Wednesday: Hili dialogue

December 18, 2024 • 6:45 am

It is Wednesday, a Hump Day (“Ден на грпка” in Macedonian), December 18, 2024: just one scant week until Christmas and the First Day of Coynezaa. It is also National Roast Suckling Pig Day, which reminds me of a Jewish joke:

An elderly rabbi, having just retired from his duties in the congregation, finally decides to fulfill his lifelong fantasy–to taste pork.

He goes to a hotel in the Catskills in the off-season (not his usual one, mind you), enters the empty dining hall and sits down
at a table far in the corner.  The waiter arrives, and the rabbi orders roast suckling pig.

As the rabbi is waiting, struggling with his conscience, a family from his congregation walks in!  They immediately see the rabbi and, since no one should eat alone, they join him.

Shocked, the rabbi begins to sweat.  At last, the waiter arrives with a huge domed platter. He lifts the lid to reveal-what else?–roast suckling pig, complete with an apple in its mouth.

The family gasp in shock and disgust, they quickly turned to the rabbi for any type of explanation.

“This place is amazing!” cries the rabbi. “You order a baked apple, and look what you get!”

It’s also International Migrants Day, Arabic Language Day, Bake Cookies Day, and National Ham Salad Day (not kosher!)

Kosher! (Photo from public domain).

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the December 18 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The NYT must warn us that Trump will have his hands on America’s nukes, and tells us a bit more about them in “The President’s arsenal” (archived here).

In the United States, only the president can decide whether to use nuclear weapons. It’s an extraordinary instance in which Mr. Trump’s decision-making power will be absolute. He will not need to consult Congress, the courts or senior advisers on when or how to use them. He will have a free hand to craft our nation’s nuclear posture, policy and diplomacy.

On the campaign trail, Mr. Trump commented on the peril posed by the rest of the world’s growing nuclear arsenals. His return to the White House offers new opportunities for him to steer America clear of those threats. His administration will need to act urgently and with creativity, all while also demonstrating the understanding that nuclear weapons are too dangerous to be brandished as a cudgel.

. . .Most Americans have never seen — or perhaps even contemplated — what it takes to be ready for nuclear conflict. Times Opinion gained rare, up-close access this summer to film what this looks like in the United States. Observing the missile launch procedures provided a glimpse at the inner workings of a warfighting machine that should never be set in motion.

Be sure to look at these videos, which are a mock-up of what would happen during a real nuclear launch.

The global nuclear balance is more tenuous in 2024 than it has been in decades.

“Tomorrow, we could have a war that will be so devastating that you could never recover from it,” Mr. Trump said in June. “Nobody can. The whole world won’t be able to recover from it.”

The last remaining major bilateral accord limiting the United States’ and Russia’s arsenals, New START, expires in just 14 months. And Russian leaders have rejected the Biden administration’s offers to discuss a new nuclear arms control framework, which follows the dismantling of other accords meant to lessen the risk of conflict. We are on the precipice of living in a world that has no restraints on how many nuclear weapons are deployed.

President Vladimir Putin of Russia continues to raise the specter ofescalating his war on Ukraine to nuclear use. India and Pakistan have an estimated 170 nuclear weapons each but are expanding their arsenals. U.S. intelligence believes China plans to double by 2030 the size of its stockpile of an estimated 500 warheads, as it continues the most ambitious expansion and diversification of its weaponry in its history. North Korea has developed missiles designed to strike America. The war in Gaza threatens to expand into a wider regional conflict; Israel already has nuclear weapons and Iran is moving closer to building a bomb, risking a proliferation cascade throughout the Middle East.

. . . Donald Trump ran a campaign of peace through strength. Time will tell if he can deliver what he promised. But all Americans should rejoice if Mr. Trump leaves the world a safer place from nuclear weapons than it was when he took office for the second time.

And so they urge Trump to take it easy, which is good advice but anodyne. Their recommendations: restart arms control talks, ensure existing test bans remain in force, ratchet back on replacing older weapons with newer ones, and remove the power of the President to launch nuclear weapons without Congressional approval (but of course that would take considerable time.)

More interesting are the interspersed videos in the piece showing how, three times a year, the U.S. takes a nuclear warhead off an ICBM, ships it off to Vandenberg Space Force Base, and runs a test, firing the circumcised missile. But it is curious that the NYT is now giving kindly, avuncular advice to Trump after it went after him so hard. I suppose that’s the right thing to do, but their volte-face is something I’m not used to. I doubt, though, that Trump will pay much attention to the advice of this paper.

*Physics news: Astronomers are seeing what seem to be two stars circling around each other near a black hole, though they’re not sure whether the objects are stars.

Scientists have spotted what appear to be two stars whipping around each other near the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy.

Nearly every large galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its heart. The one in the middle of the Milky Way, called Sagittarius A(asterisk), is about 4 million times more massive than our sun and is relatively quiet, occasionally swallowing gas or dust that comes its way.

Scientists know stars can form near and even orbit these black hole behemoths, but they’ve never seen a pair of stars survive so close by.

The research was published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.

The celestial sighting is interesting and unusual, and more research is needed to be certain of what the objects are, said astrophysicist Anna Ciurlo with the University of California, Los Angeles.

“This leaves some questions still open,” said Ciurlo, who was not involved with the new research.

At about 2.7 million years old, the twin stars seem to be fairly young. Scientists said they appear to orbit each other at just the right distance: If they were too spread out, the black hole’s gravity would rip them apart. Any closer and they’d merge into a single star.

Even so, the cosmic duo won’t stay stable forever. They could meld into one eventually though the timing is uncertain, said study lead author Florian Peissker from the University of Cologne.

“We are actually in a really lucky situation,” he said. “We observed the system just in time.”

Here’s an uncredited photo from The Independent (the paper itself doesn’t have a picture), though it looks like three stars.  Could it be that the hole could swallow them up instead of ripping them apart? If not, why not?  And aren’t we lucky that we were around when black holes were discovered—after they were predicted?

*There’s a good article in The Atlantic about the new Supreme Court case taking issue with Tennessee’s ban on puberty blockers for gender-dysphoric adolescents (it’s archived here; h/t Norm). The title gives the conclusion: “The push for puberty blockers got ahead of the research.” The lesson: the Court should not be adjudicating this case, and wouldn’t if the medical research community did its job right. The problem is that American medical societies have gotten so woke (with the help of the administration) that they’re gung-ho for affirmative care without the data to support it. Europe, in contrast, is behaving much more sensibly,

But the Court kept running into a more awkward question: Are medical treatments for minors with gender dysphoria even scientifically justified? In the late 1990s, doctors in the Netherlands touted a new treatment for teenagers with severe gender dysphoria who found puberty distressing: chemically blocking their sex hormones and then giving them the hormones of the opposite sex. Gender-dysphoric males got puberty blockers and then estrogen; females got blockers and then testosterone. Patients were also offered mastectomies, phalloplasties, or other surgeries. The initial Dutch study of 70 patients showed positive results, and the “Dutch protocol” was soon adopted by clinics around the world.

But from the start, questions arose around how quickly adolescents should be able to transition. Where was the line between preventing rash decisions and inflicting cruelty through unnecessary delays? Since then, the picture has been further complicated by research that undermines activists’ biggest claims for the protocol: that it can alleviate mental distress and prevent suicides, and that puberty blockers act as a neutral “pause button” for children to have “time to think.”

The American medical consensus—formed by the majority of the country’s professional medical associations—still supports puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for adolescents who are unhappy with their birth sex. But unhelpfully for Prelogar and Strangio, the Supreme Court justices revealed themselves to be familiar with the very different situation in Europe, where medical authorities in France, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Norway, and Finland have all begun to sour on medical gender interventions for minors. Doubts have even reached the Netherlands, where the Dutch protocol was developed. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a conservative, said that if “England’s pulling back and Sweden’s pulling back, it strikes me as a pretty heavy yellow light, if not red light.”

In the U.K., for example, the ruling Labour Party has just indefinitely extended the ban on prescribing blockers for gender dysphoria outside of clinical trials—a ban imposed earlier this year by the previous Conservative government. That followed the publication of the Cass Review, led by a senior pediatrician, which included systematic reviews of the available research that “demonstrated the poor quality of the published studies.” Treatments that had originally been authorized for a small and tightly defined group were later prescribed on a far broader scale, the review found, without any real controls.

. . .British politicians on both the left and right now accept that the evidence for puberty blockers is weak, their potential side effects are worrisome, and withdrawal of these treatments does not lead to increased suicides. Continuing to prescribe blockers would therefore pose “an unacceptable safety risk for children and young people,” Labour’s health minister, Wes Streeting, declared last Wednesday.

In the United States, though, the situation is much more polarized. The reason that the Tennessee case has reached the Supreme Court is that red states have stepped into the void between public opinion on puberty blockers (cautious, to say the least) and the official position of most major U.S. medical associations (this is necessary health care). Since 2021, more than 20 red stateshave tried to ban or restrict blockers, while blue states continue to permit their use—and also gender-related surgeries on minors, which have never been allowed in Britain. The medical associations seem very happy to decry skeptics as extremist culture warriors but less keen to engage with the scientific discussion happening in Europe. Why? Insularity, perhaps, or political polarization—or, in some cases, reputational or even financial investment in the status quo.

Progressives want blockers used willy-nilly, Republicans want a total ban, but both groups are operating in an informational vacuum. What the U.S. needs to do is follow Europe’s lead: do long-term clinical studies on adolescents (those above the age of consent, whatever it might be for this, can make their own decisions). Based on those data, then the medical establishment can decide what’s safe. What scares me is that they’ve already screwed up on deciding what’s safe based not on data but on ideology.

*Taking a play from the playbook of Mossad (except admitting they did it), Ukraine assassinated a nefarious Russian general—in Moscow!

Ukraine carried out one of its most audacious operations on Russian soil early Tuesday, killing the commander of the unit designed to protect Russia’s troops from chemical, radiological and biological attack, by blowing up a scooter on the snowy streets of Moscow.

Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov is the most senior commander to be killed in the heart of the Russian capital since the start of the war in Ukraine. The head of the Russian Armed Forces’ Radiological, Chemical and Biological Defense Troops, Kirillov was killed outside a residential building along with his assistant, Russian law-enforcement authorities said.

Ukrainian officials said the killing was a special operation by the Security Service of Ukraine, the country’s primary domestic intelligence agency, known as the SBU.

Kyiv has sought to use targeted attacks against Russian military commanders, prominent pro-war figures and military installations far from the front to gain an edge in the nearly three-year-old war with its giant neighbor that has left tens of thousands dead and destroyed several Ukrainian cities. Ukrainian forces have been accused of using drones to attack the Kremlin as well as planting explosive devices and using close-range gunfire to target high-profile figures in Russia.

Russian authorities classified Kirillov’s killing as an act of terror.

Why this guy? Well, he is an enemy combatant, but also one suspected of foul deeds:

On Monday, a day before his killing, the SBU [Ukraine’s domestic intelligence agancy] named Kirillov as a suspect in an investigation of war crimes, for allegedly ordering the use of banned chemical weapons in Ukraine.

“By order of Kirillov, more than 4,800 cases of enemy use of chemical weapons have been recorded since the beginning of the full-scale war,” the service said.

Russia has denied U.S. accusations that it violated a chemical-weapons ban in Ukraine.

*The Democrats, it seems, are already recalibrating after their election loss, ratcheting back on the extreme “progressivism”. One sign:

Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Virginia) won significant support Tuesday from House Democrats to serve as the ranking member on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee. The vote was 131-84.

His success blunted Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), 35, and a small contingency of House Democrats from seeking full generational change for contested committee positions as they prepare for a second Trump administration.

Connolly, who was next in line for the gavel, called all Democratic lawmakers ahead of the vote as part of an aggressive whip effort to earn their support. Several House Democrats had concerns about Connolly’s health as he battled esophageal cancer, but Connolly made clear that — unlike other ranking members battling illnesses this term — he would continue showing up for work.

A majority of House Democratic support for Connolly also signals a broader dynamic happening within the caucus after an election in which there was a strong rebuke of liberal policies by voters. Democratic lawmakers are looking for strategic messengers this term, and many privately worried that Ocasio-Cortez, who was elected as part of a far-left movement and has since evolved into a more pragmatic lawmaker, could still be too unpredictable as a committee’s top Democrat with a prominent microphone.

AOC’s :”evolution towards the center” is not genuine, or so I think. I haven’t trusted her since she first voted “no” on a measure to fund Israel’s Iron Dome but then changed her vote to “present” (and wept on the House floor) because, she said, she was subject to “hateful targeting.” Like I really believe that!  AOC wants to be a Senator, but I can’t believe that New York would ever elect her to that position.   In the meantime, her ambition is on show:

And speaking of social media and AOC, here’s why Wonkette, which I haven’t read in ages but seems badly off the rails, thinks AOC should have been picked over Gerry Connelly:

First of all, who is Gerry Connolly? We consider ourselves pretty plugged in and read the news for about 16 hours a day, and still have barely noticed this guy. Wonkette has written about him zero times. He represents Virginia’s 11th District, has a paltry 83,000 Xitter followers, and a handsome pushbroom mustache. He’s not on Bluesky, TikTok, or Facebook at all. Which is not the full measure of a person’s worth, sure, but social media sure seems to be a vital way to reach the kids these days. Also, the poor guy has cancer of the esophagus and is undergoing chemotherapy and immunotherapy, does he really need an extra job too?

. . . and why they should have chosen AOC:

And in the other corner, AOC, age 35, first person to reach a million followers on Bluesky, 12.8 million followers on Xitter, 8.5 million on Insta, 3.4 million likes on TikTok. She’s been out there blasting Elon Musk and his dipshit DOGE committee with all the ridicule it rightly deserves, reposting Bernie and the UAW, talking about wealth inequality, climate change, food insecurity, y’know stuff people actually seem to care about more than the Vienna Volunteer Fire Department pancake breakfast with Santa. She’s got the kind of populism that leads people to vote for her and Trump, which seems puzzling, until you realize most people get their news from Facebook these days.

This is really going to move her up in the Democratic party!

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has her usual sunny view of the world:

Hili: If everybody is fighting everybody else, who is winning?
A: Probably nobody. The question is who will survive.
(Photo: Jerry Coyne)
In Polish:
Hili: Jeżeli wszyscy walczą ze wszystkimi, to kto wygrywa?
Ja: Prawdopodobnie nikt, pozostaje pytanie, kto przetrwa.
(Zdjęcie: Jerry Coyne)

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

From Strange, Stupid, or Silly Signs:

From Science Humor:

Luana sent this picture, purportedly the employees of Twitter before and after Musk took over. It makes sense! (Musk did fire a number of people.)

From Masih: A brave Iranian woman who knows what’s what:

From Luana.  Equity???

From Malcolm; a cat watches a mouse fight:

From my feed; a drama squirrel:

I finally found something postable from my Bluehair feed:

This is Summit. He carefully selects a new stick every morning from his hotel's stick library. Thinks every beach should have one of these. 13/10

— WeRateDogs (@weratedogs.com) 2024-12-17T18:58:45.572Z

 

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I retweeted

Died at two on the way to Auschwitz.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2024-12-18T11:35:13.726Z

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. He loves his rovers!

After several months of climbing up the steep slopes of the Jezero crater rim, Perseverance has reached the top! The afternoon sun provides a spectacular view on landscape which the rover will explore soon! 🔭Full panorama: http://www.360cities.net/image/marsro…Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Simeon Schmauß

— Simeon Schmauß (@stim3on.bsky.social) 2024-12-12T20:45:18.067Z

And Neptune’s rings:

James Webb telescope just dropped its latest image, Neptune, and its rings.

— Science Explorist (@scipexplorist.bsky.social) 2024-12-12T12:58:54.245Z

21 thoughts on “Wednesday: Hili dialogue”

        1. And there is the close cousin joke which has a rabbi and a Catholic priest, good local friends, chatting in their cups, and disclosing how in their youth they had experiences otherwise forbidden by their respective faiths. The young future rabbi ate a ham sandwich, and the young future priest lay with a woman. “Better than a ham sandwich, wasn’t it?” asks the rabbi.

  3. the official position of most major U.S. medical associations (this is necessary health care).

    It’s worth pointing out that the “medically necessary health care” mantra is uttered such that insurance companies are then forced to fund it (and we’re talking about $100,000 per kid, just for starters). Most insurance would not cover it without that, and hence activists insist on the mantra regardless of evidence.

    Also:

    Here’s an uncredited photo from The Independent (the paper itself doesn’t have a picture), though it looks like three stars.

    That image is not of the binary star in the study, it’s the image of the black hole Sgr A* from the Event Horizon telescope from a couple of years ago (more strictly, it’s an image of accreting matter swirling in the vicinity of the Sgr A* black hole).

    1. That’s a very good point about the “medically necessary” wording, and you’re absolutely right about it.

      Also about Sagittarius A*, of course…as you know.

  4. “Gender” transcendence originated in mystical occult thought :

    Gender in Mystical and Occult Thought – Behmenism and its Development in England
    B. J. Gibbons
    Cambridge U. Press
    1996

    Medicine used for the promotion of the psychosomatic phenomena in a gnostic cult religious doctrine is medical Lysenkoism.

    If adults want that for themselves nothing was stopping them (Body Alchemy, Loren Cameron, 1996). This gives the alchemist the power of God to do what science says is impossible : convert a male mammal into a female – transcending the laws of Nature’s material world.

    Justifications for practicing alchemy on children are the result of mystification.

    1. Exactly, Bryan. The whole gender thing is based on mysticism. If the medical associations have fallen victim to mysticism that harms the public interest, the state has to take the privilege of self-regulation away from them and regulate medicine in the public interest directly.

      Even in adults, who should be free to mutilate their own bodies at their own expense, doctors should not be prescribing this treatment and insurance companies ought not to be reimbursing it. But stopping it in children is a good start.

      1. Yes, Leslie.
        Amazing to me how so many people can’t see a religious/mystical set up merely because there isn’t an obvious “God” at the top.

        So much of woke is religious, magical thinking in action.
        With the trans cult it is based on a “gendered soul”, child sacrifice and actual skin in the game as proof of adherence. All the rituals, names, sacred things and priest/esses. So obvious!

        D.A.
        NYC

  6. I don’t know what is going on in that black hole picture, but from what little I know an image of a black hole will always present as a ring around a dark center. The dark center is not the black hole. That object will be much smaller but in the center. The ring is an accretion disc of radiant matter, and even if that is on edge to us, it will still show as a ring bc the upper part is actually the rear half of the ring, with its image bent upward since light is gravitationally bent by the gravity of the black hole. You can easily find artist depictions of them online, and it is very weird.
    There will be two bright areas to the left and right, and that is from light escaping the accretion disc in our direction (or something like that).
    So the 3rd bright spot in this picture might be an unresolved pair of stars? I don’t know.

  7. If those aren’t stars circling that black hole, what are they?! Must be drones!

    Th Atlantic piece on gender-affirming care has a positive meta-message. As it was published in a mainstream magazine, it will be widely read. This is the kind of expose—respectful, sober, and factual—that can help turn the tide.

  9. As with Rep Bowman – which was successful – I look forward to donating Money to get AOC hurled out of office, though it is a heavier lift for her. She’s ensconced in, like herpes in the basil ganglia (like that neuro-political analogy? I can’t use them in my regular column. WEIT letters is my recreation. 🙂
    But I have some money. Look out AOC. I’m your valtrex.

    D.A.
    NYC

  10. The sign, better translated from Japanese reads:
    “Thank you for using the toilet cleanly/tidily.”

    D.A.
    NYC
    (Don’t get to use my Japanese much these days!)

    1. An ounce of circumcisional circumspection and parabolic precision prevents a pound of pissoir titivational toil (carried out by someone else).

  11. WRT nukes, I’m a bit concerned about the current occupant of the oval office given the decline of his mental health.

    1. Living less than 1000 miles from Ukraine which the nuclear-armed psycho Putin is trying to destroy, after successfully scaring the West not to interfere with the destruction, I couldn’t care less about Trump having access to nukes.

      Also, I think that any legislation forcing the US President to consult the Congress before authorizing nukes would be just inviting Russia to nuke the USA (or any of the US allies which the USA doesn’t intend to protect anyway).

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