Wednesday: Hili dialogue

April 9, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to a Hump Day (“Бөглөрөх өдөр” in Mongolian), April 9, 2025, and National Chinese Almond Cookie Day.

It’s also National Winston Churchill Day, the day in 1963 he was made an honorary citizen of the United States. This is a very high honor: only seven other honorary citizenships have been granted in American history, and the only other one bestowed during a person’s lifetime was (oy) Mother Teresa.  Further, it’s National Unicorn Day and National Former Prisoner of War Recognition Day.

Can you guess any other other other 6 honorary citizens? Try! The list is here. Here’s JFK conferring the honor on Winnie, who no longer traveled in the years before his death in 1965. Note that RFK (Sr.!) is there as well as Jackie. It’s so sad to watch this!

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 9 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*First, one sentence from the WaPo morning news announcement:

Good morning. It’s Wednesday, April 9, and these photos from a Caribbean cruise of heavy metal fans are not to be missed.

You can find the photos archived here, too.

*As rumors swirl around the administration about tariffs and Trump and his minions (e.g., Musk wants tariffs back to zero), the markets are bouncing all around. They showed a recovery earlier today (I’m writing this at 1 pm on Tuesday), bnut then dropped again. Here’s a graph of the last two days from the WSJ:

And from the article itself:

A big bounceback rally stalled on Wall Street Tuesday, with volatility making its return around midday and spoiling what was shaping up as a celebration of increased trade clarity.

The Dow industrials rose 1461 points early on, reflecting investor faith that the administration may deliver on talk of potential trade deals, before pulling back to be up 200 early Tuesday afternoon. Nasdaq and the S&P 500 both pulled back to nearly unchanged after also rallying early.

The enthusiasm started when Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the Trump administration was open to negotiating to reduce tariffs, saying the U.S. could “end up with some good deals.”

President Trump said he spoke with South Korea’s president and that the administration was in discussions with “many” nations.

The ecstatic tone didn’t last the morning, though. U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said Trump won’t provide exemptions to his new global tariffs for individual products or companies. Stocks declined from their highs at midmorning.

Stocks extended their pullback from earlier highs Tuesday afternoon with a fresh selloff in the tech favorites that led the market advance the past two years. Some so-called Mag 7 stocks were still up Tuesday afternoon but only modestly, and Apple was down more than 2%.

The retreat followed a Fox Business report that extra tariffs on China went into effect at noon, citing the White House press secretary. The White House later said new tariffs still go into effect tomorrow, after which the broad selloff stalled, though the big tech stocks were mostly declining from earlier highs.

Markets gyrated wildly Monday, driven in part by hopes for tariff resolution that turned out to be unfounded, before ultimately settling largely unchanged.

The administration also signaled it was open to discussing lower tariffs with Japan, Israel and some other countries. Japanese stocks jumped after Bessent said the country would be prioritized in trade talks.

. . .Meantime, Beijing lashed back at Trump’s threat of even higher tariffs on China, raising the specter of an all-out trade war between the world’s two biggest economies. “If the U.S. insists on its own way, China will fight to the end,” the country’s Commerce Ministry said.

Trump said he will slap an extra 50% tariff on China if Beijing didn’t drop plans to retaliate against extra levies he announced last week.

I think Trump is out of control. But then again, that goes without saying.

*He’s not only out of control, but as narcissistic as ever. Reader David pointed me to a New Republic article about how Trump is planning a military parade to honor himself–to the tune of $92 MILLION!

Donald Trump may finally get his long-desired military parade through the streets of Washington.

The Washington City Paper, citing an unnamed D.C. source, reports that the president has chosen June 14, 2025—the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army,  Flag Day, and coincidentally also his own 79th birthday—as the big day. If it goes ahead, the four-mile procession would go from the Pentagon in Arlington to the White House.

Seven years ago, Trump made his desire for a grand military parade well known after he saw a French parade in 2017, telling people at the time, “We’re going to have to try and top it.” But the idea got a lot of pushback from military leaders as well the D.C. government, who estimated that it would cost the military $92 million and the district over $21 million in public safety costs.

Trump angrily abandoned the idea, accusing D.C. politicians of wanting “a number so ridiculously high that I canceled it. Never let someone hold you up!” At the time, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser shot down the idea on Twitter, saying she “finally got thru to the reality star in the White House with the realities ($21.6M) of parades/events/demonstrations in Trump America (sad).”

This time, though, Trump has overhauled military leadership, firing four-star Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as leaders in the Navy and Air Force,  including the top lawyers of those two branches and the Army. The legal firings presumably give Trump loyalists who would defend his parade if it is challenged in the courts.

As far as D.C. leadership, Bowser and the rest of the D.C. government appear to be cowed by the administration out of fear that Trump will follow through on threats to take over the local government. Bowser chose to remove a Black Lives Matter memorial to appease administration officials and has stepped up the removal of graffiti and homeless encampments following Trump’s complaints.

Trump has also set up a federal task force on D.C. crime fighting that does not include a single local official, indicating that he plans to keep interfering with how the city runs. That will now include a massively wasteful parade for his own ego, spending millions of dollars from both local and federal coffers despite claims that his administration is eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse. Will anyone push back against it this time?

That’s OUR money funding the $92 million, on top of which are nearly $22 million in security costs, also footed by taxpayers. Well, I don’t want to fricking pay for a parade in which Trump honors himself and his birthday. But of course there’s nothing I can do to stop it.

*Yesterday the Supreme Court did what I thought it wouldn’t do: it supported the Trump administration’s firing of probationary employees:

The Supreme Court on Tuesday paused an order by a lower-court judge requiring the Trump administration to rehire about 16,000 fired probationary employees, at least a temporary victory for the president’s efforts to radically downsize the government and dismantle some agencies.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup ruled last month that the government’s human resource agency, the Office of Personnel Management, had no legal authority to direct mass firings at the departments of Agriculture, Defense, Energy, Interior, Treasury and Veterans Affairs. Most of the workers had been on the job a year or two, but some were more veteran employees.

The Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that Alsop’s order, which was based on the allegations of nine nonprofit groups, was improper because the groups did not have standing to sue, meaning they did not have a direct stake in the firings so they could not bring legal action. The high court’s order did not address allegations brought by workers’ unions that are also part of the lawsuit. The fired probationary workers were not parties to the legal action.

The impact of the ruling will be somewhat limited because a federal judge in Maryland issued a similar injunction last month against the firing of many of the same workers in 19 states and the District of Columbia. The Maryland ruling remains in effect and was not part of the high court’s decision.

Two liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, said they would have denied the the government’s application to pause the rehirings while litigation continues.

“The District Court’s injunction was based solely on the allegations of the nine non-profit-organization plaintiffs in this case. But under established law, those allegations are presently insufficient to support the organizations’ standing,” the majority wrote.

So the constitutionality of the act wasn’t adjudicated because there was no standing to sue to begin with.  So this case isn’t over yet unless nobody with standing brings suit against the government.

*The well-known Indian humanist and skeptic Sanal Edamaruku, who has been living in exile in Finland for fear of his life (he debunks Hindu “miracles”), was arrested upon landing in Poland to go to a conference, and now faces extradition to India. (Sanal is a friend of Andrzej and Malgorzata, and has stayed at their house in Dobrzyn.)

Indian skeptic Sanal Edamaruku, who lives in exile in Finland, has been arrested in Poland.

The Rationalist International organisation, founded by Edamaruku, reported the matter in a statement on Saturday. The Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs confirmed to the news agency STT on Sunday that it is aware of the arrest.

According to Rationalist International, Edamaruku was arrested on 28 March at Modlin Airport in Warsaw, where he was scheduled to speak at a human rights conference.

The arrest was based on an Indian-issued Interpol notice for Edamaruku. India is seeking his extradition, according to Rationalist International.

Edamaruku is accused of blasphemy in India and has been living in self-imposed exile in Finland since 2012.

He told STT in 2020 that his life would be in danger if he returned to India. His organisation’s statement also references the violence and killings faced by rationalists like Edamaruku.

Catholic Church upset. 

Edamaruku, a public defender of secular values, gained widespread international attention in the 1990s when the BBC followed his journey in India. In the programme, Edamaruku travelled from village to village, demonstrating to viewers how the miraculous feats of famous gurus and holy men were nothing but nonsense.

In 2012, he was charged with blasphemy after angering the Catholic Church in India. The controversy erupted when Edamaruku revealed that water dripping from a crucifix in Mumbai was actually sewage water, not a sign of a miracle.

He has lived in Finland ever since.

Look at the blasphemy he committed! He simply found out that “miracle” water coming from a cross was sewage, not the tears of Jesus. And for that he had to flee his country. It wasn’t even Hindus he offended that time, but Catholics!  Blasphemy should never be a crime.

UPDATE:  We now have two conflicting reports found by Malgorzata who is trying to find out what happened. In one, he is said to have been detained for blasphemy after an Interpol notice, while in the other involves accusations of financial fraud on his part. It is a mess.

*Over in New Zealand, the indigenous Māori are starting to take over the library classification system. An anonymous Kiwi sent me an article from Radio New Zealand reporting that advocates have leaned on a library to change the classificaiton system to reflect the pantheon of Māori deities.

A Wellington Library is trialling a new way of cataloguing its mātauranga Māori books, organising them by atua (deity) rather than by the Dewey Decimal system.

The trial shelves can be found on the second floor of Te Awe Library in central Wellington and have been integrated with the online library catalogue.

Bridget Jennings is the Senior Cataloguing Specialist at Wellington City Libraries, she said they wanted to create a structure for the library’s collections based on how knowledge is organised in te ao Māori.

“Libraries around the world have been thinking about this for a long time, how to reflect indigenous ways of knowing and certainly libraries in New Zealand have been thinking about this.”

Jennings said the idea began almost by accident during a conversation with fellow librarian Ann Reweti where they both expressed frustration with the lack of a classification system for Māori books.

They eventually settled on a structure with 13 atua classes, one with Ranginui and Papatuānuku together then 12 individual atua, she said.

The Dewey Decimal system was first developed in the United States and organises library books by discipline or field of study, with numbered classes such as 300: Social Sciences and 900: History and Geography.

Jennings said within those classes it is organised by subjects such as psychology, philosophy, literature etc. Before becoming increasingly granular within that.

Dewey has always been a bit controversial, she said, because it is difficult to deal with what the system considers to be the other.

Librarian Shane Caldwell said they wanted to get away from a system where indigenous people are an afterthought.

“With Dewey, a lot of non white peoples are in the end of the nine hundreds, because when they did it they thought they were going extinct, so they just tacked them on to the end because their histories don’t matter that much because they’ll be gone soon, obviously they do matter and so we’re bringing them out of that.”

Well, so much for indigenous “ways of knowing”! What if you want to look up some knowledge gleaned by the Māori? Which deity do you look under.  Isn’t there more to Māori culture, knowledge, behavior, medicine, and so on than deities? What if something lacks a deity. And this is no surprise:

With the trial system, there is some difficulty at times decided which atua a book should come under, he said.

Often it’s not immediately obvious how a certain book connects to an atua, for example Caldwell said books about music come under Tāwhirimātea god of the weather, because it’s the wind or hau creating the sound.

“It’s like a a mix of things and some things can go in multiple places and you know there’d be some topics where in an ideal world would have five copies of a book and it would be in five different places because, you know, you can’t break things up so easily.”

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is kvetching, and Malgorzata explains: “A good present doesn’t make it easier to complain, but it doesn’t make it more difficult. In spite of being better off than our predecessors, we have a propensity to complain and it’s not more difficult to do than it was in the past. 

Andrzej: You have a gloomy face.
Hili: I’m thinking about the present, which is better than the past but doesn’t make it difficult to complain.
In Polish:
Ja: Masz ponurą minę.
Hili: Myślę o współczesności, która jest lepsza od przeszłości, ale nie utrudnia narzekania.

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

From Jesus of the Day:

From Cat Memes:

From Now That’s Wild:

 

From Masih.  Trump is being a chump thinking that he will be able to talk Iran out of building a nuclear weapon. The only way that will happen is if the U.S. and/or Israel destroys Iran’s nuclear facilities.

From Barry, something you’ve never seen before:

This is totally insane; the Interior Dept. and Fish and Wildlife would rather spend millions of dollars “de-extincting” species (it won’t work in almost any case) than saving the species we have. (I posted this tweet yesterday in my de-extinction post.()

From Malcolm: a cat making physics calculations!

From my Twitter feed; buffalo saves a turtle!

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted.

A 20-year-old German Jew died in the camp exactly six years before I was born.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-04-09T10:26:58.727Z

Two posts from Dr. Cobb. This first one he terms, “Amazing!”, though people in the thread disagree that there’s any similarity:

The thing that always stuck with me is that there's only 11 years between the publication of the last ever Holmes story and the debut of Batman in Detective Comics, and they both perform basically the same pop culture function.

— Dan Whitehead (@danwhitehead.net) 2025-04-07T06:21:23.108Z

And of this he says, “Be afraid!”

we are so cooked* as a country https://futurism.com/openai-signs-deal-us-government-nuclear-weapon-security*possibly literally, by nuclear bombs

— Stef Schrader (@hoonofthe.day) 2025-02-02T12:34:02.653Z

25 thoughts on “Wednesday: Hili dialogue”

  1. I doubt if a Maori person could find a book filed under that made-up system!

    1. “Reading” is a colonialist imposition. Both the Māori wisdom and the place in the library where it is found will be handed down by word of mouth from tribal elders hired for the purpose.

  2. A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
    Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself. -Charles Baudelaire, poet, critic, and translator (9 Apr 1821-1867)

  3. “Here’s JFK conferring the honor on Winnie,”

    This is amazing, I never realized (I bet this happens every April 9th’s Hili Dialogue) – I have quotes with photos of JFK and Winnie taped on the wall so this is gratifying to realize!

      1. Boston-Irish accent – accept no substitutes, pal ( “pal” pronounced more like “gull” 😁)

    2. “He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.”
      I knew that tribute from JFK but I didn’t remember it as from the citizenship ceremony. It was a real thrill to hear it pop up on the tape, in Kennedy’s inimitable speaking style. Not just the accent but the cadence.

  4. I think that there is some perverse karma in cataloguing the Maori in their own god-oriented substructure that is walled off within either the 300’s or 900’s.

    When I told my wife about Churchill’s honorary U.S. citizenship this morning, she quickly offered that he would likely renounce it today. What a hell of a one-eighty things have taken.

  5. Winston Churchill’s mother Jennie was American by birth (she was born in Brooklyn, New York), so he could probably have claimed American citizenship through the principle of jus sanguinis, if had wanted to do so.

    2. Probably not, on a quick reading of the relevant law (Section 301 of the Immigration and Naturalization Act) and its history. Originally, to retain US citizenship acquired by birth overseas to a US parent, one had to spend at least two years between ages 14 and 28 in the US. That provision was not revoked until nearly 50 years ago.
      Strange!

  6. I would much rather have AI in charge of the nukes than humans, just as I’ll be first in line to get on a pilotless aeroplane.

    2. Nope. Not I. Much rather have a human pilot and co-pilot. NTSB keeps track of “pilot error” determinations. But do not keep a record of pilot saves…like Sully on the Hudson.

      1. A human is more likely to refuse to press “Launch” than AI.

        D.A.
        NYC

    3. Craig, Having spent many hours both amazed and frustrated with Grok and Chat GPT, and having worked years with nukes, I’ll politely disagree. Perhaps one day, but we aren’t even close to there.

      The biggest problem with the human link—one recognized in government-commissioned studies even before the main weapon systems were fielded—is boredom and complacency. This is particularly the case with ICBMs as the missileers don’t have planes to fly or submarines to command. The significant redundancies in nuclear-related systems can counteract this potential problem while simultaneously driving more boredom and complacency. It’s a potentially toxic mix in a zero-defect culture, so I understand your concerns. So far, we have managed it extremely well (with some hair-raising exceptions), but proliferation to nations that are less rigorous in their training and discipline is always a cause for concern. I wonder whether AI could progress to a point that it can “experience” boredom. Pity the world if we create an AI that’s out looking for something exciting to do!

      1. I have a friend who excelled in a great engineering program run by the Navy and ended he up in a nuclear submarine’s engine room. After all that education, he summed it up: I stared at LEDs for 4 years. Only had a couple of minor incidents. But what I gathered was those nuclear subs are Tight! And yes, extremely boring. AI would be a godsend, lol!

    4. Look, totally get all the dissenting opinion and perhaps now is too early. But getting it right, on these sort of decisions, is going to be necessarily an AI job and the sooner rather than the later.

      Humans make mistakes a lot more than computers do.

      Returning to piloting, if you look at any list of crashes you’ll find that something like 40% were pure pilot error, 40% were plane problems but still fly able and the pilot messed up, and 20% were just mechanical failures that couldn’t be flown. Roughly and anecdotally.

      I’m a big believer that planes don’t crash, pilots crash them.

      This just isn’t an area you can stick with “humans are best” for much longer. Be good to make peace with that soon.

  7. The cat does seem to be weighing laws of physics. It figures out that the way to jump thru the hoop is to first get closer to it so its jump is more vertical on the slippery floor.

  8. I’ve also seen reports that the parade is in honor of the 250th anniversary of the US Army. This is plausible, as it is the same day as Trump’s b-day. It would be telling to see the original planning scheme of the event from the White House – how is it titled in the working document. I still oppose spending $92 million on it, regardless of the reason.

    I can’t understand the concern with letting go probationary employees other than negative publicity against the administration. If we’re focused on reducing gov’t expenses, and assuming these are employees with little job knowledge because they’re new, then this is low-hanging fruit to cut. We hire contract staff in our firm with the express intent that when business downturns occur, then they are the first to be out, along with any new hires still within their probationary period. I can’t get worked up about this.

    All that said, of course these previous two actions seem to be at odds with each other (spending millions vs cutting costs), especially when we have a military budget approaching $1 trillion.

    1. One big difference between Holmes books and Detective comics is value (and I don’t really see how they fill the same pop-culture niche). You can’t get over a $million$ for any Doyle books. A Detective Comics #27 (1st appearance of Batman) 7.0 sold for $1.5million in 2020. There is a single 9.2 that exists without any restoration, but has never been up for sale. I’m sure it would fetch over $4 million.

      Edit: sorry, this was meant to be a stand-alone comment. Argh…

    2. A problem with laying off probationary employees is that the government has a strange definition of “probationary employee”: it apparently includes not just new hires, but also includes existing employees promoted into a new position. So someone with 20 years of experience as an “xxx employee” becomes a probationary employee again when promoted to “supervisory xxx employee”. And this means that personnel with valuable experience and knowledge can be pushed out summarily along with the just-hired.

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