Tuesday: Hili dialogue

Welcome to Tuesday, January 21, 2025, the Cruelest Day and Trump’s first full day as President. What lies in store for us? It’s also National Squirrel Appreciation Day, and please feed these lovely and fluffy rodents, especially when it’s cold (it’s -6°F or  -21°C as I write this, and my face froze on my walk to work).  Here: do what I am doing, for the animals are cold today!

It’s also International Sweatpants Day. National New England Clam Chowder Day (the ONLY edible form of chowder), National Granola Bar Day (they’re morphing into candy bars), and National Hugging Day. 

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

Da Nooz:

*A good friend called me up at 12:43 and said, “Well, we can be happy that there are 43 fewer minutes left in Trump’s presidency.” I told him that yes, he can’t be gone too soon but if we count it out in pieces that small, we’ll go nuts, and I don’t plan to spend all my time fretting about the Orange Man, or writing about his missteps on this site. (Of course I’ll single out the dumber ones, but there are plenty of places, and you know them, where you can read ALL BAD TRUMP 24/7.  At any rate, he’s now the President for four years. and the braggadocio has already started:

“The golden age of America begins right now,” Mr. Trump declared as he began a 29-minute Inaugural Address, shortly after he and Vice President JD Vance took their oaths in the Capitol Rotunda. He added: “My recent election is a mandate to completely and totally reverse a horrible betrayal and all these many betrayals that have taken place and give people back their faith, their wealth, their democracy and indeed their freedom. From this moment on, America’s decline is over.”

*Three female hostages have been returned to Israel, all in pretty good condition save one young woman who appears to have lost two fingers (no information about that is available). From CNN:

Emily Damari, one of the three hostages released by Hamas on Sunday, is the “happiest girl in the world” now that she is out of Gaza, according to her mother.

“Yesterday, I was finally able to give Emily the hug that I have been dreaming of,” Mandy Damari said in a statement on Monday.

“I am relieved to report that after her release, Emily is doing much better than any of us could ever have anticipated. I am also happy that during her release, the world was given a glimpse of her feisty and charismatic personality,” she added.

Emily Damari, a 28-year-old British-Israeli national, was released by Hamas alongside hostages Romi Gonen, 24, and Doron Steinbrecher, 31, on Sunday, in the first phase of the ceasefire-hostage deal between Israel and Hamas. Israel also returned 90 Palestinian prisoners – including 69 women and nine children.

Damari’s mother said that, while this is an “incredibly happy moment for our family, we must also remember that 94 other hostages still remain (in Gaza).

“The ceasefire must continue and every last hostage must be returned to their families,” she said.

A photo:

The swap for Palestinian prisoners, many of them convicted terrorists, was grossly uneven:

As the Gaza cease-fire took hold, one aspect of the agreement was strikingly lopsided: Hamas released three Israeli women held in Gaza on Sunday, while Israel was expected to release 90 Palestinian women and minors held in its prisons later in the day.

Further exchanges will likely follow a similar formula, with tens of Palestinians freed from prisons in Israel for each hostage held in the Gaza Strip by militants. Over the six-week first phase of the truce, Hamas is expected to release 33 captives and Israel is slated to free about 1,900 Palestinians.

You will hear no claims of “disproportionality” for such an uneven and wrongheaded swap. But if that’s what Israel wants, that’s what it will get. Remember, though, that in a similar but even more uneven swap for an Israeli soldier, one of the Palestinian terrorists released was Yayha Sinwar, who, as the military head of Hamas, planned the October 7 massacre.  1,026 of Sinwar’s mates were also released to get a single Israeli soldier back. Then Sinwar planned a massacre that killed over 1200 people, mostly Israelis.

Finally, as expected, many Israelis had mixe emotions at the prisoner release, which turned into a spectacle (there are some reports that Gazans spat on the three women), with Hamas turning out in full regalia with bandanas, facemasks, and of course AK47s:

Israelis said they felt conflicted emotions seeing the hostages handed over by Hamas militants, who posted their own choreographed video of the release. The video showed the three women posed with printed certificates declaring their release from captivity. In bags sporting the Hamas military wing’s logo, the group gave the women a map Hamas labeled Palestine, a certificate for learning to read Arabic and pictures of their time in captivity, an Israeli military official said.

The volatility of Sunday’s exchange reinforces doubts about whether the parties can reach additional agreements that would release all the hostages and end the war, and even whether the current phase of the deal will hold for the full six weeks to set the first 33 hostages free.

*Among the executive orders that Trump plans is a change in how sex and gender are treated in America by Emily Yoffe (h/t Luana). This was reported yesterday, before Trump took office, so I don’t know if it was  issued (it appears to have been signed; see a later post):

Here is what the order sets out:

• The Executive Order establishes Government-wide the biological reality of two sexes and clearly defines male and female.
  • All radical gender ideology guidance, communication, policies, and forms are removed.
  • Agencies will cease pretending that men can be women and women can be men when enforcing laws that protect against sex discrimination.
  • “Woman” means an “adult human female.”
  • The Executive Order directs that Government identification like passports and personnel records will reflect biological reality and not self-assessed gender identity.
• The Executive Order ends the practice of housing men in women’s prisons and taxpayer funded “transition” for male prisoners.
• The Executive Order ends the forced recitation of “preferred pronouns” and protects Americans’ First Amendment and statutory rights to recognize the biological and binary nature of sex.
  • This includes protection in the workplace and in federal funded entities like schools.]

. . . . . Asked why Trump is making sex-based policy a day one priority of his administration, an incoming senior administration official said, “This really was a defining issue of the campaign. The president is going to be fulfilling the promises he made on the trail.” The executive order puts it more bluntly: “Radical gender ideology has devastated biological truth and women’s safety and opportunity.”

It is becoming something of a presidential tradition to begin a term with sweeping directives regarding “gender identity.” President Biden, on his first day in office, demanded the federal government “review all existing orders, regulations, guidance documents, policies, programs, or other agency actions” that could impinge on transgender rights. Language and rules about transgender identities became embedded in the vast federal bureaucracy.

Now, Trump has ordered a reversal of all this. In an exclusive briefing with The Free Press, two senior officials provided a summary of the executive order. “Women deserve protections, they deserve dignity, they deserve fairness, they deserve safety,” said a senior policy adviser explaining why the order explicitly embraces the necessity of special treatment for women. “And so this is going to help establish that in federal policy and in federal laws.”

But this will not go gentle, because there will be challenges.

In reading the order, it’s clear that lawsuits challenging the new directives will start stacking up quickly. The order, for example, asserts that “All radical gender ideology guidance, communication, policies, and forms are removed.” This is far from mere symbolism. United States passports—which since 2022 have allowed citizens to choose “X” as their gender—will revert to offering exclusively male and female options, with the proviso that what people select must “reflect biological reality and not self-assessed gender identity.”

. . . and there’s one thing missing, though this is the subject of an ongoing Supreme Court case

The executive order does not address one of the most contentious areas of transgender activism: “gender-affirming care” for minors, meaning putting gender-distressed young people on a swift course to transition and lifetime medication. The Biden administration ardently supported such treatments, even as other Western nations began to restrict them, and dozens of U.S. states began to ban them.\

In general I think the tone of these changes is positive—no surprise to the readers who know my views—but I want to see how the laws are written. And I don’t really like the government decreeing that there are two sexes, for that is a biological observation. They can “recognize” them, but the government is not in the business of establishing biological fact, as the courts tried to do when saying that the FDA’s approval of day-after pills was faulty.

*Pollster, statistician, and Democrat Nate Silver has a new take in his “Silver Bulletin” newsletter, “Why Biden Failed.”

I have hardly any recollection of January 20, 2021, the day that Joe Biden took the Oath of Office. That may be because his speech wasn’t very memorable. In staccato bursts and simple sentences, delivered to a sparse, socially-distanced crowd, it didn’t contain much soaring rhetoric or policy substance. But it did offer a lot of promises, promises that Biden was never going to be able to keep.

The speech echoed a framing Biden had used in his acceptance speech that summer at the Democratic convention: that of a polycrisis. At the DNC, Biden had spoken of “four historic crises, all at the same time, a perfect storm”:

The worst pandemic in over 100 years. The worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

The most compelling call for racial justice since the 60’s. And the undeniable realities and accelerating threats of climate change.

In his Inaugural Address, Biden again pledged to “resolve the cascading crises of our era.” In fact, he upped the ante. The speech wasn’t humble: Biden compared himself to Abraham Lincoln after signing the Emancipation Proclamation, promising a solution to “systemic racism.” “The dream of justice for all will be deferred no longer,” he said. And with the inauguration conducted in the shadow of January 6, there was a new addition, a fifth critical threat: an “attack on democracy and on truth” and a “rise in political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism that we must confront and we will defeat.”

Silver’s view is that Biden wanted to be a hero, but faced a “polycrisis” of the pandemic, rising inflation, the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, immigration, and a rise in crime.

In high-risk, high-stakes times like these, where you’re well outside the parameters of the usual playbook, it can be tempting to be a hero. And if you listen to his inaugural address, that’s clearly how Biden saw himself. Or perhaps even as a savior: the speech contains quite a bit of religious rhetoric. “The Bible says weeping may endure for a night but joy cometh in the morning,” Biden said. He asked Americans to place their faith in him: “Take a measure of me and my heart.”

But trying to be a savior — ending the pandemic, saving democracy, and, on top of that, delivering justice from systematic racism! — is precisely what you don’t want to do during extraordinary circumstances or under exceptional stress. I explore this theme at length in my book, which includes interviews with dozens of risk-takers, both quant types and people like former astronauts and fighter pilots. “Don’t be a hero” is advice I heard consistently. Instead, stick to basic blocking-and-tackling. Identify the most critical problem and laser-focus on it until it’s solved. Probably not two problems at a time, but sometimes that can’t be avoided. Certainly not five simultaneous crises, though. Especially if you have no plan other than “unity,” which Biden described as the “elusive” ingredient to “overcome these challenges.”

Silver concludes that even by 2020 voters perceived that Biden had lost enough of his mental capacity to govern effectively, and in fact he didn’t.  Remember, this is Silver’s view, not mine. I was never a huge fan of Biden, as he turned out weaker and also woker than I perceived, nor did I like him, in the latter part of his term, trying to tell Israel how to run the war. But how much happier I’d be now if Gretchen Whitmer (or even Mayor Pete) had won the Democratic voters’ esteem in stead of inheriting the nomination like Harris did!

*I just learned that Biden issued a passel of pardons in his very last minutes in office (article archived here):

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili, an atheist cat, want her noms:

Hili: If God does not exist we have to eat something anyway.

A: Not by bread alone…

Hili: And who is asking for bread?

Hili: Jeśli Boga nie ma to i tak trzeba coś zjeść.

Ja: Nie samym chlebem.

Hili: A kto prosi o chleb?

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From Jesus of the Day:

From David Jorling, and especially for Diana:

From Cat Memes:

From Titania, tweeted last Christmas Eve:

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