Tuesday: Hili dialogue

Welcome to the Cruelest Day: Tuesday, January 28, 2025, and National Blueberry Pancake Day.  There is no chance that I will get any of these, but I do have a piece of shoofly pie (made by Pennsylvania Amish) for breakfast. It’s the perfect accompaniment to coffee.  Here from Wikipedia is the closest photo I have to celebrate the day—pancakes with blueberry sauce:

It’s also Rattlesnake Roundup Day, a horrible day on which people collect gazillions of rattlesnakes and then KILL THEM.  This is not good. Here’s a video of the slaughter (warning: cruelty and rattlesnakes getting their heads chopped off. I don’t know how pcople can do this:

And it’s International Lego Day and National Kazoo Day , which has its uses according to Wikipedia:

The kazoo is played professionally in jug bands and comedy music, and by amateurs everywhere. It is among the acoustic instruments developed in the United States, and one of the easiest melodic instruments to play, requiring only the ability to vocalize in tune. In North East England and South Wales, kazoos play an important role in juvenile jazz bands. During Carnival, players use kazoos in the Carnival of Cádiz in Spain and in the corsos on the murgas in Uruguay.

In the Original Dixieland Jass Band 1921 recording of Crazy Blues, what the casual listener might mistake for a trombone solo is actually a kazoo solo by drummer Tony Sbarbaro

Here’s “Crazy Blues” by the Original Dixieland Jass Band from 1921 (yes, “Jass” is the spelling”, can you hear the kazoo solo? I think it starts about 1:10 and continues.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the January 28 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

Let me first retract something I posted the other day: a note that a sex-after-death law had been passed. In Egypt. (It was supposedly allowing a man to have sex with his dead wife for up to six hours after her demise.) The tweet I put up:

pic.twitter.com/0dB2TwjG8b

— Azat (@AzatAlsalim) January 24, 2025

Egyptian members of Parliament have denied it, and this appears to have all emanated from a single source.  My bad.

*After Colombia refused to accept U.S. planeloads of deported Colombian migrants, Trump launched a trade war against them. But it never got off the ground before the situation was resolved. (Article is archived here.). Things got pretty hot!

Trump certainly is moving fast.  I agree with the deportation of those convicted of crimes, but haven’t yet decided how I feel about non-criminal immigrants who are here illegally in other circumstances. Those who have been here for a long time, and have made a life for themselves, surely should deserve a chance to stay (can this can be adjudicated on a case by case basis?), but deportation of very recent immigrants who are deliberately missing their court dates and avoiding the law doesn’t overly upset me. There is huge variation in how people feel about different cases, but clearly something has to be done, and so far Congress has avoided doing it (most likely because Democrats don’t want to do anything that doesn’t resemble an “open border” policy).

*A number of fiber-optic cables have been cut around Scandinavia, and people suspect (of course) Russia and Putin. (A similar breakage occurred off Taiwan, and perhaps China is responsible for that one.) NATO has now gotten involved in the investigation:

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization mounted its first coordinated response to the suspected sabotage campaign against critical infrastructure, after another underwater data cable was severed in the Baltic Sea.

NATO vessels raced to the site of a damaged fiber-optic cable in Swedish waters on Sunday morning, where a trio of ships carrying Russian cargo, including one recently sanctioned by the U.S., were nearby. All three vessels are now being investigated as part of a probe into suspected sabotage of the fiber optic cable, according to several European officials. One ship was detained Sunday.

The incident is the latest in a string of alleged underwater attacks in the region that prompted NATO to announce earlier this month the formation of a surveillance mission called Baltic Sentry. It includes regular naval patrols, as well as enhanced drone, satellite and electronic surveillance of Baltic areas that are crisscrossed by critical infrastructure such as data and power cables, along with gas pipelines and offshore wind farms.

Western officials have said they suspect Russia is fighting a shadow war against the West. Russia has denied it is behind such an effort.

“We have seen elements of a campaign to destabilize our societies. Through cyberattacks, assassination attempts, and sabotage—including possible sabotage of undersea cables in the Baltic Sea,” NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said earlier this month.

Evidence gathered so far in the Baltic investigations hasn’t been conclusive enough to result in prosecutions or arrests, officials familiar with the investigations said.

Latvia dispatched its navy to the site of the incident Sunday, while the Swedish coast guard detained one of the three ships within hours of the incident, according to Latvian and Swedish officials. A Dutch warship was also involved in the operation to combat alleged attacks on deep-sea assets.

I love the international cooperation, but how are they going to arrest Russia if they find out it’s responsible? Would they go to the ICC?

*As I mentioned earlier, the CIA has now joined the FBI and DOE in regarding the lab-leak theory as the most credible explanation for the Covid outbreak. Despite confidence in the lab theories being “low” in all cases, it is higher than confidence in the alternative wet-market theory, which was pushed by the Biden Administration, Anthony Fauci, and NIH director Francis Collins as being sacrosanct. Jonathan Turley describes how many people vigorously defended the wet-market theory, so vigorously that it became heresy to question it.

Every modern president seems to promise transparency during their campaigns, but few ever seem to get around to it. Once in power, the value of being opaque becomes evident. We will have to wait to see if President Donald Trump will fulfill his pledges, but so far this is proving the cellophane administration. Putting aside his constant press gaggles and conferences, the Administration has ordered wholesale disclosures of long-withheld files from everything from the JFK investigation to, most recently, the CIA COVID origins report. That report is particularly stinging for both the Biden Administration and its media allies, which treated the lab theory as a fringe, conspiratorial, or even racist theory.

Newly-confirmed CIA Director John Ratcliffe released the report, which details how it views the lab theory as the most likely explanation for the virus. Expressing “low confidence,” the agency did not reject the theory over the natural origins theory, which was treated as sacrosanct by the media and favored by figures like Anthony Fauci. (Other recent reports have contradicted the equally orthodox view on the closing of schools, showing no material benefit in terms of slowing the transmission of COVID).

The BBC reported that “the CIA on Saturday offered a new assessment on the origin of the Covid outbreak, saying the coronavirus is ‘more likely’ to have leaked from a Chinese lab than to have come from animals. But the intelligence agency cautioned it had ‘low confidence’ in this determination.”

The low confidence finding shows that the agency found the evidence fragmented and fluid. However, the point is that the natural origins theory and the lab theory were both viable theories. Neither was disproven or rejected. Other agencies like the FBI seemed to have a higher confidence in the lab theory over the natural origins theory.\

Turley then gives a bunch of examples of how the lab-leak theory was mocked (and, indeed, was deliberately denigrated by government officials who questioned the credentials of those who refused to rule it out.  Here are a few:

This follows a recent disclosure in the Wall Street Journal of a report on how the Biden administration may have suppressed dissenting views supporting the lab theory on the origin of the COVID-19 virus. Not only were the FBI and its top experts excluded from a critical briefing of President Biden, but government scientists were reportedly warned that they were “off the reservation” in supporting the lab theory.

As previously discussed, many journalists used the rejection of the lab theory to paint Trump as a bigot. By the time Biden became president, not only were certain government officials heavily invested in the zoonotic or natural origin theory, but so were many in the media.

Reporters used opposition to the lab theory as another opportunity to pound their chests and signal their virtue.

MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace mocked Trump and others for spreading one of his favorite “conspiracy theories.” MSNBC’s Kasie Hunt insisted that “we know it’s been debunked that this virus was manmade or modified.”

MSNBC’s Joy Reid also called the lab leak theory “debunked bunkum,” while CNN reporter Drew Griffin criticized spreading the “widely debunked” theory. CNN host Fareed Zakaria told viewers that “the far right has now found its own virus conspiracy theory” in the lab leak.

NBC News’s Janis Mackey Frayer described it as the “heart of conspiracy theories.”

The Washington Post was particularly dogmatic. When Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark) raised the theory, he was chastised for “repeat[ing] a fringe theory suggesting that the ongoing spread of a coronavirus is connected to research in the disease-ravaged epicenter of Wuhan, China.”

I have no dog in this fight, and in fact used to find the lab-leak theory more credible. Now I’m leaning the other way but, like these agencies, don’t find the evidence dispositive. Still, the government behaved badly here, and it wasn’t because of fast-moving changes in scientific knowledge.

*The Free Press, which many dismiss as a “right wing site,” but one I see as classical liberal centrist, has reaffirmed its values in a new statement called “Our promise to you.” The promise, as I read it, is to maintain honesty and objectivity in the face of slanted news from the MSM. Readers can judge how successful Bari Weiss & Co have been. An excerpt:

The Free Press was started as an outlet by and for people who said: no. Who insisted: The old values still matter. In this way, it has always been a new publication doing a very old-fashioned thing.

Whereas many in the legacy press took the election of Trump itself as evidence that the media failed, we see our jobs differently. None of us got into journalism to work for political candidates. None of us became reporters, writers, or editors to be mouthpieces for a party. We became journalists to pursue the truth—and to tell it, plainly, when we discover it—knowing full well that tomorrow might bring new facts to light requiring revision and correction, because truth is not a fixed absolute. It cannot be distilled in a test tube, or replaced by a narrative, though many these days are trying to do just that.

There will be plenty of publications who will, once again, become #Resistance warriors under this new administration. Others who have promised independence are sounding more like MAGA cheerleaders. If that’s what you seek, there will be plenty of options.

We are promising something different.

From us, you can expect the same sharp, fierce, honest news and opinion that we have worked hard to deliver since the day we started. You’ll get deep investigations, gimlet-eyed humor columns, and erudite British Sundays. You’ll also get corrections, because we fully expect to make mistakes, and counterarguments, because if we knew the answers in advance, we wouldn’t be The Free Press.

And a bit some readers won’t like:

And as the legacy media is finding, once you’ve kicked over the guardrails, it’s very hard to ever go back. Case in point: PBS NewsHour.

The publicly funded network’s flagship news show sees itself as a paragon of journalistic sobriety. But on the very first day of the new administration, NewsHour reported that: “Billionaire Elon Musk gave what appeared to be a fascist salute Monday,” adding that he raised his hand “in a salute that appeared similar to the ‘Sieg Heil’ used by the Nazis at their victory rallies.”

Watch the video with audio. Musk says, “My heart goes out to you,” after he hits his chest and thrusts his arm out. It might be a little intense, a little awkward. (Not exactly out of character for Musk.) Trying to start an Elon Musk is a Nazi doing literal Nazi salutes panic demonstrates how little the media has changed—and why so few people trust it. Musk, a person with historic levels of power, is worthy of fierce and sustained scrutiny. But the legacy media continues to discredit itself with cheap shots, and continues to find itself defanged when it lands on something right, something people should really pay attention to. How seriously will anyone take PBS the next time it has a story about Musk? The logic here isn’t rocket science. When journalists ditch their old values, they lose their old credibility.

I subscribe to the Free Press and will continue to do so unless or until I see its news being slanted in a particular direction. Some people on social media already call it “alt-right.” I don’t agree.

*Just for fun (though the results were tragic), here’s a mislabeled video from HuffPo (I went over to HuffPo after reader Norm said he looked at it for the big red headlines). Is there any way the headline can make sense?

*From Merilee we have Mayor Pete’s (actually, Secretary of Transportation’s) “chilling farewell speech” as a cabinet member, summing up what his office accomplished. It’s 16.5 minutes long, and chilling only because this guy would have made a good President.  This was made before the Inauguration.  Buttigieg was my second most favorite candidate after Gretchen Whitmer. As one commenter said,

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili isn’t keen on being groomed:

Hili: How much longer?

A: I have to comb you properly so you do not leave your hair in the bed.

Hili: And who cares?

In Polish:

Hili: Długo jeszcze?

Ja: Muszę cię porządnie wyczesać, żebyś nie zostawiała sierści w łóżku.

Hili: A komu to przeszkadza?

And a photo of Baby Kulka:

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From I Love Cats:

From Things With Faces. Man, that cone looks human!

From Strange, Stupid, or Silly Signs. I suspect this is a real ad.

And from Facebook, a serious post:

From Masih, more Iranian women defying the regime, here in at least three ways (no headscarf, music, and dancing). Ceiling Cat bless them! (sound up)

Two teenagers arrested in Iran، for moving their bodies to music and sharing joy with the world, for dancing. This is the regime the U.S. and Europe tried to negotiate with. A regime so brutal it fears its own youth. Trust me, a system that crushes its people shows no mercy to… pic.twitter.com/Ij70yC6r5V

— Masih Alinejad Read More