Tuesday: Hili dialogue

February 3, 2026 • 6:08 am

Welcome to The Cruelest Day: Tuesday, February 3, 2026, and National Carrot Cake Day, one of my favorite cakes even though it’s made with a vegetable. It must, however, have cream-cheese frosting, like this beauty I consumed in a Chicago restaurant on June, 2024. Note the generous size, the carrot curls on top, and the largesse of cream-cheese frosting:

It’s also American Painters Day, Four Chaplains Memorial Day (read their story here;  their ship went down, and them with it, on this day in 1943), International Golden Retriever Day, National Women Physicians Day, and The Day the Music Died (the plane carrying the musicians crashed on this day in 1959).  Here is a great American Painting: “The Gross Clinic“, painted by Thomas Eakins in 1875.  Info from Wikipedia:

The painting is based on a surgery witnessed by Eakins, in which Gross treated a young man for osteomyelitis of the femur. Gross is pictured here performing a conservative operation, as opposed to the amputation normally carried out.

Here, surgeons crowd around the anesthetized patient in their frock coats—this is just prior to the adoption by American surgeons of a hygienic surgical environment (asepsis) which was becoming standard in Europe.  Dr. Gross, in fact, regarded antiseptic surgery, or Listerism, as quackery until the end of his life. The Gross Clinic is thus often contrasted with Eakins’s later painting The Agnew Clinic (1889), which depicts a cleaner, brighter, surgical theater, with the participants in “white coats”. In comparing the two, the advance in understanding of the prevention of infection is seen. Another noteworthy difference in the later painting is the presence of a professional nurse, Mary Clymer, in the operating theater.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the February 3 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The Rafah crossing from Gaza to Egypt has reopened, part of the cease-fire deal that, I suspect, will never be fully implemented.

The sole border crossing between Gaza and Egypt reopened on Monday after being largely closed for 20 months, a step forward in Israel’s cease-fire with Hamas.

The reopening of the crossing, in the Rafah area of southern Gaza, will for the first time allow some Gazans who fled during the two-year war to return, but only in limited numbers for now. It is also expected to expedite the exit of thousands of sick and wounded people waiting for medical treatment abroad.

The hope is that the reopening of the Rafah crossing will be a move toward gradually improving conditions for Palestinians in Gaza.

The first groups of Palestinians started passing through the crossing on Monday morning in both directions, according to Israeli officials, who said that they would have final numbers of how many crossed by the end of the day.

At a Palestinian Red Crescent Society hospital in Khan Younis, a city in southern Gaza, a minibus departed for the Rafah crossing shortly after 1 p.m. with five patients, each accompanied by two caregivers.

Mohammed Mahdi, 25, was escorting his father, Akram Mahdi, 61, a mechanical engineer. The elder Mr. Mahdi was wounded in April 2024 in an Israeli airstrike near their home, in a refugee camp in central Gaza, according to his son. Shrapnel tore into his face, blinding him in his right eye and damaging his left one. Doctors in Gaza could do little more than stabilize him, his son said.

“Finally, we can get advanced treatment abroad,” Mohammed Mahdi said before boarding the minibus.

It was unclear by midday how many Palestinians had actually crossed the border in either direction. No returnees appeared to have arrived in Gaza as of early afternoon.

Israel and Egypt disagreed for months over the terms of the reopening, which is part of President Trump’s plan for ending the Gaza war. A shaky cease-fire took effect in October, but Israel kept the crossing closed as leverage until the last of the hostages seized in the Hamas-led attack of Oct. 7, 2023, were returned to Israel, alive or dead.

A week ago, the Israeli military said it had retrieved the remains of the last remaining captive, Master Sgt. Ran Gvili, a police officer who was shot during the Oct. 7 attack, which set off the war.

. . . .Now that it has been opened again, the crossing will be strictly supervised and operated in a limited capacity, with dozens of people allowed at first to enter or exit each day, according to officials.

This of course is a good thing, though it would be even better if Egypt let Gazans migrate to Egypt for good.  Those leaving are getting medical care, and will likely have to return. And although this opening is one of the provisions of the cease-fire, the really important one—the surrender, disbanding, and disarming of Hamas—shows no signs of occurring, as everyone knows.  Israel attacked Hamas targets on Sunday, and that will continue until there is no more Hamas. Those who think that an interim government involving the Palestinian Authority will finally bring peace (and the “two-state solution”) are deluded: Gazans and Hamas hate the PA and if there are ever elections in Gaza, Hamas, if it ran, would win.

*One or two of the photos released in the latest batch of Epsteiniana showed Britain’s Price Andrew kneeling over the supine body of a woman or girl, whose face was redacted.  That’s somewhat incriminating, though it’s not clear if the woman was underaged. At least it attests to the Prince’s randiness. He was asked to testify before Congress but didn’t respond; but in light of the new photos, he may have to show up in the U.S. and give sworn testimony. Britain’s former ambassador to the U.S., also implicated in the scandal, may also have to testify:

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is pressuring the U.K.’s former Ambassador to the U.S. Peter Mandelson to provide evidence to American authorities over Jeffrey Epstein, after a cache of emails appeared to show that Mandelson leaked confidential British government correspondence to the disgraced financier.

The emails also show that Mandelson, long an influential figure on the British left, had received $75,000 in wire transfers from Epstein years earlier.

Starmer ordered an urgent investigation into Mandelson on Monday after a trove of emails released by the Justice Department in recent days provided fresh details about the long-standing relationship between Epstein and the British politician, a relationship that continued well after Epstein was first charged with sex offenses.

Mandelson was removed as ambassador last year after earlier details of his dealings with Epstein came to light, and the latest revelations will add pressure on the politician. Starmer on Monday also demanded that Mandelson resign from the House of Lords, the U.K.’s upper chamber in Parliament.

Mandelson said in a statement on Sunday that he had no recollection or record of receiving the funds and that the payments “need investigating by me.” Mandelson quit the ruling Labour Party on Monday but he remains a member of the House of Lords. On Sunday, he said he wanted to repeat “my apology to the women and girls whose voices should have been heard long before now.” He didn’t immediately respond to an email requesting further comment on Monday.

And Prince Andrew:

The latest batch of emails released by the Department of Justice include other high profile members of the British establishment, notably Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, the former prince and brother to King Charles, who has already had his titles removed and is being forced out of his mansion on Windsor estate.

The latest emails, which all date after Epstein pled guilty to procuring minors for prostitution in 2008, show Andrew invited Epstein for tea at Buckingham Palace in 2010. Photos also released by the Justice Department show Andrew photographed kneeling over an unidentified woman.

Andrew, who didn’t reply to an email requesting comment, last year said he continued to “vigorously deny” allegations that he abused an American teen introduced to him by Epstein.

Epstein wrote to Andrew in August 2010, “I have a friend who i think you might enjoy having dinner with, her name is irina she will be london 20-24.” “I am in Geneva until the morning of 22nd but would be delighted to see her. Will she be bringing a message from you?” Andrew replied.

A U.K. government spokesman said that the former Prince Andrew should also provide evidence to the U.S. authorities regarding Epstein.

Andrew has been more or less demoted to being a rich commoner since the scandal, and the BBC further reports two allegations that Epstein sent to women to the UK to have sex with Prince Andrew.  Fortunately for Sarah Ferguson, who used to be married to Randy Andy, she won’t have to deal with this. I originally thought that nobody beyond Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell would face consequences from involvement in the scandal, but Andrew may be guilty of sex trafficking, which would be a first for the Royal Family.

*After renaming the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., Trump now plans to close it for two years for renovation. (Remember that Trump renamed the Center to include his name along with Kennedy’s.)

President Donald Trump said Sunday that he plans to close the Kennedy Center for roughly two years for the facility to undergo construction. The proposal comes amid a series of cancellations and internal upheaval since he took over the arts institution and presidential memorial nearly a year ago and remade it in his name and image.

“I have determined that The Trump Kennedy Center, if temporarily closed for Construction, Revitalization, and Complete Rebuilding, can be, without question, the finest Performing Arts Facility of its kind, anywhere in the World,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. “In other words, if we don’t close, the quality of Construction will not be nearly as good, and the time to completion, because of interruptions with Audiences from the many Events using the Facility, will be much longer.”

Under Trump’s proposal, which he said is subject to board approval, the Kennedy Center could close on July 4, coinciding with America’s 250th anniversary, with construction beginning immediately.

“Financing is completed, and fully in place!,” Trump wrote. “This important decision, based on input from many Highly Respected Experts, will take a tired, broken, and dilapidated Center … and turn it into a World Class Bastion of Arts, Music, and Entertainment, far better than it has ever been before.”

Kennedy Center President Richard Grenell confirmed the plans in a Sunday evening email to staff obtained by The Washington Post. “We will have more information about staffing and operational changes in the coming days,” he wrote.

In a post on X, Grenell cited the $257 million designated “for capital repair, restoration, maintenance backlog, and security structures” through the One Big Beautiful Bill last year.

Grenell confirmed the necessity of repairs, but also issued a groveling tweet. You can bet that Trump will be over seeing the design and construction, and that there will be more Trumpiana included in the new building.

So it goes.

*How long are you going to live? Well, you could get hit by a truck tomorrow, as they say, but barring that you can get an estimate of when you’ll die from various programs (go here, for example to estimate your longevity; mine was 96!). They do ask about your family history, and a new article in the NYT says, to my joy, that genes may be more important than environment or behavior in determining your longevity (remember that the propensity to9 smoke and drink are also partly coded by your genes).

Your potential life span is written in your genes, according to a new study. You can lengthen it a bit with a healthy lifestyle. But if your genetic potential is to live to be 80, for example, it is unlikely that anything you do will push your age at death up to 100.

That, at least, is the conclusion of a paper published Thursday in Science.

Uri Alon of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and other researchers drew the data for the study from three sets of data from pairs of Swedish twins, including one set of twins that was reared apart. To test how generalizable the results are, the group also examined data from a study of 2,092 siblings of 444 Americans who lived to be over 100. Their goal was to identify outside factors that can affect how long someone lives, like infections or accidents, separate from the intrinsic factor of genetics.

They report that aging is mostly hereditary, a conclusion that flies in the face of much conventional medical wisdom regarding dieting, exercising and healthy habits. These habits are important for the quality of a person’s life, but they run into another form of conventional wisdom: You can’t make someone into a centenarian, unless that person also has a genetic inheritance of longevity.

“If you are trying to gauge your own chances of getting to 100, I would say look at the longevity in your family,” said Dr. Thomas Perls, a geriatrician and the director of the New England Centenarian Study at Boston University. His study’s published data on U.S. centenarians were used in the new analysis, although he was not associated with the study.

“This paper has a pretty powerful message,” said S. Jay Olshansky, an emeritus professor of epidemiology at the University of Illinois, Chicago, who was not involved in the study. “You don’t have as much control as you think.”

Here’s the paper; click to read:

Now a heritability of 50% really means that of the variation of longevity among people, about half of that variation is due to variation in people’s genes.  That does show a sizable genetic component of longevity, and the rest is due to environment, gene-environment interaction, and other arcane factors (as the authors say, “(“This remaining variance likely stems from environmental influences (lifestyle, socioeconomic factors, health care access, intrinsic biological stochasticity , nonadditive genetic effects, and epigenetic modifications”).

The heritability is based on the correlation between twins, and remember that many behavioral factors that affect longevity, including drinking and smoking, are also affected by genetic variation. The estimated heritability of 50% is a lot higher than many previous estimates, which the authors argue is due to elimination of extrinsic factors like accidents, birth year, or infections that fuzz out the data and reduce heritability,

This does NOT give you a license to go hog-wild and start drinking, smoking, and having dangerous sex. Remember, half of the variance is due to factors that may not have a genetic component (not all drinking and smoking is based on the genes you have). But it does make me a bit happy as I want to live forever and my family, especially the women, live a long time. My grandmothers lived into their upper 90s, and although the men didn’t live as long, nearly all of them were heavy smokers.  I know I’m not immortal, but, unless I get some debilitating condition, I want to live as long as I can, for I want to see what happens at the party.

*There’s a big ski-jumping scandal brewing that involves the Norwegian team, which planned to jump with modified crotches of their ski suits. 

Just weeks before the start of the Winter Olympics, a cheating scandal that is equal parts bizarre and brazen, rocking one of its foundational sports and becoming a cause for national shame in Norway, has taken its latest turn.

On Thursday, after 11 months of investigation and litigation, the International Ski and Snowboard Federation’s (FIS) ethics committee handed down a harsh 18-month suspension to two disgraced former coaches and the former equipment manager of Norway’s ski jumping team. The trio admitted conspiring to manipulate the suits of the team’s top jumpers to help them beat the competition at the Nordic World Ski Championships in Trondheim, Norway, last year after a whistleblower filmed them through a curtain.

“In the panel’s view it is the fact of the violations, the admission of which was compelled by the video evidence, that justifies the imposition of the sentence,” the decision stated.

At the world championships, Magnus Brevig, the head coach of the Norwegian national team, and Adrian Livelten, the team’s suit technician, were caught on a video posted anonymously to YouTube inserting illegal stitching into the crotch area of the suits of two star jumpers, reigning Olympic champion Marius Lindvik and Johann André Forfang, after the suits had already passed inspection. The stitches essentially served to make the suits more aerodynamic, allowing the jumpers to fly farther than the competition.

Here’s the damning video, though I can’t make heads nor tails of it. You be the judge; actually, the IOC will.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili made me genuinely LOL with this:

Andrzej: Hili, these are very important papers!
Hili: That’s exactly why I’m sitting on them.

In Polish:

Ja: Hili, to są bardzo ważne papiery!
Hili: Właśnie dlatego na nich siedzę.

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From Meow Incorporated:

From The 2025 Darwin Awards!!/Epic Fails!!!:

From Cats that Have had Enough of Your Shit:

From Masih: an Iranian hero who later died. Very sad.

From Malcom, whose caption is “Ouch!”

From Cate, a WWII rescue story:

From Luana; the Brits fight back (with speech) against pro-Palestinian protestors:

One from my feed. Scienc girl always has good tweets. She’s on the money with this one.

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

Two from Matthew. The First is from a Guardian article (linked) about the woman who makes road signs keeping animals and drivers safe. Besides ducks, she made the cow signs.

I don’t remember this duck sign from when I learned the Highway Code but it was half a century ago and tbh it’s fairly clear what it means…

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-02-02T18:39:38.361Z

Divers fouled by amphipods (a type of crustacean)!

We did a scuba dive today to swap out an instrument on one of our offshore moorings. While clearing off the biofouling, we got biofouled, hood to flipper, by caprellid amphipods (aka headbangers). Here’s my leg after moderate scraping… 🦑🧪🌊

— Steve Haddock (@stevehaddock.bsky.social) 2025-01-31T03:46:30.015Z

One thought on “Tuesday: Hili dialogue”

  1. Thanks Luana for the video of U.K. counter-protest and song that I had never heard before, but just love…”you can shove your intifada up your ass”. Excellent!

    Reply

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