is smart!

Lee Jae-myung, Leader of South Korea's Democratic Party, live-streamed himself scaling the walls of the National Assembly to bypass military barricades so that he could vote to overturn the President's martial law.

— Adam Schwarz (@adamjschwarz.bsky.social) 2024-12-03T16:55:41.973Z

It is a truth universally acknowledged that this tweet is unfair to the American novel:

Goal of the protagonist in:French novel: "to fall in love"British novel: "to get married"Russian novel: "to become a great man"American novel: "to kill that fuckin' whale, man. I want that GOD DAMN whale to die. FUCK, I hate whales so much!!"

— Existential Comics (@existentialcomics.com) 2024-12-03T18:49:34.818Z