Friday: Hili dialogue

August 22, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the butt end of the week: Friday, August 22, 2025, and National Bao Day, celebrating steamed or baked dumplings.  In this video a friendly woman explains the difference between bao, other buns, and wontons.

. . . and here’s much of the anime movie “Bao,” mentioned in the video above and described below by Wikipedia; it’s three minutes of the 8-minute film:

Bao is a 2018 American animated short film written and directed by Domee Shi and produced by Pixar Animation Studios. It is the first Pixar short film to be directed by a female director. It was screened at the Tribeca Film Festival before being released with Incredibles 2 on June 15, 2018. The film is about an aging and lonely Chinese Canadian mother suffering from empty nest syndrome, who receives an unexpected second chance at motherhood when she makes a steamed bun (baozi) that comes to life. The film won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film at the 91st Academy Awards.

It’s also National Pecan Torte Day, World Plant Milk Day, Take Your Cat to the Vet Day (NOW), and National Eat a Peach Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the August 22 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*A New York appeals court overturned the $$ part of Trump’s fraud conviction, though he still stands convicted (article archived here):

A New York appeals court on Thursday threw out a half-billion-dollar judgment against President Trump, eliminating an enormous financial burden while declining to overturn the fraud case against him, a remarkable turn in a case that pitted the president against one of his fiercest political foes.

“While harm certainly occurred, it was not the cataclysmic harm that can justify a nearly half billion-dollar award to the state,” wrote Peter Moulton, one of the appeals judges whose lengthy and convoluted ruling reflected significant disagreement among the five-judge panel.

The president’s appeal will now most likely move to New York’s highest court, providing him another opportunity to challenge the finding that he was a fraudster.

Thursday’s ruling handed Mr. Trump a financial victory and some legal validation, and represents a major setback for the attorney general, Letitia James, who is one of the president’s foremost adversaries and a target of his retribution campaign. The case had been a career-defining victory after she campaigned for the attorney general’s office promising to bring Mr. Trump to justice.

However, the decision fell short of the full vindication the president had been seeking in his fight against Ms. James. In denying Mr. Trump’s bid to throw out the case, the court kept in place the ruling that he had committed fraud, an ignominious distinction for a sitting American president.

Ms. James filed the case against Mr. Trump and his family real estate business in 2022, accusing them of inflating his net worth to obtain favorable loan terms. After a monthslong trial, the judge overseeing the case ruled last year that Mr. Trump was liable for fraud, denting the real estate mogul image that underpinned his political rise.

But of course only Democrats care whether Trump is a convicted fraudster, so this is, to me, a total victory for Trump. Nor does he care what he’s been convicted of so long as he’s still President and doesn’t go to jail.

*It doesn’t look like peace negotiations about the war in Ukraine are moving forward, despite Trump’s meeting with Putin. If anything, Trump has been more positive towards Zelensky and promised him “good protection”, though of course a Trump promise is worth as much as a $3 bill. The people who are really worried, according to the WSJ, are the residents of eastern Ukraine, who will become Russians if a peace deal involves letting Russia keep what it’s conquered.

Among proposals under discussion in recent international talks, one calls for Ukraine to surrender the sizable chunk of Donetsk region that it still holds in exchange for a halt to fighting and security guarantees from Western countries.

President Trump has said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky should consider a land swap. Zelensky hasn’t dismissed it out of hand, but said any territorial concessions are against Ukraine’s Constitution and would require direct talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin, something the Russian leader has thus far avoided.

Any deal to surrender land grimly defended for years would be a bitter pill for many Ukrainians. Kyiv still controls about a quarter of the Donetsk region, including large cities like Slovyansk and Kramatorsk. Almost everyone in Ukraine has a friend or relative who has died fighting in this part of the country.

But residents of Slovyansk, who have spent a decade living along the front line, expressed varied reactions to the proposed concession of their city. While many, like Kuznetsova, considered it a doomsday scenario, others were willing to pay almost any price to stop the fighting, or insisted that they wouldn’t leave no matter who was in control of the city.

. . . Though Ukrainians have grown more willing to make concessions to end the war since the full-scale invasion began, public opinion polls show they remain opposed to giving up territory. A June survey from the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology found 52% of Ukrainians opposed to territorial concessions, with 38% willing to accept territorial losses as part of a peace deal.

George Barros, an analyst with the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, said that giving away the rest of the Donetsk region would be a strategic blunder. Cities like Slovyansk have been fortified since 2014, and also sit on high ground. Given the slow, grinding pace of Russia’s advance, it would likely take Moscow years to capture the major population centers in the region.

“The terrain further west from the Donetsk region is not nearly as defensible,” he said. “There are no large cities there. They haven’t been built up and fortified. Surrendering it without defensive positions to fall back on—that’s a huge liability.”

He said only a very robust security agreement with Western countries—including involvement of a nuclear power—could make a voluntary withdrawal worth it for Kyiv.

Fingers crossed, hoping that European involvement would lead to either that “robust security agreement”, or even some clashes between Russia and the West (no nukes, of course, but that can’t be guaranteed). I wonder if those Ukrainians who will become Russians, and who do not worry about who rules them, will rue their feelings when they have to abide by Russian law. There’s a matter of freedom, you know. . .

*The NYT tries to clarify the confusing variety of expiration dates given on food labels, like “use by” or “best by” or “sell by”. There are a few hints that are generally useful, though I’ve found that frozen steaks are still good after more than a year, so long as they don’t have mold or smell un-beefy. (Article archived here.)

When you open your fridge, how often do you check the dates on your food? The yogurt container says it’s still good for a few more days, but the label on the half-used barbecue sauce says it was best before last Sunday. Should you still eat it?

The answer is complicated. Dates on food packaging usually indicate when food tastes best, not when it’s unsafe to eat. In the United States, there are roughly 50 variations of date labels, including “use by,” “sell by” and “packaged on,” nearly all of which indicate when quality or freshness begins declining.

While it’s important to mind the printed dates for some foods, an estimated three billion pounds of food get thrown away each year because of confusion over the date label, according to the food waste nonprofit ReFED. Infant formula is the only product that has standardized, federally regulated date labels, leaving lots of questions about when to toss other aging perishables.

Here’s what you should know.

. . . . Experts said sell-by dates are not a trick to make you buy more, but the product of a chaotic system. And for most food, eating it after the date isn’t a health issue.

Some said that you should pay attention to the labels “use by” and “expires on,” especially on perishables. “Best if used by” generally refers to quality and “sell by” is generally for retailers to know when to rotate inventory.

Frozen foods usually stay good up to a year, even if they’ve been thawed and refrozen; unopened condiments, oils and canned goods often last several years; refrigerated eggs are good for three to five weeks; and refrigerated dairy products usually last one to three weeks after opening. Kansas State University offers handy cupboard and freezer storage guides for a range of foods, as does the Department of Agriculture’s FoodKeeper app.

Note my own experience with steaks above, though you shouldn’t take any advice from me. I just haven’t had a bad steak, even if it’s been frozen for fourteen or fifteen months and securely wrapped in two thicknesses of aluminum foil.  More:

The most important date labels are on meat and seafood, unpasteurized cheese and milk, baby food and foods prepared in-store, experts said.

The date on raw meat “isn’t a guarantee” that it will last that long at home, said Meredith Carothers, a food safety specialist at the U.S.D.A.’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, because household refrigerators often aren’t as cold as those in grocery stores.

“Once you get it home, better to use it within about one to two days for poultry, or four to five days for raw red meats” like beef, pork, veal and lamb, she said. Home refrigerators should be kept below 40 degrees Fahrenheit, she added.

*From the Times of London: a German neo-Nazi man declared that he was a woman so he could get sent to a woman’s prison to have an easier time in stir  (h/t Mark). He’s serving 18 months for trespassing, inciting hatred, and criminal insults.  His photo is in JKR tweet below, but also look at the one in the Times to see how bizarre these convenient declarations of sex identity are.

A prominent right-wing extremist who once dismissed transgender people as fascists and “parasites on society” has won permission to serve a prison sentence in a German women’s jail after formally changing gender.

Marla-Svenja Liebich, 53, who until December went by the first name Sven, was convicted of inciting hatred, criminal insults and trespassing and handed an 18-month sentence for, among other things, trying to sell a baseball bat over the internet as a “deportation aid”.

Questions are now being raised as to whether the neo-Nazi exploited a recent reform that made it significantly easier for people to alter their officially registered gender.

Duh!  Are they serious?  It’s more a fact than a question.

More:

Under previous German law, gender reassignment required two separate supporting opinions from medical specialists. In November, however, the last government’s self-determination act reduced the threshold to simply signing a form at a local registry office.

Liebich has been a leader on the east German extreme-right scene since the Nineties, and ran the regional chapter of an explicitly Nazi organisation called Blood and Honour in Saxony-Anhalt. Blood and Honour was banned in 2000.

Liebich later organised numerous demonstrations in Halle, his native city, where the local branch of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency described Liebich’s activities as “unparalleled” across the entire country.

In recent years Liebich has campaigned energetically in support of the Putin regime and its war against Ukraine, selling the Russian ultra-nationalist “Z” symbol through his various social media channels.

Liebich is also an inveterate opponent of the LGBTQ movement. In 2022 he marked Pride month by posting a picture of a burning rainbow flag with the words: “Finally, the marginalised alphabet-people are being made visible again, until for the remaining 11 months of the year everything will be about making them visible.

. . . Critics have suggested that Liebich’s sudden conversion to the queer rights cause might have more to do with a desire for easier conditions in Chemnitz women’s prison than with a sincere change of heart.

Duh again! Once again, I don’t think that trans-identified men should be put into women’s prisons, though of course they may have trouble in men’s prisons, too.  But they are men, and should not be allowed to deceive people to get a chance to terrorize women in jail.

*From the AP’s reliable “oddities” section, we get something not that odd: AI has screwed up not only a court case in Australia, but a bunch of other stuff.

A senior lawyer in Australia has apologized to a judge for filing submissions in a murder case that included fake quotes and nonexistent case judgments generated by artificial intelligence.

The blunder in the Supreme Court of Victoria state is another in a litany of mishaps AI has caused in justice systems around the world.

Defense lawyer Rishi Nathwani, who holds the prestigious legal title of King’s Counsel, took “full responsibility” for filing incorrect information in submissions in the case of a teenager charged with murder, according to court documents seen by The Associated Press on Friday.

“We are deeply sorry and embarrassed for what occurred,” Nathwani told Justice James Elliott on Wednesday, on behalf of the defense team.

The AI-generated errors caused a 24-hour delay in resolving a case that Elliott had hoped to conclude on Wednesday. Elliott ruled on Thursday that Nathwani’s client, who cannot be identified because he is a minor, was not guilty of murder because of mental impairment.

“The ability of the court to rely upon the accuracy of submissions made by counsel is fundamental to the due administration of justice,” Elliott added.

The fake submissions included fabricated quotes from a speech to the state legislature and nonexistent case citations purportedly from the Supreme Court.

The errors were discovered by Elliott’s associates, who couldn’t find the cases and requested that defense lawyers provide copies.

The lawyers admitted the citations “do not exist” and that the submission contained “fictitious quotes,” court documents say.

The lawyers explained they checked that the initial citations were accurate and wrongly assumed the others would also be correct/

The prosecution didn’t even check the citations! But wait! There’s more!

In a comparable case in the United States in 2023, a federal judge imposed $5,000 fines on two lawyers and a law firm after ChatGPT was blamed for their submission of fictitious legal research in an aviation injury claim.

Judge P. Kevin Castel said they acted in bad faith. But he credited their apologies and remedial steps taken in explaining why harsher sanctions were not necessary to ensure they or others won’t again let artificial intelligence tools prompt them to produce fake legal history in their arguments.

Later that year, more fictitious court rulings invented by AI were cited in legal papers filed by lawyers for Michael Cohen, a former personal lawyer for U.S. President Donald Trump. Cohen took the blame, saying he didn’t realize that the Google tool he was using for legal research was also capable of so-called AI hallucinations.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej is trying on new faces:

Hili: Why do you keep grimacing?
Andrzej: I’m searching for new forms of expression.

In Polish:
Hili: Dlaczego ciągle się krzywisz?
Ja: Szukam nowych form wyrazu.

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

From Now That’s Wild:

From Jay, who saw this photo in an article about an Israeli injured in a West Bank shooting. Look at that motorcycle! It goes under “things with faces”:

From CinEmma:

Masih is quiet again, so we get her substitute batter:JKR, who of course commented on the German man who claimed he was a woman to get into a woman’s prison:

From Michael: a Free Press article relating how an Israeli dancer was told she couldn’t teach at Berkeley any more. She’s suing the school.

And from Luana; a hilarious video in which a savvy cop accuses a keffiyeh-wearing, pro-Palestinian protestor of “cultural appropriation.” The woman melts down and the cop appears amused:

From Malcolm. I didn’t know about this anime, but I am going to look for it:

One from my feed; how to deals with bears:

This Hungarian Jewish girl was gassed to death upon arriving at Auschwitz. She was two years old.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-08-22T10:36:32.183Z

. . . and two posts from Dr. Cobb. The first  refers to a paper on dance moves in cockatoos:

If you ever wondered what the ten most common dance moves are in the world of parrot discos, wonder no more. There's an entire paper devoted to bopping cockatoos, and it's as fabulous as you'd expect. 🪶🦜💃🚨 News flash, headbanging made the cut! 🧪 🌍 journals.plos.org/plosone/arti…

— Joanna Bagniewska (@joannabagniewska.com) 2025-08-21T12:37:15.333Z

And two posts I found on Matthew’s Bluesky thread. I was heartened that he’s not a big fan of AI:

21 thoughts on “Friday: Hili dialogue”

  1. A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
    My stories run up and bite me in the leg — I respond by writing them down — everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off. -Ray Bradbury, science-fiction writer (22 Aug 1920-2012)

  4. When I was a kid in Oz our neighbor had a pet cockatoo – they’re noisy but immensely entertaining. They do head bang. They’re very comical animated birds and live for decades… usually. Until my cat tore its head off when it peaked its beak through the fence. VERY embarrassing. Still friends with the neighbor 🙂

    D.A.
    NYC

  5. Union Square keffiyeh* lady is reason number 1,000,001 to support Israel. And the cops. 🙂

    D.A.
    NYC
    *Not “Palestinian” btw – actually Iraqi design/patterns, and almost certainly Made in China.

  6. Western Ukrainians have reason for worry now, too. Belarus is mobilizing along their border, per Reporting from Ukraine a few days ago. A bluff to push Zelensky to settle with P*tin? Intent on starting their own war? An effort to draw Ukrainian troops away from the Eastern front?

    And in other news from over there as covered more recently by RfU that doesn’t seem to have gotten attention, Russia and Iran have gotten irritated by Armenia and Azerbaijan’s tilting to the west, since it affects a pipeline that Iran has an interest in. Link to that as a comment since WordPress is incapable of handling two embedded links at once.

    If either of these spill into Poland or Turkey, then NATO is involved….

      1. Thank you Mr. Hempenstein, I followed that story for years. Amazing that last year a Muslim dictatorship ethnically cleansed about 100,000 Christian Armenians who’d been in those high mountains for centuries…. and nobody noticed. Killed many and the rest fled. Fast.

        It was a brutal, slow motion 30 year war in Nagorno Karbak, a slow crushing of a “kuffir” people by a petrostate.

        Similar to the fate of many, many non-Muslim minorities (the ones not utterly exterminated) in the Islamosphere. Dozens of peoples and tribes destroyed by The Religion of Peace. Silence.

        DavidAnderson_JD_NYC
        @DavidandersonJd

  7. Liebich is also now saying that s(he) is a devout Jewess and demands kosher meals, also regular visits by a rabbi.

    1. If Liebich doesn’t want to go to a men’s prison he should try not committing crimes.

      1. The “transwomen” (men) in women’s’ prisons are a big thing here and in the UK.

        One spectacular case had one (a sex offender, they are WILDLY overrepresented in imprisoned trans id’ing people btw – the numbers are AMAZING) in NJ impregnate two other prisoners b/c he was in the ladies prison.

        DavidAnderson_JD_NYC
        @DavidandersonJd

        1. I’ve heard that it’s a problem. Doesn’t surprise me.

          One of the dumbest ideas ever.

  8. Just imagine part of the U.S. being ceded to Russia. Suddenly Sarah Palin can not only see Russia from her deck. She lives in Russia. This is what the residents of Eastern Ukraine are facing.

  9. We had this Costco-sized jar of peanut butter in our house. (I eat peanut butter occasionally, in a sandwich with mashed bananas.) So the other day I scraped the last bits off the bottom, then asked “When does this expire anyway?”

    Well, it expired a year ago. I didn’t get sick from it.

    1. Yep, and have you ever noticed that peanut butter requires no refrigeration and never gets moldy. Even the Smucker’s (Chunky – accept no substitutes!) that is one of my staples, that contains only peanuts and salt.

  10. “The Times of London”??
    It’s “the Times”. Just as it’s “the Derby” in horse racing and “the Open” in golf.

    1. And “The Empire” and “The Royal Family” are similar anachronisms. The sun set on The Empire a lifetime ago, and today’s Royal Family is now mainly an ornament and tourist attraction. Nostalgia. But Britannia no longer rules the waves (or much else); Britons are indeed still not slaves, but in some ways they’re moving in that direction.

      1. I took Mr. Bond’s meaning as just that those institutions don’t have, or need, British references in their names. They just are The Times, The Derby, and The Open. They aren’t anachronisms. Foreign pale imitations might have to add monikers like “New York”, “Kentucky” and “U.S.”, to confess to being not up to the standard of the original but that is their problem, not Britain’s. Of course this annoys foreigners. It’s meant to. Especially their mortal enemies the French. (Famous apocryphal British newspaper headline: Fog in Channel. Europe cut off.)

        “The [British] Empire” has not been used in a literal sense, anachronistically or not, in my lifetime. Everyone knows it slipped away when the “White Dominions” were granted independence in 1931, going to war on their own legal initiative in 1939 out of genuine fellow-feeling for Britain (except in French Québec, which sat out the war.) India was the first crack in the non-white wall and then the dam broke with peaceful uncontested independence for all colonies that wanted it, ending (shamefully but realistically) with Hong Kong which didn’t.

        The Royal Family may be anachronistic but the King still plays an important social construct that gives personhood to the Crown, in whose very non-anachronistic name the British state exerts its power to legislate, to tax, fine, and imprison its citizens, to deport those who aren’t, and to go to war. Over the centuries of (mostly) bloodless stability, Parliaments in constitutional monarchies have taken almost all power from the King as a person but they have not figured out how to limit and restrict their own power the way the U.S. Constitution does with its uncompromising “Congress shall make no law . . .” language. Maybe this, not the Navy, is your last best defence against slavery.

  11. Anyone who trusts the New York Times could be forgiven for believing that the NY State Court of Appeals confirmed that Trump is guilty of fraud. I mean, it’s right in the headlines: “Court Overturns Trump’s Half-Billion-Dollar Judgment, but Upholds Fraud Case.” And in a brief article short of detail, they take no fewer than three opportunities to raise the issue of fraud: 1) “. . . while declining to overturn the fraud case against him.”, 2) “. . . providing him another opportunity to challenge the finding that he was a fraudster.”, and 3) “. . . in denying Mr. Trump’s bid to throw out the case, the court kept in place the ruling that he had committed fraud, an ignominious distinction for a sitting American president.” They do note that this “convoluted ruling reflected significant disagreement among the five-judge panel” but they do not detail that disagreement.

    Let’s turn to ABC News: “In a 323-page opinion, all five judges in the Appellate Division’s First Department agreed that the half-billion-dollar penalty imposed on Trump should be thrown out. Two of the judges said Trump was properly held liable for business fraud, but the fine was excessive. Two of the judges said the trial court was wrong to decide Trump committed fraud and the case should be retried — nonetheless, those two judges said they joined the decision “with great reluctance” to allow the case to proceed on appeal to the state’s highest court. A fifth judge said New York Attorney General Letitia James should not have brought the case in the first place.”

    Oh, I see. Only two of the five judges believed the finding of fraud was appropriate. Perhaps that is what the NYT meant by “significant disagreement.” The man is truly lucky in the obvious bias and stupidity of his public enemies.

    https://abcnews.go.com/US/appeals-court-throws-trumps-454-million-civil-fraud/story?id=124848691

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