Wednesday: Hili dialogue

August 27, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to a Hump day (“Pukkeldagen” in Norwegian ): August 27, 2025, and National Peach Day.  I just bought the Tilamook Ice Cream below, which isn’t cheap but is fantastic (the first ingredient listed is “cream”). Get some if it’s available. Tilamook also makes many other tasty brands, but first try the fruit: black cherry, marionberry pie, and strawberry flavors. It’s time you discovered Tilamook.  Although it’s not cheap, it’s not nearly as expensive on a volume basis as “fancy” brands like Ben & Jerry’s or Häagen-Dazs (the latter is of course a made-up name).And when it’s on sale the price is on par with, say Breyer’s Ice Cream (or “Frozen Dairy Product”) but Tilamook is infinitely better.

 

It’s also National Banana Lovers Day, Kiss Me Day, World Rock, Paper, Scissors Day, and National Pots de Crème Day.

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

Da Nooz:

*BIG NEWS.  This was the second story on the evening news. Click the headline below to read an archived version.

Excerpt:

The pop star Taylor Swift and the football player Travis Kelce are engaged.

“Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married,” the couple captioned a joint post on Instagram announcing the news on Tuesday, adding a dynamite emoji and a snippet of Ms. Swift’s song “So High School.”

In the first photo, Mr. Kelce is shown on bended knee below Ms. Swift, who is wearing a striped dress and standing under an elaborate floral arch. A later photo shows Ms. Swift sporting a large ring.

Here’s the Instagram Post.

I couldn’t care less, I have to say.  But a gazillion people think this is the biggest news since the world began. Oy!

*Trump signed Executive Orders not only eliminating cashless bail, but making the burning of an American flag a crime. First, the bail issue:

President Donald Trump moved on two issues important to his conservative base Monday, signing executive orders aimed at ending cashless bail across the country and pushing courts to reconsider the legality of burning the American flag.

Under cashless bail, judges may release people accused of crimes without requiring monetary payment. Such releases are often accompanied by conditions — such as electronic monitoring — and are rarely granted in cases involving the most violent offenses.

One order from Trump directs his staff to withhold federal funding from states and local jurisdictions that have removed money from the bail process. He sees such policies as overly lenient; proponents say they are central to ensuring equitable treatment for people charged with crimes who lack resources.

The executive orders, unveiled Monday morning in a two-hour meeting in the Oval Office, reflect Trump’s focus on law and order — a politically powerful issue with his base that he has harnessed to build support for his vision of the country. It was unclear what the practical effect of the orders would be, as the affected jurisdictions scrambled to square the law with the text of the decrees and determine their willingness to comply.

This, I suppose, is Trump’s way of ensuring that criminals without money won’t be set loose on the populace, part of his law-and-order gig.  I don’t have much of a dog in the bail fight, being ignorant of the arguments, but the flag stuff disturbs me more, as it seems unconstitutional:

Trump’s order on flag burning directs his administration to prosecute people who “desecrate” the American flag and to detain and remove immigrants who have been accused of such behavior.

The Supreme Court in 1989 issued a 5-4 ruling that found burning the American flag is protected by the First Amendment, but Trump in the executive order asked Attorney General PamBondi to find a case that could challenge that ruling. The majority of the current justices are significantly more conservative than the court was then.

A White House official on Monday cited images of flag burning “alongside violent acts” from recent protests as a justification for the order. Trump, a president particularly attuned to imagery, took great issue with pictures of demonstrators in Los Angeles waving Mexican flags and burning the American flag during protests of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement this summer.

Robert Corn-Revere, chief counsel of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), condemned the executive order as a violation of the First Amendment.

“You don’t have to like flag burning,” he said in a statement. “You can condemn it, debate it, or hoist your own flag even higher. The beauty of free speech is that you get to express your opinions, even if others don’t like what you have to say.”

I well remember the Supreme Court ruling on that issue (it was a squeaker), and I approved of their decision. It is, after all, a form of speech to burn the flag, and so long as you don’t do it in a way that promotes violence, endangers people, or damages property, I think it should be allowed. Corn-Revere’s statement is right on the mark.

*After the Olympics allowed two men to box against women in the women’s division of the last games, World Boxing issued a new rule mandating sex testing for all athletes wishing to compete in the women’s category (h/t Ginger K.)

World Boxing has introduced mandatory sex testing, to determine the eligibility of male and female athletes that want to participate in its competitions as part of a new eligibility policy published HERE today.

The policy is designed to ensure the safety of all participants and deliver a competitive level playing field for men and women and means that all athletes over the age of 18 that want to participate in a World Boxing owned or sanctioned competition will need to undergo a once-in-a-lifetime PCR (polymerase chain reaction) of functional medical equivalent genetic screening test to determine their sex at birth and their eligibility to compete.

The new policy comes into effect from 20 August 2025 and will be applied in the female category at the forthcoming World Boxing Championships in Liverpool, 4-14 September 2025.

It means that all athletes who wish to take part in the 10 female weight categories at the World Boxing Championships in Liverpool will need to undergo a PCR or functional medical equivalent genetic screening test to certify their eligibility to box.

World Boxing’s policy on ‘Sex Eligibility’ has been crafted by a Working Group of its Medical and Anti-Doping Committee which examined medical evidence from a range of sources and spent nearly 12 months consulting with experts and studying legal, societal and sporting developments relating to the issue of eligibility by sex.

Under the policy, World Boxing will operate two categories as determined by sex: a men’s category and a women’s category.  To be eligible for the men’s category, a competitor must be male at birth. To be eligible for the women’s category, a competitor must be female at birth.

Participation in either category will be determined by a PCR or functional medical equivalent genetic screening test to determine sex at birth. The PCR test is a laboratory technique used to detect specific genetic material, in this case the SRY gene, which reveals the presence of the Y chromosome, that is an indicator of biological sex. The test can be conducted by nasal/mouth swab, saliva or blood.

Athletes deemed to be male at birth, as evidenced by the presence of Y chromosome genetic material (the SRY gene) or with a difference of sexual development (DSD) where male androgenization occurs, will be eligible to compete in the male category.

It seems, from the statement below, that the Olympics will have to follow this rule.

World Boxing was launched in April 2023 with a mission to ensure that boxing remains at the heart of the Olympic movement. It held its first formal meeting with the IOC in May 2024 and on 25 February 2025, it was granted provisional recognition by the IOC as the International Federation (IF) within the Olympic Movement governing the sport of boxing at world level.

We also know that, according to the tweet at bottom, boxer Imane Khelif, born a male but raised as a woman, won’t be allowed to box any longer (he won a gold in the welterweight women’s boxing competition in the last Olympics), as it seems he has a Y chromosome and probably male gonads. While he says he’s only taking a temporary break from boxing, he adds that he won’t let himself be tested, which tells you something.

*We learn from the National Review something not surprising: despite the Presidential EO against it, DEI persists, but under another name. In other words, colleges and universities are cheating. The article is “One out of five faculty jobs still require DEI statements. They just don’t call it ‘DEI’ anymore.” (h/t Bill)

More than one out of every five recently posted job advertisements for faculty positions asked for some sort of statement related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, according to a new report by the Heterodox Academy. It also found that many universities have responded to the backlash against DEI by substituting different phrases to describe their requests for statements of ideological commitment.

The Heterodox Academy surveyed more than 10,000 faculty position advertisements from the 2024-2025 higher eduction hiring cycle and found that 22.3 percent — a total of 2,269 — requested some form of a DEI statement.

“Although discussions about DEI statements often focus on standalone documents explicitly labeled as ‘diversity statements,’ our analysis reveals that requests for DEI-related information in faculty job advertisements take many different forms,” reads the report, which was published on August 4.

The report, titled “What’s Going On With DEI Statements in Faculty Hiring?,” reveals that DEI-related affirmations are requested in different formats that may help universities escape scrutiny and further avoid explicitly violating legislation outlawing DEI statements.

The higher-education institutions may ask job applicants to explicitly address their commitment to DEI in a cover letter, explain how DEI is relevant in a statement about their “teaching philosophy,” or describe in their research proposals how their academic work promotes DEI. In some cases, the institutions are asked to describe “their commitment to inclusion and belonging” somewhere in the application, but not in a specified portion of the submitted materials.

Some of the job positions surveys did not explicitly use the phrase “DEI,” but instead used “diversity,” “equity,” or “inclusion” singularly. For example, one job listing for a mathematics department included in the report asks candidates to submit a “statement of commitment to equity in the classroom.” Additional terminology used to elicit DEI-type statements includes the phrases “anti-racism,” “social justice,” or “cultural competency.” One job posting in a biochemistry department asked applicants for “a cover letter that addresses outreach and belonging or diversity efforts, CV, references, and research and teaching statements.”

Sometimes, the universities do not explicitly request a “diversity statement” but instead ask candidates to explain their “preparation to teach and mentor students from groups historically underrepresented in higher education,” describe their experience “working with diverse groups,” or summarize their previous success educating “students from diverse backgrounds.”

The Heterodox Academy is a pretty reliable organization, so I take this report as provisionally true, even though I haven’t read it yet. But college and universities all over America are known to be flouting the rules by using sneaky ways of divining a student’s race (e.g., asking questions about difficulties applying students faced).  While I still favor some form of affirmative action among people with equal qualifications, and thus don’t think race is completely irrelevant, it also doesn’t appear seemly for colleges and universities to engage in this kind of duplicity.  But we knew it was coming.

*Trump is trying to fire one of the governors of the Federal Reserve Board, a move that may well be illegal.

In his monthslong battle to take control of the Federal Reserve, President Trump has tried threats, name-calling and — in one particularly memorable news conference with a hard-hat-wearing Jerome H. Powell — public humiliation. But he has always stopped short of the step that advisers warned could roil financial markets and upend a pillar of the global economy: attempting to fire a Fed official.

On Monday evening, he took that leap.

Mr. Trump’s target was not Mr. Powell, the Fed chair, at least for now. Instead it was Lisa Cook, one of the Fed’s six other governors. The president, in a letter, said he was removing Ms. Cook “for cause,” citing allegations of mortgage fraud. Ms. Cook has not been charged with any crime.

Peter Conti-Brown, an expert on Fed governance at the University of Pennsylvania, said her firing, if successful, would mark “the end of central bank independence as we know it.”

In the short term, Mr. Trump’s attempt to fire Ms. Cook creates more uncertainty at a critical moment for Fed policy. Ms. Cook has vowed to fight her ouster, and on Tuesday her lawyer promised to file a lawsuit challenging what he called an “illegal action.” Legal experts say she has a strong case given that she hasn’t been convicted of a crime and the fraud allegations involve her private conduct, not her work at the Fed.

. . . It is possible that the Republican-controlled Senate could confirm a replacement for Ms. Cook while she is still fighting for her seat, a standoff with no precedent in the Fed’s century-long history.

and legal analysis:

Can he do that?

Congress has limited the president’s power to remove Fed officials, saying they can be fired only “for cause,” which is generally understood to mean gross misconduct.

Is there cause for firing Ms. Cook?

The Trump administration has accused Ms. Cook of mortgage fraud, and Mr. Trump cited that as justification in his letter firing her.

Bill Pulte, the federal housing director, said he had referred the matter to the Justice Department for investigation. But Ms. Cook has not been charged with any crime.

In a statement issued on Monday, she said she would not step down. “President Trump purported to fire me ‘for cause’ when no cause exists under the law, and he has no authority to do so,” she said. “I will not resign.”

Many legal experts on Monday raised serious concerns with the manner of her firing, and the president’s justification for doing so.

Can Mr. Trump fire Ms. Cook without cause?

A 90-year-old Supreme Court precedent allowed Congress to shield the leaders of independent agencies from politics by making it hard to fire them. Mr. Trump says that those limits are an unconstitutional check on the president’s power to control the executive branch and that he must be allowed to remove officials for any reason or no reason.

While legal precedents support Cook, John Roberts has made statements that suggest otherwise. It’s a tossup: part of Trump’s plan to control EVERYTHING.

*Israel may have screwed up again, at the cost of Gazan civilian lives. As you have heard, the IDF attacked a Gaza hospital, killing 20 people.  Although the IDF says that there will be an “investigation”, a preliminary “explanation” is that they were targeting a HAMAS CAMERA.

A deadly Israeli strike on a Gaza hospital that killed 20 people, including five journalists, was targeting what the military believed was a Hamas surveillance camera, as well as people identified as militants, the Israeli military said Tuesday.

The military issued the statement as part of its initial inquiry into the attack, which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called a “tragic mishap.”

The military said the back-to-back strikes on southern Gaza’s largest hospital were ordered because soldiers believed militants were using the camera to observe Israeli forces and because Israel has long believed Hamas and other militant groups are present at hospitals, though Israeli officials rarely provide evidence to support that claim.

The military’s chief of general staff acknowledged several “gaps” in the investigation so far, including the kind of ammunition used to take out the camera.

The initial findings emerged Tuesday as a surge of outrage and unanswered questions mounted, after international leaders and rights groups condemned the strikes.

“The killing of journalists in Gaza should shock the world,” said United Nations Human Rights Office spokesperson Thameen Al-Kheetan. “Not into stunned silence but into action, demanding accountability and justice.”

Among the journalists killed in the strikes was Mariam Dagga, who worked for The Associated Press and other publications.

The Israeli military said there is an ongoing investigation into the chain of command that approved the strike. A military official who spoke on the condition of anonymity in line with military guidelines said both of the strikes that hit the hospital were launched from a tank.

Whether there is “proportionality” is a judgement call. Is one camera and a few militants worth the lives of 20 people, including five journalists (the number of Hamas members is unknown)? But it doesn’t look good, and whether the military gain is judged to outweigh the civilian deaths (that’s required by international law) is not known. Israel had better clean up its act, though, before it loses even U.S. support (it’s lost the rest of the world’s support, though, in my view, largely for the wrong reasons).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, there is a surfeit of apples:

Hili: We’re overloaded with apples.
Andrzej: Yeah, we better ask the neighbors for help.

In Polish:

Hili: Mamy nadmiar jabłek.
Ja: Tak, trzeba wezwać na pomoc sąsiadów.

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

From CinEmma:

From The Dodo Pet:

From The Absurd Sign Project Uncensored 2:

Masih is tweeting only in Farsi today, so we’ll use her substitute, speaking of boxing (I may have posted this before):

Imane Khelif

Retweeted by Ricky Gervais. I’m well familiar with this, especially when I say I don’t like strawberry-rhubarb pie:

From Malcolm: oh, the humanity!

One from my feed; well trained d*gs:

One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:

Had this 4-year-old French Jewish girl not been gassed to death upon arriving at Auschwitz, she'd be 87 today.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-08-27T10:16:43.809Z

Two posts from Dr. Cobb. He says he doesn’t know what the first one is, but it’s a cacomistle (Bassariscus sumichrasti):

I got extremely lucky this week and found my lifer Ringtail in the deserts of Arizona!! What a cute little creature, this is an encounter that I will never forget. #mammals

— WhitePaaws (@whitepaaws.bsky.social) 2025-08-21T22:13:46.251Z

. . . and the first in a thread of beetles:

62 thoughts on “Wednesday: Hili dialogue”

  1. The typical arc of celebrity relationship (long courtship, short marriage, divorce) has me seeing celebrity engagements announcements and say, “Oh, that’s too bad. They seemed like a nice couple.”

  2. Cashless bail is a travesty, and has led to countless violent offenders being put on the streets and committing more crimes. If it is iniquitous to have cash bail, then the answer should be not to have bail for any violent crimes.

    As for the flag burning thing, that’s clearly a non-starter. The Court has been explicit about this, and the President cannot create crimes. Only Congress can do that. This might be another psych-out from Trump, though, as it will undoubtedly trigger a waive of flag burning by the “resistance,” which will only drive more people away.

    1. I’m not sure that there are “countless” defendants on the streets due to cashless bail policies, and the examples of counting are difficult from which to generalize. This comes from a recent journalism report:

      “A Brennan Center for Justice report in August 2024 found that while both politicians and police leaders have blamed cashless bail and similar policies for upticks in violent crime, there is “no statistically significant relationship” between the two, after researchers compared 22 U.S. jurisdictions with bail reform policies to 11 without.

      A year after the law eliminating cash bail in Illinois took effect, researchers at the Loyola Chicago Center for Criminal Justice released a report that said: “While we lack the data needed for a causal analysis at this point, we can say at least that crime in Illinois did not go up.””

      https://time.com/7312226/trump-cashless-bail-executive-orders-explainer/

      (The Yolo County report is not reliable, since the cashless bail policy it studied did not incorporate the restrictions that have been enrolled in other jurisdictions.)

    2. The bit about cashless bail is incorrect. The majority of perps involved are non-violent offenders, and the % of those who meanwhile commit crimes is low. It isn’t 100%, mind you. But meanwhile being unable to make bail can be a life destroyer. This other way of seeing it isn’t perfect, mind you, but it isn’t simple.

      1. Why not commit no crime?l It’s not compulsory. Problem solved. All these shoplifting offences should just not happen and it impacts everyone.

        1. The people locked up because they can’t make bail have not been adjudicated of a crime.

          Which is the reason why a good case can be made for cashless bail in certain situations.

    3. I am pretty sure that Trump has no clue that the proper way to dispose of a damaged or no longer serviceable flag is to burn it.

      1. Ann Landers had a good take on that many years ago, which I would wager that President Trump is perfectly aware of. Some smart-aleck “gotcha’d” her with the disposal by fire thing when she condemned flag-burning during the Vietnam war. She pointed out — “Smarten up, Bub!” — that there is a difference between respectful discreet private burning of a tattered flag (so it doesn’t end up on a trash heap) and protest burning of a perfectly good flag intended to bring public disrespect on the Republic. Neither can likely be illegal, of course.

        I’ll avoid commenting on whether Americans get too wrapped up in their flag. Not my business. We seem OK with aboriginal activists replacing the maple leaf on ours with a bloody red hand to signify they’re upset about something or other.

        1. Agreed. And I really like Mollie Ivins quote “I prefer someone who burns the flag and then wraps themselves up in the Constitution over someone who burns the Constitution and then wraps themselves up in the flag.”

  3. A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
    When you’re traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road. -William Least Heat-Moon, travel writer (b. 27 Aug 1939)

  4. Anyone here understand the “Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married” post?

    1. I can’t see it as anything but an oblique reference to their relative IQ status. But perhaps that doesn’t matter; my Biology teacher (F) was sh*gging the short Welsh PE teacher (M) with undisguised relish. Awkward, as her husband was one of my father’s subordinates, so I kept quiet.

    2. I took it to mean that one of the two is the sportstype and the other the literary type; a connection to two well known figures in anyones life (the two teachers, I mean). It brought a smile on my face.

      1. She does write popular poetry, so that’s something.
        After all, Mr Zimmerman did get the Literature Nobel.

  5. While he says he’s only taking a temporary break from boxing, he adds that he won’t let himself be tested, which tells you something.

    That horse has bolted. He had a Y chromosome in 2022 and 2023 and was disqualified from women’s events as a result.
    https://www.si.com/fannation/boxing/leaked-medical-report-pours-gasoline-on-imane-khelif-boxing-controversy

    Only the decision of the IOC to ignore these results and substitute a “passport test” allowed him in to savage poor Angela Carini. BTW, if you want a laugh, look at the Wikipedia page on Khelif. Total and wilful ignoral of facts.

    1. Interestingly, I see that the other suspect boxer from the Paris Olympics, Lin Yu-ting, plans to be tested and to take part in the upcoming World Championships. Will be looking forward to seeing if s/he goes through with it and if so how that works out.

      1. I wonder if he will actually go through with the test. Many people I trust have said he’s a man, but I haven’t watched any clips of him so I haven’t seen the power of his punch.

        If he has been shown to have a Y chromosome, it is still possible that he is a woman as women with Swyer Syndrome are XY. They are very rare and their genetic difference doesn’t give them the strength of a male so they should be allowed to compete against other women. I doubt that is the case with Lin Yu-ting though as he would have had no reason to cover it up if he really was a woman.

        Sywers affects approximately between 1:30.000 and 1:80.000 born children that have a female phenotype, no genital ambiguity at birth, and normal Müllerian structures. [Source Mediline plus].

  6. Khelif likely has 46 XY 5-ARD, the same as Caster Semenya. Males with that are often mis-sexed at birth, because their external male genitalia don’t develop normally. Sometimes their sex only becomes apparent at puberty when their internal testes trigger a male puberty.

    With medical assistance Semenya has fathered children with his own sperm.

    https://medlineplus.gov/genetics/condition/5-alpha-reductase-deficiency/

    If you look at Khelif boxing, his head hardly moves when a woman hits him in the face. When he punches a woman in the head, her head is dramatically knocked sideways. This is because a males’ average power during a punching motion is 162% greater than females’, with the least-powerful man still stronger than the most powerful woman.

    It’s why Angela Carini quit after 46 seconds. He could literally have killed her. It’s outrageous that this man still has medals that belong to women.

    Re the flag….

    If I buy a flag it becomes my property, and I can do whatever I want with it. I had US visitors who were appalled to see buildings here flying in the saltire at night without a spotlight on it. They claimed it was disrespectful. Ridiculous.

      1. The daily Pledge (of) Allegiance in schools is still a thing, isn’t it? (They did drop the Bellamy salute from it in 1942.)

        Repeated mindless indoctrination goes very deep. See John Cheever’s 1964 classic short story The Swimmer. (FWIW, the 1968 movie adaptation with Burt Lancaster rates a 7.6/10 on IMDB.)

  7. The traditional and honorable method for disposal of an old or damaged American flag is by burning. If burning in protest is illegal then so must be the burning for honorable disposal since they are both clearly political speech. I wonder how old flags will be retired under the new EO?

  8. I discovered Tillamook ice cream two years ago and have bought nothing else since then. It stays soft and easily scoopable (is that a word?) even after repeated openings or a long time in the freezer. Tillamook also makes excellent sausage sticks.

    I marvel at the mental contortions needed to justify making burning the US flag a crime. One cannot hold the symbol of a freedom above the actual freedom itself.

      1. It’s more expensive here but it’s often on sale at Safeway. Their German Chocolate Cake is great. So is their Apple Crisp.

    2. “One cannot hold the symbol of a freedom above the actual freedom itself.”
      That is so perfectly expressed, thank you.

      1. I agree, with the caveat that foreigners who shout “Death to America” while in the US should be deported. The country has no obligation to host foreigners who hate it.

        1. I submit that burning the Stars and Stripes in public with or without shouting “Death to America!” — what else does one shout while burning the flag?, with “Victory to the Viet Cong!” having largely gone out of fashion and “River to the Sea” probably needing an Israeli flag for proper effect — should not be a crime in a free-speech country. But it would be just the sort of “derogatory information” that the State Dept. could reference in revoking one’s visa as indicating the United States is better off without one’s presence in it. The advantage of citing the flag is that it is easier to tell on TicToc videos who is doing the burning than who is doing the shouting.

          To paraphrase an old joke, “Mahmoud, I don’t know how MIT would ever get along without your contribution as a foreign grad student. But starting first thing tomorrow morning, they are just going to have to try.”

    3. I’ve known Tillamook as ice cream only, and the mental image of a sausage/ice cream popsicle sounded way worse than strawberry rhubarb pie.

      Tillamook creamery is a separate entity from the Tillimook who make the jerky and sausage sticks.
      TMI: https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-9th-circuit/1383131.html

      I like Tillamook, but remain true to my Blue Bell natural vanilla, and their 1/2 gallon.

      And a big YES! to your flag comment.

    4. The flag is actually the symbol of the Republic for which it stands, a nation once renowned for its liberty and justice. O tempora, o mores! (That’s Cicero’s Latin for “Get off my Lawn!”)

  9. Looks like SpaceX had a fully successful test flight 10 last night, stress testing soft landings of booster and “ship” as well as thermal protection system. It Was an exciting 45 minutes or so to watch. Plus they provide communications including video throughout with starlink cluster. Congrats to Elon and his team!

    1. I watched it all on re-run. It went well in pretty much every way, even the practice launch of satellites!
      Any idea why the booster skirt got shredded during its descent?

      1. No idea, but as they said, they were doing a number of in situ experiments as a part of the flight. Given the past incomplete flights, it was really gripping to watch last night in real-time. I did skip the middle twenty minutes or so (after sat deployment) while they were at altitude in darkness and read for a bit, tuning in again about five minutes before they hit sunrise over the Indian Ocean. Also amazing that the Ship aerodynamic control brought it down right at the instrumented buoy off the western coast of Australia after a flight half way around the world, giving of video of the soft splash down.

  10. Nasser Hospital (named for Gamal Nasser, the Egyptian President bent on the genocide of Israelis, who launched his army against Israel in 1948. When I was a kid, we had a dart board with his face on it, back in the days when the Left loved Israel) is a multiply-documented Hamas headquarters where Hamas interrogates and murders Gazans they accuse of collaborating with Israel. It appears they murdered a young Gazan boy there the very day Israel fired on the hospital.

    So far, according to this Twitter thread, six of the “independent journalists”, who for some reason had office space in the Hamas headquarters – sorry, hospital – have been identified as having Hamas connections, including one who actually took part in October 7th:

    https://x.com/EFischberger/status/1960071111254979027

    1. Thanks for that. The tell in the story Jerry quotes was the editorial comment, “although Israel rarely provides evidence to support that claim.” “Rarely” means, “not never”, so it means that Israel has provided such evidence, which you cite in your comment. It could mean the IDF “rarely” hits Nasser Hospital but each time it does, it provides evidence of its militarization. (The boxing authorities have only “rarely” provided evidence that Imane Khelif is a man.)

      Journalists aren’t a special class of non-combatant civilians. The war in the street doesn’t stop so they can cross it to get that Pulitzer photo. Even if they aren’t working for the other side, if they visit a war zone and then find themselves in the way of a legitimate attack on a militarized civilian target, too bad for them. If they are enemy operatives they become the target.

      Proportionality is in the judgment of the attacker, not the attacked or the outside world. It assesses the moral military motive of those ordering the attack, not its outcome. If the IDF valued this military objective more than it valued the lives of true unmilitarized non-combatants at risk, it doesn’t matter what the world thinks, (unless the world can somehow arrest Prime Minister Netanyahu.) Much of the world, and certainly all of Gaza, values all Israeli objectives as negative, which is why it squawks so loudly when Israel invokes proportionality. The risk is that in the face of mounting IDF casualties the IDF of necessity must value enemy civilians as proportionally ever less valuable, to spare its forces from costly meticulous fighting where they are exposed to IEDs and treachery by combatant civilians. Long wars are hard for a small country that must win.

      Finally, the possibility of a true mistake has to be acknowledged. Maybe the commander who green-lit the tanks to shoot got it wrong about the military value. Or maybe he knew the journos were in the Hamas command post and decided to take them out as targets, and Mr. Netanyahu has decided to make it sound like a mistake, for political consumption, while secretly giving him a medal. Sometimes the fog of war causes mistakes. Other times it provides operational cover and security. That’s why you don’t want even friendly, but blabbermouthed, journalists around.

      The danger with honest mistakes is that they get embellished in the re-telling as war crimes, or at least get seen as a pattern of incompetent carelessness. If a mistake leads to a military tragedy, the IDF as a learning organization knows it has to try to figure out what went wrong. It doesn’t need to punish commanders for making mistakes unless their judgment is seen to be not up to standard — then they should be reassigned. Punishment only leads to cover-ups. If there are enough mistakes, though, perversely for Israel alone, they erode Israel’s right to exist. “See? This wouldn’t happen if River to the Sea!” Even most of Israel’s (now mostly former) friends say, “You have right to exist… but only if you conduct yourselves to an exquisitely demanding moral standard. Slip up — misinterpret an intercepted fragment of conversation in Arabic — and we’ll throw you to the wolves. You are Jews, don’t ever forget that. The world lets you live on sufferance.”

      Given all the above, I hope it turns out that the tanks got it right and whacked the hospital for good reasons.

      1. Before then Nassar did have an active program to acquire a nuke.
        “Egypt’s gonna get one too / Just to use on you-know-who”(TL, R.I.P.)

  11. “We also know that, according to the tweet at bottom, boxer Imane Khelif, born a male but raised as a woman, won’t be allowed to box any longer (he won a gold in the welterweight women’s boxing competition in the last Olympics), as it seems he has a Y chromosome and probably male gonads.”

    Do you have evidence for this? Or are you misgendering someone based on speculation? Even if you believe that biological sex and which pronouns you use should be based on whether someone produces sperm or eggs or has the ‘biological machinery’ for producing sperm or eggs, shouldn’t you wait for scientific evidence before deciding to use pronouns which the individual in question doesn’t identify with?

    1. Yes, there is evidence, such as a leaked medical report. There’s also the point that Khelif could simply ask for and make public an independent report if it’s not true.

      Further, using “he” for him is not “misgendering” him, it’s correctly sexing him. Who decided that pronouns relate to “gender” instead of sex, and do the rest of us get a say in that?

    2. “….shouldn’t you wait for scientific evidence before deciding to use pronouns which the individual in question doesn’t identify with?”

      With respect, no. I do not need a peer-reviewed publication to decide what language I’ll use. I will defer to people’s choices for what they wish to be called, so long as they don’t annoy me, irrespective of what a science journal may say about them. You can believe you’re Napoleon Bonaparte for all I care, and I’ll be happy to call you ‘bony’. But you aren’t really an emperor and if you annoy me, I’ll just call you “nuts”.

  12. Hey, I know the photographer for the milkweed longhorn beetle! But actually that taxon is even weirder since the compound eyes are split in two by the antennae, so it’s a 4-eyed beetle. The genus name (Tetraopes) refers to that.

  13. With regard to the topic of the Ricky Gervais clip: pianist Michael Omartian has been a notable pianist/keyboardist in the LA music recording scene for the last 50-plus years. A lot of people know him from his piano work on Steely Dan’s “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number.”

    Rick Beato had Omartian on his podcast, during which Omartian told of speaking before some group about his professional experiences, which would reasonably include Steely Dan. During question time, some guy in his late teens/early twenties got up not to ask a question but to announce to Omartian and the universe that he did not like Steely Dan.

  14. I had forgotten this excellent line from the late Molly Ivins: “I prefer someone who burns the flag and then wraps themselves up in the Constitution over someone who burns the Constitution and then wraps themselves up in the flag.”

  15. Tillamook ice cream is among the best of the commercially available brands. We’ve been to the creamery! For an ice cream lover it’s crazy amazing to see huge vats of cream being stirred and then poured into those cartons to be made into the delicious confection. Same with their remarkable cheese. We buy big blocks of the sharp cheddar ar our local supermarket. Visit the creamery if you can. It’s in Tillamook, Oregon.

    Burning the American flag is an ugly form of protest, but it is protected speech—at least for the moment. The people who burn flags are doing so publicly, so we know who they are can condemn their actions.

    Yes, the IDF screwed up. They were supposed to take out that camera using a drone. Using missiles was, well, overkill. It’s sad that some innocent people were killed. Journalists would not have to even be there if Hamas would release the hostages.

  16. I am waiting for an American flag-waving protestor who watches the burning of an American flag by counterprotestors, grabs their Mexican flag, Palestinian flag, or Pride flag, burns it, gets charged with appropriate property crimes, and then has “hate” crime penalties tacked on for targeting ethnicity, national origin, or other community identity. Trump is looking for precisely these optics.

  17. Cashless bail (not around in my day defending people in court but voted for about a decade? ago in NYC)… is one of those ideas that seems like a good idea at the time: poor people shouldn’t be discriminated against.

    But in reality it is a four square balls to the wall DISASTER. There’s a REASON why people who can’t afford any bail more than just being poor. One big reason is they’ve burned every bridge in life – there’s no friend/family etc who can whip around and get them out. These burnt bridge people are not the (criminals) you want roaming your city. Bail – the money required – is a sorting mechanism.

    I should have realized that at the time – I was an attorney for the regular working poor which turns out to be a HUGE step above public defender types (the main beneficiaries of no-cash bail).

    D.A.
    NYC

    1. Forgive my ignorance, but wasn’t the amount of bail always determined in part on the income/economic situation of the accused, anyway?

  18. IDF hospital screw up. Funny… I don’t remember any such thing before Oct. 7th.

    Almost like somebody started a suicidal war of annihilation against a more powerful neighbor and…. lost. My enemy’s lives have negative moral value to me – all of them.

    Onwards Israeli heroes. The only parameter here is to not piss off the Saudis so much they won’t make friends. When/if they do Israel will be able to triangulate the Palestinian death cult.

    D.A.
    NYC

  19. National Peach day.
    I planted a peach tree 2.5 yrs ago. Last year we were given 4 peaches by this tree but one rolled under the renga renga lillies (Arthropodium cirratum) and I never saw it again. It’s a mystery. The ones we did eat were the best flavoured peaches (we shared them with rhe granddaughter) I’d had for some time.
    I noticed Jerry that you used the Allman Brothers “Eat a Peach” album cover the other day. Nice album from my long lost (like the peach) teens.

  20. The interesting thing about the Nasser strike was that the second IDF attack happened about 10 minutes after the first, giving paramedics and journalists time to gather at the site before killing them. That is why so many journalists were killed in one strike. The “double tap” method is designed to kill responders, not cameras.

    The aforementioned camera has been identified in news reports as a Reuters camera. Of course, it is very possible the Reuters footage was being used by Hamas to track IDF movements.

    1. It is flatly false to say that President Trump’s executive order purports to make it a crime to burn the American flag. You can read the text of the order here:

      https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/08/prosecuting-burning-of-the-american-flag/

      It directs the Justice Department to prioritize the prosecution of cases in which a defendant, while otherwise breaking the law, also burned a flag.

      Does that make it constitutional? Probably not. But it is certainly a closer question than the Washington Compost would have you believe

      1. Thanks for posting the Trump order “PROSECUTING BURNING OF THE AMERICAN FLAG.”

        It’s a useful reminder of how Jim Crow guidance for Southern sheriffs used to be phrased: look hard enough and long enough and you’ll find something to charge them with.

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