Wednesday: Hili dialogue

Welcome to a Hump Day (“ཧམ་པ་ཉིན་མོ། ” in Tibetan ): Wednesday, January 29, 2025, and National Corn Chip Day. These are useless unless served with a good salsa before a Mexican meal, or, better yet, as a basis for nachos, which are good:

You need to learn this about nachos, which are a recent culinary innovation:

Nachos originated in the city of Piedras Negras, Coahuila in Mexico, across the border from Eagle Pass, Texas in the United States.  Ignacio “Nacho” Anaya created nachos in 1943 at the restaurant the Victory Club when Mamie Finan and a group of U.S. military officers’ wives, whose husbands were stationed at the nearby U.S. Army base Fort Duncan, traveled across the border to eat at the Victory Club. When Anaya was unable to find the cook, he went to the kitchen and spotted freshly fried pieces of corn tortillas. In a moment of culinary inspiration, Anaya cut fried tortillas into triangles, added shredded cheese, sliced pickled jalapeño peppers, quickly heated them, and served them. After tasting the snack, Finan asked what it was called. Anaya responded, “Well, I guess we can just call them Nacho’s Special.” In Spanish, “Nacho” is a common nickname for Ignacio.

Here is Ignacio “Nacho” Anaya, the inventor of nachos.  We should be so lucky to leave a legacy like his!:

He was honored by a Google Doodle in 2019 on what would have been his 129th birthday. Here’s the nacho Doodle:

But. . . .  eating nachos means you’re engaging not only in cultural appropriation, but colonialism! Igancio made nachos at the behest of white women.

It is also Chinese New Year, the beginning of The Year of the Snake. There’s a Google Doodle about this; click below to see where it goes (there’s a game).

It’s also National Carnation Day, Curmudgeons Day (perhaps an extension of Coynezaa?), Freethinkers Day (Thomas Paine was born on this day in 1737), National Puzzle Day, and Seeing Eye Dog Day. 

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the January 29 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The Times of Israel reports that some families of hostages have been told that their loved ones may come home in a coffin.

Family members of several hostages who are set to be released from Gaza in the coming weeks expressed dread over their loved ones’ fates on Tuesday after Hamas conveyed information saying that eight of those 33 hostages are dead.

Following the release of the information those families were informed by the military that Hamas’s information aligned with previous military assessments and there were dire concerns about their fates.

Hamas provided a list  — reportedly only numbers, without names — reporting how many of the hostages from among the 33 to be released in the first phase of the ongoing ceasefire are alive. Hamas was required to provide information about the hostages’ status as part of its obligations under the deal with Israel signed earlier this month.

The hostages’ family members confirmed that Gal Hirsh, the government point man on hostages, had reached out to them in recent days and said that while the terror group’s information was incomplete, it lined up with the assessment of Israel’s intelligence services.

“It’s not exactly data. It’s Hamas saying [the number of] ‘alive,’ ‘released,’ and ‘dead,’” specified Yizhar Lifshitz, whose father Oded Lifshitz, 84, is on the list of the initial 33 to be released.

. . .So far, seven hostages have been freed as part of the current deal, which mandates the release of 33 so-called “humanitarian hostages” during its first 42-day phase, with fighting stopped in the Strip.

As those hostages — women, children, elderly people, and sick people — are gradually released, Israel is to release some 1,904 Palestinian security prisoners, including more than a hundred serving life sentences for terror attacks

The three-phase deal’s later phases are to see negotiations with the stated goal of reaching a “sustainable calm” in the enclave, alongside the release of the remaining hostages held in Gaza, the release of more Palestinian security prisoners, and an Israeli withdrawal from the Strip.

Here are the 33 hostages supposed to be released in Phase 1 of the ceasefire (their names are at the link above. Hamas says eight of them are dead, which jibes with the IDF’s own information, and I guess IDF just informed some families that they should be prepared to receive a coffin rather than a living being:

This is not good optics, and I suspect that the dead will be returned last, and under cover of night without the disgusting ceremonies attending the return of living hostages, who were given diplomas, certificates, and so on.  When the national news starts showing Israeli families weeping over these coffins, I would hope that the world would have some sympathy for what the hostages and their families went through, but as we know, sympathy for Israel lasts as long as a snowflake on a hot sidewalk.

All four of the IDF women released the other day were either injured by bullets or sexually assaulted, but the IDF is properly leaving it up to the hostages whether to divulge what happened to them. And remember, every (living) hostage returned means Israel has to releast 30 Palestinian prisoners, unless the hostage is an IDF member, in which case the number rises to fifty. I haven’t been able to find out if they’ve bargained to releast terrorists in exchange for dead hostages.

*Trump has frozen nearly all government grants and loans, and, as far as I can see, that may include science grants from agencies like the NIH, NSF, or DOE. Our University has already been informed to start cutting back on federal grants already being used, not cutting salaries but curtailing expenditure on materials and procedures.  This is not good, and I wonder if Trump knew that this would bring scientific and medical research to a standstill (article archived here). The article is unsure about science funding:

• Federal aid pause: The White House budget office ordered a pause in grants, loans and other federal financial assistance, a sweeping move it said was necessary to bring a vast number of programs in line with President Trump’s priorities. Several states are planning a lawsuit to block the order, which is set to go into effect at 5 p.m. Read more ›

• Defending the order: In her first news conference as President Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt defended what she described as a review of federal spending and promised that direct aid to individuals would not be affected by the freeze. However, a lot of federal money goes to states and other organizations that provide individuals with aid, and it’s not clear whether that would be suspended.

Of course there will be lawsuits:

The move drew immediate outrage and lawsuits from nonprofit groups. Several states were planning to file suit on Tuesday afternoon to block the order, which is set to take effect at 5 p.m. Democrats assailed it as an unlawful encroach on Congress’s authority over federal spending, while the White House press secretary defended it as following through on the promises that restored Mr. Trump to the presidency.

“The use of federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve,” the Office of Management and Budget said in a two-page memo announcing the temporary halt.

There are exceptions:

We need to get a bunch more judges, because for sure Trump’s spate of EOs will provoke a gazillion lawsuits. The problem is that these are federal issues and ergo need federal judges. And you know who appoints the federal judges.  As for science, my own special interest, well, stopping it is arrantly stupid.

*Two from the Free Press today. First, “Christopher Caldwell: The biggest policy change of the century.” I’ll give a long excerpt since this is a very significant change in the law:

So tumultuous was the first week of Donald Trump’s second term that people have barely noticed, a week on, that last Tuesday he repealed affirmative action by executive order. That is astonishing.

For half a century, affirmative action has been the federal government’s principal instrument for carrying out desegregation, the longest and costliest moral crusade in American history. After the 1970s it was adapted to liberation movements, from feminism to gay rights. Supreme Court justices anguished over the way its call for special consideration of minorities might clash with the letter of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which barred racial discrimination. Over the past decade affirmative action became the hammer of the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) movement, which grew so unpopular that it has now brought affirmative action (and much else) down with it.

Trump’s decision to repeal it is the most significant policy change of this century—more significant than the Affordable Care Act of 2010 or anything done about Covid. How can people be talking about anything else? Yet major news outlets treat Trump’s bold move as a detail of personnel management: “Distress and Fury as Trump Upends Federal Jobs,” headlined The New York Times.

Somewhere along the line, the Trump administration came to understand in a sophisticated way how the enforcement of civil rights actually works. Not many Americans do—and it’s worth reviewing.

. . . . [Lyndon] Johnson used it. He basically enlisted the country’s top executives as the commissars of a radical interpretation of civil rights policy. They liked diversity from the moment it was invented until last Tuesday. They had better! Whenever a “global chief diversity officer,” like Ken Barrett of GM, intoned “diversity is our strength,” he was doing more than philosophizing. He was keeping billions of dollars of shareholder value safe from the sanctions and penalties laid out in Chapter 60 of the Code of Federal Regulations.

Had Johnson’s affirmative-action scheme been devised for anything but desegregation, it might have been considered sinister and totalitarian. Since Ronald Reagan’s time, conservatives have crowed that they could undo affirmative action “with the stroke of a pen.” Reagan mulled doing so himself in 1985. But he faced opposition from corporate donors and more liberal Republicans led by Kansas senator Bob Dole and opted not to. In 1996, Tennessee Republican senator Lamar Alexander tried to kick-start his presidential candidacy with a promise to zero out affirmative action—but Republicans chose Dole instead.

Now Trump has done what Reagan would not. His repeal came via three executive orders, two issued on Inauguration Day. The first overturned dozens of Biden decrees, including the “Advancing Racial Equity” executive order signed in the first hours of his presidency in 2021. The second ended all initiatives, offices, contracts, and employees connected to DEI, which Trump referred to as “illegal and immoral discrimination programs.”

. . .RIP affirmative action.

But that is only part of the story. A curious element of Trump’s third executive order is its invocation of the president’s “solemn duty” to enforce “longstanding Federal civil-rights laws,” mentioning the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This is not a concession. It’s a threat.

While the Civil Rights Act mentioned “affirmative action” it attached no specific meaning to the term, and the law was resolutely color-blind. Affirmative action programs, with their differing treatment of races, are in tension with it. DEI programs, many of which scapegoat white people, are even more so. It is Trump’s assertion that DEI programs “violate the text and spirit of our longstanding Federal civil-rights laws.” Trump is doing more than reforming the public sector. He is signaling to the private sector that certain kinds of programs are liable to prosecution, even asking each federal agency to name up to nine large private-sector organizations that might be engaged in discrimination.

There can be little doubt of the general effectiveness of such methods. In 2020 and 2021, as civil rights regulators and the Biden administration rallied behind it, DEI went from the hobby of a handful of quirky CEOs to the unanimous policy of corporate America. Today the rush in the opposite direction is just as precipitous. Among the new foes of DEI are some of its erstwhile champions: Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, Walmart, and even Target, home of the “tuck-friendly” bathing suit. More will follow.

This, in turn, will have an effect on the entire ecology of the Democratic Party. DEI and affirmative action are among the last things everyone in this divided party believes in, and the source of a good deal of its organizing muscle. Now, there is no work for affirmative-action lawyers, diversity consultants, and inclusion trainers to do. Whole job categories are being zeroed out.

And this:

In other words, Trump is not simply eliminating the affirmative-action enforcement machinery. He is throwing it into reverse. Companies will be assumed to be violating civil rights laws, we suddenly learn, if they engage in “racial balancing.” What the hell is racial balancing? How do you define DEI, for that matter? A different set of Americans are about to learn how vague mandates like these can lead to a feeling of being tyrannized and toyed with.

Finally, on the unpopularity of “affirmative action,” in particular how it morphed into favoring some minority groups:

This was a course that the public could not tolerate and neither government nor business could avow. A climate of dishonesty was the result. Affirmative action was a big factor—perhaps the biggest—in convincing about half of Americans never to trust anything any person of authority said.

Ten presidents managed to insulate affirmative action from public accountability. Then it became obvious to the public that changing anything would require dismantling everything.

And so it’s been done—or rather, threatened to be done. We’ll see in the next few months what really happens. Universities throughout the country are desperately trying to rename DEI groups or policies so that they can still operate as they did before the executive order.  I’m not sure if that will work or not, and it won’t work if Trump has “DEI detectives” who are savvy at sniffing out how DEI keeps on, but under other names.

*Second, “Emilia Peréz and the curse of Oscar bait,” with the subtitle “Why is the Academy obsessed with movies no one wants to see.”  GUESS! First, from summary in the FP newsletter:

Emilia Pérez,a 2024 French-produced, Spanish-language musical about a transgender Mexican drug lord, bombed at the box office and was so disliked by Mexican audiences that a government agency is now investigating whether disappointed moviegoers are entitled to a refund. But last week, it was nominated for 13 Oscars, more than any other film.

Then the meat.  All I’ve heard about this movie is bad stuff, and I will try to watch it, even though its Rotten Tomatoes critics’ ratings are 74% and the audience ratings a dismal 23%.

And from the article:

Emilia Pérez is what people call Oscar bait: the sort of film that is made, seemingly, for the express purpose of catching the attention of the approximately 10,000 members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Mostly film-industry insiders, their tastes are predictable. They like austere dramas and social commentary—stories that will make you cry while also attempting to say something about politics. Think of 2016’s Moonlight, a tragedy about a poor, gay drug dealer that grossed $65 million worldwide at the box office. It beat La La Land, which grossed $509 million worldwide, to the title of Best Picture. Or think of Nomadland, which won Best Picture in 2020: It follows a homeless widow who travels the country in a van after losing her job in the Great Recession.

The tastes of the academy are so predictable that they’ve been delightfully parodied—most succinctly perhaps in a 2008 episode of American Dad!, in which Roger the Alien takes on a supervillain persona and produces a film called Oscar Gold about an intellectually disabled Jewish alcoholic whose puppy dies of cancer while he’s hiding in an attic during the Holocaust. The movie is intended to make viewers cry themselves to death.

Late Night with Seth Meyers did a similar parody in 2017, producing a trailer for a fictional film simply called Oscar Bait featuring “racial tension,” “latent homosexuality,” the French language, and “dialogue that feels sort of profound.”

A conservative might say the film industry is being used to produce far-left propaganda, but the truth is the politics of Oscar bait typically run a few years behind progressive ideology du jour. Case in point: Emilia Pérez wasn’t good enough trans representation for the professional scolds over at the ultra-leftist GLAAD, the LGBTQ media watchdog, but it was good enough for the liberal boomers running the academy. They also loved 2018’s Green Book, a movie about a black musician and his friendly but slightly racist Italian American driver—even though The New York Times called it a “racial reconciliation fantasy,” and 2013’s 12 Years a Slave, which was deemed a “white savior story” by The Atlantic.

. . . Typically, Oscar bait receives a lot of hype before underperforming at the box office then fading into obscurity. I haven’t thought about Green Book since it stoked a debate about whether or not black and white people are allowed to be friends in movies. Remember The Artist, nominated for 10 Academy Awards in 2012? I doubt it. It was a black-and-white, partially silent French film about an alcoholic actor in Depression-era Hollywood—perhaps the most Oscar-baity film ever made. I’ve never met anyone who has seen 2022’s Best Picture winner, CODA—a coming of age film about the hearing daughter of a deaf fisherman who aspires to become a singer—and I also don’t know anyone who liked Emilia Pérez (which has a 24 percent Popcornmeter approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes). And I hang out with snobs! Not even Mexicans like it. When the film hit theaters south of the border, there were so many refund requests a government consumer-protection agency had to become involved.

Oy!  Do I have to watch this movie?  I’m pretty sure I won’t like it but I can at least give it a shot (I give up on very few movies that I start watching). Here’s the trailer:

*Finally, the WSJ describes a putative painting by Van Gogh that was bought at a garage sale for less than fifty bucks and may be worth $15 million—if it’s real.

In 1889, Vincent van Gogh committed himself to a psychiatric asylum in Southern France, where he spent a turbulent year creating roughly 150 paintings, including masterpieces such as “Irises,” “Almond Blossom” and “The Starry Night.”

Now, a former curator of ancient art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art has teamed up a with a group of conservators, scientists and historians who believe they’ve discovered No. 151—a previously unknown Van Gogh portrait of a fisherman plucked from a Minnesota garage sale a few years ago by an unsuspecting antiques collector for less than $50.

The thickly painted piece depicts a pensive fisherman with a white chin-beard and a round hat who clutches a pipe in his mouth as he repairs his net on an otherwise empty beach. In the lower righthand corner, the name Elimar is scrawled.

The discovery could represent a notable addition to the oeuvre of one of the world’s most famous artists. “Elimar” could also prove to be a lucrative windfall for LMI Group International, the New York-based art-research firm that bought the work from the anonymous antiques collector for an undisclosed sum in 2019 and has investigated it ever since, pouring in well over $30,000 and involving a team of around 20 experts from disparate fields, from chemists to curators to patent lawyers.

Later this month, they will begin unveiling their find in private viewings to major Van Gogh scholars and dealers around the world. They believe it is worth at least $15 million.

But is it really a Van Gogh?

“That’s the big question,” said Richard Polsky, an art authenticator who wasn’t involved in the project. “People love it when things fall through the cracks, and it would be wonderful if they found a Van Gogh—but they’ve got to pin everything down and get a scholar at the Van Gogh Museum to sign off on it.”

Doing so could prove to be a tall order. The discovery, if accepted, comes at a time when artist foundations and estates are increasingly shying away from making ultimate rulings on the authenticity of artworks for fear of being sued by owners who aren’t happy to hear that their works aren’t authentic. Museums touting deep holdings in certain artists like Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum turn down most would-be examples shown to them.

There are lots of things to consider, like the signature “Elimar” (people have that one figured out), but there are characteristics of the pigments and canvas that don’t jibe with Vincent’s other work. How would YOU like to be the person on whose judgment millions of dollars could rest. And what if you’re later proven wrong?  You can see the painting by clicking here and looking at the upper left.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, a blurry Hili gets pwned by Andrzej, and Malgorzata explains:

I knew that no biologist (and not a Pole) could understand it! There is a joke known to most Polish children:

“Daddy, does a snake have a tail?” and the dad answers: “Solely”.

Andrzej changed it a bit.

Hili: Does a snake have a tail?

A: Yes, and a head.

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

From America’s Cultural Decline Into Idiocy:

From The Cat Haven:

From Things With Faces, a doglike mushroom!

Some good advice from Michael Shermer (note #3!):

My advice to Democrats:

1. The far left progressive woke movement is over. Even if it seems like a good idea at the time (#metoo, #BLM, #georgefloyd, etc.) it has failed utterly & the vast majority of voters are against it.

2. Course correct to the center & focus on core…

— Michael Shermer (@michaelshermer) January 28, 2025

From Bryan, the famous “Planetary Parde,” with real pictures:

I captured the entire “Planetary Parade” using my 11″ telescope, and combined everything into one composite photo that stayed true to the angular scale of these objects.

Made entirely with real photos, I hope this composite helps illustrate the scale of these things! pic.twitter.com/T2SP4sxaKw

— Andrew McCarthy (@AJamesMcCarthy) January 25, 2025

From Malcolm, a cat having fun. (Sound up.):

This made my day! Read More