Category: Hili Dialogue

Monday: Hili dialogue

September 23, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to another damn week: it’s Monday, September 23, and National Great American Pot Pie Day. (I’m not sure what distinguishes American pot pies from the many other versions throughout the world (the UK has them, and they’re a great pub lunch)

It’s also Fish Amnesty Day, Museum Day, National Snack Stick Day, National Wildlife Ecology Day and International Rabbit Day. 

Here are the first four week’s in the life of a bunny:

And my laundry bag scared me this morning, looking like a scary face:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the September 23 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*It seems that Israel is about to retaliate against Hezbollah’s repeated rocket attacks, but in a major way. Malgorzata sent this short video message from IDF spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, warning Lebanese civilians near Hezbollah facilities to move. Malgorzata says, “An IDF appeal to civilians in Southern Lebanon to move out of the harm’s way. There were also TV and radio appeals in Arabic, text messages etc. It seems an Israeli attack is imminent.”  Places like the WaPo are characterizing this as an “offensive action,” implying that Israel is widening the war, but as we all know, it was Hezbollah who has been firing missiles into Lebanon by the dozens, and has done so since October 8 of last year. See next Nooz item, too.

From this morning’s NYT:

Israeli warplanes struck at least 300 sites across Lebanon on Monday in an exceptionally fierce bombardment targeting the militant group Hezbollah. Lebanon’s health ministry said the strikes had killed at least 100 people and injured more than 400, as rapidly accelerating violence brought the two sides ever closer to all-out war.

Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran, fired dozens of rockets and drones into northern Israel, setting off air-raid sirens in the city of Tzfat and around the Sea of Galilee, a day after its deputy chief pledged to continue attacking until Israel ended its military campaign in Gaza. Israeli leaders, for their part, have announced “a new stage” of the war intended to stop Hezbollah from firing at Israeli border communities.

The Israeli strikes on Monday were preceded by what Lebanese authorities called “a large number” of automated messages sent to residents of Beirut, the capital, and other regions warning them to evacuate areas where Hezbollah had secreted weapons. The Israeli military published a map showing 19 villages and towns in southern Lebanon but did not say which, if any, would be targeted.

*There are rumors that Hamas head Yahya Sinwar, who’s been cowering in the tunnels under Gaza, has been killed. But those rumors are unsubstantiated, so stay tuned:

The IDF stated on Sunday that they can neither confirm nor deny reports on the possible death of Hamas Chief Yahya Sinwar.

Among sources consulted by The Jerusalem Post, a top source poured cold water on the notion, another source – who would be expected to have information – said they had no real information on it, while others noted disagreements within the defense establishment.

No sources referred to any kind of specific assassination operation that the IDF had carried out to kill him.

*Hezbollah has decided to retaliate big time for Israel’s beeper attack and increased bombing of missile launchers.  In effect, a war is going on, though neither side has crossed any borders on foot:

Some 85 rockets were launched by Hezbollah from Lebanon at the Haifa area in northern Israel on Sunday morning, following overnight launches at the Jezreel Valley, the terror group’s deepest rocket fire into Israel since the beginning of the war in October.

A teenager was killed when he crashed his vehicle as sirens sounded in the early hours of the morning, and at least three people were injured as a result of the rocket fire.

The military said that some of the rockets fired toward Haifa were intercepted, while others impacted Kiryat Bialik, a suburb of the northern coastal city, injuring three people.

The victims were a man in his 70s who was in moderate condition, and another man in his 70s and a 16-year-old girl who were lightly hurt. All three were taken to Haifa’s Rambam Medical Center for treatment.

One rocket hit a home in Moreshet in the Lower Galilee, causing significant damage but no injuries.

In a statement, Hezbollah claimed that the rocket fire targeted a Rafael defense firm facility in the Haifa area.

The Iran-backed terror group said the rockets were in response to the pager and walkie-talkie blasts in Lebanon last week, which killed more than 30 members of the terror group and wounded thousands of others. The attack was attributed to Israel, which has not commented.

The thing is, many of Hezbollah’s missiles were fired at towns that were not Jewish but Arab, including Nazareth, comprising almost entirely Druze Arab and Christian Arabs. The Arab Muslims are killing other Arabs, most of them Muslims.  Now I’m not overly worried about Hezbollah, which I think is cowed, though their missile supply seems to be inexhaustible. Instead I’m worried about Iran getting into the show. Although Secretary of State Blinken said that nobody should take advantage of Israel when it was engaged in Gaza (translation: Hezbollah should cool it), Blinken has since become a tool of the ignorant “two staters”, and, in fact, I’m not sure he even cares what happens to Israel.  Right now, in fact, the U.S. should be putting pressure on Hezbollah. Why hasn’t it?

*A prime example of the reportorial violence of the NYT, an article called “For Mideast foes, diplomacy takes a back seat to military force“. An excerpt:

The last, best chance for a peace plan between Israel and the Palestinian authorities came in 2008. Then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was prepared to give up territory in the West Bank, and allow some refugees to reclaim land. He was even willing to relinquish control of Jerusalem’s Old City to an international committee as part of recognizing Palestine as a sovereign state.

And then the potential deal fell apart, for reasons that Mr. Olmert still finds difficult to explain. “This was something that would have changed the Middle East,” he said in an interview about his failed talks with the Palestinian Authority’s president, Mahmoud Abbas. “He was not ready to take any risk.”

Mr. Abbas has said he was not given a proper opportunity to examine the proposed map of the West Bank and asked for more time. Days later, Mr. Olmert resigned under a cloud of corruption accusations, and the deal died.

No one in Israel today is thinking about such peace talks, amid fears that a sovereign Palestinian state would find it easier to mount another attack like the one Hamas undertook last Oct. 7, killing 1,200 people and setting off the war in Gaza.

Diplomacy has taken a back seat to military force, reflecting years of distrust and failed deals that have all but cemented the belief among the adversaries that neither side will negotiate in good faith. Officials and experts doubt those attitudes will be reversed any time soon.

Among the democratic nations it is widely agreed that Israel has a right to defend itself from the so-called ring of fire it faces from Iran and its proxy fighters in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen that want to destroy Israel.

But last week’s deadly pager and walkie-talkie explosions against Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon — followed by the strike on Friday in Beirut targeting a senior Hezbollah commander that killed at least 45 people — have fueled concerns that Israel is pivoting from cease-fire negotiations to free hostages in favor of military action that could escalate the regional conflict.

. . . Diplomacy no longer seems to be a priority, she said, under the increasingly combative policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. “I think it reflects this government’s opinion and policy, generally,” Ms. Rayten Marom said. “Netanyahu, with his extremist coalition partners, chose and still are choosing this path.”

This is basically a big sleazy lie. The Olmert deal fell apart because Arafat walked away from the table, as the Palestinians have walked away from the table many times before. Israel has never preferred war over diplomacy; it is the country that always offered deals to the Palestinians, who have expressed their intention to get rid of Israel. Finally, Israel has never attacked Palestine unless in retaliation for an attack or to forestall imminent violence. I detect the strong odor of mendacity.

*I can’t resist highlighting this WSJ op-ed column after Laura Helmuth said I criticized Scientific American‘s increasing ideological corruption simply because “Jerry has a lot of time on his hands.”  I won’t respond to her on a family-oriented site, but you can imagine how I feel about a stupid statement like that.  At any rate, the WSJ piece is called “The Political Scientific American: A very unscientific Harris endorsement shows why voters don’t trust scientific elites.” The entirety:

The scientific clerisy fret about eroding public trust in science, but what do they expect when they act like political partisans? The latest exhibit is an editorial this week endorsing Kamala Harris by the formerly esteemed publication Scientific American.

The magazine has a rich 179-year history of highlighting emerging technology and scientific debates in ways the lay public can understand. So it’s sad to behold its transformation into another progressive mouthpiece, broadcasting opinions on such subjects as gun violence, climate policy and identity politics that masquerade as science. Its Harris endorsement is a classic of this genre.

The editorial repeats favorite straw men on the left—for instance, that Mr. Trump “ignores the climate crisis in favor of more pollution” because he supports rolling back burdensome regulations and green-energy subsidies. Never mind that emissions declined during the Trump Presidency as cheap natural gas from hydraulic fracturing replaced coal power.

It also criticizes Mr. Trump’s support as President for “a work requirement as a condition for Medicaid eligibility.” By contrast, the editorial says, Ms. Harris supports “science” and would “improve health” by expanding Medicaid coverage. Who knew “science” supports a bigger welfare state?

Most of the magazine’s swipes at Mr. Trump aren’t related to science or health. “He goads people into hate and division, and he inspires extremists at state and local levels to pass laws that disrupt education and make it harder to earn a living,” the editorial avers.

By disrupting education, the editors don’t mean the Covid school shutdowns backed by teachers unions. They refer to state laws that ban critical race theory in K-12 schools.

The editorial continues: “Even after Trump was injured and a supporter was killed in an attempted assassination, the former president remained silent on gun safety.” Are the editors implying Mr. Trump is partly at fault for his second assassination attempt? They also parrot the mischaracterization of JD Vance’s remark regretting that school shootings have become a “fact of life.”

The more scientists and their magazines imitate an MSNBC roundtable, the more Americans will distrust anything they say.

In fact, I would agree that a Harris administration would be more science-oriented than a Trump administration, and so don’t agree with all the defense of Trump. My point wasn’t that: it was that science magazines shouldn’t do endorsements at all, which have no palpable effect except to reduce trust in both the magazines and science itself. It was, after all, Helmuth who okayed article after woke article having nothing to do with science (see a list here or here), including editorials saying that Mendel, Darwin, and E. O. Wilson were racists (I don’t think Mendel ever said a racist word, much less encountered a person of color). If I have too much time on my hands, Helmuth has too much wokeness in her magazine. (Have a look at this piece, for example, if you want a laugh. It is pure performative Social Justice, having nothing to do with Trump or Harris.)

*When the Taliban took over Afghanistan, I predicted that all the liberal reforms they promised for women would turn out to be lies. And, in fact, that’s exactly what happened, Women can’t go to school, have to cover their heads, faces, and hands, and can’t even speak in public. But things are going further, as the WaPo reports that the Taliban is starting to come down on men, too. They are, as one could have predicted, turning into an Iranian-style theocracy—but worse!

As the Taliban starts enforcing draconian new rules on women in Afghanistan, it has also begun to target a group that didn’t see tight restrictions on them coming: Afghan men.

Women have faced an onslaught of increasingly severe limits on their personal freedom and rules about their dress since the Taliban seized power three years ago. But men in urban areas could, for the most part, carry on freely.

The past four weeks, however, have brought significant changes for them, too. New laws promulgated in late August mandate that men wear a fist-long beard, bar them from imitating non-Muslims in appearance or behavior, widely interpreted as a prohibition against jeans, and ban haircuts that are against Islamic law, which essentially means short or Western styles. Men are now also prohibited from looking at women other than their wives or relatives.

As a result, more are growing beards, carrying prayer rugs and leaving their jeans at home.

These first serious restrictions on men have come as a surprise to many in Afghanistan, according to a range of Afghans, including Taliban opponents, wavering supporters and even members of the Taliban regime, who spoke in phone interviews over the past two weeks. In a society where a man’s voice is often perceived as far more powerful than a woman’s, some men now wonder whether they should have spoken up sooner to defend the freedoms of their wives and daughters.

“If men had raised their voices, we might also be in a different situation now,” said a male resident of the capital, Kabul, who like others interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity or that only their first names be used due to fears of drawing unwanted scrutiny from the regime. “Now, everyone is growing a beard because we don’t want to be questioned, humiliated,” he said.

This can be attributed only to religion. And in this case, a dictatorial, authoritarian, and completely delusional belief in a fictitious book supposedly dictated by an angel to an illiterate Arab sitting in a cave. Because of that book, millions and millions of people have been and will be deprived of freedom. Think of all the women whose dreams have been crushed! Now the men, too, lose their freedom of not just appearance, but of behavior.

*Princess Kate made her first public appearance since she was diagnosed with cancer after abdominal surgery in January. Well, that’s the AP’s headline, but in fact she’s made two appearances:

Kate, the Princess of Wales, made her first public appearance Sunday since she announced she had completed chemotherapy and would return to some public duties.

Kate and her husband, Prince William, were seen Sunday attending church with King Charles III and Queen Camilla near their royal Balmoral estate in Scotland.

Kate, 42, announced on Sept. 9 that she had completed treatment six months after revealing she had an undisclosed type of cancer. Her announcement came six weeks after Buckingham Palace announced that the king was being treated for cancer.

In a video announcing her progress, she said the path to full recovery would be long and she would take it day by day. She said she would undertake some limited engagements through the end of the year.

While she stepped away from most public duties during her treatment, Kate made two appearances earlier this year. First, during the king’s birthday parade in June, known as Trooping the Colour, and most recently during the men’s final at Wimbledon in July, where she received a standing ovation.

Her announcement that the path of recovery would be wrong makes me believe that she had a pretty serious diagnosis, and I can’t help speculating about what form of cancer she had. Since it was discovered during abdominal surgery, it could be colon or stomach cancer, or even ovarian cancer—or, really, almost anything else. Regardless, she’s only 42, has three young kids, and her father-in-law also is being treated for cancer. I wish her well.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili, who is after all a Jewish cat, shows one of a characteristic feature of Jews: anxiety.

Hili: I’m worried.
A: What about?
Hili: Does it matter?
In Polish:
Hili: Jestem zmartwiona.
Ja: Czym?
Hili: A czy to ma jakieś znaczenie?

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

From Cat Memes:

From Richard:

Another one from Cat Memes!:

From Masih: This is a pretty bad mine accident, and Masih pins the blame on the slipshod standards of the Iranian regime:

Trump is selling Trump Coins, a “testament to the resistance of strength of the American people.” It’s the Greatest Coin in the History of the World! They will make history in America!

From Simon, who says this is funny but you can’t unsee it:

 

I used to think that AOC was just a dumb progressives. Now I think she’s an anti-semite without any empathy (but plenty of ambition). She never mentioned those dozens of Druze kids killed in Israel by Hezbollah rockets, either.

This is a fantastic idea, and I think it’s worked well every place it’s been tried:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I retweeted:

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. The first one he calls “bizarre and sad“:

Matthew screened a screenplay:

 

Sunday: Hili dialogue

September 22, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Sunday, September 22, 2024 and at 7:44 this morning, on the sabbath for goyische cats, FALL BEGINS! It’s also National White Chocolate Day, and though I’ll eat it if it’s put before me, remember that, to those who demand cocoa solids in their chocolate, “white chocolate” doesn’t have them. As Wikipedia notes, “White chocolate is a form of chocolate typically made of sugar, milk, and cocoa butter, but no cocoa solids. It is pale ivory in color, and lacks many of the compounds found in milk, dark, and other chocolates.”  Fuggedaboutit! But here’s how it’s made:

It’s also Hobbit Day (the birthday of Bilbo and Frodo), National Elephant Appreciation Day (see below), National Ice Cream Cone Day, and World Rhino Day. 

This tweet, sent by Luana, shows the WRONG way to appreciate elephants, and she suggests that the hungry people in Zimbabwe should ask for international help. I’m sure some kind of campaign raised in, say, the U.S., could provide the food equivalent of those poor 200 elephants.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the Sept 22 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*I don’t know how the IDF manages to find out where Hezbollah is meeting so that Israel can make targeted strikes, but it’s doing quite well. As the Times of Israel reports,

The Israel Defense Forces confirmed Saturday that it had eliminated many of the top commanders of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force in the Friday strike in Beirut that killed Ibrahim Aqil, the head of Hezbollah’s military operations.

Hezbollah acknowledged that the airstrike had killed two of its most senior commanders and 14 other members of the terror group who were meeting in the basement of a Beirut residential building. The devastating strike was a further blow to the Iranian proxy and brought the sides closer to a full-scale war.

The military named 11 top Radwan officials killed in the strike. The Radwan Force has spearheaded Hezbollah’s ground operations in south Lebanon.

Aqil was the head of Hezbollah’s military operations, the acting commander of the Radwan Force, and the head of a long-gestating plan to invade the Galilee. Aqil had been meeting with the senior commanders of the Radwan Force under a residential building in Beirut when the IDF carried out its strike.

Ahmed Wahbi, identified by Hezbollah and the IDF as the head of the terror group’s training unit and a former commander of the Radwan Force, was also among the dead in the strike.

The IDF said Wahbi was among those involved in the planning of a Hezbollah invasion of the Galilee, and was also part of “advancing Hezbollah’s entrenchment in southern Lebanon, while attempting to improve the organization’s ground combat capabilities.”

Over the years and during the first months of the war, the military said Wahbi was involved in planning and carrying out rocket fire and infiltration attacks. Signifying his stature in Hezbollah, Wahbi, was identified by the terror group as a “commander.” Hezbollah rarely refers to its senior operatives slain in Israeli strikes as commanders.

A chart from the IDF included in the article, with the “eliminated” in red bars. Nasrallah is in hiding, of course, and if I were Karaki, I’d be very scared, as he’s the only other one left.  I’m starting to think that Israel is doing such a good job eliminating these terrorists that they may indeed be afraid to engage in a hotter war with Israel (they are of course at war, still firing rockets at civilians in northern Israel):

*Speaking of Hezbollah, and my view that everything Israel does in the war will be demonized as a war crime, the NYT has an op-ed that just does that with the Beeper Incident: “Israel’s pager bombs have no place in a just war” by Michael Walzer.

The exploding pagers and walkie-talkies targeting members of Hezbollah in Lebanon were certainly an espionage and technological coup. Few people on the spot or reading about them from far away could fail to be amazed. But the explosions on Tuesday and Wednesday were also very likely war crimes — terrorist attacks by a state that has consistently condemned terrorist attacks on its own citizens.

Yes, the devices most probably were being used by Hezbollah operatives for military purposes. This might make them a legitimate target in the continuous cross-border battles between Israel and Hezbollah. But the attacks, which killed at least 37 people and wounded thousands of others, came when the operatives were not operating; they had not been mobilized and they were not militarily engaged. Rather, they were at home with their families, sitting in cafes, shopping in food markets — among civilians who were randomly killed and injured.

Israel has neither confirmed nor denied responsibility for the attacks but is widely believed to be behind them. If those allegations are true, it is important for friends of Israel to say: This was not right.

The theory of just war depends heavily on the distinction between combatants and civilians. In contemporary warfare, these two groups are often mixed together in the same spaces — often, indeed, deliberately mixed together, because the killing of civilians invites moral condemnation. The war that Hamas designed in Gaza is a grim illustration of the strategy of putting civilians at risk for political gain. Still, a military responding to this strategy has to do everything it can to avoid or minimize civilian casualties. Israel claims to be doing that in Gaza, although serious criticism of its conduct there has appeared in media around the world, not to mention a case brought against Israeli and Hamas officials alike at the International Criminal Court alleging war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Well, that’s one argument, and I’d counter that the beepers were given to terrorists who were going to be involved in combat (why else would they have beepers?), and that they were detonated prematurely, as they were designed to be detonated during a war. A Hezbollah member intending to fight with Israel (in fact, they’re already at war), and in possession of a beeper, is not, to my mind, a civilian. Note Walzer’s admission that “the devices most probably were bing used by Hezbollah operative for military purposes.”

If you want counterarguments, urban warfare expert John Spencer, who teaches at West Point, has a Twitter thread where he praises Israel for an operation with few civilian casualties and enormous psychological impact.   Spencer and two other authors have a piece in Newsweek called “Sorry, AOC: Israel’s Precision Attack Against Hezbollah Was Humane—and Legal” (h/t Malgorzata). It syas this:

Generally speaking, under Article 7 of the Amended Protocol II to the 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, the use of booby traps in communication devices are indeed prohibited in certain situations. There is, of course, an overriding caveat, which is that pursuant to Article 52 of the Additional Protocols to the Geneva Convention I, such acts are permissible in circumstances where the objects in question are no longer used for civilian purposes.

In this case, the pagers and hand-held devices, which were distributed specifically to Hezbollah operatives, were being used for the purposes of communicating, planning and conducting operations. As such, they immediately ceased to be considered “civilian objects” and became legitimate military targets.

Accordingly, their destruction constitutes a clear military objective under customary international law (per Art. 52 of the Additional Protocols), and they are a lawful target of attack.

Richard Kemp, former commander of the British forces in Afghanistan, says this:

“The targets of the attack were terrorist fighters who are involved, directly or indirectly, in active combat operations against Israel including rocket and drone attacks every day for almost a year. Under international law that makes them legitimate and lawful targets for attack as Israel seeks to defend its citizens from violent aggression,” he said.

Further, International Law expert Natasha Hausdorff (she’s pro-Israel) disagrees that the pager attacks were illegal “booby traps” using the “noncombatant” trope (start 30 seconds into the debate). Hausdorff says “You can’t really think of a better example of complying with international humanitarian law.”

It’s hard not to think that the NYT really does want Israel to lose this war.

*BTW, the Wall Street Journal has an article about where the rigged beepers came from, and it’s still a mystery, with the WSJ concluding only that Israel had somehow infiltrated one of the many “shell companies” set up by Iran to evade sanctions. For decades, Iran and the militant groups it supports, such as Hezbollah, have used shell companies across the Middle East and Mediterranean to obtain funds and equipment while evading sanctions. Israel has in turn created its own shadowy networks to infiltrate the supply chains used by Iran and the militant groups it backs.

Tuesday’s attack is one of a handful of examples in which Israel has likely penetrated Hezbollah’s communications supply chain, said a person familiar with Israeli operations abroad. “But it’s the first time it ended with a bang like this,” he said.

People briefed on the operation said Israel breached Hezbollah’s supply chain and laced the batteries of the devices with explosives. The devices were then detonated remotely.

Hezbollah has begun an investigation into the supply-chain breach.

Bulgaria, Taiwan, and Hungary have all been implicated, but there’s no hard proof, and no smoking gun.  But here’s an interesting diagram about how the exploding pagers worked (click to enlarge):

*As you may know, there have been many accusations of bodies secretly buried near indigenous schools (a nefarious attempt of Canada to “de-indegenize” its native peoples). But so far no bodies have been found, and yet the rumor persists—playing into the Sacralization of the Oppressed myth.  Now, according to Luana, who sent this link (access the archived version here), people are acting like questioning the graves’ existence is a right-wing conspiracy. Or so the NYT says (the author is Ian Austen):

An excerpt: my bolding:

Ground-penetrating radar had found possible signs of 215 unmarked graves at a former residential school in British Columbia run by the Catholic Church that the government had once used to assimilate Indigenous children forcibly taken from their families.

It was the first of some 80 former schools where indications of possible unmarked graves were discovered, and it produced a wave of sorrow and shock in a country that has long struggled with the legacy of its treatment of Indigenous people. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ordered flags to fly at half-staff, as many Canadians wore orange T-shirts with the slogan “Every Child Matters.”

Three years later, though, no remains have been exhumed and identified.

Many communities are struggling with a difficult choice: Should the sites be left undisturbed and transformed into memorial grounds, or should exhumations be done to identify any victims and return their remains to their communities?

While there is a broad consensus in Canada that children were taken from their families and died in these schools, as the discussions and searches have dragged on, a small universe of conservative Catholic and right-wing activists have become increasingly vocal in questioning the existence of unmarked gravesSecurity guards protecting the potential gravesites in her community have turned away people who have turned up late at night with shovels, she said.. They are also skeptical of the entire national reconsideration of how Canada treated Indigenous people.

. . .“There’s, so far, no evidence of any remains of children buried around residential schools,” Tom Flanagan, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Calgary and an author of “Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth About Residential Schools),” said in an interview.

“Nobody disputes,” he added, “that children died and that the conditions were sometimes chaotic. But that’s quite different from clandestine burials.”

. . . Security guards protecting the potential gravesites in her community have turned away people who have turned up late at night with shovels, she said.

. . . In Ontario, a search of records by investigators working for the province’s chief coroner has so far identified 456 students who died while attending 12 residential schools. Some records show where remains may be buried, the coroner said, but there’s uncertainty about those findings.

At the Kamloops school site, where one of the largest number of potential gravesites was reported, Chief Casimir said her tribe was still analyzing the results of its ground and document searches before deciding whether to conduct exhumations.

Doing so, she added, would be “very intrusive.”

I have no doubt that indigenous people were often treated very badly, but questioning whether there are bodies where there are “possible signs” demands evidence, and questioning whether that evidence exists is NOT right-wing.  Why are they preventing people from determining if in fact there are bodies there? Would they rather cling to their possibly false assertions rather than know the truth? It seems so.  There is suggestive evidence that children died, so wouldn’t it be better to know the truth? Or are those preventing exhumation worried that their assertions are wrong. It would be very different if 10,000 kids were buried (as some estimate) or only a handful. At any rate, they’ve eliminated these ludicrous and racist schools.

*The WaPo has an interesting cartoon-article about how the use of psilocybin (a psychedelic drug obtained from mushrooms) has a high success rate of curing people of PTSD. I can’t reproduce any of the cartoon as it’s copyrighted but you can see it and the article archived here). The intro (I believe Ben Kramer is the artist as well):

Over the past decade, the medical community has started to take seriously the idea that psychedelic drugs — including psilocybin, the compound found in “magic” mushrooms — can help treat some mental health conditions, including post-traumatic stress disorder. In Oregon, the drug has been legalized for use under the supervision of a licensed provider. Ben Kramer is one of those providers.

Kramer once suffered from PTSD himself, and he now helps veterans and first responders deal with trauma using psilocybin. Kramer is not a mental health provider, and he recognizes that these types of drugs are not for everyone. But he has also seen his clients break old patterns, build new habits and find new ways of seeing the world.

I heard Michael Pollan, an exponent of the use of psychedelic drugs to relieve suffering, lecture on how psychedelic drugs greatly improved the depression of people with terminal illnesses. Now he’s written a book about how psychedelics can help people beyond those will terminal illnesses. Here’s a 33-minute video of Pollan being interviewed about his views. See? The hippies were on to something!

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili and Szaron are negotiating transit:

Hili: Are you going out?
Szaron Yes. And are you coming in?
Hili: Yes.
In Polish:
Hili: Wychodzisz?
Szaron: Tak. A ty wchodzisz?
Hili: Tak.

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

From America’s Cultural Decline Into Idiocy. Indeed! Fire that teacher; the student’s answer is CORRECT.

From Cat Memes:

From Things with Faces: Happy feet!

From Masih, good news about a European resolution against “gender apartheid” in Afghanistan. Be sure to expand the tweet.

From Malgorzata, “Downfall” turned into the Operation Grim Beeper, with Hitler as Nasrallah:

From Simon. It’s amazing that Jimmy Carter is still alive! And there’s this:

This is reprehensible: CELEBRATING October 7!

Every boss should do this at least once a year:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, the site of horrible experiments by Nazi doctors. I’ve seen this place.

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. I retweeted this first one:

And one of Matthew’s favorite genre of tweets, featuring visual illusion:

 

Saturday: Hili dialogue

September 21, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to CaturSaturday, September 21, shabbos for all Jewish cats and National Chai Day.  Remember, posting will be light this weekend due to Dawkins being in town on his Farewell Tour and various events occurring.  Tonight: the Final Talk in Chicago. See you there!

It’s also International Red Panda Day, National Pecan Cookie Day, World Alzheimer’s Day (props to my good friend who has contracted this ailment), International Day of Peace, International Eat an Apple Day, National Beef Stroganoff Day, and National Sponge Candy Day.  Here’s a cute but educational video about red pandas (Ailurus fulgens; the sole living members of the mammalian family Ailuridae):

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the Sept 21 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*If Hezbollah has an appetite for war, now would be the time for it to attack the Jews, for Israel has been mopping the floor with Hezbollah, injuring thousands in targeted strikes involving sabotaged beepers and walkie-talkies, knocking out a hundred missile-launchers, destroying missiles, and now killing the military commender of Hezbollah after having killed his predecessor a few days ago.  In fact, the war between Israel and Hamas actually began on October 8, when Hezbollah launched missiles at Israel after the October 7 butchery of Jews, so be aware that Hezbollah started it.  More carnage is in the offing. If Hezbollah would stop firing missiles at Israel, none of this would be happening:

The Israeli military on Friday carried out an airstrike in Beirut that it said killed a senior Hezbollah commander wanted by the United States for his role in bombings in the 1980s that killed hundreds.

Hezbollah did not immediately confirm that the commander, Ibrahim Aqeel, had been killed in the strike.

It was the second Israeli strike in two months that was intended to kill a top Hezbollah official in Lebanon’s capital, and it came amid a flurry of attacks by both sides that have raised fears of another full-scale war erupting in the Middle East.

The Israeli strike on Friday flattened a residential high-rise building in the heart of Dahiya, a densely populated suburban neighborhood south of the city’s center where Hezbollah holds sway, according to local residents. Residents described a chaotic scene as ambulances raced through the streets. Lebanon’s health ministry said at least 12 people were killed and dozens more were injured, including children.

Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, the Israeli military spokesman, told reporters that Mr. Aqeel was meeting other senior commanders underneath the building in an attempt to “use civilians as human shields.” The New York Times could not independently verify that information.

In a statement, the Israeli military described Mr. Aqeel as the chief of Hezbollah’s military operations directorate and the de facto commander of the Radwan force, an elite commando unit. The statement claimed Mr. Aqeel had plotted a never-implemented Hezbollah invasion of northern Israel similar to that of the Hamas-led assault of southern Israel on Oct. 7.

Israel and Lebanon have been on edge for days since pagers and walkie-talkies belonging to Hezbollah members blew up en masse this week, killing at least 37 people and injuring thousands in Lebanon in attacks widely attributed to Israel. Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, had vowed retribution for the explosions.

Now you’re going to hear people wringing their hands about how a “wider war” is happening, but what is really happening is that Israel has had enough bombardment (Hezbollah was firing missiles every day at Israel for months, and much of northern Israel), and is fighting back. Even the idiot Blinken is calling for peace; he, among all Biden administration officials, has been the person most responsible for tying Israel’s hands and trying to prevent the IDF from winning. Israel has every right to attack Hezbollah, and it’s done a pretty good job so far, avoiding killing civilians with those targeted beepers and bombing military sites. It’s salutary to remember that a binding UN resolution proscribes Hezbollah from doing what it did since last October 8 (unprovoked attacks on Israeli civilians), and the UN, with thousands of UNIFIL troops stationed in Lebanon, is supposed to stop this. It angers me deeply that the UN doesn’t enforce its own resolution, and that people keep forgetting that Hezbollah has been committing daily war crimes on the Israeli populace for nearly a year. Where is the accusation against Hezbollah in the International Court of Justice?

*Well, I’ll be. After sanctioning miracles for years, including the apparitions that draw gazillions of Catholics to Fátima and Lourdes, the Vatican has decided that it will no longer grace the appearance of such apparitions with the notion of “reality”.  This is because a half dozen kids claim they saw the apparition of the Virgin Mary in Bosnia and Herzegovina (article archived here), and the Vatican isn’t fully buying it:

In June 1981, six children between the ages of 10 and 16 claimed that the Virgin Mary had appeared to them on a stony hilltop near the village of Medjugorje, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The children said she had shared messages of peace and prayer with them.

The visionaries, as the group became known, say that the Virgin has been returning to Medjugorje (pronounced mehd-JOO-gor-ee-yeh) ever since. Their claim has drawn millions of the faithful from around the world, transforming the once tranquil farming village into a major pilgrimage site.

From the outset, though, the alleged apparitions have polarized Roman Catholic opinion. Millions of believers say they have found spiritual solace in Medjugorje, with dozens of reports of miraculous healings, conversions and religious callings. Others dismiss the sightings as a hoax, in part because they have continued so long and occurred with clockwork regularity.

After years of commissions, analyses and pronouncements from the Vatican and local officials, the Vatican issued a document on Thursday “to conclude a long and complex history that has surrounded the spiritual phenomena of Medjugorje.”

Acknowledging the “positive encouragement for their Christian life” that many pilgrims receive at Medjugorje, the Vatican has decided to authorize public worship there.

But the document, signed by Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, the head of the Vatican’s doctrine office, stressed that its decision was not meant to verify the presence of a supernatural phenomenon at the site.

Given that apparitions or other sightings are private experiences for individuals, the church does not require the faithful to accept the authenticity of such sightings. In this case, the document states that “the faithful are not obliged to believe in it.”

The new guidelines, which some Catholics oppose, are evidence based, and of course it would be hard (but not impossible: you could use photography and the like) to give fairly convincing evidence that the Virgin Mary really showed up. But there are the new Vatican Roolz:

Several investigations into the origins of the apparitions have been inconclusive.

Two early investigations led by the Diocese of Mostar-Duvno in Bosnia and one carried out by the former Bishops’ Conference of Yugoslavia failed to provide definitive conclusions. One of Pope Benedict XVI’s top cardinals led a commission to examine the apparitions, but its findings were never published.

The Vatican said its conclusions on Medjugorje were based on new, comprehensive guidelines for evaluating visions of the Virgin Mary and other supernatural, faith-based phenomena that it issued last May.

According to the new rules, the church will no longer issue declarations that accept the supernatural origin of such phenomena, as the Vatican had at Fátima, in Portugal; and Lourdes, in France, two important shrines dedicated to the Virgin Mary.

My question is whether they’ll apply these rules to apparitions of the past, especially like those at Lourdes, which still draws 5 million people a year, many hoping to be cured because Mary supposedly showed up there. This is all religious quackery, of course, but given the crowds and money, the Vatican is NOT going to re-examine Lourdes. But why apply empirical standards to the past that they now have abandoned? It’s faith, of course: you don’t want to shake the faith of someone with a fatal disease who can no longer hope for cures at Lourdes.

And sticking to empirical standards, the Vatican would also need to decommission a number of saints. For to become a saint, one must posthumously have caused two documented miracles. (The “devil’s advocates” are there to question those miracles. You may remember that Hitchens was one of the devil’s advocates when the Vatican beatified Mother Theresa in 2003. He failed, of course.) If there were no evidence of the supernatural, the Catholic Church, and most Christian denominations, would simply go out of business.

*Shohei Ohtani, who entered American professional baseball after becoming a star in Japan, may now become the greatest player in the history of baseball, though he needs to keep up his accomplishments for a longer time (he’s 30). He was a terrific starting pitcher and an excellent fielder (he’d pitch one day out of four or five and then play in the outfield the other days), and was also a powerful hitter. Yesterday, playing for the Dodgers against the Miami Marlins, he set a record that nobody else has ever attained—and the season isn’t near being over. He had six at bats, six hits, three home runs, ten runs batted in, and, for the first time in the history of the game, joined the 50/50 club: 50 stolen bases and 50 home runs for the season:

Perhaps the most talented player ever to step onto a baseball field put the ultimate exclamation point on a season unlike any other in a way that only he could: by delivering what might have been the greatest game in major-league history.

Shohei Ohtani, the Los Angeles Dodgers two-way superstar with abilities rivaled only by Babe Ruth himself, woke up Thursday morning with 48 home runs and 49 stolen bases. It had been clear for weeks that he would soon become the founder and sole member of the 50/50 club, an accomplishment that was all but inconceivable before he arrived.

But the mere act of amassing heretofore unimaginable statistics in a sport that is almost as old as the Civil War wasn’t enough for Ohtani. He also needed to do it in a way nobody would ever forget.

Three homers. Two doubles. Two steals. Ten RBIs. And a 6-for-6 outing at the plate in a 20-4 beatdown of the Miami Marlins. That was Ohtani’s ledger on Thursday, yet another improbable chapter in a tome all of his own. By the end of it, 50/50 might as well have been the ancient past. Ohtani was already at 51/51. And if all that wasn’t enough, his heroics also clinched a postseason spot for the Dodgers, meaning that after seven long years, Ohtani will finally have his chance to shine on the October stage.

“I’m happy, relieved and very respectful to the peers and everybody who came before who played the sport of baseball,” Ohtani said afterward, through an interpreter.

In many ways, Ohtani’s achievements stand so far ahead of what had previously seemed possible that it might as well be its own language. There had been two other instances before Thursday of somebody recording six hits, three homers and 10 RBIs in a single game. Cincinnati Reds catcher Walker Cooper did it back in 1949—but he went 6-for-7, whereas Ohtani was a perfect 6-for-6.

Ohtani remains a designated hitter while his elbow heals from a pitching injury (his pitching record before the injury was 38-19), and I suppose they’re letting his arm rest by not making him play in the field, either.  But he steals bases as almost an fun hobby, and hits like a demon. Here’s a video of him entering the 50/50 club, and it may well be the greatest day any player has had in major league baseball:

*As usual, I’ll steal three items from the incomparable Nellie Bowles’s weekly news digest on the Free Press. Yesterday’s column was called “TGIF: No one ate Miss Sassy” (that must be a cat). The page is archived here.

→ Hezbollah has to give consent: Israel planted explosives in thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies that were then sold to Hezbollah—and this week, Israel detonated those explosives remotely, destroying Hezbollah’s communications system. The international community is aghast! Yes, Hezbollah has fired thousands of rockets into Israel for almost a year now. Yes, Hezbollah bombed a youth soccer game in Israel, killing 12 Israeli Druze children in Majdal Shams (Hezbollah denied involvement). But that’s not starting war. No. That’s solidarity. When Israel hits back at Hezbollah, that’s starting war.

As Young Turks founder Cenk Uygur put it: “Israel hasn’t been defending itself for months, this is just an offensive war that Israel is starting all over the Middle East.” Again, guys, I’m being really clear: The soccer field bombing was mere Hezbollah self-defense. You have no idea how hard a Druze teen kicks a soccer ball.

Here’s UN chief António Guterres: “I think it’s very important that there is an effective control of civilian objects, not to weaponize civilian objects.” Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez has this to say: “This attack clearly and unequivocally violates international humanitarian law and undermines US efforts to prevent a wider conflict.” It’s only odd because she didn’t say anything about Hezbollah bombing that Israeli kids’ soccer game. She’s actually never tweeted about Hezbollah before. Odd. Weird. Civilian objects, like the pagers that terrorists use, are sacred. . . .

AOC, like Ugyur and Guterres, is out to lunch.  This is the first tweet she’s ever made about Hezbollah, and she’s defending the terrorists, ignoring the fact that Hezbollah has been violating international humanitarian law for a long time, firing missiles into Israel at civilians for months. Did AOC mention the 12 Druze (Israeli) children killed on a soccer field by a Hezbollah missile?  Nope. Her empathy is strictly limited to Hamas and Hezbollah.

AOC’s tweet and a response:

→ No one ate Miss Sassy: Not to go so hard on J.D. Vance but he has continued going hard on the idea that all these Haitian immigrants are coming in and eating your pets. Asked for proof, J.D. Vance has been pointing to the twisted tale of Miss Sassy. Springfield, Ohio resident Anna Kilgore noticed that her cat, Miss Sassy, was missing. She suspected—nay, she knew—it was the Haitian neighbors. And with smells of cooking spices so rich and foreign, it could only be the flesh of one Miss Sassy. She filed a police report. It was written about locally. J.D. grabbed on. Later, after J.D. gave this to The Wall Street Journal as evidence of Haitian pet-eating, the paper looked into Miss Sassy. It turns out she is alive, all her perfect drumsticks attached to her juicy, roastable body. That fluffy bag of white and dark meat was just relaxing in Anna Kilgore’s own basement, waiting for some hot sauce. (Sorry, I just get hungry at the thought of cats!)

The WSJ also describes what happened next in that little Ohio town in this strange saga, which ought to have stayed local: “Kilgore, wearing a Trump shirt and hat, said she apologized to her Haitian neighbors with the help of her daughter and a mobile-phone translation app.” Might J.D. do the same?

→ Abortion stories are not going away: This week brings the harrowing tale of Amber Nicole Thurman, a 28-year-old mom who died of sepsis. Thurman arrived at a Georgia hospital in the middle of a miscarriage. She had to wait 20 hours while doctors hemmed and hawed on the vague language around the state abortion ban’s medical exceptions. A group of expert doctors with the state deemed her death “preventable.

Until red states can figure out how to prevent horror stories like that of Amber Nicole Thurman, they’re not exactly selling the country on pro-life legislation. It’s like trying to sell me on a government-run health system when Canada is right there. No one is fooled. We know how this goes.

*And since it’s Saturday, let’s turn to the reliable “Oddities” section of the AP. This is an animal story that sounds dire but turned out well:

It’s a good thing seals aren’t on a humpback whale’s menu.

A photograph by a whale-watching naturalist captured a seemingly bewildered seal in the mouth of a humpback whale after the giant marine mammal accidentally gulped it last Thursday in the waters off Anacortes, Washington.

The food mix-up began while a Blue Kingdom Whale and Wildlife Tours boat spotted birds flying over a school of fish and a humpback whale swimming toward it, Captain Tyler McKeen said. He said the humpback then used a lunging feeding technique, where the whale opens its mouth wide and takes in small fish and water. But instead of remaining underwater afterward to filter through its baleen, it surfaced and began opening and closing its mouth.

After the whale went back underwater, photographs and videos were checked by whale watchers.

“It only took a couple seconds for everybody to pull up the frames and zoom in,” McKeen said. “That’s when we saw the seal. It was a funny, funny moment for everybody. I mean, it probably wasn’t that funny for the seal.”

A photograph by Brooke Casanova shows the seal, which presumably was also hunting the fish, emerging from the bottom of the whale’s mouth. McKeen recorded a phone video where the seal is getting flushed out.

Here’s a tweet showing a bewildered-looking seal sitting in the mouth of a humback whale. I don’t think a baleen whale could swallow a seal anyway, but I might be wrong:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is mad at Kukla. Why? Malgorzata explains: “Andrzej was discussing something with Kulka and Hili got jealous.”

Hili: Do not anthropomorphize Kulka.
A: Why?
Hili: She is just a cat.
In Polish:
Hili: Nie antropomorfizuj Kulki!
Ja: Dlaczego?
Hili: To tylko kot.

And a picture of poor Baby Kukla, who was dragged hard by Hili:

More:  Reader Divy’s cat Jango sent a romantic email to Hili (below), and Andrzej also featured it on Listy:

Translation: “Meanwhile, from across the ocean, Hili received a friend request. (Original Polish: “Tymczasem zza oceanu Hili otrzymała zaproszenie do przyjaźni.” Here’s Jango’s email; love is in the air!

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

*From Cat Memes:

*From the 2024 Darwin Awards/Epic Fails:

From Strange, Stupid, or Silly Signs:

From Masih, Pelosi on one side, an attacked Iranian woman on the other (it looks like an acid attack):

From Simon, who says this:

”The letter excerpt here is amusing although i think blaming feminization for the change in the approach taken by administrators is overly simplistic”:

From Thomas, who says,  ”You need this cat.”  I do!

I suspect this is a leucistic fox. And of course it was I who first classified foxes as Honorary Cats!

A geeky double-entendre chemistry joke:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, two French siblings (the girl was nine) gassed to death upon arriving at Auschwitz:

Two tweets from the lately-retired Dr. Cobb. First, from SMBC, Matthew says ”Genuine LOL in fourth panel.”

And a geeky but cool inside science joke:

 

Friday: Hili dialogue

September 20, 2024 • 6:45 am

Posting will probably be very light this weekend; Richard Dawkins is coming to town on what he says is his final tour (he’s 83), and I’ll be attending several Dawkins-related events, including his talk tomorrow. It will be at the old and small Chicago Theater, a fantastic venue, and you can still get tickets here.  As you see below, the host is Jesse Singal.

Welcome to Friday, September 20, 2024, and National String Cheese Day. I do love the stuff, even though it’s bland as hell, because the texture is everything. But on average every American eats half a pound of this stuff per year. Here’s how they make it (in Wisconsin, of course):

It’s also International Grenache Day, National Fried Rice Day, World Paella Day, National Bakery Day, National Gibberish Day, aslke88 &^*&*m, and National Pepperoni Pizza Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the Sept 20 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*It looks like Israel is preparing for a war with Hezbollah, and Israel has pretty much said as much. Although the beepers and walkie-talkies that Mossad used to injure a large proportion of Hezbollah fighters this week were apparently detonated prematurely to prevent Hezbollah from detecting them, the war for which they were to be used seems inevitable. Now Israel is flying warplanes over Beirut (article archived here).

Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah called the two days of deadly blasts linked to electronic devices in Lebanon this week an “act of war” by Israel, as the Israeli military stepped up strikes on southern Lebanon, flew warplanes over Beirut and approved plans for the next stage of the conflict along the border between the two countries.

“The enemy transgressed all boundaries and red lines,” Nasrallah said in a widely anticipated speech Thursday evening local time about the attacks, which killed at least 37 people and injured nearly 3,000 when pagers, walkie-talkies and other devices exploded simultaneously on Tuesday and Wednesday across Lebanon. The attacks were “a major assault on Lebanon, its security and sovereignty, a war crime — an act of war,” he added, and they dealt an “unprecedented blow” to Hezbollah and Lebanon.

As he spoke in a televised address, the rumble of planes and large sonic booms could be heard over the Lebanese capital. But Nasrallah also struck a note of defiance, saying the group’s operations would not stop until Israel ended its war in Gaza.

“They will face a severe reckoning and just retribution, whether they expect it or not,” Nasrallah said of Israel. The nature, size and location of any retaliatory attack would be kept secret, he said.

. . . Minutes before Nasrallah began to speak, the Israel Defense Forces announced it was striking Hezbollah targets in Lebanon to “degrade Hezbollah’s terrorist capabilities and infrastructure.”

Earlier Thursday, in Beirut’s southern suburbs, where support for Hezbollah is strong, residents said they feel vulnerable and exposed, with a sense of unease sweeping across their neighborhoods. The attacks have eroded the once-solid sense of security they felt living far from the front lines in southern Lebanon.

Hezbollah has said it won’t stop attacking Israel until it ends the war in Gaza. Fat chance of that happening! And so the Keffiyeh Brigade is deeming the beeper attacks as “war crimes”, which they’re not. (As I’ve said, Hezbollah is committing multiple war crimes every day, firing missiles at Israeli civilian targets multiple times a day. But nobody seems to notice that, least of all the cowardly United Nations, which even passed a binding resolution prohibiting Hezbollah from attacking Israel. And of course there are thousands of UN troops in Lebanon that are supposed to keep the peace, but they’ve been too afraid to stop Hezbollah.) The war with Hezbollah will be a tough one, for they have more and better missiles than did Hamas, Hezbollah is a well-organized group, and they even have tunnels. This also means that Israel may be involved in two wars at once. Can they handle it? Well, they did in 1948, but armaments have changed a lot since then. And the United Nations has proven itself a bunch of hypocrites.

*John McWhorter has written some good columns lately (here’s one I wanted to feature), but I’ve had no space to do so. I do, however, want to call your attention to his new NYT op’ed called “Wby J. D. Vance dropped into my inbox” (archived here). It’s a lament for how McWhorter and Vance started out on similar paths, but then diverged. Vance, it seems, is proving a distinct liability to the Trump ticket, still harping on things like Haitian immigrants eating cats, but at one time McWhorter saw a kinship between them:

I once thought of JD Vance and me as coming from a similar place.

Not in terms of life experience, as my middle-class suburban childhood was quite different from Vance’s early years in rural poverty.

But something similar happened when we each wrote a book.

In 2000, I published “Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America.”

. . . .  quite a few people thought I wrote the book as a cudgel for conservative Republicans to take up against Black people. In the Bay Area, where I was teaching, for a while I was race traitor No. 1. Besides occasional insults on the street, local newspapers did nakedly biased profiles of me, laced with nasty comments by people like the writer Ishmael Reed (who as recently as last year had a character in one of his plays dissing me!). I heard endlessly that I must have been hoping to get rich by selling out to white conservatives.

Arguing from the middle means you get it from both ends. I am often a self-hating racist to the left, while the right often thinks I am a conservative in denial and lately diagnose me as suffering from “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” And so shall it be, as I hold on tight where I sit.

Sixteen years later, Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” became a huge best seller by arguing that what ails poor Appalachians is the result of both structural factors such as deindustrialization and also cultural factors. Structural factors can cause the cultural ones, but the latter can take on a life of their own. He describes people who see themselves solely as victims of those larger forces, rather than doing what is within their power to improve their lives.

Vance came in for it in the same way that I did back in the day. Despite his efforts to thread the needle, more than a few Appalachians read the book as disrespectful, condescending and disloyal. Sarah Jones at The New Republic judged Vance’s main point to be simply “All hillbillies need to do is work hard, maybe do a stint in the military, and they can end up at Yale Law School like he did.”

They exchanged friendly emails for a while, and Mcwhorter “assumed that his trajectory would involve walking the same kind of line I have tried to, exploring societal issues without being co-opted by the temptations of partisanship.”  It didn’t work out that way:

Instead, Vance has done exactly what my detractors had assumed I would, riding the book to fame and fortune provided by people with partisan and even hostile right-wing opinions. It’s sad and perplexing to watch a person with such potential to do good transparently selling out.

His recent CNN interview with Dana Bash — the one in which he said, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do” — was typically dismaying.

. . . And that’s just it — Vance is distinctly uncrazy. He is smart and competent and has proved himself to be capable of sensitive, thoughtful engagement. I just don’t believe that someone like that could fall for the idea that Haitians are netting people’s Goldendoodles, saying grace over a dinner of puppy chops and saving the leftovers for sandwiches the next day.

In other words, McWhorter accuses Vance of knowingly pushing lies to advance a divisive point of view about immigrants. And, it seems, McWhorter is right.

*The NYT has two op-eds aimed at giving Kamala Harris tips on how to win the Presidency. One, by Frank Bruni, is called “Why can’t Kamala Harris just say this?” (archived here), consists of a long explanation that, says Bruni, Harris should give for changing her positions over the last decade. (It doesn’t offer any new positions, which is also one of her problems.) Read it for yourself, and see if it would help her.

The other, by Todd Purdum, identified as “a former White House correspondent and Los Angeles bureau chief for The Times” is called “The political cost to Kamala Harris of not answering direct questions.” *Archived here, though they changed the title.) She did this again in her recent interview with Action News’s Brian Taff, answering questions about her specific plans by beginning with “I’ll start with this.  .” and then telling an incredibly tedious and aging story about her upbringing, before finally getting around to mentioning a few unworkable and un-pass-able initiatives that she’s mentioned before.  Some excerpts, and blame this not on me, but on the NYT, whom, I guess, some readers will accuse of trying to help get Trump elected!:

When Kamala Harris sat down for just the second major television interview of her campaign last week with the Philadelphia ABC affiliate, the anchor asked her to outline “one or two specific things” she would do to fulfill her pledge of “bringing down prices and making life more affordable for people.” She responded by recalling how she was “a middle-class kid” who grew up in a community of construction workers, nurses and teachers who were “very proud of their lawn.” She recounted her mother’s saving to buy her family’s first house. She paid tribute to a neighbor who became a surrogate parent. She praised the “beautiful character” of the American people.

Only then, after nearly two minutes, did Ms. Harris outline her plan for a $50,000 tax credit for start-up small businesses; private-sector tax breaks to spark construction of three million housing units over four years; and $25,000 in federal down payment assistance for first-time home buyers.

It’s a shibboleth of modern political strategy that candidates should answer the questions they want to, not the ones that are asked, and Ms. Harris faces a unique challenge in this truncated presidential race of introducing herself to an electorate that in many ways still barely knows her. So she might be forgiven for leading with a blizzard of atmospheric biographical detail that makes some voters feel they can’t trust her to answer a direct question.

But in a campaign in which Donald Trump fills our days with arrant nonsense and dominates the national discussion (and polls show a tight race where Ms. Harris is running behind Joe Biden’s level of support in 2020 with some groups), the vice president can’t afford to stick only to rehearsed answers and stump speeches that might not persuade voters or shape what America is talking about.

. . . Writing about politicians for decades has convinced me that direct, succinct answers and explanations from Ms. Harris would go a long way — perhaps longer than she realizes — toward persuading voters that they know enough about her and her plans, which polling surveys now suggest they don’t (yet badly want to). Being known as a straight shooter would also help persuade restive political elites, pundits and journalists that Ms. Harris is grappling with such scrutiny, and I think she’s apt to be rewarded in the end for it.

. . . For better or worse, questions — and usually the very hardest ones — come with the job of being president. When voters say they need to know more about Ms. Harris, I think part of what they are really saying is that they want to know more about how she would be as president, as well as what she would do. What would it be like to have her in their living rooms and on their devices for four years? How would she roll with the punches? How would she react in a crisis? How would she respond to their concerns, fears, hopes, dreams, desires — and, yes, criticisms? Listening closely, and answering questions — clearly, early and often — is inevitably a part of passing that test.

Purdum also says, like Bruni, that Harris should “own” her flip-flopping. Don’t blame me for this: I’m highlighting New York Times articles, ones trying to help Harris get elected. Clearly the NYT should shut up until after the election is over, lest they enable Trump by hjighlighting Harris’s deficiencies. The price of her avoidance is losing the election. I think the last paragraph above is quite eloquent—and accurate. So far, undecided voters aren’t going over to Harris’s side, regardless of her slaughtering Trump in the debate. Why? It’s because, like me, they don’t have any idea what Harris would be like as President. (We already know what Trump would be like; we experienced that nightmare.)

The NYT still continues its bias in the news. Here are the top two headlines from the online news. The middle video features mockery of Trump. Oprah??

 

*It’s now become possible to renew your passport online, saving a ton of trouble.

American travelers can now apply to renew their passports online, saving applicants a trip to the post office and mail service delays.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced Wednesday that the State Department would be moving its pilot program for online renewals out of testing and into a permanent role.

The agency has been testing the renewal system since 2022. Over time, it has slowly expanded how many online applications it can handle each day. For the system’s mid-June relaunch, the public could submit materials starting at 1 p.m. Eastern time. Once the agency reached capacity, it would close the portal until the next day.

Rena Bitter, assistant secretary for consular affairs, estimates that up to 5 million Americans per year will be able to use the service that is currently available 24/7.

To be eligible for the online system, travelers must be U.S. citizens or residents 25 and older who have already had a passport with 10-year validity, among other requirements. Here are a few. .

The list isn’t onerous, though it says to give them an eight-week period to get your passport to you.  I’ve used the renewal system not long ago, and I got my new passport within a week and a half. So if yours is expiring, go here and submit your application (if you pay extra you can get it in 2-3 weeks but I wouldn’t worry too much about that). You’ll need a digital color photo taken against a neutral background, but that’s dead easy these days. The site even has a tool that will crop your photo to the right size. (Don’t expect a great picture on your passport, though!).

*Saturday Night Live debuted on October 11, 1975, and so is beginning its 50th season. The AP looks back at what happened to the cast members of that first season, which I watched with fascination (I’d never seen anything like it!). Two of course are dead: John Belushi and Gilda Radner, but looking back at that cast, and comparing it to what I’ve seen of SNL since then (I no longer stay up that late, but watch what are supposed to be “good” skits), I have to conclude that the first case was the best cast. Here are the members and a few words given on each:

John Belushi: Following years of drug use, he died March 5, 1982, at 33 after overdosing at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles. Belushi’s death stunned and saddened his friends and fans and symbolized the end of the hard-living ‘70s.

Gilda Radner: Nasally Roseanne Roseannadanna. Weird teen Lisa Loopner. Weekend Update’s “never mind” complainer Emily Litella. Radner contributed an endearing sweetness to the inaugural season of “SNL.” She stayed for five years.

. . . Radner died May 20, 1989, at age 42 after a long battle with ovarian cancer. Her book detailing her cancer fight was released earlier that year. A documentary about her life, “Love Gilda,” was released in 2018.

Chevy Chase:  Now 80, Chase has taken in recent years to hosting screenings with audience Q&As for “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation,” the most enduring movie in that franchise. He also makes chicken sounds and posts fan meetups and family gatherings on TikTok, where he has 1.2 million followers.

Laraine Newman:  She left “SNL” in 1980 after portraying Connie Conehead, Valley Girl stewardess Sherry and ditzy public access TV co-host Christie Christina. She was also a recurring reporter on “Weekend Update.”

Newman has spoken openly about her struggles with depression and drug addiction during that time. She got sober in 1987.

Dan Akroyd:  When he wasn’t bleeding out as Julia Child or declaring, “Jane, you ignorant slut!” on “Weekend Update,” Aykroyd swagged with Steve Martin as one of two wild and crazy guys, and led the Conehead family as patriarch Beldar.

And he lent so much more to “SNL” before leaving in 1979, including as half of The Blues Brothers and impersonations of talk show host Tom Snyder, Rod Serling and two presidents: Nixon and Carter.

. . . Aykroyd, 72, wrote and narrated a recent audio documentary, “Blues Brothers: The Arc of Gratitude.”

Jane Curtin: Curtin left “SNL,” in 1980, after five seasons. She was a master of deadpan, often playing the straight woman off such outsized performers as Belushi and Radner. A regular on “Weekend Update,” she was also known for the Coneheads sketches as matriarch Prymaat and as Enid Loopner with fellow nerds Radner and Murray.

Garrett Morris:  Initially hired as a writer, he was the oldest on “SNL’s” first cast at 37. He came to the show after 17 years as a singer and arranger with Harry Belafonte, as an actor in plays and musicals, as a playwright and as a civil rights activist who helped desegregate Actor’s Equity.

. . . He remained on “SNL” until 1980. He was known for his character Chico Escuela, the Dominican baseball player whose catchphrase, “Baseball has been berry berry good to me,” caught on in pop culture. He also performed as the shouting interpreter in the “News for the Hard of Hearing” segments and did impersonations of Idi Amin, James Brown, Sammy Davis, Jr., Bob Marley and Muhammad Ali.

What a cast! Yes, there have been individuals who have been as good as some of these, but not have equaled Belushi and Radner, or, a close second, Dan Akroyd.  I’d be remiss if I didn’t show a sketch from the best two, so here you go:

Radner’s “The I Hate Jennifer Show”:

Belushi in “Samurai Delicatessen”:

@nomad_215

“Samurai Delicatessen” is a comedy sketch from Saturday Night Live that aired on January 17, 1976. The sketch features John Belushi as a samurai who makes a sandwich by: Cutting ropes on hanging salami Slicing tomatoes in midair Splitting bread with his skull The sketch also features Buck Henry as Mr. Dantley, who waits while the samurai makes the sandwich. The two characters have a pleasant conversation even though they speak different languages. #snl #johnbelushi #ripjohnbelushi

♬ original sound – Nomad_215

And Akroyd as Julia Child (genius!):

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili wants a LEAF! This is not like her!

Hili: What is it you have?
A: A leaf.
Hili: May I have it?
In Polish:
Hili: Co tam masz?
Ja: Listek.
Hili: Czy mogę go dostać?

 

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

From America’s Cultural Cecline Into Idiocy:

From Jesus of the Day:

From Strange, Stupid, or Silly Signs:

From Masih, a sad tweet:

From Steve Stewart-Williams. No, journals should not engage in politics nor endorse candidates. It only serves to weaken the public’s confidence in science.

From Simon; how ailurophiles entertained themselves during lockdown.

A cat Go-Pro—way cool!

Two tweets from Barry—a hungry eagle and an angry goose. Why are geese such jerks? Ducks don’t chase people like that!

From the Auschwitz Memorial:

Two tweets from the newly-retired Dr. Cobb. First, a lovely sunrise from The Shepherdess:

Matthew calls this pair of tweets “Beautify—and terrifying.”:

Thursday: Hili dialogue

September 19, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Thursday September 19, 2024, and it’s National Pawpaw Day, celebrating a delicious fruit (Asimina triloba) native to the U.S. and southern Canada. It’s not grown commercially, but when I was a kid I knew of a pawpaw tree in the woods near my house in Virginia, and used to pick and scarf down the fruits when they were ripe. They are delicious!

From Wikipedia, and a photo:

As described by horticulturist Barbara Damrosch, the fruit of the pawpaw “looks a bit like mango, but with pale yellow, custardy, spoonable flesh and black, easy-to-remove seeds.” Wild-collected pawpaw fruits ripen in late August to mid-September through most of their range, but a month later near their northward limit. They have long been a favorite treat throughout the tree’s extensive native range in eastern North America, and on occasion are sold locally at farmers’ markets.

The inside. Wikipedia caption: “Common Paw Paw. Photo taken at Red Fern Farm in Wapello Iowa, 11 Sept. 2004”

It’s also International Talk Like a Pirate Day, and National Butterscotch Pudding Day (this always reminds me of Bill Cosby). 

There’s a Google Doodle today (click to go to its page), celebrating the life of Emerson Irving Romero (1900 – 1972), described by Wikipedia as “a Cuban-American silent film actor who worked under the screen name Tommy Albert. Romero developed the first technique to provide captions for sound films, making them accessible for the deaf and hard of hearing; his efforts inspired the invention of the captioning technique in use in films and movies today.”

What’s weird is that he was neither born nor died on this day. But it is Hispanic Heritage Month, and I think that’s the link. (BTW, why is there no Jewish Heritage Month?)

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the Sept 19 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

Well, we start with three pieces on Israel, and forgive the imbalance today.  There’s not much to say about politics, as the Presidential race is still a tie.

*First, more devices are exploding in Lebanon (blame Mossad), but still devices in the hands of Hezbollah.  But the explosions have gone beyond beepers into other electronic devices, like walkie talkies, all in the hands of Hezbollah member.. Of course people are chiding Israel for this, which seems to me ridiculous in view of Hezbollah’s daily launches of several rockets aimed at civilians in northern Israel. Hezbollah commits war crimes every day, and Israel only responds to them, never initiating a missile attack.  Now they’ve taken the offensive, though the explosions seem to have been premature given their intention:

Wireless devices held by members of Hezbollah exploded across Lebanon on Wednesday afternoon, local officials said, killing nine people and wounding 300 others. The apparently coordinated attack came as the country reeled from a similar operation the day before that blew up thousands of pagers belonging to the armed group’s members.

The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the latest attack. Lebanese, U.S. and other officials briefed on the matter say that Israel was responsible for the deadly pager blasts on Tuesday, which blew up the hand-held devices across Lebanon in their owners’ hands and pockets.

Two Lebanese security officials and a Hezbollah official said some of devices that exploded on Wednesday were hand-held radios belonging to Hezbollah members. One of the devices was a ICOM-branded walkie talkie, according to two officials with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation. It is unclear from which company Hezbollah purchased the devices.

. . . . The attack on Tuesday pierced Hezbollah’s reputation as one of Israel’s most sophisticated foes and ratcheted up fears of a wider war between the two. Israeli officials have increasingly suggested that they favor intensifying military operations in Lebanon to fend off Hezbollah, which has fired thousands of missiles and drones at Israel since October in solidarity with Hamas in Gaza.

Yoav Gallant, the Israeli defense minister, said in a video statement that Israel was “at the outset of a new period in this war.” Without mentioning the explosions in Lebanon, he said the “center of gravity” of Israel’s military efforts was “moving north,” as the country diverted “forces, resources, and energy” toward the threat posed by Hezbollah.

The pager explosions on Tuesday killed at least 12 people and wounded over 2,700 others. Hezbollah claimed eight of the dead as members, but another two were children, including a 9-year-old girl from central Lebanon.

Once again the collateral damage (euphemism for “civilians or innocents killed”) is about as low as you can go with a tactic like this. It’s going to scare the bejeezus out of Hezbollah members, making them afraid to use any electronic devices.  As far as I can see from various reports, the injuries and deaths are confined almost exclusively to fighters for Hezbollah. (I shouldn’t have to add that the deaths of children and innocents is regrettable, but the ratio of fighters killed to civilians killed  is—and this is according to Hezbollah—four to one, the lowest in the history of combat.  This is truly a selective attack.

In this morning’s NYT I see that the devices were actually manufactured by Israel using a shell company (Nasrallah is the head of Hezbollah):

By all appearances, B.A.C. Consulting was a Hungary-based company that was under contract to produce the devices on behalf of a Taiwanese company, Gold Apollo. In fact, it was part of an Israeli front, according to three intelligence officers briefed on the operation. They said at least two other shell companies were created as well to mask the real identities of the people creating the pagers: Israeli intelligence officers.

B.A.C. did take on ordinary clients, for which it produced a range of ordinary pagers. But the only client that really mattered was Hezbollah, and its pagers were far from ordinary. Produced separately, they contained batteries laced with the explosive PETN, according to the three intelligence officers.

The pagers began shipping to Lebanon in the summer of 2022 in small numbers, but production was quickly ramped up after Mr. Nasrallah denounced cellphones.

*We again have a surprising article in the NYT, one called “How Hamas uses brutality to maintain power.” (Is that a surprise? h/t: Stephen). The article is archived here.

Early this summer, Amin Abed, a Palestinian activist who has spoken out publicly about Hamas, twice found bullets on his doorstep in northern Gaza.

Then in July, he said he was attacked by Hamas security operatives, who covered his head and dragged him away before repeatedly striking him with hammers and metal bars.

“At any moment, I can be killed by the Israeli occupation, but I can face the same fate at the hands of those who’ve been ruling us for 17 years,” he said in a phone interview from his hospital bed, referring to Hamas. “They almost killed me, those killers and criminals.”

Mr. Abed, who remains hospitalized, was rescued by bystanders who witnessed the attack, but what happened to him has happened to others throughout Gaza.

The bodies of six Israeli hostages recovered last month provided a visceral reminder of Hamas’s brutality. Each had been shot in the head. Some had other bullet wounds, suggesting they were shot while trying to escape, according to Israeli officials who reviewed the autopsy results.

But Hamas also uses violence to maintain its control over Gaza’s population.

. . . . This article is based on interviews with more than three dozen U.S. and Israeli officials, Hamas members and Palestinian residents of Gaza. Many of the officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence assessments. Many of the Palestinians spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation.

Since the attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, which killed 1,200 people, Israel’s aim has been to “destroy Hamas.” In practice that means that the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants to end the group’s hold on power in Gaza. But after 11 months of war, U.S. officials say Hamas’s control has been loosened but not broken.

Palestinians are quick to excoriate Israel for the deaths and destruction in Gaza. But some Palestinians said in interviews that Hamas has put Gazans in Israel’s cross hairs by launching attacks from neighborhoods, running tunnels under apartment buildings and hiding hostages in city centers.

And Hamas is still able to inspire fear among the people it rules, despite the chaos that has taken hold across the territory.

The article goes into some of Hamas’s brutal tactics, tactics I’ve described here. These include putting civilians in the line of fire (deliberately), brutalizing or killing those who criticize Hamas, hiding hostages among civilians, which of course has dire results. Despite all this, Hamas still has a firm hold on Gaza’s civilian government, and that of course brings up the “what next” question that nobody is able to answer without invoking an IDF occupation of Gaza until a non-terrorist government can be put in place. Only Ceiling Cat knows when that will happen. But for the meantime, this article shows the depauperate moral status of those who idolize Hamas, like many of the pro-Palestinian protestors. Would they like to live in a government like Gaza has?

*Speaking of that, this is pretty funny: a US organization that has the dosh has offered a cool million bucks to any organization willing to hold an LGBTQ parade in Gaza (or Judea and Samaria)

The New Tolerance Campaign (NTC), a U.S.-based watchdog organization, announced on Monday a $1 million offer to “Queers for Palestine” or any U.S. LGBTQ advocacy organization to host a Gay Pride Parade in Gaza or Judea and Samaria.

“This isn’t a joke. It’s not a publicity stunt. Our offer is real,” NTC President Gregory T. Angelo, who is gay and the former president of Log Cabin Republicans, said in a statement on the organization’s website.

“For the past year we’ve seen so-called ‘Queers for Palestine’ and allied LGBTQ organizations insist that the Palestinian territories are ‘inclusive’ — well, here’s their chance to prove it. We’re willing to put our money where their mouths are to underwrite a Gay Pride Parade in Gaza or the West Bank.”

NTC has secured commitments for the $1,000,000 prize, which is being offered to potential parade organizers. The offer is good for the next six months, until March 16, 2025.

NTC said it had attempted to publicize the campaign with full-page ads in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and USA Today. All three newspapers declined, citing safety concerns.

Times Square in New York City also declined to run the ad, saying the buildings displaying it could become targets of violence.

Well, those last two paragraphs tell you something, don’t they?  I think the offer is more or less a joke, since within six months Gaza will almost certainly not be open to foreign civilians.  However, areas A and B of the West Bank are open to foreign civilians (so long as they don’t identify themselves as Jews), and it’s theoretically possible that a bunch of non-Israeli LGBTQ people could enter these areas and then hold a parade. The results, of course, would be predictable: violence and carnage.  That’s why Queers for Palestine would be way too cowardly to take the NTC up on this offer. But that failure does point out the arrant hypocrisy of these pro-Palestinian LGBTQ groups.

*Reader Paul sent me an announcement that Cal Poly University has imposed strict new rules on encampments and protests, and, trying to find the announcement on the web, I found an August 19 announcement from EdSource that Cal State (which includes Cal Poly) and the entire University of California System have similar regulations.

California State University and the University of California are welcoming student activists back to campus this fall with revamped protest rules that signal a harder line on encampments, barriers and, under certain circumstances, the wearing of face masks.

Cal State, the nation’s largest public university system, was first to issue its policy Thursday, a bundle of restrictions that govern public assemblies on university campuses. UC President Michael Drake followed Monday with a letter outlining his expectations for campus chancellors to impose restrictions on how students could engage in protests this fall.

The two systems join a wave of colleges that have revisited rules about how and where people can demonstrate on their campuses in the wake of pro-Palestinian protests last spring. Critics say some strengthened restrictions could limit free speech rights.

The Cal State policy bars tent encampments and overnight demonstrations, a signature of the spring’s protest movements both within CSU and across higher education institutions. Erecting unauthorized barricades, fencing and furniture is also prohibited.

“Encampments are prohibited by the policy, and those who attempt to start an encampment may be disciplined or sanctioned,” CSU spokesperson Hazel Kelly said in a written statement to EdSource. “Campus presidents and their designated officials will enforce this prohibition and take appropriate steps to stop encampments, including giving clear notice to those in violation that they must discontinue their encampment activities immediately.”

Kelly said the encampments “are disruptive and can cause a hostile environment for some community members. We have an obligation to ensure that all community members can access University Property and University programs.”

UC campuses similarly will ban encampments or other “unauthorized structures,” Drake said in a letter to campus chancellors Monday morning directing them to enforce those rules. He also said they must prohibit anything that restricts movement on campus, which could include protests that block walkways and roadways or deny access by anyone on campus to UC facilities.

Here’s what Cal Poly (a part of Cal State) announced yesterday:

  • Encampments and camping. No person shall camp, occupy camping facilities, use camping paraphernalia, or store personal property for camping, whether indoors or outdoors. No one may erect a tent or other temporary housing or occupy any tent or temporary housing structure. No person shall set up a campsite, or bring, leave or maintain furniture or other large household or camping items.
  • Unauthorized structures and barriers. No person shall build, construct, erect, place, set up, move, deliver or maintain any temporary or permanent tent, platform, bench, building, building materials, wall, barrier, barricade, fencing, structure, sculpture, bicycle rack or furniture.
  • Restricting free movement.  No person shall restrict the movement of another person or persons by any means, including blocking or obstructing their ingress or egress, or otherwise deny a person access to normally unrestricted areas.
  • Masking to conceal identity with intent to violate laws or policies.  No person shall wear a mask or personal disguise for the purpose of concealing their identity with the intent of intimidating any person or group, or for the purpose of evading or escaping discovery, recognition, or identification in the commission of violations of the law or policy.
  • Occupation of buildings and facilities. No person shall occupy buildings and facilities or engage in trespass or any other violation of applicable law.
  • Vandalism and other damage. No person shall vandalize, damage or destroy university property.

Well, this all sounds good, but let’s see if the rules are enforced.  I don’t think any of these violate the First Amendment (both sets of schools are public and must thus adhere to Constitutional free speech), but perhaps the masking policy could be construed that way. I doubt it, though, for wearing a mask isn’t really “speech”.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s worried about the American election. When I asked Malgorzata who Hili favored for President, she replied ” Neither. She bemoans that Americans couldn’t find better candidates and she submits herself as a much better proposition.”  I agree: write in Hili!

Hili: I’m afraid.
A: Of what?
Hili: Of what Americans are going to elect for all of us.
In Polish:
Hili: Obawiam się.
Ja: Czego?
Hili: Tego co Amerykanie nam wszystkim wybiorą.

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

From Cat Memes:

From the Dodo via Nikita Simpson:

From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy. Actually, the guy is clever, albeit sneaky:

 

From Masih. Iran has not forgotten Mahsa Amini.  Sound up (and remember that women dancing in public is forbidden in Iran):

From Barry:

Don’t forget the upcoming “week of rage” (five days!) declared by Students for Justice in Palestine.  Expect trouble if you’re on campus:

This showed up on my feed. I know everyone hates Elon Musk but I don’t, and at any rate this, if true, is amazing:

Rowling is a hoot (she’s also widely hated, but not by me):

From the Auschwitz Memorial, which I retweeted:

Two tweets from the now-retired Dr. Cobb. This first predation even is much faster than I would imagine:

Go to the link to see the photos:

Wednesday: Hili dialogue

September 18, 2024 • 6:45 am

First, encomiums to Matthew Cobb, who, as this tweet below suggests, has formally retired as a professor at the University of Manchester.  He’s still giving lectures to first-year students, though, and his biography of Francis Crick is finished (he needs a title, though; please suggest one that’s racier than “Francis Crick: a Life.” The book will be out in a year (such is publishing), but I’ve read drafts and it’s EXCELLENT.

Welcome to a Hump Day (“arè bungkuk” in Madurese): Wednesday, September 18, 2024, and National Cheeseburger Day (didn’t we just have that?) Today we’ll feature a New Mexico speciality: the green chile cheeseburger, an awesome burger:

It’s also International Read an eBook Day, Rice Krispies Treats Day (I love ’em!), National Red Velvet Cake Day, and World Bamboo Day (if you want to buy 3-ply bamboo toilet paper, go here). 

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the Sept 18 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*This is an amazing testimony to the power of Mossad, which seems to be back in gear (although of course Israel won’t admit responsibility). In a tactic that I still consider unbelievable, Israel made several thousand pagers in the hands of Lebanese terrorists explode at the same time!  As of this morning’s reports, about 2800 people were injured and nine killed.

Hundreds of pagers blew up at the same time across Lebanon on Tuesday in an apparently coordinated attack that killed eight people and injured more than 2,700, health officials said on Tuesday.

The attack came a day after Israeli leaders had warned that they were considering stepping up their military campaign against Hezbollah.

Hezbollah said that pagers belonging to its members had exploded and accused Israel of being behind the attack. The Israeli military declined to comment.

The wave of explosions left many people in Beirut in a state of confusion and shock. Witnesses reported seeing smoke coming from people’s pockets, followed by a small blasts that sounded like fireworks or gunshots. Amateur footage broadcast on Lebanese television showed chaotic scenes at hospitals, as wounded patients with mangled hands and burn injuries sought treatment. Sirens blared throughout the city as the day ended.

Lebanon’s health minister, Firass Abiad, said that at least eight people had been killed and more than 2,700 others injured, including 200 who were in critical condition. Dr. Abiad said many of the victims had injuries to their faces, particularly the eyes, as well as to their hands and stomachs. One of those killed was an 8-year-old girl, he said.

Lebanon’s prime minister, Najib Mikati, characterized the attack as “criminal Israeli aggression” and called it “a serious violation of Lebanese sovereignty.”

Excuse me? This is a war against terrorists who fire dozens of rockets at Israel every week. Criminal aggression my tuches: what is criminal aggression is Hezbollah’s firing a gazillion rockets at northern Israeli cities on a daily basis. Here’s an answer to all the Israel-haters baying that this violated international law (as if Hezbollah’s rockets don’t do that multiple times a day), here’s a response:

More:

Three officials briefed on the attack said that it had targeted hundreds of pagers belonging to Hezbollah operatives who have used such devices for years to make it harder for their messages to be intercepted. The devices were programmed to beep for several seconds before exploding, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

What’s salubrious about this tactic is that only Hezbollah members can be targeted (I guess they can’t control who is using a pager, but they’re usually person-specific). There was VIRTUALLY NO COLLATERAL DAMAGE that I know of. You can see a video of a victim here, and several people standing a few feet away are completely uninjured.

The most intriguing question is obvious: How did Israel do this? Surely the pagers were bought in different places, and surely not in Israel. It seems as if Israel would have to have gotten to the pagers in advance to make them explosive, but that seems impossible.  Yet it was done. Sadly, Israel, who won’t even admit responsibility, would never (even if it did admit it) reveal such a secret, though the Lebanese will probably find out how it was done by dissecting pagers. Oh, and who uses pagers any more? I suspect it’s because terrorists think that cellphones are easier for Israel to monitor. Still . .

I just learned that the Jerusalem Post has a page with mini-articles answering some of these questions, but not the Big One. Sky News n Arabic (via Israel 7 National News, has since reported that, according to a Lebanese source, the beepers were tampered with before they reached Hezbollah, with explosive materials put into the batteries that would detonate when the battery temperature got high. But that of course raises other questions, as the beepers were apparently made in Budapest in a company (“Gold Apollo”) licensed by a Taiwanese company.

Of course the NYT’s headline denigrates this effort, as they would.  Taking out 10% of Hezbollah’s members, probably on the eve of an Israeli/Hezbollah war, would seem to me to be a useful goal, even if the explosions are premature:

But did they read the Times of Israel, which says this morning that the devices were designed to be used in case of a full-scale war between Israel and Hezbollah (that may well be in the offing), and set them off when the plot was discovered:

Israel caused thousands of Hezbollah terror group pagers to explode Tuesday, killing nine people and wounding nearly 3,000, amid fears that Hezbollah was about to uncover that the devices had been tampered with, according to Wednesday reports.

Israeli intelligence services originally wanted to detonate the pagers as an opening blow in an all-out war against Hezbollah, Axios reported, citing American and Israeli officials. They chose to act early, however, when a Hezbollah member became suspicious of the devices and planned to alert his superiors, Al-Monitor reported.

So yes, there was a strategic goal: to incapacitate Hezbollah members, and though it did that prematurely, it did indeed show the power (and smarts) of Israel.

*A study that got tons of publicity showed that black babies survived at a higher rate when birthed and cared for by black doctors than white doctors.  This led to all kinds of accusations of racism, implying that white doctors just didn’t care very much about the condition of black babies.

But I became aware of problems with this study from this tweet by Steve Stewart-Williams, a respected researcher, whose website post summarizes a new paper in PNAS, which you can access for free here,  The paper refutes the “racism” accusation by noting that the original study left out a crucial variable: birth weight. It turns out that black babies with very low birth weights, and thus a lower chance of survival, are disproportionately cared for by white doctors. Actually, I’m surprised, given the Zeitgeist, that it was actually published.

The authors do all kinds of fancy statistics, but note that in the original and subsequent analyses, researchers neglected an important comorbidity in their analysis: birth weight. If they add in whether or not the birth weight is below 1,500 grams (3.3 pounds), the doctor-race effect disappears.

There is, however, a very simple way of illustrating how a single health condition left out of the Top 65 comorbidities accentuates the empirical finding of racial concordance. We created a variable indicating whether the newborn’s birth weight is below 1,500 g*. Column 4 shows that regardless of the list of control variables included in the regression, replacing the entire vector of comorbidities with this single variable greatly reduces the magnitude of the racial concordance effect while improving model fit. In fact, the effect is statistically insignificant in the fully specified model (with a coefficient of −0.033 and a SE of 0.039). Column 5 replaces the single very-low-birth-weight indicator with a vector of the 30 different ICD-9 codes that describe the nature of the condition in detail. Not surprisingly, the inclusion of more granular information on the incidence of very low birth weights substantially increases the R-squared of the regression (to 0.39). It is worth emphasizing that the estimated racial concordance effect is statistically insignificant in all models reported in both Columns 4 and 5 that include hospital or doctor fixed effects.

. . . In other words, the newborns attended by White and Black physicians are not random samples. Black newborns with a very low birth weight are disproportionately more likely to be attended by White doctors than by Black doctors. Those newborns are also more likely to have a low chance of survival. The exclusion of the very-low-birth-weight variable from the regressions then suggests that, on average, Black babies attended by White doctors will have poorer outcomes than Black babies attended by Black doctors. But this effect may have little to do with racial concordance. It can instead arise because Black newborns attended by White doctors are more likely to have a vulnerability closely linked to mortality.

I would expect that the MSM and other outlets would give this critical analysis, which debunks the racism trope, as much play as they did the original study. But I wouldn’t hold my breath!

*If you’ve read Elizabeth Weiss’s work or her new book (see also my posts here and here), you’ll know that museum anthropology exhibits, subject to overly restrictive, and sometimes ridiculous, demands of Native Americans, are hiding artifacts, reclaiming them, or even warning observers that some displayed objects have “spiritual powers”. A new article in the NY Post by Weiss (yes, a tabloid, but Weiss is reliable and I know the anthropology examples cited (h/t Stephen) verifies the fulminating wokeness of museums:

Smothered by political ideology, America’s great museums are failing their mission as the protectors of our shared human heritage.

I should know: I’ve spent the last year immersed in a study of the world-renowned museums of New York City, after Heterodox Academy’s Segal Center for Academic Pluralism awarded me a fellowship to explore museum exhibits for viewpoint diversity and accuracy of information.

Tragically, I found that museums have become just another arena for pushing political agendas, especially those supporting the postmodern ideology that identity — race, gender, nationality and class — is more important than truth.

A few examples:

At the American Museum of Natural History’s Northwest Coast Hall, indigenous superstitious beliefs that harm can come from artifacts intended for shamans are treated with complete seriousness.

The exhibit comes with a medical-style warning label: “CAUTION: This display case contains items used in the practices of traditional Tlingit doctors. Some people may wish to avoid this area, as Tlingit tradition holds that such belongings contain powerful spirits.”

and

Similar warnings are found behind the scenes in curation rooms used by museum staffers and visiting scholars.

There, pregnant and menstruating women are currently told to stay away from “objects of power” that contain human hair, and everyone is cautioned to not even look at the bird-bone whistles that can summon “supernatural beings.”

. . . . Now, however, nearly all of the museum’s Native American exhibits have been shuttered completely due to the Biden administration’s “Indigenous Knowledge Mandate” and regulatory changes to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

one more:

Meanwhile, art museums are increasingly restructuring exhibits around identity politics — leading to confusing displays with no natural organization or flow.

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the exhibit “Look Again: European Paintings 1300–1800” focuses on “class, gender, race, and religion,” which in practice means that geographic locations and artists are jumbled throughout the halls.

Furthermore, exhibit curators redrew the border of Europe to include some of Asia and Africa — apparently a clumsy attempt to retrospectively insert diversity into the past where none existed.

Similarly, “The African Origin of Civilization” exhibit paired ancient Egyptian works with far more recent African pieces, to show how Egypt influenced the rest of Africa and vice versa.

Yet anthropologists have debunked such theories, leading curators to point to “similarities” in depictions of universal concepts found in all cultures, such as the relationship between mother and child.

*As reported by the Times of Israel, a new poll shows why a two-state solution isn’t in the offing—at least any time soon.

A poll of Israelis and Palestinians published last Thursday reveals that the two sides nearly mirror each other in their unprecedented levels of fear and distrust. In addition, Jewish Israeli respondents report record-low rates of support for an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the forms of a one- or two-state solution or a confederation with Palestinians.

An indicator of the prevailing distrust is that about 90% of respondents on each side attribute extreme, maximalist aspirations to the other. Sixty-six percent of Jewish Israelis and 61% of Palestinians believe the other side wants to commit genocide against them, and an additional 27% of Jewish Israelis and 26% of Palestinians say the other side wants to conquer the land “from the river to the sea” and expel them.

Furthermore, a record-high 94% of Palestinians and 86% of Israelis say that the other side cannot be trusted.

The findings were published on Thursday in the “Pulse” Israeli-Palestinian poll, a joint public survey conducted in July by the Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) and the International Program in Conflict Resolution and Mediation at Tel Aviv University. The lead authors were Dr. Dahlia Scheindlin, Dr. Khalil Shikaki and Dr. Nimrod Rosler.

It polled 1,270 Palestinians — 830 from the West Bank and 440 from Gaza in person — and 900 Israeli adults online, both Jewish and Arab, in the second half of July.

. . .The poll found some striking similarities between Israelis and Palestinians. For example, both sides believe that their victimization is the worst compared to other peoples who have suffered from persecution, a view held by 84% of Jewish Israelis and 83% of Palestinians.

The survey also found that an overwhelming majority on both sides legitimize the use of violence against the other. Eighty-one percent of Palestinians justified Hamas’s actions on October 7 as a reaction to the siege and blockade of the Gaza Strip imposed by Israel and Egypt to prevent Hamas from arming itself. For comparison, only 28% of Arab Israelis justified October 7.

Among Jewish Israelis, 84% believe that Hamas’s atrocities justify the ongoing military campaign in the Gaza Strip. The figure is surprisingly high even among left-wing voters, who once represented the bulk of the Israeli “peace camp”: 73% of those in the “moderate left” and 44% who self-identify as members of the “firm left” approve of the war.

This is why it’s a touchstone of someone’s geopolitical acumen if they say that a “two state solution” must be implemented immediately (cf. Kamala Harris). It simply will not work under these circumstances, and you don’t have to be a genius to know why. You just have to read the polls—or the news.

*The Wall Street Journal wrings its hands over the exploding federal debt, and criticizes both Trump and Harris as being part of administrations that not only caused this problem, but whose promises to spend more money is exacerbating it.

The U.S. isn’t fighting a war, a crisis or a recession. Yet the federal government is borrowing as if it were.

This year’s budget deficit is on track to top $1.9 trillion, or more than 6% of economic output, a threshold reached only around World War II, the 2008 financial crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic. Publicly held federal debt—the sum of all deficits—just passed $28 trillion or almost 100% of GDP.

If Congress does nothing, the total debt will climb by another $22 trillion through 2034. Interest costs alone are poised to exceed annual defense spending.

Here’s a graph. Note that a huge federal debt has a number of bad economic repercussions, including reducing wages, slowed investment and slowed economic growth, and higher interest rates.

But the country’s fiscal trajectory merits only sporadic mentions by the major-party presidential nominees, let alone a serious plan to address it. Instead, the candidates are tripping over each other to make expensive promises to voters.

Economists and policymakers already worry that the growing debt pile could put upward pressure on interest rates, restraining economic growth, crowding out other priorities and potentially impairing Washington’s ability to borrow in case of a war or another crisis. There have been scattered warning signs already, including downgrades to the U.S. credit rating and lackluster demand for Treasury debt at some auctions.

Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, and GOP rival Donald Trump aren’t the same on fiscal policy. She has outlined or endorsed enough fiscal measures—tax increases or spending cuts—to plausibly pay for much of her agenda. He has not.

Still, both Harris and Trump were parts of administrations that helped produce those deficits. Both have promised to protect the biggest drivers of rising spending—Social Security and Medicare. And both want to extend trillions of dollars in tax cuts set to lapse at the end of 2025, amid bipartisan agreement that federal income taxes shouldn’t rise for at least 97% of households.

There’s more, and some of the repercussions are above my pay grade, but what’s clear is that economists are seriously worried about the growing national debt, and about promises of political candidates to make new billions-of-dollars promises.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is studying biology:

A: What are you watching?
Hili: A microcosm in the grass.
In Polish:
Ja: Co oglądasz?
Hili: Mikrokosmos w trawie.

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

From Donna:

From Barry:

From Cat Memes:

From Masih; the ire of Iranian women has not abated, and many are making the brave move of not wearing hijabs at all.

Barry sent me the second video; you can ignore the first one. This gives the lie to the term “bird brain.”

A tweet about the exploding pagers, suggesting several ways it could have been done, though all seem unlikely:

It’s worthwhile to turn up the sound.

From my feed, of course:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a French girl moved from a camp in Paris to Auschwitz on her tenth birthday. She was gassed upon arrival.

Two tweets from Matthew, the first one autobiographical. What IS that plane?

Matthew’s comment is “LOL”:

Tuesday: Hili dialogue

September 17, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Tuesday, September 17, 2024, and National Monte Cristo Day.  In this case Monte Cristo is a sandwich, described this way by Wikipedia:

A Monte Cristo sandwich is an egg-dipped or batter-dipped ham and cheese sandwich that is pan or deep fried. It is a variation of the French croque monsieur.

I’ve never had one. Here’s a photo. but it looks more like a donut than a sandwich! Still, I would of course try it. but look at this:

In sweeter variations, the Monte Cristo is often covered in powdered sugar and served with maple syrup or preserves.

Oy!

uıɐɾ ʞ ʇɐɯɐs, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also Constitution Day and Citizenship Day, National Apple Dumpling Day, and National Voter Registration Day. (I vote by mail, automatically getting my ballots several weeks before the election, filling them out at home, and popping them into a nearby mailbox in the postage-paid envelope.)

There’s a Google Doodle today reminding people to register to vote. I don’t think that’s a problem among readers, but here it it (click to see where it goes). If you’re not registered, check your deadline here.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the Sept 17 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Kamala Harris did her first solo interview—with Action News anchor Brian Taff on Friday. It took place as she was campaigning in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.  It’s short—11 minutes long, and you can judge for yourself.  I see little few concrete proposals (beyond what she’s said before) beyond her claims that she wants to ban assault rifles and have background checks (which I approve).  Sadly, the reporter throws softballs, and there’s a lot of irrelevant autobiograpy and fuzzy sentiments.  She ends by saying that her fondest hope is to cook Sunday dinner for her family again, but if she gets to inhabit the White House that won’t be possible.

*The man accused of trying to assassinate Trump has been charged, but with gun-possession crimes. He apparently waited for hours for Trump to show up, presumably because he didn’t know whether or when Trump would play on that golf course, which is the Orange Man’s favorite course.

The man who investigators say appears to have waited near a golf course for about 12 hours in an apparent attempt to assassinate former President Donald J. Trump with a semiautomatic rifle faces two federal gun charges: possessing a firearm as a felon and possessing a firearm with an obliterated serial number.

The defendant, Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, wore a blue inmate jumpsuit to his initial appearance in a federal courtroom in Florida on Monday, and later left the courthouse in a white van. His appearance came less than 24 hours after what the authorities said appeared to be the second attempted assassination of the former president in just over two months.

According to a criminal complaint, cellphone data indicated that Mr. Routh was in the woods in the vicinity of Mr. Trump’s golf course in West Palm Beach, Fla., for roughly 12 hours before a Secret Service agent spotted what appeared to be the barrel of a rifle and opened fire. The complaint detailed the subsequent discovery of a loaded SKS-style rifle — a Soviet-era semiautomatic rifle developed in the 1940s — as well as food and a digital camera.

The charge of possessing a firearm as a felon is the more serious of the charges against Mr. Routh, carrying a prison sentence of up to 15 years. Possession of a firearm with an obliterated serial number carries a sentence of up to five years.

. . . .The cellphone of the suspect charged on Monday in a possible assassination attempt against former President Donald J. Trump was near the golf course where the episode took place for nearly 12 hours, court records show.

The cellphone of Ryan W. Routh, the suspect, was “in the vicinity of the area along the tree line” of the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Fla., beginning at 1:59 a.m. on Sunday, according to a federal criminal complaint filed on Monday.

I would have thought that the crimes for which Routh is charged would carry more than 20 years in jail, but of course the investigation isn’t through, and I’m betting they’ll come up with more charges soon.  Right now, I’m unwilling to speculate on a motive, especially because the guy seems all over the map. The obliteration of a serial number seems damning (this is in fact was the lead headline of the WSJ on Monday), but the most intriguing part of this whole story to me is that they were able to track the suspect’s car using cameras along the road that could read his license plate number—a number photographed by an alert bystander as Routh fled the scene.

*As I predicted (you don’t have to be a genius to prognosticate such stuff), the Taliban is further cracking down on women in Afghanistan, passing a new set of misogynistic, theocratic, and oppressive laws.

As the Taliban begins enforcing new draconian laws, Afghan women say that whatever hopes they once harbored for an easing of the severe restrictions on them have largely vanished.

The new religious code issued late last month bans women from raising their voices, reciting the Quran in public and looking at men other than their husbands or relatives. It requires women to cover the lower half of their faces in addition to donning a head-covering they were already expected to wear, among other rules.

Women’s lives were heavily regulated by the Taliban-run government before the latest rules were promulgated, and some of the new laws codify restrictions that were already imposed on women in practice. But Afghan women, speaking in phone interviews over the past week, pointed to mounting signs of a crackdown in urban areas, where rules had been less rigorously enforced

The Taliban’s morality police, which is an extension of the regime’s most conservative elements, appears to have been handed an unprecedented amount of power in the capital, Kabul, and elsewhere, women said. While the morality police’s white robes were a rare sight in Kabul, they have become omnipresent since late August, several women said.

Officers are roaming bus stops and shopping centers searching for dress-code violations or any women who might laugh or raise their voices. On Fridays, the Muslim holy day, religious police officers disperse women in some parts of Kabul and accuse them of preventing male shop owners from making it to the mosque in time for prayers. Women are an increasingly rare sight on Afghan television broadcasts.

And women have largely stopped going to school: the Taliban promised women could still get education equal to that of men, but now they aren’t allowed to go to college or even get any education above the sixth grade.  I predicted that, too. If you know the Taliban, you know that they could never keep a promise about equality for the sexes.

*Jonathan Turley is peeved at the laxness (or rather, one-sidedness) of the moderators’ fact-checking in the Harris/Trump debate.  “With fact-checks like these, how does truth stand a chance?” He argues that the moderators fact-checked Trump far more often than Harris (and I can’t say he’s wrong). At any

ABC News has been widely criticized for the bias of the two moderators Linsey Davis and David Muir. Even liberal outlets acknowledged that the two journalists seemed inclined to “fact check” only Trump. In the meantime, they allowed clearly false statements from Harris to go unchallenged.

Three of the unchecked claims are being widely disseminated by supporters, including some in the media. Here are three legal “facts” that are being repeated despite being clearly untrue.

“Crime is down under the Biden-Harris administration.“

One of the most notable slap downs by ABC followed Trump commenting that crime rates have drastically risen during the Biden-Harris administration. Muir immediately balked and declared: “As you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country.”

Harris and her allies have been repeating the claim by ABC. But the actual statistics show that Trump was right. The Justice Department’s released survey found that, under the Biden administration, there has been a significant increase in crime. Violent crime was up 37 percent from 2020 to 2023, rape is up 42 percent, robbery is up 63 percent and stranger violence is up 61 percent. Other reports had shown startling increases such as a doubling of carjackings in D.C. in 2023.

“Harris has not supported transgender operations for undocumented migrants.”

Some of the greatest mocking in the media concerned Trump’s statement that Harris has supported transgender conversion treatment for undocumented persons. New Yorker staff writer Susan Glasser immediately wrote “What the hell was he talking about? No one knows, which was, of course, exactly Harris’s point.”

On CNN, Wolf Blitzer declared how “outlandish” it was for Trump to make such a claim.

But it’s true.

In 2019, Harris told the ACLU that she not only supported such operations but actively worked for at least one such procedure to take place. When it was reported by Andrew Kaczynski on CNN, host Erin Burnett was gobsmacked by the notion of taxpayer-funded gender transition surgeries for detained migrants. “She actually supported that?” Burnett exclaimed.

Even the New York Times later admitted that the “wildest sounding attack line” from Trump was “basically true.”

Harris does not support the right to abortion in the final three months of a pregnancy.  

Trump also hit Harris on her no-limits position on abortion rights, allowing women the right to abort a baby up to the moment of birth. Trump said Harris supports laws allowing abortions in “the seventh month, the eighth month, [and] the ninth month,” to which Harris retorted: “C’mon,” “no,” and “that’s not true.”

He adds one more unchecked claim that “ABC later corrected:ABC later challenged another claim by Harris on the deployment of U.S. troops.” Her claim was this: “(ABC later challenged another claim by Harris on the deployment of U.S. troops).”

But I don’t remember Harris supporting abortion in the final three months of a pregnancy; I can’t remember her saying that explicitly, though I may be wrong. All that Turley says to support this is that “many states, including Minnesota under Gov. Tim Walz (D), protect the right of a woman to abort a baby into the ninth month. While it is often said that this is left to the mother and her doctor, the law gives the decision to the mother.”  But that’s not Harris speaking!  At any rate, Turley also reiterates the dumb things that Trump said, most notably the Haitian pet-eating trope, which he should have stayed well away from, and his unfulfillable promise to make burning the American flag a crime.

But Turley’s point, with which you may or may not agree, is this:

The issue is not fact-checking, but the failure to do so equally and accurately. ABC actually disseminated false information under the mantle of fact-checking, and that’s a real problem.

Moderator Linsey Davis admitted later that ABC did not want a repeat of what had happened in the last debate, wherein Trump was given free rein and the moderators limited themselves to asking questions and enforcing time limits. CNN was praised in that debate across the political spectrum for being even-handed.

*Germany is reported to be holding back or delaying the sale of weapons to Israel. Although countries like Canada and the UK have either stopped or strongly curtailed the sale of arms to Israel, that hardly matters: it’s Germany and the U.S. who supply the bulk of weapons to Israel. The articles, from the Jerusalem Post, say this:

Germany’s federal government continues to ignore Israeli requests to purchase weapons, according to a Sunday report in the mass circulation daily Bild.

The paper wrote that “However, sales of heavy weapons systems to the Emirate of Qatar – one of the most important supporters of the terrorist group Hamas – were approved.”

and:

Although German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has reaffirmed his military support for Israel repeatedly, the German Federal Security Council, chaired by Scholz, has not approved arms exports to Israel for months, according to a Sunday Profil Magazine report.

According to the report, no approvals for arms exports to Israel have been granted since March. However, Scholz made public declarations of his solidarity with Israel and promised continued military aid at the end of July.

Furthermore, following the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, Scholz came to Israel and delivered a pledge of unconditional solidarity with Jerusalem. He, along with German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, have repeatedly emphasized their belief in Israel’s right to self-defense, which included waging war in the Gaza Strip.

. . . Ultimately, the growing concerns [against Israel] are the reason why fewer approvals are being granted, even if no one wants to say it out loud,” summarized an employee of a representative on the Federal Security Council.

Approvals to export arms to Israel were initially granted at the start of the Israel-Hamas war , and they included an increase in export approvals that reportedly totaled a value of 326 million euros – ten times more than in the previous year, 2022, before the war.

“Often, there are no approvals at all – or they take forever to be processed,” the report noted. It added  that “export volumes have dropped significantly compared to last year – from 326 million euros to 14.5 million (as of August 21, 2024).”

Not a good look for Germany, especially given their history and subsequent attempts to make up for the Holocaust by things like making it a crime to deny it happened.  If the reason for this is really the “growing concerns against Israel” are the reason for this, then Germany should either articulate that, or, better yet, come up with the weapons to support the only democracy in the Middle East trying to defend itself—and in a way that has less “collateral damage”.

*Physicist Brian Greene has a science op-ed in the WaPo about string theory, a piece called “Decades later, string theory continues its march towards Einstein’s dream.” Einstein’s dream here means the elusive reconciliation of quantum mechanics with relativity theory, producing a theory of quantum gravity. And you may know that despite several decades of work on string theory now, it’s been criticized for not producing any testable predictions, which, to me at least, means that it can’t be a scientific theory. But Greene says we shouldn’t give up yet:

Scientists assess the validity of proposed theories by testing their predictions. The challenge for string theory is that it has yet to produce any definitive, testable predictions. This isn’t surprising. String theory diverges from conventional theories only under extreme conditions: where distances are unimaginably small and masses are extraordinarily large, such as in the core of a black hole or in the instant of the big bang. Unfortunately, exploring these realms is beyond our capabilities.

Critics argue that the situation is untenable, noting, “If you can’t test a theory, it’s not scientific.” Adherents counter, “String theory is a work in progress; it’s simply too early to pass judgment.” The critics retort, “Forty years is too early?” To which the adherents respond, “We’re developing what could be the most profound physical theory of all time — you can’t seriously cross your arms, tap your foot and suggest that time’s up.”

And so the debate continues, with stakes for science that couldn’t be higher. Two generations of some of the world’s most talented physicists — occupying coveted university research positions and supported by limited government funding — have spent their careers on a theory whose validity remains uncertain.

I know some of these physicists, and you can still get famous by working on a yet-untestable theory. (To some extent, that’s what Darwin was doing in The Origin.) But Greene isn’t ready to abandon the theory:

Here’s where human nature stakes its ground. There’s no one-size-fits-all answer because it comes down to individual scientific taste, one’s tolerance for risk and the extent to which one is willing to defer experimental evidence in favor of mathematical progress. To be sure, I would readily abandon string theory — and I’m confident my colleagues would as well — if experimental evidence undercut it or if a mathematical inconsistency were uncovered. I’m an advocate for truth, not string theory. But so far, no such experimental insight exists, and no such mathematical flaws have surfaced.

On the contrary, string theory continues to captivate seasoned researchers and aspiring students alike because of the remarkable progress that has been made in developing its mathematical framework. This progress has yielded provocative insights into long-standing mysteries and introduced radically new ways of describing physical reality.

People will keep working on it until it’s either falsified, gets empirical support, or physicists finally get so sick of pure mathematical manipulations that physics abandons string theory. . Where it sits now is above my pay grade, but a beautiful mathematical framework is not sufficient to keep a theory going: at some point it has to deal with empirical reality. As for the “provocative insights into long-standing mysteries”, well, Greene doesn’t describe them, and perhaps he should have, because they seem to imply string theory has led to a better understanding of nature, which can’t be true.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is cleaning up the area she hates trash on her beat:

Hili: Something is lying over there.
A: So what?
Hili: Pick it up because it’s litter.
In Polish:
Hili: Tam coś leży.
Ja: No to co?
Hili: Podnieś, bo śmieci.

And here’s a picture of Divy’s cat Jango taken by her nephew Gabriel:

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

From The Dodo

From Duck Lovers:

From Strange, Stupid, or Silly Signs (read below the outlined part, too):

Yesterday was the second anniversary of the death of Mahsa Amini, beaten to death by morality cops in Iran—for not wearing her hijab properly. Her death sparked a huge series of protests in Iran that are still going on.  I wish to Ceiling Cat that they’d work, but the penalty for protesting is getting shot, arrested, or blinded. The theocracy abides.

From Bryan, an amazing stunt:

From Barry. I’ve shown the first tweet before, but the second is new.  That is one deep cat sleep!

From my feed. This is sad but also very sweet:

I can’t access the New Yorker, which is unbearably woke and also says too little in too many words, but I found the longlist of the National Book Awards here, and obviously they include Rushdie’s new book about being attacked, Knife: Meditations after an Attempted Murder.  You can see the full list here—for free. It will be further pruned on October 1.

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I retweeted:

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. First, a lucky whale is about to ingest a fish ball:

Phoretic midges hitch a long ride!: