Thursday: Hili dialogue

June 19, 2025 • 6:45 am

We are back with a new Hili dialogue sent by Andrzej!

Welcome to Thursday, June 19, 2026 and World Albatross Day. In honor of these amazing birds, here’s a short video about Wisdom, a Laysan Albatross who is a record holder. She is at at least 70 years old:

Wisdom (officially designated #Z333) is a wild female Laysan albatross, the oldest confirmed wild bird in the world and the oldest banded bird in the world.  First tagged in 1956 at Midway Atoll by the United States Geological Survey (USGS), she was still incubating eggs as late as 2024 and has received international media coverage in her lifetime. She was spotted alive and apparently healthy as recently as February 2025.

. . . The USGS has tracked Wisdom since she was first tagged and estimated that Wisdom has flown over 3,000,000 miles (4,800,000 km) since 1956 (approximately 120 times the circumference of the Earth). To accommodate her longevity, the USGS has replaced her tag a total of six times

. . .  Albatrosses lay one egg per year, and usually have monogamous mates for life. Smithsonian speculated that, due to Wisdom’s unusual longevity, she has had to find several successive mates in order to continue breeding.  Biologists estimated that Wisdom has laid some 30–40 eggs in her lifetime and that she has at least 30–36 chicks.

Here is her latest chick from February 2 of this year. Isn’t it cute? That is Wisdom’s mate looking after it.

Here is Wisdom and a chick from 2011. She sure doesn’t look old, does she?

John Klavitter/U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also Corpus Christi, National Eat an Oreo Day, National Martini Day, World Tapas Day, and the federal U.S. holiday of Juneteenth, marking the day in 1865 when “Major General Gordon Granger ordered the final enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation in Texas at the end of the American Civil War”.  Slavery and the war had of course ended by then (the war was over on April 9 of that year), but the news got to Texas last. There’s a Google Doodle on the holiday today; click picture below to see where it goes:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 19 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The Times of Israel reports that Iran will mount a strong response if the U.S. joins Israel’s strikes, while the IDF says that it’s hit 1,100 Iranian targets since bombing started on Friday.  Meanwhile, the odious President of Turkey is defending Iran and saying that Netanyahu is worse than Hitler. Turkey should be booted out of NATO:

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says Iran has the “legitimate” right to defend itself in the face of Israel’s ongoing bombing campaign against military and nuclear targets, now in its sixth day.

“It is a very natural, legitimate and legal right for Iran to defend itself against Israel’s thuggery and state terrorism,” the Turkish leader says, a day after he referred to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “the biggest threat to the security of the region.”

He also says Netanyahu had surpassed Adolf Hitler in committing crimes of “genocide” in Gaza. It is not the first time Erdogan has compared Netanyahu to the Nazi leader.

More war news:

Apparently many centrifuges used to enrich uranium have been knocked out of action, but the big underground facilities have not yet been touched (Israel may want to just seal the entrance tunnels, but that would be a temporary measure:

Israel hit two centrifuge production sites in Iran, the International Atomic Energy Agency confirms.

The IAEA identifies the facilities as the TESA complex in Karaj and the Tehran Research Center.

“At the Tehran site, one building was hit where advanced centrifuge rotors were manufactured and tested,” says the IAEA on X. “At Karaj, two buildings were destroyed where different centrifuge components were manufactured.”

Both sites had been under IAEA monitoring as part of the 2015 JCPOA agreement.

The TESA complex, near the capital Tehran, hosted a workshop to build components for centrifuges, the machines used to enrich uranium. In 2021, Iran said cameras at the site were damaged during what it called an Israeli “sabotage” operation.

And from the WSJ:

Germany’s chancellor said what many countries are thinking, but of course French President Macron would never say anything like that. The difference in sentiments of Germany vs. France towards Israel is striking

*From the WaPo: more internecine squabbling among Democrats is outlined in a piece called “Democrats want to fight Trump, but they can’t stop fighting each other” (article archived here):

Many Democratic leaders and activists have grown frustrated with the state of their national party operation, worrying that a spate of internal divisions and unflattering feuds threatens to hinder their fight against President Donald Trump’s Republican Party.

The Democratic National Committee, typically the domain of nuts and bolts political activity, has been rocked by clashes that reflect broader generational and ideological strains in the party. Now, some prominent Democrats are openly questioning the direction of the DNC under the leadership of Chair Ken Martin, with some suggesting it is stifling input from dissenting voices and refusing to change in a way that is risky for future elections. Others are blaming rival factions for adding to the party’s challenges by intervening in primaries and embracing personal vendettas. And many are simply fed up with all the rancor.

The criticism is still flying.

The DNC has “got to do a better of job of communicating with members and Democratic electeds and other members of our coalition,” Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Michigan) said Tuesday. She added that the problem is “contributing to significant tension right now” and that Martin “needs to be pulling people together.”

. . . . . While the task of rebuilding for 2026 and 2028 will fall to many entities and leaders beyond the DNC, which tends to have a narrower mission, the committee’s challenges highlight a party struggling to find its way after a crushing political defeat shut them out of power in Washington. Widespread anger with Trump’s agenda has presented Democrats with an opportunity to regain lost ground, but they disagree on the best ways to accomplish that.

The two choices are a) become more centrist become aware of what issues most concern voters, and try to cater to Trump voters who aren’t fond of Trump, or b) go Full Progressive and lose the elections for sure.

For other Democrats, the timing of the latest party drama was especially infuriating. They were eager to seize momentum coming out of a weekend of nationwide anti-Trump protests — and focused on grieving a tragedy in Martin’s home state of Minnesota. As news of the labor union departures broke this weekend, Martin — the former chair of the Minnesota Democratic—Farmer—Labor Party — was mourning the murder of his close friend Melissa Hortman, a Minnesota lawmaker, and her husband, Mark Hortman. Authorities said the attack was politically motivated.

. . . . “Every minute we’re not talking about Donald Trump overstepping his authority, and we’re having to talk about David Hogg and the DNC, we’re losing,” said Democratic strategist Chuck Rocha. “This is just fodder to show people that the poor Democratic Party can’t even govern itself.”

I am not a pundit, but I would suggest that Democrats take a view of Trump in which they call him out for the bad things he does (most of them), but be a bit more bipartisan and admit it when he does something decent (like helping Israel). But of course that’s not the way that politics works: one must totally demonize the opponent. I understand that.

*Jonathan Haidt, Will Johnson, and Zach Raush have a joint op-ed in the NYT called “There is a way to bring back childhood“, with the subtitle, “The smartphones haven’t defeated us. Yet” (archived here). It involves cellphones, something that Haidt has criticized for years as a thief of childhood. A few excerpts from a long piece:

Since the dawn of the television age, parents have struggled to limit or guide their children’s screen time.

But with the arrival of smartphones that can — and do — go everywhere and with social media apps that teenagers now use for an average of five hours every day, many parents feel a sense of resignation. The struggle has been lost. Parents who try to delay giving a smartphone until high school or social media until 16 know that they’ll face the plaintive cry from their children: “But I’m the only one!”

To better understand the tensions over technology playing out in American families, we worked with the Harris Poll to conduct two surveys. As we reported last year, our survey of 1,006 members of Gen Z found that many young people feel trapped — tethered to digital products like TikTok and Snapchat. Nearly half of all participants expressed regret about having access to many of the most popular social media platforms.

Here we present the second part of our investigation: a nationally representative survey of 1,013 parents who have children under 18. The overall picture isn’t any better. We find widespread feelings of entrapment and regret. Many parents gave their children smartphones and social media access early in their lives — yet many wish that social media had never been invented, and overwhelmingly they support new social norms and policies that would protect kids from online harms.

. . .Almost a third of parents whose children have social media believe they gave their child access to social media too young, and 22 percent feel similarly for smartphones. Notably, for both technologies, only 1 percent of parents thought they had waited too long to introduce them. In other words, parents regret the technologies they gave, not the technologies they withheld.

Why did so many parents make decisions that they regret? One major reason is that in the brief period when flip phones and other basic phones were replaced by smartphones, roughly from 2010 to 2015, there was a pervasive sense of techno-optimism. Most people were amazed by the new technology and its beneficial applications — from the mundane like hailing a car service to the profound like bringing down a dictatorship.

Here’s a figure from the article:

And the solution, which Haidt has proposed before, is to ban the use of smartphones in schools, comme ça:

Every school in Brazil has gone phone-free bell-to-bell. Australia has raised the age for opening social media accounts to 16; other countries are quite likely to follow suit. The president of France, Emmanuel Macron, recently announced his intention to enact a minimum age of 15 for social media use in France if the European Union does not enact a similar restriction first.

With tech companies eagerly filling our children’s lives — and their classrooms — with more new and untested technologies (A.I. “friends,” tutors and other forms of virtual reality), it is becoming that much more urgent for parents to speak up and for legislators to act.

The goal of these reforms isn’t just to limit screens. It’s much bigger than that. The goal is to restore childhood.

All I can say is that I agree.  Not only do smartphones they steal childhood, but they steal education and they shorten people’s attention spans. Articles are getting shorter, and it’s not uncommon to see a “reading time” appended to an article, the object being to allow you to reject those articles which are too long.

*The WaPo discusses why many people who were in favor of Trump’s anti-immigration policies are now alarmed by how they’re being enforced.

“They said only criminals, and now they’re saying, ‘Well, they did come in illegally, so they are criminals,’” [Jesus Martinez] added. “Hispanics or Latinos that voted for Trump, they didn’t think he was going to go after kids.”

Trump’s promises to crack down on illegal immigration helped him win back the White House in 2024 and increase his voting share among young voters, working-class people and Latinos. But interviews with more than four dozen people in the Antelope Valley, a closely divided region of the state about an hour north of Los Angeles, show that tactics very much matter.

In this working-class and heavily Latino area known for its wildflower blooms, a region that moved toward Trump in the 2024 election, voters from both parties voiced support for Trump’s promises to deport immigrants who are here illegally, especially those with criminal records.But they drew lines — some over the scope of those deportations and, to a lesser extent, over his decision to crack down on immigration protesters with the military.

. . .The interviews reflect what public polls increasingly show: that many Americans are uncomfortable with Trump’s recent moves. Nearly half of American adults, 49 percent, said Trump went too far with arrests of immigrants, while 40 percent said he had not, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted last week. Eleven percent said they were unsure

That gives Democrats a potential opening on an issue that helped propel Trump to victory in 2024, when many voters blamed President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris for a surge of crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) has tried in recent days to highlight immigration raids at worksites that have separated children from their parents. That has drawn attention on social media.

But Democrats have yet to coalesce around a message amid debates over whether past attempts to counter Trump have pushed the party too far left.

Yes, this gives Democrats an opening, but they do need their own policy, and one that does NOT appear to party’s stand favoring open borders. That has been people’s impression of Democrats for too long. And yes, criminal undocumented immigrants should be dealt with first, before we decide to do anything about the rest. But undocumented or not, every immigrant facing deportation needs a court hearing, even if the case is open and shut.  A Democratic call for anything that looks like open borders will be the kiss of death in future elections.

*The AP reports something very cool: a pair of precisely aligned satellites can create for the satellite nearest to Earth a total solar eclipse, which can be photographed, allowing us to look at the Sun’s corona for hours at a time rather than just very briefly during a normal solar eclipse. Of course we can’t see this eclipse on Earth, but the observation of the corona in space is important, and the methodology is precise and amazing:

A pair of European satellites have created the first artificial solar eclipses by flying in precise and fancy formation, providing hours of on-demand totality for scientists.

The European Space Agency released the eclipse pictures at the Paris Air Show on Monday. Launched late last year, the orbiting duo have churned out simulated solar eclipses since March while zooming tens of thousands of miles (kilometers) above Earth.

Flying 492 feet (150 meters) apart, one satellite blocks the sun like the moon does during a natural total solar eclipse as the other aims its telescope at the corona, the sun’s outer atmosphere that forms a crown or halo of light.

It’s an intricate, prolonged dance requiring extreme precision by the cube-shaped spacecraft, less than 5 feet (1.5 meters) in size. Their flying accuracy needs to be within a mere millimeter, the thickness of a fingernail. This meticulous positioning is achieved autonomously through GPS navigation, star trackers, lasers and radio links.

Dubbed Proba-3, the $210 million mission has generated 10 successful solar eclipses so far during the ongoing checkout phase. The longest eclipse lasted five hours, said the Royal Observatory of Belgium’s Andrei Zhukov, the lead scientist for the orbiting corona-observing telescope. He and his team are aiming for a wondrous six hours of totality per eclipse once scientific observations begin in July.

Scientists already are thrilled by the preliminary results that show the corona without the need for any special image processing, said Zhukov.

“We almost couldn’t believe our eyes,” Zhukov said in an email. “This was the first try, and it worked. It was so incredible.”

. . . . While previous satellites have generated imitation solar eclipses — including the European Space Agency and NASA’s Solar Orbiter and Soho observatory — the sun-blocking disk was always on the same spacecraft as the corona-observing telescope. What makes this mission unique, Zhukov said, is that the sun-shrouding disk and telescope are on two different satellites and therefore far apart.

The distance between these two satellites will give scientists a better look at the part of the corona closest to the limb of the sun.

And of course you want to see a video:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej gives a political answer to Hili’s question:

Hili: So many yellow flowers.
Andrzej: Don’t worry, we will mow them and people against mowing the grass will shout.

In Polish:

Hili: Strasznie dużo tych żółtych kwiatków.
Ja: Nic się nie martw, skosimy i znów przeciwnicy koszenia trawy będą krzyczeć.

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

From Jesus of the Day:

From CinEmma:

From the 2025 Darwin Awards!!!/Epic Fails!!! But this is a good optical illusion:

Masih rebukes the Israeli government for evacuation warnings that were not issued at an appropriate time:

From Luana: Woke Pecksniffery:

From Simon: Our Democratic Senator Tammy Duckworth, who lost both of her legs serving as an Army helicopter pilot in Iraq> She knows whereof she speaks!

damn — Duckworth to Hegseth: "If you want to be the DHS secretary, maybe you can apply for that job when you're fired from this one due to your incompetence."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-06-18T15:47:40.707Z

From Malcolm, a dog “Learning to drive”. No, they can’t drive on public roads, but they do a pretty good job!

From my feed; the players apparently beat up on Caitlin Clark because she’s so damn good. That’s reprehensible:

One that I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

A German Jewish girl was gassed to death upon arriving at Auschwitz. She was eight years old.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-06-19T09:04:02.622Z

Two posts from Dr. Cobb. The first one was a good idea in principle, but the history of the red handprints made it a very bad idea:

Thank you to my son and his day care for this terrifying Father’s Day gift.

— Dan McQuade (@dhm.bsky.social) 2025-06-15T12:58:11.656Z

We now have a skull from a new hominin find (we only had finger bones and mandibles before), and it’s clearly a Denisovan. I’m glad that Matthew agrees that Denisovans were members of Homo sapiens rather than some other species; after all, they interbred with H. sapiens in nature and produced fertile hybrids).

Look upon a Denisovan! “Dragon man”, as most suspected, is indeed a Denisovan. But I hope we don’t adopt the Homo longi name that was given to the skull. These ppl, like Neanderthals, were clearly the same biological species as us, irrespective of their lumps and bumps!

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-06-18T17:00:15.859Z

61 thoughts on “Thursday: Hili dialogue”

  1. Yes they certainly will, Andrzej. Thank you and Hili on these first very difficult days.

  2. I’ve given up on the Democrats. At this point the most practical thing many of us can do, especially those of us who live in red counties and states, is join the Republican party and change it from within, take it back from the MAGA crowd.

    1. I am sorry but I cannot go that far. And right now “change from the inside” seems nearly impossible. I simply couldn’t say, “I, Jerry Coyne, am a Republican who wants to de-Trumpify our party.”

      2. If only Texas had open primaries I wouldn’t feel so frustrated. I already vote in the Republican Primary because that is the only way I can vote for a viable and responsible candidate for county judge, sheriff, commissioner, etc. Sane people simply don’t run as Democrats because they know that even if they win the primary they will never be elected to office in the general election.

    2. Interestingly, I’ve almost given up on the GOP. They have their chance to enact conservative laws, and they are just wallowing in the swamp. I’ve put my Senators and Congressman on notice that I will vote for Democrats (or any other challenger) in 2026 unless they show some grit on things like controlling the debt and spending.

      1. The only thing that Democrats and Republicans agree upon is that they must, at all costs, prevent a third party from challenging them. That speaks volumes.

  3. “Germany’s chancellor said Israel was doing the “dirty work” for other countries by striking Iran’s nuclear sites.”

    I did not vote for Merz, I do not like him. But with this statement he is 100% correct.

    The Israeli ambassador to Germany, Ron Prosor, welcomed Merz’s statement and defended him against fierce criticism from the left-wing political spectrum or left-wing/progressive media.

  4. “You issued an evacuation warning at 2 a.m. hours before a strike, expecting civilians under near-total internet blackout to see it?

    Even in daylight, most Iranians can’t access uncensored information. Expecting midnight missile alerts to reach them is…”

    This is from Masih, someone who is very anti-regime and very pro-West. This attack will naturally turn all of Iran against the west and that’s a shame, because a very large number of Iranians were pro-west before this. The attack solidifies the regime, marginalizes its internal critics, radicalizes its successors, and ensures that Iran will rush the development of nuclear weapons to keep from being randomly bombed whenever a western country desires to do so. This is a terrible way to try to provoke regime change and it is a short-sighted regional solution.

    This will not end well.

    1. For conflicts in Gaza, I believe they would drop leaflets. This seems like what they should do in Iran.

      1. That would be better, but there are probably serious tactical risks involved in getting leaflets on site in this case.

      2. Yes, but not at 2 a.m. And I’m not sure what the serious tactical problems of dropping leaflets is given that Israel controls all of Iran’s airspace. There are also telephone calls, which Israel has also used in Gaza.

        1. I was just giving Israel the benefit of the doubt for why they did not drop leaflets. I think doing so would be much more dangerous for their pilots than it would be in Gaza.

    2. I’m sorry but I disagree. I still think most Iranians want regime change, and I am not sure that this war won’t topple the regime allowing the people to have a more democratic government,

      Negotiations with Iran have not worked; Iran has cheated repeatedly for years, and are now on the verge of getting nuclear weapons. I presume that you either have a solution that nobody else has for that problem, or that you WANT Iran to have nuclear weapons.

      1. I wish they wouldn’t get them, but this attack, and Trump’s crazy demand of unconditional surrender, just offers Iran more motivation to get them.

        I believe that diplomacy could have worked, along with imposing stricter verification. After this attack, I am not so sure that anything can be done to stop them. They now believe they are under an existential threat just like Israel, with Trump stirring up the pot in the craziest way possible.

        I’ll stop now because of the Roolz…

        2. Yes, motivation is important. Even more important is the capability to act on that motivation.

    3. I suppose that he IDF could have done better, but I don’t know the circumstances. Even so, I doubt that this one criticism will have as profound an effect as you suggest.

    4. It’s a long flight to Tehran just to drop leaflets, in a plane that will need maintenance when it gets back before it can fly again. Who says a night run is safer than daylight? Israel may now have air superiority but that doesn’t mean a plane can fly over Tehran on a low-and-slow leaflet drop at no risk at all to a precious pilot. Nor can Israel provide many hours to days of warning about specific targets, to give the regime time to consolidate whatever defences they still have. And isn’t that the job of Iran’s civil-defence authorities to warn its own people of impending attack, you know, with air raid sirens?

      The Allies did drop leaflets on the French city of Caen in 1944 to warn the residents to evacuate it before they demolished it around the German garrison after less destructive means failed with high casualties. But those were friendlies a short hop from England. No way were they ever going to give advance warning to Gelsenkirchen. Indeed the flight routes into Germany were zigzag to leave uncertainty in German fighter controllers as to what the target was going to be until the last minutes.

      Israel behaves admirably, almost hubristically, in warning Gaza where they’re going to hit. But bombing Iran is entirely different. That Israel gives any warning at all that could compromise the operation is beyond any reasonable expectation. Indeed, the correct procedure would be to warn Tehran and then bomb somewhere else left open.

      Ms. Alinejad is off base here.

    5. My take:
      If Isreal issued the warning, and the Iranian gov doesn’t heed it and pass appropriate information to their citizens, it is on them.

      It is possible, in my opinion, that the regime didn’t pass it to the populace specifically to make taint their opinions re. the west/Isreal. If it looks like an unannounced surprise attack on civilians, that is to the regime’s benefit.

      Based on their past practice, I don’t think it likely that the IDF cut corners.

    1. And the bemused expression when the latest technology fails to work as expected.

  6. I don’t understand Juneteenth. I, of course, think a day recognizing the end of slavery is appropriate. But the draft Emancipation Proclamation was published in September 1862. It came into effect in January 1863. Neither that nor Granger’s action in Texas ended Slavery. It was still legal in many places, including the States of Delaware, Maryland, and Kentucky. The Thirteenth Amendment was ratified in December 1865, truly ending slavery. Any one of those three dates seems to make more sense than this one.

    1. To understand, let’s go to what Barack Obama says :

      “On Juneteenth, we celebrate freedom and recommit ourselves to the work that remains undone. We remember that even in the darkest hours, there is cause to hope for tomorrow’s light.”

      https://x.com/barackobama/status/1935696202802106835?s=46

      ….

      What “work that remains undone” does he mean? What “freedom” does he mean?

      It is an unmistakably gnostic statement, created by dialectic, and the U.S. federal holiday of “Juneteenth” is the first holiday established for a gnostic cult religion by dialectical synthesis.

      It has nothing to do with Monday, June 19th, in “1865 when “Major General Gordon Granger ordered the final enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation in Texas at the end of the American Civil War”.

      That should remove all confusion.

      The U.S. federal holiday of “Juneteenth” has nothing to do with the actual development of actual freedom according to the principles of the United States.

      The precise gnostic use of Juneteenth the holiday is left as an exercise but spoiler it’s Communist demoralization and agitation.

      1. “What ‘work that remains undone’ does he mean?”

        Fighting the racism that still exists. And those who attribute all problems in the black community to “systemic racism” will think of that.

        “What ‘freedom’ does he mean?”

        Freedom from slavery and oppression.

        I think you’re reading too much into his words here. Juneteenth in its origins had nothing to do with contemporary “Woke” fuckery, and Obama is no Marxist.

        1. What consciousness tells us the solution to end social problems?

          Critical consciousness.

          Freedom is found by breaking free from the Gnostic prison.

          This is Rousseau->Hegel->Marx. Gnostics who know the End of History. It is written in their works – no “reading into” required. It’s dialectic.

          Obama appointed known Marxists to major positions.

  7. The poll on what parents wish didn’t exist is interesting. Look how far down TV is. Remember when that was the big bugaboo? If you remove all the online activities, it rises to number four (behind large vehicles). And who’s upset about newspapers? Are kids reading newspapers? Is anyone?

    And, I’m sorry, why are we teaching dogs to drive? What if they were driving and saw a squirrel?

    1. There’s video of a cat in an appropriately-sized car who easily mastered driving inside a house, doing turns and avoiding objects.

    3. 9% of parents apparently wish that bicycles had never been invented. I’m not sure if this is 1) someone has been injured 2) the kids are bicycle fanatics 3) let’s start as far back before modern life as possible or 4) somewhere around 10% of people answering polls are a) pranksters and/or b) idiots.

      As for the dogs who were taught how to drive so they’d be demonstrably “smart “ and more likely to be adopted, I don’t think it’s smart to assume people eager to adopt such dogs will obligingly keep them off the roads. “My new dog can drive a car but I can’t show you!” Nope. That’s not gonna happen.

    2. Appreciated the triangulation from a less conventional (for me) direction. Most of my knowledge of VDH is from oral video. He writes more coherently than he talks. Maybe most of us do.

  9. Thank you so very much to Andrzej for posting the Hili dialogue. It was probably difficult, but my friends and I appreciate it more than you could know.

  10. Thank you Andrzej. It is wonderful to hear Hili’s philosophy of life.
    I know it’s a tough time but I am so happy to hear from you and Hili today.

  11. What is the deal with the ‘optical illusion’ post? It is obviously a messed up pic (see car in background), but I don’t see an illusion.

    2. I’ve seem it before. Squint to blur the image. Try to move it farther away. It’s worth it.

    3. I downloaded it to my desktop, where, as a one inch square, it turned into an easily recognizable image.

  12. There was a bit on NPR several months ago where they interviewed stressed teens about how hard it is for them. I started out with great skepticism, but soon realized that they were absolutely on point bc of the constancy of social media. In our day, the usual mishaps and events causing angst can stay within a circle of friends, but not it doesn’t. We used to be able to go home after school to get away from the talk talk talk, but kids today can’t.

  13. The treatment of Caitlin Clark by the WNBA thugs and the lack of enforcement of rules meant to protect players by the officials and league continues to be reprehensible. Along with issues several readers raised the other day regarding the demise of sportsmanship and true athletic competition in both college and the pros is very sad.

    1. Excellent point. It gives a lie to all of the so-called positive values that sport creates.

      In reality, sports are inherently neutral…meaning you can learn positive or negative values depending on how the sport is conducted. There is no natural tendency to improve the moral character of the participant just by bouncing a ball or kicking it.

      That last clip of Caitlin Clark is incredible to me because I see very little reaction from her teammates. Beating up a star player is not unique to the WNBA or women’s sports…it happens all the time in male sports. But when Larry Bird got clobbered by like goons like Bill Laimbeer, Larry’s teammates would retaliate on his behalf.

      Can anyone explain why Caitlin’s teammates don’t seem to back her up?

      1. Further down in the post, and a little later, you’ll see teammate Sophie Cunningham giving a little payback to original instigator Sheldon.

  15. I had to laugh yesterday when I read Erdogan’s statement that Iran has a right to defend itself. I suppose it does. It is defending itself and it’s quickly running out of missiles. So, what is the substance of what Erdogan is saying? Is our NATO “ally” really going to resupply Iran with missiles? Or is he just blowing smoke to placate those who support the regime? I totally agree that Turkey should be booted out of NATO or its membership suspended until the leadership changes.

    And I was very glad to read what Germany’s chancellor had to say about Israel doing the world’s dirty work. Everyone knows this to be true, but because Israel bashing remains fashionable almost no one will speak the truth. The German chancellor is a rare exception. France’s Macron had been pathetic, of course.

    Finally, on a different topic, the idea of using satellites to create artificial solar eclipses is one of those rare ideas that is completely obvious once it has been stated. So cool that it’s now being done!

  16. There is no interest in kicking Turkey out of Nato. As soon as that is done, Russia will move to strengthen relations.

    1. Totally, Mark, again I agree with you. Turkey – as obnoxious as it currently is – is better within the NATO tent than outside where it could/will play kissy-kissy with Putin (now THERE’S an image!) and Iran.

      I’m hoping Turkey’s religious mania is temporary, particularly since the Pasha seems to be using Islamic and/or insane ideas on their ever worsening economy.

      If we alienate our “friends”, others step in. Witness Pres. Xi’s make-new-friends tours of both South East Asia lately and currently Central Asia. The CCP is cleaning up in the wake of our retarded trade war.

      best to you Mark,

      D.A.
      NYC

  18. PBS just taking the Tehran Times slant on things directly. Good they have a Farsi translator in house!
    A..holes. What exactly constitutes an “enemy” to PBS? Other than white men.

    D.A.
    NYC

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