Category: Hili Dialogue

Wednesday: Hili dialogue

May 15, 2024 • 5:03 am

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is musing about the implications of atheism.

Hili: If there is no God I have to go and take a nap.
A: An interesting conclusion.
.
.
In Polish:
Hili: Jeśli Boga nie ma, to trzeba się przespać.
Ja: To interesujący wniosek.

Sunday: Hili dialogue

May 12, 2024 • 3:47 am

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has hit upon a money-making scheme:

A: I’ve never seen such a sundial.
Hili: See, a sundial with a cat would sell very well.


In Polish:

Ja: Takiego zegara słonecznego jeszcze nie widziałem.
Hili: No popatrz, a zegar słoneczny z kotem świetnie by się sprzedawał.

Saturday: Hili dialogue

May 11, 2024 • 6:45 am

Well, I’m off this evening traveling on cat Sabbath to Amsterdam, as it’s Saturday, May 11, 2024, and Eat What You Want Day.  This video tells you what I want to eat today:

It’s also American Indian Day (should be “Native American Day”), Mother Ocean Day, International Migratory Bird Day, Sun Awareness Day, National Babysitter’s Day (when will they learn to put the apostrophe in the right place?), National Train Day, and Windmill Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 11 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Hamas has been rewarded for attacking Isral by a UN vote (largely symbolic) granting Palestine a kind of quasi-statehood.

The United Nations General Assembly on Friday overwhelmingly adopted a resolution declaring that Palestinians qualify for full-member status at the United Nations, a highly symbolic move that reflects growing global solidarity with Palestinians and is a rebuke to Israel and the United States.

The resolution was approved by a vote of 143 to 9 with 25 nations abstaining. The Assembly broke into a big applause after the vote. The United States voted no.

The resolution was prepared by the United Arab Emirates, the current chair of the U.N. Arab Group. The 193-member General Assembly took on the issue of Palestinian membership after the United States in April vetoed a resolution before the Security Council to recognize full membership for a Palestinian state. The majority of Council members supported the move, but the United States said recognition of Palestinian statehood should be achieved through negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians.

The U.S. is right. This is one of the stupidest moves the UN has made yet, and that’s saying a lot. But wait! There’s more!

“The U.S. is resigned to having another bad day at the U.N.,” said Richard Gowan, an expert on the United Nations for the International Crisis Group, a conflict prevention organization. But he added that the resolution “gives the Palestinians a boost without creating a breakdown over whether they are or are not now U.N. members.”

The U.N. charter stipulates that the General Assembly can only grant full membership to a nation-state after the approval of the Security Council. Examples of that include the creation of the states of Israel and South Sudan. The resolution adopted on Friday explicitly states that the Palestinian issue is an exception and will not set precedent, language that was added during negotiations on the text when some countries expressed concern that Taiwan and Kosovo might follow a similar path to pursue statehood, diplomats said.

Sorry, but why is Palestine an exception and Taiwan is not? At any rate, this is symbolic (though of course will incite more people against Israel) because the Security Council has to approve full statehood, and the U.S. won’t let that happen, despite Biden’s current waffling and weaseling.  Besides, neither Israel nor Palestine want a state. Try again in another 40 years or so.

*Glenn Loury has published an autobiography called Late Admissions, a tell-all book reviewed in today’s NYT by Pamela Paul. (It’s archived here.)  I didn’t know that Loury’s past was that checkered!  Note that now he says he’s a conservative:

This is far from the first reversal, political or personal, for Loury, 75, one of the most celebrated and reviled Black intellectuals of the past half-century. While public debate has too often devolved into lobbing grenades from entrenched positions, Loury’s tumultuous life, his swings from the right to the left and back again, his remarkable, barrier-busting successes and his considerable frailties and failures, have taught him to always recognize that he could be wrong and to keep an open mind, no matter how vehement his opinions. He outlines this ragged road to wisdom in his remarkably candid memoir, “Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative.”

He was a star Ph.D. graduate in economics from M.I.T. and the first Black tenured professor of economics at Harvard. He was a darling of the neoconservative movement and was tapped to be deputy secretary of education during the Reagan administration.

But that was before he was charged with assaulting his ex-mistress. Before he was arrested for drug possession. Before he was exposed as both a serial philanderer and a crack addict. He’d left two daughters from his first marriage back in Chicago; he barely acknowledged a son born to a former girlfriend, until the son was fully grown.

A 1995 New Yorker profile described Loury’s first public downfall thus: “Loury was emerging as exactly the kind of person he had warned Black America to avoid: a violent, irresponsible, drug-using womanizer who put his own pleasure above the demands of his career and the needs of his family.”

In recounting all that’s happened since, “Late Admissions” does something that is rare in fiction but almost unheard-of in memoir: It presents both an unlikable and an unreliable narrator.

In an unusual introduction, Loury explains that he hopes to build trust with the reader by exposing his obfuscations and prevarications, warding off anything terrible a reader might say about him by saying it all, himself, first. One title he considered for the book, he told me, was “The Enemy Within.”

He goes into the controversy that’s arisen about the Death of George Floyd, which I’ve written about and now watched the movie saying Floyd wasn’t murdered and read the counter-narrative arguing that Floyd was indeed murdered (see here).  I have to say that I’m coming down on the latter side, but haven’t had time to review the very long rebuttal and write something. This may be as far as I get.  You can find the book, which comes out on May 14, here.

*Like many of us, Andrew Sullivan is peeved that Trump keeps delaying his trials, forestalling whatever day of reckoning is to come. The title of his piece this week,”Getting away with it, yet again“, tells the tale.

I really don’t want to be a Debbie Downer yet again, but it seems pretty clear to me at this point that the legal resistance to Donald Trump’s deep corruption, pathological recklessness, managerial incompetence, and outrageous attempts to steal an election and then prevent a peaceful transfer of power … have, well, failed.

By “failed” I don’t mean, of course, that Trump will definitely not be convicted in his current trial, or that the other cases — from the January 6 insurrection to the classified documents to the Georgia pressure campaign — won’t proceed at some point. I mean something more salient: none of this is likely to happen or seriously dent Trump’s popularity before the looming election this November. His antagonists had four years to prosecute and delegitimize him, and it wasn’t enough time. (Bill Maher chiefly blames Merrick Garland for preternatural dithering — “Attorney General Barney Fife.”)

Judge Cannon has now indefinitely postponed the Florida trial for Trump’s grotesque and dumb mishandling of classified documents. It looks fishy to me, but her pre-trial shenanigans do not appear outside her judicial prerogatives. If the DOJ had wanted to prosecute Trump in this complicated case — involving national security, executive privilege, the limits of discovery with classified information — they might have begun a little sooner than last year.

The Georgia case just got upended by Fani Willis’ hubris, as her romantic relationship with one of her prosecutors gave Trump’s lawyers a chance to delay the trial by asking the Georgia Appeals Court to rule on whether Willis should be disqualified. The federal January 6 case is suspended mid-air as SCOTUS ruminates on the question of presidential immunity.

Which leaves us with one case likely to be decided before the November election: the current, patently political prosecution of Trump for alleged violations of federal campaign law in concealing hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels. Technically, it seems pretty clear to me that Trump is guilty as sin, and may even be convicted by a New York City jury. Michael Cohen, after all, went to jail for the same crime. But the case itself is a stretch by Alvin Bragg, straining to elevate state financial misdemeanors into multiple federal felonies. Worse, the coverage this week is likely, if it has any political impact, to help Trump in his framing of the prosecution as personal persecution.

. . . So did Trump wear a condom? Boxer shorts? Was the fucking fully consensual? Yes, some of this was necessary because Trump, absurdly, is still denying he ever met the broad alone. But icky is icky, and humiliating people with the details of sexual encounters, even if they are scummy people like Trump, tends to backfire. And it’s hard to see how he politically loses from this trial. If the jury hangs, Trump wins. If he is convicted, he has an obvious appeal option, especially given the racy irrelevance of some of the testimony allowed by the judge this week. If he’s acquitted, we’ll never hear the last of it.

. . . it seems unlikely to me that an electorate that breezed past “grab ‘em by the pussy” is going to stop short at a federal financial fiddle. A recent poll found that 45 percent of Americans believe that the Stormy case is irrelevant to Trump’s fitness for the presidency — up a bit from 39 percent last summer. The slippage seems to come mainly from one demo:

[A]mong independents who lean Republican, the share calling those charges not relevant to Trump’s fitness has climbed from 57 percent to 73 percent, and the share of true independents saying the same has risen from 29 percent to 45.

Oy, gewalt! Whether Trump is a philanderer is not the issue, but whether he was involved in covering up financial dealings, which speaks to his honesty. Granted, its not a capital crime, but it does seem to me “relevant to his fitness” as President.

*Instead of a TFIF today, Nellie Bowles’s (whose new book, Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History, got shellacked in the Washington Post) has published an excerpt from her new book in a column called, “The Day I Stopped Canceling People.” Nellie’s first cancellation was when she decided not to interview a white friend who had written a book in which a black woman was made to look bad in a quote.  Apparently the quote was accurate and kosher, but Nellie didn’t want bad optics.  Her words (article is also archived here):

To do a cancellation is a very warm, social thing. It has the energy of a potluck. Everyone brings what they can, and everyone is impressed by the creativity of their friends. It’s a positive thing, what you’re doing, and it doesn’t feel like battle, but like tending the warm fire of community. You have real power when you’re doing it, and with enough people, you can oust someone very powerful.

The easy criticism of a cancellation is: You went after someone who agrees with you on almost everything except some tiny differences? Some small infraction? It seems bizarre. But that’s the point. The bad among us are more dangerous to the group. Mormons don’t excommunicate a random drag performer. They excommunicate a bad Mormon.

I watched all the presidential debates in 2016 with some family members who are conservatives. After Hillary lost, I couldn’t stomach going over there for a few months. I was too upset, and I couldn’t handle seeing them happy. But that’s not a cancellation. I had no power over these family members, or sway in their community. I couldn’t make them apologize for being happy that Trump won.

A cancellation isn’t about finding a conservative and yelling at them. It’s about finding the betrayer in your midst. They look and talk like you. They blend in perfectly. But they’re not like you.

The author I canceled existed in my community. She went to the parties I went to and showed up at the same events as me. The goal was to slice her carefully out, and I was thrilled to do my part. By showing where I stood, I felt closer to my friends. But also, in some ways, doing what I did is the price of admission to the club. To ignore the drumbeat was to suggest that I didn’t care. I definitely did care.

I saw later that the event was canceled altogether after I withdrew. Her book tour didn’t work so well. The book didn’t sell so well. I never saw her at another party, and I never heard from her again—and I was fine with that.

Nellie’s gloating about cancellation disappeared when she fell in love with someone with whom she had political disagreements (Bari Weiss, whose hiring at the NYT Bowles had argued against), and she goes on to discuss the topic of cancellation in general.

*MIT and Penn, two schools involved in those disastrous Congressional hearings, with the President of Penn losing her job, have both had their encampments cleared.

Police on Friday cleared pro-Palestinian encampments at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania, the latest efforts by colleges across the country to rein in escalating protests.

. . .On MIT’s Cambridge, Mass., campus, police arrested 10 graduate and undergraduate students, the school said Friday. None resisted, and the students were taken off campus by MIT police officers to be booked, a spokeswoman said.

“The escalation of the last few days, involving outside threats from individuals and groups from both sides, has been a tipping point,” MIT President Sally Kornbluth said. “It was not heading in a direction anyone could call peaceful. And the cost and disruption for the community overall made the situation increasingly untenable.”

MIT said police also arrested several protesters on Thursday after they marched to a campus building and blocked a garage.

. . . In Philadelphia, Penn said police arrested about 33 protesters who were cited for “defiant trespass” after repeated warnings. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, said a day earlier that it was “past time” for the school to disband the encampment on Penn’s College Green, which had grown in recent days.

Videos posted to social media by news outlets showed helmeted officers, with riot shields and zip ties, detaining people after Penn’s public-safety department warned protesters to leave.

And Harvard’s in for trouble, too:

At Harvard, a spokesman Friday said administrative referrals to place encampment protesters on involuntary leave continue to move ahead.

“The encampment favors the voices of a few over the rights of many who have experienced disruption in how they learn and work at a critical time of the semester,” said Alan Garber, Harvard’s interim president.

Garber at a meeting late Wednesday offered protesters a chance to meet with university officials to address their questions about the university’s endowment, but only if they first voluntarily ended the encampment, the Harvard spokesman said. Garber also reiterated that Harvard wouldn’t use its endowment as a political tool.

The school said protesters declined by deciding to continue the encampment.

So far quite a few of these things have been taken down, including ours, and there have been, as far as I know, no injuries. Only two cowardly schools—Brown and Northwestern—have bargained with the encampers, and that’s to their shame. 2,000 protesters have been arrested. Harvard’s tactic of allowing a “questions meeting but only after disbanding the site seems reasonable, but even that won’t work. And so the Schmarvard protesters will go the way of the others.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has yet another reason to hate Kulka:

A: What are you looking for?
Hili: I left something there but Kulka probably ate it.
In Polish:
Ja: Czego tam szukasz?
Hili: Zostawiłam tu coś, ale chyba Kulka to zjadła.
And a picture of the affectionate Szaron:

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

From The Dodo Pet:

I can’t remember where I found this, but it was somewhere on Facebook:

From Jesus of the Day. I guess they take the money out of your estate:

From Cate: Stickers found on the north side of Chicago. The one on the left is particularly good:

From Masih; quotidian life in Iran. Note that there’s now a ten-year sentence for Iranians sending a video to Masih!

From Scott, who notes, “I’ve never cared in the slightest about the Eurovision contest. But I think I’ll tune in this time to support Eden Golan, the 20-year-old Israeli who’s now in notoriously antisemitic Malmö, Sweden to perform, surrounded by a convoy of a hundred police cars and helicopters trying to stop the crowds from pulling another 1972 Munich Olympics.”

Here’s Golan being booed at her dress rehearsal. It’s simply because she’s Israeli. Morons. But she stuck it out as she’s a stalwart Israeli:

The demonstration that keeps Golan in her hotel!

And a relevant tweet:

From Luana; look at this impeccable encampment!

From Malcolm; a demonstration of the “Mercator Effect“: the unrealistic size of land as it gets farther from the Equator:

From Simon; Larry the cat is being a bit ribald:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a ten-year-old girl gassed upon arrival at the camp:

Two tweets from Professor Cobb; the first part of his findings when researching Crick’s life. Can you see why “80 CG” would have been better?

A great idea: a milk bottle for multiple kittens. And yes, look at their ears:

Friday: Hili dialogue

May 10, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to Friday, May 10, 2024, and National Shrimp Day. Here’s a lovely mantis shrimp, not for eating:

Silke Baron, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 10 Wikipedia page.

It’s also Clean Up Your Room Day, National Liver and Onions Day (my dad loved the stuff and we couldn’t even stand the smell; it baffles me that some people like it), National Lipid Day, and Golden Spike Day at Promontory, Utah. Wikipedia explains:

The golden spike (also known as The Last Spike) is the ceremonial 17.6-karat gold final spike driven by Leland Stanford to join the rails of the first transcontinental railroad across the United States connecting the Central Pacific Railroad from Sacramento and the Union Pacific Railroad from Omaha on May 10, 1869, at Promontory Summit, Utah Territory. The term last spike has been used to refer to one driven at the usually ceremonial completion of any new railroad construction projects, particularly those in which construction is undertaken from two disparate origins towards a common meeting point. The spike is now displayed in the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

Here’s a photo:

Andrew J. Russell, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Da Nooz:

*The big news for Israel supporters is Biden’s claim that he will not sell any weapons to Israel (save for rockets used in the Iron Dome) if Israel makes an all-out assault on Rafah.

A threat by US President Joe Biden that some arms shipments will be frozen if Israel launches a planned offensive in Rafah was met with swift denunciation from government figures in Jerusalem on Thursday, who indicated that the military would push ahead regardless.

The comments from Biden also sparked harsh criticism against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by chief opposition rival Yair Lapid for what he said was the government’s “failed management” of ties with Washington.

In the US, some American Jewish groups and US lawmakers spoke out against the move and others indicated it was unlikely to go beyond words. Former US president Donald Trump accused Biden of siding with terrorists.

In what appeared to be a response to Biden’s decision to suspend key weapons shipments to Israel and his threat that more could follow, Netanyahu on Thursday shared footage of his speech at Yad Vashem earlier this week, in which he said that Israel will stand alone against Hamas if it must.

“Today, we again confront enemies bent on our destruction,” Netanyahu said in the clip posted on X, formerly Twitter, from a Holocaust Remembrance Day event in Jerusalem. “I say to the leaders of the world — no amount of pressure, no decision from any international forum, will stop Israel from defending itself.”

“If Israel is forced to stand alone, Israel will stand alone,” he pledged, adding, “We will defeat our genocidal enemies. Never again is now.”

*Stormy Daniels finished her testimony against Trump yesterday, and apparently it was quite seamy, though I’d prefer not to hear the details. There’s little doubt they had a liaison, but Trump’s accused not of philandering, but of hiding the hush money.  Some details:

During more than seven hours of searing testimony spread over two days, Stormy Daniels recounted a one-night sexual encounter she said she’d had with Donald J. Trump, described taking a $130,000 payment in return for her silence, and swung between defiance and vulnerability in the face of combative questions from his lawyers.

“You made all this up, right?” a lawyer for Mr. Trump asked, to which Ms. Daniels responded with a forceful “No.” And when the lawyer suggested that Ms. Daniels, a porn star, had experience with “phony stories about sex,” she responded that the sex in such films is “very much real, just like what happened to me in that room.”

Yes, porn is “phony stories about sex,” but nobody is going to be fooled by that lawyer’s implications.  Whether Daniels’ reply was a good one is unclear, for if it was as real as porn, that seems to say that Daniels wasn’t really into it as sex qua sex.  But there’s more:

Ms. Daniels was at times defiant during her testimony, including when the defense attacked her for hawking merchandise to supporters and she responded by likening it to Mr. Trump’s own merchandising. But at other times, Ms. Daniels spoke quietly, seemingly on the verge of tears. Asked by a prosecutor after cross-examination about the effect these events had on her life, Ms. Daniels said she had to hire security, move a couple of times and take extra precautions because of her daughter. Asked if publicly telling the truth has been a net positive or net negative, she responded, “Negative.”

The 34 felony counts of falsifying business records against Mr. Trump stem from his repayment of Mr. Cohen after he became president, and the recording of the checks as “legal expenses” at the Trump Organization. Mr. Trump, 77, has denied any wrongdoing. If convicted, he could face prison or probation.

. . . . During her first day on the stand on Tuesday, Ms. Daniels described — sometimes nervously, sometimes graphically and often hastily — having a liaison with Mr. Trump in 2006, which Mr. Trump denies. She testified that she met Mr. Trump at a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe, Nev., and accepted an invitation for dinner that led to sex in his penthouse suite. “I didn’t know how I got there,” she recalled thinking as she lay on the bed with him. “I was trying to think about anything other than what was happening there.”

* Here’s an op-ed the NYT arguing that divestment demands by college students are ineffectual and performative ( Sernovitz is identified as “a managing director of Lime Rock Management, a private equity firm that invests in oil and gas and clean energy companies and whose investors include colleges and universities.” The article is called Elite colleges walked into the Israel divestment trap.”

College endowment managers no doubt feel beleaguered that pressing moral questions regularly end up on their desks. For that desk is already covered with spreadsheets on another question: how to generate returns for universities that are nonprofits, unfathomably expensive, and desperate to not be just finishing schools for the rich. Last fiscal year, endowments over $5 billion provided 17.7 percent of their university’s budgets. This school year, Williams College charged $81,200 in tuition and fees. But spending per student was $135,600. The endowment helps make up the difference.

Yet activists view endowments with a sense of ownership. They are part of a community that owns this money. They also go after endowments because they lack better targets. It says something about the authority of ideas in our age that students lobby institutions dedicated to the advancement and propagation of knowledge mainly over what they do with their excess cash.

Sernovitz then mentions that the anti-apartheid divestments may have been successful (it’s still debated), but the same isn’t true in his area:

Unlike the effects of the South Africa movement, the early impact of oil and gas divestment by colleges and others has been negligible, or even counterproductive: Oil and gas companies have needed little external financial capital, and hostility to the divestment movement has led Republican-led states such as Florida to restrict E.S.G. investing, which focuses on environmental, social and governance factors. (Note that Florida’s State Board of Administration manages almost exactly the same amount of money as the 10 largest private college endowments combined.)

What the fossil fuel divestiture did establish, however, was that university leaders can be made to concede that their endowments will, in certain circumstances, be guided by the school’s collective values, and that current students can shape those values. And by getting endowments to not invest in the sector in some way, the protesters hardened an abstract moral judgment: that the oil and gas business, and the faceless bureaucrats who work for it, are wrong. Divestment champions hope the symbolic removal of an industry’s “social license” can take on its own power, emboldening government policymakers to regulate that industry or dissuading students from seeking jobs in it.

. . . and there are yet more problems with divesting from Israel:

University leaders could follow the same playbook as they did on fossil fuels and find ways to symbolically divest without disrupting their endowments in any notable way. Based on the size of G.D.P., not investing is Israel directly would be like not investing in Colorado. And despite the chants that charge otherwise, many endowments appear to have little to no direct exposure to Israel or to many of the American companies protesters want to blacklist.

But there’s a key difference between avoiding fossil fuels and shunning Israel. The institutions that divested from oil and gas made sure to describe it as financially prudent, albeit sometimes with shallow investment logic. This time, Israel’s social license is the only thing that is on the table. And if Israel is on the table, what other countries should lose their social license? How many years must pass since what some believe to be a country’s settler colonialist period or messy wars that kill innocent civilians to make it investable?

And if divestment against Israel is carried out, when should it end? Oil and gas divesting is meant never to end; oil and gas consumption is meant to end. Divestment from South Africa ended with apartheid. So university leaders will be forced to ask an often heterogeneous group of students what would earn Israel its social license back. A cease-fire? A new Israeli government? A two-state solution? The end of Israel as a Jewish state?

. . .Listen to the protesters on divestment. They will not stop. They will not rest.

But neither will the markets. They open every morning, Monday through Friday, and university budgets’ demands on endowments never go away. Tuitions are rising. Costs always go up. Colleges should debate deep moral issues and discuss the hard compromises to solve the world’s ills. But we should move those efforts to the lecture halls, away from the investment offices. Divesting is an easy chant. Investing is hard enough as it is.

Well, that’s not entirely convincing. My opposition to divesting in Israel is that it’s performative, and, most of all, wrong, for Hamas is on the wrong side of this war. Nevertheless, the cry is for more investment in Palestine, even those the vast majority of Palestinians back Hamas. As my friend in Berlin wrote (see below), “These are crazy times.”

*Hospitals are now asking patients to pay in advance for surgery and other procedures, forcing some to put off procedures that they can’t yet afford. This is why we need some form of national, affordable health care.

Heather Miconi has seven weeks to come up with $2,000 to pay for surgery her daughter needs to breathe more easily.

Merritt Island Surgery Center in Merritt Island, Fla., billed Miconi in advance of the adenoid and tonsil surgery. If she can’t pay for the surgery before it is scheduled to take place next month, the procedure will be put off.

Miconi, whose insurance won’t cover the cost because she has a high deductible, works three jobs and doesn’t have savings to cover the cost. She is now appealing to strangers through a GoFundMe campaign for help.

For years, hospitals and surgery centers waited to perform procedures before sending bills to patients. That often left them chasing after patients for payment, repeatedly sending invoices and enlisting debt collectors.

Now, more hospitals and surgery centers are demanding patients pay in advance.

Advance billing helps the facilities avoid hounding patients to settle up. Yet it is distressing patients who must come up with thousands of dollars while struggling with serious conditions.

Those who can’t come up with the sums have been forced to put off procedures. Some who paid up discovered later they were overcharged, then had to fight for refunds.

Among the procedures that hospitals and surgery centers are seeking prepayments for are knee replacements, CT scans and births.

Yes, I can understand why hospitals are concerned with repayment, but to endanger patients who can’t pay up at the moment? That’s mean-spirited. I’m actually surprised because some hospitals, despite the law requiring it, refuse to specify charges for procedures, preventing comparison shopping. I’m surprised they don’t ask for tips after it’s all over!  Would you go to a restaurant that made you pay upfront before serving you any food?

*A friend wrote me from Berlin this morning saying that these were “crazy times”. Now I understand what she meant: German politicians are getting physically attacked left and right:

A prominent Berlin politician was violently assaulted and suffered injuries to her head and neck, police said Wednesday, in the latest attack on elected officials that raises concern over rising political violence in Germany.

Franziska Giffey, the city’s top economic official, a former mayor and an ex-federal minister, was attacked at an event in a Berlin library on Tuesday by a man who approached her from behind and hit her with a bag containing a hard device, police said.

Giffey was taken to a hospital and treated for head and neck pain, police said. A 74-year-old man was detained and police searched his home, police said. They said the suspect was known to police, but did not give any indication for a motive.

. . .Last week, a candidate from the party of Chancellor Olaf Scholz was beaten up in the eastern city of Dresden while campaigning for next month’s election for the European Parliament and had to undergo surgery.

Police detained four suspects, aged between 17 and 18, and said that the same group had apparently attacked a Greens party worker minutes before they attacked Matthias Ecke. At least one of the teens is said to be linked to far-right groups, security officials said.

Also on Tuesday, a 47-year-old Green Party politician was attacked by two people while putting up election posters in Dresden, dpa reported.

The incidents have raised political tensions in Germany.

Both government and opposition parties say their members and supporters have faced a wave of physical and verbal attacks in recent months, and have called on police to step up protection for politicians and election rallies.

In February, the German Parliament said in a report there were a total of 2,790 attacks on elected representatives in 2023. Representatives of The Greens were disproportionally affected in 1,219 cases, those from the far-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, in 478 cases and representatives of the SPD in 420 cases.

The country’s vice chancellor, Robert Habeck, who is a member of The Greens, was prevented from disembarking a ferry for hours by a group of angry farmers in January, and the vice president of the German Parliament, Katrin Goering-Eckardt, also from The Greens, was prevented from leaving an event in the state of Brandenburg last week when an angry crowd blocked her car.

The causes? Many are suggested: Scholz’s government isn’t popular in the eastern part of the country, neo-Nazis are making trouble, and there is a lot of anti-immigration sentiment. Here’s a self portrait she took in Berlin yesterday, which at least expresses a reasonable sentiment. Yes, what’s written on the sidewalk is “F*ck Hamas.”

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn,  the two cat friends are on the prowl:

Szaron: We have to be very observant.
Hili: What for?
Szaron: So that no mouse will sneak through.
Polish:
Szaron: Musimy bardzo uważać.
Hili: Na co?
Szaron, Żeby się żadna mysz nie prześlizgnęła.

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

From Things with Faces:

From the 2024 Darwin Awards:

. . and from Science Humor:

From Masih: Justin Trudeau has a decision to make:

Sci Am goes political again. . .but the takedown is good. (Have you seen Teen Vogue?)

JCO weighs in:

Speaking of ideology corrupting science, Colin Wright tells us how Yale’s medical students are fed lies. Be sure to click “show more” as it’s a long and disheartening tale. (h/t Luana).

From Barry, who says, “The cat doesn’t know what to make of it.” It’s clearly some kind of toxic insect, but readers might weigh in:

From Malcolm: a bike escalator in Norway.  Now there’s a country with panache!

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a French girl (Jewish of course) gassed to death upon arrival.

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. First, a lovely fossil that took 18 years to prepare!

This doesn’t look like a tasty meal, but great blue herons will eat anything aquatic:

Thursday: Hili dialogue

May 9, 2024 • 7:00 am

Welcome to Thursday, May 9, 2024, and National Butterscotch Brownies Day, also known as “Blondies”. Those are okay, but chocolate is better.  Here’s a photo of a a blondie from  Wikipedia.  They’d be good with morning coffee (pies, cinnamon rolls, and other such treats are underrated as breakfast foods).

Almanutri, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also Ascension, celebrating the fiction that Jesus rose to Heaven after resurrection, National Moscato Day (muscst is an unappreciated grape and can make great wine), Tear the Tags Off the Mattress Day (it’s actually legal), Commemoration of the end of the German occupation of the Channel Islands with the related observance of Liberation Day, commemorating the end of the German occupation of the Channel Islands during World War II. (Guernsey and Jersey),  Victory Day observances, celebration of the Soviet Union victory over Nazi Germany, celebrated in the Soviet Union, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Israel, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Serbia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 9 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Oy! Trump’s trial for mishandling classified documents has been postponed—indefinitely.

Judge Aileen Cannon has indefinitely postponed former President Donald Trump’s classified documents trial in Florida, citing significant issues around classified evidence that would need to be worked out before the federal criminal case goes to a jury.

In an order Tuesday, Cannon cancelled the May trial date and did not set a new date. While Trump was in criminal court Tuesday for his hush money trial in New York, Cannon’s move means there are no trial dates currently set for the other three criminal cases against him.

By indefinitely postponing the classified documents trial, Cannon’s order pushes it closer to the 2024 election – and potentially afterward

Ha! If Trump wins they’ll delay it another four years, for who is going to put a sitting President on trial. The article continues:

The judge’s new schedule lays out all the legal disputes that Cannon must decide before a jury could hear the case. Cannon said that process will take at least until late July of this year.

Cannon noted in her Tuesday order that there are eight substantive pending motions she has yet to decide. She also reiterated that she believes the national security mishandling allegations in the case “present novel and difficult questions.”

Though all parties agreed that the case wouldn’t be ready to go before a jury in May, prosecutors still pushed for a July trial date, while Trump and his co-defendants proposed dates in August and September. Although Trump’s attorneys have continuously asserted in court filings that a pre-election trial would be “unfair.”

The further delayed trial also could put Trump’s two federal cases on a collision course.

In Washington, DC, the former president is charged with alleged crimes he committed during his presidency to reverse the 2020 election results. That case, also brought by special counsel Jack Smith’s team, has been on pause while the Supreme Court considers Trump’s claims of sweeping immunity. A decision from the high court is expected by July.

Trump is charged in the Florida case with mishandling classified documents and with working with two co-defendants, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, to obstruct the Justice Department’s investigation. All three have pleaded not guilty.

Cannon said in her new scheduling order that she will hold a hearing on what had been considered Trump’s longshot request for records from the Biden administration.

Crikey, the only trial proceeding is the Stormy Daniels hush-money trial, in which, if convicted, Trump would probably get probation. He’s Teflon, I tell you!

*Yet another possible agreement between Hamas and Israel fell apart, apparently because Hamas was squirrelly.  But Israel is already attacking Rafah, so the Woman of Size has already sung.

On Tuesday night, more than a day after Hamas claimed to have approved what it said was the Egyptian and Qatari mediators’ proposal “regarding a ceasefire agreement,” the US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller finally declared publicly, “That is not what they did.”

Rather, said Miller, “They responded with amendments or a counterproposal.” The US, he said, was “working through the details of that now.”

On Tuesday night, more than a day after Hamas claimed to have approved what it said was the Egyptian and Qatari mediators’ proposal “regarding a ceasefire agreement,” the US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller finally declared publicly, “That is not what they did.”

Rather, said Miller, “They responded with amendments or a counterproposal.” The US, he said, was “working through the details of that now.”

In fact, close examination of the Hamas document, as issued (Arabic) by the terror group itself, shows that far from containing “amendments” or a remotely viable counterproposal, it is constructed with incendiary sophistication to ensure that Hamas survives the war and regains control over the entire Gaza Strip. (Quotations from the Hamas text in this piece are from a translation by the Qatari-owned Al Jazeera website.)

But that’s far from all.

It is also calculated to ensure that Hamas secures further key, immensely far-reaching goals without having to meet the prime Israeli requirement for a deal: the release of all the hostages. In fact, Hamas can abrogate the deal, with all of its key goals achieved and then some, while continuing to hold almost all of the hostages.

Among those goals is one of the most central Hamas objectives since it invaded Israel on October 7 — seeing its declared war of destruction against the Jewish state expand to the West Bank. By extension, the terms of the document are also designed to destroy US President Joe Biden’s grand vision of Saudi normalization and a wider Middle East coalition against Iran.

Much has been made of the fact that, whereas Israel has repeatedly insisted it will not end the war as a condition for the release of the hostages, Hamas, in the opening paragraphs of its own sinister alternate proposal, specifies that one “aim” of the deal is “a return to a sustainable calm that leads to a permanent ceasefire.” But relatively speaking, that’s splitting hairs: The proposal conveyed by the mediators to Hamas late last month, and described by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken as an “extraordinarily generous” Israeli offer, reportedly provides for an “arrangement to restore sustainable calm” — which sounds like a near-euphemism for a permanent ceasefire.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, a lovely reflection photo with Editor Hili ensuring that all is well with Listy:

Hili: What is Małgorzata doing at your desk?
A: She is looking for my mistakes.
In Polish:
Hili: Co Małgorzata robi przy twoim biurku?
Ja: Szuka moich błędów.

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

From Science Humor (ignore the misspelling!):

From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy:

From Jesus of the Day:

From Masih; more nonsense about hijabs. How can a principal ATTACK a student for not wearing a hijab?

This is only one bit of what our protesters were demanding!

The letter mentioned below is here; it’s sad and moving.

From Barry, who says, “Well, I guess that’s it for National Geographic of old.”

From Malcolm, a sweet scenario:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a post I retweeted with a comment:

Two tweets from Professor Cobb. First, Matthew’s alarmed about climate change:

Sir David is 98 today! Here are four posts from a thread showing Attenborough as insects:

Wednesday: Hili dialogue

May 8, 2024 • 6:55 am

Welcome to a Hump Day (“Letsatsi la Hump” in Sesotho), May 8, 2024, and and National Coconut Cream Pie Day, an estimable pie if made well.  Here’s one from Wikipedia, titled “Photo of a slice of coconut cream pie. Taken at the Golden Nugget Restaurant, Chicago, Ill.”  I haven’t been there!

Kim Scarborough, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also Bike to School Day, Root Canal Appreciation Day (!), National Give Someone A Cupcake Day (I’m willing to take some), National Have a Coke Day, National Outdoor Intercourse Day (yes, you’re supposed to copulate al fresco), Truman Day in Missouri (Truman was born on this day in 1884), , Furry Dance in Helston, UK. and Victory in Europe Day (Germany surrendered on this day in 1945), and Time of Remembrance and Reconciliation for Those Who Lost Their Lives during the Second World War, which continues to May 9.

Here’s a Furry Dance from Helston, in Cornwall:

 

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 8 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Stormy Daniels, the porn star given hush money by Trump and his minions, testified today in his trial for misreporting transactions.

Daniels testified that the two later had sex but she was in shock afterward, saying her hands shook nervously as she tried to buckle her high-heeled gold shoes. Before she left Trump told her he wanted to see her again, “Let’s keep in touch, honey bunch,” she recalled him saying.

The brief sexual encounter is at the heart of the trial, in which Manhattan prosecutors allege Trump falsified business records to conceal a $130,000 payment to Daniels on the eve of the 2016 election to buy her silence. Prosecutors said the payment came during a critical moment in his first presidential campaign. At the time, Trump was under scrutiny after an “Access Hollywood” tape surfaced of him describing how he groped women.

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee has denied the affair and any wrongdoing and has said Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Democrat whose office brought the case, charged him out of political spite.

For prosecutors, putting Daniels, 45 years old, on the stand was a gamble. Her testimony helped to bolster the account of her former lawyer, Keith Davidson, and gave jurors a firsthand look at her efforts to sell her story and negotiations around her silence. But throughout Tuesday morning, Trump’s lawyers raised objections over what she told the jury and by the afternoon they demanded a mistrial. They accused Daniels of changing her story and of providing details outside the scope of the trial.

Daniels said at one point that she blacked out during the encounter, but clarified she wasn’t drunk or drugged.

Todd Blanche, a Trump lawyer, said Daniels’ testimony was meant to inflame the jury and wrongfully raise questions about whether the sex was consensual.

“There is no way to unring the bell in our view,” Blanche said.

The judge denied the motion but acknowledged that some of Daniels’ testimony was “probably better left unsaid.” He also granted the defense’s request for a limiting instruction, curbing what Daniels could say going forward.

Daniels said that in October 2016 she learned that Trump and his then-personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, were willing to pay her to sign a nondisclosure agreement. She said she thought the agreement was the best scenario because she didn’t want her husband at the time to find out. She also said she wasn’t concerned about getting paid.

“It’s money but the number didn’t matter to me, and I didn’t pick the number,” she told jurors.

But how would her husband find out if she didn’t want him to? The only person who would “disclose” anything would be Daniels herself.  I wonder if there’s any Republican,  much less any American, who believes Trump’s denial that they had an affair.

*Surprisingly (at least to me), President Biden gave a speech in which he strongly decried antisemitism in America—without mentioning Islamophobia (perhaps that’s because he was speaking at the Holocaust Memorial Museum). The NYT reports:

President Biden declared on Tuesday that hatred of Jews “continues to lie deep in the hearts of too many people,” saying there has been a “ferocious surge of antisemitism” in the United States following the attacks by Hamas that killed 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7.

Speaking at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Days of Remembrance, Mr. Biden demanded that Americans learn the lessons of what he called one of the “darkest chapters in human history” by opposing attacks on Jews.

“People are already forgetting, are already forgetting that Hamas unleashed this terror,” Mr. Biden said from Emancipation Hall on Capitol Hill. “It was Hamas that brutalized Israelis. It was Hamas that took and continues to hold hostages. I have not forgotten.”

Mr. Biden’s address came during weeks of protests on American college campuses against Israel’s war in Gaza, with students demanding that the Biden administration stop sending arms to Israel. In some cases, the demonstrations have included antisemitic rhetoric and harassment targeting Jewish students.

“I understand people have strong beliefs and deep convictions about the world and America,” the president said, referring to the protests. But he added “there is no place on any campus in America, any place in America, for antisemitism or hate speech or threats of violence of any kind.”

He said destroying property does not constitute a peaceful protest.

“It’s against the law,” he said. “We’re a civil society. We uphold the rule of law, and no one should have to hide or be brave just to be themselves.”

The president vowed that his commitment to the security of Israel “and its right to exist as an independent Jewish state is ironclad. Even when we disagree,” a reference to the arguments his administration has had with Israel’s right-wing government about the death of tens of thousands of people in Gaza.

The Republican Speaker of the House issued similar sentiments:

House Speaker Mike Johnson on Tuesday compared the protests unfolding on American university campuses to what happened at institutions of higher learning in Germany during World War II.

It was the “same elite centers of learning” from which “Jewish faculty and students were suddenly expelled” in Germany, Mr. Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, said in pointed remarks at a Holocaust Remembrance Ceremony at the Capitol. Today, he said, American universities have become “hostile places for Jewish students and faculty.”

*Israel has begun a serious assault on Hamas in Rafa, having taken control of the border crossing with Egypt. (Contrary to the NY Times’s claim, Egypt had already closed that crossing to humanitarian aid, so all the aid is coming through the Israel crossing to northern Rafa, a crossing that Israel repaired after it was destroyed by Hamas’s rockets. Here’s what the NYT says:

The Israeli military said on Tuesday that it had sent tanks into Rafah and established control over the Gaza side of the border crossing with Egypt in what it called a limited operation. The move halted the flow of aid into the enclave, drawing immediate condemnation from international officials.

No, no, no. The flow of aid into southern Gaza was halted yesterday by Egypt. Aid is starting to flow it (at a higher rate than before the war) through Israel. Now, from the ToI:

Israeli tanks rolled into the southern Gaza Strip early Tuesday, capturing the Palestinian side of the Rafah Crossing on the Egypt border, in what the military called a “pinpoint operation” against the Hamas terror group.

The ground incursion in the eastern part of the city of Rafah came after Jerusalem said a truce offer from Hamas the previous day did not meet its demands, and announced that it had okayed moving ahead with the long-threatened offensive.

An Israeli official told The Times of Israel that it was a “limited operation” aimed at pressuring Hamas to accept a deal.

I’m not sure about that bit, as the “deal” would have to include the complete surrender of Hamas and release of all the hostages. Hamas still wants Israel to release 1000 terrorists in return for an unknown number of hostages (many are dead). But to continue:

Israeli tanks rolled into the southern Gaza Strip early Tuesday, capturing the Palestinian side of the Rafah Crossing on the Egypt border, in what the military called a “pinpoint operation” against the Hamas terror group.

The ground incursion in the eastern part of the city of Rafah came after Jerusalem said a truce offer from Hamas the previous day did not meet its demands, and announced that it had okayed moving ahead with the long-threatened offensive.

An Israeli official told The Times of Israel that it was a “limited operation” aimed at pressuring Hamas to accept a deal.

t was not the broad Rafah offensive that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu repeatedly promised Israel would carry out, CNN reported, citing a source familiar with Israel’s plan.

The Israel Defense Forces said its 401st Armored Brigade captured the Gazan side of Rafah Crossing on Tuesday morning, apparently with little resistance. Israeli flags were raised by troops at the border crossing, footage showed.

The crossing, located some 3 kilometers (1.8 miles) from the Israeli border, was captured amid a “pinpoint operation” against Hamas in “limited areas of eastern Rafah,” the IDF said. It is located along the so-called Philadelphi Corridor, separating Egypt and Gaza.

As of Tuesday morning, Israel controlled all of the known overground crossings with Gaza.

The new proposal put up by Hamas for consideration was apparently intended to keep the IDF out of Rafah, but it didn’t work. Hamas is, I suspect, getting desperate.

*Our encampment removal made the NYT (click headline to read original, or see it archived here):

The bit:

When pro-Palestinian protesters put up tents on a University of Chicago quad early last week, administrators initially took a permissive view.

But that changed on Friday when the university’s president, Paul Alivisatos, wrote a letter saying that demonstrators had violated policies and that the encampment “cannot continue.” Four days later, on Tuesday morning, the university police moved in before sunrise to forcibly disperse the camp.

“The university remains a place where dissenting voices have many avenues to express themselves, but we cannot enable an environment where the expression of some dominates and disrupts the healthy functioning of the community for the rest,” Dr. Alivisatos wrote on Tuesday.

The encampment at the University of Chicago, a highly selective private institution, was among dozens across the country that have tested campus leaders and posed thorny questions about the balance between free speech and safety. But the Chicago camp took on added significance because the university is the home of the Chicago statement, a set of free speech standards adopted in 2015 that has become a touchstone and guide for colleges across the country.

. . .After 4 a.m., Dr. Darrow said, she saw two vehicles with bright headlights pull onto the quad. Soon, she said, more vehicles arrived and University of Chicago police officers in riot gear exited and started tearing down barricades.

“They started very, very quickly ripping and throwing the barricades that were protecting the camp,” Dr. Darrow said. “They started destroying the tents and throwing them. They were both yelling over bull horns and also just yelling very loudly that everyone needed to get out.”

Protesters were told to leave immediately, Dr. Darrow said, and they complied. She said she did not witness any physical contact between protesters and officers while the camp was being cleared. A student protester, Kelly Hui, said she was pushed by a police officer and witnessed contact between other officers and protesters. Demonstrators have been asking the university to disclose its investments in weapons manufacturers and divest from companies involved in Israel’s war effort.

I’ll show one photo from the article because it’s so good; the photographer is Jamie Kelter Davis and the caption is “Police officers blocked protesters from returning to the University of Chicago’s quad, where an encampment created by pro-Palestinian protesters was dismantled on Tuesday morning,:

The protestors on the street were chanting away and asking the cops, “Why are you here?”, which bespeaks a remarkable display of ignorance since they’d been told several times what was going to happen to them and why.

In the end, despite the delays and the rumors that the administration was negotiating with the protestors (as happened at Northwestern), I think we came out looking pretty good on this one. I just hope the protestors don’t try to come back and en-tent themselves again, which seems to have happened at MIT. But I think the admin and cops know enough now to respond immediately when the first tent stake is driven into the ground.

Finally, in the AP’s ever-amusing “oddities” section, we discover that a Pennsylvania man has lost his emotional support alligator.

A Pennsylvania man who credits an alligator named Wally for helping relieve his depression for nearly a decade says he is searching for the reptile after it went missing during a vacation to the coast of Georgia.

Joie Henney has thousands of social media users following his pages devoted to Wally, the cold-blooded companion that he calls his emotional support alligator. He has posted photos and videos online of people petting the 5 1/2-foot (1.7 meter) alligator like a dog or hugging it like a teddy bear. Wally’s popularity soared to new heights last year when the gator was denied entry to a Philadelphia Phillies game.

Now Henney said he is distraught after Wally vanished while accompanying him on an April vacation in Brunswick, Georgia, a port city 70 miles (112 kilometers) south of Savannah. He said he suspects someone stole Wally from the fenced, outdoor enclosure where Wally spent the night on April 21.

In social media posts, Henney said pranksters left Wally outside the home of someone who called authorities, resulting in his alligator being trapped and released into the wild.

“We need all the help we can get to bring my baby back,” Henney said in a tearful video posted on TikTok. “Please, we need your help.”

There’s a photo at the link: the gator isn’t big, but Henney will have a hard time hugging it when it gets big. I do hope he finds his lost reptile, as it’s not every alligator that can provide the requisite emotional support.  Here’s a news story on the loss, and the video of Henney and Wally is adorable.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Szaron takes down Hili’s puffery:

Hili: I have the nature of the lynx and the spirit of the lion.
Szaron: And imagination like a lizard.
In Polish:
Hili: Mam naturę rysia i duszę lwa.
Szaron: I wyobraźnię jaszczurki.

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

From Rosemary, who calls the encampers “gerbils.” She made this using AI and a U of Chicago background:

From America’s Cultural Decline Into Idiocy:

From Mark:

This tweet from Masih says that she not only had to sell her house, since Iran is trying to kill here, but also left the United States. I have no idea where she lives now.

x

Here’s a recording of the IDF warning inhabitants of Rafah to leave because of an imminent bombing—and the defiant response:

From Simon, a tweet from the Republican but anti-Trump Lincoln Project:

From Barry: in the second tweet, a fish is an Uber for a frog (the loud frog tweet that’s first was posted yesterday)

From Susan: J. K. Rowling makes a snarky and hilarious reply:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a post I retweeted:

Two tweets from Doctor Cobb. First, he found out something new about the history of DNA:

 

And yes, this is a monster alligator: