Sunday: Hili dialogue

August 17, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the Sabbath for goyische cats: it’s August 17, 2025, and National Pineapple Juice Day, a great substitute for OJ at breakfast. If you want to see an eight-minute video about how it’s made by Del Monte, watch below (don’t miss the pineapple-coring machine!):

It’s also National Black Cat Appreciation Day, National Vanilla Custard Day, National #2 Pencil Day (the only one to use) and World Eggplant Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the August 17 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Shoot me now! Trump has completely capitulated to Putin, saying that Ukraine must give up land if the war with Russia is to end.

President Trump on Saturday split from Ukraine and key European allies after his summit with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, backing Mr. Putin’s plan for a sweeping peace agreement based on Ukraine ceding territory it controls to Russia, instead of the urgent cease-fire Mr. Trump had said he wanted before the meeting.

Skipping cease-fire discussions would give Russia an advantage in the talks, which are expected to continue on Monday when President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine visits Mr. Trump at the White House. It breaks from a strategy Mr. Trump and European allies, as well as Mr. Zelensky, had agreed to before the U.S.-Russia summit in Alaska.

Mr. Trump told European leaders that he believed a rapid peace deal could be negotiated if Mr. Zelensky agreed to give up the rest of the Donbas region to Russia, even those areas not occupied by Russian troops, according to two senior European officials briefed on the call.

In return, Mr. Putin offered a cease-fire in the rest of Ukraine at current battle lines and a written promise not to attack Ukraine or any European country again, the senior officials said. He has broken similar promises before.

Mr. Trump had threatened stark economic penalties if Mr. Putin left the meeting without a deal to end the war, but he has suspended those threats in the wake of the summit.

The American president’s moves got a chilly reception in Europe, where leaders have time and again seen Mr. Trump reverse positions on Ukraine after speaking with Mr. Putin.

My theory about this, which is mine, is that Trump thinks that if he brokers an end to the war, no matter what it involves, he will get a Nobel Peace Prize. And that’s definitely something that the Orange Man wants badly.  But who gives those prizes out? Largely Europeans!  It’s a bad plan and Trump has just caved into another autocrat because he think he’ll be thought of as The Great Peacemaker. LOL.

*The WSJ reports that Israel is having sub rosa talks with other countries, trying to see if they’ll take people from Gaza; and the U.S. is involved, too:

Israel and the U.S. are pushing forward efforts to relocate hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, a move they have presented in humanitarian terms but which governments in Europe and the Arab world have criticized as unrealistic and a potential violation of international law.

The idea, which Israeli officials have publicly mulled since the beginning of the war in Gaza, got its biggest airing early this year when President Trump said the U.S. should take over the enclave and redevelop it as an international tourist destination while relocating many of its two million residents.

That spotlight has moved on, but advocates of the idea are still pursuing. Israeli officials have sounded out their counterparts in half a dozen countries and territories including Libya, South Sudan, Somaliland and Syria about taking in Palestinians who agree to leave Gaza, people familiar with the matter said.

Israel and the U.S. have also been pressing Egypt to resettle people from the enclave in the Sinai Peninsula, some of the people said. Egypt, which once controlled the Gaza Strip, has strongly resisted the idea. Its border with Gaza makes it a logistically attractive destination, in the eyes of the idea’s proponents. The pressure has led to a number of contentious meetings, including shouting matches between Israeli and Egyptian officials, some of the people said.

“President Trump has long advocated for creative solutions to improve the lives of Palestinians, including allowing them to resettle in a new, beautiful location while Gaza rebuilds,” White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said. “However, Hamas must first agree to disarm and end this war, and we have no additional details to provide at this time.”

Well, the U.S. and Israel will try, but they’re not going to even get a large proportion of Gazans to leave, and, as always, other countries don’t want them because they think that harboring Gazans will lead to harboring terrorism (they may not be wrong.) But who’s going to run Gaza, and what about this transfer of people would make Hamas want to surrender?  Dumb idea, but not necessarily a harmful one.

*A French university is making efforts to become a Sanctuary University for American scientists damaged by Trump’s cut in federal grants.

For many American scientists, the second Trump administration has instilled a sense of fear and futility. Billions of dollars in federal grants to universities have been frozen or slashed. Thousands of scientists across federal agencies have been terminated. Entire research initiatives have been defunded for containing politically inconvenient keywords such as “health disparities,” “climate change” and “coronavirus.” The administration’s budget proposal seeks to cut the nation’s scientific infrastructure even further — the National Institutes of Health by 40 percent and the National Science Foundation by more than half.

Against this backdrop, a university in southern France is welcoming America’s “scientific refugees” with open arms. Though its efforts won’t stop the ongoing dismantling of what was once the beacon of global scientific leadership, it is a principled stand to safeguard intellectual pursuits free from political interference.

The school is Aix-Marseille University, one of the oldest and largest higher-learning institutions in France. Its president, Éric Berton, an engineer with a PhD in fluid mechanics, is an unlikely hero in the resistance to the Trump administration’s offensive on science. In March, as he saw the stream of news about mounting budget cuts, dismissals and censorship, he knew the moment demanded more than words.

“We have colleagues whose funding was cut, whose databases were erased,” he told me in an interview. “Some were fired, others lost grants, so they no longer have the means to continue their research.”

So he established the Safe Place for Science program, tasked with recruiting American researchers and providing them with three years of dedicated funding. Berton mobilized his university to commit 15 million euros (more than $16 million) to support 15 scientists, who would use the funds to cover laboratory supplies, their salaries, and those of postdoctoral fellows and other staff.

The application process appears to be closed now, and they want to hire 15 researchers. It’s an attractive place, but research money may be harder to get there, despite what Trump has done. Certainly a big lab would have to look hard at this opportunity. Still, it’s in France, and in the warm south of France, at five main campuses in Aix-en-Provence and Marseille. I did both of my sabbaticals in France (one in Paris, the other in Dijon), and spent another month working in Paris. Not a bad life if you can sustain your research.

*A new study in Science Advances (and reported by the AP), suggests that by about 2.6 million years ago, our ancestors or their relatives had become quite picky about the stones they used for tools, sometimes going long distances to get stones for various purposes, including skinning and butchering animals:

From the AP:

Early human ancestors during the Old Stone Age were more picky about the rocks they used for making tools than previously known, according to research published Friday.

Not only did these early people make tools, they had a mental picture of where suitable raw materials were located and planned ahead to use them, traveling long distances.

By around 2.6 million years ago, early humans had developed a method of pounding rocks together to chip off sharp flakes that could be used as blades for butchering meat.

This allowed them to feast on large animals like hippos that gathered near a freshwater spring at the Nyayanga archaeological site in Kenya.

“But hippo skin is really tough” — and not all rocks were suitable for creating blades sharp enough to pierce hippo skin, said co-author Thomas Plummer, a paleoanthropologist at Queens College of the City University of New York.

At the Nyayanga site, researchers found durable blades made of quartzite, a rock material that they traced to streambeds and other locations around 8 miles (13 kilometers) away. The new research appears in the journal Science Advances.

“This suggests they’ve got a mental map of where different resources are distributed across the landscape,” said co-author Rick Potts of the Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program.

Previously, researchers had assumed the stones may have been found within just a mile or so of the freshwater spring site.

The new study shows that “these early humans were thinking ahead. This is probably the earliest time we have in the archaeological record an indication of that behavior,” said Eric Delson, a paleoanthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History, who was not involved in the research.

 

Click on the title below to read the paper:

The abstract (my bolding)

The adaptive shift that favored stone tool–assisted behavior in hominins began by 3.3 million years ago. However, evidence from early archaeological sites indicates relatively short-distance stone transport dynamics similar to behaviors observed in nonhuman primates. Here we report selective raw material transport over longer distances than expected at least 2.6 million years ago. Hominins at Nyayanga, Kenya, manufactured Oldowan tools primarily from diverse nonlocal stones, pushing back the date for expanded raw material transport by over half a million years. Nonlocal cobbles were transported up to 13 kilometers for on-site reduction, resulting in assemblage patterns inconsistent with accumulations formed by repeated short-distance transport events. These findings demonstrate that early toolmakers moved stones over substantial distances, possibly in anticipation of food processing needs, representing the earliest archaeologically visible signal for the incorporation of lithic technology into landscape-scale foraging repertoires.

Well, surely hominins were smart enough to think ahead about many things by 2.6 mya, when two and maybe three genera of hominins lived in Africa, though I’m not sure which ones lived in Kenya, where the study took place (the authors suspect it’s either Homo or Paranthropus). But of course we need evidence about hominins thinking ahead, and this is evidence.

*Yes, I sometimes read the conservative National Review online, though it gets paywalled if you read too much. But here’s a headline that caught my eye: “Have Democrats forgotten how to do politics?” (The subtitle is “Their reaction to Trump’s D.C. police takeover is unconvincing.”).  Of course I have to read everything I see that indicts Democrats—not because I’m a Republican, but because I’m a Democrat and concerned about the party. Anyway, the article has a clever beginning:

Washington Democrats have determined that a dysfunctional and wholly dependent geographic entity, which has a reputation for terrorizing its neighbors, deserves to be rewarded with statehood. But enough about Gaza.

Donald Trump’s edict taking “direct federal control” of law enforcement in Washington, D.C., for 30 days, barring congressional approval of a longer mission — a maneuver accompanied by the deployment of the National Guard to the capital city — has had its intended effect on the Democratic Party.

The initiative prompted the X handle “@TheDemocrats” to insist, with all the passion that unnecessary capitalization is supposed to convey, that it’s time for “STATEHOOD FOR D.C.” — a proposition that roughly two-thirds of Americans opposed when it was last a live issue in 2019. Legacy media outlets tripped over themselves to warn that the threat to the integrity of D.C.’s “homeless encampments” represented an intolerable encroachment on the rights of vagrants and their host cities. Too many Democrats to count insisted that Washington’s violent crime rate had substantially declined, presumably to the point of negligibility. “The crime scene in D.C. most damaging to everyday Americans is at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries wrote, by way of example. Even suggesting that D.C. had a crime problem was evocative of the “racist narratives” promulgated by white supremacists “to shape public opinion and justify aggressive police action,” according to no less a venue than the Associated Press.

The president and his allies must be astounded by the degree to which their political opponents are so easily manipulated by the president. The objections to the D.C. takeover expressed by the opposition party and their allies in the press afford Trump’s allies opportunities for one layup after another. And the administration has a point.

As pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson observed, by relying on the statistics (notwithstanding their questionable veracity) to contend that crime in the district isn’t all that bad, Democrats are falling into the very trap they set for themselves throughout the Biden administration in relation to inflation. Democrats kept asserting, often with the support of relevant data, that inflation was cooling. Voters kept responding by conveying to them via public opinion surveys that their personal experience with inflation was unendurable, cooling or not. It was hard to blame voters for concluding that Democrats had accepted the insufferable status quo as the new normal. It’s even harder to blame them for rejecting that premise.

Likewise, by arguing that D.C.’s violent crime rate has fallen lower than it was over the last several years, Democrats are implicitly arguing that the post-2020 status quo represents a new baseline crime rate we must simply accept. The argument Democrats don’t seem to know they’re making is that a certain amount of street crime is a quirky feature of the urban scene.

Well, I don’t know. In some places you find graphs like this one:

And this one from CNN, covering a longer period.

Although one is murder and the other “violent crime”, what’s the truth?  And why should “personal experience” trump the statistics? On the other hand, my one Democratic and liberal friend who lives in D.C. says that yes, crime is up and believes the statistics have been cooked. All you can do to counter misconceptions is to show the data. But, in this case, what do the data really show?

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is still hot, but won’t come inside. (She loves being outdoors.)

Andrzej: Where are you going?
Hili: I’m after a deeper patch of shade.

In Polish:
Ja: Gdzie idziesz?
Hili: Poluję na głębszy cień.

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

From Stacy:

From Beth:

From Cats That Have Had Enough of Your Shit:

Another Iranian woman condemned to death for political protest. Masih is back posting, at least for now:

. . . but Luana’s flying back from Brazil, so I’ll replace her tweet with one from JKR. I’m sure Dr. Maroja would approve:

From Malcolm; this is adorable:

https://www.stevestewartwilliams.com/p/one-bias-to-rule-them-all-98c

A thought-provoking distillation of cognitive biases from Steve Stewart-Williams. It’s discussed in his article here.

Two from my feed. Another cute one:

. . . and this; do you think that’s what the hedgehog wanted?

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

Typhus was a common way to go (carried by lice) and is probably what killed Anne Frank and her sister Margot, along with this Russian Jew.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-08-17T10:18:05.416Z

Two from Doctor Cobb. These guys are trying to use the sound of the balloon to avoid being hit with it:

This is a masterpiece. Simply excellent http://www.instagram.com/reel/DMVGMIC…

— Patrick Monahan (@pattymo.com) 2025-08-14T15:54:50.340Z

. . . and a good way to hide. Clever little crab!

watch a tiny crab getting excited about a new hat

— Gil Wizen (@wizentrop.bsky.social) 2025-08-16T11:31:34.114Z

16 thoughts on “Sunday: Hili dialogue”

  1. I don’t see any other path to peace except for Ukraine to cede territory.

    As for the Nobel Peace Prize, I don’t have a view into Trump’s heart, but if Obama deserved one for doing nothing, Trump certainly merits one at this point.

    1. Even Obama acknowledged that his Nobel Peace Prize was an fluky error. One mistake does not justify more.

      Besides, Trump has invented a number of awards he claims to have received, so all he has to do is to announce that he is this year’s peace prize recipient. Problem solved!

    3. I may be getting cynical with age, but I had been thinking that Trump will capitulate this one, and that he always knew it. The bluster from a couple weeks ago about more serious repercussions for Russia was just an act, known in advance. And I wonder if Putin knew it too.

    4. If it were the area they already took (less Crimea) then it would be acceptable (in my personal view) based on the idea that a large part (not all) of the areas in question were completely Russified over time. Its inhabitants are loyal to Russia, and supported the invasion, at least until they found out what Russia is really like. But Crimea is necessary to ensure Ukraine’s territorial integrity vs. Russia’s future attempts at invasion, which are very likely. If Ireland were given to a hostile power, would Britain object?

      Donbass however is the major iron mining/steelmaking region, so Ukraine will never agree to ceding it. Trump or no Trump, they will fight for it to the last man.

      As for “security guarantees” America is willing to offer, we already saw what America’s word is worth: less than the paper the previous ones were written on.

      First World War divided up the empires based on a plebiscite that determined the national identities and loyalties of the populations involved. Unfortunately, this determination can only be done by a third party, and Russia will never agree to such a solution unless it sees itself beaten.

  2. A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
    I speak two languages, Body and English. -Mae West, actress, playwright, singer, screenwriter, and comedian (17 Aug 1893-1980)

  3. What a lovely ferret! I had a patient who had one as a pet and I persuaded her to bring it to the office to meet me. We ran late that day…
    My grandmother used to tell stories about her uncle who kept ferrets (usually involving his trousers). Standard way of supplementing the diet of Durham coal miners’ families.

  4. Forgive me as I’ve posted this before here, but my article – variously syndicated, explains exactly WHY Arab countries don’t want Pal “refugees”. Thought they are not “refugees” by any definition other than UNWRA’s.

    https://democracychronicles.org/worst-houseguests-ever-the-palestinians/

    The US shouldn’t be asked to allow these people – who destroyed their own sharia enclave by launching a suicidal war of annihilation (many times). And nor should Australia, btw.
    Nobody wants a badly behaved population. Even the 20 or so nations whose own passports forbid visits to Israel/”The Zionist Entity” nor admit Israeli visitors.

    D.A.
    NYC

    1. David, I want you to know I’ve shared that article several times since I read it.

  5. Regarding that post about the sea squirt, Daniel Dennett made a similar joke about it in his book Consciousness Explained. It’s on page 177:

    “In order to solve this problem, you need a nervous system, to control your activities in time and space. The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn’t need its brain anymore, so it eats it! (It’s rather like getting tenure.)”

      1. I was also amused by the Dennett quote and the analogy between the adult sea squirt and getting tenure, but on a more serious note, it might have revealed more about the generation of which Dennett was a member than about the nature of tenure. Dennett’s first academic job was in 1965, at a time when baby boomers were clogging college and university classrooms, and faculty were being hired — and tenured — with minimal qualifications. No doubt a highly productive philosopher such as Dennett noticed the frequency with which his colleagues stopped their even minimal level of productivity when they got tenure. And departments were stuck with them for 30 or 40 years….

        I like to think that, as the academic job market got more and more competitive in the 21st century, academic hiring was more successful in selecting and promoting the strong teachers, scholars, and researchers. My own experience in academia, which extends to more than 40 years now, is that it is now more common for tenure to fulfill its conceptual mission of empowering faculty to explore, innovate, take risks, and participate in governance without fear of losing one’s job. At least I hope so.

  6. On DC crime. (I love DC and lived there while at Georgetown U – many decades ago).

    Feelings or vibes of safety are a funny thing in criminology in that the actual rates (particularly murder, which is the only real metric one can go on, for various reasons) of crime differ from perceptions.

    In other domains (like medicine or demographics, say) the data is way more important than the group psych “feels” but in perceptions of crime stats don’t get the final say. Rather, stats are contributory to the final mass judgement.

    D.A.
    NYC

    1. The murder rate depends itself on medicine and psychology, not to mention the aim, caliber, and magazine capacity of the shooter, and how many children were at the birthday party his now-deceased rival was attending. A shooting with half-heartedly murderous intent may be converted into a minor offence like attempted murder or aggravated assault by timely EMS, rescue surgery, and skilled intensive care, all uncompensated I might add. Tourniquets we now know from Iraq save lives, and even legs. Alternatively, the shooter may deal out his punishment with a bullet to the neck, producing quadriplegia requiring 24-hr care by family, instead of a fatal head shot that allows them to move on. (When the news mentions a “life-altering injury”, this is what they mean.)

      As always, David, you speak wisely.

  7. The above article re stone tools made me finally look up the answer to a question that I’ve always casually wondered about, which is why early humans persisted in flint-knapping despite the near certainty that stone chips would fly into their eyes, and the high risk of blindness as a result. (I learned this firsthand when I hammered rocks in my geology classes.)

    So I found an article about research detailing the high rate of serious injuries suffered by hobbyist flintknappers today. By extrapolation, it’s almost certain that early humans did indeed suffer a very high rate of disabling injuries, blindness, and even death as a result of making stone tools. From which it follows that the reason they persisted in making stone tools for millennia is that the benefits of stone tools were so great that they outweighed the high rate of injuries they must have suffered as a result.

    “This study emphasizes how important stone tools would have been to past peoples,” Eren said. “They literally would have risked life and limb to make stone tools …. But despite those injury costs, past peoples made stone tools anyway – the benefits provided must have been immense.”

    If you’re interested, the article is at https://www.kent.edu/cas/news/despite-dangers-early-humans-risked-life-threatening-flintknapping-injuries

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