Friday: Hili dialogue

Welcome to Friday, June 12, 2026 and it’s National Loving Day, celebrating both romantic bonding but, more important, celebrating the day when

. . . the 1967 U.S. Supreme Court decision Loving vs. Virginia. This decision struck down all anti-miscegenation laws remaining in sixteen U.S. states. The ruling cited, “There can be no doubt that restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the equal protection clause.“

From the Wikipedia page on Loving v. Virginia:

Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967), is a landmark civil rights decision of the United States Supreme Court which held that laws banning interracial marriage violate the Equal Protection and Due Process clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The case involved Richard Loving, a white man, and his wife Mildred Loving, a woman of color. In 1959, the Lovings were convicted of violating Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which criminalized marriage between people classified as “white” and people classified as “colored”. Caroline County circuit court judge Leon M. Bazile sentenced the Lovings to prison but suspended their sentences on the condition that they leave Virginia and not return. The Lovings filed a motion to vacate their convictions on the ground that the Racial Integrity Act was unconstitutional, but Bazile denied it. After unsuccessfully appealing to the Supreme Court of Virginia, the Lovings appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed to hear their case.

In June 1967, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision in the Lovings’ favor that overturned their convictions and struck down Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act as unconstitutional. Virginia had argued before the Court that its law was not a violation of the Equal Protection Clause because the punishment was the same regardless of the offender’s race, and therefore it “equally burdened” both whites and non-whites. The Court found that the law nonetheless violated the Equal Protection Clause because it was based solely on “distinctions drawn according to race” and outlawed conduct—namely, that of getting married—that was otherwise generally accepted and that citizens were free to do.  The Court’s decision ended all race-based legal restrictions on marriage in the United States.

Here are Richard and Mildred Loving in 1967:

And they rest together forever. Here are the “Graves of the Lovings in the St. Stephen’s Baptist Church cemetery, Central Point, Virginia.” Mildred lived for 33 years after Richard’s death.

It’s also International Cachaça Day, celebrating the sugarcane-based Brazilian spirit used to make the drink caipirinha), International Falafel Day, National Jerky Day, National Peanut Butter Cookie Day, and World Day Against Chile Labor.

There’s a World Cup Google Doodle today. Click on it to see where it goes:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 12 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

The usual anti-semitic news:The Dept. of Justice has indicted eight pro-Palestinian activists for making threats connected with their push to get the University of Michigan to divest from Israel.

A group of pro-Palestinian activists associated with the University of Michigan have been indicted for allegedly transmitting threats to school leaders, law enforcement officials and businesses in what the U.S. Department of Justice called a coordinated effort to convince the university to divest from Israel.

The 63-page grand jury indictment filed last month in the U.S. District Court of the Eastern District of Michigan was unsealed Wednesday morning by federal prosecutors following reports of a raid in Washtenaw County’s city of Ypsilanti.

The alleged conspirators named in the indictment are Paige Feyock, Amatullah Hakim, Zainab Hakim, Ahmet Korkaya, Miriam Odeh, Alexander Sepulveda, Colin Weger and Jonathan Zou.

Prosecutors allege that the defendants and unindicted co-conspirators used encrypted messages, social media and collaboration with partners overseas to research, target and attack alleged victims, and then later posted about it on social media. The social media posts, prosecutors said, were meant as warnings.

“Their criminal activity included spray painting threats, breaking windows, and throwing glass jars filled with noxious chemicals into family homes,” the indictment reads. “They marked their victims with threatening symbols used by Hamas, including red inverted triangles and red handprints. They used the internet and social media to broadcast their message to ensure their threats and commitment to continuing criminal activity were heard by their victims and others who support Israel.”

The indictment notes that they were motivated by the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack on Israel and the ensuing war between the two in the Gaza Palestinian territory. Israel has since been accused of fomenting a genocide with its response to the attack, with both Amnesty International and a United Nations independent commission reaching that conclusion.

. . .The Jewish Federation of Detroit, which was also alleged to be vandalized by the group, issued a statement on Wednesday applauding federal, state and local law enforcement for taking action.

“The indictment details a deliberate campaign of intimidation and terror: attacks on private homes, threats to ‘get’ the ‘kids’ of victims, witness intimidation, and the targeting of Jewish institutions, including our own,” the federation said. “Many of the alleged threats directly reference the Hamas-led terror attack on October 7, 2023. We are grateful to law enforcement for pursuing this investigation with the seriousness it demands, and we look forward to seeing justice served, sending a clear message that hate, intimidation and antisemitic violence have no place in our community or in our country.”

A Facebook post with pictures (I can’t vouch for whether they’re real photos):

So it goes. . . every damn day.  I guess peaceful protests aren’t enough these days.

*Over at It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal sums up the latest U.S. attacks on Iran.

It’s Thursday, June 11, and Donald Trump appears to be changing tack. For the second night in a row, the U.S. military launched what it called “self-defense strikes” against Iran—strikes Trump seemed to imply were punishment for Iran taking “too long to make a deal.” In response, the Islamic Republic retaliated against bases in Jordan, Bahrain and Kuwait.

According to U.S. Central Command, the latest strikes targeted Iran’s military surveillance, communication systems and air defense sites. Iranian media confirmed explosions across the country’s south near the Strait of Hormuz—the same region where U.S. forces struck similar assets just on Tuesday. So far, the most devastating card in the American target bank, Iran’s energy infrastructure, remains notably untouched. Washington is instead methodically degrading Tehran’s capabilities around the strait—to what end, exactly, remains an open question.

Two months in, Trump appears to have finally learned to speak Persian. As the supposedly “moderate” Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf bluntly stated this week, military force and diplomacy are complementary tools—violence creates favorable conditions on the ground, allowing diplomats to extract “legal, political and economic achievements” at the table. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi literally wrote the manual on this bazaar-style negotiation. In his 2025 book, The Power of Negotiation, Araghchi advocates for continuous, grueling “repetition” of demands until the opponent “gets numb” and surrenders, noting that “he who gets tired and bored quickly will lose.”

Both approaches have been on full display over the past two months. The endless offers and retractions at the negotiating table, paired with the constant pricks of military strikes against regional allies and global shipping, were designed to drain Trump’s patience through a thousand small cuts.

The strategy appeared perilously close to working. In May, the announcement of a “largely negotiated” deal—offering upfront financial relief in exchange for 60 days of nuclear talks—nearly gave Republican hawks a collective heart attack. Trump ultimately pulled back, but the strategy seemed to be gaining traction again this week when he echoed Biden’s infamous “don’t,” urging Israel to turn the other cheek to an Iranian attack. Critics feared Trump was about to follow his billionaire confidants off the cliff, placing his trust in an extremist Middle Eastern regime. Worn down by Araghchi’s relentless bazaar-style bargaining, Trump looked ready to fold—ignoring his own warning from The Art of the Deal: “The worst thing you can possibly do in a deal is seem desperate to make it.”

. . . Since Iran crossed Trump’s red line in January, he has been walking a high wire, stretched between forcing regime collapse on one side and securing a diplomatic settlement on the other. He opened with a swift pivot toward diplomacy. Then came an unexpected lurch toward destruction, oscillating between threats of devastating force and economic reassurances. Then, abruptly, he froze. With the far side of the wire seeming impossibly distant, he has hung suspended over the abyss for two months. Today’s strikes suggest he may finally be moving again—though toward what, nobody can say. As with most such performances, it is we, the audience, not the presidential acrobat, whose hearts are in our throats at every tremor. The performer himself betrays nothing. With Trump especially, that inscrutability may be the whole act.

Since his first announcement of the attack, I don’t recall Trump mentioning “regime collapse” at all.  And yes, this mercurial way of making war does make me anxious.

Segal also has a discussion of the contentious fight between Ultra-Orthodox Israeli Jews, who heretofore have been exempt from their country’s universal draft because studying the Torah is considered a “basic law,” but that may change.

*The Washington Post reports that Trump saw no fewer than 22 medical specialists as part of his latest checkup! (Article is archived here.)

For George H.W. Bush’s first medical checkup as president in 1989, he was seen by five specialists, the White House said at the time. His son George W. Bush was seen by 12 in his first presidential checkup, White House officials said a dozen years later.

President Donald Trump appears to have set a new bar: 22 medical specialists assessed him as part of his latest checkup, according to a medical report recently released by the White House.

That figure is nearly double the number of specialists who assessed Trump for his past medical checkups as president, according to a review of publicly available statements by Trump’s doctors.

The figure also represents the most medical specialists to assess a president for a single visit, based on a review of public statements and records, prompting questions from outside physicians who said they were already skeptical of the White House’s disclosures around the nearly 80-year-old Trump’s health.

“It is an extraordinary number,” said Jonathan Reiner, a longtime cardiologist for former vice president Dick Cheney. “What specialties do they represent? Why so many?”

White House officials said that the number was commensurate with the need to perform a “complete and preventive evaluation” of the president. Sean Barbabella, the president’s physician, said the assessment found that Trump was in “excellent health.”

“The involvement of multiple specialists reflects a comprehensive, multidisciplinary evaluation consistent with best practices for executive-level medical care,” the White House said in a statement.

. . . The White House has often declined to answer specific questions about Trump’s medical assessments, such as what prompted the president to undergo a second physical exam at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center last year. Presidents usually make one annual trip unless they have an urgent condition. Nearly three months after the visit, and after initially telling reporters that he had undergone an MRI exam, Trump and the White House clarified that the president had received a CT scan as part of his assessment.

I understand that the public should know the general state of Trump’s health, but is he totally exempt from every human’s right to medical privacy?  If he was terminally ill or had dementia or something, then yes, they should tell us–but they don’t have to.  As far as I see him in interviews and stuff, I hope I’m that vigorous when I’m 80.  No, I don’t like him, but neither do I wish him dead, though a lot of people make no bones about that.

*Last year the Australian government banned kids under 16 from having social-media accounts.  As the NYT reports, and as you’d expect, the ban has largely failed, but there are those who hope that younger kids not already on social media may remain off (article archived here).

Late last year, Australia became the first country in the world to institute a nationwide ban on children younger than 16 having social media accounts.

Six months in, most indications are that the law has largely failed at keeping young teens off the platforms, in a disappointing start to an initiative carefully watched by parents and governments around the world.

But some Australian parents say the real effect of the law may be for the coming cohort of younger kids who were not yet on social media, and who may stay off because of the ban.

. . .Australia’s eSafety Commission, the regulatory agency tasked with enforcing the law, reported in March that seven in 10 parents whose children already had an account said the teens were still on one of the age-restricted services. Other surveys have reported similar findings.

Teenagers have described easy workarounds — drawing a mustache on their face for an age estimation scan, creating a new account with a fake birth date, or using a parent or older sibling’s account. Others said their accounts kept working without a hitch.

. . .“The kids all laugh about it, ‘What a joke, we haven’t been taken off anything,’” said Lauren Hillier, 42, who said she had really looked forward to the law taking effect. She had hoped she wouldn’t have to be the lone “evil nasty mom” for being strict about her 13-year-old son and 15-year-old stepdaughter’s phone usage.

Her son still has access to Instagram and her stepdaughter remains on Snapchat, Ms. Hillier said, adding: “I don’t know a single person who’s lost an account.”

Olivia Olsen, a 15-year-old in Canberra, said she still had access to her TikTok account and that a few friends who were kicked off were mostly able to get back on the apps.

“I feel like nothing changed on that day,” she said.

So far, these signs of fallibility haven’t deterred other countries that are planning on introducing similar laws. Last month, Britain’s online safety minister, Kanishka Narayan, traveled to Australia to learn about the implementation of the law as his country considers similar steps to protect children.

. . .Much of the media, academic and regulatory attention around the efficacy of the law has been focused on young teens between the ages of 13 and 16 who were already using social media and were supposed to be weaned off it by the ban. (Most platforms already had in place a seldom-enforced minimum age of 13 in their user agreements.)

But parents with children under 12 who weren’t already on social media apps said the real beneficiaries might be the next generation, who will enter their teenage years with the ban already in place.

I don’t think that the wait-for-the-next-generation tactic will work, because generations overlap, and that alone guarantees that each generation will be addicted to devices. Do I favor such bans? I’m not sure, though I do favor banning phones and devices that are distracting in schools.  There’s something a bit chilling about being on a bus or in a subway care where 75% of the people are glued to their phones.  This can come to no good end. Indeed, the very next item suggests one result:

*Tyler Jagt, who’s taught literature at several universities, complains in the Chronicle of Higher Education that “My students can’t read.”

In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem “intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” Crucially, he added that this is “not a matter of laziness on the part of the students” but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of “meet your students where they are” for so long that she has begun to feel “like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.”

Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.

Why is this happening? One reason, of course, is smartphones.

I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japan’s Showa University used near-infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline.

So when a student tells me they “kept losing track” of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.

Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI.

. . . The thing I am no longer willing to do is pretend this is a temporary adjustment period, or that “students will adapt.” They will not adapt on their own. The conditions that produced this collapse are still in place: the phones, the algorithmic feeds, the test-prep excerpts, staffing models that load the reading-intensive work onto the most precarious faculty, and now the chatbots that finish students’ sentences before they’ve even begun to think of them. If we want literate citizens, we will have to rebuild the conditions for literacy deliberately, against the grain of every incentive currently pointed the other way. I know the academy has the will to do that. It also has the obligation.

If you can’t read a sustained piece, then you can’t write down sustained thoughts; indeed, you can’t think sustained thoughts. Now what will happen to a country whose residents, by and large, are functionally illiterate? Well, your guess is as good and mine, but the outcome will not be salubrious.

*In case you haven’t been paying attention to the NBA (National Basketball Association) Finals, the New York Knicks (who haven’t won an NBA final since 1973!) is playing the San Antonio Spurs, and on Wednesday in Madison Square Garden the Knicks pulled ahead in the series 3-1 (it’s a best-of-seven series) with a stunning win of 107-106 in the last seconds of the game. The Knicks overcame a 29-point lead in the game, too:

A record-breaking comeback, capped off by what could go down as a legendary play.

The long road back to the top of the NBA is almost complete for the New York Knicks, and the step they took Wednesday night was unforgettable.

The Knicks came from 29 points down and moved to the brink of their first championship since 1973 by beating the San Antonio Spurs 107-106 in Game 4 of the finals on OG Anunoby‘s tip-in with 1.2 seconds remaining.

“That has to be the most iconic shot in the history of New York basketball,” Knicks coach Mike Brown said.

It’s certainly high on the list — as high as Anunoby leaped when Jalen Brunson‘s long 3-point shot bounced off the front of the rim, with his right hand stretching high to softly flick it in.

“Right hand from God,” Knicks center Karl-Anthony Towns said.

The Knicks, who have just two titles in their 80-year history and hadn’t even been to the NBA Finals since 1999, have a 3-1 lead and three chances to win the best-of-seven series — starting with Game 5 on Saturday night in San Antonio.

It looked impossible early, when the Spurs rolled to a 27-point halftime lead. But Brunson helped bring the Knicks back with 36 points and Anunoby finished with 33.

Here is the very end of the game:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili shows she knows her biology, but Andrzej has a wisecrack:

Hili: Photosynthesis must have existed before plants did.
Andrzej: Looks like you’re right, and besides, in the beginning there was no word.

In Polish:

Hili: Fotosynteza musiała się zacząć zanim pojawiły się rośliny.
Ja: Wygląda na to, że masz rację, a co więcej, na początku nie było żadnego słowa.

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

From a Facebook page The Atheist Experience, which seems to be a page for nonbelievers, but it doesn’t like scientism. I’m honored to be grouped with those who accept the pejorative word “scientism”, but where did they get my picture. That ain’t me!

Who is this? Not I!!!

Reader David took this photo:

And from Cheryl’s Amazingly Positive, No Politics Allowed, Interesting People Group. Yes it can’t be a real sign, but it’s funny:

From Masih, who tried simulating the wearing of a burqa:

I stand with the brave women of Afghanistan who face guns, bullets, beatings and arrest, simply for saying no to forced hijab.

I tried to cover my face. I couldn’t breathe behind that piece of cloth for even a few seconds. A total humiliation. And the Taliban is demanding… pic.twitter.com/UAfAKPoKkI

— Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) June 10, 2026

From Luana; I’ll put the full text of the top tweet below:

Mohsen Mahdawi is 34 years old.

He first enrolled at Birzeit University in the West Bank in 2008 and studied there for six years. In 2018 he enrolled as an undergraduate at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. He stayed there until 2021, and never earned a credential despite enrolling as a seventh year senior and being a full time student there for four years. Despite this extremely suspicious academic record, he was admitted as a transfer to Columbia University — a school which rejects over 97% of applicants — where he attended as an undergraduate for another four years.

Columbia’s rules explicitly state that students must be progressing toward an on-time graduation, but they accepted Mahdawi as an eleventh year undergraduate and allowed him to remain a student in good standing even though he was evidently not maintaining a full course load. His student status was a pretext; he was acting as a full-time anti-American, anti-Jewish and pro-terrorism activist. Since he claims to be a Palestinian refugee, it is unclear who was paying his tuition or providing for his rent and expenses in New York City while he was engaged in subverting American institutions.

He finally earned a bachelor’s degree in May 2025 from one of the top five American universities after 17 years as an undergraduate and was accepted to a master’s program at Columbia even though the State Department was already trying to deport him on national security grounds.

Democrats at every level fought hard to keep him in the country.

Let’s not forget that he told two different people that he liked to kill Jews. https://t.co/Cd2WzVfDtp

— daniela (@daniela__127) June 10, 2026

The fall and recovery of the kakapo, the world’s only flightless parrot. I love them, and New Zealand is doing a ton of stuff to save this endangered species:

There are only 236 of them left on Earth. Every single one has a name.

The kākāpō is the world’s heaviest parrot – a mossy green, owl-faced bird the size of a small dog that cannot fly, may live to 90 years, and only breeds every 2 to 4 years when New Zealand’s rimu trees… pic.twitter.com/sP2QDHGiDP

— Sammi🦋 (@StoriesBySammi) June 7, 2026

A World Cup video from the Number Ten cat. I can’t embed it for some reason, but click on the screenshot to go to the video:

Two from my feed. The first is unintentionally hilarious.

In a theater performance of Romeo and Juliet in Russia, at the exact scene where Romeo is dying, Juliet was having an emotional moment by his side.

At that very moment, the theater’s cat entered the stage and went up to Romeo, pulling his hair. Then, looking at Juliete, the cat… pic.twitter.com/hBT9Z3dbPB

— Dailymeow (@Dailymeoww1) June 11, 2026

Brainwashed Gazan children (UNRWA also moves it along in the schools):

Hamas terrorists are arming LITTLE GIRLS IN GAZA and recruiting them to join the terrorist organization.

Where is the world’s outrage? pic.twitter.com/oG407RyVIz

— Vivid.🇮🇱 (@VividProwess) June 11, 2026

One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:

It’s Anne Frank’s birthday, though she died (probably of typhus) when she was 15 or 16. She would be 97 today had she lived. https://t.co/6NJxNakWZ5

— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) June 12, 2026

And one from Dr. Cobb, on hols in Switzerland, wonderful and old Chinese “cat contract”. But they forgot the obligatory naps!

18th century "cat contract" (納貓兒契式; based on a Yuan-dynasty original), laying out the cat's duties and responsibilities: tirelessly guarding the grain, repelling the "mousey bandits" (鼠賊), not messing with the livestock, not stealing numnums "of any kind whatsoever" (不得偷盜食諸般).

— Brendan O’Kane (@bokane.org) 2026-06-10T16:47:26.431Z