Wednesday: Hili dialogue

June 25, 2025 • 7:00 am

Welcome to a Hump Day (“こぶの日” in Japanese): Wednesday, June 25, 2025;  and the month (with its brutal heat) is slipping by.

It’s Color TV Day, celebrating the first “official” color broadcast:

On today’s date in 1951, at 4:35 p.m. Eastern Time, CBS made what is regarded as the first color television broadcast. It was an hour-long variety show called Premiere, which featured Arthur Godfrey, Ed Sullivan, Garry Moore, Robert Alda, and Faye Emerson. The chairman of the FCC and both the president and board chairman of CBS also appeared on it. The program was transmitted from CBS’s New York City studio to the city, as well as to Boston, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Philadelphia. Only televisions built for color could pick up the transmission, so most people—those with black-and-white sets—who were tuned to CBS just saw a blank screen. Most of those who were able to view the program saw it at a hotel, in department stores, or in an auditorium. Because of this groundbreaking broadcast, today is known as Color TV Day.

It is also National Strawberry Parfait Day, National Catfish Day, Global Beatles Day (celebrating the first satellite broadcast of the Fab Four, which took place on this day in 1967), and, finally, Bourdain Day, honoring the birthday in 1956 of the famous chef, writer, and television documentarian. I was a huge fan, and was distraught when he killed himself at 61.

Here are some of Bourdain’s fellow chefs celebrating his birthday:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 25 Wikipedia page.

Posting will be light today as I have the HxA meetings and my panel this afternoon. Tomorrow evening I’ll be back in Chicago and will be glad to see my ducks. (There’s a lovely phot-and-video duck post in the offing.)

Da Nooz:

*Yesterday the Heterodox Academy gave out its annual awards for courage and speaking out. Here are the winners, with the presenters (in parenthesis) all having won in that category in previous years,  You can read about the winners’ accomplishments here.

Courage:  Joseph Yi (Alice Dreger)

Leadership: Anna Krylov (Alexandra Lydia)

Community excellence: Western Michigan University (Craig Gibson)

Teaching:Abigail C. Saguy (Matt Burgess)

Exceptional scholarship: Musa al-Gharbi   (Keith Whittington)

Special kudos to my friend Anna, who works tirelessly to enforce academic freedom and freedom of speech, and to point out the infestation of science with ideology.

*In a stunning upset, Zohran Mamdani, a Democratic Socialist, beat the predicted winner, former state governor Andrew Cuomo, to win the Democratic primary for NYC Mayor.  Here’s the vote as of 7 a.m. in NYC:

From the NYT:

Zohran Mamdani, a little-known state lawmaker whose progressive platform and campaign trail charisma electrified younger voters, stunned former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City on Tuesday night, building a lead so commanding that Mr. Cuomo conceded.

Mr. Mamdani, a 33-year-old democratic socialist from Queens, tapped into a current of anxiety around New York City’s growing affordability crisis. His joyful campaign brought new voters into the fold who rejected the scandal-scarred Mr. Cuomo’s ominous characterizations of the city and embraced an economic platform that included everything from free bus service and child care to publicly owned grocery stores.

The outcome was not official, and even assuming Mr. Mamdani gains the nomination, he faces an unusually competitive general election in November.

Still, Mr. Mamdani declared victory at a rally early Wednesday in Queens, pledging to be a “mayor for every New Yorker” and framing his win as part of a movement powered by volunteers.

“Tonight we made history,” he said. “In the words of Nelson Mandela, it always seems impossible until it is done. My friends, we have done it.”

The decisiveness of New Yorkers’ swing toward Mr. Mamdani reverberated across the party and the country, at a time when Democrats nationally are searching for an answer to President Trump and are disillusioned with their own leaders.

. . . . “This is the biggest upset in modern New York City history,” said Trip Yang, a Democratic strategist.

From The Free Press:

[Mamdani’s] proposals include government-run grocery stores, a rent freeze for more than two million New Yorkers, and free bus rides. Mamdani’s housing plan alone would cost $100 billion—only slightly less than the entire size of this year’s city budget.

“Everyone who can tell you about basic economics can tell you that a rent freeze just doesn’t work,” said one strategist at a firm employed by the Cuomo campaign.

It is rare to find a single area of agreement between the editorial boards of the New York Post and The New York Times. But both urged readers, before the primary, not to vote for Mamdani.

. . . In much of this, Mamdani’s campaign reminded many people of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who endorsed him. Seven years ago, she defeated 10-term incumbent Joe Crowley in a Democratic primary race for a House seat in Queens and the Bronx.

. . . and from The Free Press‘s morning newsletter:

Then there are Mamdani’s views on the police (“We don’t need an investigation to know that the NYPD is racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety. What we need is to #DefundTheNYPD,” he posted on X in 2020); Israel (“apartheid”); Benjamin Netanyahu (“As Mayor I would have Netanyahu arrested if he came to New York”); and Islamist radicalism (he refuses to condemn the phrase globalize the intifada).

I don’t know much about this candidate, but we’ll see, as he still has to beat a Republican in November (not much of a task, I’d think). Still the victory of a Democratic Socialist with these views, celebrated by many Democrats as the way we should go, may be a bellwether for more Democratic defeats come the midterms or 2028. I was no fan of Cuomo, but I’m wary of a candidate who wants to defund the NYC police and refuses to condemn a phrase whose mening we all know: “Globalize the intifada.”  In NYC?

*According to the Washington Post, the U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear program set that program back only by months and not longer.

An initial U.S. intelligence report assesses that airstrikes ordered by President Donald Trump against Iran’s nuclear facilities set Tehran’s program back by months but did not eliminate it, contradicting claims by Trump and his top aides about the mission’s success, according to three people familiar with the report.

The classified report by the Defense Intelligence Agency is based on the Pentagon’s early bomb damage assessment of the strikes on nuclear sites at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan using earth-penetrating munitions carried by B-2 bombers and submarine-launched Tomahawk missiles.

It assesses that the strikes did not destroy the core components of Iran’s nuclear program and probably set it back by several months, not years, one of the people said.

U.S. intelligence reports also indicate that Iran moved multiple batches of its highly enriched uranium out of the nuclear sites before the strikes occurred and that the uranium stockpiles were unaffected, said the person, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence matters.

According to the Times of Israel, the IDF disagrees:

Israel’s military thinks the recent war with Iran has set the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program back by years, but the assessment is preliminary, and it is too early to know for sure, Israel Defense Forces spokesman Brig. Gen. Effi Defrin said Wednesday.

“We met all the objectives of the operation as defined for us, and even did so better than we had optimally expected,” Defrin said, but he cautioned: “I say this with humility, because it’s still too early to determine.”

“We are investigating and reviewing the results of our strikes on every part of this puzzle, as I’ve previously called it, the various components of the nuclear program and more,” he said.

“Now, I trust our intelligence analysts in the Intelligence Directorate and in the Air Force. I believe they have proven themselves to be accurate in recent weeks, and I can say here that the assessment is that we significantly damaged the nuclear program, and I can also say that we set it back by years, I repeat, years.”

Defrin’s comments echoed those of IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir on Tuesday night that, “We have set Iran’s nuclear project back by years, and the same goes for its missile program.”

Well, all we can do is wait and see, and even then we may not know the answer. I suspect that if the IDF finds that the damage was not that substantial, they will continue their bombing campaign, probably without American bunker-busters and B-2s. But. . .

*Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is peeved that the U.S. damage-assessment report was leaked.

The Trump administration pushed back on a leaked intelligence report that said the U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities only set back Tehran’s nuclear ambitions by a few months, while the cease-fire brokered by President Trump appeared to hold for another day.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, speaking at the NATO summit Wednesday, said the Federal Bureau of Investigation has started a probe into how the preliminary assessment became public. President Trump, also at the summit in The Hague, said reports minimizing the impact of the operation were disrespectful. “This was an unbelievable success,” Trump said.

Meanwhile, Israel said its military and intelligence services are still investigating the extent of the damage. Trump, also speaking at the summit, said Iran shouldn’t try to rebuild its nuclear program, suggesting the U.S. would strike Iran again it did.

President Trump reiterated his view that U.S. strikes on Iran caused a massive blow to Tehran’s nuclear program, downplaying a preliminary intelligence report that indicated the strikes merely set the country back by a few months.

“This was an unbelievable success,” Trump said. Reports minimizing the impact of the operation, he said, are disrespectful. “The thing that hurts me is it’s really demeaning to the pilots and the people that put that whole thing together, the generals—that was a perfect operation.”

If the IDF and U.S. reports coincide in lowering the assessment of damage, then I’ll believe that the operation was not as big a success as we were led to believe. But what upsets me as much is that there is not sign of any impending regime change in Iran, a false hope that I had entertained. And I am tired of Trump using the word “perfect.”

*The AP tallies up the number of Israeli and other hostages held by Hamas in Gaza.

Here are details on the hostages:

Total hostages captured on Oct. 7, 2023: 251

Hostages taken before the Oct. 7 attack: 4, including 2 who entered Gaza in 2014 and 2015 and the bodies of 2 soldiers killed in the 2014 war

Hostages released in exchanges or other deals: 148, of whom 8 were dead

Bodies of hostages retrieved by Israeli forces: 49

Hostages rescued alive: 8

Hostages still in captivity: 50, of whom Israel believes 27 are dead. Netanyahu has said there are “doubts” about the fate of several more.

The hostages in captivity include four non-Israelis: 2 Thais and 1 Tanzanian who have been confirmed dead, and a Nepalese captive.

They don’t mention the hundreds of Palestinian terrorists and prisoners released in exchange for the 140 live hostages, and, as usual, and AP quotes the number of dead Gazans according to Hamas:

Hamas-led militants killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took 251 hostages in the Oct. 7 attack. More than 55,000 Palestinians in Gaza, mostly women and children, have been killed in the ensuing conflict, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. The ministry doesn’t distinguish between civilians and combatants.

I’m betting that the “mostly women and children” claim is bogus.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Szaron have a chinwag:

Hili: Where are you going?
Szaron: To hunt.
Hili: Happy hunting.

In Polish:

Hili: Gdzie się wybierasz?
Szaron: Na polowanie.
Hili: Szczęśliwych łowów.

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

From Cats That Have Had Enough of Your Shit:

From America’s Cultural Decline Into Idiocy:

From Things With Faces, taken at a health facility:

From Mash: Iran is ramping up its execution of opponents of the regime:

From Luana; this makes me ineffably sad and bodes ill for academia:

From Malcolm a pissed off cat mom:

From my feed; two cases of one animal helping another (one case is conspecific):

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

This Dutch Jewish girl died at Auschwitz. She was fifteen.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-06-25T11:47:57.474Z

Two posts from Matthew. His comment on the first one: “Duck! Mongoose!”

A 2,000 year old ‘face-off’ between a mean-eyed mongoose and a rearing cobra!My money’s on the mongoose! Detail from a Roman mosaic from the House of the Faun in Pompeii. Now on display at the National Archaeological Museum, Naples. 📷 by me#MosaicMonday#Archaeology

— Alison Fisk (@alisonfisk.bsky.social) 2025-06-23T09:22:53.072Z

. . . and a wondering duck:

4am…

— Moose Allain (@mooseallain.bsky.social) 2025-06-24T14:11:51.779Z

41 thoughts on “Wednesday: Hili dialogue”

    1. And more on this and some point by point specifics from Sen Warren’s back and forth with jr at the confirmation hearings are in pediatrician Dr. Paul Offit’s “Beyond the Noise” one-pager this week at url https://pauloffit.substack.com/p/the-irony-of-rfk-jrs-conflicts-of

      I highly recommend taking a few minutes to read it….and subscribe to his substack if you aren’t already subscribed. It’s, like so much of Paul’s good work, free to public.

      1. Yep, Paul Offit is great. I watched his Open Letter to Wm Cassidy a couple days ago.

  2. “Where is Khamenei” one of my column readers asked me yesterday.
    I said he is under a park housing the old palaces once owned by Shah Pahlavi, now museums.

    In tony North Tehran the Shah’s former residences comprise a large park/museum. They’re beautiful in a 1970s architectural sense (my fave, btw) and all on google earth. Visit online if you can. There’s even a “Shah’s Car Museum”. 🙂
    Revolutionaries ALWAYS like to put the “Luuuuxury” of the overthrown leaders on display. Classier than heads on spikes for sure.

    This is all on the up incline of the South to North slope of Tehran. The proles live in Sth Tehran – where Ruoallah Khomeini’s splashy enormous shrine is…. grim suburbs. But the northern suburbs are tony, snazzy like NYC’s 5th Ave or Chelsea (w/o the gays – hehehe)

    This is where, at an IRGC guesthouse in those leafy climes, Ismael Haniyah, late of Hamas, had his very last (courtesy of Mossad) hotel stay.

    For the record, I’ve got form: I was right about Bin Laden. I said he was: “Ensconced privately in a wealthy supporter’s mansion in a large Pakistani city, probably Karachi” in 2004. It turned out to be the outskirt suburbs of Islamabad, Abbatobad, but I was close enough. The CNN and USG “Afghan cave” idea for OBL’s hidey hole was always retarded. I had no clue about Saddam though I thought the Tikrit area was probable but Saddam was an unpredictable guy. I had NO idea about Mullah Omar (who expired in basically a mud hut in his old ‘hood north of Kandahar where he grew up).

    Where would YOU go?

    ———-Either that…. or Khamenei is out of Tehran entirely – so probably in Qom – his base of support, the beating spiritual heart of Shia’ Islam. All the bigwig seminaries are there. Without Qom on your resume in Iran you’re a nobody, no promotion body will take you seriously.

    Remember, using runners and paper, no electronic devices, The Supreme Leader needs to be able to be close at hand to couriers and Qom is a good place for that.
    His idiot son, Mojtaba (a nasty piece of work…) is still waiting in the wings – like D.J. Trump if you will, but rumor has it he isn’t one of the “lucky” three Dad, the Ayatollah specified as next leader and the revolution is specifically anti monarchy/inheritance.
    Like North Korea…. yet comes now “Fatty the 3rd”, Kim Jong Un, in Pyongyang.

    Any real promotion requires the Assembly of Experts’ go-ahead to take up the IRI mantle. I’d love to meet these “Experts” and the inner “Guardian Council” to test their expertise in anything outside medieval Arabian peninsula fairy tales.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_of_Experts

    These are just my opinions though. To know the “Truth” you should have PBS or the BBC translate their stories from the Farsi or Arabic they base all their useless but terrorist friendly reportage on, as per the Al Qaida/Al Jazeera playbook. 🙂

    D.A.
    NYC

  3. Looking forward to more on the Heterodox Academy conference.

    Re NYC mayor’s race, Lisa Selin Davis recent substack has some pointed remarks about his gender-nonsense position & proposals — $65 Million for “gender affirming care”. Not good for the Democrats.

      1. Thanks, Frau. Good article. I had no idea what her “angle” was which is how I prefer to be introduced to a writer — free from prejudices, expectations, etc.

  4. National Colo(u)r TV Day. Remember the phrase, “In Living Color!”?
    That must be why all those corporate logos have been rendered in rainbow colours every June for the past lo these many years. Not so many this year, though. Hmm.

    1. Whatever else I might say about my parents, it’s just weird that they didn’t buy a color TV until 1976. I still see old movies or TV shows and am surprised to find they are in color. :-/

      1. I graduated from college in 1983. Made it through four years with a twelve inch portable black and white TV.

      2. My parents also bought a colour TV around 1976. My brother and I were watching cartoons on our black and white TV when our parents came in and said “Why don’t you come and watch in the other room?”. “No,” we replied. “We are in the middle of watching.” It never occurred to us that we didn’t have a TV in the other room. Nonetheless, our parents insisted, so we ran through and plonked ourselves down in front of the new colour TV and continued watching. Mum and Dad waited to see our delight at the colour TV and we simply didn’t notice. Talk about ungrateful kids!

        1. I had a similar experience. I remember watching The Flintstones on our new colour TV (about 1973?) and telling my parents I didn’t notice the difference.

      3. First ‘color’ we got on TV was that 3-color transparent sticky that you could put on the screen, blue sky, brown-ish for people and buildings, and green grass. Yes I am old.

    2. Hmmm… National Color (sic) TV day.

      Does that mean there is also a National Colour TV day to celebrate the first colour TV transmission by John Logie Baird in 1928 in the UK? (Ducks to avoid thrown fruit).

  5. There are reports that the enriched uranium was removed and that Iran will no longer allow IAEA inspections.

    I suspect Trump will issue another ultimatum soon.

    We are in the eye of the hurricane. The storm has not passed.

  6. It’s getting harder and harder to argue that candidates like Zohran Mamdani don’t represent the mainstream of the Democratic party.

    1. I know. If the Democrats don’t move towards the reasonable middle I’m going to start wanting them to lose more than I want the Republicans to lose. Sounds like Mamdani appealed to the young voters who were raised in this crap. We need some grownups and I’m not sure where to get them.

      1. The supposed grownups are the ones who taught, mentored, and parented the young voters.

    2. And it is getting easier and easier to identify the demographic within the Democratic Party that is the problem. Hint: it is not those who topped out with a high school diploma, nor those who make under $50k annually, nor those who make under $100k annually.

    3. I looked at his platform. At least as stated here, it’s not that outrageous.

      https://www.zohranfornyc.com/platform

      For example, under “Small Businesses” he is claiming to cut red tape and make it easier to start and maintain such businesses. As someone who has worked in NYC on and off in the last 20 years, I’ve seen the degradation of these business, which hurts the local economy and the character of the neighborhoods.

      Free bus fare would be nice too.

      It’s really slim pickings. That corrupt fool Eric Adams? Has-been and already defeated Cuomo as an independent? That cosplay blabbermouth Curtis Sliwa the Republicans are running?

      After taking a political quiz on the candidates, the best match for me was apparently Jim Walden. Seems like a solid fellow, but I have no idea of his chances of winning.

    4. This guy is slick. Of all the things he’s running on that sound much more serious, I want to say something about making public transit free. Tucson did the same during Covid. I happened to live downtown at the time and used the bus for any business I couldn’t conduct within a 5 mile radius of my home. Almost over night the buses were overrun by theft rings that, in turn, were lorded over by gangs. Hoards of head-nodders road from one end of the city to another stealing the items they’d been tasked with lifting. Where previously, the druggies had been contained to known and avoided parts of town, they were now free to roam and rob and set up their camps anywhere they wanted. Providing mobility to the drug addicts brought our city to its knees and we still haven’t recovered. Commuters won’t ride the buses any longer. Politicians will add transportation to the growing list of things people used to be inspired to work for that are now deemed “rights”. Free transit marked the beginning of the end of our city. Huge swaths of previously bustling commercial zones are boarded up as the business owners couldn’t absorb the losses. And just as with Mamdani, “Defund the Police” became the rallying cry. Police became the enemy, they were demoralized, quit in huge numbers and we still are hundreds of officers short of what a city this size needs. Free transit hits a nerve with me. That and the “Housing First” model. No cops, give free transportation to criminals and hand them keys to brand new apartments regardless of their state of mind. No need to be clean and sober. Big, big mess.

      1. Some conspiracy theorists would say that was all the plan, to destabilize and demoralize the “normal” people in a city. Free transit (since Covid as you say), free housing, safe(r) supply, and defunding the police (and, in Canada, a strong judicial bias against usefully long and incapacitating prison sentences) have predictable consequences that must be known and predicted to the activists promoting them. How can they not?

  7. Interesting that it’s Color TV day. CBS may have been responsible for the first broadcast, but CBS and RCA (under CEO David Sarnoff) fought an epic battle to decide the eventual color TV standard. The CBS format was not compatible with existing black-and-white sets, hence the CBS broadcast was received on black-and-white TVs as a blank screen. But RCA eventually won the battle for a fully electronic color system that was compatible with existing black-and-white TVs. Consequently, until my parents relented and got a color TV in the 1970’s, we kids could only imagine what we were missing.

    We’ll have to see what the damage assessments in Iran really are. Amid the uncertainties, different factions are surely trying to create narratives to bolster their own positions. If the bombing was ineffective, someone—either the U.S. or Israel—will need to go in and do more. If the enriched uranium was moved to another location, someone will have to go find it and confiscate it (or irretrievably bury it). Iran cannot be allowed to obtain a nuclear weapon.

    1. Here’s a detailed analysis from map and satellite data of the potential damage: https://isis-online.org/isis-reports/post-attack-assessment-of-the-first-12-days-of-israeli-strikes-on-iranian-nuclear-facilities. We still need boots on the ground to really know what happened.

      And further analysis by John Spencer: https://spencerguard.substack.com/p/winners-and-losers-of-the-12-day. This is an excellent summary of the Israel’s prosecution of the war, end to end (so far).

    2. Sadly, the assessments from the Pentagon are probably not the result of motivated reasoning.

    3. Bomb damage assessments via aerial reconnaissance are historically very difficult, and easily susceptible to wishful thinking. How much more difficult must it be for facilities that are underground? Until Mossad has agents on the ground, I will remain sceptical.

    4. I wonder if satellite surveillance tracked the Fordow truck convoy to its destination(s).

  8. Re: chatGPT
    There is a nice new study out in preprint. Your brain on chatGPT
    Showed that LLM usage for writing tasks results in lower brain activity and “cognitive debt”

  9. Mamdani’s victory reminds me of two things. First, the acronym OPM, ie, other people’s money. When a candidate campaigns on initiatives like freezing rent, providing free bus service, and offering free childcare funded by taxing the wealthy, the 69% of NYC residents who rent will vote for him.

    Second, I can’t help but recall Eric Adams’ response when he shot down a tax increase on the rich, “To continually attack high-income earners when 51% of our taxes are paid by 2% of New Yorkers—it blows my mind when I hear people say ‘so what if they leave.’ No, you leave! I want my high-income earners right here in this city!” 

    If Mamdani is elected, I predict that the wealthy will move.

    1. Jackie I am one of those people. My first inclination is indeed to move. I can go to Florida as I do for a bit each winter, hitch my pants up to my nipples and get cool two tone shoes, sit on the beach and whine about how its all gone to shit….

      I might.
      We’ll see.
      I can’t stand Zoran “Kwame” (check Ghanaian history – how’d that work out? His fake name after a failed Afro-socialist dictator).
      Mamdani is a huge phony, and a Marxist Islamist of all horrors. I have an article about all this coming soon, betcha can’t wait – I’ll post it here. 🙂

      I do however have an abiding faith in our city – we’ve had dumbasses before. Kotch (whom I met once) was mid, Dinkins a disaster, Giuliani an utter clown I despised all day every day, etc. (Bloomberg was excellent, de Blasio a communist horror, and Adams is ….troubled but pretty good all up. Our mayors have tough jobs).

      But before I pack the two tone shoes and cabana-ware, I and my insane tax dollars will have to wait and see….
      See you in NY one day Jackie – we’d love to have you!

      D.A.
      NYC

  10. The US uses a system called NTSC (joking called ‘Never Twice the Same Color’). The rest of the world (with a few exceptions) uses better systems that were created later. They are called SECAM (from France) and PAL (from Germany). These days, this is all history. Video these days, uses newer standards such as MP4, MOV, and AVI.

  11. Congrats to our Anna on the Leadership Award. A very fitting recognition by her peers…the best kind IMHO.

  12. Late in the day, but, regarding the New York mayoral race, the words of Ed Koch after he was defeated for re-election in 1989 suddenly sprang to mind. He was asked if he could run again and said, “No. The people have spoken. . . and they must be punished.”

  13. The proud ChatGPT cheat reminds me of an interview I saw not too long ago with the actor Rami Malek, who told of how he once wrote a Greek exam for his twin brother at university, as otherwise he never would have passed and graduated. The audience cheered enthusiastically.

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