Thursday: Hili dialogue

April 10, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Thursday, April 10, 2025, and National Cinnamon Crescent Day, celebrating a cross between a croissant and cinnamon roll.  The link on the day says this:

While cinnamon crescent rolls might not be the healthiest of foods, since cinnamon is the operative ingredient, there is some opportunity for health benefits, since cinnamon has many.

This is self-contradictory: how can cinnamon be unhealthy as an “operative ingredient” but also have many health benefits?

This is a species of the treat, the Finnish korvapuusti:

By Lilitala – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0.

It’s also American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Day (a good organization, founded on this day in 1866), Safety Pin Day (patented on this day in 1849) National Farm Animals Day, and Sibliongs Day.  Here I am with my only sibling, Susan, in a passport picture taken with Mom before we went to Greece in 1955:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 10 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*A federal district court has blocked the Trump Administration’s use of the antiquated Alien Enemies Act to deport immigrants it didn’t want. The Supreme Court earlier refused to block the act, but this is a matter of who files a suit in what state:

Broadening their efforts to stop the Trump administration from using a rarely invoked wartime statute to carry out deportations, lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union on Wednesday asked a federal judge in Texas to bar the White House from using the law to send Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador.

The filings by the A.C.L.U., submitted in Federal District Court in Brownsville, Texas, were in direct response to a Supreme Court decision on Monday. That ruling permitted the migrants to challenge efforts to deport them under the wartime law, known as the Alien Enemies Act, but only in the place they were being held.

The three Venezuelans identified in the Texas filings — albeit only by their initials — had already secured a court order from a federal judge in Washington last month shielding them from being flown to El Salvador under President Trump’s invocation of the act. But the Supreme Court, in its ruling, vacated the order by that judge, James E. Boasberg, saying that the A.C.L.U.’s case on behalf of the men should have been filed in Texas, not Washington.

On Tuesday, the A.C.L.U. filed a similar case in New York, noting that two of the Venezuelans subject to Mr. Trump’s proclamation had been moved from a detention center in Texas to one in the town of Goshen, in Orange County, N.Y.

At an emergency hearing Wednesday morning in Federal District Court in Manhattan, Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein followed the path laid out by Supreme Court and declined, for the moment, to decide whether Mr. Trump was correctly using the Alien Enemies Act.

But Judge Hellerstein also said he would order the government to alert anyone who was targeted for removal in the Southern District of New York to give them an opportunity for a hearing to question whether they had been improperly identified as a gang member.

My mantra: “No deportations without a hearing.  This of course does not mean that the immigrant will not eventually be deported, but it seems distinctly un-American to send people off to horrible prisons without at least letting the law weigh in. But the Supreme Court may eventually rule that using the Alien Enemies act is kosher.

*As I write this at 1 pm on Wednesday, the markets have had a bit of a rally, but the bad news is that the trade war between the U.S. and China is on–big time. UPDATE: But the markets rallied big time later in the day as Trump paused tariffs and appears to be retreating; the S&P had its biggest daily rise since 2008.  I think Trump realized he was about to trash the world’s economy.

U.S. stocks rocketed higher Wednesday after President Trump announced in a social-media post that he had authorized a 90-day pause on certain tariffs to most countries.

Volatility returned to the market, as stocks recovered after at least one false start in early trading. But at shortly after 1 p.m. in New York, the president’s post on Truth Social lifted the three major indexes into session highs.

Earlier, Trump counseled cool and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told bankers “we are in pretty good shape” on the economy. Earlier, JPMorgan chief Jamie Dimon had said the economy was likely headed for a recession.

Trump’s reciprocal tariffs on nearly 100 nations took effect overnight, including a 104% tariff on Chinese imports. On Wednesday, Beijing said it would raise levies on U.S. imports to 84%, from 34%.

Also under scrutiny was the selloff in U.S. Treasurys. The yield on the 10-year note, the reference point for trillions of dollars in loans and securities, rose as high as 4.47% Wednesday before retreating somewhat after the 10-year Treasury note auction was met by strong demand.

Still, investors say there is broad nervousness about holding longer-term Treasurys ahead of government auctions Wednesday and Thursday. That anxiety contributed to a global stock selloff, with Japanese equities falling 3.9% and Europe’s main benchmark down nearly 3%.

Trump said Tuesday that levies on pharmaceutical imports will be announced “very shortly.” Pharma stocks such as Merck and Pfizer were down 3% early Wednesday.

The market is so nervous now, and investors so depressed about the tariffs and market fall, that they will cling on to any scrap of good news to buy.  As for me, I’m holding steady and just reinvesting; my whole career I’ve done that and largely ignored what the markets were doing.  As for Trump, I do not try to predict what he’s going to do, as the man is unstable.

*For Democrats looking for a good scrap of political news, there’s an op-ed in the WaPo by Evan Roth Smith, a Democratic pollster: “Elon Musk is making Democrats great again.”

Since the inauguration of Donald Trump, Elon Musk has set out to transform American government and politics as the front man of the new administration. But he might have accidentally transformed something he never intended: the wavering fortunes of the Democratic Party.

Musk aggressively inserted himself into last week’s Wisconsin Supreme Court election, a critical off-cycle election in a swing state that Trump won by less than one percentage point in November. Musk’s $20 million intervention on behalf of Brad Schimel, the Republican-backed candidate, managed to turn the race into something else entirely: a referendum on the world’s wealthiest man.

The Democratic-aligned polling initiative Blueprint, where I am lead pollster, surveyed voters from the April 1 race — in which the Democratic-backed candidate, Susan Crawford, won by 10 points — to ascertain Musk’s impact on the race. We found deep disapproval of the billionaire entrepreneur’s national role and his decision to intervene in Wisconsin, as well as a pronounced negative impact on the likelihood to vote for Schimel, particularly among critical independent voters. We are releasing this data here for the first time.

Wisconsin was the first test of the theory that Musk’s national unpopularity would translate into downballot benefits for Democrats. In prior Blueprint polling conducted before the Wisconsin election, Musk’s national approval rating tracked about 10 points behind Trump’s, including among independents, suggesting he was a significant liability. Only 38 percent of U.S. voters approve of Trump giving Musk a role in his administration, while 56 percent disapprove. Among independent voters nationally, net approval of Musk being given a role in the Trump administration is even lower, at minus-28.

Here are the stats from Blueprint, and approval for Musk is not high at all:

And about the Wisconsin election:

Musk is about as erratic as Trump, or at least as clueless. It’s time for Trump to sit Musk down across from his desk and say, “You’re fired!” On the other hand, Dems should wish for Musk to stay on, because he’s only helping our party.

*This is something that Netanyahu said at the beginning of the war with Gaza, but it’s not pleasant to hear it now.

Although the IDF is making consistent progress against Hamas on many fronts, IDF sources acknowledged to The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday that it could easily take a full year or even years to fully root out the terror group.

The starting point of the conversation was the recent success of the IDF killing 300 Hamas terrorists and the success prior to the January 19 ceasefire of having killed 18,000-20,000, but then combining that picture with the fact that Hamas may have another 25,000 or more fighters, and that currently the IDF is focusing lots of energy on killing Hamas’s remaining fighters in Rafah.

In other words, the IDF has killed many Hamas fighters, and few are left to resist it in Rafah from the original 4,000-8,000 terrorists, but if the largest group of known and consolidated fighters the military is going after is a few hundred, and it is up against an enemy that has 25,000, then finding and rooting out that enemy could be a long process.

While some Israeli officials hope that Hamas will soon disband and its top leaders will accept expulsion, if that does not happen and if Israel also does not reach a permanent ceasefire with Hamas including with its moderate Sunni allies rebuilding Gaza, Jerusalem could be in for an extended and slow war of attrition in the Strip.

Some IDF officials recognize this scenario and believe it could take years, including gradually and painstakingly eliminating small numbers of terror cells at a time when their hiding places in schools and mosques and other civilian facilities are uncovered.

Further, the tunnels in Gaza are pivotal in Hamas’s persistence, but the Jerusalem Post also reports this:

The IDF has only destroyed about a quarter of Hamas’s tunnels in Gaza, security sources told N12 on Wednesday.

Security sources also added that a significant number of smuggling tunnels crossing from Egypt to the Gaza strip are still intact. The Egypt-Gaza border remains a point of contention, with concerns over weapons smuggling resulting in Israel’s refusal to withdraw from the Philadelphia Corridor.

“I saw with my own eyes quite a few tunnels crossing into Egypt; some were closed, and several were open,” Defense Minister Israel Katz said at a February conference, according to N12. “We had information that Hamas was planning to attack soldiers and settlements during the ceasefire.”

*And from the reliable AP “Oddities” section, we learn that Boris Johnson got–wait for it–pecked by an ostrich.

Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson received a memorable welcome from an ostrich at a state park in Texas when the towering two-legged bird gave him a peck, according to a video Sunday.

In the video, posted by his wife Carrie Johnson, an ostrich slowly walks toward a car before poking its head through the driver’s seat window where Johnson is sitting with his son on his lap. Once in front of Johnson, the bird quickly pecks its beak toward his hand.

“Oh, Christ,” Johnson yells before driving off in the video.

“Too funny not to share,” Carrie Johnson said in the caption on Instagram.

It is not clear which wildlife park they were visiting, but other posts on the same account show the family visiting Dinosaur Valley Park, about 80 miles (128 kilometers) southwest of Dallas.

Boris Johnson, who served as prime minister from 2019 to 2022, was also spotted with his wife at a local restaurant in Lake Granbury, Texas, on Sunday, according to the restaurant’s Facebook page.

“We are so honored to have him as our guest!!” said Stumpy’s Lakeside Grill in a Facebook post with a photo of the former prime minister.

The short video (sound up). I know a lot of people who would have liked to have been that ostrich, but they would have aimed lower!

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili admires the quinces, but nothing will become of the hard, bitter fruit (Malgorzata used to make it into jam, but now can’t be bothered).

Hili: Our quince has gone crazy again.
Andzej: I love when it’s in bloom but there is a problem with the fruit.
In Polish:
Hili: Nasz pigwowiec znowu oszalał.
Ja: Kocham go jak kwitnie, ale z owocami tylko kłopot.

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

From Cat Memes:

From Now That’s Wild:

From Animal Antics:

From Masih. This is a really bad crime in Iran!

From Luana; you can read the story here. The Vermont ACLU, of course, criticized the team’s decision.

From Malcolm; sound up to hear the purr, and have a gander at that fur!

From Barry, who says, “Sound up (gotta love the reaction of the other dog)”:

From my feed. How do they get the d*gs to DO separation by color? And a bonus sheepdog video.

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted:

This Dutch girl was gassed to death upon arriving at Auschwitz. She was six years old.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-04-10T10:13:23.150Z

Two posts from Dr. Cobb. First, a groaner limerick:

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

— Moose Allain (@mooseallain.bsky.social) 2024-12-04T11:06:30.903Z

. . . and what are those crabs doing there?

The base of “Cleopatra’s Needle” – the obelisk (originally from Heliopolis but moved to Alexandria in ~12 BCE & then to NYC in 1881) that stands behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York’s Central Park – is guarded by four very angry crabs. #Invertebrate #MarineLife 🦑🐡🦀

— Matt Bracken (@brackenlab.bsky.social) 2025-04-08T04:18:26.736Z

32 thoughts on “Thursday: Hili dialogue”

  1. A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
    It’s my duty to see that they get the truth; but that’s not enough, I’ve got to put it before them briefly so that they will read it, clearly so that they will understand it, forcibly so that they will appreciate it, picturesquely so that they will remember it, and, above all, accurately so that they may be wisely guided by its light. -Joseph Pulitzer, newspaper publisher (10 Apr 1847-1911)

  2. I used to enjoy a quince tart with creme anglais or something I think the chef call Savoyard sauce for dessert at a favorite French restaurant in Old Town Alexandria. The quince tart had the consistency of my regular favorite apple tart but a different but very enjoyable taste. Maybe the quince was cooked for a long time to softness?

  3. I think the young Ostrich was simply expecting a handout.
    It looks to me that the ducks mainly separated themselves. Perhaps they were raised together by color and have closer ties? I don’t know.

  6. From humour writer Andy Borowitz:

    WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In the latest illustration of the tensions roiling the White House, on Tuesday JD Vance reportedly “blew his stack” when he learned that newly instituted tariffs had sent the price of his favorite eyeliner brand soaring.

    According to sources, Vance demanded a meeting with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick upon discovering that the price of his go-to beauty product, Shanghai Smokeshow, had quadrupled.

    The meeting, however, did not achieve its desired result, as a tearful Vance emerged from it with black streaks staining his cheeks.

    https://www.borowitzreport.com/p/jd-vance-freaks-out-after-tariffs

    1. Heh. I came across a picture of a younger Vance, complete with creepy eyeliner. I don’t know if its real or photoshopped.

      1. No relevance but very weird: Taliban troops routinely wear eyeliner. It is quite a Thing there for decades now. And it does make them look fierce.

        Interestingly this fashion tip hasn’t taken off in other, philosophically near identical groups like ISIS, Hezbalass or Hamas.
        Seems to be a Pashtun thing: all that thin high alpine air?

        It is fun to play dress ups while exploding. Always said that.

        D.A.
        NYC

        1. In many, mostly Muslim, countries men and boys (also) wear “eyeliner” (kohl actually) for such practical reasons, like you intimated, such as to reduce the glare of the sun.
          Many also wear it, or apply it to the eyes of their children, especially the little boys, to ward of the “evil eye”. One can of course also buy an “evil eye” talisman, ubiquitous in just about every shop you see and hanging in nearly every home you visit.

      2. Slightly off-topic, but Tim Minchin (Aussie musician/comic – “Storm”, etc.) does or at least used to wear eyeliner on stage.

        1. Funny, Derek, I was thinking that as I wrote it. Must have stuck in both of our minds.

          In a great interview with Prof Kraus (origins podcast) Minchin said he’s so pale that he uses eyeliner stage make-up while on the piano so he could do emotional expressions more clearly to distant cameras and audiences.

          I thought that kind of neat (but then the magic of all face make up fascinates me. It is a superpower for women – evolutionary biology strikes again!).

          I’m a big Minchin fan – a fellow Aussie one can be proud of.

          best regards,

          D.A.
          NYC

  7. Good question of how to train the dogs to separate by color. I can’t get my Australian shepherd (named “Aussie” – I’m uncreative as you can see) to even sit on command!
    He’s a herder and adores it. We have no ducks in our apartment (sadly) but he’ll herd his toys, visiting children, us.

    Wait till I get that giant anteater I saw on WEIT this week as a new pet: that’ll shake things up around here.

    D.A.
    NYC

    1. Google or check AI for herding activities for dogs in the New York area. One is Dog Days Farm; however, it’s 3 1/2 hours away.

  8. “On the other hand, Dems should wish for Musk to stay on, because he’s only helping our party.”

    I think Musk is a gift that will keep on giving no matter what. He, like tRump, is incapable of being on the sidelines and will continue to inject himself regardless of whether tRump “fires” him.

    Meanwhile, his car company will continue to evaporate.

  9. The Nietzsche poem was very clever, but not a limerick, said the nitpicker.

  10. I think the seemingly contradictory cinnamon quote was just awkwardly written. It might have been better if they’d written, “Cinnamon crescent rolls might not be the healthiest of foods, but since cinnamon is the operative ingredient, there is some opportunity for health benefits, since cinnamon has many.”

  11. Name for that cat? “Symmie,” short for symmetry.

    Gaza. Of course it will take years more in Gaza. Tunnels still abound, and decades of anti-Israel propaganda has poisoned the entire population. So, young terrorists reach fighting age every day ready to join the fight. Israel’s goals need to remain the same: rescue the hostages and end Hamas as a governing and military force. Once those goals are achieved, there will be years of insurgency that Israel will need to deal with. It may not be possible to extinguish an ideology, but it is certainly feasible to remove its proponents from power.

    1. To rid the region of anti-Israel sentiment they’ll have to destroy much more than the tunnels of Gaza. Our world needs to find another way to crush the hatred that’s long been brewing in the middle east. I don’t claim to have a clue what that way may be.

  12. Good on the girls from Mid Vermont Christian School. Not mentioned in this post but described in the X post, as a result of their action (actually, inaction) the entire school has been permanently expelled from all sports statewide. This seems a rather extreme punishment for forfeiting one game. I cannot understand how a sports governing body can seriously think that allowing males to play female sports is not providing an unfair advantage to the team with the male or that it’s not depriving females of opportunity.

    We have some terms that we use to describe people who believe that they are in the wrong sexed body, such as gender dysphoric. Is there a term for people who believe that people can magically transform from one sex to another simply by proclaiming it?

    It’s worth noting the courage shown by these girls and others such as the fencer shown here previously vs the anti-Zionist college protesters. The girls who refused to participate in sporting matches against boys have accepted the consequences of the their actions – they willingly forfeit. But the performative racist university vandals are not willing to accept the consequences of their civil disobedience – they want to have their privilege and abuse it too.

    1. The state’s athletic authority is clearly scared to death of somebody….and it’s not girl athletes.

      Just as the universities are clearly scared to death of somebody, too…. and it is vandals and trespassers.

      The responsible authorities surely know what they’re doing. Nobody is fooled. It just shows that the ad baculum logical fallacy isn’t really a fallacy. A policy delivered in order not to be the victim of violence is just as good as a policy arrived at by logical persuasion.

      1. I had not considered the fear aspect. I honestly believed that these administrators made their decisions based on their own moral position, and I never considered fear of retaliation to be a motivating factor. I can see that now as the line connecting these decisions – both fear for physical safety, as well as fear of being shunned from their social group.
        Thanks for providing that explanation – it’s nice to have one’s eyes opened to a different way of thinking about something!

        1. With trans-ID, it’s money, too: Loss of government grants, legal trouble with discrimination lawsuits that could bankrupt school districts or umbrella sport organizations, leading to the end of athletic programs or put the taxpayers on the hook to pay out damage awards. If you are an administrator who gets blamed for precipitating a complaint that ends up being successful, you will be fired instead of praised for standing up for principle. “Not on our dime”, the Board will say. “And thanks to you, we no longer have an intercollegiate athletic program in our state.” Rather, punish those girls so they don’t encourage other teams to try it when a trans athlete shows up at their school. Don’t give us more discrimination complaints to pay off. And, yes, we’ll cheerfully punish the whole school so those girls will bear the blame for their school being ostracized. That’ll teach ’em.” Why settle for decimation when you can with the stroke of a pen strike them all? Even parents of female athletes will be cowed if they know speaking out could get the whole school canceled.

          Where discrimination by gender identity is illegal, as it is in Vermont (and in every province in Canada), it is illegal to tell a “transgirl” that “she” can’t play on a girls’ team because that would be discriminating amongst women on the basis of whether they are cis-women or trans-women, just as it would be illegal to discriminate amongst women on the basis of whether they are black women or white women — well, OK, that is legal in Canada as long as you favour the black woman — or whether they are homosexual women or heterosexual women. Trans-women are merely a subset of women defined by gender identity, just as lesbians are a subset of women defined by sex of attraction, and so you can’t discriminate on the basis of gender identity either.

          If you object, “But transwomen aren’t women. They’re men”, you will be silenced with, “That ignorant transphobic opinion is not supported by civil rights law in Vermont.” No administrator will dare breathe it because if she wants to keep her job, she can’t go around dissing the law that governs her organization’s behaviour and success in getting (and keeping!) government money. No one who would talk that way on principle, putting principle ahead of the interests of the organization, has any chance of being hired to a job like this.

          When people say that trans people should have “full civil rights”, this is what they get. The State of Vermont says men can change their sex marker on their birth certificates and thus legally become women. Just as in Indiana, it was legally possible to square a circle with compass and straightedge, (which implies pi = 4), just because the legislature said so.
          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_pi_bill

          1. 100% with you on all the above, Leslie.
            Particularly… it is like the “assassin’s veto” but socially. Many people who reject gender ideology keep their traps shut because – as you say – there are career implications which are very harsh – but also b/c our society has relegated TERFs and even biologists (like our host here) as “bigots”. Huuuge blowback. You don’t need a gun to have an assassin’s veto.

            I’ve been borderline obsessed with this genderwang issue from an intellectual perspective for 5 years now, heightened when a family member became a victim of it.
            And I have a syndicated column – I’ll take the blowback from various “friends of Palestine” writing about Middle East politics, but I’ve never written about trans, despite my deep knowledge and opinions. As Pinker says “I manage my scandal portfolio carefully.”

            Other parties like Pamela Paul, GENSPEC, the British terfs do it better than me but it is a cop out I know.

            D.A.
            NYC

    3. Oh, that is so true. I was thinking earlier how I used to use the cases the ACLU got behind as a test for my own thinking. As the free speech issue –you either support it or you don’t. I no longer view the ACLU as the honest brokers they once were. Gone are the days — for me — when we could safely line up behind certain organizations. Maybe it was wrong of me to ever think we could.

  13. The Nietsche poem is a limerick, but missing a line, probably the third line which would rhyme with the current third line. It is not a clerihew, which has AABB rhyme-scheme..

    The white cat’s name is Aang: see ‘Avatar, the Last Airbender’.

    1. Oh Ray. A limerick missing a line is not a limerick! Also, the number of feet in the first, second, and fifth lines is important. The whole rhythm is this:

      Da, Da da da, Da da da, Da da,
      Da, Da da da, Da da da, Da da. (or sometimes just one Da in the last phrase)
      Da, Da da da, Da da,
      Da, Da da da, Da da,
      Da, Da da da, Da da da, Da da. (see above)

      Now I’m going to research this in a desultory way, and see if there’s an original with at least the right number of lines. Stay tuned!

      OK, I only found references to the poem as quoted. So it was never a limerick. Somebody tried to add a fifth line, but it was a little tortured. Better as a non-limerick, I guess.

  15. Perhaps the Border Collies separating the black and white ducks each worked with a separate group of ducks… one with the white group and one with the black ducks.
    Border Collies are so damn smart.

    1. And, sadly, very prone to epilepsy. Two of my parents collies ended up on phenobarb, but succumbed to status epilepticus nonetheless. My most successful efforts to use the Welsh language were in respect to Meg, a wise old collie that only spoke Welsh and when I was entrusted to work the sheep with her I had to use the Welsh commands she understood.

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