Sunday: Hili dialogue

Welcome to Sunday, June 7, 2027, and National Boone Day, explained thusly:

National Boone Day is observed each year on June 7 to commemorate the day frontiersman Daniel Boone first began exploring the valleys and forests of the present-day Bluegrass State of Kentucky on June 7, 1769. Boone founded the village of Boonesborough, which is one of the first American settlements west of the Appalachians.

Here’s a painting on Daniel Boone’s Wikipedia page called “Boone’s First View of Kentucky” by William Tylee Ranney (1849; Boone died in 1820).  I assume he’s the person pointing in the picture.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 7 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Iran has sent drones firing on (they claim) American bases in Kuwait and Bahrain, violating the ceasefire. But it’s not clear—since the U.S. also struck Iran—who fired first:

 Iran fired ballistic missiles and drones toward Bahrain and Kuwait early Saturday, Bahrain’s government said, adding that they were intercepted. It called on Tehran to immediately cease attacks on Gulf neighbors that it deemed a “serious escalation.”

Iran’s foreign ministry said the U.S. early Saturday attacked surveillance facilities on Qeshm Island and near Sirik that it said were used to protect borders and “ensure the security of navigation in international waters.” Tehran called the attack a violation of the fragile ceasefire.

The latest exchange of fire came as the Trump administration pressed Iran to make a deal to end the war that has strained the global economy and threatened a hunger crisis in some of the world’s most vulnerable countries.

The U.S. military earlier said it shot down several Iranian missiles and drones launched toward the Strait of Hormuz and Gulf Arab allies, and struck some of the Islamic Republic’s coastal surveillance radar sites in response.

“The attack drones posed an immediate threat to regional maritime traffic,” U.S. Central Command said on social media. It confirmed it hit radar sites, including an island in the strait, “to defend against further attacks.”

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said it targeted the Ali Al Salem air base, which hosts U.S. forces in Kuwait, and the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet in Bahrain, according to the state-run IRNA news agency. The U.S. military said there were no reports of harm to U.S. personnel.

It looks as if it going to go on this way for a while, and if there’s a “cease-fire” in progress, well, it’s a very tenuous one. But I can’t imagine that this is going to make the Gulf states like Iran more or try to expel U.S. bases in Bahrain and Kuwait.

*There’s a lot of attention in the news to Graham Platner, the Democratic candidate for Senator in Maine, who will likely be facing incumbent Susan Collins in a crucial Senate race. He now avers that his past is being “weaponized.”  I guess that means that his past, which is extremely checkered with numerous scandals, is being brought up to question him.  So what else is new? His past missteps and other bad stuff include sexting to repeated women while he was married, a Nazi-ish death’s-head tattoo that he’s now effaced (but claims it has nothing to do with the SS), violent behavior towards girlfriends, and offensive and obscene social-media posts. Even the Washington Post has an op-ed called “Platner is a strange reason for Democrats to dump moral standards,” with the subtitle, “There isn’t much for liberals to gain from replacing Susan Collins, the Senate’s most liberal Republican.” And the WSJ has called him a “mounting liability for Democrats.” Nevertheless, Dems like Bernie Sanders have endorsed him vigorously because, after all, he’s a Democrat.

From the first link (NYT):

Graham Platner, the presumptive Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine, moved to quell mounting Democratic anxieties about his candidacy on Friday, telling supporters in a defiant speech that his past behavior was being “weaponized” by his political opponents.

A day after The New York Times reported that three women — a conservative and two Democrats — who had been romantically involved with Mr. Platner described volatile and “toxic” relationships, Mr. Platner addressed a crowd at a theater in Bar Harbor, expressing confidence that Maine voters would stick by him.

“When politically motivated, serious and false accusations are made against me, Maine, you have my back,” Mr. Platner said. “The state of Maine raised me, and the state of Maine saved me, and to all of you out there, Maine, I will always have your back.”

Mr. Platner’s appearance came at a tense moment in one of the year’s premier Senate races. With just days left before Maine’s primary on Tuesday, revelations about Mr. Platner’s personal history have caused escalating discomfort within his party, while drawing intensifying attacks from Republicans.

The rally also took place less than a week after The Times and The Wall Street Journal reported that Mr. Platner’s wife, Amy Gertner, had sought to warn his campaign last year that her husband had been exchanging sexual messages with multiple other women.

From the Washington Post (an op-ed):

Maine voters are free to support Platner, of course, as are progressive political commentators — notwithstanding the tattoo, the lying about it, the lying about his home loan, the extramarital sexting and everything else. But it’s a strange race to jettison moral standards for.

Platner is running against Susan Collins, the most moderate Republican in the Senate. She supports abortion rights. She voted to confirm Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and against Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Collins opted to convict President Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial. If her side had prevailed, he would have been disqualified from the presidency.

People who are significantly to the senator’s left may well prefer Platner’s stated views. But even then, you have to wonder about the practical advantage they would gain from his replacing Collins. His presence in the Senate wouldn’t make single-payer health care much more likely to become law. Congress is not going to remove two conservative justices from the Supreme Court, regardless of what Platner is telling voters. But perhaps people who believe in these ideas think it’s important to have one more senator making the argument for them even if the ideas aren’t going anywhere.

And from the WSJ:

Morris Katz, a New York-based ad maker who helped recruit Platner, said the Democratic Party needed candidates who come from outside traditional politics. Some will have complicated backgrounds.

“If you believe that we should have people who never before thought they’d run for office,” he said, “they will have said things that they will have regretted, especially as a new generation that’s entire history of every thought they’ve had is recorded on social media.”

Genevieve McDonald, a former political director for Platner’s campaign who resigned after his Reddit posts became public, said the campaign failed to conduct an adequate vetting operation. “This was a large part of why I quit,” she said. “I trusted Graham and his campaign to have done oppo research and cleared him.”

Platner’s social-media posts have come up on the campaign trail, with some voters pressing him about his comments suggesting that women “take responsibility” for avoiding sexual assault by not getting drunk.

Complicated background indeed. But surely there is someone in Maine not tarnished by all these missteps. And it is his campaign’s fault that he wasn’t vetted properly. I’m just glad I don’t live in Maine. And if the Republican candidate had a background like Platner, do you think the Democrats would ignore it, saying, “Well, that was all in the past. People change.”  Not in our lifetime!

*David J. Rush, a former CIA official who was caught with $40 million in gold bars, is now revealed to have gotten by bars by fabricating and funding a secret intelligence mission, then funneling the gold to him. From the WaPo:

The former senior CIA official found with more than $40 million worth of gold bars in his house allegedly created a fake, highly classified intelligence program that he used as a conduit to funnel millions of dollars for his personal use, according to people familiar with the criminal investigation.

David J. Rush, who was arrested last month and charged with one count of theft of public money, constructed what is known as a “special access program,” a sort of black box for the most secret intelligence operations, the people familiar with the investigation said. Even intelligence personnel with the highest security clearance cannot access an individual SAP, as they are known, without specific authorization.

The people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe an ongoing investigation, said the criminal probe found that Rush “read in,” or initiated, two colleagues into the highly secretivesham program, effectively cultivating them as perhaps unwitting accomplices andpreventing them from talking to others about it. Hepersuaded one of them to transfer millions of dollars to the program via a government contract that was also fraudulent, they said.

“He made up a contract,” one of the people said.

. . .The account of those familiar with the criminal probe appears to raise serious questions about secrecy guardrails and vetting at the CIA.

It remains unclear, for example, how Rush could single-handedly create a “black box” for a fictional spy program without sign-off from his superiors. It is also unclear whether the two colleagues Rush brought into the fake program knew it was fraudulent.

One of the people familiar with the probe said Rush’s fake program involved “continuity of government” operations, or programs to keep the U.S. federal government running in the event of nuclear war, natural disasters or other catastrophes.

Rush apparently used the fake government continuity program and the contract to persuade a government defense contractor to purchase large amounts of gold, this person said.

Even more astounding, according to former U.S. officials and others familiar with the issue, is that Rush’s duties at the CIA included involvement in one of the government’s most sensitive intelligence-gathering programs, a project so secret that only a handful of U.S. intelligence officials and lawmakers knew of its existence, according to four people familiar with the matter.

Clearly someone’s not doing their job at the CIA, though Rush did get caught. But it’s amazing to think that he would evade that forever!

*This is one reason why I consider the Times of Israel the best source of news on that country, for it calls out bad stuff about the country. The latest is an article called, “9 Palestinians wounded in setller rampage in Huwara; IDF soldier seen beating man.”

Nine Palestinians were wounded Saturday in a settler attack on the northern West Bank town of Huwara, Palestinian media reported, as footage from the scene showed masked assailants and at least one soldier beating Palestinians and damaging property, as clashes spread to nearby areas.

WAFA, the Palestinian Authority’s official news agency, said the wounded include a local councilman who was injured by shrapnel to the leg, four other people who were beaten, and another four who were tear-gassed.

Images showed that the masked settlers arrived at Huwara in pickup trucks.

The Israel Defense Forces said that soldiers and Border Police officers were dispatched to several sites in Huwara after receiving reports of “suspected theft of livestock belonging to Israeli civilians,” and to “remove the Israeli civilians and the livestock from the village and prevent confrontations in the area.”

Later, the military said, “several rioters arrived in the area of the village and violent clashes developed, including stone-throwing and the use of clubs between Israeli civilians and Palestinians.”

One surveillance video showed an Israeli soldier and a group of settlers beating two Palestinian men. The footage showed the soldier, seen in full military gear, repeatedly punching one of the Palestinians. The group was then seen leaving the area, leaving behind the two wounded Palestinians.

. . .The military said that it was “aware of footage showing an IDF soldier using violence against a Palestinian,” and that the soldier’s actions are “serious and inconsistent with the values of the IDF.”

“Once the soldier is identified, he will be subject to disciplinary proceedings, and appropriate command and disciplinary measures will be taken in accordance with the findings,” the army said, adding that it had launched an investigation into the incident.

Here’s a tweet from this site showing the beating, including an IDF soldier as one of the “beaters”.  (There is a long English translation.) And yes, the soldier should be disciplined (including dishonorable dicharge, if they have that), and jailed or punished for assault. The settlers, too, should be identified and disciplined.  Both the IDF and the Israeli press are not hiding this, but can you imagine a headline in a Gaza newspaper saying something like “Hamas soldier shoots Gazan civilian for leaving apartment after Israel warned that it would be bombed”?

תיעוד מטורף מהיום בחווארה.

חייל תוקף פלסטיניים בצוותא עם מתנחלים בכפר חווארה.

עפ״י הסהר האדום מהמקום פונה פלסטיני עם פגיעת ראש שמצבו מוגדר קשה.
.

עשרות מתנחלים רעולי פנים תקפו ארבעה כפרים שונים בסמוך ליצהר החל מהשעה 11:00, תוך שהם מיידים אבנים, מציתים רכוש, תוקפים תושבים… pic.twitter.com/iidq2XpwDH

— Matan Golan (@MatanGolanPhoto) June 6, 2026

*Reader Pyers calls our attention to a new interview with Richard Dawkins in the Times of London, called “Richard Dawkins: ‘AI chatbots are so insightful—what more could you want?‘”

Dawkins, 85, has a reputation as a ferocious dogmatist (there was a time when it was obligatory for newspaper interviewers to refer to Dawkins as “Darwin’s rottweiler”), but in person he is mild-mannered, earnest and abstracted. He is smartly turned out in a shirt and navy jacket, the uniform of his generation of academics. The patrician accent — product of public schools first in Zimbabwe then back in England — also marks him out as belonging to another time. Mentally and physically he is well preserved. The coif of silver hair is perhaps a little thinned. And his tolerance for small talk (famously slight) has dwindled almost to nothing — we get from “hello” to the nature of consciousness remarkably quickly. The impression is of muted, carefully concentrated energy.

. . . . The title of a compilation of appearances recently released on YouTube, Destroying Religion for 4 HOURS Straight, attests to his undiminished argumentative vigour. He is also — and I hope any octogenarians reading this feel thoroughly ashamed of their indolence — writing his first novel.

. . . The occasion of our meeting is the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Selfish Gene in 1976, which launched the 35-year-old Dawkins, then an Oxford zoology lecturer, into public life. The Selfish Gene (I don’t think anyone really quibbles about this any more) is one of the greatest popular science books. And where most scientists live to see their work superseded, The Selfish Gene has endured. Having re-read it, Dawkins says, “I’m surprised how little it needs to be changed.

He also retains what might be characterised as a childlike literalism about the truth. He has never accustomed himself to the grown-up equivocations and evasions with which most of us ease our way through life. Indeed, they infuriate him. In his memoir, An Appetite for Wonder, he records his childhood indignation at the preacher who told him faith could move mountains, forgetting “to make the distinction between metaphor and reality clear to a gullible child”. He writes disapprovingly of such people: “I sometimes wonder whether they even realise there is a distinction. Many of them don’t seem to think it matters much.”

Dawkins, to put it mildly, dislikes having to humour other people’s illusions. His most famous controversies are about God, who got a memorable drubbing in the multimillion-selling The God Delusion, published in 2006. Since then, more battles have been joined. In the irrational 2020s, a stickler for the strict truth is never going to find himself short of foes. Dawkins is contemptuous of Donald Trump, a “conspicuously anti-intellectual philistine thug”. He has also made a brace of new enemies on the progressive left with its truth-bending tendency to put feelings before science. He has little time for the idea that, “If you say you’re a woman, you are a woman,” he says. “That way madness lies.” If we go on like this “words cease to have meaning”.

There’s a bit about the kerfuffle in which Richard engaged Claude in a conversation and made a statement that he now regrets, but that’s peanuts given the sweep of the man’s accomplishments:

He says: “I rather regret [the phrase] ‘you may not know you’re conscious but you bloody well are’.” He thinks “a better thing to have said would be, ‘What more do you want? What more do you expect?’” The thought he keeps returning to is that AIs are “so intuitive and insightful… what more would you want from them to prove that they are human?”

. . . To me the most interesting thing about Dawkins’s chatbot is that it has been reading his novel. Will he divulge what he’s been writing about? “I don’t know what the publisher would think,” he says, but, “Why not?” The book’s heroine is a scientist named Rosalind “who conceives the idea of bringing back to life Homo erectus”, the humanlike ancestor species that lived two million years ago. Rosalind “insists on being the surrogate mother” to two Homo erectus babies. This is (understandably) “very controversial”.

The purpose of “the second half of the book is to explore the impact on humanity, society, morality, ethics, politics of having an intermediate between what we call animals and what we call humans”. A thorny issue “because our present morality is so species-ist”.

Eventually the twins fall in love with each other, causing a scandal because their relationship looks like incest (actually they are biologically unrelated). Dawkins has been planning out the linguistic and sensory world of Homo erectus too. “They can do nouns and verbs, but not adjectives, and not recursive grammar,” he says. Smell is important to them so instead of “expressing a liking for somebody they say: ‘You smell apples.’” He is “still trying to work out how to end the novel”. One option could be a Romeo and Juliet-style tragedy.

. . . There are public intellectuals who, by their mid-eighties, have safely retired from public controversy and are content to be treated as monuments, admired for glories of half a century ago. Dawkins refuses to retreat behind a red-velvet rope and behave like a museum exhibit. Fifty years on from his entry into public life he is still thinking and arguing as energetically as ever. To those of us who owe him all our curiosity about science this seems to me to be something to be glad about — whether you always agree with him or not.

Indeed.  There is a genre of human beings that treats Dawkins as an Antichrist, as if everything he says and does is reprehensible. Those people are morons.  Yes, he’s made missteps, but to be human is to make missteps. Weigh those against what the man has accomplished, particularly in getting people educated about and interested in evolution, and you’ll see where the needle rests.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has an evolutionary question:

Hili: Is a human more closely related to a chimpanzee or a cat?
Andrzej: Depends which human. Some are nearest to a baboon.

In Polish:

Hili: Czy człowiek jest bardziej spokrewniony z szympansem, czy z kotem?
Ja: To zależy który człowiek, niektórym najbliżej do pawiana.

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

From Cheryl’s Amazingly Positive, No Politics Allowed, Interesting People Group:

From Things With Faces:

From This Cat is Guilty:

From Masih, who calls out a UN representative for truckling and groveling before an Iranian official:

Masih @AlinejadMasih is right to call out the body language. This is not mere diplomatic courtesy. It reflects a craven orientalism, blind to the social context of Iran’s gender battle and to the symbolic meaning of such gestures before a regime that polices women’s bodies.

I… https://t.co/9a1UcfSImW

— Kian Tajbakhsh (@k_tajbakhsh) June 6, 2026

From Keith, which I reposted with a comment:

This situation is vanishingly rare: honeybees usually leave the venom sac behind with the stinger, incurring a fatal wound. Stinging honeybees almost invariably die,, which the tweet doesn’t say. https://t.co/yaIoFs06t5

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) June 6, 2026

The Number Ten cat thanks the man who adopted him out to Downing Street. That looks like a young Larry:

Anthony Head was an Ambassador for Battersea Dogs and Cats home for more than two decades. Thanks for everything Tony x pic.twitter.com/3koD9hWExF

— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) June 5, 2026

Two from my feed. First, sound up; this is what Tuvan throat-singing sounds like. (I may have posted this ages ago.)

German singer Anna-Maria Hefele stunned the world with a viral video showcasing polyphonic overtone singing.pic.twitter.com/vYe2bnwMCG

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) June 6, 2026

A very tame bobcat! “But he’s soft. . . . ”

Me bringing my boyfriend home to meet my parents😂🥰 pic.twitter.com/ed7SQLcBOn

— This Account Makes You Happy (@FeelYouHappy) June 6, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

This French Jewish boy was gassed very soon after his train pulled into Auschwitz. He was ten years old.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2026-06-07T09:42:48.623Z

And two from Dr. Cobb, about to go off to France and Switzerland.  Look the first one up; it all ends badly for Earth:

What's going to happen in the future and when? A timeline of the far future. 🧪

— Dr Space Junk (Alice Gorman) (@drspacejunk.bsky.social) 2026-06-06T01:57:31.664Z

Matthew loves “mistake” cartoons like this one, and he says, “Tricky but I got all 13 (two are very subtle).”  Sure enough, I got only 11. 

An observation test for your inner 8-year-old. Can you spot the 13 mistakes in the picture?From Treasure magazine, 1965Official answers coming soon(Even if you don’t reply, could you please ‘like’ or share this one?)

— Helen Day (@lbflyawayhome.bsky.social) 2026-06-06T07:57:38.204Z