Wednesday: Hili dialogue

August 20, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to a Hump Day (“День горба”) in Ukrainian; it’s Wednesday, August 20, 2025, and National Bacon Lovers Day. All of us carnivores love the stuff, but I limit my consumption when I’m not traveling on a ship that serves bacon and eggs.  Here’s a video telling you how to make what is purported to be the best bacon sandwich ever.  It’s made with butter (ketchup and mustard on the side), and each sandwich comes with a double bypass:

It’s also National Hawaiian Pizza Day (with pineapple and ham; many despise it but I love it), National Lemonade Day, World Mosquito Day, and National Chocolate Pecan Pie Day (plain w/o chocolate is better).

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the August 20 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The good news is that there’s been a tiny bit of information about what security guarantees Trump will demand from Russia.in a peace deal to end the Ukraine war. The bad news is that it’s negative news: Trump has said he won’t send American troops to Ukraine.Now that may be a decent response, but so far that’s all we have:

President Trump said on Tuesday that no American troops would be placed on the ground to protect Ukraine as part of any peace agreement with Russia, as European leaders met for urgent talks over what a postwar security arrangement could look like.

In an interview on Fox News, Mr. Trump said that the United States could help in other ways, including air support. When the hosts asked him about any “assurances” he could make that there would be no U.S. “boots on the ground,” he replied, “Well, you have my assurance, and I’m president.”

The shape of postwar security arrangements for Ukraine dominated discussions among European leaders on Tuesday, the day after hastily arranged meetings with Mr. Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine at the White House, which showcased solidarity with Kyiv but yielded few details on how the war with Russia could end.

The White House meetings produced smiles and warmth among Mr. Trump, Mr. Zelensky and European allies — but few public signs of tangible progress toward an end to the war. That will require follow-through from Mr. Trump, potentially sweeping concessions from Mr. Zelensky and a willingness by Russia to stop attacking Ukraine.

Overnight, Russia launched hundreds of drones and missiles at Ukraine, causing injuries and damage to infrastructure and energy facilities, Ukrainian officials said, a day after at least 14 people were killed in Russian strikes.

Mr. Zelensky, whom Mr. Trump greeted more warmly than in their previous Oval Office meeting, when he berated the Ukrainian leader as insufficiently grateful, pointed to progress with the United States on security guarantees to keep Russia from invading again, though he left without a formal agreement. He said Ukraine would purchase $90 billion in American weapons through Europe as part of the security guarantees. In return, the United States would buy drones from Ukraine, he said.

But wide gaps remained between Russia’s demand for territorial concessions and Ukraine’s insistence on a cease-fire to stop Moscow’s deadly attacks. Mr. Trump, who is pressing for a quick peace deal, says one can be reached without a cease-fire.

U.S. troops in Ukraine may be a bad idea, as it could result in a mutual nuclear conflict.  Perhaps European troops wouldn’t, but what kind of security guarantee besides the use of somebody’s troops would prevent Russia from further expansion? Does anybody trust a guarantee that Russia would make to end the conflict given that it’s already violated other peace agreements. In addition, it makes sense to have a cease-fire given that Russia is determined to keep taking over more Ukrainian land as the fighting continues, and is determined to keep that land after the fighting ends (Russia has already taken over a fifth of Ukraine, in addition to Crimea.)

*In today’s NYT, Bret Stephens, who I’m now reading regularly, explains “Trump just reminded me that I”m still a neocon” (someone on the right who is a no-Trumper; article archived here). It’s basically a list of why Stephens thinks that Trump is screwing up the negotiations with Russia about the Ukraine war, and his accusations of Trump and Putin are on the mark. I’m not sure why that is “neo-con”, and plenty of us liberals think Trump should be buttressing Zelensky. Here’s an excerpt:

Although the term “neoconservative” has fallen into disuse — except as an occasional slur used by the MAGA right, the progressive left and social-media antisemites who really mean to say “Jew” — I’ve never been shy about describing myself as one. In Donald Trump’s whipsawing performances with Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday and Volodymyr Zelensky and his European allies in Washington on Monday, I’m reminded of why.

Neoconservatism emerged in the early 1970s as a loosely coherent movement of disenchanted liberals who were critical of the welfare state and turned off by the anti-Americanism of parts of the antiwar left. But the movement also took a dim view of the Nixon administration, particularly in its pursuit of arms control with the Soviet Union, its relative indifference to human rights issues behind the Iron Curtain, and its realpolitik approach to foreign policy in general.

Little wonder, then, that many of Trump’s most ardent conservative opponents in recent years are, or were, old-school neocons. Like President Richard Nixon’s, Trump’s politics are a mix of statist economic impulses, populist grievances, the conceit of being above the law and a transactional approach to foreign policy that discounts the moral force of American ideals. What Trump lacks in his predecessor’s intellectual sophistication, he makes up for with his gifts for crude showmanship.

What would a traditional neocon say about Trump’s latest diplomatic efforts between Russia and Ukraine? A few points.

I’ll give three of his points, but there are seven, and I agree with all of them. See the archived link below to read the others:

First, we’d note that dictators who are contemptuous of the rights of their own people tend to be equally contemptuous of the rights of other countries. That’s why some of us were ringing alarms about the global threat from Putin when many liberals still thought he was negotiable. By retreating from his threat to sanction Russia if it didn’t agree to a cease-fire, Trump has simply ratified Putin’s strategy of contempt.

Second, dictators who do not abide by the rule of law at home will not honor international agreements, either. The Soviet Union violated virtually every arms control agreement it signed. Putin’s Russia has followed suit with violations of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the 1994 Budapest memorandum supposedly guaranteeing Ukraine’s territorial integrity and the Minsk agreements that were supposed to end the fighting between Ukraine and Russia in 2015. Whatever deal Putin may yet sign will simply be another paper promise he’ll inevitably break.

Third, Putin does not see Trump’s chummy manner, his effort to forge personal ties, as an invitation to be reasonable. He sees it as vanity and therefore weakness: The perennial hankering of Western politicians for a deal, a win, a Nobel Prize. Even worse is Trump’s constant blaming of Joe Biden for the war, which would make the United States responsible for the war Putin started — exactly the anti-American narrative Putin wishes to advance.

As I said, the other four are sensible, and I think you’d be hard put to find even a liberal centrist (or even a classical liberal) who would disagree with Stephens’s points about Putin and the use of state power.

*After its deal with the Trump administration, Columbia University has begun paying Jewish employees, faculty, and students who were victims of antisemitism during the war protests. The pot to be divided is $21 million, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education:

When Columbia University announced last month as part of its deal with the Trump administration that it would establish a $21-million fund to compensate employees who have been victims of campus antisemitism, Bruce Robbins, a Columbia English professor, said his first reaction was shock. His second reaction, he said, was, “If that’s really what they’re doing, then what about me?”

Robbins, who is Jewish and critical of the Israeli government, says he feels he has experienced antisemitism from supporters of Israel since October 2023. He recalled being labeled a traitor to his race for supporting pro-Palestinian students and told he was not a real Jew because his father changed the family’s surname.

“If that’s really their rule — Jews who have been victims of antisemitism — sign me up. I want my share of the money,” Robbins said. Several of his colleagues have echoed that sentiment.

. . . Columbia’s settlement with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission — the commission’s largest religious-discrimination settlement on record — will resolve charges that Columbia violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination, without admission of liability. Unlike the university’s $200-million settlement for alleged Title VI violations going directly to the U.S. government, the money from its deal with the EEOC will go back to university employees who “may have experienced antisemitism” on campus since Oct. 7, 2023.

Obtaining financial remedies for victims of employment discrimination is common practice. But the scale of the Columbia settlement raises a host of questions, including what role the EEOC will continue to play in higher ed’s battle with the Trump administration; how the commission reached its $21-million sticker price; and how the government will determine who is eligible for a slice of the money.

“Typically, in an EEOC investigation, there’s a lot of work done to talk to the individuals harmed to value the case,” Jenny R. Yang, an employment and civil-rights lawyer who served as chair of the EEOC from 2014 to 2018, wrote in a statement. “To have such a large payment without disclosing more information about the number of individuals harmed and the kinds of harms experienced is unusual. This raises concerns about the EEOC potentially using the federal government’s power to intimidate.”

There will be vetting of individual claims, with a cap of $300,000 on payments to individuals, but the article notes that non-Jews and especially pro-Palestinian faculty will object, plus the whole affair, including the criteria, are being kept secret.  I have no dog in this fight, but I don’t object to these claims because Columbia did target Jewish members of the University. But I have no sympatrhy for Halberstam’s claim that “Zionists” were the source of a lot of hate speech at Columbia. If they were, I didn’t hear about it. To wit:

Although the claims process is supposed to be confidential, Jack Halberstam, a gender studies and English professor, said he wouldn’t be surprised if word spreads among faculty members as employees eventually begin to claim payouts. On a campus where 180 people were laid off this spring because of federal funding cuts (an additional 77 were laid off at Barnard College as part of the college’s “restructuring”), some faculty members said sizable windfalls paid to some — but not all — Jewish employees could build already existing resentment of the administration and within the faculty.

“It is so unthinkable to me that Zionists who have potentially been the source of so much hate speech on campus … might walk away with large payouts, and that anyone would believe that this equates to justice,” Halberstam, who is Jewish and anti-Zionist, said of the claims process. Halberstam recounted being targeted by what he described as antisemitism from Zionist protesters, including being called a “self-hating Jew” and a terrorist.

*I used to point out that, based on FIRE’s tally of campus ideological deplatformings, most of those incidents came from the Left, Now, in a post at the Heterodox Academy’s Free the Inquiry Site, Shiri Spitz Siddiqi shows that the tide seems to have turned, and a huge percentage of instances of a different kind of attack—”targeting incidents involving scholars at public and private American institutions of higher education”—has shifted from coming mostly from the Left to nearly all from the Right. (Again: targeting is different from “deplatformings. ” But according to FIRE,reports from the last two years, deplatformings, although still coming mainly from the Left, are starting to come more often from the Right.)  An excerpt from the HxA:

Rumors of a “vibe shift” have reverberated throughout the political sphere as commentators attempt to explain why the second Trump administration feels different. The “Great Awokening” of the 2010s and early 2020s, when the political left was culturally (if not always politically) dominant, appears to be winding down.

For years, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has been documenting cases of campus figures who are targeted for constitutionally protected speech. Using data from FIRE’s Scholars Under Fire and Students Under Fire databases, I charted recent trends in cancellation attempts to understand whether and how things have changed on college campuses.

First, although FIRE’s data suggest that attacks on scholarship peaked sharply in 2021 and decreased through 2024, attacks on students appear to have remained relatively high throughout that period. Documented attacks on scholarship surged again this year, and it’s only August.

But the absolute numbers obscure a fascinating hand-off occurring between the political left and right that started around 2020: since then, documented attacks from the left have plummeted, while those from the right have trended upwards – especially since 2023.

The share of politically motivated incidents coming from the right (versus the left) has increased steadily since 2020 for both scholars and students. Even in 2021, at the height of what many consider to be a period of primarily left-wing cancel culture, 50% of documented incidents targeting scholars came from the political right. In 2020, 80% of documented incidents targeting students came from the left. In 2025, 83% have come from the right.

Here are the data, and it speaks for itself:

More:

This backlash has been building for a while, with right-wing attacks on scholars increasing in tandem with left-wing attacks from 2018 to 2021. By 2021, alleged incidents coming from the right (of which FIRE logged 100) numbered almost as many as those coming from the left in 2020 (when FIRE logged a total of 111).

Finally, it’s interesting to note that the surge in right-motivated incidents isn’t simply driven by a single topic – at least for scholars. Right-wing views on COVID, gender, institutional policy (such as DEI), policing, and race all elicited spikes in attempted censorship from the left between 2018 and 2020, each of which was followed by a rightwing backlash against left-wing views. The exceptions are Israel-Palestine and political views (e.g., being critical of Donald Trump), where the political right led the charge and the left followed suit only later.

I would have said that it all reflects and emboldening of the Right since Trump was elected, but some of it is simply a backlash reacting to policies of the “progressive” Left, like DEI and defunding the police.

*I don’t know how they do it, but the video below shows National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration “hurricane hunters” flying a plane into the eye of Hurricane Erin. I guess a plane can stand going through 160 mph winds, for I believe this was done Sunday when the hurricane was on Saturday when the hurricane was a category 5.  The hurricane wasn’t as damaging as anticipated, especially in the U.S., for it veered east after heading north from the Caribbean. (It didn’t do much damage to the Caribbean islands, thank Ceiling Cat.)  From the AP:

Although the storm is expected to stay offshore, evacuations were ordered on such barrier islands along the Carolina coast as Hatteras as authorities warned the storm could churn up dangerous rip currents from Florida to the New England coast.

Erin lashed part of the Caribbean with rain and wind Monday. Forecasters are confident it will curl north and away from the eastern U.S., but tropical storm and surge watches were issued for much of the Outer Banks.

Officials at the Wrightsville Beach, near Wilmington, North Carolina, reported to the National Weather Service rescuing at least 60 swimmers from rip currents Monday.

By Tuesday morning, Erin had lost some strength from previous days and dropped to a Category 2 hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 110 mph (175 kph), the National Hurricane Center in Miami said. It was about 665 miles (1,070 kilometers) southwest of Bermuda and 720 miles (1,155 kilometers) south-southeast of Cape Hatteras and was moving northwest at a slower 7 mph (11 kph).

There may be from five to 9 more hurricanes in the Atlantic this season. Have a look:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is hassled:

Andrzej: Hiding in the closet again?
Hili: Yes, I need some peace.

In Polish:

Ja: Znowu ukryłaś się w szafie?
Hili: Tak, potrzebuję spokoju.

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

From the 2025 Darwin Awards!!/Epic Fails:

From Cat Memes:

From Now That’s Wild!:

Masih is still quiet: I wonder if she’s replacing her tweets with podcasts. (I’m not a fan of podcasts.)  So. here’s a wickedly clever response to a critic from Masih’s stand-in, J. K. Rowling.  And yes, there are four Harry Potter theme parks.

From Malcolm; wrestling cats. Sound up. I like the second one–the airborne takedown.

And three from my feed (nobody’s sending in tweets):

This one has to be a sign, but what kind of a sign?

I hope that money grows, because when she goes to college, tuition will be over $100,000 per year:

This is apparently invisible to the MSM:

One that I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

Two from Dr. Cobb. I reposted the first one with a comment:

Looks like a tabby to me. (The ancestor of all domestic cats, Felis silvestris lybica, has and presumably had tabby markings.)

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-08-19T16:42:31.816Z

AI!

Who did this

— Olga Nesterova (@onestpress.onestnetwork.com) 2025-08-17T22:33:24.337Z

42 thoughts on “Wednesday: Hili dialogue”

  1. Not just the theme parks, whenever I go through King’s Cross there is always a big queue waiting to take selfies at the “Platform 9 3/4” wall.

    Even though it isn’t a platform, it’s just a bit of wall outside the Harry Potter gift shop (King’s Cross has been heavily redeveloped since the films were made).

    1. Fun fact: The first actor to portray Dumbledore was Jeff Dench, brother of Judi, at the launch of the second Harry Potter book at Kings Cross. Jeff was a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company at the same time as my dad in the ’70s – a really lovely bloke and very kind to me and my sister during the endless hours we spent backstage during school holidays in Stratford upon Avon. https://archive.is/u93y7

      1. How interesting! What parts do you remember your Dad playing? Or did he have a backstage role? Were you ever tempted to go into theatre yourself?

        1. Dad was very much a spear carrier at the RSC (second duke, third gardener kind of thing). The fact that he made a living in a career with an 85% unemployment rate (and the 15% in work are often the same people over and over again) was definitely an achievement of sorts. He made quite a few TV appearances in the UK over the years. Thanks to him I can do a lot of “six degrees” connections (he worked with Alun Owen who went on to write the screenplay for A Hard Day’s Night and Sue Fleetwood, sister of Mick, was in the RSC with him). Bizarrely, my mum worked for years with the sister of the actor Robert Shaw, so there are connections through her, too.

  2. Hurricane Erin has yet to make its closest approach to U.S. East Coast. It will pass mostly off the coast, closest to the barrier islands (Outer Banks) of North Carolina tomorrow morning. Because the eye of the storm will be well off shore wind gusts on the outer banks and just to the north at the Virginia Beach oceanfront are forecast to be in the 50mph range, but waves and tidal surge are expected to be significant, overwashing the outer banks sand dunes and flooding the only north/south highway running the length of the outer banks from Kitty Hawk to Cape Hatteras, state route NC12. Evacuation orders currently are in place on all of the outer banks; and north to the Virginia border for areas that only have off-road vehicle access.

    The picture of the inside of the eyewall from the hurricane hunter aircraft in calm air with deep blue sky above is amazing.

    1. There likely will be news coverage over the next couple of days of cottages falling into the ocean. While sad to watch, this is not really news or shocking to people who live in the area. As the ocean shoreline continues its natural movement westward each storm season, several more cottages are destroyed and several more are exposed for destruction the next season.

    2. I literally gasped when the eye wall came into view.

      I was seriously tempted yesterday to drive to somewhere safe on the coast (from Atlanta) just to watch the ocean action. I’ve loved watching huge waves ever since I first saw them as a kid in Hawaii. It’s too late for me to go now and I’m regretting I didn’t.

  3. A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
    If we were to wake up some morning and find that everyone was the same race, creed, and color, we would find some other cause for prejudice by noon. -George D. Aiken, US senator (20 Aug 1892-1984)

    1. Indeed! Well, we couldn’t all be the same sex or we wouldn’t exist, so I’m guessing that sexism and misogyny predate prejudices about race, creed, and colour.

    2. Ursula K. Le Guin wrote “The Lathe of Heaven” in 1971 in which she explores this topic (among other themes). She agrees with Aiken.

      2. I have never read “The Lathe Of Heaven”, but last night dreamed that I had.

        What a great book.

    3. Senator Aiken recognized our ability to detect instantly the features that distinguish tribe members from interlopers, which he calls prejudice, yet he overlooked its importance to our survival. So yes, if all the tribes were one morning the same race and creed, finer tribal differences would have to be detected, by noon, for immunological protection. This isn’t a bug. It’s a feature. In real life, tribes become truly indistinguishable as tribes only through intermarriage, which requires patient development of enough intertribal trust and side-by-side friendship for it to meet with community approval. (And the minority tribe has to accept that its heritage will disappear in the bargain, a tall order. Why should it?) But intermarriage is the cause of homogeneity, not the result. Because black people don’t suddenly become white, Sen. Aiken’s claim can’t be tested.

      The peculiar curse of the United States is that (black) Africans were brought over almost entirely as slaves, not as invited immigrants, and didn’t became the dominant majority tribe as they did in British Caribbean slave colonies after Emancipation. Selected for plantation labour they were never meant to be out and about fostering intertribal trust and economic cooperation in the American society that kept them, unless manumitted (a practice frowned on by state governments as an abdication of the owners’ responsibilities to them, which alms-givers would have to assume from parishioners’ tithes.) So it would have been impossible, and still is, for everyone in America to become the same race. Racial differences remain a handy heuristic, in no danger of being obliterated. Even though white people have been trained to express less societal hostility to inter-racial marriage than in the past, there is still a strong personal taboo against black-white and white-aboriginal marriage at the individual level because of the alien tribal culture one is marrying into, and this cuts both ways.

      So it’s not clear to me if Sen. Aiken was expressing pessimism or optimism about the human condition. I’m not even sure he was calling for an end to “prejudice.”

  4. Still a neocon? Since hopes for a viable new third party are tenuous at best, let those of us who favor support for Ukraine AND Israel, who dislike MAGAS and Progressives, band together and embrace the Neocon Party. See how you like redistricting now, Texas.

  5. I don’t know if that means that the volcano god was pleased or angered by the man’s proposal.

  6. Talk about purely performative activity: how about a$21M dollar fine to Columbia or any university for that matter as a penalty for antisemitism? These financial penalties exact no punishment from or assign any blame to any individual. It does not come from the pockets of a president, dean, or any complicit staff or student. My guess is that the uni would simply raise tuition if need be the next year to cover the cost. Just more bullshit without addressing the issue.

    1. It’s a stunningly large payout. We all witnessed (on newsreels, at least) the pro-Palestinian takeovers of the elite college campuses and no doubt it was intimidating, if not downright scary for Jewish students. You call it “performative”. It’s definitely got Trump prints all over it and I really can’t get over the size of it. It’s unusual for a commissioner to lodge a complaint. They are typically lodged by workers who seldom win much if anything. Wow! I’ll never buy Trump’s crocodile tears over antisemitism. It rings fraudulent to me.

  7. A neo-conservative is above all a conservative who believes that America should be the world’s policeman. They are the folks who’ve keep us in wars for the last twenty years. I hardly think it likely that Stephen’s just remembered he is a neo-con. If there’s one thing Trump has consistently been against, it is overseas adventurism. Pretending that the Ukraine talks triggered some kind of catharsis for Stephens is just a rhetorical device. As for his third point, assessing Putin’s supposed opinion of Trump, that sounds like projection on Stephens’s part. We should blame Biden (and Obama, who began the dismemberment of Ukraine with Crimea), but we should also be blaming the neo-cons for pushing the idea that Ukraine should be in NATO. You don’t need to be a mind-reader to know that that was and is a red-line for Putin.

    1. If there’s one I can’t stand, it’s Putin defenders. Who cares what his “red lines” are? If he’s unhappy, he can stop invading other countries.

      1. Precisely. Peculiar, isn’t it, that discussion of this subject never allows any “red-lines” to Ukraine, such as its continued existence, freedom from bombardment, freedom of its citizens from abduction, etc. etc. ?

  8. Prof. Coyne comments “Here are the data, and it speaks for itself…”

    May I offer a friendly correction? Those are not data. Those are already twice-analyzed and aggregated from data not given, and we don’t know from that simple chart what any of the incidents was about.

    1. I agree Ms. Piper. Sorry boss.

      I wrote an article once about the fake “Anti-Asian Hate Crime Wave” and the more I dug the more fraudulent and bought (Anti-hate NGOs are extremely profitable in blue states) the data and arguments appear.

      For instance, apparently antisemitic “hate” incidents in NYC are barely reported but they are the bulk of all hate crimes (quietened bc it is almost always black men doing the beating). That old grifter Al Sharpeton wants NONE of THAT reality. And on and on..

      I’ve come to avoid and distrust ALL “bias” stats over the years.

      D.A.
      NYC
      ps Witnesseth:
      https://democracychronicles.org/on-the-anti-asian-hate-crime-wave/

  9. Pizza is anything you want it to be. You haven’t lived until you’ve had a pineapple and sauerkraut pizza with Canadian bacon.

    1. Pizza is just an open-faced sandwich. I can imagine a world with a sauerkraut sandwich with Canadian bacon. But I can’t imagine a world with a pineapple sandwich.

    2. Interesting — I like pineapple and Canadian bacon on pizza — it may be my favorite — but I’ve never considered adding sauerkraut.

    3. I’ve heard enough people rave about pineapple on pizza to make me think there must be something special about pineapple that complements the tastes of cheese and tomato sauce on a pizza crust, rather than clashing with them, as I’d have thought. Maybe it has something to do with the papain.

  10. Just for clarification, the issue for hurricane hunter aircraft is not flying in 160mph winds…the (usually) P3 Orion hurricane hunters must fly at around 130mph just to take off and generally fly around 400mph or one might say in a 400 mph wind. So wind per se is not an issue.

    The issue for these guys is changing winds over a short distance or short time, known as gusts or shear. The airplane reacts to these changes by bobbing up and down like a cork on a wavy surface, but not all of the plane responds immediately to these wind changes in the same way, so we see bending of wings and the tail surfaces…they are made to be flexible for these responses…but if a shear is too powerful, the wings could be bent to the point of failure and break off. Of course designers know what this point of failure is and generally aircraft are designed for a failure point well beyond what it expected to encounter in flight missions. Sorry, but after so many years of retirement, I cannot recall the actual safety factor.

    1. There is a video somewhere of Boeing testing the force it would take to break one of its wings. They had a wing up on a (fake) fuselage and used a giant crane to flex the wing until it broke. The video was astonishing; the wing bent to an extreme angle before failing, and the force required was clearly far greater than any force a real plane would face in the air. The engineering and materials science that have gone into to making modern aircraft is a testament to the brainiacs among us, but those folks who fly in the hurricane planes are made of different stuff. I get motion sick on a riding lawn mower, fercryinoutloud…..

    2. I’m reminded of the excellent three-part PBS documentary “21st Century Jet: The Building of the 777”, first shown in 1996. It followed the design, construction and testing of the Boeing 777. After the prototype had completed its flight testing, it then underwent — presumably as part of its FAA certification — destructive testing on the ground. The landing gear was bolted to the floor of the hangar, then a hydraulic jack was placed under the wing-tip, and the wing was forced upwards. It reached an almost unbelievable 45 degrees to the horizontal before shattering spectacularly.

      So if you’ve ever been in a window seat on an airliner and watched the wing flexing up and down a little, and been worried that it was going to break, don’t panic. That’s nowhere near the limit of what that wing can do.

      1. Yep David and Edward. You must demonstrate (or at least used to…no computer sims allowed) the safety factor on a full scale physical wing/fuselage test rig, testing it to (yes, spectacular) destruction.

    3. Yes. Makes sense. It’s the shear forces that can tear the airplane apart. That video shows a very impressive sight from inside the eye.

    4. The default safety factor is 1.5 (14CFR part 25 subpart C- sec25.303) for prescribed load limits for external loads. This means at 1.5 times the load limit (50% overload), no permanent deformation or structural failure can occur. There are then considerations for cyclic loading (safety factor vs inspection interval vs a host of other things). IIRC, civilian commercial aircraft generally have a 2.5G loading requirement, but other classes of aircraft may have loading requirements much higher than this. There are a ton of other things that come into play, like how wing deflection (bending, flutter, and so on) change the load distribution.

      Some aircraft deal with high wing loads by allowing significant deflection, and this gets pretty involved. Small aircraft with relatively rigid wings are analytically easier to deal with,

      1. Thanks. 1.5 was what I was thinking, but 1.2 seemed to be somewhere floating in memory too….maybe for houses or bridges or the like.

  11. I watch a lot of NRLW on weekends (it’s free-to-air). The NRL is the National Rugby League, and the W is Women’s. Having a lot of weight is a good thing for being a player, and having powerful thighs is also a good thing. If you value ‘feminiity’ you probably would not watch it. Recently I watched a game and my partner and daughter were present, and my partner observed also that players are not ‘typically’ lithe or willowy. It was a teaching moment for my daughter and her husband! So I said to my partner, “Remember Liberace? He was criticised for being gayer than a spring morning, and more camp than a row of tents. And Liberace’s response to his critics was ‘I cry all the way to the bank’. So I guess I am saying, in a roundabout way, that J. K. Rowling is using the “Liberace response” to her critic. Well said!

  13. Youtube removes “Gender Identity” from hate speech policy. Good1!

    Firstly…. all “Hate speech” and “Hate Crime” laws are a jurisprudential nightmare, a disaster.

    Even worse are “self defined” categories. You can’t “protect” a group for which there is no categorical coherence. Or solid definition! Particularly any voluntary “opt in” definition. Cheers to youtube.

    D.A.
    NYC

  14. He recalled being labeled a traitor to his race for supporting pro-Palestinian students and told he was not a real Jew…

    “self-hating Jew” and a terrorist….

    Not sure I buy this either. In the first place, the examples describe internal squabbles among Jews, and I don’t think that can fairly be called antisemitism. No True Scotsman-ism, but not antisemitism.

    In the second place, though IANAL, I think that if Columbia set aside $21 million, their lawyers probably have evidence to suggest that the problem went beyond hurty words. As in, people were actually being intimidated.

  15. I looked a bit at the FIRE database and explanation, and it does not seem to me to reflect our first impressions.
    A bunch of the “Scholars Under Fire” incidents seem to be about librarians maliciously complying with Trump’s EO and temporarily removing books from library shelves.
    So one librarian pulls 50 books from the shelves and generates 50 incidents. The incidents from the left seem to be mostly either an academic pronouncing their solidarity with Hamas and getting complained about, or the pitchfork wielding mob going after some professor for uttering an opinion running counter to current woke orthodoxy.

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