Friday: Hili dialogue

June 27, 2025 • 8:00 am

I am just back, and after a few hours of restive sleep have dragged myself to the office to produce a Hili.  So don’t expect much today as I am, as the Brits say, “knackered.”

Welcome to Friday, June 27, 2025, and National Indian Pudding Day, the finest indigenous American dessert, especially when served warm with vanilla ice cream. Good luck getting, it, though, as you have to make it yourself (laborious, see recipe here) or get it at the Union Oyster House in Boston. (I used to get it at Boston’s finest restaurant, Durgin-Park, but that closed (and broke my heart.)  Here’s a nice dish, though the portion seems small to me:

“Indian pudding” by theturquoisetable is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

It’s also National Food Truck Day, National Ice Cream Cake Day, Helen Keller Day (she was born on this date in 1880) and National Cream Tea Day.  Here’s a short video of Helen Keller taken in 1954 (she died in 1968), with the caption, “Helen Keller explains That her Greatest Disappointment in life is that she can not speak normally.”

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 27 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The Washington Post tells us that the Supreme Court is going to rule on several important cases this morning (article archived here):

1.) LOUISIANA VOTING MAP

What to know: In response to a lawsuit from civil rights groups, the Louisiana legislature redrew its congressional map to create a second majority-Black district out of six districts inthe state. The Supreme Court is being asked to decide whether the map violates the Constitution. The ruling could affect the balance of power in Congress, the landmark Voting Rights Act and how states consider race in drawing electoral maps.

Key takeaways: At oral argument March 24, several conservative justices expressed skepticism that the Voting Rights Act’s attempts to redress past discrimination can coexist with the Equal Protection Clause. . .

2.) NATIONWIDE INJUNCTIONS FOR BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP

What to know: The Supreme Court added a special session late in the term to review a case involving President Donald Trump’s effort to ban automatic U.S. citizenship for children born to undocumented immigrants and foreign visitors. Trump has asked the justices to lift or narrow three nationwide injunctions that have blocked his policy from taking effect while its legality is tested in court.

Key takeaways: At oral argument May 15, the justices expressed concern about the proliferation of nationwide injunctions in general, but several appeared sympathetic to states challenging Trump’s executive order and open to a middle ground that would permit judges to issue universal orders in limited circumstances.

3.) AGE VERIFICATION FOR ONLINE PORN

What to know: The case tests the constitutionality of a Texas law requiring people to prove they are over 18 to access online pornography.

Key takeaways: A majority of the justices seemed open to allowing age verification for these sites during oral argument on April 15.

4.) OPTING OUT OF BOOKS ON GENDER, SEXUALITY

What to know: The justices heard a challenge by a group of parents in Montgomery County, Maryland, who objected to rules barring them from taking their children out of lessons that used storybooks with LGBTQ+ characters and themes. The parents said the themes of the stories conflicted with their religious beliefs.

Key takeaways: At oral argument April 22, the justices appeared poised to side with the religiousparents in what would be a significant expansion of the long-standing practice of allowing opt-outs for reproductive-health classes.

5.) PREVENTIVE HEALTHCARE COVERAGE

What to know: A Christian-owned business and others are challenging a provision of the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare, that requires health plans to provide no-cost preventive care, such as cancer screenings, immunizations and contraception, to millions of Americans. The challengers say having to cover pre-exposure medications intended to prevent the spread of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, encourages risky homosexual behavior thatconflicts with their religious beliefs.

Key takeaways: At oral argument April 21, the justices seemed skeptical that members of the expert committee that set the preventive-care mandates were not properly appointed.

*The AP discusses the bunker-buster bombs dropped by US B-2 bombers on Iranian uranium-enrichment sites. It turns out that they were designed to attack such sites.

The deep penetrating bombs that the U.S. dropped into two Iranian nuclear facilities were designed specifically for those sites and were the result of more than 15 years of intelligence and weapons design work, the Pentagon’s top leaders said Thursday.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a press briefing that they are confident the weapons struck exactly as planned.

. . .The bombs, called the GBU-57 A/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator, have their roots in a decades-old classified briefing “of what looked like a major construction project in the mountains of Iran,” Caine said.

That turned out to be the Fordo fuel enrichment plant, with construction believed to have started around 2006. It became operational in 2009, the same year Tehran publicly acknowledged its existence.

The classified briefing was shown in 2009 to a Defense Threat Reduction Agency officer, who with a colleague “lived and breathed” Fordo for the next 15 years, studying the geology, construction dig, the earth moved and “every piece of equipment going in and every piece of equipment going out,” Caine said.

. . . The 30,000-pound bomb is comprised of steel, explosive and a fuse programmed to a specific detonation time. The longer the fuse, the deeper the weapon will penetrate before exploding.

Over the years, the military tested and retested it hundreds of times on mock facilities, Caine said. Crews fine-tuned the bombs to detonate in the mock enrichment rooms, delaying detonation until they had reached a position to send a pressure blast through open tunnels to destroy equipment underground.

What they concluded: The U.S. didn’t have a bomb that could destroy those sites. So the Pentagon got to work, Caine said.

“We had so many Ph.D.s working on the mock program — doing modeling and simulation — that we were quietly and in a secret way the biggest users of supercomputer hours within the United States of America,” he said.

And some tactics:

Fordo had two main ventilation routes into the underground facility — and officials carefully eyed these entry points as a way to target the site.

Each route had three shafts — a main shaft and a smaller shaft on either side, which looked almost like a pitchfork in graphics provided by the Pentagon. In the days preceding the U.S. attack, Iran placed large concrete slabs on top of both ventilation routes to try to protect them, Caine said.

In response, the U.S. crafted an attack plan where six bunker-buster bombs would be used against each ventilation route, using the main shaft as a way down into the enrichment facility.

Seven B-2 stealth bombers were used, carrying two of the massive munitions apiece. The first bomb was used to eliminate the concrete slab, Caine said.

The next four bombs were dropped down the main shaft and into the complex at a speed of more than 1,000 feet per second before exploding, he said. A sixth bomb was dropped as a backup, in case anything went wrong.

Well, we still don’t know the extent of the damage, but pictures of the holes created by the bombs show an amazingly accurate targeting. Do see the photos at the site given by DrBrydon in the second comment.

We’ll know (I hope) within a couple of months.  And there are rumors that Iran had removed its already-enriched uranium (not yet to bomb grade) from the site.

*Today’s TGIF at the Free Press is not by Nellie (she keeps going on vacaion! An infant is no excuse!), but by Will Rahm. But I will take a few items for your delectation. The column is called, “TGIF: The People’s Republic of Manhattan.” Here’s what Rahm says about himself:

My name is Will Rahn, and I’m a senior editor at The Free Press by benefit of my gilded journalistic lineage. Nellie Bowles is on vacation this week. So is her blood boy and TGIF workhorse Sean Fischer. So I have the unenviable task of writing this damn thing after a bunker busting week of a shock mayoral race and more movement in the Mideast than we’ve seen in decades. Thankfully, I have Suzy Weiss and Sascha Seinfeld here to save my bacon. Let’s do the news! 

→ Comrade Mayor: We’ll get to Iran in a moment, but we’re talking about New York City first because I live here and not Tehran. And it appears we New Yorkers are on the brink of electing a socialist in Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old state legislator who just became the presumptive Democratic nominee for mayor. His signature piece of legislation thus far in politics—there have been exactly three that he’s gotten passed—was an amendment to state liquor license laws that allow visitors to the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria to have a drink on the premises.

Zohran—he has just one name now, like Madonna or Trump or Beyoncé—ran a brilliant campaign on a totally crackpot platform that includes arresting Bibi Netanyahu if he comes to New York. And free buses and rent freezes, which will be made possible because of reasons and plans. But if you put his ideas aside for a moment, you can see the campaign itself was pretty darn Trumpy.

Remember when Trump went on all those podcasts and got the Joe Rogan crowd to vote for him? Zohran did that at the local level. He was all over Instagram and TikTok, appearing with local microinfluencers. He was funny, smiling, optimistic. And the implicit promise of his campaign was that he’d drop a bunker buster on the political status quo. Remind you of anyone?

The Trump/Mamdani comparisons are unavoidable. . .

. . . . Moderate Democrats in the New York suburbs already are distancing themselves from Zohran, in large part because of his nutty anti-Israel stuff—read his message from October 8 and shudder—but he’s the only member of his party this decade who has shown the fingertip feel for politics we associate with the president. He’s running to Make New York Great Again,

Here’s Mamdani’s tweet from October 8.  It’s not reassuring; I think I should have called the title “TGIF: The Caliphate of Manhattan”:

→ Real impeachment has never been tried: You may remember that Trump has already been impeached twice: once for January 6, and once for some convoluted Ukraine thing. And you may also recall that these impeachments didn’t stop Trump from winning the White House again in 2024, and with substantially more support than he had in 2016. I wouldn’t say he’s unimpeachable, but the man is certainly peach-proof.

And yet some House Democrats, to the immense chagrin of their more sober-minded colleagues, tried to impeach him again this week over the strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities that he ordered. The ringleader for the move was Texas Rep. Al Green, and it’s important to note here that he’s not the Reveremd Al Green, who wrote “Let’s Stay Together.” Rather, he’s the guy who was escorted out of Trump’s address to Congress earlier this year after he stood up and shook his cane at the president, which is an awesome old guy move that we don’t see enough of. It’s very “get off my lawn / why I oughta” energy.

Green’s impeachment resolution was swiftly defeated on Tuesday, with 128 House Democrats voting with Republicans to squash it. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries voted no. So did former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who I guess still works there.

→ Robots versus drunken frat boys: Grubhub is testing food delivery robots on dozens of college campuses, and so far the results appear underwhelming. The company is unleashing them on college campuses because they’re in a sense the perfect place to try these things out: not that many cars, massive clusters of hungover people willing to refinance their cars if it means they can get a breakfast burrito without having to put on pants. But the delivery companies didn’t anticipate the most fearsome foe of all: a drunk frat guy doing something on a dare.

“At Notre Dame, some complain that the robots clog the sidewalks,” TheWall Street Journal reports. “Students trip over them, especially when they’re drunk, and mischief makers sometimes sit on them.” In defense of Notre Dame undergraduates: It is very tempting to kick a robot. They are not our friends. They are coming for our jobs. Their little beeps and lights and the fact that they’re always scooting around give the impression of a teacher’s pet. . .

Rahn’s pieces are too long, and he’s not nearly as snarky nor as funny as Nellie.  There is simply no substitute for Nellie at writing the TGIFs.

*Bhutan, a place I’d dearly like to visit (but you can’t do so without paying a hefty daily fee and using a tour operator, is now getting rich on—wait for it—bitcoins.

The tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan is best known for its stunning landscapes and national happiness index. Lately it has earned a new reputation: crypto pioneer.

Bhutan now boasts a stash of bitcoins worth $1.3 billion, or roughly 40% of the country’s gross domestic product, according to cryptocurrency platform Arkham. It is the third-largest such stockpile held by governments, according to Arkham.

Unlike the U.S. or U.K, which also have vast crypto holdings, Bhutan’s fortune wasn’t seized from criminal activity or purchased in the open market. Instead, the secluded Buddhist nation began quietly setting up bitcoin mines in 2020, harnessing its abundant hydropower to dig for digital gold.

“For Bhutan, it was quite obvious in a lot of ways,” said Ujjwal Deep Dahal, chief executive of Bhutan’s sovereign-wealth fund, Druk Holding and Investments, which implemented the project. “We kind of look at bitcoin as a store of value, similar to gold.”

. . .By 2022, Bhutan had broken ground on all four of its government-owned mines, officials said. Moreover, it came just ahead of a run-up in the price of bitcoin, which has gone from under $10,000 in 2020 to around $100,000 today.

Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay said the bitcoin haul has more than made up for a drop in hydropower exports, which typically fund about 40% of the government budget. Hydropower exports have fallen as bitcoin mines use up more electricity.

In 2023, the government decided to sell off $100 million of its cache to finance pay rises for civil servants for two years.

“That increase has been financed totally with bitcoins,” Tobgay said. If you just sold electricity, “you wouldn’t get anywhere near the amount that’s required.”

I don’t trust bitcoin and would never invest in it as it’s arcane and, I think, risky. But Bhutan doesn’t think so, and so far it’s been right.

*Finally, RFK Jr.’s panel on vaccines has decided not to recommend flu vaccines containing the mercury-based preservative thimoseral, touted as causing autism (arcticle is archived here).. THERE IS NO EVIDENCE FOR THAT, and the amount of thimoseral in flu vaccines is tiny (one source says the amount of thimoseral in a flu shot “is less than the amount of mercury in a 6-ounce can of chunk white albacore tuna; see http://www.pbs.org/now/science/mercuryinfish.html for details.” But you can ask for a flu shot without it, and kids less than 6 years old are given thimoseral-free flu shots as a precaution. But RFK Jr. has always touted the bogus connection with autism:

On Thursday, the new members of the C.D.C.’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, hand-selected by Mr. Kennedy after he fired all 17 members of the previous panel, decided it would no longer recommend annual flu shots that contain it. Thimerosal’s appearance on the committee’s agenda in the first place shocked public health leaders, who have long considered the matter settled.

But it was not a surprise to people who have followed Mr. Kennedy closely. Thimerosal started Mr. Kennedy down a path of questioning vaccine safety, and Thursday’s vote was the culmination of a long personal journey. It offers a window into how, as secretary, he is pursuing his own passions and installing old allies in positions of influence.

“He’s got a big passion for this subject, and he knows this probably better than anybody,” said Eric Gladen, who featured Mr. Kennedy in his 2014 film, “Trace Amounts,” which espoused a link between thimerosal and autism.

Critics say that in resurrecting an old controversy, Mr. Kennedy could brew mistrust rather than ease it. Numerous studies, including a 2004 report by the Institute of Medicine and a 2010 review of the medical literature, have rejected a link between the preservative and autism. Dr. Oz, who now runs the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, noted on his 2014 show that any link had been “ultimately discredited.”

. . . But the panel on Thursday did not hear from the C.D.C. The agency posted a document on the advisory committee’s website on Tuesday that concluded “the evidence does not support an association” between the preservative and autism or other neurodevelopmental disorders.

But the document was taken down the next day. A spokesman for Mr. Kennedy, Andrew Nixon, said that it had not gone through the proper vetting, but that committee members had been given copies of the document.

The panel voted 5 to 1 on Thursday to stop recommending flu vaccines that contain the preservative. It was unclear how manufacturers would respond, and how the recommendation might affect access to flu vaccines. Some flu vaccines are already available without thimerosal.

I’ve asked my doctor, but I suspect he’s with the CDC.  After all, I have an occasional can of tuna and don’t seem to have autism.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, we have a lovely picture of The Princess, who is once again musing:

Hili: The past lives in the present, and the present turns into the past.
Andrzej: And our thoughts are rarely original.

In Polish:

Hili Przeszłość jest w teraźniejszości, teraźniejszość zmienia się w przeszłość.
Ja: A nasze myśli rzadko są odkrywcze.

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

From Wholesome Memes:

From Jesus of the Day. Is this true?

From Now That’s Wild:

Masih shows a video of an Iranian woman who masks her identity (a wise move) to publicly criticize the theocracy:

From Malcolm: the real size of the world’s countries after removing the Mercator distortion:

There are more tweets about earthquakes in this thread (from my feed), but this one is chilling:

One I posted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

A Dutch Jewish girl was gassed upon arrival at Auschwitz, probably dead within two hours of the selection. She was ten.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-06-27T12:55:15.313Z

And one tweet from Matthew showing an important letter from Francis Crick:

A letter to Crick from his pal Georg Kreisel, on hearing about the existence of introns in eukaryotic genes, which Crick described in a Science article "Split genes and RNA splicing".

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-06-27T10:33:48.819Z

32 thoughts on “Friday: Hili dialogue”

  1. Yes, this Mamdani thing will be interesting to watch. If he is elected, I think he will only serve to push more people out of the Democratic Party.

    On the comparison to Trump, William Daley (son and brother of Chicago Mayors and former Secretary of Transportation) has a piece in the WSJ: “Mamdani Is as Extreme as Trump:
    A socialist victory in New York’s mayoral primary should be a wake-up call for Democrats. Will my party answer it?”

    Finally, as Gateway Pundit points out, Axios is now characterizing criticism of Mamdani as “Islamophobic”: “MAGA erupts with Islamophobic attacks on Zohran Mamdani“.

    1. Zoran is a proper horror – the worst thing to happen in NYC since our last brush with Islam – which I remember well – in 2001. Article about him by me soon and boy I’m aaangry!
      (and not just b/c I danced around a week ago telling everybody “Sure we’re stupid but we’re not THAT stupid here.” OOOpf!)

      I’ll inflict the link on WEIT when it comes out.

      D.A.
      NYC

    2. The Trump/Mamdani comparisons are unavoidable. . .

      Does that mean we can expect Mamdani to remake the Democratic party in his image?

  3. Don’t take this the wrong way! I’m just going for knowledge here :

    Comparison of thimerosal use with the “mercury” in the tuna as noted is extremely misleading.

    Drawing a circle around organic derivatives will be more informative. We find in that case, perhaps ethylmercury.

    As Paracelsus noted (1538), “the dosage alone makes it so a thing is not a poison.” – in that case, consider the case of methylmercury.

    I can add from experience that the Sigma thimerosal has (or, used to have) a skull and crossbones on the hazards section of the label on the bottle, and had to be specially disposed of.

    1. Also method of intake. You eat tuna, but inject vaccines.
      But regardless of that, there is more than ample evidence that the compound in this dosage is a big yawn.

    2. Not knowing enough about any of this to sit through a Paul Offit video (isn’t that the virology guy everyone loves?), l just have a simple question. If something other than mercury or thimerosol or whatever the stuff is can be used, why not use it and shut RFK up?

        1. Thanks for such a succinct answer. You inadvertently answered other questions I’ve had but didn’t even know how to ask. Very simple to search. Most of the vaccine discussion here goes way over my head. Appreciate it!

    3. Two points:
      1. The usual prefix for sulfur compounds is ‘thio’ and in the UK this preservative is called thiomersal. Did you know you’re getting an anagramatized version?
      2. If there was a real concern about it causing autism, then it would only be necessary to use thimerosal-free shots in infants and pregnant women. Why then refuse recommending it altogether? I smell some upcoming circular reasoning: “It must be bad because it has been banned. So there, we were right all along!”

  4. After years of watching RFK, Jr., my assessment (worthless, of course) is that he is interested in science, and is probably sincere, but he simply doesn’t know how to evaluate scientific data or results.

    His beliefs seem often to come from the fringes—not outside of science altogether, but outside the center. The autism “connection” (a fraud) and the thimerosal worry have their origins in science, but don’t rise to the level of harm that Kennedy has come to believe (especially the autism fraud). His sources are out of the mainstream, and he doesn’t seem to be good at weighing evidence. This failing, of course, is exacerbated by his suspicion (sometimes well-placed, sometimes not) of “big pharma” and other situations where a commercial interest stands to make a profit.

    Kennedy’s suspicion of the motivations of business coupled with his poor understanding of how to evaluate scientific results sums to his strange and distorted views on public health.

    2. He doesn’t believe that viruses and bacteria cause disease. (I’ve met people who don’t believe the viruses even exist.)

      1. There is barely a crackpot idiot theory he doesn’t believe in. Chemtrails – Jesus!

        He’s a crank’s crank and the most dangerous US cabinet member of my lifetime. After anti-vax platformer Oprah Winfrey possibly the most dangerous American citizen.

        “Sincerity” doesn’t cut it with me. Every evil asshole in history had “good intentions” like the ISIS guys beheading the “evil shia’ raffidas” or chucking gays off buildings. All 100% sincere and good hearted.

        Even if I wanted to vote for Trump RFK would have veto’d my vote by himself.

        D.A.
        NYC

    3. Paul Offit met with him long before he became head of HHS, patiently explaining some things to him. When they parted, Paul was convinced that he had gotten thru to him. Only to find him spouting the same nonsense soon thereafter.

      Junior’s in it for the $ he derives from his stance.

      1. Indeed. I subscribe to Offit’s free substack. He has a good piece on talking with RFK Jr.

  6. The thing about Bhutan and its new-found cryptocurrency wealth is fascinating, but also incomprehensible to my middle-aged brain. I’ve heard about countries and individuals having huge banks of computers working day and night to “mine” Bitcoin, but I just don’t understand what it is that’s being “mined” (which I assume = created), or why this disembodied digital entity has a monetary value. If you can just create wealth like this, as if by magic, does this mean that Haiti or Somalia could become the richest countries on earth if they just invested in enough computers? Like Jerry, I don’t know enough to risk investing in Bitcoin – is it the currency of the future or just history’s biggest Ponzi scheme? Maybe someone younger and more savvy among the WEIT community can enlighten me!

    1. Log ago I read the foundational crypto currency paper enough to get the gist of it. I thought it was very clever but not a good thing. Basically people assign value to things that are scarce. Its hard to create scarcity in the digital realm where copies of things like a cat photo are essentially free and unlimited. Some math problems are hard to calculate; take a lot of CPU cycles. This crypto scarcity is based on proof of work. These computers doing the mining are doing a lot of calculating and proving they did the work. The crypto algorithms have built into them increases in complexity to account for improvements in computing performance. That’s about it. Manufactured scarcity.

      1. Trying this on for size: Manufactured scarcity is exactly what you need for a medium of exchange. Because bitcoins are scarce and not easily counterfeited by criminals or devalued by sovereigns, even Haiti and Somalia, sellers may rationally accept them in exchange for goods they produce, knowing that at least some creditors will accept them, in turn, in settlement of debt. But anything that is scarce and valuable will have a secondary market in and of itself, as gold does, and fiat currencies do. There being no fixed exchange rate, it is possible to make and lose money on buying and selling bitcoins for their own sake, whether you ultimately redeem your bitcoins for gold, dollars, or a ham sandwich.

        Is that the sum and substance of it?

        1. Yes. And one can add that, ever since fiat currency came off the gold standard, even fiat currency is only valuable because people value it. (Hence why fiat currency is vulnerable to hyper-inflation if people lose trust in it.)

        2. I would add two (maybe just one) other factors. They are density and intrinsic value. Gold has high density. The amount of Gold needed to buy a house (for example) can be easily picked up with one hand. Gold has other virtues (intrinsic value). Gold oxide has a negative enthalpy of formation. In practice what this means, is that Gold does not rust. Gold is also highly malleable and a very good conductor of heat and electricity.

          Crypto has high density (much better than Gold), but does not have intrinsic value.

  7. I for one think that Will Rahn did a fine job in the above post. There was sufficient amounts of snark.

  8. I did a quick search, and Jerry has written about National Indian Pudding Day on:

    June 27, 2025
    February 17, 2025
    November 13, 2024

    Big Pudding has really put one over on us!

    1. Thank you Mr. Carter, you saved me some research time.
      Zoran’s dad is everything I expected and more.
      I can’t believe this happened to our city. Damn it.

      D.A.
      NYC

  10. “We had so many Ph.D.s working on the mock program — doing modeling and simulation — that we were quietly and in a secret way the biggest users of supercomputer hours within the United States of America,” he said.

    I imagine that they were using time at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, among others, so it’s interesting to think that modeling on MOABs was probably going on during the same week if not day ca. 2010 that simulations were running on the catalytic mechanism of my enzyme, aldehyde dehydrogenase.

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