Wednesday: Hili monologue

July 23, 2025 • 4:40 am

Meanwhile, in Dobrzyn, Hili has an update on Andrzej:

Hili: Our Administrator returned without ever leaving. He made a promise and broke it, cracked open the gates to paradise and shut them again. Now he insists that he really will take that vacation, stop yelling, and finally begin his time off – he just has a few things to take care of first, and then, today, he’s off. He said he’s going to the countryside, and either he’ll be back tonight or he won’t. Yes, I know exactly where he’s going. By car, it’s only a few minutes away. If he starts yelling again over there, the mood will turn sour, and he’ll come right back here. Which means the door to Paulina and Mariusz’s apartment will be locked. Then Paulina will show up with little Julia, because Julia is the one who calms the Administrator down the most.

In Polish:

Nasz Administrator wrócił nie wychodząc. Obiecał i obietnicę złamał, uchylił drzwi do raju  i ponownie je zamknął.  Zapewnia teraz, że on naprawdę na ten urlop pójdzie, przestanie wrzeszczeć i zacznie urlop, on musi tylko załatwić kilka spraw i już, dziś, idzie na urlop. Powiedział, że jedzie na wieś i albo wróci na noc, albo nie. Tak, ja wiem gdzie  on jedzie, Samochodem to tylko kilkanaście minut drogi. Jak znowu będzie tam wrzeszczał, atmosfera stanie się ciężka i natychmiast wróci tutaj. A to oznacza, że drzwi od mieszkania Pauliny i Mariusza będą zamknięta. Potem Paulina przyjdzie z małą Julią, bo Julia najbardziej Administratora uspakaja.

NYT’s wildlife quiz

July 22, 2025 • 11:15 am

I swear that the NYT seems to be inserting more and more fluff in the paper in lieu of news (well, at least on the front e-page). But sometimes that’s ok, so long as you don’t mind the Gray Lady becoming the National Enquirer. 

But I’m a sucker for a quiz—especially one on biology. And if you click below you’ll find ten questions, each with four answers, about how to deal with potentially dangerous animals (click here to see the archived version). You can also see the questions archived here, but you can’t see whether your answers are right. In the regular paper, if you’re right you get an instant check mark, but if you’re wrong you get a red “X” but the right answer is shown with a check. Good luck; give your scores below (see mine further down) but please don’t reveal the questions or answers in the comments.

I got only 50% of the questions, but it seems that that is a decent score given that random guessing would give only 25% (yes, somebody will point out that 5 out of ten is not significantly different from 2 or 3 out of ten, but don’t be a wiseass).

Here’s my score:

James Carville suggests how to repair the Democratic Party

July 22, 2025 • 8:15 am

I’m a big fan of James Carville: I love that he’s a curmudgeon, speaks plainly, curses a lot, wears Louisiana State University tee-shirts (his school) during interviews, and opposes the “progressiveness” (aka wokeness) of the Democratic Party. (In case you don’t know, he’s a diehard Democrat and has helped many Democratic candidates with campaign strategies, most notably Bill Clinton in 1992.)

Now he’s not always right. In the last election, he first predicted that Kamala Harris would win, and, when she didn’t, gave a bunch of explanations about why her loss was inevitable (she was, he said, too woke). Still, I always listen to him, and he has a column in today’s NYT telling Democrats what they need to do to fight back against the odious Trumpian regime. Click the headline below or find his piece archived here.

His suggestions boil down to two things (headings are mine, indented prose is Carville’s), both of which, says Carville, can help Democrats recapture Congress at the midterms.

a.) Find a leader.

Constipated. Leaderless. Confused. A cracked-out clown car. Divided. These are the words I hear my fellow Democrats using to describe our party as of late. The truth is they’re not wrong: The Democratic Party is in shambles.

Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary wasn’t an isolated event. It represents an undeniable fissure in our political soul. We are divided along generational lines: Candidates like Mr. Mamdani are impatient for an economic future that folks my age are skeptical can be delivered. We are divided along ideological lines: A party that is historically allegiant to the state of Israel is at odds with a growing faction that will not look past the abuses in Gaza and the West Bank. From Medicare for All purists to Affordable Care Act reformists, the list goes on and on.

The Democratic Party is steamrolling toward a civilized civil war. It’s necessary to have it. It’s even more necessary to delay it. The only thing that can save us now is an actual savior, because a new party can be delivered only by a person — see Barack Obama in 2008 and Bill Clinton in 1992. No matter how many podcasts or influencer streams our candidates go on, our new leader won’t arrive until the day after the midterms in November 2026, which marks the unofficial-yet-official beginning of the 2028 presidential primary contest. No new party or candidate has a chance for a breakthrough until that day.

That makes sense to me, and I spend what time I hve musing about this issue trying to find a good leader for our party. Well, it ain’t AOC, it’s ain’t Gavin Newsom, and it doesn’t look like my erstwhile favorite, Gretchen Whitmore. I once hoped that Mayor Pete could rise to the occasion, but he’s been pretty quiet (though he was effective in oofice) and doesn’t seem to aspire to a leadership role. If you have good candidates for someone to lead us out of the muck, put them below.

b.) Loudly call out Trump’s most palpable mistakes—mistakes that have angered even Republicans.  I’m not talking about his EOs on the sex binary or universities, which some Democrats approve of, but things that are just arrantly dumb:

Our midterm march starts with a simple phrase every candidate can blast on every screen and stage: We demand a repeal. A repeal of Mr. Trump’s spending law is the one word that should define the midterms. It is clear, forceful and full-throated. It must be slathered across every poster, every ad, every social media post from now until November 2026. That single word is our core message. Every Democrat can run on it, with outrage directed not at the president or a person but at this disastrous bill. And the reasons are countless, each one a venom-tipped political dagger.

. . . We demand a repeal to protect Medicaid. Mr. Trump’s law will slash roughly $1.1 trillion from health care programs, stripping coverage from an estimated 11.8 million people over the next decade.

. . . We demand a repeal to save the deficit. Not only will the new policy explode the national debt — the Congressional Budget Office estimates it could add $3.3 trillion over the next 10 years — but it will also take money away from the poorest 20 percent of Americans

. . . We demand a repeal to end the endless wars, because the bill boosts military spending to $1 trillion for the very first time. We demand a repeal for students who are losing loan protections or who may no longer be eligible for Pell Grants. We demand a repeal for working families, children and seniors who could go hungry because the bill is estimated to demolish SNAP by over $180 billion.

. . . We’ve never had a simpler, more unifying oppositional message. Soon it will no longer be possible to avoid a brawl between the factions ignited back in the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries. But for now, whether you’re the progressive Mr. Mamdani, the centrist former Representative Abigail Spanberger running for the Virginia governorship or even Elon Musk, we can all agree on one thing: We demand a repeal. Onward to the midterms.

Note that all of these things echo the famous phrase that Carville used when he ran the Clinton campaign, a phrase he repeated over and over again to energize the volunteers: “It’s the economy, stupid.” As Wikipedia notes,

In order to keep the [1992] campaign on message, Carville hung a sign in Bill Clinton’s Little Rock campaign headquarters that read:

  1. Change vs. more of the same.
  2. The economy, stupid.
  3. Don’t forget health care.

Although the sign was intended for an internal audience of campaign workers, the second phrase became a de facto slogan for the Clinton election campaign.

Now I don’t know if this new strategy will work. But it sure makes a lot more sense than whatever “strategy” the Democrats are using now, and in fact there doesn’t seem to be one. What we have is endless squabbling, with younger Democrats calling for older Democratic leaders to step down.  That’s a recipe for disaster, with the end result of Dems backing someone like Sanders or (heaven forbid) AOC.  Yes, those “candidates” may have charisma, but they’re not going to unite Democrats.

Of course I’m not a pundit with experience like Carville’s. These are just some random thoughts before I wander into downtown Reykjavik to find some coffee.

Tuesday: Hili monologue

July 22, 2025 • 3:05 am

Meanwhile, in Dobrzyn, Hili is being judgemental:

So much for a vacation. He got back last night. Probably had a fight. Only lights up when he sees Paulina and Julka. Paulina slid a few documents his way to sign. What are they plotting now? The administrator turned on the computer, but the screen stayed black. He propped up his head and closed his eyes. Then turned the screen on, but didn’t type the password. Same mess on the screen and on the desk. He’s examining Word files with a magnifying glass. A pretty pipe bowl arrived from Katowice, without a stem. He cut a birch twig and then whittled it with his penknife. That’s how Sławek found him.

In Polish:

Niby urlop. Wczoraj wrócił wieczorem. Pewnie się pokłócił. Rozpromienia się tylko na widok Pauliny i Julki. Paulina podsunęła mu kilka dokumentów do podpisu. Co oni jeszcze knują? Administrator włączył komputer, ale ekran pozostał zgaszony. Podparł głowę i przymknął oczy. Włączył ekran, lecz nie wpisał hasła. Na ekranie i na biurku ten sam bałagan. Z użyciem szkła powiększającego ogląda pliki Worda. Przyszła z Katowic śliczna główka fajki, bez cybucha. Uciął patyczek brzozy, potem strugał go scyzorykiem. Tak zastał go Sławek.

JAC: This extra bit was also on Listy, and Slawomir is probably the Slawek mentioned above. Don’t ask me why there are cherries in the photo. Apparently Slawek came to visit while Andrzej, after his one-day vacation, was making a stem for the pipe bowl he’d received. Don’t ask me why the pipe came without a stem, or where Andrzej will get pipe tobacco in Dobrzyn. . .

What I Know Today
About Letters from the Orchard
Sławomir Holand

I found Andrzej sitting in a wicker chair, in the shade under a lilac tree. He was peeling bark from a stick with a small pocketknife. He was delighted to see me and asked if I wanted something to eat or drink. When I said no, he said it would be a pipe, that he’d gotten a beautiful one, but without a bowl. With deep concentration, he finished peeling the bark, then carefully and carefully smoothed it with the blade of his pocketknife. He told me to check if it was smooth enough. Then he said, “It should sit for two years now, but I don’t have time.” We went to the kitchen, he left for a moment, and returned with a hairdryer.

Boy meets gull (again)

July 21, 2025 • 1:15 pm

Okay, yesterday I took a photo of seagull at a Reykjavik cafê, but its legs weren’t visible, and birders beefed that they couldn’t identify it with assurance unless they saw the color of its legs.  Here’s that photo:

Well, walking back to my guesthouse after my all-day tour today, I saw another gull going nuts over an entire breadroll that someone had discarded.  This time I could photograph the whole bird, and here it is (two shots):

So, you birders, two questions:

a. Did I see the same species twice? (Looks the same to me.)

and

b. Now that you see its yellow legs, what is the species?

The first person who identifies it correctly gets my warm congratulations. Since I don’t know the species, I’ll have to count on several birders verifying the ID in the comments.

Get on it!

The story of an amazing Russian and her WWII female comrades

July 21, 2025 • 10:45 am

While reading the NYT this morning, I came across a spellbinding story of a small (5-foot) Russian woman who was determined to fight the Germans during WWII. Along with a bunch of other women, she took to a clumsy wood-and-cloth biplane reserved for training and crop dusting, and carried out many missions bombing Germans (the plane could barely go 60 mph with a load of bombs).

The deadly effects of these determined women, and the silence of their tiny planes, led the Germans to call them the “night witches” (“Nachthexen”), and Polina Gelman, the hero of the story,

. . . .  became one of [the Night Witch’s] most celebrated members and the only Jewish woman who served in the war to earn a Hero of the Soviet Union medal, the U.S.S.R.’s highest commendation for military service, according to Arkadi Zeltser, a historian at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial and museum in Israel.

(A long Wikipedia article on the Night Witches notes that 22 other women also won that medal.)

But her religion is mostly irrelevant in this story save for the pervasive Soviet bias against Jews. What is amazing is what Gelman and her fellow women flyers achieved, and you can read about it by clicking below, which I’ve linked to a free archived version of the story. The author is Alexander Nazaryan.

A short excerpt:

The planes, about 40 in all, came in succession, each making as many as 15 runs a night. “What they’re doing is keeping the Germans from sleeping, making these random attacks that can come out of nowhere,” Pennington said.

Gelman herself flew 869 combat missions, standing out not just for her stamina but also for her precision, her composure under fire and her deep sense of political purpose.

Her experiences were at once representative and unique. “It is possible to call Polina Gelman, with full confidence, the embodiment of the roiling, fighting, revolutionary 20th century,” the author V. Selunskaya wrote in a postscript to Gelman’s memoir.

Planned Parenthood going the way of the ACLU and the SPLC?

July 21, 2025 • 8:30 am

Luana called my attention to an article on wokeness, in this case describing the ideological erosion of Planned Parenthood (henceforth “PP). Click the headline below to read the WSJ “Saturday essay”, or or find it archived free here.

Notice that the author is Pamela Paul, formerly the Sunday book-review editor and then a columnist for the NYT, whose columns over the last few years were refreshingly heterodox for  (see here and here).  In this way she could be seen as a white female John McWhorter, but, unlike McWhorter, she also wrote a lot about gender issues, and not in a way that, at least when the paper was about to let her go, did not comport with its gender activism and mania for “affirmative care.” As she wrote in her farewell column,

. . . . the reporting I’m most proud of is when I used my voice to stand up for people whose lives or work had come under attack, whether they were public figures or were dragged into the public eye because they’d dared to speak or act in ways that unjustly elicited professional or social condemnation: A popular novelist ostracized for alleged “cultural appropriation.” A physician assistant who was excoriated on social media for standing up to bullies. A Palestinian writer whose appearance at a prominent book fair was canceled. An early beneficiary of affirmative action who dared to explore its unintended consequences. Vulnerable gay teenagers who described being misled by a politicized medical establishment into dubious gender transition treatments. A public university president who was driven away by a campus besieged with political division. Social work students and faculty undermined by a school that had betrayed its own principles. A public health expert who risked opprobrium from his peers by calling out his profession on groupthink.

The Times may tolerate a bit of heterodoxy, but the columns Paul wrote that were critical of gender activism (see here for a list) were too much. Perhaps the last nail in the coffin was Paul’s “In defense of J. K. Rowling,” guaranteed to rile anyone who mouths the mantra, “A trans woman is a woman.”

At any rate, Paul seems to have found a home as a writer at large for the Wall Street Journal, and has written two pieces for them since June: the one below and the other an analysis of the Trump administration’s assault on scientific journals, which takes shots at both the Right and Left. Paul has trod an increasingly well-worn path: a good journalist let go because they’re insufficiently “progressive,” then finding a new home at a more centrist or even right-wing site (Paul is a classical liberal, and the WSJ’s news and analysis items are more or less centrist).

But I digress. Her new WSJ piece is how the once-estimable organization Planned Parenthood, the reproductive and sexual health care organization whose antecedent was founded by Margaret Sanger in 1916, is going to ground.  Perhaps it was predictable that, given its ambit, PP would buy into gender activism, just like the ACLU did or how the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) devolved into ferreting out “hate speech” by people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali. (The SPLC was also plagued by financial mismanagement.)

I’ll give a few quotes from Paul’s piece; they’re indented below:

Excerpts:

To American feminists, the Planned Parenthood brand symbolizes liberation and empowerment. To Medicaid recipients and rural women, it means access to affordable contraceptives, testing and treatment for sexually transmitted infections, and cancer screenings. To conservatives and opponents of abortion, it means the devaluation of human life and dissolution of the family.

But to many young people encountering Planned Parenthood today, the organization, founded in 1916 as a grassroots movement to provide family planning to poor women, means something else entirely. When a 3- to 5-year-old asks, “Is that a boy or a girl?” Planned Parenthood, currently the country’s leading provider of sex education, suggests replying, “Only an individual can define their gender identity. Gender identity is separate from what body parts a person has.” (Planned Parenthood is also now the country’s second largest provider of cross-sex hormones for transgender treatments.)

On Instagram, where young people are most likely to seek information, Planned Parenthood offers decidedly liberationist advice, including graphic descriptions of sexual techniques. Posts celebrate Pansexual Pride Day and declare that “virginity is a social construct.” In keeping with the organization’s racial justice agenda, which includes support for #DefundthePolice, its TikTok account displays a video of a Black woman seemingly fleeing and then laughing, with the tag, “Running from the police, but then they say, suspect is an abortion-rights baddie.”

As Paul reports, these stands haven’t sat well with the Trump administration:

In March, Trump withheld Title X grants, which fund contraceptive, reproductive and sexual health services for poor people, from at least nine Planned Parenthood affiliates while the administration investigates their compliance with its policies on D.E.I. In June, the Supreme Court ruled that patients do not have the right to sue states for denying state Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood clinics, making it easier for more states to withdraw funding. And earlier this month, Congress passed Trump’s megabill, which effectively ends federal Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood for the next year.

Of course I deplore the withholding of support for reproductive health services for the poor; this is part of the bullying that this Administration is known for. On the other hand, PP has taken on political stances that seem unnecessary given its classical mission:

. . . . The trouble stems from [PP’s] dual and often dueling roles as both a national advocacy organization and a local healthcare provider, one inherently political and the other necessarily nonpartisan. While its roughly 600 clinics offer patient care, the national organization operates as an advocacy group, raising money to support positions that place it firmly on the progressive left in America’s culture wars.

Well, one of these positions I do support: the advocacy of a pro-choice stand to abortion. That’s perhaps one reason the Administration is going after PP. I see the pro-choice stand as something important to the welfare of women, particularly poor ones. But other stands have little to do with at least the original mission of PP.

In the years since Wen was forced out, a different kind of mission creep set in, with the organization tethering itself to causes like democracy reform (including support for expanding the Supreme Court and ending the filibuster in the Senate) and gun control—actions that have alienated some donors, according to former employees. These moves reflect the political motivations of its workforce, increasingly populated by what some employees refer to as social justice warriors—young people who come to the organization for its progressive values more than for its provision of healthcare.

A self-described “champion for social and racial justice,” [PP President and CEO Alexis] McGill Johnson  shares this vision. In a 2021 op-ed, she accused Planned Parenthood of focusing too much on “women’s health” and “privileging whiteness.” As she wrote, “What we don’t want to be, as an organization, is a Karen. You know Karen: She escalates small confrontations because of her own racial anxiety. She calls the manager. She calls the police. She stands with other white parents to maintain school segregation.”

Planned Parenthood wants to be the head of the anti-Trump resistance in all its forms, according to one former senior executive at the national office. The question, she said, is who are they alienating in the process?

Now Paul describes other problems with PP, like poorly-run clinics, a decrease in donations, and so on, but the organization is not helping itself by buying into gender activism, at least under this Administration:

Today, Planned Parenthood no longer positions itself as the leading healthcare provider for women and has largely stopped referring to women on its website and in policy statements. The only mention of “women” among its promotional items are T-shirts emblazoned with “Stand with Black Women.” In testimony before Congress, Dr. Bhavik Kumar, then a Planned Parenthood medical director and now chief medical officer at the Greater Ohio affiliate, said that “men can have pregnancies, especially transmen.”

Especially transmen? What other “men” can get pregnant? But let’s proceed:

The organization’s pervasive language around “pregnant people” is intended to be inclusive of transgender people, a cause that the organization connects to abortion rights under the umbrella of “bodily autonomy.” As Planned Parenthood put it on Threads, “trans and nonbinary people are essential to the movement for sexual and reproductive health and rights—the fight for trans rights is our fight.”

Not everyone agrees this is the best approach for a movement founded to empower women. “I don’t understand the national office’s thinking in not allowing anyone to talk about women’s health anymore,” said [former PP President Pamela] Maraldo. “These really, really left-wing ideological postures are to me just as off-putting as they are on the right when they’re counter to basic Americans’ common sense.”

Banning the word “woman” is guaranteed to alienate not just the Right, but the sensible moiety of the Left. As is this:

Planned Parenthood has also rapidly expanded its services into one of the most contested and politicized areas of healthcare, gender transitions. Its national office does not reveal numbers on these services, instead grouping them into an “other services” category in its annual report. In 2019, that category included 17,791 cases. It rose to 77,858 in 2023. With trans-identified minors, Planned Parenthood follows an “informed consent” model, which, according to its patient guidelines, enables patients to get a same-day prescription for cross-sex hormones after a 30-minute in-person or remote consultation with a staff member. No professional diagnosis is required.

Cross-sex hormones given after just 30 minutes of consultation? How old are these “minors”? Is there a lower age limit? It’s not clear from the data, but surely 12 to 17 is too young:

According to an analysis of insurance claim information by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, at least 40,000 patients went to Planned Parenthood for gender medicine in 2023. About 40% of them were 18- to 22-year-olds. Between 2017 and 2023, it also treated 12,000 kids aged 12 to 17 for gender dysphoria. (These figures do not include patients who paid out of pocket, patients at VA facilities or those covered by Kaiser.)

Don’t get me wrong: this progressivism may not be the main reason why PP is going under—its advocacy of the right to choose abortions may be pivotal, and Paul also reports about the waning of donations and hamhandedness in clinics (I’ve been to one, and it was excellent). And, at the end, she notes that the erosion of PP has inimical social effects, particularly in truncating reproductive and sexual care for the poor.  I just wonder why PP has to buy into the affirmative-care model for adolescents and to curtail its use of the word “woman.” It’s not necessary for the organization’s goals, and alienates the powers that be. In the end, PP’s progressivism, which it refuses to abandon, may be its death blow.

I look forward to more articles like this from Paul, who, I think need no longer be afraid of writing what she think lest she alienate her paper.