Sunday: Hili dialogue

Welcome to the sabbath for goyische cats: it’s Sunday, January 26, 2025, and National Peanut Brittle Day.  Here’s how to make it with only three ingredients:

It’s also National Green Juice Day, a drink I’ve never had but I suppose is good for you. I’d try it if the version didn’t have Satan’s vegetable: broccoli

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

Da Nooz:

*Inspectors general are individuals that have oversight of an agency, being a general auditor and looking for waste, embezzlement, and the like.  And, yesterday, Trump fired at least a dozen of them, a move that, like preventing birth citizenship, is probably illegal (archived here):

President Trump fired at least 12 inspectors general late on Friday night, three people with knowledge of the matter said, capping a week of dramatic shake-ups of the federal government with a purge of independent watchdog officials created by Congress to root out abuse and illegality within federal agencies.

The firings appeared to violate a law that requires presidents to give Congress 30 days’ advance notice before removing any inspector general, along with reasons for the firing. Just two years ago, Congress strengthened that provision by requiring the notice to include a “substantive rationale, including detailed and case-specific reasons” for the removal.

The move was the latest wave of abrupt upheavals following the inauguration of Mr. Trump that have put the government in increasing confusion.

There were competing lists circulating in Washington on Saturday morning of which inspectors general had received an email from the White House telling them that “due to changing priorities, your position as inspector general” was “terminated, effective immediately.”

But agencies and departments whose watchdogs were said to have been removed included the departments of agriculture, commerce, defense, education, housing and urban development, interior, labor, transportation and veterans affairs, along with the Environmental Protection Agency and the Small Business Administration.

It was not clear whether the departments of State and the Treasury were included, but multiple people said that Michael E. Horowitz, the inspector general for the Justice Department, had been spared. Mr. Horowitz was lauded by Mr. Trump’s supporters in 2019 after he uncovered serious errors and omissions in the F.B.I.’s applications to wiretap a former foreign policy adviser to the 2016 Trump campaign as part of the Russia investigation.

I don’t know enough about the fired IGs to render an opinion on the specifics, but surely the illegality of the firings is sufficient to contest it. I suppose Trump has the right to do this if he fulfills the required month’s notice to Congress, but perhaps he should slow down on the housecleaning, and Congress (and the American people) deserve to know why these oversight people are getting dumped.

*And another bad Trump appointment comes though: Pete Hegseth was confirmed as Secretary of Defense after Vice President J. D. Vance broke a tie in the Senate after three Republicans defected from a bloc vote, while all Democratic Senators rejected the nomination.  (archived here).

The Senate narrowly confirmed Pete Hegseth as defense secretary on Friday after he survived a bruising struggle with Democrats who decried the Trump nominee as unqualified and unfit to oversee the country’s 1.3 million active duty troops and the Pentagon’s nearly $850 billion budget.

Vice President JD Vance had to cast a tiebreaking vote to confirm Mr. Hegseth, after three Republicans — Senators Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky — joined all Democrats in opposition.

Kudos to Collins, Murkowski, and (LOL) Mitch McConnell, who, though Republican, still recognize that Hegseth really is unqualified for the job.  McConnell even said this:

Mr. McConnell stressed that in his estimation, Mr. Hegseth had not demonstrated a sufficient understanding of national security challenges to handle the job of defense secretary, which he called “the most consequential cabinet official in any administration.”

“Effective management of nearly 3 million military and civilian personnel, an annual budget of nearly $1 trillion, and alliances and partnerships around the world is a daily test with staggering consequences,” Mr. McConnell said in a statement explaining his vote. He added: “Mr. Hegseth has failed, as yet, to demonstrate that he will pass this test.”

*At the Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan approves of “Undoing Biden’s left-extremism.”

To say I have conflicted feelings after a week or so of Trump’s return to power would be an understatement. Some of his early decisions remind me why I couldn’t vote for him. His decision to pardon even those among the J6 mob who assaulted cops jibes with his own instinctual love of vigilante justice against anyone in his way. That’s why his egregious withdrawal of security detail from John Bolton and Mike Pompeo is so instructive. Trump is no longer fond of these men, so he has all but invited a foreign hostile government to murder them. His embrace of anti-police vigilanteism at home is matched by his removal of sanctions on the violent settlers in the West Bank this week. He’s a thug who loves thugs.

But for all this, a large part of me is exhilarated by this first week. Yes, exhilarated. Liberated even. I wasn’t quite expecting this, but I can’t deny it. I suddenly feel more oxygen in the air as the woke authoritarianism of the last four years begins finally to lift. And let me put the core reason for this exhilaration as simply as I can. On the central questions of immigration and identity politics, what Trump is proposing is simply a return to common sense — a reflection of the sane views of the vast majority of Americans, who support secure borders and oppose unfairness in sports and medical experiments on children. My conservative soul is glad.

Joe Biden brazenly lied when he promised moderation in 2020. Check out my column on his initial flurry of executive orders four years ago this week:

[Biden] is doubling down on the very policies that made a Trump presidency possible. In every major democracy, mass immigration has empowered the far right. Instead of easing white panic about changing demographics, Biden just intensified it.

All Trump had to do was wait. But Biden’s EOs on “equity” were even more extreme, effectively ending any pretense of color-blindness in American law and society. Biden, I wrote four years ago, was:

enforcing the Ibram X. Kendi view that “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.” And he’s enforcing it across the entire federal government and any institution the federal government funds.

It was a direct and proud embrace of systemic race and sex discrimination by the federal government. It was accompanied by a massive shift in the private sector toward illegal race and sex discrimination in hiring, firing, and promotion. This was buttressed by actual mandatory workplace indoctrination in critical race, gender, and queer theory. This was authoritarian brainwashing, accompanied by blatant race discrimination.

Biden also decreed by executive order that the postmodern notion of “gender” would henceforth replace biological sex in determining who is a man or a woman. He mandated that any school or university getting federal funds should remove distinctions between boys and girls — even in sports and intimate spaces. His administration fully backed the medically irreversible transing of children with gender dysphoria, lied about the science, and secretly urged removing all age restrictions on transition — subjecting countless gay and autistic children to the permanent destruction of their future ability to have kids or even an orgasm.

Biden was, in these respects, an unremitting extremist; and almost all Trump is doing this week is unraveling this insanity. The one actually radical act from Trump is rescinding LBJ’s “affirmative action” directive of 1965. Reagan wanted to do this, but he faced bipartisan opposition. One justification of the feds moving from anti-discrimination to being pro-discrimination was because, in LBJ’s words, African-Americans “don’t have their 12 percent” in federal employment, i.e. their proportion in the country at large. Today, African-Americans are almost 19 percent of federal employees — much higher than their population share. The MSM won’t frame it this way. But that’s the truth. And Trump’s EO language suggests he now has a staff shrewd and determined enough to push back. This week was more regime change than shit-show.

But he’s not that hopeful, and, of course, we will some day have a Democratic President who may undo much of what Trump did.

It is, however, far too soon to declare the war on left authoritarianism over. It is far from dead; it has replaced Christianity entirely for many, as we saw with Bishop Budde at the National Cathedral this week, or the Oscars giving an unpopular film 13 nominations just so they can give a Best Actress award to a biological man. The Ivy League will do everything it can to keep discriminating against members of “oppressor classes.” The MSM is too far gone to reform itself. If you want proof of that, notice that the NYT has two emphatically “queer” columnists pushing gender woo-woo, and it just fired the only writer in that publication, Pamela Paul, who helped expose the medically baseless transing of children.

*Over at the Guardian, Arwa Mahdawi, trying to understand Trump’s order on sex while desperately trying to adhere to gender-activist extremism, gets a lot of stuff wrong or confused:

Most scientists now reject the idea that sex is strictly binary. The likes of Nature, possibly one of the most prestigious scientific journals in the world, has noted that “the research and medical community now sees sex as more complex than male and female”. And there’s a huge amount of disagreement as to how these categories should be described. “Scientists ourselves cannot agree on how to define the two sexes,” Rachel Levin, a Pomona College neuroscientist who studies the development of sex, told me over the phone. “To say that sex is simple and easily defined – and defined at conception – is factually incorrect.”

I urge you to look at the Nature link to see if it shows that science rejects the sex binary, particularly one based on difference in the reproductive apparatus to produce sperm or eggs. No, it doesn’t, but it involves the reader in a lot of confusion about intersexes and DSDs. The paragraph below makes an argument that is becoming familiar: because the development of secondary sex traits is complicated, and different organisms use different cues to produce the universal gamete binary), and because people differ in their secondary sex traits, then sex cannot be binary.  But it’s binary in other animals!  I’d like to ask these people four questions:

1. How many sexes are there in nonhuman animals likes cats, horses, hyenas, ducks, or sharks?
2. If “two,” Is there a universal way to tell them apart? (the answer, of course, is “two” and “gamete type”
3. Now how many sexes are there in humans?
4. If answer to #3 differs from that to question #1, Why is that the case, and then how do you tell the more-than-two sexes apart?

Biologically, we are animals, mammals, and primates, and have the same number of sexes in all species of animals (and vascular plants). Bringing in hormones, chromosomes, and the like is what I now call “The Argument from Complexity,” Remember, the definition of biological sex is not the same as the way that biological sex is determined (it differs among taxa), and those are also different from the way biological sex is usually recognized (genitals, in humans, but that can be wrong.

More palaver:

There are lots of factors that contribute to how we think about sex, including physical characteristics, hormone levels, gamete size (larger gametes are eggs while smaller gametes are sperm), sex chromosomes, etc. Trump’s executive order seems to tie sex to just gamete size at conception. This is despite the fact that a lot of academics have moved away from a sex-classification system based primarily on gametes because some people will never produce a gamete. And, while it’s true that most people inherit either XX (typically female) or XY (typically male) chromosomes at conception, declaring that sex is determined so early is overly simplistic. “Most of us develop along a certain fairly common pathway, but a lot of us do not,” Levin notes. “One really important thing for the public to realize is that the president declaring something to be the case doesn’t make it true.

Note the arrant stupidity: if you’re a sterile male or a postmenopausal or prepubertal female, you’re not male or female. Does this writer have two neurons to rub together? Clearly, a male who gets castrated is no longer a male.  Further, we do not have “gamete size at conception,” we have the genetic underpinning at conception of what your gamete size has the potential to be.

What all this boils down to, in short, is that sex is a hell of a lot more complicated than Trump’s executive order would have you believe. Shocking, I know. Who would have thought that the guy who suggested “nuking hurricanes” to stop them hitting America wouldn’t be the most trustworthy scientific voice?

Yep, it’s the argument from complexity, which refuses to recognize the biological universal of two sexes based solely on the apparatus used to produce large, immobile or small, mobile gametes. Why do they refuse to recognize one of the few “laws” of biology that holds across all animals and vascular plants? Because it makes those who don’t feel male or female uncomfortable, including trans people. But, as I’ve often said, biological fact is not dictated by ideology, nor should we discriminate against people (except in a few cases like sports or where one is incarcerated) because of differences in gamete size.

It’s no surprise that Mahdawi is a columnist and not a biologist, and not even a science columnist.

*Good news in medical science, at least: a woman with a pig kidney as her sole kidney has now survived for two months. As you might expect, the pigs had been genetically altered to make their kidneys more like human ones to prevent immunological rejection.

An Alabama woman passed a major milestone Saturday to become the longest living recipient of a pig organ transplant – healthy and full of energy with her new kidney for 61 days and counting.

“I’m superwoman,” Towana Looney told The Associated Press, laughing about outpacing family members on long walks around New York City as she continues her recovery. “It’s a new take on life.”

Looney’s vibrant recovery is a morale boost in the quest to make animal-to-human transplants a reality. Only four other Americans have received hugely experimental transplants of gene-edited pig organs – two hearts and two kidneys – and none lived more than two months.

“If you saw her on the street, you would have no idea that she’s the only person in the world walking around with a pig organ inside them that’s functioning,” said Dr. Robert Montgomery of NYU Langone Health, who led Looney’s transplant.

Montgomery called Looney’s kidney function “absolutely normal.” Doctors hope she can leave New York – where she’s temporarily living for post-transplant checkups – for her Gadsden, Alabama, home in about another month.

. . .Scientists are genetically altering pigs so their organs are more humanlike to address a severe shortage of transplantable human organs. More than 100,000 people are on the U.S. transplant list, most who need a kidney, and thousands die waiting.

Pig organ transplants so far have been “compassionate use” cases, experiments the Food and Drug Administration allows only in special circumstances for people out of other options.

And the handful of hospitals trying them are sharing information of what worked and what didn’t, in preparation for the world’s first formal studies of xenotransplantation, expected to begin sometime this year. United Therapeutics, which supplied Looney’s kidney, recently asked the Food and Drug Administration for permission to begin a trial.

Loobey donated a kidney to her mother, and then lost her other one when she developed post-pregnancy high blood pressure. So far there is no sign of rejection, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that she does well. It’s amazing that we got to this point, a point where we could modify in animals hard-to-get organs that can be used in place of human organs.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is perturbed (Malgorzata uses fat-free milk, but Andrzej’s milk in his coffee has fat in it):

Hili: This coffee has a strange color.

A: Because Małgorzata adds a strange milk.

In Polish:

From Things with Faces:

From Cat Memes:

From America’s Cultural Decline Into Idiocy (this looks like the UK to me):

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

Retweeted by Masih. “Woman, Life, Freedom”

In a normal country, #PakhshanAzizi & #VerishehMoradi would be heros. In #Iran, they face death row. And these death sentences are nothing but acts of revenge against #WomenLifeFreedom

پخشان_عزیزی#
وریشه_مراد# pic.twitter.com/yRvC2J625f

— Hannah Neumann (@HNeumannMEP) January 23, 2025

A woman who is fed up with people forcing women to get undressed in front of trans women:

A left wing snob was mansplaining to a woman why she should undress in front of men in women’s changing rooms.
She let him ramble on for a few minutes before this epic interruption Read More