Category: Hili Dialogue

Wednesday: Hili dialogoue

February 26, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to a Hump Day (“Yim Humpbe” in Kanuri) : it’s Wednesday, February 26, 2025, and National Pistachio Day.  I have a nice bag that was a Coynezaa gift from a reader, and, unusually all the nuts in the bag are open. But I’ve had more depressing experiences, when a fair number of nuts in the bag aren’t open and you have to either discard them or smash them (cracking with the teeth is a bad idea!)  This was Brit Kate Quilton‘s problem, and so she headed to California to understand the unopened nuts. Note the shaking machine that can harvest 10,000 nuts by shaking a tree for just three seconds.

It’s also a thin day for holidays: just Thermos Bottle Day and Levi Strauss Day (he was born on this day in 1829).

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the February 26 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

Breaking Nooz: The House passed a GOP budget plan last night.

The House on Tuesday narrowly passed a Republican budget resolution that calls for $4.5 trillion in tax cuts and a $2 trillion reduction in federal spending over a decade, clearing the way for major elements of President Trump’s domestic agenda.

The nearly party-line vote of 217 to 215 teed up a bitter fight within the G.O.P. over which federal programs to slash to partially finance a huge tax cut that would provide its biggest benefits to rich Americans.

It came after a head-spinning hour in which Republican leaders tried to put down a revolt among conservatives who wanted deeper spending cuts, failed to do so, canceled the budget vote and then reversed course minutes later and summoned lawmakers to call the roll.

*Trump is not having a good week as his popularity ratings are tanking, judges are blocking some of his orders (undocumented immigrants can no longer be plucked from Quaker churches), Republicans are squabbling over the budget, and there are big protests from American Republicans over the dismantling of government.  There are many articles, but here’s one about federal employees quitting rather than engage in the DOGE mishigass:

A group of 21 civil servants with technology expertise resigned on Tuesday rather than help implement an array of changes to the federal government being pushed by the billionaire Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency.

The government employees had worked for the U.S. Digital Service, a technology-focused unit housed in the executive branch, that had been rebranded by Mr. Musk and President Trump as the United States DOGE Service. The resignations pared the unit, which had already been reduced by layoffs, by roughly a third.

“We will not use our skills as technologists to compromise core government systems, jeopardize Americans’ sensitive data, or dismantle critical public services,” the resigning group wrote in a letter addressed to Susie Wiles, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff. “We will not lend our expertise to carry out or legitimize DOGE’s actions.”

The resignations, which were reported earlier by The Associated Press, come as Mr. Musk and his allies have begun to radically reshape the size and scope of the federal government, engaging in layoffs, ending contracts and attempting to shutter entire agencies. Most recently, Mr. Musk created confusion for millions of federal employees by issuing a directive ordering them to detail what they had worked on during the previous week as a condition of keeping their jobs. Several Trump appointees ordered employees at their agencies to ignore Mr. Musk’s directive, even as workers received contradictory information about whether they need to comply with it.

The mass resignation at the technology unit is the latest action being taken by federal workers to resist President Trump and Mr. Musk’s extreme overhaul of government. Other civil servants have engaged in public protests, filed lawsuits and even filmed staff members working for Mr. Musk’s team in an attempt to identify them.

Maybe Carville is right (see next piece); he recommends that Democrats stand aside and let Trump ruin the government before stepping up to take over.

*My favorite Democratic curmudgeon, James Carville, has a NYT op-ed called “The best thing Democrats can do in this moment.” First, the irascible Carville characterizes Republicsns:

The Republican Party is all too often effective at campaigning and winning elections, but there’s another fact about it that a lot of Americans forget: The Republican Party flat out sucks at governing. Even Tucker Carlson agrees with this. For all the huffing and puffing on the campaign trail in 2016, the first Trump administration largely amounted to tax cuts for the wealthy, 500 miles of a border wall and a destructive pandemic gone viral. George W. Bush got us into a harebrained war in Iraq and then tried to privatize Social Security while letting our financial system drive smack into the Great Recession. And George H.W. Bush governed his way into a one-term presidency because of the economy.

For round two in office, instead of prioritizing the problems he campaigned on — public safety, immigration and the border, and most of all the economy — President Trump is hellbent on dismantling the federal government. . . .

He then notes that, given the power balance, there’s nothing we Democrats can do to stop this. So Carville proffers a novel solution:

. . . . With no clear leader to voice our opposition and no control in any branch of government, it’s time for Democrats to embark on the most daring political maneuver in the history of our party: roll over and play dead. Allow the Republicans to crumble beneath their own weight, and make the American people miss us. Only until the Trump administration has spiraled into the low 40s or high 30s in public approval polling percentages should we make like a pack of hyenas and go for the jugular. Until then, I’m calling for a strategic political retreat.

The first test will come, says the Louisiana curmudgeon, when the GOP tries to pass a budget that raises the debt ceiling. What do we do? (See above; the budget passed and I haven’t heard Democratic reaction):

Already, many Democrats across the party are itching at their seams for a showdown. Instead of gearing up to fight them — as we love to do — the most radical thing we can do is nothing at all. Let the Republicans disagree with themselves publicly. Do not offer a single vote. Do not insert yourself into the discourse, do not throw a monkey wrench into the equation. Simply step away and let ‘em flirt with a default. Just when they’ve pushed themselves to the brink, and it appears they could collapse the global economy — come in and save the day. Be the competent party and not the chaos party. House Democrats know this; it’s time for everyone in our party — including the darlings who want to run in 2028 — to understand this as well. You won’t win or achieve anything meaningful going toe to toe with the Trump Administration right now.

. . . . This equation must be applied for the remainder of this year. Let the Republicans push for their tax cuts, their Medicaid cuts, their food stamp cuts. Give them all the rope they need. Then let dysfunction paralyze their House caucus and rupture their tiny majority. Let them reveal themselves as incapable of governing, and at the right moment, start making a coordinated, consistent argument about the need to protect Medicare, Medicaid, worker benefits and middle class pocketbooks. Let the Republicans crumble, let the American people see it, and wait until they need us to offer our support.

It’s a wiser approach than we pursued in the first Trump Administration, when Democrats tried and failed at the art of resistance politics.

It won’t take long: public support for this administration will fall through the floorboard. It’s already happening: Just over a month in, the president’s approval has already sunk underwater in two new polls. The people did not vote for the Department of Education to be obliterated — they voted for lower prices for eggs and milk. Democrats, let the Republicans’ own undertow drag them away.

The tide will turn, Carville says, in the November 2025 Virginia governor’s race.  Given that many fired federal workers live in that state, Carville says, “It looks set to be a resounding Republican defeat. This will be the first moment where we can take the offensive back and begin our crusade again.”  Well, perhaps.  I tend to like Carville, but remember that, while properly calling out the Democrats (his party) for wokeness, he also predicted that Kamala Harris would win.  I do agree that the best things that the Democrats can do is to play possum right now. This is good advice, but I think that many Democratic Congresspeople, seething with anger over the GOP victory, might not be able to effect this “strategic retreat.”

*This is pretty scandalous, but of course it’s the antisemitic BBC. The Free Press reports on a now-pulled documentary: “A BBC Documentary, Brought to You By Hamas.” (The subtitle is “How the British broadcaster made the terror group its silent partner in Gaza.”)

Abdullah Al-Yazouri, a 13-year-old boy living in the Gaza Strip, is a natural in front of the camera. In the BBC documentary, Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, which first aired February 17, he and other youngsters guide viewers through wrecked buildings, rubble-strewn streets, and bloody, overflowing hospitals.

The film, which the network’s website proudly billed as a report on “four young people trying to survive the Israel-Hamas war as they hope for a ceasefire,” offers “a vivid and unflinching view of life in a warzone.” There are moments of levity, befitting a doc narrated by kids: We meet Renad, 10, who runs an online cooking channel on TikTok, conjuring up delicious dishes from whatever she and her sister can gather. Elsewhere, Rana, a young woman, has given birth prematurely to a baby girl.

For the most part, though, the film is grim—and some of the footage is disturbing. A surgeon tries to save the injured arm of a child on the operating table. Soon after, he passes the bloody, amputated limb to a colleague.

The message could not be clearer: Such is the horror inflicted by the Yehud—the Arabic word for Jew, which is spoken by Palestinians in the film, but sanitized in the BBC’s translation as Israeli, per the network’s long-standing practice.

Yet now it is the BBC that’s under fire over the documentary’s fishy sources and methods. It turns out that Al-Yazouri was anything but a random child-journalist. He is the son of Dr. Ayman Alyazouri, a deputy minister in the Hamas government. It took an investigation by David Collier, a British media researcher and activist who describes himself as “100 percent Zionist,” to bring this fact to light. Though obviously pertinent information, it was not disclosed to viewers.

The ensuing uproar extended across Britain’s political spectrum and forced the BBC first to issue a correction and then to remove the film from broadcast “for further due diligence.” Lisa Nandy, the Labour government’s culture secretary, has said she will demand answers about the film from BBC bosses. Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the Conservative opposition, has written a letter to Tim Davie, the beleaguered BBC director general, demanding “a full independent enquiry” into both the Gaza film and “wider allegations of systemic BBC bias against Israel.”

. . . Much of the problem, said Cohen, stems from the BBC’s Arabic language service, some of whose reporters are especially biased against Israel. Those attitudes then percolate into the main newsroom and influence coverage by the English services, he argues. In the five months following the October 7 attacks, the BBC Arabic Service made 80 corrections of its coverage, an average of one every other day. Thirty corrections were due to reports that described towns and communities inside Israel’s pre-1967 borders as “settlements.” On three occasions BBC Arabic described Hamas and Hezbollah—both designated terror groups under British law—as “the resistance,” according to a report by CAMERA, the pro-Israel media monitoring group. “BBC bosses absolutely know that there is a systemic problem of bias at BBC Arabic,” said Cohen, “but the fact that they have not admitted it is just pure gaslighting of the Jewish community.”

As the article points out, the Beeb has “Verify, a 60-journalist unit devoted to countering ‘disinformation’.” It flopped, and big time! As Malgorzata told me, she thinks the only Western MSM more antisemitic than the BBC is the Guardian.

*Another underwater cable serving Taiwan has been cut, and it isn’t the first one. It’s almost certain that this is a tactic that China is using to terrorize the island nation before they try to take it over (the target date, it’s rumored, is 2027). This time, though, the Taiwanese have detained the crew of a Chinese ship:

Taiwan detained a cargo ship and its eight Chinese crew members after an undersea fiber-optic cable was severed, in a stepped-up effort to police such incidents, which are often seen as part of China’s pressure campaign targeting the self-ruled island.

Taiwan’s coast guard said the incident was being handled as a national security matter and that deliberate sabotage hadn’t been ruled out. A string of such episodes has called attention to Taiwan’s vulnerability as it works to ensure that it has secure internet services to keep the island online in the event of an invasion or blockade by China.

Similar incidents elsewhere, including the cutting of data cables beneath the Baltic Sea, have brought global attention to security concerns surrounding the critical infrastructure.

Taiwan’s coast guard said it spotted the Togo-flagged cargo vessel in the area on Saturday evening. When it dropped anchor around 2:30 a.m. on Tuesday, the coast guard directed the ship to move away.

Within less than an hour, telecommunications provider Chunghwa Telecom reported that one of the undersea communications cables connecting Taiwan to its outlying islands and to nearby countries appeared to have been damaged by external forces. Internet services were largely unaffected, the Ministry of Digital Affairs said.

The coast guard escorted the vessel, identified as the Hong Tai, to a Taiwanese port for investigation.

China is engaged in a long-running campaign to pressure the people and leadership of Taiwan to give up their commitment to self-rule of the island, which is claimed by Beijing as its territory.

. . . Taiwan’s coast guard said that the ship was provisionally registered, crewed by Chinese nationals and backed by Chinese capital. “The possibility of China conducting gray zone harassment can’t be ruled out,” the coast guard said. In the past China has used tactics ranging from military drills that simulate a blockade of the island to cyberattacks and social-media campaigns, Taiwan authorities say.

Make no mistake about it: Beijing wants Taiwan, which it claims is part of the People’s Republic of China. And the Taiwanese won’t have any part of it.  There may be a war as China, heartened by Russia’s success in Ukraine, and noting Trump’s support of Russia, invades Taiwan.  That is going to be a bloody battle, but of course the Taiwanese will lose. The interesting thing will be to see whether the U.S. will help Taiwan in such a conflict.

*Bill Maher’s short (2 min) monologue this week is called “Hulk Smash”, about the dismantling of the government:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is hunting indoors:

Hili: Theoretically there should be something interesting hidden here.
Andrzaj: It’s just a theory.
In Polish:
Hili: Teoretycznie tu powinno ukrywać się coś ciekawego.
Ja: To tylko teoria.

And a photo of the loving Szaron. It’s blurry but he is meowing:

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

From Now That’s Wild:

From Things With Faces, a ghoul at the bottom of your ice cream:

From Divy:

From Masih: a brave Iranian woman got arrested for removing not just her hijab, but also some of her clothes. World Hijab Day was on Feb. 1 and is best forgotten.

Yes, “progressivism” can make people sound stupid, if not actually become stupid. Here’s one:

From Bryan. This is amazing, and I’m assuming it’s real.  What a skill!

From Malgorzata, some non-humanitarian “humanitarian aid”, undoubtedly for Hamas:

From Malcolm, an adventurous kitten:

From my feed, “the cat came back” (sound up).

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted:

A Czech Jewish boy was imprisoned in the family camp at Birkenau, but did not survive. Nor did the Germans want him to. He was eleven.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-02-26T11:21:01.875Z

Two tweets from Matthew. First, his favorite planet, Mars, probably taken from the rover:

Saturday afternoon in Jezero Crater, Mars.

— Paul Byrne (@theplanetaryguy.bsky.social) 2025-02-09T17:37:36.110Z

Matthew calls this one “more beautiful grimness”:

Whip spider (Paraphrynus laevifrons) covered with chloropid fly puparia. The parasitoid fly attacks the eggs carried by the female. When done, the maggots climb on the "childless" mom's back and pupate. She protects them during this period thanks to her motherly instincts.

— Gil Wizen (@wizentrop.bsky.social) 2025-02-06T17:13:24.292Z

Tuesday: Hili dialogue

February 25, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the Crueliest Day: Tuesday, February 25, 2025. and National Chocolate-Covered Nut Day, celebrating something good for you covered with something bad for you.  Like these, displayed on Wikipedia (M&M Peanuts are a related species):

By picture taken by Evan-Amos, Fair use

It’s also Let’s All Eat Right Day, National Clam Chowder Day (only the New England form is acceptable) and World Spay Day, a day to have all our ovaries or testes removed. This is supposedly the best chowdah (and lobster rolls) in Chicago, though I haven’t been there:

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the February 25 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Trump is NOT on the side of the angels vis-à-vis the war in Ukraine, for the U.S. has just voted against a United Nations resolution condemning Russia for starting that war. (Remember Trump blaming it on Zelensky?) What?

The United States voted with Russia, North Korea, Belarus and 14 other Moscow-friendly countries Monday on a resolution condemning Russian aggression in Ukraine and calling for its occupied territory to be returned that passed overwhelmingly in the U.N. General Assembly on Monday.

The U.S. delegation also abstained on its own separate resolution that called simply for a negotiated end to the war after European-sponsored amendments inserting new anti-Russian language also passed the 193-member body by a wide margin.

The votes were a clear sign of opposition by major U.S. allies as well as countries throughout the Global South who were prepared to buck heavy diplomatic pressure from the Trump administration to support President Donald Trump’s efforts to quickly end the war through direct negotiations with Moscow

A State Department official, speaking on the condition of anonymity about the fast-moving diplomacy, said the United States would introduce its resolution at a meeting of the 15-member U.N. Security Council later Monday and would veto any amendments.

“While our partners at the Security Council and in the General Assembly would like to debate the entire situation now, we are much more focused on just getting the parties to the table so that whatever the next step is can be undertaken,” the official said

Richard Gowan, a U.N. expert at the International Crisis Group, said the divide between the United States and Europe marked “the biggest split among Western powers at the U.N. since the Iraq War — and probably even more fundamental.”

Everything the U.S. does about this war is insane. Yes, it’s a tough situation, but voting against our allies and taking sides with Putin rubs me the wrong way. The European-amended resolution, however, passed the UN with a vote of 93-18, with 65 abstaining, a vote that reflects weakening but still strong support for Ukraine, as well as a big split between the U.S. and our allies.

*The six-week cease-fire between Israel and Hamas is coming to the end of Phase 1. Will there be a Phase 2? Nobody knows, but Israel’s refusal to release the latest dollop of Palestinian terrorist shows that the Jewish state is running out of patience.

When Israel and Hamas agreed to a six-week cease-fire in January, there were hopes that it would evolve into a longer and more stable truce.

Now, those hopes are dwindling.

Both sides have accused each other of breaking the terms of the existing deal, which have allowed for the exchange of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners. Over the weekend, Israel delayed the release of several hundred prisoners, protesting the humiliating manner in which Hamas had paraded hostages before handing them over.

With just days before the current truce elapses on Sunday, the sides have yet to begin negotiations for an extension.

Steve Witkoff, the Mideast envoy for the Trump administration, said he would return to the region on Wednesday to push for a new truce.

(Witkoff is the new Blinken, trying to hold back Israel by telling it how to fight and/or negotiate.)  More:

While a brief extension is possible, the likelihood of a long-term arrangement — preventing the revival of fighting — seems remote.

Both sides have preconditions that make it hard to reach a permanent resolution. Israel’s leaders say they will only end the war once Hamas no longer exerts military and political power in Gaza. Hamas has indicated it could give up some civil responsibilities but its leaders have largely dismissed the idea of disarmament, at least in public.

, , ,  The two sides were supposed to use the six weeks to negotiate the terms for a permanent truce that would have begun as soon as March 2. Those negotiations were expected to focus on who should govern postwar Gaza, as well as the release of roughly 60 other hostages.

Though punctured by disruptions, most of the exchanges have gone roughly to plan. The negotiations for a second phase have not. They have yet to begin in earnest — even though, under the terms of the January agreement, they were supposed to conclude by this past Sunday.

That failure is partly because, according to the agreement, the truce can only formally roll over if both sides agree to end the war. But Israel and Hamas have such differing visions of a postwar Gaza that the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been unwilling to even restart talks.

My prediction? The war will start again, unless Hamas agrees to surrender, giving up its arms and its power. I don’t see that happening.

*Germany is turning towards the right, as are many European countries. The election yesterday was not good news for the German Left. From the Free Press’s morning bulletin yesterday:

. . . It’s not a guten morgen for Germany’s center-left.

The polls predicted an electoral earthquake in Germany’s elections—and that is exactly what voters in Europe’s largest economy delivered on Sunday.

Turnout was at its highest since reunification. The right-wing populist party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), doubled its vote share and finished second. Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s center-left Social Democratic Party (SDP) slumped to an all-time low. And the center-right CDU/CSU bloc came top, with their leader, Friedrich Merz, poised to take over as chancellor.

Never before in Germany’s postwar history has a party other than the CDU and the SDP finished in the top two in the Bundestag election. The message from the result is stark, writes Christopher Caldwell in The Free Press today: “German voters have decided that stopping mass immigration, legal and illegal, is a national emergency.”

Germany is far from the only Western democracy in which voters’ anger at high rates of immigration—and an elite refusal to grapple with the issue—has driven its politics. But, for obvious historical reasons, the rise of a right-wing, populist party brings with it added apprehension in Germany.

That’s part of the reason why the German electorate isn’t quite ready to give up on its establishment parties. The math in the Bundestag means Merz will likely end up in a grand coalition with the SDP—the same governing arrangement that kept Angela Merkel in power for so long. The question, though, is whether the next chancellor can use that power to fix the issue that has voters so angry.

This of course largely reflects a dissatisfaction with widespread immigration, particularly after a series of nasty and fatal attacks against Germans. And if the CDU/CSU don’t do something about this problem, then we’re only a Sieg, Heil away from the AfD.

*The NYT reports that a rare oarfish was spotted swimming on the beach in Mexico. There are three species of this fish in two genera (Agrostichthys and Regalecus, and they are not considered very edible.

The elusive oarfish, a creature nicknamed the “doomsday fish” because of its place in folklore as a precursor to disaster, was captured on video this month after it was seen in shallow water in Baja California Sur, along Mexico’s Pacific Coast.

A group of people who were visiting the area spotted the fish swimming near a beach in early February.

Oarfish have an eel-like slender body and gaping mouth, but the sea-monster-like creatures have rarely been seen alive by people. As of August, only about 20 oarfish sightings had been recorded along the coast of California since 1901, according to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, though one washed up in the state as recently as November.

In Japanese mythology, oarfish are viewed as harbingers of doom, signaling impending earthquakes. But researchers in Japan debunked any significant link in a paper published in 2019.

Oarfish typically dwell at depths of around 650 feet, but have been found living much deeper, up to 3,280 feet, according to the Florida Museum of Natural History.

From Wikipedia:

R. glesne is not fished commercially, but it is an occasional bycatch in commercial nets. When cooked, the taste of an oarfish is described as “like paper.” R. glesne was offered to a dog who regularly consumes fish, and was refused. Six people agreed to try fried oarfish and said that the taste was suitable, but the flesh was extremely flaccid, and overall objectionable.

Here’s one labeled, “United States Navy SEALs holding a 23-foot (7.0 m) giant oarfish, found washed up on the shore near San Diego, California, in September 1996″. It’s HUGE! And it’s the world’s largest bony fish.

*Bad news for the consumer (and most of us): coffee prices are at a 50-year high, and this is due largely to climate change (article archived here).

Some see more expensive coffee as a corrective to an international system that has long underpaid producers, having the potential to rectify generations of injustice and environmental destruction.

“Older methods of production have stripped soil health and fertility, and they don’t allow for resilience against climate change,”said Amanda Archila, executive director of Fairtrade America, a Washington-based nonprofit that establishes environmental and social standards for coffee producers, certifying those that abide and connecting them with world markets at guaranteed minimum prices. “Higher prices are where we need to go, pricing that allows these farmers to invest in the future of coffee.”

Sixty percent of the world’s coffee is produced by an estimated 12.5 million people working on farms no larger than 50 acres — and most far smaller than that — according to World Coffee Research, a nonprofit organization that promotes sustainable farming practices. Some 44 percent of these so-called smallholders are living below the World Bank’s measure of poverty.

. . . Even in modern times, the enterprise has largely revolved around scale and abundance. Coffee harvested and processed into green beans from Colombia to Kenya has been shipped to boutique roasters and vast agribusiness conglomerates in wealthier countries. It is a chain connecting laborers who earn as little as $2 a day in Latin America, Asia and Africa to people who hand over more than twice that for a single cappuccino in Copenhagen, Dubai and Boston.

The bulk of the profits have traditionally been captured by major coffee roasters. Their profits have grown along with the price of coffee beans, even as many growers have failed to capture a piece of the extra bounty.

The solution? Perhaps cooperatives and fair-trade agreements, but the workers have to be properly compensated.  And given that Starbucks is not going to charge reasonable prices for its fancy coffee, that means higher prices for consumers. That’s fine with me: I buy my own beans and grind them.  In the end, people will pay whatever the traffic will bear, for coffee is not just a drink, but a necessity (when I was a grad student at Harvard, you could buy it from Lab Supplies using grant money, for it was considered an essential tool of scientific research.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is down on philosophy, and it’s no surprise:

Hili: The poverty of philosophy.
A: Have you been reading Marx again?
Hili: No, Judith Butler.
In Polish:
Hili: Nędza filozofii.
Ja: Znowu czytałaś Marksa?
Hili: Nie, Judith Butler.

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

From Cat Memes:

From Things With Faces, a sad garlic clove:

From Jesus of the Day; I think it refers to micturation:

From Masih; Fatima Payman is an Australian senator who defended the two Muslim Aussie nurses who said they’d kill Israeli patients if they could.

From Luana; you can see the ad here, and oy, is it anti-Semitic!

From Malcolm, three species in friendship:

From my Bluesky feed. Did they really decorate 10 Downing Street that way?

Slava Ukraini! 🇺🇦(Photo @justinng.bsky.social – 2022)

— Larry the Cat (@number10cat.bsky.social) 2025-02-24T10:08:30.898Z

I want this job, too!

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted.

Gassed upon arrival at Auschwitz, this German Jewish boy was only 12.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-02-25T11:00:08.419Z

An old guy making jokes about getting old (sound up):

One tweet from Dr. Cobb, currently in Asilomar; it leads to a thread about “lazy corn”:

A brief #Cornfax. And since I've been lazy with my #cornfax, let's talk about lazy corn. Lazy corn is, well, a pretty apt description. Unlike the corn on the left which stands tall and proud, the lazy corn just lies on the ground. It doesn't grow straight. So what's up (or not up in this case)? 1/4

— Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra (@jrossibarra.bsky.social) 2025-01-22T14:26:26.511Z

 

Monday: Hili dialogue

February 24, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the start of the “work” week: it’s Monday, February 24, 2025, and National Tortilla Chip Day.  They are basically an altered cultural appropriation from Mexico, and now are found worldwide. This photo from Wikipedia is captioned “Tortilla chips, salsa, and guacamole from the Restaurant Weisshorn, Zermatt, Switzerland.” Switzerland!  I’ll have the guacamole, please.

Andrew Bossi, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons
It’s also Twin Peaks Day (read the link) and World Bartender Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the February 24 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*It seems likely that there will soon be a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine, with Ukraine giving up about 20% of its land to Putin and half of its rare-earth minerals to the U.S. Now two countries in Europe have offered to monitor Ukraine if such a ceasefire occurs, but of course that depends on the Orange Man’s approval.

Britain and France are developing a plan to deploy up to 30,000 European peacekeepers in Ukraine if Moscow and Kyiv reach a cease-fire deal, European officials say.

But the European proposal hinges on persuading President Trump to agree to a limited U.S. military role—dubbed a “backstop” by British officials—to protect the European troops in Ukraine if they were put in danger and deter Russia from violating any cease-fire, the officials said.

An initial test of Trump’s willingness to consider U.S. security guarantees for Ukraine will come in the next few days when U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron are scheduled to hold talks with the president at the White House.

The emerging European plan wouldn’t require the U.S. to deploy its own forces in Ukraine, which the Trump administration has all but ruled out, but would seek to draw on U.S. military capabilities that European forces lack, the officials say.

The U.S., for example, might operate air-defense systems in neighboring countries that covered swaths of Ukraine while contributing other air-defense systems to the Europeans, European officials said. U.S. air power based outside Ukraine could be kept at the ready in case European troops were in danger.

Will Trump agree to that? Given his stupid remarks about Ukraine, and seeming disdain for the country (“they shouldn’t have started the war,” he said), I’m not sure such a guarantee would happen. And given that that membership in NATO requires unanimous assent of existing members, we can forget about that for Ukraine as well.

*I forgot to note that Hadi Matar, the man accused of trying to kill Salman Rushdie 36 years after the 1989 fatwa against the author and his publishers, was found guilty on Saturday of attempted murder.  (I recently read Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, Rushdie’s account of the crime and his long physical and psychological recuperation, and recommend it highly.)

A jury on Friday afternoon convicted the man who was charged with stabbing and trying to kill the author Salman Rushdie as he delivered a lecture at a literary gathering in western New York state in 2022.

Hadi Matar, 27, of Fairview, New Jersey, was quickly declared guilty of attempted murder in the second degree. He could receive up to 25 years in prison at a sentencing hearing tentatively set for 23 April.

Jurors deliberated for less than two hours on Friday afternoon, after lawyers’ closing arguments followed days of testimony that included a vivid account from Rushdie of how he was certain he was going to die at the hands of a man who rushed him on stage with a knife.

Matar was also found guilty of assault on the man Rushdie was talking to on stage, Ralph Henry Reese, who was wounded in the attack.

The district attorney, Jason Schmidt, had played a slow-motion video of the attack for the jury on Friday morning, pointing out the assailant as he emerged from the audience, walked up a staircase to the stage and broke into a run toward Rushdie.

After Matar’s conviction, Schmidt said such evidence “really is as compelling as it can possibly get”.

“Mr Matar came into this community as a visitor,” Schmidt remarked. “And, really, it’s my job that he stays a resident of New York state for the next 25 years.”

Seated at the defense table, Matar had no obvious reaction to his conviction. His public defender, Nathaniel Barone, later said Matar was “disappointed” but “quite frankly … well prepared for the verdict”.

. . . A trial for Matar on federal terrorism-related charges is scheduled for later in US district court in Buffalo.

Disappointed? There was no doubt that Matar was guilty, as he was apprehended on the spot and there is video. Frankly, I think 25 years isn’t long enough, but perhaps that’s the maximum. This is a man who, I think, cannot be rehabilitated.  And get this desperation from the lawyer:

The assistant public defender Andrew Brautigan told the jury that prosecutors had not proved that Matar intended to kill Rushdie. Therefore, Brautigan argued that prosecutors had not proven their case against Matar.

“You will agree something bad happened to Mr Rushdie, but you don’t know what Mr Matar’s conscious objective was,” Brautigan said.

Is anybody stupid enough to believe that? What his conscious objective was?  It is not surprising, though, that the Guardian neglects to mention that Matar is a citizen of both the U.S. and Lebanon and had praised Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini in a prison interview last August.

*The Times of Israel reports that Israel has halted the release of Palestinian prisoners in return for hostages

Israel said early Sunday that it was delaying the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners who had been slated to go free Saturday until Jerusalem receives assurances regarding the end of “humiliating ceremonies” staged by Hamas when hostages are handed over.

The statement by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office came after over 600 inmates had  already boarded buses to leave Ofer prison, in the largest single-day release of the first stage of the ongoing Gaza ceasefire. Instead, the inmates were told to disembark, their release on indefinite hold. Hezi Markowitz, a former Prisons Service southern commander, said Sunday that the hundreds of prisoners were on the buses for hours, waiting for release and then en route to their release destinations, when the decision was made to return them to their prisons.

The prisoners had been slated to be let go as part of a deal for the release of six hostages who were freed by Hamas earlier in the day. But with Israelis fuming over the handling of the transfer of the bodies of mother Shiri Bibas and her two small children murdered in captivity, and new anger sparked by a propaganda video showing hostages being brought to a ceremony where others were being freed, Netanyahu said Israel would demand an end to the gauche fanfare before resuming freeing prisoners.

Israel said early Sunday that it was delaying the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners who had been slated to go free Saturday until Jerusalem receives assurances regarding the end of “humiliating ceremonies” staged by Hamas when hostages are handed over.

The statement by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office came after over 600 inmates had  already boarded buses to leave Ofer prison, in the largest single-day release of the first stage of the ongoing Gaza ceasefire. Instead, the inmates were told to disembark, their release on indefinite hold. Hezi Markowitz, a former Prisons Service southern commander, said Sunday that the hundreds of prisoners were on the buses for hours, waiting for release and then en route to their release destinations, when the decision was made to return them to their prisons.

The prisoners had been slated to be let go as part of a deal for the release of six hostages who were freed by Hamas earlier in the day. But with Israelis fuming over the handling of the transfer of the bodies of mother Shiri Bibas and her two small children murdered in captivity, and new anger sparked by a propaganda video showing hostages being brought to a ceremony where others were being freed, Netanyahu said Israel would demand an end to the gauche fanfare before resuming freeing prisoners.

“In light of the repeated violations by Hamas — including the ceremonies that demean our hostages’ dignity and the cynical use of our hostages for propaganda purposes — it has been decided to delay the release of terrorists planned for yesterday until the next release of hostages is guaranteed, and without the humiliating ceremonies,” read a statement from the Prime Minister’s Office sent just after 1 a.m. Sunday.

Israel’s announcement abruptly put the future of the truce into further doubt.

*I can’t vouch for the truth of this assertion made by Jennifer Sey on her site “Sey Everything”, but I’m betting it’s true.  The piece is called “The NCAA wrote a toothless policy that won’t keep men out of women’s sports.” (h/t Ginger K.)

. . . . on February 6, the NCAA announced a new policy and their intention to follow the Executive Order. Seemed pretty good on the surface.

It’s not.

The policy is riddled with loopholes. And ensures that the NCAA need not take any accountability for ensuring that women’s sports and spaces in federally funded, Title IX governed institutions remain for women only.

The primary loophole, and the one I will focus on here, is that the “proof” that must be provided to “test” for sex is a birth certificate. And the NCAA need not go any further once a birth certificate is provided, thus “certifying” that an athlete is female.

But here’s the thing: the vast majority of states have laws on the books allowing people to change their sex on their birth certificate with varying levels of requirements. (Only 6 states don’t allow it at all.)

I’m not even going to get into how Orwellian that is. Well, maybe I will a little.

A birth certificate is a record of fact. And it can now be altered to change — literally — facts. All that is required is a “signed statement of identity” and a photo ID for the mother or father listed on the birth certificate. What??

They call it a “gender marker correction.” It’s not a correction. It’s a lie.

I just also learned you can change your “gender marker” on your social security card! All you need is a driver’s license, a birth certificate (which you just got changed by filling out a form) and a completed application.

And now, governors across the nation are moving to accelerate the paperwork to change sex on birth certificates. Governor Bob Ferguson of Washington State has announced that his Department of Health will process all “gender designation” changes in 3 business days! Hurrah! Now men can lie faster!

The tweet:

The NCAA policy is no policy at all. There are holes upon holes upon holes, and mostly the NCAA wants to appear to satisfy the Executive Order while allowing the gender ideologues and whiny scream-y failed male athletes to still have their way and validate their kooky identities.

It’s a case of the NCAA taking no accountability. Pointing fingers in both directions and saying Well, we did everything we could! Sorry your daughter lost out to a dude.

I’m saying it again: this ends when public opinion and the cultural conversation changes.

Sey notes that this policy may change when the administration changes, but so many Americans agree that trans-identified men shouldn’t compete in female sports that this could be an issue in any Presidential election. It’s a touchstone of fairness. But Sey also notes that it’s up to us to keep women’s sports for women, so if you feel that way, don’t be afraid to speak up about it.

*Over at the (Canadian) National Post, physicist Lawrence Krauss tells us “Indigenous land acknowledgements often ignore history,” with the subtitle “We should avoid creating mythology and special recognition that may have no basis in fact.”  An excerpt:

I remember the first time I heard a statement at a public event along the lines of, “This building is located on traditional unceded Aboriginal land.” It was in Australia, and it struck me as disingenuous, simplistic and patronizing. If the people making this statement really felt that badly about the land they (and possibly their forebearers) lived and worked on for generations and ostensibly stole, then they would reasonably choose to give the land back along with all they had built upon it.

However, the people who utter such statements implicitly recognize that the country they inhabit and the land they live and work on is only distantly connected to the land occupied, or colonized earlier by groups we now label as Indigenous. Moreover, the land acknowledgments also skip over the reality that in some nations, treaties cover part or all of the territory — Canada and New Zealand, as examples.

In giving primacy to the more activist Indigenous groups, institutions and governments around the world readily express their willingness to not only change history, but also to ignore scientific evidence as well.

I live in Prince Edward Island and regularly attend musical and theatre events here. Every show begins with someone coming out to recite their Indigenous mea culpa. But the last time I heard the phrase, it was slightly different, and it jarred me. I heard that the Mi’kmaq, the Indigenous tribe with deep roots in the province, had been here “since time immemorial.” Since that event, I have begun to hear more extreme versions of this prescribed mantra, with “time immemorial” replaced by “the beginning of time.” While “time immemorial” can legally refer to any time before 1189, the claim that Indigenous people have been on the land since the beginning of time is historical and scientific nonsense.

. .None of this is to suggest that we should ignore past mistreatment of Indigenous groups. The Mi’kmaq culture began to be supplanted on Prince Edward Island beginning around the 1700s; we can and should bemoan the fact that they were not treated better.

But that does not justify creating a mythology and special recognition that may have no basis in fact. We need to respect history, even as we work to provide equal opportunities for everyone in this country, within a realistic 21st-century context.
We all share this land, its laws and resources, whether our ancestors moved here decades, centuries or even millennia in the past. These ancestors were, at various times in history among the colonizers or the colonized. Let’s celebrate the diverse cultural mix that makes up present-day Canada, along the fact that if we go back far enough, we are all related, instead of creating myths to appease any modern guilt about the past.

Land acknowledgments are perhaps the most arrantly performative aspects of “woke” culture.  They accomplish nothing save parade the virtue of the issuer.  Those who say them have no intention of reimbursing the indigenous people for the “theft,” nor will they ever give back the land.  What, then, do they accomplish? I suppose there is a subset of people who really do think that one must say these things, and who don’t ask themselves, “What does this accomplish?”  The best I can say is “gives a partial history lesson.” But even that may be misleading.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s showing a bit of bioblophilia. I’m told the book she’s looking at is John Maddox’s, What Remains to be Discovered.  

by John Maddox.

Hili: What haven’t we discovered yet?
A: What are you talking about?
Hili: About this book, it looks interesting.
In Polish:
Hili: Czego jeszcze nie odkryliśmy?
Ja: O czym ty mówisz?
Hili: O tej książce. wygląda na ciekawą.

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

From Things With Faces:

From The Dodo Pet.  Poor pigeon!

An update from Feminist News:

 

From Luana, who got her Ph.D. at Cornell:

From my BlueHair feed, a terrific leaf mimic:

I couldn’t resist putting up this exchange between Fuentes, who has an upcoming book on why sex isn’t binary, and Martina Navratilova (yes, the real one).

From Malcolm; helpers at the nest:

From my feed. I love this!

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted:

A French Jewish boy gassed to death upon arrival at Auschwitz. He was five.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-02-24T10:46:17.757Z

Two from Dr. Cobb, hot-tubbing it in Asilomar.  Matthew says “Words of wisdom from John Dean,” but I am not so sure I agree with the predictions.

If Trump continues to defy the Courts and increasing numbers of people protest, Trump will rely on the Insurrection Act and call on federal troops to stop the protests. When the stock market crashes Trump may reconsider or the GOP Congress may find its spine. If not American democracy ends!

— John W Dean (@johnwdean.bsky.social) February 10, 2025 at 2:56 PM

I wonder what creationists would say about this:

On this day, the 10th of February 1825, a letter from Gideon Mantell was put before the Royal Society. We became aware of the large and iconic Early Cretaceous herbivorous dinosaur ‘Iguanodon’. So happy 200th birthday Iguanodon. Probably the best dinosaur in the world.

— Jeremy Lockwood (@valdosaurus.bsky.social) 2025-02-10T07:56:50.503Z

Sunday: Hili dialogue

February 23, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the Sabbath for goyische cats: it’s Sunday, February 23, 2025, National Banana Bread Day, a comestible infinitely better than zucchini bread (no dessert save carrot cake is improved by the inclusion of vegetables).  Here’s a tasty Filipino banana bread:

Joost Nusselder, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also National Dog Biscuit Appreciation Day and World Understanding and Peace Day (sadly, this ain’t being celebrated).

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

Da Nooz:

*Israel is holding back Palestinian prisoners supposed to be exchanged for the six hostages released Saturday by Hamas. Trouble is brewing in Israel’s war cabinet.

Hamas released six Israeli hostages from Gaza on Saturday, delivering the last living captives set to be freed in the first phase of a fragile cease-fire. That truce was already jolted this week when the militant group initially returned remains purportedly of an Israeli hostage that testing revealed to be someone else.

Early Sunday, Israel announced that it would continue to delay the release of 620 Palestinian prisoners whom it had pledged to free on Saturday until the release of further hostages “has been assured,” and Hamas commits to releasing them without “humiliating ceremonies.” Hamas has been releasing hostages in performative ceremonies aimed at showing that it is still in control of Gaza, which many Israeli officials have condemned.

The announcement, delivered in a statement from the prime minister’s office hours after the prisoner release had already been delayed without explanation, added tension to the shaky cease-fire between Israel and Hamas that is set to expire next week.

On Thursday, Hamas had returned four bodies it said were those of hostages who had died in captivity, among them Shiri Bibas, an Israeli women who had been abducted with her two young children during the Hamas-led attack of Oct. 7, 2023, that began the war. Forensic testing by Israel determined that the body was not Ms. Bibas, however.

Late Friday, Hamas transferred another set of remains, which Israeli officials confirmed early Saturday as those of Ms. Bibas, whose kidnapping and death with her children have become a symbol of Israeli grief.

The delivery of the wrong remains set off an uproar in Israel. Additionally, Israeli authorities, rejecting Hamas’s assertions that Ms. Bibas’s children were killed in Israeli airstrikes, said that their captors had killed them “with their bare hands.” The episode raised doubts about the next steps of the cease-fire agreement, including whether Saturday’s exchange would proceed as planned.

From what I heard, the Bibas family was strangled by hand, which one can apparently tell because a certain delicate bone is broken in the process. Hamas tried to cover it up by stoning the dead bodies, but the forensics told the tale.  This should enrage anybody who demonstrates for Palestine, which is now pretty much equivalent to demonstrating in favor of Hamas. Israel might return the prisoners today, or they might try to renegotiate the agreement. As I predicted, Israeli sentiment was going to change when they began swapping coffins of dead hostages for living imprisoned Palestinian terrorists.

*Another one of Trump’s executive orders has been put on hold by the judiciary: this time his anti-DEI program.

A federal judge in Maryland has temporarily blocked some enforcement of a series of executive orders by President Trump targeting diversity, equity and inclusion programs, halting a widespread crackdown on such initiatives across the federal government.

In his ruling late Friday, Judge Adam B. Abelson of the District of Maryland said that the defendants shall not “pause, freeze, impede, block, cancel, or terminate any awards, contracts or obligations,” or “change the terms of any current obligation” related to equity programs. The executive orders had required a halt to spending on diversity initiatives throughout the federal government.

Judge Abelson wrote in his opinion that the plaintiffs in the case — groups representing college professors and school diversity officers — had established that they would suffer irreparable harm under the order, and had “shown they are likely to prove” that provisions of the orders were “unconstitutionally vague on their face,” and beyond that, provisions of the orders “squarely, unconstitutionally,” violated freedom of speech.

“As plaintiffs put it, ‘efforts to foster inclusion have been widespread and uncontroversially legal for decades,’” Judge Abelson wrote, adding that “plaintiffs’ irreparable harms include widespread chilling of unquestionably protected speech.”

The Trump administration has moved to shut down diversity initiatives in government agencies, going so far as to quickly take down government web pages that referred to equal employment opportunity programs and diversity initiatives.

Among the most aggressive orders signed by Mr. Trump were ones that mandated the immediate purge of hiring practices that sought to reverse the effects of systemic discrimination against women, minorities and people with disabilities. Administration officials also threatened federal employees with “adverse consequences” if they failed to report on colleagues who defied the orders.

Judge Abelson made note of the Trump administration’s aggressive moves in his ruling, writing that the orders sought to punish people for constitutionally protected speech.

“The White House and Attorney General have made clear,” Judge Abelson wrote, that “viewpoints and speech considered to be in favor of or supportive of D.E.I.” are “viewpoints the government wishes to punish and, apparently, attempt to extinguish.”

Now I’m not a lawyer (I just play one on television), but what Trump seeks to eliminate seems to be not so much words as action: programs that, he considers, foster discrimination.  It’s not illegal to go around promoting things like “equity,” but I wonder what the “irreparable harm” the plaintiffs will suffer if Trump’s EO is enforced, save their DEI-related jobs. And it’s not true that efforts to foster inclusion have been “uncontroversially legal for decades,” as we can see from the Bakke case. Further, the Supreme Court, not long ago, banned preferential race-based admission to colleges, another effort to “foster inclusion.”

*The right-wing WSJ op-ed column has gone after RFK Jr and his agenda! The topic: the man’s anti-vaccine agenda.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been Health and Human Services secretary for all of a week, but he’s already pressing what looks like an anti-vaccine agenda. Mr. Kennedy never did disavow his vaccine views in the runup to Senate confirmation. He merely said he wouldn’t take away anyone’s vaccines. But the HHS secretary has many tools to undermine vaccines, and his early moves are revealing.

News reports this week say he’s preparing to sack members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. This is the group that decides whether and how to recommend vaccines for the public. Its recommendations help determine which vaccines are covered under the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.

That’s the program Congress established to compensate individuals injured by vaccines. Its aim is to limit litigation against vaccine makers so they’ll take the high risk of developing them. Plaintiffs can only sue if they first file claims with the special vaccine courts and are rejected. Trial lawyers hate the system since it makes it harder to round up plaintiffs.

Mr. Kennedy is targeting the committee members for alleged conflicts of interest. But none of the members work for drug companies. They’re medical professors and physicians with careers studying vaccines.

Perhaps Mr. Kennedy doesn’t like that they have done research showing vaccines are beneficial and may have—oh no!—even advocated for them. One member advised a presidential cancer panel during President Trump’s first term on how to boost uptake of the Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine to prevent cervical cancer. If the committee withdraws a vaccine recommendation, it could be removed from the vaccine compensation program and open manufacturers to mass tort liability.

I’ve always thought that the man was the worst of Trump’s appointees. And with no vaccine compensation program, new vaccines might not be developed. Sometimes, as in covid, they need to be developed rapidly. And remember, RFK Jr. is going to be in charge of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Whopee; we’re all gonna die!

*From the NYT: “Six things E.R. doctors wish you’d avoid“. Read carefully (article archived here).  A bit of each

Adaira Landry, an E.R. physician at Harvard Medical School-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital, said knife injuries in the kitchen were among the most frequent injuries she saw.

Avocados are a major culprit, Dr. Landry added. “Sometimes I’ll even ask, ‘Oh, were you cutting avocado?,” she said. “And they’re like: ‘Yes! How did you know?’”

The best way to cut something like an avocado or a bagel is to use a secure, nonskid surface such as a wooden cutting board, and to cut away from your body, said Matt Shannon, the director of community emergency medicine at University of Florida Health.

Several doctors said they avoided trampolines. “They’re a broken-bone factory,” Dr. Sugalski said. “We see fractures, dislocations, spinal injuries, head injuries, all the time.”

Dr. Pratt is a dog lover, but after seeing many canine attack victims in the E.R., he doesn’t pet unfamiliar dogs. “You don’t know what kind of trauma that animal has been put through and what kind of triggers it has,” he said.

But is it okay to pet strange cats? I do that all the time! The last three:

Dr. Landry takes her own unexpected and extreme symptoms seriously. If you experience something like severe chest pain or paralysis of a body part, come to the E.R. immediately, she said.

And if you have heart attack or stroke symptoms, do not drive yourself to the hospital, said Michael E. Silverman, the vice chairman of the department of emergency medicine at Morristown Medical Center in New Jersey.

If you’re not wearing a helmet, whether it’s for sports or e-bikes, “you’re just looking for serious injury,” Dr. Sugalski said. “We see folks come in with helmets and without helmets, and it’s night and day.”

The last one is buried in the story:

Don’t wear Crocs when it’s snowy or icy outside.

Or any other time! (That’s from me.)

*Just for fun, I found a 14-minute video giving the late Roger Ebert’s list of the ten greatest movies of all time. Click on “watch on YouTube” on the video screenshot below.

The list in reverse order of ranking: “Gates of Heaven,” “28Up,” “Floating Weeds,” “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Notorious,” “Raging Bull,” “The Third Man,” La Dolce Vita,” “Casablanca,” and “Citizen Kane”. I realized to my horror that I’ve seen only “Raging Bull,” “Casablanca,” and “Citizen Kane,” all of them great movies.  I have some movie-watching to do!”

But the first one I’d like to see is “Floating Weeds,” directed by Yasujirō Ozu, who made “Tokyo Story,” which is on my own list of greatest films, and, along with Kurosawa’s “Ikiru,” is one of the two best foreign films.

Click for Ebert’s ten best:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s concerned that Malgorzata is using Andrzej’s mouse pad. (He got a new one and gave the old one to Malgorzata.) But it has upset the order of things:

Hili: This is your old mouse pad.
A: Yes, Małgorzata’s mouse pad was dilapidated and I don’t have time to buy her a new one.
In Polish:
Hili: To twoja stara podkładka pod mysz.
Ja: Tak, Małgorzaty podkładka się zniszczyła, a nie mam teraz czasu, żeby jej kupić nową.
And in Berlin, Stupsi is chewing on grass and notes: “Heute hast Du die Wahl. Ich wünsche uns allen viel Glück.” (Translation: “Today is the election. I wish us all good luck.” (A very far-right party is running.)

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

Barry caught some bad grammar at the Associated Press. Did you know some monkeys can live for two hundred years or more?

From Things With Faces, a tired cappuccino:

From America’s Cultural Decline Into Idiocy:

From Meow:

From Masih, and it’s not just in Europe:

Erin Molan (Aussie, eloquent, not Jewish) on the nature of Hamas. Worth hearing!

From Malsolm, two disparate cats:

DO NOT DO THIS TO CATS!

From my Twitter feed:

From Ricky Gervais:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I posted.

Sixteen-year old French girl, died in Auschwitz.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-02-23T10:32:59.870Z

Two tweets from Matthew, who’s now in America!  First, a political/religious one:

From FB – “The car in front of me had a bumper sticker on it. It read: "Pray for Trump Psalm 109:8." When I got home l opened my bible to the scripture and read it and started laughing.Psalm 109:8 -"Let his days be few and brief; And let others step forward to replace him."

— (@deezgan.bsky.social) 2025-02-11T04:07:23.103Z

Photos from where Matthew is now:

Heard of Asilomar, the meeting that discussed the dangerous new technology of genetic engineering in February 1975? The world was in black and white back then (or at least the meeting photos were), right? Wrong! Previously unseen colour slides! digital.sciencehistory.org/collections/…

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-02-10T08:25:58.157Z

Saturday: Hili dialogue

February 22, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the Sabbath for Jewish cats, in which shabbos goys are required to clean their litter boxes. It’s CaturSaturday, February 22, 2025, and National Margarita Day. Who has not had one of these frozen concoctions? Here’s a nice frozen version that would go down well with fresh chips and a spicy salsa dip:

Jon Sullivan, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also Be Humble Day, International Tongue Twister Contest Day (see below), Open that Bottle Night, National Cook a Sweet Potato Day, George Washington’s Birthday (he was born on this day in 1732), World Thinking Day, and National Wildlife Day.

Here’s a one-word tongue-twister in Polish:

Konstantynopolitanczykowianeczka

It means: “A little girl from Constantinople.”

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

Da Nooz:

BREAKING:  Hamas handed over five living male hostages to Israel this morning, with one more set to be released later.  Also, Hamas finally handed over the body of Shiri Bibas to Israel, after having given a Palestinian woman “by mistake”. Earlier Bibas’s two children, both dead, were returned to Israel, with the doctors saying both children had been strangled to death by hand. Finally, Trump fired General Charles Q. Brown, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: America’s senior military officer. Five other senior Pentagon officers were fired, the firing said to “[reflect] the president’s insistence that the military’s leadership is too mired in diversity issues, has lost sight of its role as a combat force to defend the country and is out of step with his ‘America First’ movement.”

*The battle between Trump and Zelensky continues, with Trump acting, as usual in this mess, greedily and reprehensibly. He wants Ukraine’s mineral rights given to the U.S, apparent as one a condition of a peace!

The Trump administration is stepping up its push for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to hand mineral rights worth hundreds of billions of dollars to the U.S., after Zelensky’s initial rejection of the demand fueled President Trump’s escalating broadsides against Ukraine’s leader.

The White House called Zelensky’s refusal to sign a deal it proposed and his criticism of Trump unacceptable, a day after Zelensky said Trump is living in a “disinformation” bubble and Trump countered by calling Zelensky a dictator.

“They need to tone it down and take a hard look and sign that deal,” Trump’s national security adviser Mike Waltz said Thursday of Ukraine’s leadership on Fox News.

Zelensky has said he is open to a deal, but that it needs more work.

The U.S. demands were first presented by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in Kyiv last week.

A U.S. Republican lawmaker who met with Zelensky on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference last week described the Ukrainian leader’s account of the interaction with Bessent.

Bessent pushed the paper across the table, demanding that Zelensky sign it, the Ukrainian president told the lawmaker. Zelensky took a quick look and said he would discuss it with his team. Bessent then pushed the paper closer to Zelensky.

“You really need to sign this,” the Treasury secretary said. Zelensky said he was told “people back in Washington” would be very upset if he didn’t. The Ukrainian leader said he took the document but didn’t commit to signing.

Trump is acting like the Godfather: “Nice little country you got here; it would be a shame if anything happened to it.”  Trump is furiously osculating Putin’s rump, and demonizing Zelensky at the same time. Isn’t this the opposite of the way things should be?

*Apparently, the four bodies of the hostages returned to Israel by Hamas on Thursday did not include Sheri Bibas, the mother of the two young children whose bodies were returned. Further, the children were not killed by IDF fire or bombings, as Hamas claimed, but were murdered by the terrorist group. Further, and this makes me ineffably sad, the two children were strangled to death by the bare hands of terrorists.

From the ToI:

The Israel Defense Forces said Friday that forensic examinations have revealed that Palestinian terrorists murdered children Ariel and Kfir Bibas “with their bare hands” weeks after their kidnapping on October 7, 2023.

“We can confirm that baby Kfir Bibas, just 10 months old, and his older brother Ariel, aged four, were both brutally murdered by terrorists while being held hostage in Gaza no later than November 2023. These two innocent children were taken hostage alive, along with their mother, Shiri, from their home on October 7, 2023,” IDF Spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said in a televised statement.

But Hagari said the evidence clearly showed that they were not killed in an airstrike as Hamas claimed.

“Contrary to Hamas’s lies, Ariel and Kfir were not killed in an airstrike. Ariel and Kfir Bibas were murdered in cold blood by terrorists,” he said. “The terrorists did not shoot the two young boys — they killed them with their bare hands. Afterward, they committed horrific acts to cover up these atrocities.”

“This assessment is based on both forensic findings from the identification process and intelligence that supports these findings. We have shared these findings, intelligence and forensics with our partners around the world so they can verify it,” said Hagari.

Here’s Hagari’s statement. I have just heard that Sheri Bibas was murdered the same way as her children.  Rumors say that the bodies were stoned by Hamas after they were dead to make it look as if they all died from an airstrike. Hagari below notes that the forensic conclusions have been shared with Israel’s allies throughout the world so they can be verified.

 

This has stoked fears that the fragile cease-fire may not hold. (NYT article archived here).

Early on Friday morning, the Israeli military announced that the body of Ms. Bibas — nominally returned, along with those of her sons, by Hamas to Israel on Thursday — appeared to be that of someone else. And an autopsy of the two boys, aged 4 and 8 months at the time of their abduction, revealed that terrorists killed them in Gaza “with their bare hands,” the military said.

A senior Hamas official, Mousa Abu Marzouq, said in a phone interview that the family was killed in an Israeli airstrike in November 2023, dismissing the accusation that a small militant group that held the hostages, the Mujahideen Brigades, had murdered them. But Mr. Abu Marzouq acknowledged that Ms. Bibas’s body may have been kept in Gaza by mistake, saying that Hamas members were now searching for her remains in a place where the family had been buried alongside Palestinians.

Neither side’s account could be independently verified. [I’m betting that Hagari’s statement, but not that of Hamas, can be verified.

Israelis remain deeply traumatized by the October assault, and the return of the Bibas boys, coupled with the uncertainty about their mother’s whereabouts and the disrespectful way that Hamas paraded their coffins on Thursday, revived the torment.

Responding to the military’s announcement, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel returned to the language of vengeance that defined his speeches in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack.

“May God avenge their blood,” Mr. Netanyahu said in a recorded speech to the nation on Friday morning. “And we will also have our vengeance.”

The seething tenor of Mr. Netanyahu’s response was maintained across much of the Israeli political spectrum. Naftali Bennett, a former prime minister, said in a broadcast interview that the Bibases’ treatment showed how “the majority of Gazans want to murder all of the Israelis.” (Polling last fall suggested that less than 40 percent of Gazan Palestinians supported the Oct. 7 attack, down from more than 70 percent early last year.)

. . . For some Israelis, the fate of the Bibas family underlined the need to restart the war to defeat Hamas once and for all. The current truce is set to elapse in early March unless Hamas and Israel can agree to an extension. “The only solution is the destruction of Hamas, and this must not be postponed,” said Bezalel Smotrich, the far-right finance minister, in a post on social media.

Others in Israel differ, of course, but I still think Hamas needs to be defeated; it cannot be allowed to run Gaza. This is from Alison on FB:

*As always, I’ll steal a few items from Nellie Bowles’s weekly news summary at the Free Press, called this week, “TGIF: War Games.”

→ Planes just falling out of the sky now: A Delta Air Lines plane crash-landed in Toronto, which NBC News managed to associate with Trumpo, even though the crash was technically not in America (yet). “This is going to, yet again, raise the concern about FAA staffing, air traffic control staffing. Now, this is a Canadian air traffic control tower and this is under Canadian authority once it crosses the border, and yet, as you know, there has been this talk about maybe staff cuts at the FAA as a part of President Trump’s effort to trim down the federal workforce.” The cause of the accident is still under investigation. So the American right doesn’t yet know whether to blame this on union workers making the plane badly or suspiciously tan pilots—is that an Italian with a man bun or a Latina with a bun bun? We need to know.

There’s an amazing essay in Palladium Magazine about how complex systems like modern air travel can’t survive our anti-competence culture, and I think there’s a lot of truth to it. For planes to fly around and basically never crash, you need a lot of extremely competent people working together competently. And for the last decade, the air traffic control worker tests have penalized anyone who indicates interest in science or math. It sounds conspiratorial but it’s true. We can say that being on time is “white supremacy culture” when the stakes are the anthropology department’s annual team dinner, but we can’t do that with air travel. Or we can. But then planes absolutely will fall out of the sky.

→ Julianne Moore’s controversial book about freckles: The new Department of Defense has apparently banned Julianne Moore’s children’s book Freckleface Strawberry from Pentagon-run schools. The ban followed a broad review by the Department of Defense Education Activity of school books “potentially related to gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology topics.” So: freckles. Moore’s book follows a 7-year-old girl “who’s learning to love the skin she’s in.” She wrote the book for children “to remind them that we all struggle but are united by our humanity and our community.” Military professionals can still get to Freckleface Strawberry if they really need to, if it’s a freckle emergency. During the Defense Department’s review process, officials said that, of problematic books like Moore’s, “access will be limited to professional staff.” I, for one, am glad we’re bringing back freckle-shaming. It’s enough about them and their sunburns. Red hair is alarming. Freckles are a sign that no one put zinc oxide on your face, and therefore you’re unruly and anti-authority. I’ve never known a peaceful redhead. My case remains. Did you know they need more anesthesia during surgery? That’s real. Good ban, Trump. Get ’em.

→ We simply did not woke hard enough: As I do every week now, I ask the question: Are there still Democrats? Where are you? America is calling for your return. New polling from Gallup shows that a plurality of Democrats favor party moderation, a significant shift from 2021 following Biden’s victory.

But that is not what Dem intellectuals want. No. Liberal intellectuals are actually arguing the opposite. Still. Even now. Here is Rebecca Traister, an influential progressive writer, with a clarion call for action in New York magazine this week: “Democrats have lost recently not because of an excess of wokeness but because of a failure to get excessive enough.” That is a real quote. She believes that the wokeness was not woke enough. The rioters need to smash more windows. The people who misgender don’t get fired—they get the wall. There can be no change of course; Kamala ran too moderately. The polls are wrong. Taxpayers gave a brand-new, Stacey Abrams–linked eco-nonprofit just $2 billion dollars when it should have been $3 billion, you see (that $2 billion is real, by the way). We must simply woke more and harder.

In that essay, she calls my wife “a reactionary troll,” but in fact, Bar is tall and quite calm compared to some of the women I dated. Anyway, Rebecca, I know you hate me and everything I stand for, which is whatever Matt Yglesias tweeted that morning combined with whatever Derek Thompson tweeted last night. But I promise, the answer is not to woke harder. If you could just stop screaming at anyone who believes slightly different things, you might win something. As Jen Psaki put it last week: “Democrats just lost everything. They control nothing.” Rebecca—it’s okay. We know it’s sad that the canceling stuff didn’t work out and most Americans aren’t into making crimes legal.

This last piece burns my onions.  Why are prominent Democrats doubling down, increasing their demonizing of those who voted for Trump? Yes, of course Trump is on balance hurting America, but the Democrats don’t have a chance in hell of gaining any power unless they become more moderate. It’s as if Dems are so angry at having lost the election to an unhinged narcissist that they’ve lost their cool—to the extent that they can’t figure out what to do now save curse Trump and his minions. I suspect this is making it worse for all Democrats.

*Andrew Sullivan is really peeved at the Trump Administration, perhaps so much so that he’ll declare himself a Democrat (there are few Republicans as moderate as Sullivan). His latest piece, about American foreign policy, is called “Requiem for the West“, with the subtitle, “Trump and Vance have put a stake in the heart of the free world.”

We only saw Donald Trump’s foreign policy darkly in his first term — constrained, as he was, by a handful of white-knuckled Republicans in the executive branch. Now we see it face to face. It’s a vision where international law disappears, great powers divide up the planet into spheres of influence, and the strong always control the weak. It’s Trump’s vision of domestic politics as well. And of life.

Control, plunder, gloat. This is the Trump way.

And to give the madman his due, something had to happen. Neoconservatism is long since dead — by suicide, of course, in Iraq and Afghanistan. And the global position of the US after 1945, and then after 1989, is over and never coming back. There is simply no threat in the world that is equivalent to the totalitarian regimes of Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and Maoist China. Islamism was never going to replace them.

And so a retrenchment of the US position was inevitable at some point: a more judicious approach to interventionism, a greater balance with the allies, a pivot toward Asia and away from Europe and the Middle East: responsible, realist re-positioning. In fact, failure to do so when our debt payments now exceed our military budget would be asking for trouble.

. . . . What we are witnessing now — as Washington’s support for Ukraine crumbles — is what happens when US promises run way ahead of its core interests and US public opinion, and we get caught funding an unending, unwinnable, unspeakably bloody war.

On this much, Trump is right. The Ukraine conflict is at a stalemate; the human toll is vast, unimaginable, and mounting every day; there’s no chance of repelling Russia from its current occupation — but there is some chance of driving a hard bargain to ensure a stable, new border and an independent rump Ukraine, with security guarantees against any future invasions from Russia.

And so I’ve always been in support of a tough peace negotiation that would have to reflect the facts on the ground. I was prepared for concessions from the West in the end, alongside some guarantees against future aggression. Even if it was realistic to understand that victory was impossible, we could still find a way to protect Ukraine’s fledgling democracy and remaining territory, keep the democracies aligned against Putin, and maintain the broad structure of the post-war settlement, alongside international law.

But that is not, it now seems obvious, the Trump position at all. What he is doing is not about making a tough peace deal with Russia, recalibrating NATO, or protecting Ukraine’s democracy. He is merely setting the terms of a new alliance and relationship with the criminal Russian dictatorship — directed against the European democracies.

Clearly, Sullivan concedes that some of Ukraine will have to be given to Russia to end the war. Everybody seems to think so, though I deeply regret that, because it’s a tacit admission that Russia can take whatever land it wants (granted, the cost was high). But I would love to see Ukraine in NATO. That may be a dealbreaker for Russia, and they’d continue the war, which they’d eventually win at a huge cost in lives and moneuy.  But to see our administration on the side of despotism rather than freedom is a hard thing to bear. And I completely agree with Sullivan in his closing:

This is who Trump is. But it isn’t who Americans really are. I have faith that the West, now mortally wounded, can yet survive Trump and Putin, and re-emerge at some point. But it may be a dark, dark few years before the dawn’s early light breaks out again.

Indeed.

*And from the AP’s reliable oddities section, which also reports that the New York Yankees baseball team has finally dropped its ban on players having beards. But this piece is about Birkentocks, which I’ve always thought were the ugliest footwear in creation.  The company tried to prevent other makers from selling copycat designs, and Birkenstock tried to defend its interest by claiming the sandals were art. They lost. 

Birkenstocks: They are ubiquitous in summer, comfy and very German. Sometimes they look chic and sometimes shabby. But can these sandals be considered art?

That’s the question Germany’s Federal Court of Justice wrestled with Thursday, and it ruled they’re just comfy footwear.

Birkenstock, which is headquartered in Linz am Rhein, Germany, and says its tradition of shoemaking goes back to 1774, filed a lawsuit against three competitors who sold sandals that were very similar to its own.

The shoe manufacturer claimed its sandals “are copyright-protected works of applied art” that may not be imitated. Under German law, works of art enjoy stronger and longer-lasting intellectual property protections than consumer products.

The company asked for an injunction to stop its competitors from making copycat sandals and order them to recall and destroy those already on the market. The defendant companies were not identified in the court statement.

Before Germany’s highest court for civil trials weighed in Thursday, the case had been heard at two lower courts, which disagreed on the issue.

A regional court in Cologne initially recognized the shoes as works of applied art and granted the orders, but Cologne’s higher regional court overturned the orders on appeal, German news agency dpa reported.

The appeals court said it was unable to establish any artistic achievement in the wide-strapped, big-buckled sandals

The Federal Court of Justice sided with the appeals court and dismissed the case. In its ruling, it wrote that a product can’t be copyrighted if “technical requirements, rules or other constraints determine the design.”

“For the copyright protection of a work of applied art — as for all other types of work — the level of design must not be too low,” the court wrote. “For copyright protection, a level of design must be achieved that reveals individuality.”

I agree, but I also know that tastes differ and I’m not gonna kick your butt if you wear these monstrosities. For your delectation, here is not-art from Wikipedia:

aaronisnotcool, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Szaron and Hili await their dinner. “He,” of course, is Andrzej:

Szaron: Do you think he will finally come here?
Hili: I’m losing all hope.
In Polish:
Szaron: Czy sądzisz, że on tu wreszcie przyjdzie?
Hili: Tracę nadzieję.

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

From the Dodo Pet:

From My Cat is an Asshole:

And from Meow, an inbread cat:

From Malgorzata, who captioned this as “Innocent, starving Gaza civilians rejoice at the sight of murdered Israeli babies.”

From Malcolm, a bad orange cat:

A retweet from J.K.R. The guy is John Swinney, the First Minister of Scotland.

Sound up to hear this adorable baby bear:

From my Bluesky feed, where I’m trying to follow as many good animal/nature posts as possible. Sound up.

Jens has had a Lovely Bath today and he would like to share some Facts About That!

— Stickyfrogs (@stickyfrogs.bsky.social) 2025-02-21T18:40:31.967Z

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted:

A 7-year-old Dutch Jewish girl, gassed to death upon arriving at Auschwitz.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-02-22T11:16:20.206Z

Two posts from Dr. Cobb, who’s heading for Asilomar, CA, the subject of his first post:

Criticisms of the 1975 Asilomar meeting on genetic engineering are quite valid, in terms of its lack of representation and so on. But remember the positive consequences – all insulin is now produced in engineered microbes, and careful medical use of the technology can be amazing:

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-02-21T11:40:45.787Z

I found this one next to a post from Larry. #10 Cat!

In Westminster it's all about who you know

— Larry the Cat (@number10cat.bsky.social) 2025-02-20T19:36:20.686Z

Friday: Hili dialogue

February 21, 2025 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the end of the “work” week: it’s Friday, February 21, 2025, and it’s National Sticky Bun Day, a celebration of those oversized cinnamon rolls that I love so much.  Ann Sather is the most famous place in Chicago to get them, and sometimes people would bring a dozen to the lab, but, if you ask me they’re a tad on the small side.

It’s also National Caregivers Day, National Grain-Free Day (not if you have a cinnamon roll!), and World Kombucha Day, celebrated the fermented tea drink that I’ve never had–but would be glad to try.

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

Finally, there is a Google Doodle today in which you can play a game against an opponent, a game involving the Moon and the lunar cycle. Click below to begin:

Da Nooz:

*The NYT describes the return of the four dead Israeli hostages in a piece called, “With coffins and taunts, Hamas hands dead hostages back to Israel”  (article archived here).

Hamas handed over on Thursday what it said were the remains of four Israelis abducted during the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, including a woman and her two young children whose abduction was widely seen as emblematic of the viciousness of the Hamas assault.

Crowds of Palestinians gathered near the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis to watch the theatrical handoff staged by Hamas: four coffins placed on a stage in front of a cartoonish, vampiric picture of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister. Triumphant music thumped in the background.

One casket bore a picture of Kfir Bibas, who was less than nine months old when he was kidnapped. A few yards away, another poster threatened that if Israel went back to war against Hamas, even more hostages would return in coffins.

Miles away, Israelis watched the scene unfold in horror and anguish, a sharp contrast to the catharsis evoked by the recent releases of hostages who had survived. Israel’s leaders had vowed to topple Hamas and bring home the roughly 250 hostages the militant group and its allies abducted in October 2023.

But some of those taken captive are now coming home dead.

Critics in Israel say Mr. Netanyahu shares at least part of the blame, arguing that he pressed on with his campaign against Hamas rather than agreeing earlier to a cease-fire that would have saved some lives.

And despite more than a year of devastating war, Hamas’s show of force at the exchange demonstrated that the group was still very much in charge in Gaza. Scores of gunmen — most clad in green Hamas headbands — patrolled the area around the exchange.

On Thursday, the coffins containing the hostages’ remains were the latest props.

Volker Türk, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, called the display “abhorrent and cruel,” adding that it “flies in the face of international law.”

I suspect that when all the hostages (or their remains) are back in Israeli or Thai hands, Israel will resume activities assuring that Hamas will not govern Gaza in the future.

*Mitch McConnell is 83, and though many of us disliked him in the past, he’s found more favor with Democrats lately since he’s been voting with them.  But he’ll be gone soon, for he’s not going to run again.

Senator Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican and longest-serving Senate leader who played a pivotal role in obstructing major Democratic agenda items and stacking the federal courts with conservatives, said Thursday that he would not seek another term in 2026.

In a speech on the Senate floor that fell on his 83rd birthday, Mr. McConnell made official what had been widely expected since he announced last year that he would step down as Republican leader. He said that representing Kentucky was “the honor of a lifetime,” but that “I will not seek this honor an eighth time. My current term in the Senate will be my last.”

When he stepped down as leader, Mr. McConnell had said he was committed to finishing out his seventh term in Congress. He had not announced his political plans, but it had become clear that he was nearing the end of his career. Mr. McConnell has suffered a series of health issues over the past year, including a back-to-back pair of falls recently that left him temporarily using a wheelchair to navigate the Capitol.

Mr. McConnell established himself as a master tactician in the Senate during 18 years as minority and majority leader, making shrewd use of the chamber’s rules to thwart his opponents and empower his allies, including President Trump. He blocked former President Barack Obama from filling a Supreme Court seat at the end of his tenure and then led a Republican effort to install deeply conservative jurists on the bench under the first Trump administration, culminating in the confirmation of three Supreme Court justices.

But he has a deeply fraught relationship with Mr. Trump, despite the key role he played in enacting Mr. Trump’s agenda and allowing him to return to power. In recent weeks, he has found himself increasingly isolated within his own party, particularly on the issues of national security and safeguarding democracy.

All told, he was not good for the Republic, but I did admire his recent votes against Trump’s nominees.

*Trump issued an early EO that people born in the U.S. but whose parents immigrated here illegally, were here on temporary work visas, or were on student and tourists visas, did not deserve “birthright citizenship.” Since birthright citizenship is in the Constitution, I agreed with the many people who said that Trump’s dictum was unconstitutional. And one federal judge agreed, blocking the order. Now a federal appellate judge has done the same, setting up a Supreme Court case that, if all be right with the world, Trump will lose:

A federal appeals court panel denied a Justice Department bid to reinstate President Donald Trump’s executive order aimed at curbing birthright citizenship, edging the battle over the order’s constitutionality closer to a potential Supreme Court showdown.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit declined on Wednesday the administration’s emergency request to immediately lift a nationwide block on Trump’s executive order, rejecting its claim that the preliminary injunction was overly broad. It is the first time an appellate panel has weighed in on one of the several lawsuits challenging Trump’s birthright citizenship order.

Justice Department lawyers had argued that the court’s injunction — which blocked Trump’s order nationwide after a lawsuit from four Democratic-led states — was harmful because it stymied Trump’s effort to “address the ongoing crisis at the southern border” and implement an immigration policy designed to combat “significant threats to national security and public safety.”

The three-judge panel unanimously rejected the request, with Judges William C. Canby Jr. and Milan D. Smith Jr. writing in their order that the administration had not made a “strong showing” that it would succeed on the merits of its appeal.

In a six-page concurring opinion, Judge Danielle Forrest wrote that setting aside a court order on an emergency basis should be the exception rather than the rule, and that the injunction did not meet the bar. “A controversy, yes. Even an important controversy, yes. An emergency, not necessarily,” wrote Forrest, who was nominated to her seat by Trump in 2019.

In rejecting the emergency plea, the panel upheld a nationwide injunction ordered Feb. 6 by U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour in Seattle, who called Trump’s executive order “blatantly unconstitutional,” while paving the way for the case to be brought before the Supreme Court.

If you want to get rid of birthright citizenship, you’ll have to amend the Constitution, not issue executive orders. And that simply isn’t going to happen. Even Clarence Thomas won’t be able to find enough daylight to say that Trump’s order was lawful.

*Trump’s decision to settle the Ukraine war without the presence of Zelensky has just ticked off the Ukrainian leader, and rightly so.  A sign of that animosity is that, following talks between Zelensky and Trump’s “Ukraine envoy” (what a snub!), there was going to be a press conference with the two. Now, however, it’s been canceled.

A news conference that was planned to follow talks between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and U.S. President Donald Trump’s Ukraine envoy was canceled Thursday as political tensions deepened between the two countries over how to end the almost three-year war with Russia.

The event was originally supposed to include comments to the media by Zelenskyy and retired U.S. Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, but it was changed at the last minute to a simple photo opportunity where the two posed for journalists. They did not deliver statements or field questions as expected. The change was requested by the U.S. side, Ukrainian presidential spokesman Serhii Nikiforov said.

Kellogg’s trip to Kyiv coincided with recent feuding between Trump and Zelenskyy that has bruised their personal relations and cast further doubt on the future of U.S. support for Ukraine’s war effort.

Dozens of journalists gathered at Ukraine’s presidential office in Kyiv after being invited to take photos and observe a news conference with Zelenskyy and Kellogg. As the meeting began, photographers and video journalists were allowed into a room where the two men shook hands before sitting across from each other at a table.

Journalists were then informed that there would be no news conference with remarks by the leaders or questions from reporters. Nikiforov gave no reason for the sudden change except to say that it was in accordance with U.S. wishes.

The U.S. delegation made no immediate comment. The White House did not immediately respond to questions about why the news conference was called off.

. . . Kellogg, one of the architects of a staunchly conservative policy book laying out an “America First” national security agenda, has long been Trump’s top adviser on defense issues.

What did they expect? Trump is talking to Putin while Zelensky gets fobbed off on some factotrum.  Is he supposed to sit there twiddling his thumbs while the Russian dictator and American dictator President decide how to slice up his country.  Trump’s “diplomacy” in this case is execrable, but he’s never seen a part of Putin’s buttocks that he wouldn’t osculate.

*I have never swung a golf club in my life, save at miniature golf places as a kid, but the pros have now developed a new and weird way of putting called AimPoint:

When the best golfers in the world line up a putt these days, many of them look completely deranged.

Their process for reading greens everywhere from Augusta National to St Andrews involves standing over the line of the putt, closing one eye and sticking a couple fingers in the air as if they’re trying to hail a cab to the clubhouse. Never in the centuries since a bunch of Scots started malleting balls toward a cup had anyone studied greens quite like this before.

But that hasn’t stopped professionals from adopting the unorthodox putting strategy known as AimPoint, a technique that has become as popular as it is polarizing. One PGA Tour veteran, 2009 U.S. Open champion Lucas Glover, recently inflamed the controversy when he called for AimPoint to be banned and cited it as a factor in golf’s pace-of-play debate. Others have criticized it for simply looking silly—or worse, violating the game’s unwritten rules when players stomp around too close to the hole.

Still, a growing number of top pros swear by it. They argue it makes the maddening art of reading a green more scientific and that the backlash against it is just uninformed.

“AimPoint has 1,000% helped me,” two-time major champion Collin Morikawa said. “I don’t think people understand how AimPoint works to really say this is right or wrong.”

I don’t even understand the description. What is the “biggest break”?

Here’s what you have to understand: First, you straddle the putt’s line at the point of the biggest break. Then you use your footing to discern the amount of tilt, at which point you assign a number—usually one, two or three—to the slope’s severity. Next, standing behind the ball with one eye closed and a pointer finger aimed at the center of the hole, you raise the number of fingers that corresponds to that slope. And that’s your line. So if you estimate the slope at 2% from right to left, you aim at the point outside your middle finger. Voilà.

Here’s an explanation and a demonstration, which sort of makes sense:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, it appeared  that Hili made up with Baby Kulka! But the truce was short-lived. Malgorzata explains:

Kulka was eating from Hili’s bowl and Hili was not hissing. That’s why Andrzej thought that she finally accepted Kulka. But, as Hili said, it was just a temporary ceasefire. Half an hour later they were hissing at each other again and ready to fight. Andrzej took Kulka and deported her upstairs. 

A: Finally you accepted Kulka.
Hili: It’s just a temporary ceasefire.
In Polish:
Ja: Nareszcie zaakceptowałaś Kulkę.
Hili: To tylko chwilowe zawieszenie broni.

And in snowy Berlin, a photo of Stupsi in the wild “Hatte ich Dir schon ein Bild von Stupsi geschickt, wie sie durch unseren Iglu läuft?” (translation: Did I already send you a photo of Stupsi walking through our ignloo?)

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

From Things With Faces, and the caption, “A forgotten potato at the bottom of the pantry turned into a Moose.”

From The Dodo Pet:

A thoughtful moggy from Jesus of the Day:

A 16-minute discussion between Masih and Quillette editor Jonathan Kay. Masih explains how Western feminists “Iransplain” to her: “hijabs are part of your culture,” etc.

Philosopher Bogardus said this:

I found these two responses to the new definitions:

CNN: https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/19/health/hhs-sex-man-woman-definitions
Washington Post: https://archive.ph/jLdGb

CNN offers this objection: “the new definitions fail to account for people such as those who identify as intersex.”
WaPo offers this objection: “Intersex people and those with chromosomal conditions do not fit into a simple binary construct.”
So he tweeted this out (there is more in his thread):

From Ken. Translation: “It turns out that debris from the second stage of the Falcon9 rocket fell near Poznań [Poland] photo: Adam Borucki”

From Malcolm; an old man waits for his cat to catch up to him. (Sound up for the “meow” song.)

I found a frogs amidst all the progressive virtue-signaling on BlueSky!

Tonight’s Dinner Menu has included Wriggly Crickets, Fingers, and also a Bath because Voigt Reasons!

— Stickyfrogs (@stickyfrogs.bsky.social) 2025-02-20T14:56:52.258Z

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I reposted:

This Polish teacher lived barely a month after arriving at Auschwitz.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-02-21T11:01:36.857Z

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. First, a very unusual fly larva:

This nearly decade-old observation was finally identified as fly larva of the genus Rhyncomya thanks to the publication of a new scientific paper and it's our Observation of the Day! Seen in South Africa by peterwebb.Read the discussion at: http://www.inaturalist.org/observations…

— (@inaturalist.bsky.social) 2025-02-15T16:50:58.102Z

I may have posted this, but so what? It’s amazing! Look at all those mRNA molecules wiggling around. And they have to be fast because proteins have to be made fast:

67 years after Pardee, Jacob and Monod called this stuff “X” (pronounced “eeex” à la française), now we can actually see mRNA molecules wriggling about. Quite amazing. Source in linked post.

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-02-18T15:51:10.260Z

 

Thursday: Hili dialogue

February 20, 2025 • 7:15 am

Welcome to Thursday, February 20, 2025 and National Cherry Pie Day, one of the Three Great Pies (pecan, blueberry, and cherry).   Here is one of Malgorzata’s cherry pies from their own orchard.

It’s also National Muffin Day, National Love Your Pet Day, and The Great American Spit Out Day, calling awareness to the dangers of smokeless tobacco.

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

Da Nooz:

In the previous post, I reported on the return of four dead Israeli hostages taken by Hamas. In return, Hamas got 1000 Palestinian prisoners back.

*Is there any improvement Trump won’t try to de-improve? I’m referring to the new “congestion pricing” to enter lower Manhattan, which by all accounts has been a big success. Trump doesn’t like it because, he says, it drives people away from the city, and of course it’s his city.

President Trump intends to revoke federal approval of New York City’s congestion pricing program, fulfilling a campaign promise to reverse the policy that tolls drivers who enter Manhattan’s busiest streets to finance repairs to mass transit.

In a letter to Gov. Kathy Hochul on Wednesday, the president’s transportation secretary outlined Mr. Trump’s objections to the program, the first of its kind in the United States, and said that federal officials would contact the state to “discuss the orderly cessation of toll operations.”

The letter did not indicate a specific date by which the federal government intended to end the program. The decision will almost certainly be challenged in court.

The letter from Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, cited the cost to working class motorists, the use of revenue from the tolls for transit upgrades rather than roads, and the scope of the plan compared to the federal legislation that authorized it as reasons for the decision.

The program started on Jan. 5 and charged most drivers $9 to enter Manhattan below 60th Street, an area that includes some of the city’s most famous destinations like Times Square and the Empire State Building.

The plan aimed to discourage drivers from entering the congestion zone. It also hoped to clear pollution from Manhattan’s core while helping to raise $15 billion for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the state agency that runs New York City’s transit system.

But Mr. Trump has said that he would end the tolls because he claimed that they were drawing visitors and businesses away from Manhattan. Observers have speculated that he would try to withdraw federal approval for the plan or threaten to withhold federal funding.

Now I haven’t been to Manhattan since this started, though I’ll be there in June, but this seems once again like revenge. “How dare you de-congest MY CITY?  This is the worst thing that anybody’s done to a city in the history of the world!”

*The WSJ now reports not only that Trump is blaming Zelensky for the war in Ukraine, but also that Trump and Zelensky are starting to snipe at each other.

From the first article:

Europe is struggling to respond to a stunning about-face in U.S. foreign policy and President Trump’s broadsides against Ukraine in its war with Russia.

Trump late Tuesday essentially blamed Ukraine for the war, which started when Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a large-scale invasion of his smaller neighbor three years ago. In a comment directed at Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump said: “You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”

He said Ukraine should hold elections before a peace deal can be reached, saying, without basis, that Zelensky had very little support among voters.

The comments—and Europe’s lack of reaction—follow a meeting Tuesday in Saudi Arabia between U.S. and Russian diplomats, who sketched out plans to negotiate over Ukraine. Zelensky said any talks that didn’t include his country were doomed.

And from the second:

President Trump stepped up attacks on Volodymyr Zelensky, calling the Ukrainian president a “Dictator without Elections” after Zelensky said Trump was repeating Russian propaganda points.

The comments marked a significant escalation in a feud that could complicate efforts to end the war. The exchange came one day after Trump accused Zelensky of starting the war in Ukraine, which began after Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a large-scale invasion of the country three years ago.

Zelensky told reporters in Ukraine earlier Wednesday that Trump is “living in this disinformation space.” He added, “I want there to be more truth in Trump’s team.”

Trump responded with several accusations, saying Zelensky had misused U.S. aid and “done a terrible job” as president.

“Ignoramus” is about the mildest word I can apply to the American President here. If anybody is on the wrong side of history here, it’s Trump, who never seems to have met a despot he didn’t like.  Well, the American people voted for him, and you didn’t have to be an expert to know that this is how the Orange Man rolls.  I’d pin my hopes on the midterms, but even if both houses of Congress go Democrat (unlikely), it won’t affect much.

“He refuses to have Elections, is very low in Ukrainian Polls, and the only thing he was good at was playing Biden ‘like a fiddle,’” Trump wrote in a social-media post on Wednesday. “A Dictator without Elections, Zelensky better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left.”

Oy! Trump called Zelensky a dictator!

*And we might as well hear what the conservative National Review says about Trump/Putin/Zelenslky. Surprisingly, it’s not on Trump’s side (maybe I haven’t read it enough to see its political bent). From the article “The American betrayal of Ukraine begins“:

There’s still time for President Trump to turn it around. But so far in his second term, regarding the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Trump has offered to Vladimir Putin that Ukraine will not retake all its annexed and occupied sovereign territory, that Ukraine will not join NATO, that there will be no U.S. troops on Ukrainian soil after the war, and that the U.S. will lift sanctions on Russia. And Trump might even throw in a withdrawal of the extra 20,000 U.S. troops that Joe Biden sent to NATO’s eastern flank after the invasion of Ukraine.

And in exchange, Putin offered . . . well, nothing, really.

Yesterday in Saudi Arabia, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the U.S. and Russian governments had agreed to four key principles, including an effort to “lay the groundwork for future cooperation on matters of mutual geopolitical interest and historic economic and investment opportunities which will emerge from a successful end to the conflict in Ukraine.”

What “mutual geopolitical interest” do we have with the regime that fired a missile into Kyiv’s main children’s hospital? (The intensive care, surgical, and oncology wards of Ukraine’s largest children’s hospital were severely damaged, and its toxicology department — where children receive dialysis — was destroyed. Reportedly, 27 civilians, including four children, were killed, and 117, including seven children, were injured.)

Russia has killed more than 12,000 Ukrainian civilians, and more than 6 million Ukrainian citizens live under the brutal hand of occupying Russian forces, and our government is talking about “historic economic and investment opportunities” with them?

What exactly does Russia have to offer us that we want so badly? Grain? Oil? Natural gas? We already have that stuff; there is more than we need, and plenty is available for export. I thought the Trump plan was to build us into an energy production superpower. Why is the man who presciently warned Germany that it was becoming completely dependent on Russia for its energy now so eager to make it easier for people to buy Russian energy supplies?

Rubio also said, “We’re going to appoint a high-level team from our end to help negotiate and walk — work through the end of the conflict in Ukraine in a way that’s enduring and acceptable to all the parties engaged.” What “end to the conflict” does he envision could be “enduring and acceptable to all the parties engaged”? How much stolen territory does he visualize Ukraine conceding to Putin?

Does Rubio envision Putin recognizing Ukraine as a legitimate and independent country? He has never done that. Down to the marrow in his bones, Putin sees Ukraine as part of Russia that can never be allowed to pursue its own separate path.

An apocryphal story goes that when Walter Cronkite described the Vietnam War on the air as a stalemate, Lyndon Johnson said “When we’ve lost Cronkite, we’ve lost America.” This story is an anecdote without real evidence, but the sentiments were true. But how would you finish this sentence: “When you’ve lost the National Review, you’ve lost _______”?

*A NYT article intriguingly called “Can this fish make you cry?” (archived here), tells the sad tale of a deep-ocean anglerfish (Melanocetus sp.) that, for some reason, swam up toward the surface and died. These fish live in total darkness, luring prey with a bioluminescent appendage on its head, which it consumes with a huge mouth a wicked teeth.

It is easy to believe that the black seadevil anglerfish, with its gaping maw of razor-like teeth, a bioluminescent rod sticking out of its head and lidless eyes used to scan the deepest, darkest depths of the ocean, might make someone cry with fright.

It is perhaps less believable that such a creature, the kind so freakish it inspired a particularly scary scene in the children’s movie “Finding Nemo,” would move people to genuine, raw tears of emotional overwhelm.

On social media, a seadevil has done just that, becoming a folk hero in recent weeks after swimming great lengths from its typical home, some 200 to 2,000 meters deep in the ocean, to the surface. Some of the fish’s fans have turned the watery odyssey — which ended in death — into a poignant version of the hero’s journey.

“My first reaction was, ‘Oh my god, this fish is terrifying,’” said Hannah Backman, 29, who lives in Minneapolis and posted about the fish on TikTok. But, she said, she eventually succumbed to the poetry of a lone fish approaching the light: “This poor fish is just spending her literal last seconds trying to do something beautiful.”

“I did shed a few tears,” she added.

In late January, the seadevil made headlines when it was spotted near the surface by a group of researchers off the coast of Tenerife in the Spanish Canary Islands. It was a rare event and “a dream come true,” said one photographer with the group who was able to capture the fish on camera. The team observed the fish, which was already injured when it was spotted, for several hours. The seadevil ultimately died.

Why did the seadevil decamp for the surface? We do not know for certain, although scientists have speculated that it might have had to do with illness or an unusual current. Weepy fans of the fish on TikTok, however, have woven a beautiful, and probably fanciful, narrative for the fish: a story of a creature in its final days, desperate to experience a source of light not generated by its own body.

Here’s a video of the poor fish before it died:

*The Free Press reports how, after two Australian nurses threatened to kill any Israeli patients they had (and implied that killing had already been done), a coalition of 50 Muslim groups rushed to defend the miscreants. (There’s no evidence that any Israelis were actually killed.) First, the short video in a tweet:

tt was bad enough when two Australian nurses were caught on camera saying they wouldn’t treat Israeli patients and instead would “kill them.” But now 50 of Australia’s Muslim community groups have rushed to the nurses’ defense. If a couple of Aussie caregivers doing a throat-slitting gesture to a man from Israel was chilling, the fact that so many Muslim leaders are willing to stand up for them is outright terrifying.

This sordid story started a week ago with the release of a video showing two nurses at Bankstown Hospital in Sydney engaging in the most abhorrent Israelophobic chatter. They were talking with an Israeli TikToker, Max Veifer, after encountering him on a video chat site. He told them he was Israeli. One of the nurses drew his fingers across his throat to suggest Veifer deserved to die. He said he sends Israelis to Jahannam—the Muslim version of hell. The other nurse said she would never treat an Israeli. “I won’t treat them. I will kill them.”

The clip went viral and the nurses were suspended. Australian PM Anthony Albanese slammed their “antisemitic comments.” There was horror across Oz that these nurses seemed to have sacrificed the core moral principle of medicine—first do no harm—at the altar of their burning hatred for the Jewish state. Yet there’s a section of Aussie society that seems pretty blasé about the whole thing: self-appointed Muslim leaders.

A coalition of prominent Muslim groups has written an open letter criticizing the “selective outrage” over the nurses’ behavior. It says the nurses were just being “emotional and hyperbolic.” Nice try. We all get emotional at times but we don’t go around fantasizing about the deaths of people from the world’s only Jewish nation. Emotion is no excuse for violent-minded loathing for a whole national group.

. . . The letter says the nurses were raging against Israel, not Jews. They were expressing “frustration and anger” over Israel’s “violent and inhumane policies.” Apparently, the “hypocrites” who have called the nurses out—that would be most of Oz—are seeking to “weaponize accusations of antisemitism to silence dissent [on Israel].” This, the letter concludes, is “dishonest” and “dangerous.”

. . . Australia having nurses who passionately hate Israelis is deeply worrying. Australia having Muslim groups that are willing to defend those nurses is even more so. It exposes the depth of the moral rot under the ideology of multiculturalism. Israelophobia is an old hatred in new garb. It is the social malady that springs from our rejection of civilizational values. Tackling it is the great task of our time.

You can excuse any amount of hatred towards Jews now as hatred of “Israel” or “hatred of Zionism”, but given that the patients the nurses claimed to kill, or wanted to kill,  were in fact Australian, it seems to me like good old-fashioned antisemitism.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili’s keeping a close watch for signs of Spring:

Hili: The birds have gone crazy.
Andrzej: Why do you think so?
Hili: They think it’s spring already.
In Polish:
Hili: Ptaki zwariowały.
Ja: Czemu tak sądzisz?
Hili: Myślą, że to już wiosna.

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

From The Dodo Pet:

From My Cat is an Asshole:

From Things With Faces: a wedding bouquet that looks like the Cookie Monster:

Masih is still very quiet so we’ll have a post from J.K.R.:

From Malgorzata. I don’t know who this Israeli woman is, but she’s passionate and also discussing aspects of the last hostage handover that weren’t reported by the media:

Two more from the magic thread:

From Malcolm, who calls it “nearly”:

From my feed. I put this up because it sounds like Kamala Harris!

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I posted:

The gas chamber (low building) and crematorium at Auschwitz (located in the Birkenau part of the camp.

— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-02-20T11:16:19.962Z

Two posts from Dr. Cobb. A big beaver in Chicago, and not that far from me! What a chonk!

In lighter (heavier?) news, one particularly large beaver has been seen frequently along the Chicago River."Lori Heavyfoot, Southside Large Marge, Dam Ryan, Sufjan Beavens and Sigourney Beaver are some top contenders suggested by people on Reddit."blockclubchicago.org/2025/02/18/a…

— Katie O'Reilly (@drkatfish.bsky.social) 2025-02-19T15:31:56.914Z

A cartoon posted by Matthew:

Genuine lol from @privateeyenews.bsky.social

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-02-19T09:00:43.920Z