Friday: Hili dialogue

October 24, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Friday, October 24, 2025, and we’ll soon be in November. It’s also National Bologna Day. Here’s how they make the sausage (maybe you don’t want to know), and yes, bologna is a sausage. Note that they pronounce the word as “ball-own-ya”. That’s wrong! But note too that one of the ingredients is often myrtle berry.

It’s also Black Thursday (the day in 1929 when the stock market crashed), Food Day, Global Champagne Day, National Good & Plenty Day, and National Tripe Day (I tried it once in France, and that was the last time for me).

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the October 24 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Putin is rattling his sabers again after Trump imposed severe sanctions on two Russian oil companies. The sanctions are the good news. The bad news is that Trump won’t give Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine.

A day after President Trump’s first major punitive action against Russia over its war in Ukraine, President Vladimir V. Putin on Thursday called new U.S. oil sanctions “an unfriendly act” and warned of an overwhelming response if Kyiv gets the powerful missiles it seeks.

Speaking with journalists in Moscow, Mr. Putin said that the sanctions against the two biggest Russian oil giants would hurt the country’s economy, but that Moscow would never make any concessions under pressure.

“This is an unfriendly act toward Russia, and it doesn’t strengthen relations between Russia and the United States that only began to get restored,” Mr. Putin said. “But no self-respecting country and no self-respecting people ever decide anything under pressure.”

Asked about Ukraine’s push to get long-range Tomahawk missiles from the United States or other Western states, a request that Mr. Trump has publicly entertained but so far not approved, Mr. Putin warned that “this is an attempt at escalation.”

“If a strike is made on Russian territory with such a weapon, the response will be very serious, if not staggering,” he said. “Let them think about that.”

Mr. Putin’s comments signaled that the Kremlin was not willing to soften its maximalist demands to end the war in Ukraine. Russia has continued to strike Ukraine daily with drones and missiles, and its troops are still pushing to occupy more Ukrainian territory, even as the Trump administration has demanded that Moscow agree to a cease-fire along the current battle lines.

It’s not that Tomahawk missiles are nuclear or anything; it’s the fact that they would come from the U.S. that’s bothering Putin. And it’s not that the U.S. has not previously funneled arms (sometimes indirectly) to Ukraine. Putin just wants land.  Another NYT article notes that these sanctions could cause a rupture between Russia and one of its biggest oil customers, India:

Business concerns could end an impasse between United States and India over Russian oil, and whether India ought to feel free to buy it.

President Trump has said several times that India was on the verge of ending its purchases, which have saved India billions of dollars while generating billions in revenue for Russia in the years since it invaded Ukraine.

That has not happened.

But on Wednesday, the U.S. Treasury announced a new raft of sanctions aimed at Russia’s two biggest oil firms, Rosneft and Lukoil. The move could convince India’s private businesses and government-owned oil companies that it is time to quit buying oil from Russia, in a way that threats and tariffs did not.

*Two top officials in America’s Anglican Church are in big trouble: one accused of sexual misconduct, the other of allowing men with histories of sexual misconduct or violence to have meaningful roles in the Church. (Article archived here.)

The Anglican Church in North America — forged from the headline-grabbing conservative revolt against the Episcopal Church’s first openly gay bishop — is now confronting allegations by clergy and parishioners against two of its top leaders: One is accused of sexual misconduct, while the other allegedly abused his power by allowing men with troubling histories into the church

The denomination’s senior-most official, Archbishop Stephen Wood, 62, has been accused by a former children’s ministry director of putting his hand against the back of her head and trying to kiss her in his office in April 2024. The incident allegedly occurred two months before he was elected to the helm, according to a new church presentment, which The Washington Post obtained in advance of its Monday submission.

The woman, who gave an interview to The Post, also accused Wood of giving her thousands of dollars in unexpected payments from church coffers before the alleged advance. Wood, a married father of four sons, remains the rector of St. Andrew’s Church in the Charleston, South Carolina, area, and a bishop overseeing a diocese of more than 40 churches across the South.

If the presentment triggers an ecclesiastical trial, Wood could be defrocked and forced to step down. He is the first archbishop in the Anglican Church in North America to face a presentment, a denomination spokeswoman said.

. . . . Beyond confronting the allegation of making an unwanted advance on his employee, Wood also faces complaints from priests that he plagiarized sermons and bullied and disparaged church staffers in the years before he became archbishop. The presentment accuses Wood of violating his ordination vows, committing sexual immorality and bringing “scandal and offense” upon his office.

And the other guy:

The presentment — a report that chronicles formal allegations of canonical offenses — is unfolding amid a protracted ecclesiastical trial against another leader, Stewart Ruch III, an Anglican bishop who oversees a diocese of 18 churches in the Midwest. Parishioners and clergy have accused Ruch, 58, of allowing men with histories of violence or sexual misconduct to worship or hold staff or leadership roles in his diocese.

Testimony in Ruch’s trial, which was conducted privately on Zoom, wrapped up in mid-October. A verdict from the court’s seven-member panel of judges — a group of bishops, priests and parishioners — is expected to arrive later this year. Ruch declined to comment through a diocese spokeswoman, who cited a court directive prohibiting him from media interviews during the trial.

This is one of the problems of religion: it not only has authority figures, but ones that children may think have the power to send them to heaven or hell. And who would believe accusations against a “holy man.” Well, as Christopher Hitchens said after the death of Jerry Falwell, “The empty life of this ugly little charlatan proves only one thing.  That you can get away with the most extraordinary offences to morality and to truth in this country, if you’ll just yourself called ‘reverend’.”

*The science column Trilobites in the NYT (author: Gennaro Tomma) describes the survival of three-legged “pirate” lizards in the wild.

Scientists have long thought that a lizard losing a leg should be a death sentence. New evidence seems to overturn this assumption, showing that some lizards can not only survive, but even thrive after losing one or more limbs.

James Stroud, an evolutionary biologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has spent years catching lizards in the wild to study how they evolve. He and his colleagues long thought that even the smallest difference in the length of a lizard’s leg could affect its ability to run from predators and chase their prey. Losing an entire limb seemed much more severe.

However, every now and then he and his colleagues would observe something odd. “We’ll find a lizard completely missing its leg, and it seems fine,” Dr. Stroud said. He casually calls them “three-legged pirate lizards.”

Speaking with other researchers, he would hear similar stories.

To further investigate, he and his colleagues contacted a long list of lizard biologists, asking them whether they had ever seen a lizard with three legs. “Most have never thought about it and just had a random picture on their phone, just like: ‘Huh, this is odd’,” Dr. Stroud said.

The team received images that documented 122 individuals on four continents, with 58 species included, from geckos to iguanas to chameleons. Some had lost only one foot, others even two legs.

This allowed Dr. Stroud’s team to establish that surviving the loss of a limb is widespread among lizard species. They reported their finding last week in the journal The American Naturalist, adding that usually less than 1 percent of individuals in a population are missing a leg.

The original paper in The American Naturalist, with many authors, can be found here. Click to read:

Here’s the summary:

Variation in limb length among lizards is a paradigmatic example of evolutionary adaptation. Given the established adaptive significance of limb length, reasonable hypotheses about the effect of limb loss might include that it reduces the survival, health, and welfare of lizards, perhaps by reducing their locomotor performance. Taken at face value, the case studies that we have assembled indicate that the consequences of limb loss may sometimes be less severe than hypothesized, even for lizards that lose an entire limb. For example, many of the lizards in our dataset do not appear to have incurred a high foraging cost, appearing healthy and well nourished (figs. 1, 2). In cases where quantitative data were available, the body condition of limb-deficient lizards, corrected for body size, was often comparable or superior to that of uninjured lizards (table 1), and some limb-impaired lizards were reproductively active. Longitudinal data, when available, revealed mixed results. Some limb-deficient lizards survived longer than most fully limbed individuals, while others were not observed to survive spans of 6 months or less between sampling periods (although low survival of all lizards in these populations means that limb damage may not be the cause of the quick demise of limb-deficient lizards).

Of course the authors realize (and point out) that there’s an ascertainment bias here, as lizards who lose a limb and don’t survive wouldn’t be part of the study set. Plus the fact that the lizards appear to be doing well now doesn’t mean they do well (at least in terms of reproduction) over their whole lifetime.  Many papers are said to have shown an adaptive difference among species in limb length, and that may still be the case, for what this paper shows is just that losing a limb doesn’t mean that you become a pirate lizard who does very poorly compared to lizards with the normal four limbs. It does not show that there no adaptive cost to losing a leg.

Here, from the paper, is a figure showing lizards with more than one leg damaged, apparently doing okay:

(From paper): Figure 2. Examples of damage to more than one limb. A, Brown basilisk (Basiliscus vittatus [Corytophanidae], table S1, ID 61) missing almost all of its forelimb and partially missing contralateral hindlimb (B. Hillen). B, Jamaican opal-bellied anole (Anolis opalinus [Anolidae], ID 20) missing most of a forelimb and lower contralateral hindlimb (D. Calder/L. Johnson/I. Maayan). C, Jamaican stripe-footed anole (Anolis lineatopus [Anolidae], ID 16) missing both forelimbs (A. Walker).
*I didn’t realize the extent to which free speech was suppressed in Switzerland until reader Bill called my attention to an article on Jonathan Turley’s site which is pretty horrific.  The issue it reports, in fact, has gotten very little publicity: a man was jailed for simplky questioning the claim that you cannot tell sex from human skeletons. It’s well known, however, that you can tell biological sex with high accuracy by combining a number of features. Here’s from a 2005 paper in Forensic Science International (my bolding):

Examination of the sample by an individual with training in physical anthropology, but no case experience, suggests that experience is likely to contribute moderately to the accuracy of the sex determination. Namely, the inexperienced anthropologist accurately assessed the sex of the sample 95.04% of the time; 4.06% less accurate than the experienced anthropologist. The two anthropologists showed the least agreement in scoring the ventral arc and composite arc on the pelvic bones.

Switzerland was famous (or infamous) for staying neutral in World War II. It simply would not take a side between the Nazis and the rest of the world. However, when it comes to free speech, Switzerland has declared war on anyone who challenges certain orthodox positions, including gender policies. Just ask Emanuel Brünisholz.

Brünisholz is reportedly about to start a 10-day prison stint due to his voicing skepticism about claims that skeletons are transgender.

Note that transgender usually means that individuals do have a biological sex, as do transsexuals, but adopt certain non-skeletal characteristics of the other sex (or have a gender of their own devising), and unless there is radical hormone-mediated changes in the skeleton, or surgery on bones, then the claim that a skeleton was transgender (especially before hormones were used) is quite dubious. But Turley continues:

There is very little coverage of this story. Free speech cases are often downplayed by European media. So, we have only limited information coming from conservative sites.

In 2022, he responded to a Facebook post by Swiss National Council member Andreas Glarner on the controversy. Some, including academics in the United States, are now claiming that you really cannot gauge the sex of individuals from their skeletons.

The wind-instrument repairman thought that such claims were unfounded and posted a comment that said, “If you dig up LGBTQI people after 200 years, you’ll only find men and women based on their skeletons. Everything else is a mental illness promoted through the curriculum.”

Brünisholz then received a knock on his door from the Burgdorf police and then a prosecution letter for engaging in “hate speech”  and “publicly belittling” comments based on sexual orientation under the Swiss Criminal Code. He was convicted and fined 500 Swiss Francs.

If true, this sounds like just another absurd use of a criminal charge to silence those with opposing views. However, a court actually convicted him and then another court upheld the conviction. He was ordered to pay a fine or go to jail. He is now going to jail for simply expressing his view, a view supported by many scientists and citizens.

The court adopted an exceptionally broad definition of the protected class under Swiss law:

“LGBTQI means lesbian, gay, bi, transgender, queer and intersex, and denotes therefore different sexual orientations. It’s a loose group of people who consider themselves a part of the aforementioned sexual orientations. Therefore, LGBTQI is a group of people with specific sexual orientations.”

The case is only the latest example of how free speech is in a free fall in Europe. I spoke in Berlin at the World Forum, where European leaders gathered in one of the most strikingly anti-free speech conferences I have attended. This year’s forum embraced the slogan “A New World Order with European Values.” That “new world order” is based on an aggressive anti-free speech platform that has been enforced for years by the European Union.

The forensic science paper quoted at the top was done blind, without knowledge of what the biological sex of the skeletons was.  Brünsholz is right. To be jailed for being right, just because you’re ideologically “impure”, is reprehensible. Shame on the Swiss authorities.

*The Times of Israel reports what my Jewish friend Peggy Mason called “They hate us—take gazillion and one.” A professor in London was threatened by students because he was in the equivalent of the IDF. But nearly all Israelis, save the ultra-Orthodox, Israeli Arabs, and a few others, have to serve in the IDF. And that includes women, who must serve two years.

Masked demonstrators stormed the classroom of an Israeli-born economics professor at City University of London Wednesday.

The professor, Michael Ben-Gad, said they threatened to behead him and shouting accusations that he was a “war criminal” and a “Nazi.”

“They came right up to me and screamed in my face,” Ben-Gad told Sky News. “One of them made a threat about having my head chopped off.”

Video footage shared on social media showed masked protesters taking over the classroom and yelling that Ben-Gad “is part of the genocide in Gaza.”

The video shows a handful of enraged masked students charging that Ben-Gad served in the “IOF” — an acronym for Israeli Occupation Forces, a term used by some anti-Israel activists to refer to the IDF — and chanting pro-Palestine slogans as security personnel attempted to guide them out of the room.

Ben-Gad, who served in the IDF in the 1980s and has ties to Israeli universities and the Bank of Israel, said he has been targeted by an anti-Israel group called City Action for Palestine demanding his dismissal.

A week earlier, the group had distributed flyers around campus branding Ben-Gad a “terrorist” and calling for his dismissal because his compulsory army service, from 1982 to 1985, coincided with the Sabra and Shatila massacre in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War.

Ben-Gad responded that his “only crime” was being a Jew who has lived in the Middle East.

“If the objective of the demonstration was to frighten or intimidate me, frankly they will have to try a lot harder than printing up a flyer, launching an Instagram campaign or a small demonstration,” Ben-Gad told the Daily Mail.

Ben-Gad responded that his “only crime” was being a Jew who has lived in the Middle East.

“If the objective of the demonstration was to frighten or intimidate me, frankly they will have to try a lot harder than printing up a flyer, launching an Instagram campaign or a small demonstration,” Ben-Gad told the Daily Mail.

“I lectured this week as usual while all this was beginning, and plan to do so next week as well,” he said. “I am indeed, as they claim, an IDF veteran, and I plan to act like one — these modern brownshirts are not going to send me into hiding.”

Here’s a tweet showing the disruption. Look at the cowards hiding their identity by wearing masks. Fortunately, his University is supporting him, as it should.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej is being a Luddite:

Hili: Why is it that you never text?
Andrzej:  I’m not quite at the point of perfect succinctness.

In Polish:

Hili: Dlaczego nigdy nie piszesz SMS-sów?
Ja: Jeszcze nie osiągnąłem doskonałej zwięzłości.

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

From a Facebook site I can’t remember:

From Laugh Until the Tears Run Down Your Eyes:

From The Onion:

From Masih, who will proudly be in court when one of the men Iran sent to kill her will be sentenced. Here’s a video showing an Iranian saying she’d gladly kill the American hostages from 1979:

From Iona, David Attenborough introduces us to the remarkable mimicry of the lyrebird. I’ve posted on this befgore

Ricky Gervais is selling vodka, though I don’t know why because he’s rich. At any rate, not all of his suggested ads have been approved by the London underground:

Had this one rejected too. Back to the drawing board.

— Ricky Gervais (@mrrickygervais.bsky.social) 2025-10-23T10:23:01.042Z

From Luana; Canadian indigenous people are trying to take back land that descendants of “settlers” have bought and built on:

From Malcolm; cat gets returned after doorbell is run. Sound up!

One I retweeted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

24 October 1936 | A Dutch Jewish boy, Max Slager, was born in Enschede.In September 1944 he was deported to #Auschwitz and murdered in a gas chamber after the selection. —A short video about gas chambers and crematoria of the Auschwitz camp: https://youtu.be/-A05i25j9Ck

— Auschwitz Memorial (@auschwitzmemorial.bsky.social) 2025-10-24T05:00:08.910773842Z

Two posts from Dr. Cobb. First, a newborn runner duck that has grown up:

Four years ago a little runner duck hatched out and was named Mo by my grandson Casey. Happy birthday Mo we know we love you more ❤️

— Chris and his farmily of forever friends (@caenhillcc.bsky.social) 2025-10-23T05:10:17.086Z

. . . and cops rescue a kitten (click screenshot to go to the original). The thread says the kitten has been adopted, too.

 

 

36 thoughts on “Friday: Hili dialogue”

  1. A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
    Inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it kinetic, energetic striving, but it comes into us slowly and quietly and all the time, though we must regularly and every day give it a little chance to start flowing, prime it with a little solitude and idleness. -Brenda Ueland, journalist, editor, and writer (24 Oct 1891-1985)

      1. There is a wise quite of the Baroque composer Dietrich Buxtehude. It applies to life generally, not just music.

        When you lack inspiration, it does not help to make the music more complex and ornate.

        1. I agree. But I don’t get how it applies here, about the difficulty or not of facilitating the inspiration.

  2. Regarding Professor Michael Ben-Gad, there’s a statement supporting him and denoucing the harassment signed by over a 1000 academics. Add your signature at this link.

    (There don’t seem to be any limitations on who can sign, though most of those who have are UK-based academics. And there is a Twitter statement that they intend closing it at 5pm today, presumably UK time, which is only 4 hrs away.)

    1. Ben-Gad seems a heroic figure. I hope that the university protects him from these little shits (opprobrium intended and appropriate here)

  3. Charlies says,
    Love my Good & Plenty!
    Charlie says,
    Really rings my bell!
    Charlie says,
    Love my Good and Plenty!
    Don’t know any other candy that I love so well!

    1. …did anyone see that that there is a schism going on?

      Yes. The tensions have been there for some time. I think CoE in England is very different from the worldwide CoE. Gafcon has been around for some time too.

  5. I’m with Andrzej today: At my current level of literacy, the bandwidth limitations of texting often leave me unable to express my thoughts with an adequate degree of completeness and integrity.

    Andrzej is not a Luddite to me, as I infer he is still striving for succinctness, rather than rejecting the texting technology.

      1. No David…i am just with Andrzej in spirit today, but not physically. Perhaps a poor choice of words on my part. Sorry.

        I am afraid I do not get around much at all anymore…other than digitally.

  6. “Here’s a tweet showing the disruption. Look at the cowards hiding their identity by wearing masks. Fortunately, his University is supporting him, as it should.”

    Note to any University president or others who have authority in institutions of higher learning…please just implement this simple rule:

    “Any *disruptions of lectures will be met with immediate and severe penalties, including academic suspension and expulsion.”

    I’ll leave it to them to define the difference between a disruption and vigorous class debate, but I think we all know the difference.

    The people who do disrupt are a classic case of a very small minority that nonetheless ruin the experience for everyone else. Simply start suspending or expelling these people, who really don’t want to learn anything and therefore shouldn’t be at a university anyway, and this will no longer be a problem.

    1. Yes Jeff. A clear case of the “heckler’s veto” which has no place at university.

  7. “From Luana; Canadian indigenous people are trying to take back land that descendants of “settlers” have bought and built on:”

    The logical consequence of these ridiculous “land acknowledgement” sermons that proliferate among the Woke left. Indigenous people are saying “ok, so you admit to stealing our land…I’ll have it back then now thanks.”

    1. I’ve noticed that those who recite land acknowledgements are nearly always referring to land the speaker does not herself own. The land where the event is taking place belongs to the university, to the municipality, to the church, to the Legion, to the corporation that owns the theatre, hockey rink, or baseball park. Even an Indian Reserve (in Canada) is the property of the Crown. Resident Indians don’t own even that. (Any person of aboriginal ancestry, status-Indian or not, is free to own fee-simple land off the Reserve just as any other person can.) All speakers of land acknowledgements are thus insulated from the challenge, “So give the land back, then.” All they have to say is, “Oh, I don’t own this land we’re standing on now. I don’t have the power to give it back. The only land I own is a little semi-detached in Leaside. It’s also on ‘aboriginal land’ — the whole country is — but I’m not ‘acknowledging’ that.”

      At least one professional sports team in Canada has told its employees to stop doing land acknowledgements, to much grumpiness from the local Indians, because it fears that they could undermine its title to the arena it owns on expensive downtown “unceded” real estate. During the pandemic, volunteer community organizations had to switch to Zoom meetings from inside members’ homes. At least one I have knowledge of decided to suspend their ritual land acknowledgement because the speaker would be making the acknowledgement in respect of her (and her husband’s!) own private dwelling whose dining-room table she was sitting at. These things are either meaningless patter or they’re not. When they resumed their gatherings at the local parish hall, they decided not to reinstitute the acknowledgements. When you’re a guest on premises that aren’t yours, it’s bad manners to imply that the owner stole it from some long-ago “owners” who knew “territory” but not “title.” A long time ago we called this “consciousness-raising.”

    2. The Navajo should start every official event with a land acknowledgment confessing that they live on land stolen from Hopi and Zuni and Pueblo peoples. The Navajo arrived in Arizona and New Mexico in waves between 1300 and 1550.
      The Hopi and Zuni sometimes derisively refer to the Navajo by an epithet that translates “head pounders”. Apparently the ancestors of the modern Navajo used to execute war prisoners by bashing their skulls with heavy clubs.

  8. About that “land back” tweet by Bryan Breguet, I’m also a land owner in British Columbia. And I’m opposed to resolving those conflicting land title claims by giving private property to indigenous groups. The land was conquered. Period.

    So I understand Breguet when he says “this is an existential threat to this country [and] we need to be ready to do whatever it takes” including revision of our constitution. The problem is that whatever-it-takes thinking is one good way to get a Trump-style executive. That’s harder but not impossible to achieve in a Westminster system. And it would not be good.

    All we really need are government lawyers (who supposedly represent the peoples’ interest) to not roll over in court and essentially plead with the judge to find in favour of the indigenous litigants.

    1. Unfortunately, Mike, the Government’s lawyers represent the interests of the Crown, not you the people. The Crown has hitched its wagon to the star of reconciliation as on over-riding Crown interest, to prevent insurrection or a race war in the realm or something, I guess. You simply don’t count. “The People” is a republican concept, the difference between being a subject of a monarch, as we all technically are, and being a citizen.

      The rationale and directives for the federal government’s “incompetent defence” — yes, that’s what it’s called — in indigenous litigation is laid out in this remarkable document from the federal Attorney-General here, cited in the background paper the City of Richmond provided to affected landowners:
      https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/ijr-dja/dclip-dlcpa/litigation-litiges.pdf

      Neither the A/G nor her boss are in government any more, for which small mercy we can perhaps be thankful.

  9. How do you pronounce bologna? As baloney? Brits and Canadians always use “bal-own-ya” and baloney just means “nonsense” to us.

    1. As a kid, I called it “bull-ogg-na” because that’s how it’s spelled. And I thought it was funny.

    3. There is an anecdote about the physicist Richard Feynman. Near the Caltech campus, there was a deli that had sandwiches named after celebrities. Thus they had a “Frank Sinatra sandwich” and a “Sammy Davis Jr. sandwich” and so forth.

      After Feynman was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1965 for his work on quantum electrodynamics, the deli asked Feynman about his taste in deli sandwiches and proudly added to their menu the “Richard Feynman sandwich”.

      One day Feynman was entertaining a visiting colleague Leonard Susskind. After a morning arguing about some heavy duty particle physics, they took a break for lunch and went to the deli. Susskind tried the Feynman sandwich. He said to Feynman, “Dick, this sandwich is pretty good. It makes sense that a sandwich named after you would contain a lot of ham.” Without missing a beat Feynman replied, “Lenny, if they name a sandwich after you it would have less ham, but a lot more baloney.”

  10. I read the Michael Ben-Gad story but didn’t realize how bad it was until I saw the video. If someone got into my grill screaming, I don’t know what I would have done, but it actually looks like Ben-Gad walked toward the protestors, which was probably a good move. They turned away from Ben-Gad at that point and launched into an anti-Israel rave that seemed to be for purposes of self-amusement. The descent into idiocy continues.

    It’s interesting(-ish) about the lizards with missing limbs. They apparently remain viable enough to survive in substantial numbers, but I’d be surprised if missing a limb didn’t make life more difficult. Most amazing to me is the number of authors on the study! That’s quite a list of contributors.

  11. ” If you dig up LGBTQI people after 200 years, you’ll only find men and women based on their skeletons. Everything else is a mental illness promoted through the curriculum.”

    Everything I’ve seen says that Brünisholz was arrested for the first part of this tweet – we can tell the sex of a skeleton – but it seems to me that the second half is more likely to have triggered the outrage. One of the main reasons being able to identify out of your sex is being treated as a matter of human rights is the belief that “being trans” has been a natural, normal state of the human body throughout history. Calling it a mental illness is therefore supposed to be very bad indeed. Claiming that it’s a social contagion promoted in the schools is also supposed to be dehumanizing.

    I wonder if the Swiss would have reacted the same way if there’d only been the stuff about the skeletons. It’s still an egregious overreaction, of course. It would just need to be met with different arguments in this case.

    2. This is the pernicious effect of lumping the TQ+ with the LGB – the latter are sexual orientations, the former (despite the Swiss judge’s interpretation) are not.

  12. “It’s not that Tomahawk missiles are nuclear or anything; it’s the fact that they would come from the U.S. that’s bothering Putin.”

    From what platforms will Ukraine launch these missiles given that they don’t have any launch systems of their own? Tomahawks aren’t bottle rockets. Should we also give Ukraine our Tomahawk-capable ships or submarines? Or do we hand them our limited stockpile of the Army’s new ground-based launchers?

    The U.S. military calls this the “Tomahawk weapon system” for a reason. First off, there used to be nuclear-armed variants of the missile. Russia could fear nuclear potential, but that isn’t Putin’s chief concern: it is the “system” part that Putin rightly points to. Ukraine would need significantly more assistance from U.S. military personnel to use these missiles than they do for any other weapon we have given them: launch operations and control, training, maintenance, intelligence, targeting, digital terrain mapping, etc. These and other capabilities depend upon highly-classified, US-owned and controlled air, land, sea, and space assets. Any interested parties can go to AI and ask it to tell you about the Tomahawk kill chain and the personnel involved. I won’t post it here: it would break the ROOLZ 600-word limit many times over.

    This isn’t a matter of lending your friend a very big gun for hunting season and letting him use your ammunition. Think of Tomahawk not as a weapon but as an ecosystem—one populated largely by U.S. military personnel. But aren’t broader U.S. military capabilities already deeply involved, essentially validating Putin’s claim that he is fighting NATO forces? Yes, if media reports and common sense are to be believed. The difference here is that none of the current capabilities that we enable Ukraine to use can destroy the Kremlin.

    1. From what I’ve heard, Ukraine would receive Tomahawk K which is the ground launched version. The launchers themselves are not the issue. At the end of the day Ukraine would just weld some tubes in some shed.

      It is range, precision, payload and survivability. If the US doesn’t want to deliver, then I guess it is one less system US companies can get paid for.

  13. From the mouth of a common thug:
    “Mr. Putin said. “But no self-respecting country and no self-respecting people ever decide anything under pressure.”
    Except for the Ukrainians then different rules apply, twat!
    Trump’s oil sanctions and Ukrainian strikes on russian oil facilities may be a winning ticket. Hopefully by the Russian population as things worsen on their domestic front as winter sets in.
    Putin’s deliberate targeting civilians is criminal. The death by missile of a mom, her 4 month old baby and 9 yr old neice in a modest little house… how is that winning a war?
    “But no self-respecting… ” Putin’s pressure?

    Professor, Michael Ben-Gad.
    It just occured to me that masking up and carrying on like an banshee is similar to posting anonymously online.

    1. “Except for the Ukrainians then different rules apply, twat (sic)”

      No rational argument is complete unless an ad hominem is added.

      A few years ago Antony Blinken said that the U.S. (government) was for any country joining any alliance it wanted to. Does any rational person believe that on its face? Just let a country in the Americas join a foreign alliance and see how the U.S. reacts.

      Venezuela hasn’t had to join a foreign alliance to provoke attacks from the U.S.

      1. The US has bombed Venezuela?

        I would point out, that Blinken was not of the current administration. Every country may pick its alliances. That’s part of being sovereign. The US would be in the wrong if they invaded just because Mexico allied with China. Just like the EU doesn’t invade Hungary just because Orban allies with Xi and Putin.

        1. The EU, as the EU, can’t invade anyone because it has no military forces under its command, no one who will answer the call from the eurocrats in Brussels to give ‘em …regulated sausages and plumbing standards.

  14. Re toilet paper math(s) [a semi-serious rant from this former university lecturer]:
    Look at the units, dammit.
    Sometimes, for example, 50 does = 127, if it’s 50 inches and 127 cm.
    In the left-hand pair of photos, it’s 12 super-mega¹ rolls = 72 regular rolls (from which we can derive that super-mega is in some sense 6 times as large² as regular).

    I remember many times when my keeping track of the units caught an otherwise unnoticed error. IMO it’s an essential STEM skill.

    (Consider the 1999 Mars Climate Orbiter, which failed after navigation thrust data from Lockheed Martin (pound‑force seconds, imperial) were interpreted by the flight software as newton‑seconds (metric), producing an incorrect trajectory and subsequent atmospheric burn-up. Whoopsie.)

    Thanks. I feel much better now.
    . . . . .
    ¹ WhateverTF that is; definitely not SI.
    ² Not “6 times larger”. Grrr.

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