Monday: Hili dialogue

Another damn work week is on tap: it’s Monday, August 18, 2025 and also National Bad Poetry Day. For a collection of the absolute worst bad poetry, get this book. It’s hilarious (click for Amazon link):

And then read some poems by the very WORST BAD POET IN HISTORY, William McGonagall. Here’s one of his more famous poems, “The Tay Bridge Disaster.”, about a railroad bridge in Scotland that collapsed with a train on it, killing many.  The last verse:

. . . It must have been an awful sight,

To witness in the dusky moonlight,

While the Storm Fiend did laugh, and angry did bray,

Along the Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay,

Oh! ill-fated Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay,

I must now conclude my lay

By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay,

That your central girders would not have given way,

At least many sensible men do say,

Had they been supported on each side with buttresses,

At least many sensible men confesses,

For the stronger we our houses do build,

The less chance we have of being killed.

It’s also Cupcake Day (in Australia), National Fajita Day, Helium Discovery Day (it was “discovered” on this day in 1868 by Pierre Jules César Janssen), National Ice Cream Pie Day, and Pinot Noir Day. Wikipedia says this about helium: the “discoverer” is different from “the detector.” Anyway, it’s complicated:

Helium was first detected as an unknown, yellow spectral line signature in sunlight during a solar eclipse in 1868 by Georges Rayet, Captain C. T. Haig, Norman R. Pogson, and Lieutenant John Herschel, and was subsequently confirmed by French astronomer Jules Janssen. Janssen is often jointly credited with detecting the element, along with Norman Lockyer. Janssen recorded the helium spectral line during the solar eclipse of 1868, while Lockyer observed it from Britain. However, only Lockyer proposed that the line was due to a new element, which he named after the Sun. The formal discovery of the element was made in 1895 by chemists Sir William Ramsay, Per Teodor Cleve, and Nils Abraham Langlet, who found helium emanating from the uranium ore cleveite, which is now not regarded as a separate mineral species, but as a variety of uraninite. In 1903, large reserves of helium were found in natural gas fields in parts of the United States, by far the largest supplier of the gas today.

Here is some helium:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the August 18 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Today European leaders, along with Ukraine’s President Zelensky, will meet with Trump in Washington about the Russian/Ukraine war.  As you know, Europe is much more favorably disposed to Ukraine than is Trump, who seems will to almost give the country away so he can get his Nobel Peace Prize. From the NYT:

European leaders said on Sunday that they would join President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine when he meets with President Trump on Monday at the White House, as they strive to present a united front against Russia and avoid being sidelined in peace talks.

The presence of at least six European heads of state — including Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain and President Alexander Stubb of Finland, two of Mr. Trump’s favored counterparts — highlights the continent’s effort to smooth relations between Mr. Trump and Mr. Zelensky, whose last White House meeting in February descended into a public clash.

Although much of Europe is wrong in trying to recognize Palestine in search of a “two state solution,” here they are right.  Trump, who promised to end the war in Ukraine on Day 1, now says he didn’t really mean it (duh!). And under his plan, what does Ukraine get out of a deal save the end of its citizens being killed? Will Russia give it back Crimea? Don’t hold your breath. Nor will Ukraine get to keep what border Russian territory it’s now occupying.  This is not a compromise, but a bullying of Ukraine to bow to Trump. Fortunately, Zelensky is not an invertebrate, and Europe may be able to apply pressure to Russia to effect some compromise. But for me, from the beginning of this war the only “good” outcome was for Russia to lose and pull back into its own territory. After it, it invaded a sovereign nature without good cause, just like Hitler with Austria and Czechoslovakia. Russia is now insisting that it should keep all the Ukrainian territory it has taken over, and will take over until there is a peace agreement.

*California governor Gavin Newsom has promised to retaliate against Texas’s redistricting to do his own redistricting that would counterbalance five new Republican seats in Congress with five new Democratic seats in Congress from California. I don’t like either of these moves, though if you aren’t American you might find them amusing. But a WSJ op-ed warns of a greater danger to us Democrats than this tit-for-tat gerrymandering: people are moving to red states.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom is promising a referendum in November to gerrymander five more Democratic House seats on top of the 43 of 52 they already have in the state. Even if it works, his victory may be short-lived. The real problem for Democrats is that progressive policies are driving population flight, which on current trend could cost their states 10 House seats after 2030.

Migration from blue to red states is one of the great stories of the age. It accelerated during the Covid lockdowns as Americans fled states with high taxes and living costs—and disorderly streets and lousy schools. Sayonara, San Francisco. Hello, Salt Lake City.

Start with the raw numbers. Between 2020 and 2024, California (-1,465,116), New York (-966,209) and Illinois (-418,056) lost the population equivalent of Kansas to other states. Texas (747,730) and Florida (872,722) gained the equivalent of West Virginia. Utah, Idaho, Arizona and North Carolina also experienced a rush of newcomers.

Births and foreign migration have somewhat lessened the population losses in Democratic-run states. But their populations are nonetheless aging as young people and families leave. Between 2020 and 2024, California’s population under the age of 18 shrank by 523,000, while New York’s fell by 250,000 and Illinois’s by 186,000.

School closures during the pandemic no doubt contributed to their loss of children, but maybe parents also don’t want their children learning about the varieties of sexual experience in third-grade or being taught that America was founded to preserve slavery. Just a thought. Texas gained 199,000 children and Florida 219,000 in the same period.

While slowing immigration under President Trump will dampen population growth in some Republican-led states like Texas and Florida, it will steepen losses in many Democratic states. Notable, though, is that many immigrants who initially come to New York, California and Illinois later leave for other states—for the same reasons native citizens do.

Only about one-third of immigrants who came to California between 2010 and 2023 on net stayed in the state. Immigrants who arrive in Florida and Texas are more likely to settle there. California’s foreign-born population increased by about 600,000 between 2010 and 2023, versus roughly 1.5 million for both Florida and Texas.

Despite their policy failures, Democrats have used gerrymanders to entrench their power in statehouses in California, New York, Illinois, Maryland and elsewhere. Population flight cost Democratic states several House seats during the last Congressional reapportionment following the 2020 Census, but they lost fewer seats than expected.

That’s partly because Covid lockdowns increased the risk of miscounting college students and people with second homes. Perhaps Floridians with pied-à-terres in Manhattan were counted as New Yorkers. The Census Bureau in 2022 reported that New York’s population was over-counted by 3.4% while there were under-counts in Florida (3.5%) and Texas (1.9%).

Such inaccuracies may have cost Florida and Texas an additional House seat and given Rhode Island, New York and Minnesota one each they shouldn’t have received. Tough for GOP Speaker Mike Johnson. But if population trends continue, Republican states stand to gain at least 10 House seats in the 2030 reapportionment.

The left-leaning Brennan Center estimated in December that Texas and Florida would each gain four House seats while Utah, Idaho, North Carolina and Arizona would each add one. California would lose four, New York two, and Oregon, Minnesota, Illinois, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island one each.

Yes, but what this article forgets is the midterm “bounce” that favors the Democrats. It’s possible—indeed, likely, that disaffected Republicans may stay home during the midterms, or would vote Democratic because of Trump’s tariffs and the rising cost of living (they are connected, of course). I myself would be unwilling to bet which party would hold a majority of the House of Representatives after the midterms.

*Perhaps in response to those misguided souls who criticized “our” book (i.e., a collection of essays edited by Lawrence Krauss for playing into the hands of Trump by criticizing the Left’s attack on science —didn’t you know that the Right is the real Destroyer of Science?), Krauss has written a piece in Reason magazine called “America’s two-front war on science” (subtitle: “Universities’ internal culture wars threaten free speech and inquiry, but political attacks on research funding and infrastructure are crippling U.S. scientific leadership”).

There is currently a two-pronged attack on higher education, research, and scholarship in the United States. Activists inside universities have hijacked many administrative functions, and significant reform is needed to ensure free speech, open inquiry, and the integrity of scholarship. But the Trump administration has used this fact to launch what may be a more dangerous direct attack on university scientific and research infrastructures across the nation. We can’t afford to lose either war if we are to protect the country’s scientific integrity and productivity.

Harvard University epitomizes the quandary we now find ourselves in. Over the last decade, it succumbed to much of the modern culture war in ways that have threatened faculty and students, and even prospective students. Students and researchers have alleged that Harvard has discriminated against Asian applicants, rigorously policed speech, and punished faculty whose research results didn’t match preconceived notions about racism or who stated that there are only two sexes, while allowing antisemitic conduct. In addition, the university promoted staff based on identity rather than academic accomplishments, including those known to have plagiarized academic work, while discriminating against talented students and scholars on the grounds of their race or sex.

Harvard is by no means unique. Bloated diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) bureaucracies have taken root at academic institutions around the country. The University of California at Berkeley biology department, for example, in 2019, disqualified 76 percent of the applicants for a faculty position based solely on their DEI statements—before examining their research

. . .Prestigious scientific journals, such as Nature Human Behaviour, have indicated they will not publish scientific articles if they could cause offense or a sense of harm to certain groups. Physical Review, a major journal in my own field of physics, went so far as to publish a case study positing that the use of whiteboards in classrooms could be viewed as a remnant of white supremacy.

The situation has set back scientific and scholarly progress, and has undermined the credibility of many academic disciplines among the public.

At the same time, President Donald Trump has not only launched a frontal assault on Harvard but has also removed leading scientists from national advisory boards and federally supported research institutions, and declared war on universities and departments that don’t bow to his political agenda. Perhaps most damaging of all, this administration is proposing to end support for most cutting-edge American research programs. This includes cutting the National Science Foundation budget by almost 60 percent, and killing major projects—from closing half of the Nobel Prize-winning Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, to ending U.S. participation in the next generation space-based detector, to considering closing the NASA-Goddard space center, where most of the science at NASA originates.

The administration’s attempts to paint all university faculty as woke are misguided. Many leading scientists and scholars have continued to push the boundaries of knowledge while either ignoring ongoing culture wars or avoiding administrative activists on their campuses. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater is never a good idea, nor is schadenfreude worth risking the future of knowledge. The proper way to fight one form of intolerance is not to impose your own brand of intolerance.

But of course nobody who has gone after the book (or Lawrence) on the grounds of mostly criticizing Leftist attacks on science will pay any attention to this. This claim that we can’t criticize the Left’s attack on science because it plays into the hands of Trump reminds me of those idiots people who said I should not criticize Kamala Harris until after she won the election because otherwise I’d be supporting Trump. (Of course I spent plenty of time criticizing Trump, too.) And of course I didn’t vote for Trump. Further, those criticisms ignore the possibility that the wokeness of the left, even in science (e.g., declarations that “trans women are women” and the like) also played into the hands of Trump, who spent more money on that one issue that on any other issue in the election. Our job is to criticize people as we see them, and not to ignore only the transgressions on “our side” because it makes us look bad and could make us lose. I’ve explained many times when I see my brief as purifying my own end of the political spectrum, or at least calling it out, since everybody in the MSM is already going after Trump and his administration.

*If you’ve ever been to Yosemite National Park in California, you’ll know that (despite the crowds in some places) it’s one of the most beautiful places in America.  Yet, as reader Rachel Dec writes at The Free Press, the park is getting “quietly gutted” due to Trump’s budget cuts. (The article was originally published at The Dispatch.) It’s very sad:

You’re stuck in a snaking line of cars in 80-degree heat, tour buses idling behind minivans. The scent of pine still cuts through the fumes. The websites warned of hours-long queues, but miraculously your car’s tires roll past Yosemite’s entrance gate in less than 25 minutes.

“Very quick for a summer Saturday,” a ranger jokes as he hands you a map. “You should have seen it last weekend.”

After a half-hour descent into the valley, you can finally get out. High above, the granite cliffs are so tall they don’t fit in your iPhone’s viewfinder. Among the network of tall pines, you’ve never been so small.

That’s Yosemite for you.

Home to more than 400 species of animals, 1,500 species of plants, and roughly 4 million annual visitors, the park has stood, since President Abraham Lincoln first preserved it, as a radical idea: that some landscapes are too magnificent to belong to private individuals, and instead should be given to the nation.

Today, this legacy is at risk. Over the past six months, permanent staff at the National Park Service (NPS)—which is the agency that governs the park—have been cut by 24 percent. It’s the result of layoffs, buyouts, and a hiring freeze from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). This year, of the 8,000 seasonal positions allotted by President Donald Trump’s budget, barely 4,500 were filled by July. At the same time, the government has moved aggressively to open more public land to mining, logging, and energy extraction.

. . .On a desperately hot July Saturday, I came to Yosemite to see how these pressures were reshaping the park. Out on the trail, tourists could be heard grumbling about the four-hour queues at the park’s southern entrances, but few noticed the creeping overgrowth of invasive Himalayan blackberry along the trails. But there are a few tangible signs of decline: a sold-out bike rental shop, overflowing trash cans, volunteers answering basic questions outside the visitor center because of the long lines to speak to the rangers inside. Recent online reviews of the park’s campsites complain of “dilapidated bathrooms without soap or paper” and “pitiful” conditions. Artifacts relating to the park’s natural history were recently stolen as a result of low staffing, forcing every building in its Pioneer History Center to temporarily close.

Speak to workers, and the prognosis is alarming. In Yosemite, there is growing unease that a diminished ranger corps will struggle to manage not just the impact on wildlife, but on people. The park averages around 200 search and rescue operations per year, and many warn these lifesaving missions will soon be dangerously understaffed, and therefore slower and less effective. While emergency medical workers are technically exempt from the Trump administration’s funding cuts, staff from other divisions are generally brought in to support large emergencies—so falling head counts elsewhere will have spillover effects.

If I didn’t know that Trump won’t be President after January, 2029 (and if you think he will win a third term, email me and I’ll bet you otherwise), I’d say we should be campaigning against his re-election. (I’m not at all sure now that J. D. Vance will succeed him, though I used to be pretty sure.)  When foreigners planning to come to America and ask me where they should go, I always tell them to the National Parks in California:  Sequoia, Yosemite, Death Valley, and then up the White Mountains to see the bristlecones and then north of San Francisco to see the tall redwoods.  If Trump ruins these glories (logging, my tuches!), well, I don’t know what I can do except chain myself to a tree (which doesn’t work).

*A library book has been returned after the death of its borrower—82 years after it was taken out. Fortunately, there were no overdue fines. But that’s not even close to the record for overdue books!

A library book has been returned nearly 82 years after it was borrowed from the San Antonio Public Library. It came with a letter noting that “Grandma won’t be able to pay for it anymore.”

The book is “Your Child, His Family, and Friends” by marriage and family counselor Frances Bruce Strain. It was checked out in July 1943 and returned this past June from a person in Oregon, the library said in a news release.

“After the recent death of my father, I inherited a few boxes of books he left behind,” the person wrote in a letter that was shared by the library on Instagram and signed with the initials P.A.A.G.

The book was a guide for parents on helping their children navigate personal relationships. It was checked out when the person’s father was 11 years old.

“The book must have been borrowed by my Grandmother, Maria del Socorro Aldrete Flores (Cortez),” the person wrote. “In that year, she transferred to Mexico City to work at the US Embassy. She must have taken the book with her, and some 82 years later, it ended up in my possession.”

. . .The library said in a news release that it eliminated overdue fines in 2021. The inside cover of the book was stamped with the warning that the fine for overdue books was three cents a day. Not accounting for inflation, the penalty would amount to nearly $900.

Three cents in July 1943 amounts to 56 cents in today’s money, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Inflation Calculator. That would add up to more than $16,000.

The library noted that the book is in “good condition.” It’ll be on display in the city’s central library through August. It will then be donated to the Friends of San Antonio Public Library and sold to benefit the library.

Eight decades may seem like a long time for an overdue library book, but it’s nowhere near the record. Guinness World Records says the most overdue library book was returned to Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge, England, in 1956.

It was borrowed in 1668, some 288 years earlier. No fine was extracted.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej calms Hili down:

Hili: Everything’s becoming more tangled.
Andrzej: Yes, but it’s something we’ve seen before.

In Polish:

Hili: Wszystko się komplikuje.
Ja: Tak, ale to znane zjawisko.

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

From Clean, Funny, & Cute Animal Memes:

From CinEmma. Look at that tuches!

From Jesus of the Day:

From Masih, who reminds us that “CCCP” stands for (translated into English) “The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics”, which of course hasn’t existed since 1991:

Clothing sends a message. The Soviet Union collapsed decades ago. But when Russian leaders wear its symbols, the past isn’t gone. It’s a blueprint for the future they want, it’s about power, control, and the belief that history’s darkest chapters should be repeated.… pic.twitter.com/P6gr8p5VKf

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) August 17, 2025

J. K. Rowling explains why she voted against Scottish independence:

Here’s the thing: I was always (and remain) open to persuasion on independence for Scotland. I have close pro-Indy friends who are good, clever, thoughtful people. I’m well aware there was a respectable argument to be made for independence and there still is.

I voted against it… pic.twitter.com/6yQTqkulwA

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) August 17, 2025

From Luana; I didn’t see “Barbie” (well, I watched part of it but didn’t like it), so I don’t know what homosexuality they’re talking about. But this article explains that it happened in a suburb of Paris, and the cowardly mayor refused to say that the objectors were Muslims:

Mayor Olivier Sarrabeyrouse announced the cancellation publicly on Monday (11 August), alleging that “an extreme minority of thugs, who, no doubt, had not seen the film, transformed a simple free open-air cinema screening open to all into a violent opposition movement”.

🚨 NEW: A Barbie screening has been cancelled after Muslim men complained about “homosexuality” in the film.

So let’s get this straight:
If Christians object to content – branded “bigots.”
If Muslims object – the showing gets pulled.

Double standards. Cowardice. Cultural… pic.twitter.com/UvDkFmYD9q

— Darren Grimes (@darrengrimes_) August 16, 2025

From Malcolm; a mother is very eager to adopt a new kitten to replace her own:

This mother cat lost her kitten, her family got her an orange orphan kitten to adopt and heal the ache

pic.twitter.com/L0M53490Hb

— Science girl (@gunsnrosesgirl3) July 21, 2025

One from my feed; a dextrous eagles gets its feed:

Man notices an Eagle eyeing the fish he just caught. pic.twitter.com/H2aDRTo8Zp

— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) August 17, 2025

One I posted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

An eleven-year-old German Jewish boy and his younger brother were gassed to death as soon as they arrived in Auschwitz.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-08-18T10:31:02.411Z

Two from Dr. Cobb. Matthew presumes this first one is real, but I suppose we won’t know:

Randomly remembered this science textbook for Christian homeschooling.

— Comfortably Numb (@numb.comfortab.ly) 2023-04-28T22:40:32.292Z

Look at these answers; they’re very disheartening. Look especially at the answers to question #9 about evolution. Oy!

Snapshot of US beliefs about science and flat-earthy stuff. [1000+ people surveyed, +/- 3%] carsey.unh.edu/publication/…

— Carl Zimmer (@carlzimmer.com) 2025-08-07T17:13:27.883Z